Weight, In Rooms

Today I weighed myself. It was at a gym- my gym, the one that takes my money. Also the gym where I can never work out again, because I made such a colossal fool of myself in the weight room. There may have been some material damage.

The weight room sounds more lighthearted than it really is. The term brings up relatively gentle images of giant steroid-ballooned hulksters and women in eighties-era leotards with itty bitty hand weights and soft, undampened headbands. The worst that can happen there, besides causing yourself permanent damage to your spinal discs, is a flirtation that will lead to some mutual masturbation in the showers. My gym's actual is much, much, much more odious because it is full of- almost carpeted with- scales. Some of them are industrial scales, with giant dials and tissues mounted on the dial post for the crying. There are lots of scales, though most of them are of the standard bathroom-scale variety. The scale I initially stepped on was a doctor's scale.

This scale told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was four pounds heavier than I had been at some point in the past. I don't remember precisely when this lighter weight prevailed, or if there had been a recent stomach flu somewhere in that time frame, but by god there it was: four pounds. I had to jump from scale to scale, getting increasingly freaked out, until I climbed up (or shuffled onto, really- it had a ramp) on the industrial scale. The same: four pounds since...whenever. FOUR. POUNDS.  My adrenaline and cortisol levels were whooshing themselves to a spanking new height, so that freaking out became Freaking Out- I think I was uncontrollably flapping my hands about midway through the weight room- and that became a big, inappropriate, injurious FREAK OUT.

"FOUR POUNDS!" I screamed at the spin instructor, whose name is Candy. "Ha ha ha Candy- your name is clearly a part of the problem" I brayed, since I'd taken her spin class four times since my last trip to the weight room. Four pounds. "It says four pounds, Candy!"

"Maybe it's just that scale-" she started.

"NOO!! IT'S FOUR GODDAMN POUNDS, CANDY, and you should really change your name if it's going to make people hoist on the blubber-"

Candy looked shocked, but only partly so. "I cannot help what goes into my student's mouths after the class ends-

"YES YOU CAN, Candy! You can start by changing it to Celery, or Aqua, or Selenium, because NO ONE is going to scarf up any of those things in large quantities, are they?" I was trembling in the gym towel that I'd worn up to the weight room (you don't want to wear anything more than you have to, am I right?) when some other person saw fit to deny me my dodo self-perception.

"You really wear it well- " He started. I screamed: I screamed like a Velociraptor and bent over, which I wouldn't ever advise anyone to do who isn't wearing underwear- ever- and despite some gasps, I grabbed the undercarriage of two scales and flipped as hard as I could.

"FFFOOOOUUUUUUAAAWWWRRR POOOOUUWWWNNDSS!!!" I screamed. I don't remember this precisely, but the helpful people in the station showed me the sped-up version of what happened, and indeed, I'm saying that: fffoooouuuuuaaaawwwrrr pooooouuwwwnndss!! My eyes did look like the eyes of the deeply stoned, red capillaries blazing, pupils dilated. And my horrible dinosaur voice was unmistakable. The stand up scale next to the condemning industrial scale  went down, and took the row of scales next to it like a row of Hell's Angel's hogs in the classic comedy movie where that happens. The one on my left took a hit from the first one, which spiraled upward and then down on just the point that would make it explode, which spiraled and dove onto the same point on the next one, so that there was a room full of perfectly triggered exploding bathroom scales, making small bang noises one by one. It was entertaining to watch in the digital whilst with my enforcer friends. One would think, watching that tape, that they were hand-made scale-bombs, rigged with fertilizer and shame, and I the Jane Bond trying to both escape from the bad dudes and keep my hair perfectly tousled.

What did happen after all the little scale-bombs triggered was that I ran. I ran out of my gym and into the street, yelling "FOUR POUNDS! FOUR POUNDS, PEOPLE! That's going to be FOURTEEN THOUSAND CALORIES I have to burn on those FUCKING TREADMILLS!"  I got to the underpass of the highway and started to whip back and forth on the pigeon-poop covered sidewalk, clutching my towel to my chest and wishing I had remembered to put on my shower shoes. "FOURTEEN! THOUSAND! CALORIES, PEOPLE ! POUNDS! FOOOOUUR! POWOWOWNDSS!"

Someone who'd been sleeping under the embankment sat up unexpectedly. "couldyoukeepitdownsomeoneistryingtosleep" He or she said (I couldn't tell because of the angle,) but I just kept ranting. It was my turn. You see people ranting or muttering or screaming underneath these giant on/off ramps in any city or large town, but you never think: is it my turn yet? Do I have to go down there and sing or something- is it a civilian obligation of some sort? If so, how do I go about it? "FOUR POUNDS, SIR OR MA'AM! FOUR FUCKING ONES, FOUR! I'M SURE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!"

"Seriously, shut up! There are rules about that kind of thing!" she said (I decided to go with the female pronoun.)

I stopped pacing. "What are those rules? Because I think that I need to talk a whole lot more! I mean, LOOK AT THIS! I'M AN ABOMINATION!" and I held the towel at my side and turned my head so that I couldn't see her looking.

She looked for a long time. I turned my head to check if she was done, twice. My neck grew  a few knots from holding the position for too long. "Ok. When you're down here the first thing you have to do is check with everyone else to make sure you're not cutting in line. There's only one screamer at a time down here. At the 55/94 junction underpass they can have two at a time, but here's not a big enough platform."

"Uh...there's no comment about this mess?" I indicated my own self with a sorrowful gesture.

"Second, you have to check for sleepers, lady. I'm a person, and I was sleeping, and I deserve a little peace. The cars and trucks and so on are soothing-" I listened for the first time to the sounds from above, and they were at a hurtful volume. "But to have an unscheduled screamer down here is just not done."

I was getting excited, now. "Ok, manners, check. There's more?"

The beggar lady thought. After a while it seemed like she was in a fugue state, just staring and stuck. I personally was not at all stuck- not in the least, my brain was being unpleasantly licked with some flames of self-loathing, gathering into a ferocious amount of shouting- and as I was about to open my mouth and let more of the necessary words just spew, she spoke again.

"You'll want some cardboard."

"Why?" It wasn't cold, so I didn't need shelter. I was sweating around and beneath my gym towel.

Instead of answering, she ran upward on the cement embankment to her bedroll or whatever. She bent over and pulled a nonsensically large sheet of cardboard from underneath it. She brought it down and handed it to me.

"What is it for, though? You didn't answer my question before."  I held the cardboard up to take a look at it. It was hard to do, given the wake wind distributed by the speeding semi trucks just a few dozen feet above us. It was perfectly clean.

"You'll want to build a little shelter around yourself-"

I cut her off. "No, no, I don't want to stay, I just wanted to say my piece, and I was going to go back home." Something bothered me about what I'd just said, but I mentally waved it away- what else can one do? When you have four humongous, slobby pounds...

"You're naked, right? Where's the glass going to hit when it rains down here in shards? And you have to think about the grit. That stuff is hell to clean off, my friend- it'll take weeks to let go of intimate places."

She was right: I couldn't trust my gym's puny community towel to keep the grit out of my hoo-ha.
My new supervisor helped me make the cardboard into a barrel shape and prop it up around myself. "I just wish I had suspenders!" I said to her, and we shared a giggle, in that I laughed like a loon and she looked at me as if I were one.

"Maybe you should save the hysterics for something worth the vocal cords, you know?" And she may have been trying to say something fundamentally important, I think, but I wasn't sure.

"Do you have a marker?" I asked, and she did! So I was squatted down beneath the underpass on my somewhat bulging haunches, just finishing the legends IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY LIFE HAS BEEN SO STRESS FILLED!! AND THE WORLD AT LARGE NEEDS TO ACCOUNT FOR MENSTRUAL WEIGHT FLUCTUATIONS!!! JESUS SAID EAT THIS BREAD IT IS MY BODY BUT IT WAS DURING DINNER AND EVERYONE, EVEN JESUS, SHOULD KNOW THAT YOU CAN'T EAT CARBS AFTER 4!!!!! when the cops came by and took my elbow and put me in the back of their squad car, holding my head so that I didn't give myself an owie. They were both very nice.

On the way, the passenger-side cop turned his head and said "I know what you mean," then turned back and stayed silent the rest of the ride.

I was so, so relieved.

Mouthguards Just Don't Work

I'm experiencing some discomfort right now. Every night I grind my teeth in my sleep, which is interesting given that Fibromyalgics don't really sleep well. Or at all, really; but with the right chemicals in one's bloodstream- the perfect, balanced dose of newer and gentler little pills that help you get to sleep, like a little butler of the brain escorting sleep in with a gentle cough and an announcement, along with the really old antidepressant that weighs as much as the nighty-night anvil to the crown that it represents- one can get to the level of sleep where one grinds one's teeth to fangs. I have them. Originally I only had them in the front, but now I have them where my flat and useful molars used to be.

Making your teeth into fangs is a long-term project, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with them. I have some ideas: I can see the immediate usefulness of a mouth full of pointies, because I have long been able to see myself as the heroine of a dark, softly absurdist suspense-comedy, where I am the lucky wereperson responsible for bringing all kinds of vigilante justice to those who are too vain or too stupid to stay out of the public's consciousness.

SCENE: The steps of the House of Representatives. Broad daylight.

      Jenn, sharp-toothed and cranky, lurks behind a column. Her prey walks out into the unflinching sunlight of DC, striding with great confidence toward a podium at the bottom step. Reporter 1 steps forward just as the smiling and sharkish politician gets to the microphone.

     Reporter 1: Sir, can you tell us- Sir, over here- I'm Jim Gosholot from Some Fictitious Legitimate Newsource, and we need to know why you're such an asshat?

     Politician: Ha ha, that was a good shot there, Jim. What I'm here to talk about isn't personal, though. It's about the freedom of the American people to demand anti-tyrannical infrastructure nine-eleven, which was in response to a woman named Maria. When Maria first came to America, immigration bylaws dictated that she be given a briefcase full of Fort Knox gold and one puppy of her choice. The unsupportableness of the situation-

     Reporter 2: Jayita Calamarala of Only Other Legitimate Newsource- Sir, can we get back to the central question? I believe Jim asked why you're such an asshat, and also can you tell us why we should listen to a word you say?

     Politician: Again, I think the personal has really no place in this conversa-
Jen steps from behind the column, quickly descends the steps by leaping three steps at a time until she comes just behind the podium with the Politician.

     Jenn: That's where you'd be wrong, Speaker Boehner.

Jenn opens her mouth wide to reveal sharpened wolf-like teeth set in mildly inflamed gums.

     Jenn: RAWR!!

Jenn takes a big bite of Speaker Boehner's neck- blood spatters everywhere as the crowd disperses with screams. The Speaker cries like a baby-

QUICK FADE TO BLACK.

...and that's just one of the episodes I fully intend to develop and pitch to whomever will sit still long enough to listen. I might use this one:

SCENE: A dark alley. Midnight or something like it. Ryan Seacrest walks down the alley, jacket slung casually over his shoulder. He gets his car keys out of his pocket and opens the door of his car, which is parked at the end of the alley...

to SCENE: Car interior. Ryan Seacrest sits at the driver's seat- he reaches to put the key in the ignition, but a bony human hand with some serious paper cuts grasps his wrist tightly. PAN UP to face of person in the passenger seat next to him.

     Ryan Seacrest: (gasp!)

     Jenn: I'm sorry, Ryan. I'm sorry I have to do this. All the hipsters and post-punks and I have watched your plasticine face and robotic delivery on your various television shows, and we've decided that we just can't let it continue. You represent everything lame to us, and it is very, very frightening- it makes us imagine a world where there are nothing but Access Hollywood anchors on TV, and then you making the leap to the big screen where you will annoy the shit out of every audience member, young and old, and everyone will succumb and buy themselves a face exactly like yours and no one will have any genuine emotions to express. It's a dystopia, a terrible future, and you are the acorn of that textureless tree. So, I'm sorry, because I don't know you personally; for all I know you're a nice person and treat all those you come across with care and respect, and you visit your mother weekly and remember what her favorite flower is so that she's never disappointed on Mother's Day. Hell, you could be tutoring quadriplegic crack orphans and cleaning oily seabirds on your weekends-

     Ryan Seacrest: Hey, I can see my reflection in your eyes-

     Jenn: RAWR!!!

Jenn bites Ryan Seacrest's face. QUICK FADE TO BLACK.

...Ok, I know it's not fair to pick on Mr. Seacrest- shooting fish in a barrel and all that.  But seeing as how I'm of a certain age and in possession of a certain level of snarkiness, it's kind of a counter- cultural obligation to hate him, right? In fact, I hate him so randomly and with such manufactured ire- HOW DARE HE TAKE VALUABLE AIR TIME FROM JOSS WHEADON- that I think about it all day, right up until I'm in bed trying to go to sleep. I believe it's making me grind my teeth.

The Motherfucking Chickens

I walked into my kitchen and yes, the Motherfucking Chickens were there. I don't mean that these chickens fucked any one's mother, but they were chickens and they're in my kitchen unraveling the Idea rug with their beaks and making everything unsanitary; so, these were the Motherfucking Chickens.

"Fuck!" I said.

I'd been thinking about the Motherfucking Chickens a lot. There had been a number of years when the chickens were constantly in rooms I'd just cleaned. They were domesticated chickens, to be sure, what with their cleanish feathers and rested expressions, but they still shit on everything and laid eggs in hidden spots to be found much later. They fought, these birds- they fought like mountain lions, or like any other aggressive, adolescent big cat (like a Puma or Ocelot) except they were feathered and louder and could only see things by turning their heads back and forth, presenting one eye at a time toward whatever it was they wanted to look at. The object of their interest frequently changed while they were pivoting their little heads, so that they became confused and more than a little peeved. This led to fighting. It was a terrible cycle, and I had to end it.

"Look" I said to my group of kitchen chickens, "You all have to find somewhere else to go. I don't have anything for you." Some of them turned their heads to stare at me with one skeptical eye, and some of them took up different areas of the Ikea rug to pull at. "I do not have anything for you. I DO NOT. All  I have in here is raw meat. I have a raw, plucked chicken in my refrigerator- YES- so you'd best leave before I decide to take a cleaver to one of you. One of you might make me do that." I made the last bit as creepy as I could, bringing my voice to the low-and-damaged octave of a TV serial killer. None of those birds took my meaning. They made a lot of noise and flapped around, and some individual fights broke out. It made me wonder if Leonard Bernstein had been visited by the Motherfucking Chickens before he wrote the Sharks/Jets scene.

I had discussed the chickens with a few people, and they'd been rife with advice at the time, so I gave one of them a call.

"Hey, Kendra."

"Hey- what the hell's up with you?" She was my friend who was the most accomplished life-planner, so it was natural that I'd called her first.

"Oh it's that the chickens are here again, dammit."

"Motherfuckers!" She said.

"I know, right? I have to get them out of here. They have eaten up my rug, I swear." It was halfway gone. They were going to be some sour-bellied fowl in an hour, but that was their business because the chickens and I would have parted ways by then, I thought. "But they're not going anywhere- there's one who keeps attempting to mop up my dishwasher with her feathers. I'm pretty sure she's going to nest in there. Or fight. It would be the cage for their cage matches."

"Did you leave the door of the dishwasher open?" Kendra asked. She was also the most annoying of the friends I'd told about the chickens, because she was the type that cannot help but point out what you did wrong while you were still experiencing the effects of your own poor decisions.

"Yes, I left the door of the dishwasher open."

"And you tried a rolled-up dish towel, right? All locker-room style?"

"These are not those kind of chickens, Kendra." I rolled my eyes a little.

"Yeah, yeah, but it's worth a try sometimes. Ok, here's what you do: I think you should get the hose from your garden, attach it to the kitchen tap, and then just hose them down like they were unruly demonstrators." Kendra had a point- the MF Chickens were acting like protesters, being both idle and restless and in a group, but I couldn't figure out what the hell they'd be protesting. And she'd forgotten something crucial about my environs.

"I live in an apartment, remember? There's no garden hose." I didn't hear her response because there'd been a really awful round of hostile pecking, so I had to break it up by walking between them. One of them- the chicken with the upper hand, going in for the final, potentially blinding peck- stabbed me on my ankle. "Shitballs!"

Kendra was saying "are you all right?" when I picked my phone off the slightly bloodied floor. "Kendra, I have to go. I'll come up with something. Thanks-" and I hung up, and called someone else.

"Hey Tom, it's me. The Motherfucking Chickens are back. One of them stabbed me with his beak. Or her beak. I'm bleeding."

Tom said "Oh my god honey! That must really hurt. I was pecked once at my aunt's house when I was feeding them, but hers weren't the Motherfucking Chickens. Do you need me to drive you to the hospital?" He was my most empathetic friend, which is why I'd called him.

"No, I'm ok, but how do I get rid of these things?"

"Well, what are they trying to say to you? Are they indicating anything, or circling some furniture in particular or something?"

"No, they're just stinking up the kitchen and ruining my Ikea rug."

"Oh, I know how much you love that thing." Tom was generally a great listener, but I was thinking that his input wouldn't send the MF Chickens away. He might have me create some group therapy circle for them, because that's how he works with conflict of any kind- it was a hobby of his to start therapy circles.

"Ok, I just thought of something. I'm going to get off the phone now."

"What are you-" said Tom, but I hung up.

I looked at each chicken. One of them seemed to be the leader. He (or she) was the same one that had punctured my ankle, and appeared to be the one that was strutting rather than flapping or pulling at the twine that was once my floor covering. I thought of the shopping trip when I'd bought that rug: I'd looked online first, and narrowed my search to four rugs before I drove out to Schaumberg with my bungees and credit card. Once I saw that rug I didn't bother looking at the others on my list: I loved it with all my might. My ankle dribbled as I stood there, remembering.

I leaned over and grabbed the leader, then opened the back door and stared marching up the porch steps to get to my building's roof. I held him (or her) under my arm like an obnoxious, clucking football and the rest of the MF chickens followed me. We got to the roof and I stood still and waited for them all to cluster around me. "Look here, birds. Don't come to my place anymore. I don't want you there. You clearly cannot come to a peace and while you're trying to ostracize each other I can't trust any of you. You got that?" Again, none of them appeared to take my meaning- in fact their attention was diverted and they were walking around, pulling on tears in the tar paper.

"CHICKENS!" I shouted, and then, in a rage, I threw the leader over the edge of the roof.  All of the MF's suddenly ran to where I'd thrown him over and scream-clucked. Their little heads swiveled furiously, looking as fast as they could. I looked over the edge: the leader of the MF Chickens was flapping hard with and craning it's neck up ward so that he (or she- whichever) could look at where it had lost it's long game of dominance. In that moment, that particular moment, I realized: Oh my god, I just threw a mostly-innocent chicken off my roof.

I live with the flock, now. I never replaced the Ikea rug, or any subsequently destroyed rugs, because they'd just be destroyed anew. It was penance, before- letting them build their little keeps and use the dishwasher as their personal fight club space seemed like the best way to assuage my guilt. I've come to really, really tolerate them now, in their own right: they have genuinely taught me some lessons, like patience and to not get attached to material objects; on the other hand, they still lay disgusting eggs in nooks and will occasionally stab their beaks at my feet for, say, stepping between some of them on my way to the bathroom. They are still Motherfuckers.

Skin

Every time I look in the mirror, I examine my skin carefully and fretfully. There were inklings of the coming central-nervous-system clusterfuck at just about the time I hit puberty. We'd moved from the Big City- and by Big City I mean Brooklyn, NY, and during the 70's, which is now a mythical time when the young people had yet to build ethnically-themed bistros in their brownstones and the families that lived there had no fear that their children might fall in with the wrong crowd and become Hipsters- when I was twelve. Rotten time to move to a cowtown in beautiful and stupid rural NJ; to be fair, that's a rotten time for any twelve-year-old to move to anywhere. My skin felt this, right down to its' stem cells, and revolted by becoming revolting.

There was such nastiness that now I have legendary stories about lunchroom ruptures that will make other skin disaster survivors become silent and then say something like "ohmygod", their eyes wide with awed sympathy. I became obsessed with checking my skin for potential nastiness, making plans to just go ahead and wear a veil the next day because of an approaching outbreak, and unfortunately I still do this.

My face is kind of a wreck now, what with the ice-pick scarring and the pebbliness and the rocacea and the years of medications and Extreme Stress marathons. I think it looks awful...still, it's occurred to me that perhaps my idea of my skin should be re-examined and that there are people in the world that would look at me and then look at the food in my refrigerator and the roof above me and the lack of beatings in my life and find this perspective a mite trivial. They would be right. But still, it bothers me. To mitigate the moral discomfort I sometimes feel, and to keep it silly, I've decided that I'm going to make up a different history for my face...

When I was twelve my family moved from Brooklyn, NY to the Sahara Desert. We lived as nomads- white liberal nomads in Africa- who rejected the sexist belief system of the area while still enjoying tents, manitoc quiches, and toiletries made from Shea Butter. My skin became dry as I formed fast friendships with absolutely anyone I met.

When I was sixteen, our fortunes changed and we moved to Alaska to become Snow Crab fishers. The crabs were plentiful, and after a period of stinging adjustment, my skin tolerated the ice-needle spray of the ocean and the shallow claw wounds I'd receive pulling the delicious beasts from the nets (fyi: Shea Butter is a wonderful balm for either of those irritations.) It was a lucrative business and the long off-season was spent chopping wood, learning native board games, and forming fast friendships with absolutely anyone I met.

I packed up and went off to college as a double-major in musical composition and astrophysics. The music pulled me into a band; the band signed with a major label; I became a contract slave to the music industry. It was an international folk group, and the concert schedule was grueling, forcing me to play my lyre and pan pipes to wine drinking jet-setters in some small and tasteful venue four or five times a week. I became addicted to Adderal and herb cigarettes, which are hell on fragile skin systems.

This continued for some time, until we traveled to New York City and I, on a whim, auditioned for the Broadway hit, Cats. The producer and director called me the next day to offer me the part as The White Cat. I quit the band- it was a misty farewell to all of the fast friends I'd made while on tour- and began my stint on Broadway the next week. I jumped and danced and slunk around onstage for five years, During the precious dark days, when there were no performances, I went on day-trips with the cast to Coney Island or Connecticut and sang along to any street musician I saw playing on a subway platform (this being NYC, I was perpetually late to everything). I made fast friends with absolutely anyone I met. Despite the years of religious and intense facials my pores were permanently full of greasepaint (there is only so much that Shea Butter can do.)

Finally I tired of the shabby glamour and endless rehearsing of the working actor's life. I had heard of the American Fringe Theater scene, and since I was flush with Cats cash and in need of a difficult vocation, I settled down in Chicago to become a major American playwright.

Then I had a baby. I began putting Shea Butter on her, and her skin is beautiful.

Side Effects

So this UCTD (Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disorder) is not yet a full diagnosis. No, I go back in March for more bloodwork and then, possibly, a New Drug. (In my head I hear "A New Drug! A New Drug!" in the voices of Carol Cleaveland and the rest of the women in "MP and the Holy Grail. There is jumping and clapping. You've seen it, right? If you haven't seen it, I, as the person whose blog you're reading just now, command you to see it. Then for the rest of your life you can imagine that scene, only with new lines. Instead of "A Spanking! A Spanking!" you can insert words that are relevant to your life, such as "Poo on the floor! Poo on the floor!" or "Some Oreos! Some Oreos!" Don't forget to picture them jumping and clapping. It will make the banal seem delightful, I swear.)

Anyway...new drug. Plaquenil, pronounced PLAK-in-il should you ever wish to ask for it by name. It's an old anit-malarial drug, apparently, and is used for immune system disorders, apparently. I haven't delved too deeply into the side effects yet, because I've learned this about side effects: they don't make any sense. I don' t mean they don't make sense that you have them, I mean that the people who are in charge of writing about them are acutely aware that their work will be shrunken down to cookie fortune sizes so that it'll become unreadable. Also they know that no one will read them. So they take the actual, measurable side effects that happen and translate them into their bored medi-speak.

Actual Side Effect: Will turn patient into hallucinogen-producing toad.

Side Effect As Written: Mild queasiness may occur. Take pill with milk.

Actual Side Effect:  Will pop out of bottle after midnight and steal all of patient's oranges.

Side Effect as Written:  Possible rash may develop- stay out of direct sunlight.

Actual Side Effect:  Will produce substantial brain wave activity, esp. in prefrontal cortex, thus rendering the patient able to single-handedly run the country. Effect is strongest when taken with close friends, who will become members of the cabinet.

Side Effect As Written: Patient may experience sleepiness. You shouldn't operate the government heavy machinery until you are aware of how you will respond to medications.

...What does interest me, however, is some man's story: among the lamentable list of numb limbs and month-long fevers and episodes where people woke up on the kitchen floor, ten hours after taking the medication- among all that this man lists his miracles. They're doozies. First nothing happened; then there was tingling in the extremities that was constant for two months, along with flashes of brilliance; then there was a spate of spontaneous racing, the gentleman joining any 5 or 10-k race that he happened to pass by; then re-growth of hair that was flowing and gently wavy and so thick that he had to buy a whole different set of combs; ditto eyelashes; then a loss of desire to issue recriminations to anyone at all; then attainment of the true enlightenment; then his fallen arches rose.

His story interested me so much that I stopped reading anything else. I just don't want to know, frankly. If I do end up on Plaquenil it will take months to tell if it's working, which is just shitty but how the game goes. I'll be able to pull it off, get through the achiness and shaking hands and monitoring because I believe, with some of my heart, that in six months I'll have written quite a few novels and will have long, wavy auburn hair. My hair is not normally auburn (or rather not without chemical assistance,) but that doesn't matter because if it happened for this one guy then it must also happen for me.

Point Taken, Part 3 of 3

The kids were racing, and it made Maria nervous. Mimi was first, clambering up on the trail like a goat, which is what she looked like: she had long face and wide, long nose of a goat but the calming brown eyes of a doe. George was more like a cat. He wasn't like a mountain lion, which also would have been fitting; he was more the house cat, strolling to a place on the trail that pleased him to stand on it, looking. It was hard to tell if he was bored or not. Their speed was what unnerved her: she was fine with clambering and looking, but the thought that they might get in some high-altitude trouble while no one was watching them kept poking at her. It was obnoxious.

Beth came up behind her. She was sprightly herself, which explained the trip up to the mountain they were currently hiking on. Beth's idea of a family gathering always involved exercise of some kind. Beth thought she went a little far with it: thereat been canoeing, a sock-hop that the kids' school was hosting, a full eighteen-hole round of sweaty and fruitless golf that Maria had finished with her daughter and grandchildren to prove that she was open to learning sports. To Beth's credit, the kids had been hot and crampy from using the clubs for so long but they'd recovered quickly at the cafe and didn't speak of the game once during lunch. When Beth was younger she would have complained for a week, holding her wrist or pressing her back for emphasis once Maria's sympathies had run thin- and now she was sprightly. Maria blamed the girl's college's physical activities prerequisite. Beth hadn't been the same since she'd taken karate her freshman year. She had thought about admitting how well she felt afterward, an as-advertised energy and clarity barging into her day; she'd decided against it. But she stopped complaining. Occasionally she told Beth that the trip or match or swim or whatever was a good idea.

"Did they-" Beth started, still walking, her Mom-eyes focused at a point past a bend in the path as if she could see through rock.

"They were fine-" Maria said to Beth's back. Beth was brisk but not hurried and so Maria decided not to be unsettled. The kids were old enough to know not to walk out on any precipice that was off-limits, and they were wearing insanely electric colors so that they could be spotted quickly if lost; also she'd watched Beth layer the kids in sunscreen while they were still in the parking lot. She made herself imagine the kids caught on a picturesque bluff, waving at the rescue helicopter's pilot in their gaudy safety colors, skins unblemished by heat rash. It soothed her.

The night before, at Beth and Jemali's house, Beth had told Maria that she and Jemali were having some problems. Maria had asked "what problems?" and Beth had sighed and responded without a bit of the impatience that sometimes crept into her tone when she spoke with her mother. (Maria was impatient with Beth's impatience; however, after she'd been swapping an escalating snipe with her daughter for a month she'd realised that this was simply a tradition: she'd used it with her own mom, whom she'd heard being pert with her grandmother and etcetera. The Tone was more ceremonial than active.) So she was a little surprised when Beth was tone-free in her response. "We can't get along." Then Beth expelled some air- relieved, Maria correctly surmised- and waited.

"Is he here now?" she asked, and Beth turned her head to either side, slowly.

"He's at Amy's now. That's what he's told me. Amy called me to tell me he was all right, which was decent of her."

It was. Amy wasn't normally decent, to Maria's mind. Suddenly she was filled, in an obligatory way, with memories of her own husband and the times that they couldn't get along. It had felt like the end of the literal world at the time. He'd done something or said something and Maria was sure that it must have been despicable, because she'd thrown the man out of the house and refused to let him come back for two years. Maria had no idea what they'd been fighting about- none. She remembered what seemed like every single day he was gone, though. The absent couple of years was funny to her now- what on earth were they so worked up about? What had he done- was it something he had done, or something that he'd said, some principle about which they disagreed? It was really tickling her, but she looked at Beth and saw that she'd not been sleeping, because her cheeks were flat and her eyes looked as if she'd been blinking away grit. Maria wanted to just bray out some nervous laughter, something to sluice away the alarm she felt.

Instead, she listened: Jemali had, indeed, said something horrible, and when confronted with the horribleness did not recant. No, he had simply paraphrased himself, repeating his complete lack of manners and compassion, Beth reported. The horrible phrase had been a pointed re-telling of something they'd struggled with, something that they both felt had left them feeling raw and abandoned despite the discussions with a family therapist and various neighbor friends. Beth only looked exhausted as she told Maria her story. She felt the flutter of a laugh as she listened, and took that as her cue to clamp down: this was it, she thought. This is the last time that my girl will be so open to me... Maria gathered herself. I have to leave her with something, but it has to be small- I have to make it seem that I'm just suggesting things rather than gifting her with my best advice, my finale advice. She collected that moment and pinned it, wings outstretched, onto a rectangle of framed cobalt velvet.

Beth had looked at her mother and slowly taken a breath to speak again. Maria interrupted:

"Elizabeth. That sounds so insurmountable, I know, he leaves and you just get to stay with the kids, which is so unfair, right?" Beth nodded her head up then down, slowly. "Once Brian came back- you remember he was gone for two years, that was while you were still an undergrad- once he came back, it was amazing how fast I forgot what the hell we were fighting about. And I felt like I had no part of him that I loved any more-it felt like being a survivor of some shipwreck and there you are, treading in water, with nothing to grab and float on."

"That's exactly..." Beth didn't finish her thought. Maria breathed in through her nose and out her mouth, a practiced meditator now.

"That's what I think marriage is about. You get to talk about all the dreams you're supposed to build and the amount of decorating you can afford and all, but really the thing that glues you together like you were welded that way are the parts when you don't see any relief but you still stay in it."

"Impossible. I don't think that's possible, Mom."

"That's the place, then. I don't like to see you hurt, love-" Maria put her arms up and Beth walked into them, fast and tearing up. "But it will help to keep talking. You have to for the kids anyway, so you should just stay treading water and I'll sit them, and I can bring desserts. I can watch movies with them or take them to movies. The kids are covered." Maria was not convinced she'd said enough, but she was tired too, and the one of the most valuable things she'd learned from being married so long was when to shut it.

Maria stood up from the rock she'd been sitting on and walked further up the path to join her family. Around the bend there was a wider spot in the path, a shelf of cliff that you could take pictures from. Beth found them clustered in front of the rock wall. "I need a picture of this!" she called, and Beth instinctively took Mimi and George by their shoulders to move them into a more photogenic togetherness. Maria smiled at them through the digital display, taking longer than was needed to press the camera icon, unable to stop herself from being happy. Her daughter was separated from her son-in-law; her daughter was in despair; the future of her grandchildren's contentment was more unsure than it normally was. The display showed them as glowing and present, glad of the fresh air, and Maria looked up to check that it wasn't the camera's distortion. It wasn't. There was glowing and gladness. She stepped back and pressed the icon.

Immediately there was a whoosh sound and then she was falling backward. looking at the sunshine and roaring with surprise. She saw Beth's face above her, sideways, with a confused expression, shouting something. "MOM-" Beth shouted. "MOM-" and it looked like more but Maria couldn't hear the words. For some reason this struck her as funny, and she switched from roaring to laughing. Beth's face was too far away to make out, so Maria's cartwheeling brain provided a picture: Beth at thirteen, at some aunt's house, taking a third roll while she crossed her eyes at her mother from across the table.