Maisie Knew Some Things and Didn't Know Others

[mallorys_camera]

Muffled conversations half-heard through walls have always filled me with a peculiar, irrational terror. In the whispers, I always hear the pronoun "she" and then I start straining for the mention of my own name, sitting very, very still, never moving a muscle.

For a long time I thought this was latent paranoia or perhaps some perverse expression of narcissism – like every conversation I overhear is really about me, right? Wasn't until I watched What Maisie Knew -- an emotionally wrenching and mostly overlooked film that came out last year – that I finally recognized the behavior for what it was, a kind of conditioning licensed by the hyper-vigilism that all neglected children are forced to develop, struggle as they might to remain oblivious.

Kind of a Come to Jesus moment.

I wasn't raised like the Maisie character in the movie. I mean, I was a city kid, true, but my mother had no money. Plus she didn't feel compelled to pay lip service continually to her great, overweening LUV for me. I think she did love me in her way, but she was very young when she had me, barely 17. And having me more-or-less ruined her life – at least in her own mind – so she had mountains of resentment, which she attempted to bury me under. I was the suitcase that was never unpacked, lugged around in the background of her life until I finally got out when I was 15.

She was 32, still pretty young. And she did kind of reinvent herself. True, it was too late for Julliard and the professional violinist career for which her own insane mother had groomed her, but she ended up becoming a fiddler for a number of San Francisco bands, one or two of which were on the fringes of breakthrough success in the early 1970s. She was never as successful as Annie, the self-taught musician, and that kind of poisoned the well for my mother, she became insanely jealous of Annie.

But my mother was someone who was easily moved to jealousy.

I remember sitting with her once sometime in the early 1970s, flipping through a magazine to show her one of my modeling shots. I mostly did catwalks as a model. Although my face was extremely photogenic, the stylemasters thought I was too fat and too ethnic-looking for camerawork. At the time, I weighed 120 pounds. I'm 5'10".

This modeling shot was an ad for a bra. You were allowed to use ethnic-looking models in underwear ads because, you know, we're dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and that obviously meant we liked sex more than your standard issue virginal blonde Grace Kelly lookalike.

"Doesn't look like you at all," sniffed my mother. "I guess they had to airbrush the shit out of you to get a good shot, huh?"

###

I've been in kind of a funk for the past week or so. Weather-related in part. I don't like gyms, so in the wintertime, my main exercise is walking. I can't walk, though, when it's 15 degrees outside and the sidewalks are coated with ice. I'm at the age when one slip on ice could end up fracturing a hip. I mean, I'm big-boned and my fingernails are as strong as daggers, which is generally a sign my calcium levels are good. I don't think I have osteoporosis. But One Never Knows.

Without exercise, I get testy, maudlin. I worry that my cats are depressed. I cry when I overhear hustlers talking big on the street, knowing that their schemes are doomed to come to naught. I cry when I see unloved children, skipping through snow in inadequate coats behind their grim-faced mothers.

I almost cried at the mall last night when I went into a store that sells gourmet treats because they used pretzel sticks to sample the products, and my Little Store used to use pretzel sticks to sample products. The store was completely empty as it had been during that grim week l'il Jeremy and I tried to do a giftwrap benefit to raise funds for our smoothie cart. No way this little store survives, I thought and the thought made me very, very sad. The old retail model is dying. In the future, all you will have is these megalithic brands disseminated by global corporations.

It is the blight that man was born for
It is small business capitalism you mourn for

Last week, we did our event at the nursing home in conjunction with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of National Service. (Betcha didn't even know there was a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day of National Service! Oh, MLK is a big brand for nonprofits!)

Surprisingly, the event was a success. I'd been hitting the phones and the pavements for weeks trying to drum up volunteers from the local colleges, high schools and churches, and whadiya know, I was actually successful.

The volunteers were charged with mingling with the inmates – whoops! I mean residents. I kept strictly away from that. I'm only 25 years younger than those folks, and it's absolutely my worst fear that I'll end up in a place like this. In fact, I stockpile suicide techniques as a kind of precaution. ("Dry ice?" scoffed BB? "That won't work. I mean – yeah, it will work, but the thing is human beings have a panic reaction when they breathe in carbon dioxide. The best thing is to go into an airtight room with a couple of tanks of helium, you know, the stuff you use to blow up party balloons.")

I had a long talk with one of the volunteers who's also on our advisory board. Keisha was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension in 2008 and given exactly one year to live. Six years later, an oxygen tank trails her everywhere she goes, but she's not dead. She is exhaustingly upbeat and chirpy, but I might be that way too if every morning was another fabulous WIN! in the Beat-the-Reaper game. I seem to recall that Mark was similarly upbeat and chirpy in the early stages of his MS.

We talked about Poughkeepsie, of course. A source of unending fascination to me: Why is Poughkeepsie the way it is? In particular, why does Poughkeepsie have a white, Republican Italian mayor when half the population is black or Hispanic, and 50 percent of the population is on food stamps and other types of social welfare?

Keisha doesn't know.

Since I kept away from the residents for the most part in the meet-and-greet portion of the facility, I got to listen to the nursing home's receptionist do the phones all day. She was a moon-face woman with alopecia, around my age. She was in a foul mood, had cultivated a neat trick of hanging up on people so that they didn't actually realize they'd been hung up on. I admired that about her.

Towards the end of the day, she suddenly became more beneficent, and we started talking.

"What did you do before you did this?" I asked.

"I was the City of Poughkeepsie's Director of Urban Development," she said.

Oh.

Turns out she was responsible for getting those large swathes of houses on Academy Street, Balding Avenue and the intersection of Dwight and Hooker put on the National Register of Historic Places. There are quite a few Poughkeepsie buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, in fact, which is just one of many reasons why the abject squalor of this place amazes me. Honestly? It has all the ingredients for an urban renaissance in place – beautiful architecture, tourist attractions, cultural events, fairly good restaurants. It's only lacking one thing: Residents that care.

Comments

[nodressrehersal.livejournal.com]

I wonder how you get from Director of Urban Development to receptionist.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing, but didn't think it was polite to ask. :-)

[signorinakatina.livejournal.com]

I would love to see some of your old modeling photos :)
I'm sorry your mother was so critical, but it sounds like you are able to understand the context of your presence in her life, and that it wasn't your problem or anything personal. Congratulations on having perspective.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[fasterpussycat.livejournal.com]

"I cry when I overhear hustlers talking big on the street, knowing that their schemes are doomed to come to naught. I cry when I see unloved children, skipping through snow in inadequate coats behind their grim-faced mothers."


This was me, just exactly yesterday. These two things specifically.




Thank you for your entries.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Awww... Thanks.

tag list

[bb-lurks.livejournal.com]

You left out "suicide tech"

Re: tag list

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

The tag is in my head. :-)