Madame Bovary 2022

My name is Emma.  I changed my name from Elsie after I married Chuck.  

For some reason, he wouldn't change his to Charles.

I was bored to tears working as a cashier in my father’s gas station, only meeting trashy people who were  going nowhere. So when Daddy broke his leg  it was sweet Dr. Chuck who treated him. 

Chuck had us come in for a lot of what seemed to me unnecessary office visits. And he also bought a lot of gas.

So when he asked me to marry him, I said yes. What girl doesn't want to marry a doctor?

What I didn't bargain for was just how nice he was. He was so nice he was just plain boring. No good in the sack either. Okay, I told myself, he can make a name for himself as a doctor and I'll  at least have a nice house and great clothes and maybe even status, but he blew that  by bungling the first important surgery he attempted. It was so bad he gave up climbing the ladder  and managed to descend a rung or two by moving to a less demanding practice. 

Then we had the kid. Barbie is okay but  not particularly pretty, and even with a full time nanny, she’s always in the way, climbing on me, wanting something.  I just don't feel that old maternal pull, you know?

By then I was totally stuck with him, so I dedicated myself to making our home a show place. Chuck didn't mind the expense. “Credit is easy. Go for whatever you want, darling,” he said. 

Then I met Leon, a young law intern, who was really turned on to me and I have to say was a cutie. He wanted to move to New York and take me with him. But he had scruples about breaking up a family. So he went off on his own. 

I was totally depressed until I met Rudy. We had a really terrific run before the bastard got tired of me. Me! I couldn't believe it.  I was so down I demanded Chuck buy me  a bigger house and pay for a private boarding school to get the kid out of my hair.

By now  we were in debt up to our ears. In addition, I discovered that my so-called  ‘better than thou’ attitude and ‘sleazy’ affairs were all over Facebook.  I was pretty upset  but good old Chucky said it was a just bunch of lies. He kept taking out loans and telling me everything would be alright as long as we were together. 

I was so miserable, I decided to leave. Take off. Go to New York. Look for Leon. I had to have some sort of life.   

But the debts were so immense I couldn't pull it off. I was considering suicide when it came to me, why should I commit suicide?  I know whose fault it really is and it isn't me. It's Chuck. He trapped me with his selfless lovey dovey crap. He was such a lousy lover, of course I strayed. And don’t forget he’s the one who insisted on taking out all those loans. 

He has insurance out the kazoo! Plus, he  works with chemicals and is such an idiot it should be easy to make it  look like an accident. 

Yep, that’ll be my happy ending.

Take A Cab

 

Way back in my thirties, I was living in New York with my husband, our two children and a really great dog named Mandy. The husband and children were great too, but they were driving me to despair. Amy aged eight and Tony aged seven and Jim aged a bit older seemed to ignore any suggestion, hint, or screaming fit about helping me with household chores. Unmade beds, dirty dishes, dust, or debris never seemed to faze them. 

Jim wrote for a television show. He had glamour. I had laundry. He would help but he was very busy writing  and he loved to play the piano. The kids just loved to play. Mandy just wanted us all together in the same room, clean or otherwise.

I began to doubt the whole idea of being a working mother. I wasn't making much money as an anthropology librarian. The library was lovely, but I was completely bored with cataloging treatises on matrilinear family structures. 

It  just seemed like I was running around all day, rushing to meet  the kids at school, rushing to work, rushing to walk the dog, rushing to make dinner, rushing to drag gargantuan loads of laundry up to the laundromat.  

The apartment was beyond messy. It was downright  disgusting. But apparently only in my eyes. The rest of them didn't seem to mind at all.

I began having dreams.  I would be riding the bus and it would skip my stop and take me to some strange neighborhood and leave me there to find my way home. Over and over, I would be abandoned in the Bronx or Queens, where I would wander around looking for a bus or even a subway home . 

This went on night after night until I dreamed I was plunked down somewhere in Staten Island. I couldn’t find a bus or a train or even the ferry, so although I knew it would cost a fortune, I hailed a cab. And who was driving the cab? Well I don’t know who he was but he wore a cap labeled Psychotherapist.

I had been spoken to. How could I ignore  such a blatant message? I found a therapist  who suggested I make a big chart of the chores that had to be done and show who was doing them. Me.

And just like in fairy tales, it worked!  Maybe the three of them were tired of being yelled at, but the kids and Jim each agreed to do  their own laundry, cook a meal a week and do the  dishes too. The kids learned how to operate the laundromat machines. They did dishes - maybe 24 hours late. They just threw their toys and stuff in a closet. And maybe we ate too many dinners of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. But they were doing it. 

So was Jim. He did his own laundry, cooked Sunday brunch and cleaned when we had company coming. 

I became a school librarian. I tripled my salary, kept  the same schedule as my kids and learned that I really enjoyed working with teenagers.

Anyway, the moral is: when you are in the middle of a dark wood or even Staten Island, hail a cab. It’s worth the expense.

Curmudgeon

 It's true. I am becoming a curmudgeon. You know, one of those people who is always finding something to complain about. 

I am in denial of course. And fighting it. I like to think that I just have a heightened awareness of the incongruities of life or that I am just prone to noticing how strange and or peculiar things are and wondering why. I am not really annoyed so much as amazed.

These things don't consume me or anything. I don't keep harping on the same old annoyances over and over.

With one exception: Why is the NY Times Book Review  always folded wrong?

I have tried to overlook it. It's not important that the first half of the pages are wider than the second half or that there is a line showing where the fold should be yet the fold seldom is on that line, or that sometimes it's even more of  a mess with pitiful staples trying to keep the pages even which doesn't work.

And if I do try to fold it correctly it never works. It just wants to revert to the incorrect machine fold.

The section of the Times I love, the section I look forward to all week looks careless and undignified as thought this section doesn't matter as much as the rest of the paper.

The rest of the paper is folded properly including the Magazine and the ad inserts. How can this be? Don't they care?

I keep thinking they will fix it. Now and then they do. Sometimes I receive a pristine perfectly folded Book Review and I tell myself “Ah see? I knew they would fix it. Why did I make such a big deal out of this minor little problem?

I bet no one else notices or cares. After all, I am getting older and more easily annoyed. I've always had a thing for refolding a messy newspaper so that it looks unread. Its just a habit I picked up working in libraries."

!/?%$#, gosh darn it, the next week the Book Review was in even worse shape. The staples weren't even on the gray line. It was a disaster.

So I brought this up to my daughter, a graphic designer who said she had noticed the improper folding but didn't think it was such a big deal.

“Not a big deal,” I spluttered - I seem to  splutter a lot lately - “this is the New York Times.! The rest of the sections are folded properly. This is a sign of disrespect to the printed book.”

She was kind, she didn't laugh.

But yesterday she called to say she had looked at the folding as she would a project of her own and could see that it wasn't a folding problem so much as a printing problem. Maybe the Book Review has a separate printer from the rest of the paper.

Okay. I get it I suppose. But it still doesn't explain why occasional  special sections like Education are folded perfectly. 

You may ask why I don't write a letter of complaint. It's probably because I would prefer not to take action over something  I truly believe will be ignored, which will make me even angrier. Not much of a citizen I admit.

But the biggie is I don’t want to be a recognized curmudgeon.

Maybe I fear that if  I put this aggravation into words I will really become a small time version of Fran Lebowitz. And while I love laughing at her unabashed contrarianism, do I want to be like her: a bona fide grump who  makes a living from being annoyed?

Hmm. 

The Difference

Several times a week she empties the kitchen compost bin and cleans it out with some kitchen cleaner. She waits a few minutes until it dries and inserts a fresh liner.

Every few months he announces that he is going to clean out the kitchen composting bin.

“I will take it into the bathroom and give it a good cleaning. Where's the spray cleaner? I need the one with bleach. Where did you put the paper towels?  Also, I'll need some old towels to keep the bathroom floor from getting wet.  I’ll turn the bin upside down in the tub and let it dry.  That will take a while so you won't be able to throw away any garbage for quite some time.  I will have to hang a new bag on the cabinet door, the one close to where we keep the trash cans. Do you want me to show you where it is?”

This is the difference between men and women.

My Vocation

 

When I was seventeen I decided I had to enter a convent. I hated the thought of it and I cried myself to sleep every night for months. 

But in my benighted teenage mind I was convinced that it was the right thing to do. I thought that if I truly believed what I was learning in religion class, the right and logical thing to do would be to abandon worldly pleasures and follow God. Right into a convent.

I would leave my parents behind and see them only when some Mother Superior allowed me to. This would be my last Thanksgiving at home. My last Christmas. I would have to leave my dog. It was just awful.

For the rest of my life I would be eating awful cafeteria food like the nuns served at my all girls Catholic high school where we had to wear navy blue uniforms with white blouses, no jewelry and sensible oxford shoes. Nice Peter Pan collars, though.

I consoled myself with the hope that the convent might serve those really good Sloppy Joes occasionally served at school and maybe even those terrific peanut butter cookies Sister Constance Marie would turn out. But the rest was pretty bad. I was going to live the rest of my life without my Mama's mashed potatoes and gravy. Or my Daddy's spaghetti and meatballs.

They served something called Italian spaghetti at school and let me tell you there was nothing Italian about it.

No more new clothes. I would never again shop for  cute shoes. It would be all nuns' shoes. But I probably wouldn't have foot problems like my mom. That was one plus.

The habits nuns wore back then were a definite minus but also a kind of mystery. They were  long and black and looked pretty involved with lots of layers and a head piece made with lots of  starch. How did they get them on and off? Also there were huge white bibs to keep clean. But the nuns did sort of glide as they walked and the huge rosaries were kind of cool.

What a wretched future. I would probably end up teaching a bunch of girls like myself who couldn't wait to get out of class.

But if that was what God wanted, I guess I would have to do it. "Offer it up," as the nuns were always saying.

This went on gnawing at me all winter but I couldn't bring myself to mention it to anyone. Fear of being taken seriously? Could've been.

I made it to spring when some classmates began announcing their vocations. Everyone applauded. I just wanted to throw up.

Over Easter vacation I decided to ask my friend Julie DeBrosse how she knew she had a vocation. How did she know she wanted to join up, I mean become a nun. She told me that the life of tranquility of not having to make decisions appealed to her. She knew she would be happy in a convent. 

Tranquility? Happiness? In a convent? I couldn't believe it. Didn't she see herself as a martyr? Sacrificing her life to be miserable for God. She just sort of looked at me oddly. Julie also said that one or two of the Sisters had approached her because they thought she might have a vocation. She was made of the right stuff, just like an astronaut.

So I asked a few of the other girls who had declared their intention to go into the convent and they all said that they had been singled out as good nun material.

Well, no one, not one single nun, had ever suggested that I might make a good nun. I felt off the hook.

But the obsessive part of me was still clinging to the idea that It Was the Right Thing to Do.

Still I didn't tell a soul.

Spring was coming and with it the Prom, Graduation and something called Senior Retreat where we were required to spend a weekend of prayer and meditation at the Sisters of Notre Dame Mother House, located in a former mansion in a spiffy neighborhood that had been donated to the Sisters many years ago.

So I went to the Retreat, no uniforms required, lots of sweaters suggested because that old mansion was just plain cold. Silence and meditation were the by words. I listened to the lectures, kept my mouth shut and wondered if that old mansion had ever been a home. It was pretty dreary. Lots of dark oak paneling and straight back chairs.

The food was memorably terrible, runny scrambled eggs, slightly stale toast and margarine and somehow the tuna salad sandwiches didn't taste like tuna. 

We went to Mass and sang in the chapel and were allowed to walk in the gardens to meditate. Absolutely no talking permitted.

Spring was just beginning and I had been reading Colette. I know most people think she is all about love but I kind of got her other message: "Regardez." Look, really look and then look again. Observe what's around you closely. I sat on a rock and began to look around.

Even though the was pretty bare I could see the beginnings of color everywhere. Pale shoots and tiny buds appeared before my eyes. It started to become beautiful. I took out my notebook and began writing. I found myself making a list of all the things I wanted to see and do. It was a long list and not one of them was inside a convent.

So that is what my vocation would be: I would spend my life looking  for what was beautiful. I would be out in the world, in museums and gardens and in my own home.

I was saved. 

The Retreat worked. I guess those Sisters knew what they were doing, after all.  At least they knew something about me before I did.

Dirt Path

When I’m driving my car, am I the only person who expects my GPS to yell at me when I don't follow its instructions? I truly believe I am going to hear something like ‘Why on earth did you turn right?  I told you to turn left. Aren’t you listening? Here I am trying to make this trip easy and you have just totally made a mess of it. We will have to reroute again. This is the third time this week.’

Or when I start out on a trip and ignore how the GPS tells me to get to the highway. I can here that little click of impatience. Or worse, it goes silent. Then I think, O God, is it mad at me? Is it going to take revenge?

And then there is the suspicion that I don't really trust my GPS. It started with the appearance a few years ago of the Dirt Path. I live at 108th St. and Riverside in Manhattan and every time I look for traffic advisories for a route to some place north of the City, the GPS tells me to take the Dirt Path to 110^th St.

Dirt Path? With a capital D? Is my GPS playing games with me? Or has it made a Mistake? Does it have a diabolical streak, or does it just want to get my goat?

Just to be clear: there is a kind of footpath through a grassy area between Riverside Dr. and the parallel service drive. The dirt path is about two feet wide and is primarily used by dog walkers. Or, is the GPS really referring to the Service Drive? Not according to the GPS map. It actually shows a Dirt Path where no car could possibly go.

But here’s the part that annoys me: When the Dirt Path first appeared, I told friends about it. “Isn’t this a hoot?” I would say. “Look, the GPS has made a mistake! ”

Do you know what the invariable reaction was? My friends would say “Are you sure there isn’t some road called Dirt Path you don't know about?” And I would say, “Duh, I live here. Believe me, there are no hidden roads.” 

“Well, you better check.”

Do you know how many people have said this to me? Now I tell about the Dirt Path just to see what they will say. And always they say, “Technology must be right.”

I see this little example not as idiocy but as indoctrination, a sort of omen of just where we are going with these devices. Right now, we have become dependent on them to find our way. And it's a great thing for the directionally challenged. But doesn’t it bother you that some day you may go somewhere and the thing won’t work? You will have no idea how to get out of the place without your little device. I mean, what if you lose the signal? What if you run out of battery power and your charger doesn’t work? Do you keep a map in your car any more?

And what’s to stop the diabolical device from sending you over a cliff? Or into a trap devised by foreign agents?

On the other hand, you could be like my husband - aka “The Human Compass” - who is not willing to trust any electronic anything. He looks at maps and plans trips and remembers where he is going. He knows immediately if he has made a wrong turn, or if we’re going in the wrong direction.  "You can see by the shadows that we are heading east not west," he might explain. I swear he can see on which side of the tree the moss is growing.

I am nothing like my husband. In fact, some would say I have no sense of direction at all.

Add to that the fact that I never ask directions, not out of ego but because I can never remember what the directions were. I just look at road maps, write down directions and hope for the best. I am very good at U-turns.

But I can find my way to any major department store in Westchester County without a hitch.

What will I do if the pandemic puts department stores out of business?

Guess I had better hope my GPS doesn’t really hate me.

A Few Carats Less

We rented a cottage on an island in Maine for many years. It was called Gem Island.

It was a big old two-story cottage on a tiny island accessible only by a small motorboat. We had lovely views of the bay and could watch lobster boatmen at work. There was a covered porch with comfy rockers and although there were mosquitoes they were the inept kind that could be batted away.

It was plain, strong old house probably 100 years old. It was a no nonsense house with wooden floors and walls. There were four bedrooms but not much in the way of decoration except for book shelves and comfy chairs. It smelled clean and wind swept. Nothing musty or old about it. It was comfortable and also comforting to stay in.

Gem Island didn't ask much of the visitor. Reading and chatting and playing games were all you had to do. Maybe row over to the lobster pound and eat on the picnic benches a magnificent meal of lobster, biscuits, corn on the cob and blueberry pie. Or bring some home for lobster pie.

The cottage had a lovely old kitchen with an electric stove and refrigerator. There was electricity but no septic system so there was a composting toilet in the bathroom. We had to bring in our drinking water, but rainwater collected in a cistern for hot showers.  

It wasn't even expensive. Gem Island had been owned by the same family since World War II who weren’t interested in profit. They liked to rent to people who loved the place as much as they did.

It was pretty sweet. We felt we were lucky to have found it.

Some of our friends found the plumbing situation a bit too dicey for a visit. That was okay. It made me feel slightly adventurous – not an adjective I normally associate with myself.  But it gave us most of the time to ourselves.  We had two weeks in July every year alone and one terrific third week when Tony and Larissa and the boys came.

Jamie and Nicky loved it. They thought Gem Island was Maine. For them, the whole state existed on that tiny island.

Like many good things, our summers on Gem Island ended when Nancy, the last member of the family, died and left it to her sons who lived in California. They sold it for an enormous sum that was way way out of reach for us to buy.

After a long search, we’ve found anther cottage with lots of amenities and a killer view of the ocean and several lighthouses. Since it's a lot more expensive than Gem Island, we stay there for only one week with the kids. There is a small beach where they swim, quite happily, in the unbelievably cold water. We love it but everyone agrees it just isn’t Gem Island.

Jim and I have kept longing for something a little bit more like Gem Island. Last year I found an island for rent on a lake in central Maine. Accessible by canoe, without water or electricity, with a porch looking over the lake, it looked really charming.

And the name was Little Diamond Island.

So Jim and I rented it for four days to try it out.

After our usual week on the shore, we waved goodbye to the kids and headed inland to Lake Cobbosseecontee.

We found the spot where a canoe was waiting for us but somehow it took over an hour to figure out how to open the clever, extremely simple looking lock that held it fast.

We paddled the canoe easily enough and followed the directions to Little Diamond Island. The instructions said to go south past a big island and a smaller one would appear. Well, a really tiny spec did appear that looked like the online picture I had seen.  So we tried it, feeling a little like Goldilocks.  The keys opened the locks, so we were sure we had found the right place.

The island was even smaller than Gem Island. we were greeted by a mother osprey who had built a new in a very tall tree right above the deck.  the tiny deck was lovely as was the bedroom and the bitty living room. 
The kitchen, however, was another matter. It had windows but they didn't seem to offer much light. and it was already late afternoon. It was full of very old, rusty looking indefinable items. There were dark corners lurking everywhere and a certain odor of critters gone by.

We were searching for  lanterns without finding them when it occurred to us that something important was missing. Oh yes, where was the bathroom?

It just wasn’t there. The cottage was so small we couldn't have missed it. So we looked in the shed, under the cottage, banged on walls until the sun was setting before we found there was a false door at the back of the shed. And there it was: the composting toilet perched about three feet off the ground and surrounded by really smart mosquitoes.

I don't have a problem with composting toilets, but somehow I don’t deal well with one in an outhouse that can only be reached after sunset with a flashlight. Climbing up onto the darn thing with a flashlight in my mouth was also rather unappealing. If there was a light in that shed I didn't find it.  I mean it just didn't seem right to do that much work just to use a bathroom.

I could have dealt with the bathroom if the kitchen weren’t so creepy or vice versa. Anyway I guess I am just not that adventurous. I am fairly game about many things but that goes only so far. I am, after all, a scaredy cat just like my sister always said. I was too fearful to try to figure out the propane stove so we ate cold rolls for breakfast, canoed out for lunch and ate salads for supper. Wine doesn't need cooling. But doing dishes in lake water was sort of fun, and if we had found a sunny spot to heat the solar water shower thingy, bathing would have been fine. Even lake water is cold in Maine.

But come sundown the shed became ominous. I have seen too many 'murder in the remote woods' movies I guess. But between the icky kitchen and the scary shed, we said goodbye to Little Diamond Island with few regrets.

We have found another cottage on top of a hill, which gives the illusion of being far away from civilization. You can see the sea if you look sharp. But it has a nice little kitchen and a working bathroom right inside and has a screened in porch to help fight off the mosquitoes.

We are always on the lookout for another gem of a place to stay. But every single one is always a few carats less than our memories of Gem Island.