Hillery Occasionally

With all the change I’ve been embracing lately, I think it’s only fair to tell you about the one constant in my world.  New readers to this page might feel a love story coming on—and I’ve been in love—but this has something of a happy ending.  And just to catch up you neophytes, my romances generally don’t. 

The night before I moved to New York I stayed out as late as you can in Minneapolis with my best friend taking pictures together at all of our soon to be old haunts.   We were up long after that in her front room talking about where our lives were going and what we’d been through together.  In mid-nostalgic anecdote, her face froze and her eyes locked onto something out the window just behind me.  She couldn’t speak.

Maggie was an actress.  One of those performers whose presence extends to all areas of life.  You didn’t always know where the performance ended and the concept of off stage began.  I’d seen this intensity before, often in response to an off hand remark or bad cheese.  It didn’t bother me.  The process of discerning the cause of her perturbation was plenty entertaining, well worth the interruption itself.

So, I took the bait and asked her what she saw.  “There’s a man,” she said, “right outside the window.”  A person would have to be well over six feet tall to see in the window or to be seen looking.  But I went along, even raised the stakes for the Hell of it.  “Okay,” I said, “then we should call the police.”

In my underwear, I went into the living room and dialed 911.  I calmly reported that my friend had seen a man trespassing and looking into the windows.  When the operator asked me if I had seen anyone I screamed at the top of my lungs for as long as I could.  I saw him through one of the windows alongside the house.  They say intruders are just as scared of you as you are of them, but he just stood there and watched me scream and finally casually walked off…not away, but toward the back of the house.

Someone had to stay on the phone with the operator, but Maggie’s roommate was asleep in the back bedroom and one of us had to check on her.  And that meant, like in every horror movie you’ve ever seen, we had to split up.  It was probably only ten minutes before the police came and maybe two that I spent standing alone in the house, but that was all it took.  I was terrified.  I flew to New York the next morning. 

The one thing that’s safe about this city is that there are people almost everywhere and at all hours.  They may not always care what happens to you, so you have to think about where you’re going, but you’re almost never alone.  Between the bustle of Manhattan streets at night and the company of my four dorm roommates, I should have been fine.  But I couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two a night for months.

Maggie sent me a photo album of our carousing that last night in a care package soon after I arrived.  The best picture of me was a black and white shot taken in her front room at the end of the night.  Looking at it, I wondered if he was there then.  Not long after that my mother told me she’d seen a newspaper article that might interest me.  The police charged a man for six related rapes in Maggie’s neighborhood.  He was six foot four.

Really, I saw myself as fortunate.  I was only frightened when it could have been much worse.  And eventually I was sleeping through the night again.  My terrors weren’t an issue unless I was visiting Minneapolis.  Especially at my father’s house, out in the suburbs where everything was quiet…too quiet.  But it was manageable.

When I moved into my first apartment after college, things were different.  I was alone a lot and on the top floor of the building I couldn’t hear the reassuring street noises of the city.  I would stay up nights, completely frozen in bed, contemplating the ease with which anyone could rappel down from the roof and into my window.

I passed by the veterinary hospital every day on my way home and the solution seemed simple.  I adopted.  Sisters from the same litter, my boyfriend named my cats George and Gracie after Burns and Allen.  Ultimately I went one better; I gave up the boyfriend and took a basement studio in Brooklyn where I could monitor all points of entry from any place in the room.

It was a lot to have two cats, no longer kittens, in a one-room apartment.  And as time went by I started to accumulate, you know, adult stuff.  In a few years I had real furniture and a china cabinet and books.  My friends used to joke that it looked less like I was living there and more like I was amassing my tomb, just way ahead of time.  Hey, I was already underground. 

This is about the time the kid came into the picture.  There was a bakery on the corner of my block.  I knew this because as I drank my way through my twenties I often had to smell my way home.  Bread was always baking by the time I was turning the corner and, lucky for me, olfactory sensation is one of the faculties I generally keep in tact.  One night there were six or seven kittens running out of the place.  They didn’t look so good, but there were too many of them to gather up even if I could have saved them. 

Some months later I came home to one of them waiting patiently, for me it seemed, on my doorstep.  Not quite a kitten anymore and not so desperate looking, my will was strong.  I told her I was full up on cats just then, but best of luck to her all the same.  She looked at me like I was very foolish.

The next night she was there again.  I explained that, according to classic American cinema, women either married men or kept cats.  There was no wiggle room, just one or the other.  And the line, as I understood it, between keeping cats and having cats was at three.  If I brought her inside, I would never get married.  It was just that simple.  Her look turned to imperious omniscience.  Clearly, my days were numbered.

The third night in a row I found her waiting for me, I crumbled.  At least I went down swinging.  I told her that I’d feed her and help find her a home, but that was it.  My resolve lasted a full twelve minutes once I let her in the house.  Since then, other far more real nightmares have dominated my mind.  For starters, I’ve saved her from bleeding to death and rescued her from having wedged herself between my ceiling and my upstairs neighbor’s floor.  And personally, I’ve been punished, penalized, and made to pay punitive damages merely for the pleasure of her company. 

The bottom line is that I can’t conceive of a life without her.  And I’ve never said that about a human being.  I don’t know about you, but I find the combined notion a little disturbing.

Although the VH1 website says Can’t Get a Date! is on hiatus, a friend watched my episode on VH1-on-demand over the weekend.  As far as I can tell, you can order it up (if you have VH1-on-demand) anytime from now through July 2nd (according to Comcast programming guides).  Perhaps this means the show will air soon.  Perhaps not.  They tell me nothing.

Incidentally, her review read as follows:

I watched the VH1 show that you did. That host was a PRICK! I thought you handled yourself really well and he really seemed like an ass. When he made that comment about a history of violence or about you being judgmental, I would have decked him too. Everyone is judgmental. If some trendy girl threw a water balloon at me, I am not sure how different my reaction would have been. Bottom line is you are great and came across as really confident, witty and charming.

Just so we’re clear, I did not deck the host.  I did once hit a man and if you want to know who I guess you’ll have to watch.

Names I know have been falling out of the sky.  I’ve been located via MySpace by several people I knew in secondary school and Friendstered by an old college friend recently.  Let me just say that I was one of those people who had fun at her ten year high school reunion because I’m earnestly interested in what happens to people, how they are transformed by time and experience.  And a lot has happened to the people I used to know.  They’re married, they’re having children, they’ve moved across the country, they have jobs that come with a title and a staff, and one even has her Ph.D.—plenty of transformation.

So you know what’s coming, right?  I start to wonder about me.  If I’ve been making progress.  It’s not a competitive thing.  I have no desire to continue my formal education.  We know I’m not ready for marriage.  And I don’t want to be the boss of anyone.  But as far as my path is concerned, I do think about whether I’m as far along as I should be.  That may sound ridiculous—like I’m racing myself—but then again it could be symptomatic of always having felt like I’m a beat behind.

When I was a kid and I thought about my eventual adult life I was certain of only a few things.  I would never work all day, every day in an office and I wanted to be part of a team.  When I became an adult, my neuroses kicked in and I acted in accordance with my fears.  I needed to be able to support myself and show accomplishment.  I got a job at a corporate publishing house and did what I could to round out my square edges.

It was not an unmitigated disaster.  I learned a great deal about good writing, fixing bad writing, what kind of writing sells, and the often unbelievable lengths people will go to…to show accomplishment.  It took me years and not a little heartbreak to admit it, but commerce, even of the literary variety, is not my domain.  I felt lesser for it, for a while, and then I thought that perhaps the reason I didn’t make it working for the man was because that isn’t where I’m supposed to be.  And so I left.

Leaving was good, but getting off the wrong road doesn’t exactly put you on the right one.  I still had that rounded out mentality and I didn’t know quite what to do with myself.  I would sustain great flows of creative energy only to get bogged down with the stress of trying to classify where I was going with my career, how I would succeed financially, and whether or not I was even good enough to be bothering with creative endeavors.  Without the structure of the man, I was at a loss.

Historically, change has been intensely difficult for me.  I’ll do almost anything to avoid it.  So many of the major changes in my life have been jarring and painful that I consider placidity to be an altered state.  As soon as I acknowledge contentment, I start sweating what will happen next.  Because I’m sure it won’t last.  I feel like I’ve been in survival mode, without backup, for the last twenty years.  And it’s taken its toll.

So, yeah, the whole leaving thing was a big deal for me.  But I didn’t know how to follow it up or who I was to be making change—a circumstance that usually affected me, not the other way around.  In the wake of it all, I haven’t had much of a grip on who I am.  When I think about the precepts set out by my young self and consider how far a field I’ve strayed, I feel like my adulthood has been one great big suppression.  Because that kid may not have had the chance to learn much, but she knew exactly who she was.

But like I said, give them enough time and some people will surprise you.  My granny, for instance, getting married at 81.  I went back to the Midwest to attend the event.  Who would miss it?  I’d been jogging a lot and was in peak physical shape, for me.  I was wearing a size eight.  Blanche wore an enormously large brimmed hat, which she kept on throughout the reception…at the Moose Lodge.  Once the one-man-polka-band got going she picked out the best dancers and stole them away from their partners.

There was some to do about one of my cousins wearing a dress.  She’s a beauty, but she doesn’t know it and likes to keep a low profile in baggy jeans and T-shirts.  I’m all too familiar with that awkward adolescent feeling, especially being more of a curvy girl.  In the dress she felt exposed…fat.  I remarked that she’d outgrow it in no time and meanwhile we could all see how pretty she was.  Blanche agreed, in her fashion.  “No one cares about these things.  I mean look at you.  You wear a pretty dress and you smile and no one notices.”

I was speechless.  But if I could have spoken I might have asked, ‘No one notices what?’  Because, for once, I felt sure that nothing was wrong with me—that I was pretty.  I had to go to the bathroom and look in the mirror before I could suck it up.  And I could.  Because I’ve learned that Blanche doesn’t mean to be an underminer.  It’s just part of her neurotic cocktail.  This is an extension of the way she looks at herself and she can’t help but apply it to me because I’m an extension of her.

I understand that, but I’ve had to reconcile myself to the fact that she doesn’t see these tendencies within herself and even if she could acknowledge them she wouldn’t know how to address them.  You can’t demand change from people.  You either find a way to work with who they are or you don’t.  It was a coup, but I got her to buy short shorts to wear gardening and swimming at Aunty Em’s lake house.  At first, she wouldn’t have it because you could see the cellulite on her size four legs.  (She admits to it now—I think only because she knows she can’t fool me anymore.)  But I got her not to care, for one weekend, in the seclusion of our family.  That was big.

This is all by way of affording you the opportunity to truly appreciate my surprise a couple of months ago when Blanche told me she was buying a house.  She had scoped out an up and coming neighborhood and found a reasonably priced property that qualified for a state funded grant program for low income first time home owners.  She was organized.  She had done research and filled out forms.  She was talking about downsizing her menagerie of material possessions in order to settle comfortably into the small home.  She was meeting with one of her regular clients to discuss putting her on the company payroll, so she could create a monthly budget.  I didn’t know who was on the other end of the phone.

“What brought this on?” was the gist of my stammering reaction. 
“I always thought I’d be swept up by the knight and he’d take me home to the castle,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Well lately I’ve been thinking, Prince Charming isn’t coming…”

You could have knocked me over with a feather.  In context to this miraculous happening, I had to expect a little more from myself.  I needed to believe that I could get back to being who I was.  Because if Blanche can make that cognitive leap, absolutely anything is possible. 

The upshot of my transformation is I’m re-squaring my peg.  And I think more change has to be the way to do it.  Because while I may have gotten myself out of the office, I’m leading quite the solitary life.  And learning how to shape my own change, well, it’s about time.

In this spirit, I went out and found a job.  It’s far less cerebral and much more active—I’m a waitress at a fairly well known SoHo bistro.  I get out of the house and interact with people four or five days a week now.  It’s terribly pleasant.  And I work with very cool individuals from all walks of life.  It turns out my neurotic cocktail is geared toward service.  I’m all about making sure the table is properly set and you’re happy with your wonderfully prepared, beautifully plated food.

I got an email the other day from another old college friend.  One of her friends is coming to New York this summer and she’s looking for an apartment or a share.  I got to thinking that if I could reduce my expenses, it might be easier for me to get back to sustaining that creative flow.  My office is mostly just a handy place to store my books.  And it might be nice to have someone around all the time, especially if that someone is friend-recommended.  We’ll soon see.  She’s moving in at the end of July. 

This may just be the beginning of an adventure…a very long awaited one.