Forks or Fiction

This summer, Pigeon Husband, Baby Bird, and I are taking a trip to the Olympic National Forest.  All the hotels in Port Angeles were full and/or too expensive, so I booked us a room in Forks.  Yes, Forks.  As in, the place where Bella and Edward live.

Last week, I read all four of the Twilight novels in five days.  That's quite a feat, given that I must wake once or twice each night to feed the baby, and that my days consist of feeding, changing, reading to, playing with, and chasing the baby, who can crawl wicked fast now.  I have also been busy perfecting the pinky-sweep method for removing food/foreign objects from his mouth.  So far, I've had to remove pieces of banana that were far too big (we let him take his own bites, now that he's ten months old), too-big pieces of strawberries, dusty Cheerios that he found on the floor (because he flings most of his Cheerios on the floor and I can't find them all later) and bits of cat food kibble.  Years ago, I was talking on the phone to a friend who paused to say to her baby, "No, Adrienne, that's cat food."  What was going on in her house?  Now I know.

So last week, in between nursing the baby at all hours and herding him away from the cat food, I read all of the Twilight novels.  Two or three years ago, when I first heard about this series, I thought, "What a silly fad.  It will pass."  When the movies started coming out, I honestly did not notice.  When my parents-in-law hiked in the Olympic National Forest and, staying in Forks, accidentally found themselves in a teen vampire festival, I laughed.  Oh ho ho.  Like British people, down their noses with an intellectually superior smirk.  So funny.  Bunch of nerds.  Then last Christmas my own mother made me watch one of the movies and I was simultaneously disgusted (so cheesy) and enraptured.  Reading the books this week was even better; I could enjoy the teen drama without feeling embarrassed that someone, even my own mother, could see me enjoying it.

Wow.  All the angst and desperate passion of first love, intensified by literal (okay, fictitious) life-and-death choices.  It was magical.  I loved the setting, the re-created vampire/werewolf lore, and the voice of this clumsy, sarcastic girl who, though many have called her weak, is of course just generic enough for us all to imagine that she is us, that we are her.  I even loved her clunky truck and her job at the sporting goods store.  I laughed out loud at the scene where a queasy  Mike rides home in the back of Jacob's '86 Rabbit and Bella tries to ignore Jake's take-no-prisoners flirting.  I stayed up reading till four in the morning, twice.

How embarrassing, though, in the morning, to go about my business enthralled with a teen vampire series.  I'm thirty-five.  Luckily, I found a friend who likes the series even more than me, and she's thirty-eight.  Am I cool again now?  

"Isn't Edward fantastic?" said my friend.  We're both English teachers, so even though we're blushing and fanning our faces, you know we're really debating the literary merits of Edward's character development.

"No," I had to say.  "I find him pushy and condescending.  Besides, I'm on Team Jacob."

More blushing--I mean, analyzing the, uh, literature.  Sigh.  Jacob is just the kind of hunky dreamboat I would have fallen for as a teen.  ("Hunky dreamboat?" you say.  Yes.  That's the best I got--can't think of a better word cuz I'm still blushing.)  I like how Edward and Jacob are foils for each other.  And how they're both so dreamy.  Dreamy hunkboats.  ("Is that a word?" you may ask.  It is now.)  When I got to the end of the third book, I actually cried.  Meyer created two equally compelling heroes, and it was heartbreaking that Bella could only choose one.

My husband does not want to go to the Dazzled by Twlight store in Forks, or see Bella's high school, or even go to First Beach on our vacation this summer.  There's far too much to see and do in the ONP, he says, to waste time following crowds of screaming teens and their too-much-eye-make-up-wearing moms.  Besides, he says, Twilight is not real.

Whaaaaat?!  Okay, I kind of knew that.  I knew that when we get to Forks, we won't be seeing Edward or Bella.  We probably won't see Jacob either because he'll be down at La Push--I mean, because he's a fictional character.  But damn, that's hard to remember.  Am I insane?  In planning the trip today, I remember thinking that I didn't want to go to the Quileute Reservation because I might be invading Jacob's space.  I mean, I don't know him, and he didn't invite me there.  And when I called the Forks Motel (so, so sad that all the rooms in Port Angeles were unavailable), I felt a little thrill talking to the lady at the desk, thinking that even though Bella and Edward don't live there, perhaps she knows someone who works at the school, who maybe saw Bella and Edward last fall, so that's like only three degrees of separation...between me and madness.

If my husband won't stop at the tour spots in Forks, I'll just have to keep my eyes open while we're hiking.  Maybe we'll see some wolves, size X-tra, X-tra hunky.  Or maybe, if I'm really quiet, he won't notice when I slip out of the hotel bed, raise the window, and dangle my pasty-white arms out into the night air like a pair of neon white rubber worms on a line.  Who knows?  Maybe I smell delicious.

The Pigeon Brides and Grooms

In Baltimore, the pigeons on my fire escape looked so dapper.  Always alert, always serious, dressed to the nines.  Every pigeon was different, too.  Mottled tans.  Oily browns.  Bits of redwood  flecking along the edges of wings.  Deep grays and dove grays.  Steely grays and matte blacks.  Ice white.  

These last few colors were my favorites.  They looked like brides and grooms; the iridescence on the white ones seemed like sequins on a wedding dress; the gray and black ones wore little long-tailed morning suits.  (I asked Pigeon Husband to wear one of these suits when we were married.   It's been seven years now, and I just connected that choice to my fondness for pigeons.)  The pigeons paraded in their formal wear on the fire escape and I sat near the one window in my room, just to the right of the half-shuttered venetian blinds, trying not to startle them.  My room was small and dark, my furniture university-issued and heavy as plagiarism, for which I flunked a student.  It was the smallest room in my grad student apartment, and as the last of four roommates to arrive, I had to take it without a fuss.  

In keeping with its cave-like ambiance, I spent a week or so heaving the heavy furniture here and there, using a monstrous wardrobe as wide and tall as two coffins to create a blockade behind which I could feel hidden, safe enough to sleep in my hard, narrow, virginal bed.  The desk, too, with its high stack of shelves on top, made a nice hidey-hole in the corner when turned backward, in which I could type my poems without anyone seeing me.  Who would see me?  Why?  That didn't matter.  Somebody might, and I had to keep private or I couldn't think.  

The one window looked out on the fire escape, onto which also opened our kitchen door.  For safety.  Naturally a university-owned student apartment needed a second exit in case of emergency.  But we only used this kitchen door to take out the trash, which moldered for a week in a big plastic bin beneath my window until the janitor came to collect it.  Its presence, its twin bin (from the neighboring apartment), and the fact that the fire escape hovered over a windy, damp alley, prevented this place from becoming a porch of sorts.  Moreover, the next building was so close we might have hit it with a broom handle, so the fire escape was always so shaded it was cold.  

This was my view.  On the day I met my three roommates, we all smiled nervously at one another.  Ready to be friends.  They helped me carry my sewing machine up from my car.  And then they said, apologetically, that the only room left was the small one.  "That's okay," I said.  And then I saw the room.  My golly, it was small, really much smaller than the others, only half the size of the next smallest room.  Who designed the apartment this way?  Was this some kind of architectural joke?  My suitcases and boxes of books, which had fit fine in the car, overwhelmed the space; I was tripping over them as I shelved my belongings and my roomies stood in the doorway, looking truly sorry.  They were nice girls.  "It's okay," I said again, and I meant it.  (This was big of me.  But I was prepared for such an event by witnessing the graciousness of a girl I roomed with in my junior year as an undergrad.  She drew the short straw and elected to call a large closet her bedroom in order to have her own space.  She was very good about it.  She could fit her futon and her boyfriend in there.)

In my dark, crowded, messy little room, I sat by the window thinking about Ohio.  Tulip trees in spring.  Mittens of sassafras leaves turning orange-yellow in fall.  White hundred-year-old houses with real porches floating in a rippling sea of corn tassels, as the crop rolled to the horizon and the sky flung itself upward like a whole bolt of cotton quilting unfurled.  In Baltimore, the traffic was so heavy that pedestrians just had to go for it, even when the crosswalk lights were on, and take their chances with the red-light runners.  Highway 83 had five lanes of traffic going in one direction and the first time I drove on it I cried, so terrified (and horrified) was I.  In Ohio, the big road to my high school saw one, maybe two cars going the opposite way sometimes.  People lifted their fingers from the steering wheel in a sort of "hi, there" to the other motorists as they passed.  Not waving would have been rude, and you might go another ten miles before you had a chance to redeem your manners.  In Ohio, the big road (it had two lanes and a yellow line) had along it some signs that said, "This is farm country.  Watch for slow moving machinery," and there was a silhouette of a tractor. 

I began to start a lot of sentences with, "In Ohio..."  My new friends pointed this out.  Baltimore marked the beginning of this homesickness, which lasted through Maryland, Alabama, and the first six years of my marriage.  Husband pointed this out to me, too, gently at first, and later with annoyance.  Didn't I love California?  Ah, it's okay.  I still prefer Ohio, still miss Ohio, but I know now that I prefer, over any place, the place that is with him.  He is home now.  Dear husband.  In Baltimore, however, I reeled between towers of concrete.  Big blocks of rectangles.  Glass and iron.  Brick with no ivy--off campus, that is.  And what was up with the sidewalks?  They went right up to people's front doors!  They had no yards!  Where did the children play?  A new friend from New York City said that he had played in parks, and that when he was born his parents brought him home from the hospital in a taxi cab!  Preposterous.

And painful.  I sat by my window in my tiny room, looking at the pigeons.   Brides and grooms.  In every flock I'd pick the handsomest pair and hope for them to stand together, just for a moment, to make a picture in my eye.  Pizza crusts fell out of the garbage can and the pigeons ate them, indecorously, tugging at them and pursuing each other in jerky circles.  In his poem "Beautiful Ohio," James Wright said he knows what people call it, but he has his own word for it.  Me, too.  It's the sweetness I assigned to what I found alive amid all that pavement.  It's the song I listened for, a hush behind the traffic, the pigeons' low hoody-hoo.

 

Post-Workout Malaise

My husband, the Pigeon Spouse, says that exercise will make me feel great.  He's always urging me to go swim at the Y.  After we put our baby to bed, he says as nonchalantly as possible, "You should go swim."  Like he might say, "Maybe I'll cut my toenails" or "Let's watch TV."  He's watching me even as he turns away and pretends not to watch me.  

I pretend not to feel irritated by his suggestion.  "Sure," I say, and then I find some way to stall, even going so far some evenings as to do the dishes, until it's too late to swim.  "Darn.  The pool is closed now."  

Tonight I headed out to the Y for the first time in over a month.  I had been on vacation in Ohio, having taken the spud to see the grandparents, and then two weeks ago I stepped in a hole in the backyard and broke my leg.  (Technically, I merely twisted my knee and created a teensy, weensy fracture in the top of my tibia, a couple millimeters long, but it still counts as breaking my leg in my book because it hurts and has greatly impeded my lifestyle.)  "You should go swim,"  Pigeon Husband very carefully suggested after dinner.  Okay.  If I must.  

On the way to the pool I  stopped at the drugstore to buy him generic Claritin ($3.51 cheaper) and at Trader Joe's to buy myself dark chocolate almond Laceys cookies.  I wrestled the plastic seal from the tub and ate three on the way to the Y and one more on the way through the parking lot to the door.  

Swimming tonight was not so satisfactory.  It is almost the only form of exercise I enjoy, and until recently, swimming and I have had a loathe/hate relationship.  In recent years, however, I have overcome some pyschological trauma caused in my teen years by a wicked-cold lake in northern Michigan, mandatory lifeguard training for a camp counseling job, and my mannish negative buoyancy, which did little to enhance my self-esteem:  if I'm going to sink and fail the course, can I at least have some boobs?  I ate a lot of chocolate milk and fish sticks that summer, trying to bulk up.  I went from 110 to a whopping 118 pounds of pure muscle, I think. At any rate, at 35 I forgave my skinny 17 year old ass for failing the lifeguard course (not my fault!) and began to enjoy swimming.  I learned to breathe on opposite sides, every third stroke, during the front crawl, and to slowly release bubbles in a continuous streaming exhalation to prevent that bursting, gasping feeling.  Since I renewed my Y membership this past fall, I've come a long way in my front crawl form.  I can even do two consecutive lengths without my heart pounding too much.  (Avoiding that heart-pounding feeling is one of my exercise goals.  PH says my heart ought to pound.  This makes me distrust his judgement.)

Tonight, as I said, swimming was not so good.  Two whip kicks into an abortive breast stroke  told me that my knee is NOT ready for this.  I swam ten lengths of a very slow crawl (might have gone faster literally crawling on deck) before the knee began to pop and ache.  Four more lengths convinced me that I'd reached my limit.

Hobbling to the locker room, I felt angry.  Impotent and angry.  My knee did not break itself.  I did not break it.  I have never been injured, never.  I am an ox.  An aurox, even.  Medieval and unflappable.  And extinct.  I showered and styled my hair very badly with the hair dryer provided by the Y.  Ate two more cookies in the car on the way home.  

As I parked the car in front of the house and stuffed the cookies into my gym bag, I wondered about the best adjective to describe that action:  ironic?  pathetic?  shameful?  rebellious?  morose?  Who will have sympathy for me?  Who will condemn me?  Will I ever have a healthy relationship with junk food?  Do I want one?  

These are the circumstances contributing to my post-workout malaise this evening.  Yeah, exercise makes me feel great.