Hauling Foam Away By The Truckload

November 2, 2008 by 9 Comments

Dear CF,

I’d pay good money to see you in your stirrup pants, and wish so much you could have come. I wore our shirt, as you know, and my weirdo jeans from when I was 13. They’re oddly high-waisted, and from the knees down they’re tie-dyed white with embroidered stars. I have an actual picture of my first day of junior high which I will share with you some day. It is beyond description. For starters, I’m wearing a “Hello, My Name Is” sticker. At home. Before leaving for school. Meaning, it wasn’t mandatory, nobody was handing out nametags and sharpies. It was on my own initiative and of my own free will that I chose to announce myself to Middle School thusly. No wonder I didn’t last long.

It was odd and delightful to have the apartment filled with people. Many of them gentle souls. All in all, it was a cheery night. I’m pleased beyond all sense with the outcome.

I haven’t been able to see Pillow Talk (which isn’t on Netflix? Where did you find it?) but I saw The Thrill of it All the night my grandmother died. I was shocked by the whole third-baby subplot–his plan to impregnate her in order to arrest her career, his subsequent pretense that he was having an affair (how exactly did he plan to prove he WASN’T, I wonder?), and his decision at the end to interpret her desire to “be a doctor’s wife again” not to be a gesture at reconciliation, but a total surrender of her own hopes.

I take your point that Doris Day is the silver screen’s reproductive queen. There is something so wholesome about her—surprising, considering the artificial coloring of her skin and hair. She’s perfect, she’s impressively sexed, golden-skinned, golden-coiffed, golden-bosomed, and yet she’s absolutely unsexy. I think our modern-day equivalent (minus the fake-n-bake) is Reese Witherspoon.

The money discussion was fascinating: that she was offended that her money was hers, while his money was THEIRS. Incredibly realistic–one of the movie’s better scenes. I loved the fight, too. Some dimensions of that relationship are so dead-on and relatable. Which made it all the more odd that the movie chooses to take Doc’s shining moment, when he apologizes for being jealous of her career, and turns it, without warning or apparent discomfort, into a bald manipulation. That was played so straight! I didn’t anticipate the chauvinist wink, and it took me off-guard. (I compare the off-kilter feeling to the most recent episode of The Office, that uncomfortable and slightly aimless scene in which Jim’s brothers “prank” him by mocking Pam’s career. The episode refuses to direct the audience’s response, so we’re left to draw our own conclusions about What It All Means in a highly unfictional, unsatisfying way.)

I miss you, savvy? In my dreams you will be wearing stirrup pants and Vans.

Fondly,

Millicent

P.S. Hm. It may be some time before I can reclaim “savvy” from Jack Sparrow.

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In Which You Turn Three

October 29, 2008 by 1 Comment

Dearest CF,

I’m in the peculiar position of teaching Mrs. Dalloway on the day on which I myself am giving a party. I won’t buy the flowers myself, but I will buy candy and beer and lemons and ice. I will clean the toilet and blend egg whites and scrub the floors and make pisco sours and spike the punch to really get at the theme, which is Junior High. (Technically, I suppose I should leave the toilet as is.) Today I’m privacy-proofing my house. How I wish you could come.

Of course I sympathize with your rageful in-class moments. I have one pupil–a repeat from last semester–soft-spoken, sweet, deferential and considerate, who absolutely boggles and baffles me whenever she comes to office hours. She wrote a paper on a famous Yeats poem about rape. The aggressor is a swan. My student claims that the rape was the young woman’s fault. She must have been provoking the swan (this in a myth–there is no “he-said, she-said” version of this story). The essay is filled with startling turns, like how the young woman’s world was small and has now been “opened up” as a result of this event. The rape is “constructive,”  she writes elsewhere. The argument culminates with a dali-esque reading of the swan’s wings as Zeus’s “scrotums” [sic].

I am a poor teacher this semester. I stare dumbly. Today I was grading a paper in which the Whitman quote “hold my head athwart your thighs” exemplifies how one holds a baby. I wrote “?” and then “sounds dangerous?” then gave up and turned the page.

I am better. I awoke today in a positively Clarissa Dalloway-esque mood, larks! and plunges! everywhere I went. It felt risky to feel happy. “Shouldn’t I…” the familiar voice kept saying, but something over which I have no control refused to ponder the missed phone calls, uncharitable thoughts, the dusty socks and unfinished embroidery and chances (someone yesterday, for instance, with pretty eyes), the feeling of measured sameness speckling every new hour that will never change because I absolutely refuse to make anything  happen. It was all there, but hiding under the bed, like my ex’s boxers. Suddenly it feels like I can do things!

So, tonight, I am boiling potatoes and pleasurably pondering wings and scrotums and in what way they could possibly be said resemble each other.

I miss you, dear friend. I hope to visit soon.

Fondly,
Millicent

PS–HAPPY THREE YEARS!!!! I am so terribly pleased for you, and toast you from afar.

PPS–What will you be for Halloween?

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