Reading: The Blind Assassin

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: the full moon. And "Shakespeare in Love" last night. Also "Enemy of the State"

Learning: about late- and early-blooming cultivars, and how apples are related to roses, and oh! so many things.

13 September 2000: Wormbelly

I have loved Penelope Keeling since I first read Rosamund Pilcher's The Shell-Seekers. She cooks, she gardens, she loves people. I read this first the summer of 1991, when I very much needed soothing and here found it. Also in the summer of 1991, my hair was long enough to hang, not just swing. The novel has at least three scenes with Penelope brushing her hair. Wanting to emulate Penelope, I looked forward to the day I could brush my long brown hair just like hers. She is, in fact, chief among the women I so admire for keeping their long hair into their old age. I love a long silver braid or a proud gray bun.

So Sunday, when I was so upset, I tried to channel Penelope. I brushed my hair, but that brought me no comfort. It's not enough of a ritual to be a comfort, because I'm primarily a comber. Instead I braided it and went out for a 25-mile bike ride. When I got home and threw myself on the floor to gather energy for the challenges of a shower, I pulled These Happy Golden Years randomly from the shelf and reread the Little House series from backward from there to Silver Lake (skipping The Long Winter until Monday because I didn't want anything depressing) with a hop to Farmer Boy. There's a scene in Silver Lake when Ma and Laura wait up for Pa, Ma in a rocking chair and Laura on the floor beside her. Ma strokes Laura's hair, and tells her the wind and sun are drying her hair and she must brush it 100 strokes a night. At least I don't want to cut a bang.

Now it's Wednesday. Yesterday I cleaned the house and mowed the grass and then found "Shakespeare in Love" again on a movie channel, so I didn't read much further in Blind Assassin (which, truth to tell, I am not liking so very much and doubt I'll finish by Saturday at 7:30), but I figure when I do get further than the 20 pages on the bus this morning, there'll be something about long hair.

Or maybe not: maybe I used up the long hair karma of channeling Penelope and Laura by wearing it loose today. Since I was ill I have not been able to beat these nasty headaches, and yesterday I dressed up as a way to make myself feel better, wearing my Occasion 'Do (high ponytail at the crown, turned inside out and braided, tucked and pinned). Unfortunately that winds up feeling like all my hair is hanging from one strand, and when I take it out, all the hair suddenly turns the other way in the follicles and it's heavy and it hurts. So I figured today would be every follicle for itself. I popped in to say hi to someone in Publications whom I haven't seen in a while and she asked me what was different about my hair, saying it had always been long, but there was something different, wasn't there?

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I didn't watch all of "Shakespeare in Love." I slept somewhere in there between the Banquo scene and when Viola shows up in time to be Juliet. What a great movie. It was on last week sometime, and seeing it so recently reduced not by one whit my pleasure in watching it last night. Dame Judi Dench makes a fine Elizabeth. When RDC first got a laptop that could play DVDs, he bought "Life is Beautiful," so we had that, and when he bought the player, "Being John Malkovich," "The Usual Suspects," and "The Matrix" came home with it. All these are fine movies, but the one top priority should have come home first: "Henry V," our favorite of our few mutual films. We have a well-worn tape of it, much deteriorated through multiple viewings over the past eight or nine years. I first saw the film in the summer of 1990, in a cinema, and again that fall at school in an auditorium with notoriously bad sound, and since then on the worsening tape. So to see it on DVD was like reading Watership Down in hardcover when RDC gave it to me for Christmas, after years of reading my yellowing pulp paperback, when the hardcover's different pagination meant that familiar text appeared in unfamiliar geography, on the right page instead of the left or at the top instead of the bottom, and for the first time in years I read it carefully, the whole thing including "El-hrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé," which I usually skip. The "Henry V" tape has been so bad for so long that the chorus is inaudible, the initial scene between the archbishops invisible, and the war council only slightly improved. Thus we hadn't seen the credits for years and years. So there we sat, watching the DVD from the absolute first instant, Patrick Doyle's music and the credits, and I exclaimed "Judi Dench! Judi Dench? How can I not have noticed Judi Dench?" There aren't many possibilities, and she obviously wasn't Katherine and I'm sure I would've recognized her if she were Nurse. RDC said it first: "She's Hostess Quickly," to which I responded, "Povery sucks the life right out of you, doesn't it?" Good make-up job.

I disliked Meryl Streep from the first movie I ever saw with her, "Kramer vs. Kramer," because I'm so rational that I associate characters with actors. She hasn't grown on me since, though; and except for "Out of Africa," I say merely that she cries too damn much, and when she's not crying, she looks like an Afghan hound whose paws have been trodden on. With similar rationality, I didn't think I liked Judi Dench after she was Eleanor Lavish in "A Room with a View." I was absolutely wrong (unlike about Meryl Streep).

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Internet access is down at work and I am fighting off the dry heaves. Being deprived of it on the very day I have my hair down, I am proving why wearing my hair down is such a bad idea. Split ends. I am noticing my split ends. I usually don't. I can roll along happily unaware of them for weeks at a time. Months. And then comes a day I decide I'm going to do this, I'm going to leave it down all day, and since other people manage, so can I. Hmm. Managing. Mrs Whatsit cannot manage all her various scarves and shawls and things and Mrs Who puts her to rights, yes? I'll have to check the exact quote when I get home: "'Oh dear,' she sighed, 'I shall never learn to manage.'"

Which reminds me of a pair of shoes I saw today. Take an ordinary pair of black loafers. [The previous line was itself a paraphrase of the Steve Martin's "Cruel Shoes" routine: "an ordinary pair of black and white pumps."] Elevate them on a chunky heel. That isn't too bad, and it's not a spike heel anyway. Now open the toe, straight across. Yii.

I don't like shoes, of course, but aren't open-toed, high-heeled loafers excessive even to a normal woman? Furthermore, they remind me of the shoes Mrs. O'Keefe bought for Calvin for a dollar that she couldn't spare, whose heels he had to saw off and whose toes he had to open so he could shove his feet into them (before Mr. Jenkins bought him a new pair, proving his own humanity). Poor Beezie.

So ends my Madeleine L'Engle tangent, which, did you notice, OMFB, included all three books?

However, I don't want to go back to discussing my hair.

However, I can't remember the actress who played Cousin Charlotte ("poor, poor Charlotte") in "A Room with a View"--no, I do, Maggie Smith. And Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, and later old Wendy, ever so much more than 20.

Now for some random griping.

• Item one: Cinematizing Possession. Shouldn't happen. Bad idea. Nasty. Even if Byatt were to write the screenplay, badness would abound. I won't see "Simon Birch," since it will taint A Prayer for Owen Meany. I don't really want to see "Cider House Rules" but I probably will in a remote watching fest with RRP and SWBW in Connecticut and CLH in Boston, if SWBW ever finishes it, because they mean more to me than Homer Wells does. I might see "Nobody's Fool," despite loving the book, because I remember seeing the trailer when it came out, not knowing it was from a book, and thinking, despite such movies not appealing to me ordinarily, that it seemed a likely movie. (Aha, I've been meaning to mention this: there's a character named Homer Wells in another Richard Russo novel, Mohawk. An unusual name to appear in two such dissimilar books and for me to happen across in a six-week period.) I guess it could happen. "The Wizard of Oz" is far, far superior to the book. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" happened to have the same title and characters with the same names, and since I hadn't read the book first, I could love the travesty. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a good movie, and while of course it cannot touch the book, it doesn't profane it. (As a related aside, "A Miracle on 34th Street" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" cannot be improved upon and their remakes should be burnt at the stake.) Then there's that thing they did to Mansfield Park--which proves once and for all that however excellent his taste in wives (Antonia Frasier), Harold Pinter is just a bad and wrong man. But Gwyneth Paltrow as Maude? Blonde she is, but can she be austere and academic? How to convert the pastiche of Victorian poetry and the vital correspondence into a movie?
• Item two: Why is Bob Knight, recently former coach of Indiana University's men's basketball team, a news item? Who cares? So he has a violent temper; what different can anyone expect from someone responsible for the profit and victories of organized, professional athletic team? (And oh yes, I call any college that gives athletic scholarships "professional.") The school, supposedly an academic institution despite its giving athletic scholarships to people not necessarily academically qualified or even competent, purports zero tolerance for violence and confrontation. CNN reports that the student whom he attacked in the most recent confrontation, which he was fired for, has received death threats and has been offered police protection. It follows that people who idolize a violent person understand only violence themselves, as if harming the young man would lead to Knight's reinstitution. I heard Bob Knight's son Patrick say that IU has shot itself in the foot, that basketball players come to IU to play for Knight and now IU's basketball record will suffer. Slap my hind with a melon rind, but I thought college students attended a college to earn an education, not primarily to play a sport, let alone only for a specific coach. I suppose I'm naïve.
• I work near someone I've never liked. I might not mind her if only I didn't sit within earshot of her. Her voice, activated continuously, loudly, and in a whining monotone, grates. Today she pitched her voice carefully louder to ask the capital of Illinois. She wasn't asking me but the answer exploded out of me in a tone as inappropriate for work as most of her gossipy topics of personal conversation. I should have said nothing; and if I had to answer I shouldn't've betrayed any disgust or frustration. But to have graduated from high school not knowing the capital of Illinois, and to work in a research firm but not to open a dictionary to "Geographical Names," and particularly to work here, at Dot Org, and not know the states' capitals, is unacceptable to me. She is now commenting to no one in particular, and heaving great sighs, that a whole day without Internet access is just amazing.

  I haven't enjoyed my unwired day either, but I don't voice my disgruntlemnt. Well, I have here, but here my audience is voluntary. I do not understand having to voice every thought aloud, and less do I understand voicing all negative thoughts. This has been called New English Puritanical stiff-upper-lippedness in me, not kindly. Perhaps it is. I think of Shelley's friend's girlfriend and Shelley's wickedly merciless reproduction of the woman's mundane, whiny, pointless monologue, which, must it have existed at all, should have been internal but was not.

  I remember using the bathhouse when camping in Glacier, being in the showerroom with a mother and two daughters. One, about 13, voiced her every thought, and each one was a complaint. The water not being hot enough and not having enough pressure. Misplacing her brush. Her flip-flops being muddy and her clothes getting wet. The sundry offenses her relations were committing. She incorported for me the egotistical self-doubt of adolescence, that oxymoron that requires one's self be heard and known (even or especially by those who persecute one) and that results in paranoia and feelings of persecution. In a 13-year-old, such behavior is annoying but understandable and is Reason #846 I don't want to have children. In an adult, such behavior is inexcusable and is why I shouldn't be anywhere near this person.

Now for some random happinesses.

• Last week a squirlkin expired in the street in front of the house. (That's not the happiness) She was round, not bloody or flattened, so I don't know if this was the somnolent squirrel I've always thought looked so peaked finally at the end of her rope. Disposing of her little carcass was more than either of us undertook to undertake, so there she festered. We've kept the front door and windows closed for most of week now, and even the crows left her alone. Yesterday, she was gone. Today is a street-sweeping day, and she would have been gone anyway, but her absence made mowing the front lawn last night much more pleasant than I had expected it would be (that was the happiness).
• I picked up five fallen pears. One was perfect, and I ate it out of hand. Unlike the first pear I ate off that tree, this was sweet and tender and everything a pear should be. Easily the best I've ever eaten in my life. I thought at first that the other four were fit only for compost, but after I mowed and clipped and tidied away, I sat on the patio with Blake in his cage beside me and surgically excised the bad bits and ended up with a bowlful of delicate pear morsels. I called them supper and ate in the twilight.
• RDC is coming back today, and he sounds healthy again.
• I got my first New Hampshire quarter in change today.

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Fine, I'll out with it, but I might remove it before I post the rest of this. I hesitate to write about it here because she knows of my escribitionism and last I knew she was reading my archives. SEBB, the friend whose return I so gladly hailed in June, has bowed out again. Why I know not. If two months' silence after a June fraught with communication bemused me, it hardly quelled my enthusiasm and the affection that I was so happy to give free rein to after a decade of suppression, upside-down like a guinea pig in a large canvas bag tied up at the mouth with strings, and then sat upon. She is not coming to the wedding.

It was a courteous kiss-off, as far as such things go. Wishing me well, saying "keep bouncing," citing a reason I call flimsy (her bad correspondence) but at least nothing gleaned from my archives or her Cheezy-Poof memory, no admitted offense. That's what made me so mad Sunday morning, being given no reason.

Being a negligent correspondent is no reason to be no correspondent, though, damn it. Not all of our friends responded to her as enthusiastically and prolifically as I did; some wanted to wait for face-to-face contact at the wedding, which disappointed her and led her to wonder if she could ever reconnect with them or would want to. I thought that this delay (four months between reintroductory email and meeting) was no reason to dismiss the possibility of reuniting with them then or ever. [I am omitting details of other people's perspectives here, whose absence doesn't help me explain my own.] Just as I didn't accept their reluctance to explain their current lives in email and their desire to reunite in person, as good reasons for her to dismiss the possibility of reacquaintance, I don't accept her "I'm a bad correspondent" as a credible justification to end contact.

When SEBB first reappeared, a whole section of my psyche sighed with relief and relaxed, the same as happened when HEBD and I were reconciled four years ago. I miss SLH, whom I have not heard from in years, but there's no rancor between us. I miss SSP; and while just as I never expected forgiveness from SEBB I don't expect it from him, yet so would I welcome it were it to come. When I learned SEBB indeed had long forgiven me and we could laugh about everything, I ricocheted off the walls with delight. Now she wants to reconstitute the silence, watering it down with a baseless excuse. This time as far as I know there's not antagonism behind it; as far as I can see there's no other reason for it at all. She says there is no discord, says we're on a positive note, so why end?

Bad correspondent, ha! I'm not in as frequent touch with a lot of people as I'd like to be, and while I miss the close intimate knowledge of someone's daily life, reading, traumas, and newest dress, the surety I feel of love and loyalty is much more important. It might not often offer the delight I feel when I can call someone and irreverently ask their answering machine where my funnel is, but it serves as the basis of a mighty contentment. I don't ask for the 90K emails and the three-hour phone calls we had throughout June all the time: right in the first flush we had a lot to rehash and restore. As far as I knew, everything was rehashed and was restored, and I enjoyed the satisfaction of a renewed friend. Is even that peace to be stripped from me?

So I was angry. And hurt. And bewildered. Eventually, three days later, I continue bewildered. I debated whether to post this, not because I don't want her to know what I think, but because she might not want the world (or the wee but pertinent subset that is my readership) to know what she thinks. But I don't think I do know what she thinks, and I'm hardly putting words in her mouth--there have been so few. And if she really means she's outta here then not reading Speaking Confidentially should follow, and anyway I omitted as much not-me detail as possible.

If there's just amicable silence, that's got to be better than the decade leading up to last May, when as far as I knew her silence was inimical. I guess.

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Perhaps it is time for me to return to my hair now.

The other thing I notice when I can see it is its blah color. There's a color of hair I particularly dislike, the taupe of hair color. (Taupe shoes are the worst. So practical! They go with everything and don't show dirt! Erk.) It's darker than taupe, a kind of washed out brown, without sheen or highlights. My hair's a bit darker than that, but not chestnut. Oooo, another L'Engle reference: "...though [Meg']s chestnut hair might not rival her mother's rich auburn, it was thick and lustrous and became her perfectly, pulled softly back from her face into a knot at the nape of her slender neck." Actually, the color of Meg's hair before her transformation, the mouse-brown L'Engle calls it in A Wrinkle in Time, is what I mean about taupe hair. And when I'm looking at my hair instead of surfing, as I am, and I'm inside, which I am, I can't see my highlights, which used to be copper and red but which I think have faded, with age and also with less sun. I don't get my blonde streak anymore.

I have considered coloring my hair (or since I have no idea how to do it myself, having my hair colored), but since I feel like a whore using mascara, such a permanent cosmetic as dye probably wouldn't be a good idea for me.

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I keep wondering if a Miss Grey dictated her Willoughby words. And I want her to know I have the Jennifer Ehle "Pride and Prejudice." And that "Shakespeare in Love" is not wholly perfect because Colin Firth is mean. And to ask if she likes Rupert Everett too, and what other Richard Russo she's read, and whether she's read Possession, and if she ever located my funnel.