Chapter Twenty Eight An Opera in Three Acts But with Five Parts
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| never should have happened.
* * * * My life was and wasn’t fucked. Herry would have, I am thinking, been disappointed to know. To know that he had not quite finished the task of that. I did commence rocking again; that I did do. And it was, once more, so cold, … November now; and as in previous years, I did not start the furnace’s pilot light to even begin to be able to turn on the heat source. That alone would save me $15 a month, just its pilot light unlit. It was back to 2 percent milk, baked potatoes with butter for main and only course and bananas with sprinkled sugar crystals on top for dessert. Sometimes a certain molar acted up in the upper right. Sometimes to the point, in fact, of forming an eruption which I could not only palpate in my cheek from the outside but could also visualize it enough orally in order to be able to actually drain its pus on the buccal aspect of the mucosa and reduce it completely. Till –– of course –– the next time the abscess ballooned out. No wonderful job prospects, not surprisingly. For sure – not after Herry’s sabotaging shenanigans with his sending all around everywhere that evilly ‘prepared’ and purposefully mother – fucking Ames Tribune article of Tuesday, 25 September 1990, its front page featuring that all – crazed and – whoring witch – twat which was the thing in its screaming headline who was me. The junk mail factory was laying off – right before the holidays. This included Dr. Legion True, too. I’ve, like I said, never seen Ms. Phillipa Chance again. I have just read about her in that rib joint’s fire, but every so often that scene at her countertop, supernatural she was in her head and obviously in her heart, too, kind of like my Truemaier Boys’ brains’ and hearts’ wiring, just sometimes in order to give me comfort and to take for myself a refresher in compassion, I actively conjure up –– her lovely image that late October afternoon there on the factory floor. I couldn’t move either. I didn’t know to where to move away –– in order to be near my Boys, and I didn’t have 50 cents with which to do that anyhow. I suppose I should’ve lived out of the Ol’ Black wagon once it was learned where they actually were, but I wasn’t brave enough to do that then. Other DEhumans run and, very, very often, like 50,000 or so – annually – in only America alone as I’ve referenced, these mamas flee with a child, but I had no support network in the form of Mehitable nor in my many Ames and Iowa friends who simply themselves had nowhere near money enough to lend to me in huge chunks that could carry a person through more than a couple of weeks. I wasn’t about to ask Wyman for more. While I don’t know exactly why –– it probably had all to do with that Midwest – finishing and – solvency thing in me again. The Wednesday when Mirzah was absenting the performance of his lifetime both in fulfilling the tenor of that of true friend as well as of defense attorney and possibly convicted murderer, I read in the weekly free flyer a small box advertisement for help wanted. Another temp position so no benefits at all but the pay was $9.08 an hour, and I didn’t have to telesurvey at minimum wage, something I was already doing and loathing every second of for the University’s Sociology Department –– in sporadic droplets of four – hour sprints in between trips to the junk mail time clock. Rural sociologists, the ones here at Iowa State anyhow, just loooove asking people of tragedy zillions and bazillions of questions about how they’re coping after this flood or that tornado or this barn fire or that drought. I sat on my tuchus for hours on end with only a total of from three to eight people surveyed by the finish of the four hours –– utterly captured and tethered because of my wired headset connection to the computer screen –– asking these soooo – saddened folks all of those soooo – scripted questions. Precisely as written the queries had been asked –– so as for us questioners to appear … unbiased. It seems to me –still – simply quite ridiculous for one … to fear if her voice isn’t flat enough or drone – like enough, to fear prejudicing the stranger’s response back to me! Fuck! I soooo could’ve answered for every single one of the farmers! I full – well knew … exactly … how they’d all be a – copin’, didn’t I, Jury?! True it was: I wholly loathed this position and “work” –– even more so than the destruction I had wrought to trees and to people by my manufacturing mail that was effing rubbish. Try asking heartbreaking questions without any feeling or emotion in your tone to already heartbroken individuals. An ordinary and reasonable human or DEhuman being wouldn’t even need to start from a fucked mother’s so sorrowful standpoint to feel like pure shit for doing this to others. Let alone, for money. Not to mention in order to accumulate for intellectual hoo – hahs whom I didn’t even really know either … reams and reams of dissertational research material and subsequently, from that, a couple of PhDs and all of the publishing and other accolades that go with those. A form of ‘collective’ – aprovechar over at The Ivory Academe. Come to ponder on it, Unempathetic Herry’d be a natural, a whiz – bang at this speech form and could, pell – mell, churn out of those poor unfortunates telephoned just a whoooole passel of entirely uninfluenced survey answers, I am thinking. The United Parcel Service was hiring, through the folks over at the state’s local Job Service HQ, a very few drivers’ helpers for its upcoming holiday frenzy, the wee flyer’s ad stated. Application itself took the form of a series of three testing sessions over the next couple of weeks and another one for processing all of the scores of hopefuls. Work began the Monday after Thanksgiving. I was the only DEhuman put on at the Ames center that season. The rest were all men, farmers of the surrounding counties done with harvesting mostly and a few others about whom I didn’t know a thing. We temporary helpers were each issued the lovely standard chocolates right up to an oversized, lined carcoat under which I still needed to pile on layers of flannel and thermal in order to stay warm enough, all of which livery was required to be turned in late christmas eve night –– or else the last paycheck withheld until such time as the center recovered from me its toggery. In between episodes at the Sociology Department’s carrels especially equipped with surveying technology and the proceedings that tested my parcel delivery locating abilities, I began a calling and address discovery campaign of my own. For which, of course, I not only received no income but had to, instead, outlay some of my last few precious dimes. Directory assistance of any of the A. G. Bells and all other major telecommunication companies costs. I don’t know how much now because I never use it anymore – what with wonderful telephone book banks and happily helpful reference desk catalogers at the Ames Public Library or with internet access to folks’ number information, but it also cost back then in late 1991. Perhaps 60 cents or so a dial – up. I began with the state of Maine and not Washington believing that the earlier weeks’ undercurrent chattering within the Edinsmaier 69th Street household specifically about Wenatchee might have purposefully been loosed upon the Truemaier Boys as a decoying direction. I spent 3½ weeks speaking to different accents from the country’s most eastern rim instead –– while working the map westward. “Yes, thank you. Have you a listing in your region for a Herod Edinsmaier or a Ms. Fannie McLive, maybe just F. McLive? Any at all for either Edinsmaier or McLive. That would be E d i n s m a i e r or M c L i v e.” I didn’t know, of course, how long it took from placing an order for telephone service before one’s name and number appeared upon the operators’ sheets of new listings so if I’d called and there was no record at present, perhaps, if I “were to call back in a week,” I was told repeatedly, why then … “there may be one later on.” Too, I didn’t know if Dr. Herod Edinsmaier would choose to keep unlisted the home residence number entirely; but I banked on his not at all doing this –– because of his ego. He too much wanted to remain accessible to anyone who might want to find him – other than I – yet still, for anyone he might think to term ‘an associate’ or ‘a colleague’ such as Varry Wussamai or those other Des Moines – area alcoholics anonymous gangsta – thugs of which there was a large number, he did not want to do the work of letting them all know the specific changes in address and telephone. After all, others might inquire about more than he wanted to reveal on why the changes; and, besides that, I had always done this detail for the family after all of those moving stints before. King Herod wasn’t about to issue Ms. Fannie McLive a fiat to contact Mehitable, for example, and perform for him this mundane part of moving herself, that is, of also informing Mehitable and AmTaham of what he’d done by taking Mirzah, Zane and Jesse even further away from me –– especially after the fiasco of Herry – Daddee’s Columbus Day weekend caper just the month before. If she, Mehitable, and others wanted to put out their efforts to find him, that would be all right; but Dr. Herod Edinsmaier wasn’t about to expend any orderliness on anyone else. I so counted on this predictability in Herry Edinsmaier; and 3½ weeks into the same script that I recited to approximately 70 or 80 different directory operators, struck paynim pay dirt. Atheist that I am, Jesse, Zane, Mirzah and I had been missing to each other for what felt like to me an eternity of hellfire. Oprah Winfrey periodically offers up on her television program what would seem to be a fairly common piece of wisdom to get, to understand, to know on one’s own: that the evil that Herry did to my children “changes them forever.” The “not knowing” is the worst; I already felt this and had experienced it in my core, of course, every day the Boys were in Urbandale so the not knowing – until I did know – until I did know that they were so far, far away, 890 miles and five states, seemed interminable. I know other mothers live decades like this. Not knowing. How they do daunts me. How they survive this holocaust … How dare they even ever … have to! I immediately phoned all of my friends to let them know I’d found that which was lost –– well, not exactly. It was waaaay, way worse than we’d feared –– the ‘finding’ of the lost children. Maybe Chicago or Saint Paul or Omaha or Kansas City, even possibly Milwaukee. We had all thought, “Well, he and she both have family around here themselves and Herry’s already done the coastal living thing – with Legion herself when Mirzah, Jesse and Zane were so, so little – so, no, it’ll probably be around here somewhere. Worst it could be is the big city, ya’ know, Legion –– like Chicago or Saint Louis.” “What’ll ya’ do, Legion?” Grace asked, “Are you headed out there, do you think? How could that man have thought – that – a good place for your Boys? Why, Legion, I’m from the South, and while that place might be in the South, too, our schools are not so bad in Tennessee. But there?! Where he took them?! Why, its schools truly, truly do suck, Legion! You don’t think, Legion, do you?! Naw – surely, surely not! That … ah, ya’ know, cuz she herself was a teacher at one time, ya’ don’t think she’ll homeschool them all, do you?! Om’god, Legion, ya’ know, he just might tell her to do that! It’d be like her own classroom – that kid of hers plus all of yours, too! Om’god, Legion, surely not!” Fuck, I didn’t even possess one credit card, no. I in November 1991, was headed at the next month’s Winter Solstice into beginning my 44th year, and I had always and only done all of my deals in cash. Never, never credit –– an opposite of sorts from AmTaham and from most farmers with whom I’d grown up … as a matter of fact. One time my father told me when I was a young adult, maybe 29 or 30, when he and Mehitable finally had had to leave the farm for good that he and she were $88,000 in debt. I remember myself there in his beater sedan’s front seat hearing this figure and my jaw dropping and determining from the lines in AmTaham’s forehead that I myself would never, never, never have to repeat words such as those to someone, least of all to my Truemaier Boys, about my financial circumstances –– and, so far, despite the iciness inside the condominium in which I was indeed existing and the utter absence of life lessons in such solo debt ‘protection’ for myself from either AmTaham or Mehitable, I had not had to. I was in debt all right, four different dentists’ bills and that horrendous SpaChezResort Hotel hospital bill which Homeland Terrorist Edinsmaier had viciously incurred for me by way of his orchestrating and, then from behind his so – pillared judicial curtain, remotely conducting Commander Stout’s misogynistic threatening. But I was whittling away at each at $15 a month per recipient and, since these came due every 30 days’ worth long before any such online bill payment options were in place, dropping off the payments on my walks around town every month saved – as well – on the postage stamps even. And as part of my entire savings plan, while it had no pension nor stocks in it and the IRAs to date had all been cashed out, it did include absolutely no credit extended to me from anywhere else. Dealings only in cash money. On the barrelhead now. So, consequently and purposefully, I had had not one credit card issued to me –– ever. No card? No temptation then. One reason, however, that I also could not just climb into Ol’ Black and go barreling forth to seek after Mirzah, Zane and Jesse … either. How would I reserve hotel rooms or buy gasoline or, for that matter without a credit card, rent a tiny car, for example, –– in order to stay clandestine –– that didn’t have on it Iowa license plates? If I had run with all three Boys, why I definitely would have had to possess a credit card and probably several, but that hadn’t happened because of the fact that there, indeed, were three of them and not just one child. Consequently, I just had never even applied for any kind of a credit card. Yet. “No, no. Umm, I won’t be moving out there, Grace, I can’t. I want to. For chris’sake I so want to, but I just can’t. Not nearly enough money, but I’ll certainly start to learn everything I can about the damn place. That’s for sure. Hope? JYeah, I sooo hope that just even for a little while, while I try to figure out what to do, that the schools and the fact that they’re some older, well, I just have to hope they’ll know something of what I taught them, enough to get by in one piece for a little bit anyhow. Shit, I so hope just for that little. And not for much more, Grace.” And I set about doing just exactly that: finding out –– again –– and … learning.
“I hope … ” and then fill in the blanks with whatever. It’s like saying, “I believe in the father and the son and a goddamn ghost, for chris’sake. Who is male, also, that holier – than – me ghost is!” when one really needs to sit up and place belief and strength and … protection … “Yes, Mehitable and AmTaham!” protection for oneself out of one’s … own being. Out of one’s own essence. Out of one’s own damned ghost! Out of one’s own ghostly spirit! Hence, why the teaching to our littlest human beings of the lessons of self – reliance and self – protection, the preparations that will last them for all of their adult years –– instilling in and imbuing the kiddos with reality, with its realism, with hard work, rationality and reason! –– must, for certain, take place during their very, very youngest ones. Sure, I loved holding and comforting and mothering my Boys when they were tiny, as I do now that they are adults and men; and I do not, in any way, mean to imply that that should lessen because I do not believe that that should … lessen. I do not believe in “mamas’ boys” or smother love; I don’t believe it exists, that is. I don’t believe DEhumans are over – anything. I do believe that males choose to be under – loving themselves because i) either, like Herry, they want to be this way usually as a manipulative, aprovechar / swindling out of and taking the greatest advantage of sort of defrauding violence, a passive – aggressive tool for their own selfishness and self – aggrandizement or ii) they were under – loved as little humans themselves and that “the standard measure of all things guided by” isn’t, but should be, the guiding loving possessed, accomplished and demonstrated to all children by DEhumans. An editor of Iowa State University’s student – run paper, a student herself of course, once wrote that, about the Y2003 Iraqi War, females were “overly emotional,” “too emotional” and “just hysterical” when she described that war’s protestors. I had to respond. “No!” I said in my published letter to her, its editor, “your assessment is as false as that which operates on the patriarchal premise that all things human are only all things androcentric and male – approved and male – oriented. Your assessment is smack in line with all of the male – identified lies that diss the emotions, feelings, sentiments and the utter essences of all of us female humans. It is, in fact, DEhumanization and, for mothers specifically, a fucking.” “Instead,” I continued, “we DEhumans possess and display, for the human species, for all of the human condition, just exactly the correct amount of emotion, the correct amount of hysteria and the correct measure of all things human and, most especially, when those things actually mean … blood – and – guns – and – guts – and – graves war.” That males themselves actively choose to not possess, to not accomplish and to not at all emote in an enough of a measured amount simply … because they can. And that leads me back to the hope thing: hoping accomplishes for us DEhumans exactly squat. Because it cannot! It is again the sitting back and the being passive, servile, deferent and so, so soft, the blindly abiding by the Mehitable – sort – of – poor me – poor me rule and role which many, many males and seemingly all male – identified females such as herself choose not only for the females in their lives but want to also put onto all of us other DEhumans. And for long, long millennia now, this hoping deal has been –– as well. Hoping is an opiate, an addiction –– and an excuse, an escape from accountability –– like religion is. And we DEhumans especially would do so much better to get on in our lives without it, that is, by losing it! By losing the “O, I so hope … yada, yada, yada” dithering. I finished the United Parcel Service helper job around 11:15 p.m. christmas eve 1991. It had been great, and I actually have fond memories of that particular post. Not always, by any means, no, no, no! has that corporation done well by DEhumans. Uh – uh. Sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuits, as a matter of fact, abound against the company nationwide; and in Iowa alone rather recently – 1998, one such jury awarded $80,700,000 to a Des Moines woman so justifiably charging both harassment and discrimination for years and years against a UPS center just a little over an hour away from me. Yes, that’s quite correct! I am stating … … that amount: 80.7 million dollars. Thank goodness and, most certainly! no frigging gaaawds, for moral jury persons. But back up here out of the Ames center I was treated with nothing but respect and honor – and the expectations on managers’, overseers’ and drivers’ behalves that I could – and would – actually do the job. It certainly was work, all right. Run, run, run. Haul, haul, haul. Lift, lift, lift. Smile, smile, O remember to smile at the customers, Legion! Although all of the drivers for whom I rode shotgun I truly liked and we went everywhere including the remotest rural homesteads of Storm County and beyond, I especially enjoyed the shopping mall assignment wherein early every morning for about two weeks the sorters loaded me up a colossal fifth – wheel and parked it out at the mall’s back lot to the service entrances of the biggest shops and stores. With brown suit and flatbed and hand truck and appropriate clipboard and paperwork and lots and lots of walking back and forth to the trailer then, I kept stocked the stores for the holidays. I so relished the smiles. The most difficult wasn’t the physical labor although true it was: I could consume whatever the hell I pleased because of its exercise. The hardest was, of course, watching the little kiddos dart about happy as clams. O, that was hard –– incredibly so! Seeing mama after mama after mama stroll children by my carts as I rolled and unloaded, I knew I had to hold back on the waterworks in order to keep professional the outward countenance –– and so … I just did. AmTaham as well as domestic violence and battered women’s shelter workers and sexual abuse counselors all called that –– this utility which I practiced … splitting: the adept ability to split into two people, two personalities … at the least. The one who does the work simply because the job needs doing in order to survive, and the person who splits off of the first Legion and floats up somewhere around the ceiling, safe there, protected and comforted for the time being, by the distance and the warmth up there in the darkened recesses of my brain. AmTaham had explained repeatedly to me –– in the last few months of my and the Truemaier Boys’ turmoil –– about this phenomenon which he himself still performed some 4½ decades later since the return from his Pacific battles of World War II. “But above all, you must keep this to yourself, Kitty. You just don’t know whom you can trust with this information. You know, that you split off –– in order to manage. I think it’s fine. As a matter of fact, I believe it necessary to the psyche, but you just can never know what other people are going to believe about you –– and, an’, aaah, they might hold it out against you. As proof you’re whacko. You know what I’m saying? So just be truly, truly careful with whom you admit this about yourself, Kitty. This cleaving thing. Hear? ‘Specially under no circumstances to any court or judge! Verstehen?!” And, O, had I! This ‘protection’ advice from an old warrior and the adroit True tribal chieftain to his 44 – year – old adult daughter! Only Grace knew. I kept this skill so secret, that is, about my ability to become two Legions. And most certainly nowhere near that custody evaluator, Ms. Carrie Canard, had I ever let on. Same survival mechanism as within my condominium’s raw and so frosty glaciation when showering, lo, those many years’ worth of no heat. A system so honed that within moments of my being socked with something shocking or difficult or tragic or holocaustic to the flash of generating and accomplishing the schism, I could split in seconds –– if there be need to do so. On the 24th of December then, we were particularly swamped as had the entire week been before, naturally. But this exceptional Tuesday, I’d received an early morning notice from an Iowa State University human resources official that if I wanted an interview for a secretarial position, then I had better get on over to its Forestry Department just as soon as possible since at noon they were all closing up shop there and everywhere else within the University for the holiday. I asked for an hour off is all –– explaining straight up front to my UPS bossman that if I didn’t get on out at the University or somewhere else after that night, why I’d be evicted from the condo in less than two weeks’ time –– with the beginning of 1992 –– because I simply did not have January’s rent money. “One hour! Then I need you right back at the Mall. Got that?!” O JYeah, that? That … I had gotten all right. “Says here, Dr. True, that you have a lot of degrees. What about that? What’s the story with that? Why are you applying to be a secretary? Maybe you won’t be staying very long? Would I have that about right?” asked a very tall, lissome man wearing the Malcolm X – browline and FBI agent Carl Hanratty – style of eyeglasses which Actor Tom Hanks modeled in Catch Me If You Can and who appeared to be about my age. He stretched out his right hand to me and identified himself as Dr. Joplin presently then Chair of Iowa State University’s Forestry Department. I had already taken to the woman, also my age, perhaps up to a decade older it was hard to tell, who was Dr. Joplin’s chief administrative assistant when she remarked how nice it was to see me liveried for a job interview in the chocolate browns of the UPS uniform, the one I was to entirely relinquish later on that very night, –– instead of, of course, in the ‘standard’ two – piece navy wool with matching pumps. She genuinely meant it. I looked at Dr. Joplin; I looked over at his assistant, Ms. Rosalind Franklin. I looked down at the floor. To be honest –– which I so wanted to be with these two people –– I needed another byte about the size of this book and the time that that would take … to explain the mother – fucking. And just how matters such as one, that is, how matters such as a mother – fucking, result in DEhumans like me darkening their doorstep seeking employment. Long – term employment, as a matter of fact, and a situation that came with belovéd benefits, too! It did strike me though –– Dr. Joplin’s very initial questioning –– as sooo, so different than what would have been Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s dissing at such as would be my introduction in this type of conversation. Hell, Herry would not have believed me to even own those degrees! I would have been –– right off! –– accused of lying on my résumé –– –– |