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"The housekeeper's been hired fulltime," I told Mike over dinner. My friend Noreen found out she was pregnant the day before and after five miscarriages she wasn't taking any chances.
"Good for them," Mike said swallowing his spaghetti and hushing me with a wave of his fork. Fox News was on, and of course even I concede that new developments in auto theft crimes are more crucial to our life than what I may have to say: I mean if we lose the car, we're screwed. But Mike doesn't like the tone of voice in which I tell him this, and I don't like it much either but that doesn't change the fact that we couldn't afford a housekeeper were I ever in the same predicament, and so I'm glad there was no chance of that.
When I met Mike I'd never really given kids much thought.
"You have four sisters, Paula," he said one evening twirling the ringlets of my hair around his forefinger, the silver ring with the garnet he wore flashing through my hair like a red eyed fish through honey glazed water.
"So what Sweetie?" In those days I was so soft spoken I'd surprise myself.
"Isn't being an Aunt supposed to be much more fun?"
"Yeah," I said. "Like being single." I leaned over to kiss him, but he sat up, his slim feet sliding in their thick white socks like planes on the runway of a vinyl coffee table.
"Seriously," Mike said, "all of the coo coo stuff without the shit smell or snot or other nasty solids or fluids."
"Don't you want children?" I sat up too.
He bought his feet down solidly on the beige carpet. "No".
"Okay, me too." I smiled and snuggled back down. That was that. No sleepless nights. No loss of figure. No scrimping our whole lives for a college education kids might not want after all. No kids.
My sisters have a hard time understanding this. I don't know why, considering they're always bitching and moaning about how they have no life, and how by the time they'll get time to have a life, it'll be time to let the kids live life. I swear thanksgivings are one long grumble. I'm the star at these family dinners though, fresh and chirpy, come as I do laden with gift baskets (an assortment of herbals teas, multi-vitamins, and lotions I purchase over the year as soon as they hit the sale bin at the health store I've been working at since high school).
I love my job. The employee discounts are great. I can afford organic produce at every meal and high quality food brands. We employees get to goof off when Ellen, the manager, isn't watching, and if she catches us we get to bitch her out, and that just makes for great camaraderie amongst us. There are three part time positions with an unbelievable turnover rate, no surprise to anyone who's ever wondered why we never remove our Help Wanted sign.
Julia and I work full time. We've both been at Wise Health well over ten years, not that we got a decade bonus or anything special. However Ellen did take us out to dinner which was very nice, even if we did end up at Hooters since they have the best chicken wings, although it did seem more because it was just across the street. (Ellen's got these gigantic bunions on all her toes which makes walking very tough. Nothing in store has helped much but she's got faith, and she's begun reading Deepak Chopra which, if we believe some customers, is the real deal).
The day Noreen applied for a job was one of the coldest in Boulder we'd had so far that year. It was snowing and windy and gray, and reminded me of the winter days in the Scrooge and Tiny Tim TV movie specials. Noreen walked through the glass doors, which I take special pride in keeping stain free, in a bright red coat, and I thought, shitty kitty she doesn't look cold at all while I'm standing in here freezing with the heater on. I quite expected her to anoint a cart and begin circling our four aisles without a nod in my direction, she seemed the type with her perfectly applied magenta lip pencil and chestnut scarf glinting against her gold dangly earrings. Instead she glided to the register counter, rubbed her gloved hands, and said,
"It's freezing out there. Can I please have a job application?"
Why, I thought, she's one of us. I beamed. She beamed right back. I almost told her to save the grin for Ellen's benefit, but then decided against: it felt good to be grinned at, and anyway, one day I'd make manager, for sure, so may as well practice being grinned at like a maniac.
"Hey," I said, "What do you think of this Deepuck Chop-ra Indian guy?"
I picked the book Ellen had tucked under the counter and flashed the chubby author photograph at Noreen.
"Don't know," she said. "I'm not Indian."
"Really?" I said. "You could have fooled me."
"I'm from Pakistan."
"Where's that at?"
She proceeded to explain in the kindest of ways (not that I got it, but I nodded anyway and thanked God that my existence did not depend on the knowledge of remote geography) and, since kindness is a quality I value in all peoples I was pretty pleased when Ellen hired her on the spot.
This is what I appreciate about a career in sales: I get to meet lots of people and since everyone in the world needs to buy something, sooner or later I'm going to meet the whole world. (We had one of those Nigerians walk in the other day, now that was an experience. Ellen and I could follow her without having to move on account of her headgear rearing over the aisles though she spent most of her time in the diabetic section. She smelled of hot cider and her teeth were so white, as if she took really good care of them- I told Mike it didn't look like her country was the one Fox News always featured in their Disastrous Regions, and Mike said it sounded like I was, for once, right).
The thing with meeting people from all over the world is that I have to be very tolerant, and that's not an easy thing especially when it comes to odors. To put it simply Noreen reeks. She's a human skunk. Ellen asked her to tone it down but Noreen said No, on account of that being discrimination. You'd think Ellen had asked her to remove her nose ring or wipe off her forehead dot (not that she ever wore one) or something when she'd simply requested her to use less perfume. Anyway the customers didn't really mind. At least one a day would ask, "What's that lovely fragrance?" with their eyes half shut and nostrils erect, but then they didn't have to spend all day with that expensive as all hell scent.
I know because Noreen corrected me over it not being of the drug store variety but a true to God vial costing an outrageous amount. (I went to the mall to check her tall tale, but she wasn't lying. I had a massive headache that night. Such a waste of good money, I told Mike, when you can buy a similar scent at Walgreens for one tenth the price. I did add though that I wouldn't mind getting the real deal myself once in a while, didn't I deserve as much, but Mike must have thought I was joking because, to date, I haven't received any such fragrance.)
Noreen by the way really goes all out when giving me birthday and Christmas presents. Thanks to these four years of friendship I've built up quite a handbag collection. My sisters are dolts for not recognizing the worth of what I'm carrying; I cringe to think pre Noreen I didn't have the foggiest either. Mike understands, he thinks the same of a guy who can't recognize a car from its coloring.
Mike doesn't like Noreen's husband much. Calls him Mr. Silk Socks and yeah, okay, he is a bit namby pamby with his crisp white cotton shirts, red wine when Mike would rather a chilled beer, and serving green tea in dragon painted cups so tiny, so delicate that Mike's joke about crunching them in his fist does not sit well at all in Noreen's drawing room, plastered as it is with the plushest rugs ever and biggest paintings which apparently they had shipped from back home. (I was talking to one of my sisters and referred to Pakistan as 'back home' and she said "Say what! You're spending too much time with that girl.")
But so what? Noreen's a riot, she got these super eye lashes, thick as gumbo, as long as a colt's tail and as black as the devil's privates; I can stare at her for hours. I couldn't for the life of me be Noreen nor she me, though sometimes when I'm lying awake next to Mike, not that he knows because he's fast asleep, I think, why would she ever want to be me, and that's not a nice thought because part of being satisfied with one's life is having others wanting to live it.
The only thing Noreen wished she had of my life, and I know because she says it constantly (which used to make me wonder about how envious she really was because you'll never catch me voicing jealousy) was the desire to not have kids.
"You American women are so lucky," she said. "You don't have a biological need to be mothers. You have evolved so far that you are fulfilled by yourselves completely."
I didn't bother to correct her. For one she'd never believe me, and second she'd meet my sisters sooner or later and figure out how wrong she was.
Early in our friendship I asked Noreen what she was doing stocking Wise Health's shelves with five varieties of protein bars, when she could just as well be living at a spa. (I'm straightforward, which Mike says is one of my charms, though the way he says 'charms' makes it sound like a skanky word). That's when Noreen told me about her miscarriages and wanting to stay busy, busy, busy until a baby came. Why Wise Health? Because it's a five minute walk away from her house (there is a Hooters and a Donut shop too but apparently neither have the cachet a health store, according to her, does) and, apparently since she has a chauffer back home, she's never learned to drive and cannot possibly because she's terrified she'll run someone over.
I must say it gives me a thrill to watch Noreen dusting between the loose herb racks, coughing hysterically even if a fingertip worth of lavender, or nettle, or chamomile floats by her face. I feel like Camilla Bowles, Prince Charles' true love, watching Lady Di soil herself. The day Noreen discovered a dead rat in the toilet right behind the potty was a riot. She nearly fainted. So much for cachet I thought as I pretended to be perfectly okay depositing a fat, gray lump into a paper bag and throwing it out in the dumpster. Noreen thought it was another example of the evolved American woman being able to feel sorry for dead vermin and being able to touch it too.
"We may as well be perfect," I joked, "even if we do shop at second hand stores for good party clothes and think a good time by definition involves buckets of naked flesh."
I was trying to convince Noreen about the merits of no clothes, and she me about fully clothed; I guess that's about the time I was roped into Eid gatherings: Islam's Christmas.
I didn't deck up much for the first one, denims and a sequined T-shirt. I'd feared they'd be a morose bunch dressed like black birds discussing gradations between sins and sinners; I was pleasantly surprised. They were fully clothed all right and for fully clothed a terribly festive bunch, a right hubbub of yakking and laughter with a million children running underfoot between adults who patted them indulgently and seemed to know which child was whose. It was a like an uproarious family dinner where everyone actually liked each other, or at least pretended to so well that they fooled me. (Although the segregation (voluntary, Noreen told me) with the women gathered on one side of the hall and the men on the other scared the hell out of me. It was like they were being punished, I told Mike, or were homos.)
This particular Eid party, like all others I would attend, was a potluck affair. I gasped the first time I saw how much food crowded the table which, if it could speak, would have shouted 'For pity's sake.' That first time I'd taken a shrimp salad from Costco, a feast of an appetizer if you ask me, and rather costly except it looked like a sell out in the midst of deep dishes overflowing with warm, home cooked curries and yellowed rice.
"I could have made mulligatawny soup or something," I said to Noreen, but she was too busy meeting and being greeted by swarms of women, who smiled at me, graciously, before dissolving into their native tongue as if even their smiles had been nothing but an automatic tic for the foreigner.
It's not like they can't speak English you know, I told my eldest sister. She said that she didn't think they were trying to be exclusionary or rude or anything just that it sounded like when she was with Ric's Italian family and no one bothered to even translate anymore they were so used to thinking that she was one of them. I secretly agreed with my sister, but I didn't tell her because I wasn't too fond of Ric's family and didn't want to associate anything positive with them.
The men, at these Eid gatherings, ignored me completely, you'd think I had cooties, or was going to jump them and defile them or something, but within a matter of hours I noticed they didn't talk much to women in general, not even their wives. I mean a man telling his wife to get him a glass of water is not exactly talking. Shitty kitty, even when Lord Mike while watching football from the Sofa Throne orders of Paula the slave girl refills of cola and chips, I do get all kissey kissey in between, and if his team is winning, I'll playfully smack him on the head especially if I'm getting irritated with trips to the kitchen. I can't imagine any of these wives, no matter how irritated, dishing out a smack or two. I bet they'd be divorced on the spot like in a movie Noreen was watching once.
"Reciting 'divorce' thrice," she said all teary eyed, "is incorrectly depicting Islam. It doesn't work like that."
"There has to be some truth in it," I said as Noreen squirmed. "I mean it is in a movie. They do check facts."
I kept arguing the point and I think I pissed Noreen off completely, but she's such a sweetheart she still packed hoards of food she'd made for me to take home, knowing how Mike likes spice now and then, and how I refuse to cook curries on account of the smell.
"Noreen," I said as I got ready to leave, "You're a good girl."
I felt Noreen held me in particular regard. She had to, for, if someone came to my house, expected to be fed, defended a movie they had no idea about and then laughed at my culture to boot I'd have kicked them out fair and square and then hung up on them ever afterwards. But here was Noreen saying See ya.
I suppose that's why I'm friends with her- she's so mellow, so chilled, like she's discovered her place in the world and words aren't going to budge her.
I must say Mike was a bit pissed off at me later when I told him what all I'd said to Noreen, but the truth is I think outfits from her part of the universe are funny looking. At these Eid gatherings most of the men dress in voluminous white tunics with equally tent like baggy pants, all that's missing is hoods and then they'd really look like KKK rejects, I swear, all grim, as if they've been spanked into sobriety.
The women look like a cross between well-stuffed turkeys and over zealously decorated Christmas trees, an obese clump of color like regurgitated jellybeans. Actually once I got used to the kaleidoscope I thought them rather gorgeous, like parakeets studded with diamonds and other jewels.
"The Christmas Trees wear," I told my sister, "the bright ass colors black people wear in hair parlor movies." I didn't tell her about the jewelry though, it would dredge up memories of our deceased mother, still a great loss for us all, for the jewelry these women wore was the sort I've only seen Joan Collins wear back in the day when Mother lived for new episodes of Dynasty: trains of solid gold bangles inlaid with rubies and emeralds and sapphires all the way up their asses, even the poorest of them, which is a big joke to me.
I'm poor and look it and rightly so with a wedding band, a measly wire around my thin rod of a ring finger, my only ornament. The only time the Christmas Trees speak to me is when I'm stuffing their sticky desserts down my throat by the handful.
"How you keep your figure?" they ask adjusting the long scarves they wear over their gargantuan chests and even bigger bellies. I tell them I didn't bother to have any kids. That shocks the geniality out of them for a bit. I can just hear them, in private: "Americans!"My Granddad used to say that. I'd be sitting in his lap, a sugar cookie in one hand, with the other pulling his long, thick white beard, the longest and thickest and whitest I've seen since, half paying attention to he and Mother decrying some book which they'd soon be sending out a petition to get banned. Granddad would say, shaking his head as I tickled his ear with the end of his beard, "The downfall of this country is the countrymen itself. Americans!"
Since Granddad's time I think this country's really changed. For one thing my high school, back then, was all white. Let alone colors, we didn't know any of this Eid, Diwali, Hannukah crap; certainly commercials weren't interrupted the way they are now to wish the majority of this country a happy holiday it doesn't have the first clue about.
Last year's Eid gathering coincided with Christmas (I took Noreen to a tree trimming party. She had a ball. If she'd had her way we'd have all stood back watching her fix the tree up like, she said, a traditional bride and then clapped till we were sore). Along with the usual potluck chitter chatter there was a Christmas tree, a sorry ass one if ever there was, but never the less, decorated with a smattering of star shaped cookies (which were eventually handed out to the endless kids that are always creating a rumpus at these events (these people, I swear, have never heard of decent bedtimes)) and crowning the Christmas tree: a colossal crescent.
Apparently the green pine and stars and moon were supposed to represent the fusion of the Pakistani flag and America or some such, and though I thought it was hysterical, by the time I got home I wasn't laughing anymore. What gumption, what audacity. If my Granddad were alive he'd set them straight with one roar for desecrating Jesus' birthday when we've got to respect Mohammed (Holy Prophet, Noreen always corrects me).
This was the last Eid gathering I would accompany Noreen to before she became pregnant and so very busy. Had I known I would have certainly made more of an effort to be in less of a bad mood over the fusion tree.
Noreen had her baby and since they'd decided to keep the gender a surprise I was worried they might collapse if it was a girl. One of my sisters had watched a prime time special about how these communities are plagued with wanting boys, so of course when Noreen kept telling me that she didn't care what they had, that in fact they preferred a girl, and Silk Socks corroborated so very emphatically, I thought surely they're dying for a boy.
No one could have been more ecstatic than me when they were as ecstatic as they were upon begetting a girl. I've seen enough ugly, bald newborns to last me a lifetime thanks to my sisters but Noreen's daughter was cuter than I expected, a little button with a plume of soft, jet-black hair. I gave her a basket crammed with baby food. I'd gone all out and splurged on organic Step 1 jars of every possible variety.
*****
As expected once Noreen became pregnant she stopped working and once she gave birth we began to drift apart. Old jokes about dead rats and Ellen's bunions became, indeed, old after a while. Of course these days when Noreen comes to shop, her live in nanny pushing the stroller behind her, most of the new part timers stare but stay clear, she looks ominous with her perfect lip pencil, gloves and neck scarf.
When I tell them she used to work here once, cleaned out the loose herb section like any one of us they say 'Get Out!', and even when Noreen and I have a chit chat as I ring up her cart, they stare and afterwards, whistling loudly, say
"Well, look at that. There's hope for us all."
Lately I have been looking at that: I suppose you'd never think looking at Noreen that she could have worked in here, mopping the floor like any of us but always trying to get out of it and beaming when I'd take over. Looking at me, I guess, you can't think of me anywhere but here. Lately I've also begun cooking a curry or two once or twice a year; Mike enjoys it, and so do I.
"Damn kids," I said to Mike once. "Coming into the word just to split apart the best of friends, or sisters."
"Are you saying," Mike said swallowing, "that you want a baby?"
The great untold truth is that everyone can live without everyone, that most people go through life dreaming about what it would be like to live without the people they are living with and that, if they could just start over, they'd never choose anyone they'd chosen: even their kids.
"Oh Hon," I said hugging Mike tightly, "No."
*****
The leaves are turning color. This year we plan to drive to Aspen, Mike and I, and watch them together, if only because there's nothing else to do and because we can.