While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Archives for November 2008

On being rescued.

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My father taught me how to swim. 

I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, and it was in a kidney shaped inground pool in Myrtle Beach, S.C. It had a water slide and a rock waterfall. 

My father and I were in the shallow end, and I wasn’t wearing arm floaties. He instructed me to swim to him, and I paddled like a hatched turtle into his arms.

“Faster. Faster,” he said. “Lift your arms higher. Keep your mouth closed. Don’t drink the water goddammit!”

And I paddled faster and lifted my arms higher and didn’t drink the water.

Once, when he wasn’t looking, I decided to swim across the pool, to the water slide where older children were clambering up the stairs and plunging into the deep end. Kicking off the concrete wall, I embarked on what felt like an epic journey, but about midway through I panicked, stretched my toes to touch the bottom and gulped a good cups worth of pool water.  For all the big-footed teasing I endured as a child, the big toes on my giant embarrassing feet would not touch the bottom.

For what seemed like years, I flailed my arms, gurgled chlorine and cried hot salty tears, a bold 5-year-old buckling halfway through her shitty plan. I remember clearly the stab of failure. It tasted like phlegm and chemicals. 

I don’t recall if I cried for help or if someone else in the pool alerted my father of the blonde child without arm floaties taking in water faster than the Titanic. But when he came to get me, I remember he grabbed me under the arm pits and pulled me to the side of the pool, where I coughed sweet relief that hurt coming up.

I called my dad yesterday to ask him if he remembered this incident.  
“You saved my life,” I said.
“That’s what they pay me for,” he replied. 
“But do you remember it?” I asked.
“You almost drowning? Nah,” he said. “I remember teaching you girls how to swim in Myrtle Beach, but I don’t remember a thing like that.”
“I’m sure I wasn’t drowning. I mean it felt like I was drowning, but it probably wasn’t as big a deal to you as it was to me.” 
“I tell you what,” my dad said. “Same thing happened to me when I was about 6 years old. I was swimming in Lake Erie with David Koch and for whatever reason I started taking in water.”
“Who rescued you?”
“David Koch. Pulled me right up out of the water.”
“Do you remember it vividly?”
“You don’t forget something like that,” my dad said. “I remember it like it happened yesterday. Scared the shit out of me.”
—
PS. The picture above is of me without arm floaties. I’m on the offending water slide in Myrtle Beach, S.C. My father is waiting to catch me at the bottom.  

Luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

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Glorious sleep. Glorious, frothy dream-filled sleep! Keep it coming, Mr. Sandman.

After spending both September and October fending off nightmares, I’m thrilled to report that November has been less cruel to my fretful unconscious.

Employed as a nanny for seven sniveling children, I would dream horrible things. Dreams that would wake me in the middle of the night and cause my head grief the following morning.


In one month I pounded an entire bottle of Advil.


Mostly, I had nightmares about the woman I worked for – the stay-at-home mother-of-seven, who spent her days in spandex exercise gear, scribbling grocery lists on the back of her kids’ stick figure drawings, rattling off demands hurriedly and with a tight, cold scowl that pulled her tanning-bed skin into a kind of leather hide that reminded me of the bottom of moccasins that sell for nine bucks on Indian reservations.

The Friday before Joe and I closed on our house, Wall Street collapsed and our pre-approved mortgage was almost denied. Why? Because I quit my job as a staff writer at a newspaper so I could freelance from St. Pete and moonlight as Mr. Belvedere for one humiliating month.

The day the mortgage broker called to tell me my career switcheroo was about to cost us our house, I calmly provided him the name and number of my new spandexed employer, swallowed two Xanax and rehearsed between snot-sucking sobs, how I would break the news to Joe.

Later that day, while doped up on anti-anxiety medication, the mortgage broker called to tell me to breathe. He would use the jaws of life to secure our loan. Staff writer or disgruntled nanny, he’d find a way to approve our mortgage, of course not without first using the phrase, “by the skin of your teeth.”

When we closed Oct. 3, and the subject of my employment came up, the woman who owns the title company kicked me under the table, and without making eye contact said to Joe, “If anything has changed with anyone’s employment situation, please by all means don’t tell me.”

I never stopped writing for the newspaper. Juggling both jobs, I banked my Belvedere money for furniture and scribbled notes at night about how the protagonist in my novel would never be a nanny, because to subject her to such tyranny would be to limit the depths of her character.

Four years of college and four more years of reporting and here I was, folding some woman’s thong underwear into a silk square smaller than a postage stamp. One night, while putting her children to bed, the 6-year-old turned to me and snapped, “You use a lot of big words for a first-time babysitter. What are you a scientist or something?”

“Well,” I replied. “Before I was your babysitter, I was a reporter. My job was to write stories for the newspaper.”

“Like the St. Pete Times?” She asked.

“Not quite,” I said. “But something like that.”

Two weeks later, on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-October, after Joe had assembled my new pine desk and we’d scheduled our first trip to Ikea, the spandexed mother-of-seven fired me.

Who would have thought that in these piss-poor economic times that getting shit-canned would feel so good?

I started this post weeks ago. At first it began like: “She was a straight up rich bitch, who despised me for reasons I’ll never know. She fired me because she claimed I couldn’t be trusted with her children …”

And you know what? I deleted the whole sour-pussed rant. The world is too hopeful right now to mop up my absence on this blog with negativity. The last headache I had was the result of two glasses of champagne, consumed Tuesday night during Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. So in the spirit of optimism, I’ll spare you the tirade and leave you with a story about luck, faith and benevolent Canadians.

I’ve always thought lucky pennies were underrated. If you’re like me, when you find a lucky penny you forget to note which side is facing up when you pick it up.

As children we’re taught (perhaps by grandparents or big-fannied aunts) that pennies are lucky. That when we find one we should pocket it. Forget the fact that Lucky Penny lore only holds true when a coin is found head’s side up. For those of us who operate on whimsy, technicalities like this are easy to dismiss.

If you’re a hopeless non-denominational optimist like me, you have faith in the idea that pennies can’t possibly be cursed. What kind of prick universe would this be if half the pennies we found were responsible for half our misfortunes? If I could add up all the pennies – lucky or otherwise – that I’ve collected over the years I could probably buy Joe a nice steak dinner on the better side of Tampa. Besides, if all pennies can be used to make wishes then certainly no penny is luckier than another.

But why the subject of pennies? Specifically the crusty, oxidized one that was given to me last month by a Canadian man after my car was pinned between a concrete wall and a motor home while driving 75-mph on the interstate?

I’ll spare you the details of what could have been a dreadful accident. As talented an embellisher as I am, I cannot exaggerate non-existent, non-dreadful details. I can only credit my reaction time, the fact that I was listening to The Chemical Brothers, and two benevolent Canadians.

In the nanoseconds that passed between the offending motor home to my left, and the concrete wall to my right, I somehow managed to summon a previous life as a tomboy in the sticks of Western New York, where as a teenager I drove a demolition car named The Vaginator in the fields behind an ex-boyfriend’s house.

Locking the brakes on my Honda Civic, I kept the car on a straight skid as I pinballed between the RV and the wall. Had the benevolent Canadians, who were driving behind me when the accident occurred, not pulled over to provide a witness statement, the officer who responded to the crash would have cited me for failure to yield the right-of-way.

“Failure to yield the right-of-way?” Cried the benevolent Canadians. “She had nowhere to yield to!”

“Yes I understand,” said the officer. “But if the people in the motor home wanted to argue the situation she would’ve had a hard time proving her case.”

While we waited for the necessary paperwork to wrap up one of the benevolent Canadians handed me a penny.

“I found it by your car,” he said cheerfully. “Pennies from heaven you know.”

Funny, I thought. My godless family never phrased it like that.

On Tuesday, I got my car back from the collision shop. It looks brand new thanks to four new tires, a rearview mirror, and a week’s worth of banging out and buffing up. The guys at Wulff’s Collision on 20th Avenue couldn’t have been nicer or more skilled.

As for the penny, it went back into circulation sometime last week when I purchased ice cream at CVS. I have no idea if the benevolent Canadian found it heads up or heads down, and I totally forgot to ask.

Losing the hockey mom vote.

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Before I leave to cover U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan’s election party at the Sarasota Hyatt, I thought I’d share with you this anecdote:
My mother, who hasn’t voted in an election since 1980, cast her vote today at the Langford Fire Hall in North Collins, NY. 
In a rural Erie County farming town that still uses the old lever and curtain voting booth, my mother cast her vote for Barack Obama. She even called to share the news, she was so proud of her voter participation. 
Later in the day, while waiting in the check-out line at a Marshalls department store near Buffalo, N.Y., my mother overheard two ladies discussing today’s election. 
Said one lady to the other: “White people should be ashamed of themselves, voting for Obama.” And then, turning to face my mother, she croaked: “Did you vote?”
My mother, in her trademark non-confrontational Western New York accent, replied: “You should be ashamed of yourself. At moments like this I’m ashamed to be white.”
Mom, in your honor. This post. 
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