“The harvest is always richer in another man’s field,” the poet Ovid wrote over two thousand years ago, and so it seems when I pass through towns and villages. In the night, wooden frame houses with lit windows have me longing to leave the bus, take a peek, step into another life, one that seems warm, stable, and perfect. It’s what I call, “The Yellow Window Syndrome.”
I began my career as a “Peeper” at age fourteen. After shinnying down the drainpipe from my bedroom window, I would prowl through the night, creeping into back gardens, peeping into windows. What was everyone else doing? What were their lives like? I never saw much of interest. People watched TV, did the dishes. Sometimes they talked, or sat with friends. But how warm and appealing those interiors looked from where I was, out in the cold night, hidden in shadows or up in the branches of a tree (to see the higher floors of apartment buildings). Of course, nothing is really better elsewhere, but I still sometimes have the urge to peep.
A book talk in Raleigh and an invitation to stay with Sandra, a long-lost relative, and her husband David, does give me a chance to see how the other half lives. My own life, often itinerant and always on a shoestring, has been pared down to necessities: simple good food, small villages, houses made of natural materials, wood-burning stoves, and a garden patch. Security has been out of reach, but just outside village boundaries, dirt trails are invitations to adventure. With my dogs, I’ve followed many into deep forests, scooped valleys, onto flat plains and, sometimes, into other countries.
The
yellow windows world is a very different place. I now find myself ensconced in
a huge house with six bathrooms and six bedrooms. Beautiful wood floors are
covered by expensive carpets in neutral colors, and in the “basement” apartment
where I’m lodged, broad windows give out to a luxuriant garden. Even the glossy
guest bathroom is filled with so many perfumes, oils, and beauty products, a
professional salon would find it hard to compete.
In the oversize kitchen, dernier cri, nothing much is going on: “David and I prefer eating out. We aren’t really into cooking. We’re taking you to a Japanese restaurant tonight.” But the deep cupboards are filled with the latest equipment, and the enormous refrigerator is packed full with food. Most will certainly be wasted — in the USA, 40 million tons end up in landfills each year. What is important is purchasing the food, having it here, then going for something fancy. The many other cupboards in this huge house are equally filled with clothes, cloths, linens — who could possibly use all of this in a lifetime? No one. The average American throws away eighty-one pounds of clothing every year. Why all the excess? Perhaps to underline security, to show that disaster has been kept at bay.
Yet fragility is here, after all. David, a big eater, is overweight, has heart problems and, victim of a scam, has no life insurance. He also has problems at work: he’s a doctor, and stressed — not because his patients have worrying illnesses, but he needs to attract more clients into the clinic. If he doesn’t, he’ll be asked to leave.
“Basically, a doctor should be seeing 30 to 50 new patients every single month, and that means publicity, putting your face out there, offering competitive services and reasonable pricing.”
“Since when is being a doctor a business?” Obviously, I live in another world.
He laughs at my naivety. “Times have changed in healthcare. You have to keep your eye on the competition, know how other practices are performing, what they’re offering for similar services, the insurance plans they’re accepted, and their availability for patient scheduling.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Hire a sales rep, start using marketing techniques, and social media. On top of that, we doctors have to be very careful about lawsuits. For example, awhile back, I worked with a nurse who was excellent at her job, but she was so inconsistent you couldn’t count on her. Eventually, we had to fire her. When people called us up for references, all we could say was, ‘Yes, she worked here,’ but nothing else. That caller could have been anyone, a lawyer, a friend of hers trying to get us to perjure ourselves. Believe me, this is life on a tightrope.”
Sandra, on the other hand, radiates stability. A solid-looking woman with practical hair and glasses, (although in the family photo album, she had been a lovely slender princess with waist length golden hair) she dedicates herself to charities, to women’s associations, and brings in speakers (like myself). Her job is to make life look easy, to reign over the expensive doll collection from France, the plush sofas, the very many table and chair arrangements, the baby grand piano no one can play, the huge TV screens, expensive hi fi equipment, and the framed art on every wall.
Life
revolves around her grandchildren and her daughter, with whom she shares long
conversations about illnesses and allergies, undiagnosed, imagined, and
improbable.
“My daughter is married to a very ambitious and successful man. The problem is, he loves to travel, but she’s terrified of the outside world.”
Of course, disaster can come crashing in at any moment, Sandra admits. Take her friend Cynthia, a lovely woman, a doormat wife who worked hard to please a husband who was definitely not good to her, putting her down in public, letting doors slam in her face. If anyone dared take her side, he forbade Cynthia to contact them again.
Hubby began spending a lot of time in Chicago, taking care of their business. Cynthia knew he had friends there, that he’d run into a childhood sweetheart who became a close colleague. Then, one day he came home and announced that the sweetheart was his soul mate, his True Love. That he was leaving Cynthia, their children their home.
“You think you have a partnership,” Cynthia said to Sandra, “and it’s only an illusion.”
Hubby moved to Chicago, lived with True Love for six months. “He was wracked with guilt,” says Sandra with great satisfaction. “About the children, about the wife he left behind. Then, one night, when driving home from work, True Love fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the white line in the road, and was killed. He lost everything. Love was gone, his marriage was over. He went to stay at his mother’s house, but she died suddenly. Then what happened? He had a stroke. Now he can’t move or take care of himself. You see? He was punished by fate.”
“Well… if fate has to go around and punish people for falling in love and ending their marriages, it has its hands awfully full,” I say.
“What do you mean by that?”
“ That mistresses and lovers are a common, everyday occurrence. They are part of life. They exist.”
“Not in my life,” Sandra says stubbornly. “I don’t even want to talk about them.”
I’ll bet Cynthia said the same thing, once upon a time.
The next day, we visit Sandra’s friend Debby, another woman snug in a luxury palace. “Sure, walk around, take a look. The house is for sale anyway, three quarters of million. It’s too big for us.”
Here, there are faux classical Greek pillars, burbling indoor fountains, a hot tub, canopied beds, badly painted murals, froufrou curtains, all the kitsch money can buy.
The business that Debby runs with her husband — selling expensive beds and mattresses — is going badly.
“Too many entitlement people out there. For
example, this woman comes into the shop, found a mattress she liked, lay down
on it, tried it out, and then ordered it. When it was delivered, she raised
hell. Claimed it wasn’t the bed from the showroom, the one she’d ordered. Okay
fine. So we had it picked up, and we delivered the identical one from the
showroom, although it’s forbidden to sell showroom models. After she received
it, she came in, said she was sure there was no latex in the mattress, even
though we’d claimed there was. ‘You’re all a pack of dishonest thieves,’ she
said. ‘I want a mattress from the showroom with a guarantee that there’s latex
inside.’ She actually wanted us to cut a mattress open so she could see what
was inside. So that’s what we did.
‘Okay. But how do I know this is the one I’ll be getting?’
“Well, take a marker, put your name on it.’
When it arrived at her house, she told the delivery men she wanted them to remove all traces of the marker. ‘No wa-a-ay, lady.’"
Debby sighed. “Fifty percent of clients are like this now. We’ve decided to close down the showrooms, sell directly from warehouses: what you order is what you get.”
Both Debby and Sandra are horrified that I’m traveling by bus. “My son was going on a Greyhound trip, and when we saw the sort of people getting on the bus, we dragged him over to the airport, bought him a plane ticket. There are dangerous people on buses, people with knives. How can you take risks like that?”
But tonight, as I climb into my luxury bed in the silent huge bedroom, I find myself thinking of the bus station downtown, right next to the colossal new mall that Sandra loves to frequent, for the expensive stores, restaurants, and tea salons. At this very moment, life is humming in the station: buses are pulling in and out, security men are moving people back. There are odd conversations. Yes, it can be a chaotic and uncomfortable place, but there’s always something going on. How I miss them, the bus station crowd, the drivers with their opinions, travel tales, and good nature, and all the people with their stories. Good to know everyone’s out there, and that I’ll soon be back there with them.
More about my books and passionate life can be found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com
and http://www.jill-culiner.com, and on my story podcast at https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner
