Cheap and Easy Things Any Woman Can Cook Up!

Scituate, Massachusetts is a coastal town south of Boston where abandoned buildings that once processed Irish moss coexist with luxury condominiums built to quench the incessant thirst for water-side realty. It’s a wholesome looking town with quaint colonials, hydrangea bushes galore, and a main street replete with an ice cream shop, hardware store, and a two lane bowling alley. Here, generations of families have lived, worked, and played, most of them oblivious to or undesiring of the big city to their North.

After Steve and I break up, I often barrel down the five lane highway from Cambridge, my home, to Scituate to find solace in the sea air and in the company of my aunt and uncle, two, true practioners of the adage, “Come anytime!” Their marriage is the second for the both of them and their love has a serene beauty that echoes their surroundings. I appear at their doorstep, like the pesky greenheads that ruin July for beachgoers, but my aunt and uncle tolerate me, even welcome me, despite my pesky exterior. When I seek my relatives’ company I am in awe of their active consumption of life. Compared to the dark exile of my shade drawn living room where I smoke cigarette after cigarette, their busy lives dazzle me like the thrill of Technicolor after watching black and white.

One Sunday I arrive unannounced and find my aunt finishing her morning coffee. “Oh, good,” she greets me without any register of surprise, “you’re just in time for yoga. Grab the mats from the front closet. I have to go to the bathroom and then, we’ll go.” She tosses back the last swallow of her coffee and turns to put her ivory mug in the sink. On our short trip to the yoga center, my aunt chatters away and I let h er words wash over me. I swim in sadness , numbingly cold and murky, and just being near my aunt clarifies the water and reminds me there is a surface. In class, I bend and stretch hoping the yogic energy will lighten me somehow.

Later that afternoon, my uncle coaxes me out of the house and into their detached garage to admire his recently purchased motorcycle. I listen to him prattle on and try to determine why he is so animated, happy, alive. His lips move, his hands gesticulate, and I hear his voice but my uncle is removed from me like a holographic image. I examine his earnest face as he explains the shiny engine and wonder how to acquire his joi de vivre. “Maybe,” I ask myself, “ I should get a motorcycle?”

Leaving the house for any period of time makes me anxious. I am capable of only rare moments of sitting still; more often I smoke on the porch or sequester the computer in my aunt’s home office to check Steve’s online activity. I eat little, sleep less, and steer any and all discussion to the topic of Steve.

One evening, when the phone isn’t ringing, the dog requiring a walk, or the laundry in need of folding, my aunt sits with me on her yellow, chintz couch in front of the living room fireplace. She takes a noisy slurp of tea, eases back into the flowery pillows, and sighs, “Isn’t this pleasant?”

I look at her surreptiously; pleasant or any variation of the word is not in my vocabulary. “Yes,” I manage to eject out of my mouth, still able to recall the proper way to respond to comments outside my mind. “This is pleasant. What do you think Steve is doing?”

“Sheila,” my aunt responds tersely and puts her mug on the coffee table with a bang, “you’ve got to try and stop thinking of him.”

She speaks in an instructive tone and I sense a lecture follows. “even if you were to get back together with Steve it’s important that you use this time to think of yourself not just how to get him back. You two fought a tremendous amount,” she reminds me, “and you know I thought he was verbally abusive. Think of how often you were upset.”

“So, you think we’ll get back together?” I ask, a train on a one-way track.

“I don’t know,” she replies with frustration. “The important thing is that you grow. Get on with your life. You cannot live in the past.”

“But he’s dating someone else. How would we get back together?” I voice my internal thoughts out loud.

My aunt reels me in, “Sheila, this is not what I am talking about. I’m concerned about you. Your situation is not going to improve if you keep making yourself miserable. How is that going to help?”

“You’re right. You’re right,” I acquiesce. “I am miserable.”

“You need to stop going online and looking at what he is doing,” she continues, encouraged she may have made some headway. “It’s poison and, if you ever want to be in his life again, even as a friend, you need to respect his privacy.”

“They’re not private sites. I’m not tapping into any place that requires a password. They’re online for all to see,” I say defensively.

“Yes, but you don’t need to be looking,” she snaps back. “He has a right to his privacy and you need to respect that. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to look.” Her suggestion is reasonable sounding but at the same time intolerable to my ears. She is unyielding. “ And you need to stop writing h er.” My aunt refers to Steve’s new girlfriend, Da.

I snicker. I had created a fake profile on myspace and disguised myself as a 22 year old computer engineering student at Boston University living in a town bordering hers. I was accepted to be her ‘friend’ and Da writes me, aka artemobile, multiple times a day asking for advice, flirting, and sending perky messages.

“Yeah, it’s funny,” my aunt allows giving me a discordant piercing look, “but you need to stop. It’s not right.”

“Do you think they’ll last?” I know her answer because I have asked her hundreds of times and I love to get her going on this subject.

“Definitely not! Look at the way they met! On-line,” she says practically spitting the word. Her disdain and prediction are a salve for my broken heart.

“So, how long do you think they’ll last?” I ask in full obsess mode.

She leans back and considers the question and I can tell I have engaged her. “I don’t know – nine months . . . a year?”

I am as incorrigible as my niece who watches the ending of Beauty and the Beast over and over again, “Really, just one year?” I say with glee.

Later that night, about 9:30, I sit down at my aunt’s computer expecting to find a note from Da on my ruse of a myspace page. Her computer activity is constant, not an hour passes that she isn’t online. As soon as I log in, she sends me, aka artemobile, a message.

What’s up? I write trying to sound 22 years old and male.

I need your help.

Boy problems. She scribes.

The doctor is in. I write back.

No. I really need to talk.

What’s your screenname?

“Crap,” I think. I don’t have an instant messaging account for my fake personality.

ho I write stalling for time.

I take care of gotta take care of something real quick.

Brb

I log into aol and establish an account with a profile matching my fake myspeace persona, log back into myspace, and send a note to Da with my new screenname. As I wait for her, I add her name to my ‘alert’ list. They’ll be an electronic blurp when she signs on and soon I hear a noise.

Hey

Me so sad

Talk to me

It’s a boy

No. not u. u r hot!

Well, it is

What’s going on?

I have been going out with this guy and he’ll only hug me.

Is he getting over someone else?

No. his old gf is a baitch and she’s old

Maybe he’s shy

Have you tried to kiss him?

YES!

What kind of stuff have you done together?

Bars, bowling, movies

Huh.

I think he really likes me

Why’s that?

His face lights up every time I see him

Well, hang in. some guys just take a while to make the first move.

Ok. Ty.

No prob. Ttyl.

I am overjoyed with the news, he hasn’t even kissed her! I float downstairs, my heart a helium balloon, and join my aunt in the kitchen.

“You seem happy,” she notices.

“I am. I am.” I sing.

“Okay,” she cuts to the chase, “what did you see or hear?”

“Steve hasn’t even kissed her. It could be that he’s not that into her.”

“Could be,” my aunt agrees then rolls her eyes. “Sheila, are your moods going to depend on what’s going on with them?”

I understand her point; “Okay,” I concede and hide my joy.

After sharing a bowl of ice cream with my aunt, even my appetite returned, I leap upstairs and log into my fake myspace account.

Hurray! Da has written to artemobile.

I went over to his house and we kissed!

I asked him to be my bf and he said yes!

She attaches a red, sparkling heart to her message.

Congrats! I type in reply, log out, and go out on the front porch for a cigarette.

The cyber tete-a-tetes between artemobile and Da transpire daily and in addition, I communicate with Steve multiple times a day as myself, the jilted x-girlfriend. Steve always responds and infrequently initiates the communications but he distances himself weening his availability to mere emails. I strain to maintain the connection between us with the logic that as long as Da knows Steve and I are communicating, she doesn’t like that we are writing, and Steve still writes me, they cannot be serious.

The emails are lopsided and become more so as the time we have not seen each other extends. I try to be creative and search youtube for videos that will make him laugh thinking my good humor will lure him back. I send him a link to a spoof of a Microsoft ad showing an attractive couple in a uberchic apartment falling intertwined to the floor, mad with passion, causing their laptop to blink with the words, “SYSYTEM OVERLOAD!” I even dare to send him footage of a German eyewear commercial in which a couple sits in a parked car. They exchange a smoldering look, her head lowers to his lap, and his face displays a grimace. Slowly, the camera angles downward and reveals the woman sucking the stickshift.

For nine months, I correspond with Da as artemobile through myspace, try to win Stve with captivating emails until one day in November. Steve does not respond. Panicked, I make a resourceful attempt to reach him; I send him a note through myspace that I establish with a cute picture and plead that he answer a few questions with simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers.

Do you love me?

Yes.

Do you miss me?

Yes.

Do you want to see me?

Yes.

My head swirls trying to make sense of his behavior. In a contemplative state, I sit in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen as they make breakfast. My aunt scoops coffee into the percolator and my uncle press-twists the knob on the gas range to start the process of making French toast. The flame on the range does not appear.

“Oooh, that’s dangerous,” my uncle comments. “If that had been left on we all could have been knocked out.”

As if I were a dog, my ears perked up like a stranger was approaching the front door. “that’s right,” I say formulating my thoughts. “You’re not supposed to breathe that stuff. What happens if you do?”

“Well, you become unconscious,” my uncle explains succinctly while he uses the spatula to press the bread against the bottom of the pan.

I imagine climbing into Steve’s apartment, turning on his stove, and blowing out the flame. “Yeah, but you smell it.” I say out loud finding a flaw in my own plan.

My uncle adapts a fatherly stance and uses the opportunity to teach me about home safety. “You do because they add an odor to it but if you are sleeping,” he shakes his head to end the sentence. “Luckily, a lot of homes, newer ones, have detectors.”

I picture Steve’s apartment in detail and try to visualize any detectors. I don’t think there are any. “So, if you were exposed to just a little, you’d pass out?” I verbalize to an audience unaware of my disturbed reasoning.

“You could,” my uncle replies still shaking his head in imagined disaster.

“How much would you need to make someone pass out?” I inquire practically asking for a formula.

“Oh, I don’t know. It depends on the size of the place, the circulation of the air. The most important thing,” he advises me, “would be to get the windows and doors open and the air flowing.”

After breakfast, I head home to Cambridge. There is an unusual amount of traffic and the sun gleams off the stream of cars so I squint and lean my head backward to avoid the glare. As I drift northward, I allow my thoughts to explore the morning’s possibilities. I consider the various ways to enter Steve’s apartment . . . “the basement window – no good. The door from his apartment to the basement is usually locked. The side window – it’s high off the ground and would require a ladder but no one would see me from that angle. The bathroom window – high also and closer to the street plus moving the shower curtain would be noisy because I’d enter through the bath. In fact, wouldn’t this all be noisy? They’ll hear the click of the stove especially late at night when the rest of the house is quiet . . . This is a bad idea. . . It won’t work.”

I bring my car to a halt behind a line of traffic and since the day is nice I open the window to get some fresh air. “That’s it!” I realize and snap my head forward. “Somehow I have to get the gas from the outside in.”

I arrive home and, exhausted from scheming, I submerge in the comfort of my dim living room, smoke, and watch DVDs. I start with an episode of The Sopranos in which Carmella, sick of Tony’s philandering, has thrown him out of their house. Tony stops by the wife to give Carmella money and as he peels off hundreds from a pile of bills he complains, “You are the one that wanted us to split.”

Her reply startles me and changes my whole perspective of unfaithfulness. “There’s more than one way to ask for a relationship to end, Tony!” Carmella quips in her signature tangy voice. She is implying he is the one that asked for the relationship to end by being disloyal. I question whether Steve is doing the same thing by staying in touch with me.

The next day my usual malaise sets in and I barely want to move but I set a time, 2 p.m., and gear myself up to leave the house to leave the house at that time. At the allotted hour, I push my front door closed and recoil from the sunshine. I hate the sunny weather; I wish it were gloomy to match my mood. I drive up Route 2 in the direction of Concord where there is an Ace hardware store in the town’s center. I notice my car’s emergency light is on, a bright lightbulb red, but it has been on for weeks and I have not had the energy to arrange for the car to be serviced.

When I pull into the spacious parking lot of the mall where the hardware store is, I am reminded why I like to run errands in the suburbs, the plethora of parking spaces and the neat storefronts decorated with uniform designs. I notice a locked, fenced-off area where putty colored propane tanks sit by the door of the hardware store. “damn,” I curse to myself in exasperation. “I’ll have to ask for assistance. What am I wearing?” A quick look down reminds me I am wearing jeans, a black top, and clogs, the uniform of every practical woman with the Boston environs. I tell myself not to smile so I do not draw attention to myself.

The store associate, an older man with a fisherman’s grey beard, falls over himself helping me. He carries the tank to my car. As I pull away, I thank him and wave trying to act energetic like a suburban housewife, never weary of her errands.

The tri[ depletes my energy. When I arrive back home, I leave the tank and garden hose in the car and revive myself with cigarettes and DVDs. At midnight, I have the sudden thought that someone might drop by so I better hide the equipment. I descend the steep stairs to my basement to collect my gardening gloves and in my pile of gardening supplies I spot my pruning shears. I decide I can use them to cut a length of the hose; I only need a portion, a few feet to reach from the tank to the window.

I carry the gloves and shears to my car and drive to an isolated spot, a trail I often walk when I am at a crossroads in my life. After I pull over to the side of the remote road, I put on the gloves and pick up the shears and open the front door. I bend over the back seat to cut a yard of the green hose.and haul it and the tank out of the car and off the trail. I place both behind a tree stump out of anyone’s view. Then, I head home throwing away the remainder of the hose in a grocery store garbage can along my way.