johannaLG's Open Salon Blog

All the world is not a stage

Mon, 7 Nov 2011 14:11:11 -0500

I only just slapped him. Not that hard, really. I had done it a thousand times before, so by then it was no big deal.

But that night by happenstance, as my palm met his face, my fingers clipped one side of his glasses, and they went flying. They sailed through the air and skittered to a stop several feet away.

For a few agonizing seconds, I only managed to stare speechlessly at them, lying there on the thick shellacked wooden floor like nothing was amiss, like they'd been carefully set down that way on a dresser or a desk.

I glanced up again and back to him. Between his wide, shocked eyes a tiny speck of blood marked where metal frames had scratched the bridge of his nose.

Someone in the back of the theater let out a long, low gasp. Off to the left, a group of boys snickered.

My legs felt unsteady. My hands shook. But somehow, I found my voice again.

I yelled at him. He kissed me. We danced a long slow dance. And by the time the curtain fell, all had been forgiven.

My brilliant Never-Never Land career

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:10:12 -0400

My mother’s divorce lawyer looked exactly like this hyperactive kid I knew from school. He had the same helmet haircut and the same roundish cheeks. Even his frown was identical. On meeting him, these were my first thoughts.

Dad’s attorney was spindly and red-headed with beady blue eyes and an ugly gold watch. When I stuck out my hand to shake his, the ghost of a chuckle flickered across his face.

I was there in the office ostensibly to answer questions related to my mother’s petition for sole custody and had every intention of being polite to ensure the preferred outcome. But even then, at the age of 11, I told myself if I had to I could take them. I didn’t need some fancy degree to tell me how to think.

I followed the lawyers down the hall to a small room lined with built-in shelves of fat, color-coded reference books. We sat there together in tall-backed leather chairs clustered at one end of a humongous oak table.

The attorneys proceeded to wonder aloud whether I ‘understood’ things and ‘how I felt’ about them. They nodded and said, ‘mm-hmm,’ a lot. They scribbled on giant yellow notepads and whispered to each other, a de facto tag team of incompetent shrinks.

I did my best to stay even tempered, to act cool and be respectful, but their questions were just so ridiculous. And they asked so many.

Had my father ever abused me?

Was I sure?

Was I really, really sure?

Then why on earth would I choose not to see him?

Was there some other legitimate reason to reject a person’s company?

After what seemed like several hours of this, the red-headed one set his pen behind an ear, sifted through his notes on the tabletop and sighed.

“Do you think you’d still feel this way if your mother were ‘the bad guy’?” he asked me.

But I didn’t feel like answering.

Behind the thick lenses in my rainbow-framed glasses, I leveled my eyes to his and held them there, completely unaware of how small I must have looked in their stuffy, self-important room.

“I don’t see what relevance that has to this situation.” I said.

The attorneys exchanged a look of abject shock.

“Oh-ho, well,” came the reply. “Where did you go to law school?”

And for years after that, I assumed someday I would.

Confessions of a not-so-newly wed

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:10:51 -0400

I didn't really want a wedding.

The prospect of buying an overpriced dress in which to pose with overpriced flowers for countless cookie cutter photographs while hundreds of our 'closest friends and family' scrutinized my every move had never really appealed to me. So when my husband proposed, I begged him to elope.

It's only because he said no that, a year ago today, we didn't.

I grumbled. I sighed. I asked him again at least ten times.

His desire to spend money on this, after all:

meant less left over for this:

I was baffled.

But he longed for the extravagant party, so we threw one anyway.

It was my husband who envisioned a cake with ‘a cascade of sugar leaves’ and drew mock-up sketches for the baker.

and my husband who insisted on off-white linens so my dress would be the whitest thing in the room.

He searched high and low for chocolate brown tuxes and whimsy orange socks, to maintain this ‘condensed color palette.'

I just rolled my eyes. Or laughed.

Apart from insisting that our flower girls needed swishy dresses and that no ringbearer of mine would be forced to carry a cutesy satin pillow down the aisle, all I really did was chip in and show up.

But somehow, I'm still getting all the credit:

People keep gushing about how beautiful it was, and he hasn't once bothered to set the record straight.

Photos by Terra Dawn Photography (except our empty glasses by the beach).

All we really need

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:10:53 -0400

The school social worker’s office was a glorified closet, barely large enough for its small wooden table and a few plastic chairs. Motivational posters clung to the walls, a miniature rock fountain trickled in one corner, and balanced atop a tall stack of self-help books, a four-cup coffeemaker ran clear, heating cold metallic water-fountain water for chamomile tea.

Despite the influx of students in various stages of crisis, it was a relatively secluded, cozy place -- by far the best spot I ever found for finishing forgotten calculus homework in a hurry. So after stumbling in one day by accident, I made regular practice of eating lunch inside those walls, hunched over that tiny table and half-listening to other people’s problems between punches at calculator buttons and scatterings of eraser dust.

Because the social worker liked me, she allowed this, as long as the other students didn’t mind. And, for the most part, no one did.

The teacher assumed David was sleeping, so she left him alone. He had transferred in an out so many times, shuffled between his mother’s home in Georgia and his father’s in Virginia, that his failing was a foregone conclusion. She didn’t care.

But to rest his head on the too small desk space, fused via too short metal rod to a too small wooden chair, his back bent awkwardly, almost in half. One hand shielded his face from the glaring fluorescent lights. The other, in his lap, formed a tight fist.

Gingerly, I reached across and touched him on the shoulder.

“You okay?” I asked.

It was an idiotic question, but David looked relieved.

“Yeah, I’m just -- I,” he rubbed his eyes. “Well, no, not really.”

When the women came, he said, it never mattered what time it was. There were always ten of them at least, shouting, shrieking, running -- so fast they almost flew. They had old sad eyes and gaunt, bony faces, pigmented only in gray scale, like black and white TV.

They poured out of his locker and whispered in his ears. They rapped on his third story window at 3 a.m., shouting, pleading. They told him that the sky was on fire.

The sky was on fire.

In another era, David might have been a prophet.

Clustered around a stack of mediocre adolescent poems, the lit mag staff had abandoned its afternoon critiques in favor of vigorous debate about the pros and cons of a pessimistic outlook on life. David sat quietly for a few minutes, off to one side, gathering thoughts. Then, abruptly, he interrupted us.

“The glass isn’t half empty or half full,” he declared. “It’s just too big. What all of you really need is a smaller fucking glass.”

Startled, everyone turned to look at him. We looked at him and then we laughed. But while we laughed, I thought about it. Maybe he was right.

“I just want to be alone, I -- get everybody out of here.” David hadn’t raised his voice, but his expression made clear it was an order.

He was already there when I opened the door, seated with his back to me at the tiny table, fidgeting with the straw in a single serving carton of milk.

The social worker looked unsteady, overwhelmed. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Just leave,” he told her. “I need everyone to leave.”

But hearing me turn to go, he twisted around to look.

“Oh, I didn’t mean Johanna. Johanna isn’t ‘everyone.’ ” David gestured toward the other side of the table, the empty chair across from him. His tone softened suddenly.

"You don’t have to go,” he said. “Stay.”

His gaze was sharp, hyper-focused. His eyes, I noticed for the first time, were an uncommonly pale shade of green. I sat.

The social worker shot a quick glance at me, wordlessly wondering whether I’d be comfortable remaining there without her. I gave a single, fluid nod, and she was gone.

For a minute or two, I said nothing. David sipped his milk. The rock fountain trickled. Overhead, the lights buzzed.

“How long has it been this time?” I asked, just to break our silence.

“I don’t even know,” he said. “Days, probably."

Better safe than science

Fri, 7 Oct 2011 15:10:29 -0400

Intro to Feminism was a required course for philosophy majors, so I had to take it. Every Tuesday and Thursday (almost), I dragged myself out of bed and across campus to dutifully listen from the back row as a horde of rosy-cheeked freshmen girls from wealthy metropolitan backgrounds babbled about being oppressed and stifled and compelled by the media to hate themselves.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many places where gender bias is a very real, very significant problem, and throughout most periods in history it was an even bigger one. But here and now? Less so. Most contemporary American women, particularly those with the time, education and resources to write and publish academic papers, should just get over themselves -- or get therapy.

Besides the one guy in the class, a gruff, muscle-armed jock named Max, who mostly stayed quiet, and Ryan, a fellow female philosophy major rumored on account of her butch-sounding name and boy-short hairstyle to be my lesbian lover, I was on my own about this though. So most days, I held my tongue.

You’re fucking kidding, right?

The girl with the green notebook started it. I can still see her hand in the air. I can hear her voice, calm, crisp, matter of fact.

“There are no significant biological differences between women and men,” she said.

...

No, of course not. I mean, except for that whole chromosome thing.

...

I waited for someone else to disagree, someone more capable of not laughing in her face, the professor or Max or the redhead from the week before who admitted to thinking the ‘all men are rapists’ theory was bullshit. But no one did.

My immediate, unspoken response would not work. I had to dial it back.

“That’s pretty blatantly false.” I said.

The whole room turned to stare at me, eyes wide, breath held -- a naysayer in their midst.

Short, wordless bursts of disgust, disbelief and righteous anger flooded the air in waves. They were all talking at once, saying nothing discernible. They were shocked, freaked out, and they weren’t going to stop.

An hour later, after the chaos had dispersed, I stood by the door in an empty hallway, steered there and cornered by our rookie instructor. Ryan, who was curious, waited too, next to me.

“I’m going to recommend you drop this class,” the professor said. “Those comments today about biology -- you made the discussion unsafe.”