Dear Abby (Lynda Schor)

Dear Abby:

Every time I ask my friend Sally if she wants to hang out she says she has something else to do.  A few weeks ago she said she had to go out.  About an hour later while walking around the block I noticed her car was there.  I knocked on the door.  Sally said she was getting ready to leave and besides she was on the phone.  Does it take an hour to get ready to go out?  I don’t want to lose an old friend, but I’m not sure she really is a friend anymore.  If she is why does she keep ditching me?  My husband Lyle and I have a fourteen-month-old child together.  My two children from an earlier relationship and Lyle’s son make up our family of six.  Lyle and I make good money and we both collect child support from previous partners.  What bothers me is Lyle won’t let me see his paychecks or combine our joint incomes in a joint account.  I contracted herpes-2 after a one-night stand ten years ago.  Since the age of seventeen I have times when I feel really happy and I’m talking to friends on the Internet all of a sudden I feel a wave of sadness.  And I remember bad things, like when my best friend died when I was little.  I don’t know why this happens all the time.  What do you think?  My husband thinks my herpes-2 is a constant reminder of my promiscuity.  I get very angry at this, but then I remember that stress can trigger an outbreak.  I try to remember that the virus doesn’t change who I am inside.  I don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?  I didn’t say anything about his gonorrhea, did I?  I was in the parking lot of a shopping center when I noticed a woman two cars away yelling and hitting a little girl.  The girl seemed to be about six or seven.  I wrote down her license number.  I checked with several state agencies and fund out that although slapping may be legal in Virginia the state policy is open to interpretation.  Should I report her?  I got into my car, pulled up alongside them and called out, Are you okay?  The little girl was crying and straightening her dress.  Yes, she’s okay, the woman snapped.  This kind of behavior really bothers me.  I frequently see adults slap, pinch and berate their children—sometimes babies in strollers.  These adults seem to be out of control and everyone ignores them.  Sometimes I walk slowly by these people to let them know I see what they are doing.  One time I reported a woman who was slapping and scolding her Down syndrome daughter, who kept yelling, I’m your friend.  My mother died when I was seven.  She suffered bad depression toward the end of her life.  I actually scare myself sometimes.  But I don’t think my depression is bad enough to see someone about.  Do you?  My best friend Sheila was recently married and I was a bridesmaid.  About two months before the wedding Sheila called to say that the junior bridesmaid dress she had selected for one of her attendants was too small—size 8 for a girl who was size 12.  She wanted to know if there was anything I could do to alter the dress because it was too late to get another one.  After a lot or work and many long hours over a four-week period I finished the alterations.  Neither Sheila nor the junior bridesmaid offered to pay me for the work so I thought it was because I said I’d do it as a favor to Sheila.  A few days before the wedding I was still deciding what to give her as a wedding gift but everyone I asked said that altering the dress was enough.  Well Sheila didn’t see it that way.  On her wedding night she called me several times demanding a gift of money.  Even after her honeymoon she called and said I’d been disrespectful not to give her a gift.  Was I wrong not to give her a separate wedding gift?  My husband’s mother wants to spend a lot of time with him.  She likes us to have dinner at her apartment only a mile away.  If we can’t then she still likes my husband to.  If he can’t or doesn’t want to she gets very hurt.  She tries to make my husband feel guilty.  I tell him that’s what she’s doing but he still feels bad.  At my job I get hit on right and left by men in their fifties.  I’m not talking about cute or even simply annoying remarks, but constant lewd suggestions and requests for my phone number.  Would it be right to report these guys?  I don’t want to risk my job.  And here is an embarrassing problem:  My job requires me to make public appearances and often I am “dressed to the nines.”  I admit for dramatic purposes I sometimes apply too much makeup.  I have always been told I am beautiful and have even done some modeling.  The problem is people think I’m a man.  Once I was cornered at a festival by an angry group of people who had been fired up by one drunkard’s insistence that I was a drag queen.  You know I’m a woman—I have kids for heaven’s sake.  The first few times it happened I tried to brush it off and regain my composure—once I stopped crying.   But lately it’s getting ridiculous.  I am mistaken for a cross-dresser even when I wear very little makeup.  At five-foot-seven and a hundred and twenty pounds I’m hardly manly.  A week doesn’t go by without this happening.  My husband says I should just blow it off that people are just jealous.  But my confidence is in the cellar and I’m at my wit’s end.  I’d like to cower somewhere but my job won’t let me.  The other night my Lyle brought home a male friend for dinner without letting me know beforehand.  They both drank a lot of wine.  Then my husband wanted me to go to bed with the two of them.  Of course I declined, but I was really put out by this new wrinkle.  And neither of them even offered to do the dishes after I did my best preparing a nice meal for them.  If my husband’s mother hadn’t called to berate him for not visiting her who knows where this could have gone.  My son wants a dog, but my husband says, No way.  He becomes enraged when I bring it up.  I said it would be good for our son and he said he’d rather have a dog around than my son (who is my child with a previous husband).  Then he said it’s either him or the dog.  Now I feel I must get a dog as my first priority is my son, isn’t it?  It isn’t right for him to keep bringing up my herpes—2, either.  The other day I found my son in bed with my husband in my son’s bed.  I don’t usually walk right into his room but I needed to get something.  He said my son hadn’t been feeling well and he was just taking a nap with him.  My son seemed upset.   He asked if this meant he couldn’t have a dog.  I don’t know what to believe Dear Abby.  What would you think?

Lynda Schor's most recent book, Sexual Harassment Rules, and an older one, Seduction, are out with Spuyten Duyvil press. A half-dozen of these are here, on the Truck. Her interview with Carol Novack can be found in The Mad Hatters' Review 7. Prints of her artwork are at Hamilton Stone Review, where she also serves as Fiction Editor. She lives, and writes, with Halvard Johnson, in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico.

-- Lynda Schor

IN MEMORIAM: Carol Novack 1948-2011

Carol Novack died of lung cancer Thursday at 8:55 pm. She was a genre-defying writer of lyrical and inventive work, imaginative and beautiful. She was a lightning rod who brought together thousands of artists from around the globe in collaboration and exploration as publisher of the groundbreaking Mad Hatters' Review. She was also my good friend, quite irreplaceable.

Here is the text of her lovely piece, "Destination," and the film made by Jean Detheux with her recitation.

vimeo.com/26782140

DESTINATION
(for Jean Detheux)

I
On the hill, there is an easel holding a painting of a town. You
are always traveling to the town, but whenever you think you’ve arrived,
there is nothing but stones, statutes and indigestible
bread. You return to the painting. You wonder if there’s a detail
you’ve missed, a clue that will help you find the town. You let
your eyes be deceived. They are connected to your heart with its
longing to nest; you are possessed with owning. You lose your
perspective again and again, wanting perspective, you are cursed.

II
You have come to rest. You think perhaps this is my town or
close enough to the one I was walking towards, at least when the
moon guided me like a mother it seemed to be. I can’t be too
fussy; I will die with dust mites and sand crabs and there will be
no home in death. But now, always now this town is different
from then, at least my memory of soft greens and blues with
gentle angles, or so it seemed, seems. This town is all glare with
acute turns and sonic booms. It won’t hold me, rock me, is neither
mother nor lover. It has so few dimensions for me though it has
dimensions for the neighbors, I suspect. They talk about rules,
have so many they can’t keep track of what’s forbidden. Too many
of them stay indoors for fear of breaking a rule. The chandelier
drops are cameras. They don’t understand. They make more rules.
This town’s windows need insulation in the frigid seasons when
the voices grow colder and louder. Nothing grows and the
kitchen shelves are vacant. One can hear the real estate agents
screaming in their white rooms. One can see their angry shadows
through white curtains. Always white – that is what the
denizens want: a neutered town in which you may disappear
into your shadows. They say that colors invite arrest. They
think they are invisible, the fools. Perhaps they are invisible
and I am the fool.

Here again I have to walk on stones for bread; the bakers don’t
know me. So I will move on. This is not a town, well not mine.
That is my perspective, not this.

III
He frightened me when he clasped me to him in the night,
when he lowered the volume of his voice to speak of the mirage
of walls and roofs. Not so long ago, he seemed to be my destination.
He was mine and I was his or so it seemed. After an
orgy of mirrors, we sucked and picked at one another’s bones.
Then he strayed into that other woman’s residence and stayed
too long, I took the turn back to where I’d been going, but
couldn’t find it. Pain was my map; I could hardly see clearly.

So I found you hiding in a hedge with thorns, not crying but
chanting, no, singing, singing a lament to your mother; you
crooned, wanting to crawl back into her, so I came and stroked
your head. I remember your hair as soft as dandelion puffs and
you trembled but kept still for a spell entranced you let me
be your home. And then like flotsam, you floated away, you
with your eyes dense with storms. I carried on, tore off my red
dress, taunted you. Who can stay still? Who can remain in homes
with so many rules? you pleaded. I left that town a long time ago,
I answered. At least I thought I did. You looked like a rabbit in a
wolf’s yellow eye. All homes have rules, you said. You said I am
a nomad. I have no choice. You do, I replied, drawing you into
me for the last time, feeling like the rabbit in your jaws. But
was I the wolf? Now I have forgotten your name.

IV
In those towns they lock up the homeless when they remain in
one spot and throw stones at Gypsies. Like snails, the Gypsies
carry their homes on their backs. The denizens say it’s not
right! Everyone must pay taxes and mortgages like us – despite
interest rates. They rape the land we have purchased and pillage
the daughters we have sown and own. Lock them up!

The Gypsies say it is a curse to want to own, a curse to be
possessed. It is a curse to want to possess and be possessed,
a curse to own. You can seek to become the color of any of these
towns with their home teams, but the shade will be unbecoming
and oppressive. You will see!

I try hard not to want but keep gazing at the painting, as if I
had perspective or could learn it. My eyes are connected to my
heart with its longing to nest; I can’t help but let it flutter its
wings and woo my eyes. How foolish. I keep traveling to the
towns, all the same the cursed towns with their statutes and
stones. None is the town I seek.