Songs of Torture

My sophomore year of college I lived in a dorm near the DKE fraternity. And although much of what took place in their hazing process was, intentionally and gratefully, not common knowledge around campus, there was one component that year that the whole school was, uh, privy to.

Which was that they blasted the same bloody song OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN throughout the famously haunted (but that’s beside the point) Old Kenyon building where they lived, and blaring out onto the quad. To really fuck with the pledges, and anyone else who wasn’t hearing impaired in Knox County, sometimes they’d stop the song for a small stretch. Just long enough to get you really fired up that–sweet relief!–they were moving away from that particular form of aural abuse, and leading some goats into the building or something.

But then, they’d ruthelssly turn it back on. Whaling it extra special loud. And the entire campus would collectively seize up. Scraping at the sides of our faces wondering derangedly if they would ever show mercy on us, and hoping at the very least that whatever intangible social stature those pledges would gain as a result of it all, that it was really fucking worth it.

For years after when I’d hear the song I think I still twitched and gnawed on my lips a bit. I feared I might never shake the trauma.

But here I am, just weeks away from my can-ya-believe twentieth college reunion, and I’m thrilled to report that, as you might have noticed due to its omission–at this point I can’t even remember what that damn song even was.

Which thus far is the best mental yardstick to indicate just how freakin’ long it’s been since my college prime. Well, that or that the experimental mind-erasing procedure I had performed in Boston in ’97 really did the trick.

Heh.

At any rate, in his years as a Sports Illustrated reporter, Mark got to cover the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta. (And if you’d like a few commemorative duffel bags, t-shirts, or even a 100% rayon necktie from that event, I can happily hook you up.) Anyway, the bombing that year made the already overworked and sleep-deprived journalists there exponentially more overworked and sleep-deprived.

But outside the hotel where most of them were staying–where they’d retreat for the measly hours of sleep they’d get to have a night–there was a street vendor selling sodas, sounvenirs, and the retarded Izzy the mascot crap. The dude worked nearly round the clock and blasted that hateful hot hit which you’ve probably blacked out of your brain by now, “The Macarena.” He played it in an evil, heartless, endless loop.

And really just one hearing of that song when I’m not even mad for sleep makes me want to take a chop stick to my eardrums.

In the past couple weeks I’ve had occasion to think of these episodes. Unfortunately. All because of one greeting card. One of those open-it-and-it-plays-a-song cards, sent to Kate for Easter from her grandparents. (I won’t tell you from whose side of the family.)

Okay, OKAY! So it was from MY side of the family.

This card plays a very tinny version of a song whose nonsensical verses are, “Yummy yummy yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy, and I feel like I’m loving you.” Verses that at times seem sexually perverse to me, and at other times just an odd choice for how vaguely associated with Easter—candy eatin’, I guess—they are. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ponder this.

Anyway, don’t get me wrong. This card is adored and beloved by Kate. It was incredibly sweet and thoughtful to have sent it to her. Every time she opens and closes and reopens that card—while eating breakfast, peeing, riding her bike, or leering up close to Paigey’s face—every single time, morning, noon, or night, it’s as though the fact that music emanates from it is a freshly exciting revelation. Something she isn’t certain will necessarily happen if she opens it again. So she needs to check.

That gal’s tenacious.

And even though I’ve had on the order of seven breakdowns where I’ve pleaded with her to take mercy on us and it’s only 6:47AM and Daddy is still trying to sleep and don’t you think that’s a little close to Paige’s face and maybe if we just sit down and eat a big pile of candy for a while that would be a fun way to take a little break from the card hmmm? Even with all that, when I cleaned up all our Easter crap a couple days ago, throwing away the already broken or rotten stuff and shoving the rest of it ceremoniously in a garbage bag for basement storage, I still left that card out for her.

Why? Because in a weirdly genuine I’m-happy-that-she’s-happy-even-if-it-makes-me-unhappy maternal way, I feel like with some intermittent intervention I can stick it out until she eventually hopefully tires of the damn card. Or, if there’s a God, it breaks.

Not that I’m setting my sights on it or anything, but if she ever wants to, that girl could DOMINATE a sorority some day.

Things that did not happen today

Today part-way through an article in Us Weekly about how celebrities lost their postpartum weight—or maybe it was the story about George Clooney and his ex-girlfriend having recently “kept in touch” via email—I set the magazine down in my lap and ran my mind though a voluntary exercise of abject terror.

I was at the chiropractor. Sitting on the table in a blue hospital gown and an absurd little triangular lead apron, a grossly inadequate-seeming shield for my baby-makin’ parts from the x-rays I’d just had taken. X-rays of my lower back and neck–standard stuff the new doc figured would confirm his garden variety “baby trauma, computer hunch, yadda yadda” diagnosis about my bag of bones.

At some point in the middle of whatever article it was, I suddenly realized just how long I’d been sitting there reading that crappy magazine. Long enough to envision a scenario whereby the doctors were all in the other room, leaning with concern into the light box of my x-rays and discussing just how they’d break the news to me about the wretched thing they saw–long enough to make that terrible image suddenly seem as though it was without a doubt what had to be happening and why I was waiting so damn long.

And here I’d been. Haplessly reading a magazine. Ignorant and blissful. Expecting that after scanning the pictures showing celebrities doing things ‘just like us’ (putting money in the parking meter!) the doctor would come back, inform me the x-rays were just fine, tell me to get dressed, direct me to another room for a heat pack and a few righteous neck crunches, then send me on my way home to collect Mark and the girls for a rainy-day visit to the wildlife sanctuary.

But really what would-could-might be about to go down would make these few page-flipping minutes seem like the happiest carefree bored would-that-I-could-go-back-there time ever. What if the doctors came in, stern and serious? And after our talk I had to dig out my cell phone, call Mark, tell him he needed to come meet me there, or maybe even at the hospital? What if something suddenly on this otherwise nondescript day sent me into a mother-love panic about my fragile and about-to-crumble mortality jeopardizing my happy-go-lucky magazine-reading life and my heretofore inadequately appreciated days and months and years with my beloved husband and those blessed beautiful girls?

It could happen.

But in some deep deep place I think I somehow knew that this whole mental spiral was only meant to act itself out in my mind. Based in part on the odds. But also because if I thought it might really be happening I don’t think I could even bear to conjure it up. To take it all the way though to the sickening horrible thought that I can barely force myself to return to now—my sweet small children, motherless.

Who knows what triggered this sudden ardent need for a heroin-heavy dose of life perspective. Maybe, God willing, the doctor’d come back in, all in a flurry with some double-booked back-up of neck-wringing to wrangle with, and like some hairdresser who’s gotten behind on one appointment that’ll screw her for the whole day, apologize as he hastily loaded a heating pad on my back to move me through the rotation and out the door—one more down.

And thankfully, blessedly, thank you thank you thank you Mr. Universe, Sir, some version of that did happen.

But still in my relief the thought lingered that maybe one room over there was another woman who wasn’t so lucky. And if not in this doctor’s office surely somewhere nearby someone was getting crappy news. Someone’s plans to go home and heat up leftover chicken soup for lunch were about to be shot to shit.

I had a professor in London my junior year of college. A rapid-fire-talking layered-clothing-wearing kindly woman whose voice was as high-pitched as it was shrill. Truth be told I don’t even remember what genre of lit she taught, though it seems like it should be 19th Century.

Anyway, one day I went to her office for our tutorial—the one-on-one sessions that comprised the Brit’s collegiate learning structure. (“Here’s the syllabus. Read the books. Meet with me every other week–maybe over a pint–to chat. And turn in five papers by the end of the term.”) So I walk into her office. She’s all in a tizzy–much more so than her usual state. Wisps of gray hair flying out of her bun and glasses low on her nose. Standing up behind her desk slapping together teetering piles of books and papers and folders and a tea cup or two while clucking to herself, “Oh, Margorie. Come on now! Come on.”

Then, having done nothing to acknowledge my presence at her door, she lets out a sudden shriek, “Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes!” And clutching a little ratty brown leather billfold to her chest and exhaling deeply closes her eyes for a moment then flaps them open wide cackling, “Kristen! Dear! I am so very happy to have you be the first person to know that my wallet is now found! Hiding right here in plain view! And you know really, it’s such a thrill. Sometimes,” she said leaning closer to me, and I can still picture her grinning giddily on the verge of this, “when you think something is lost—you’ve utterly and uncompromisingly convinced yourself of it, and then—behold!—why it’s suddenly right there! Right back there for you! Do you know how sometimes it’s really such a wonderful delight to have it back that it sort of makes having lost in the first place actually quite worthwhile?”

Yes, Margorie. Yes, I do.

The Final Straw

Several months ago I bought a wooden toy chest as one of my volunteer duties for Kate’s preschool auction. A guy from the furniture store took it out to the car for me while I was signing the credit card receipt.

A few minutes later he came back in and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t put that in your car.” Odd, since he’d measured it and my car minutes ago and assured me there was plenty of room.

After waiting a couple seconds and (I assume) delightfully registering my confusion, the guy leans into my face and leers, “I can’t put it in a car with a Carleton College sticker! I went to St. Olaf!”

Sadly for him, I had no awareness of the apparent collegiate rivalry to which he was referring, since it’s Mark who’s the Carleton alum.

Sadly for me, I didn’t think fast enough to make the “We always said you St. Olaf people would be moving furniture for us one day” comment.

Oh well. It’s just another little weird-since-it-ain’t-my-college scenario that’s cropped up ever since we had Kate and I started driving Mark’s car, which along with its superior kid-transporting space, comes emblazoned with his alma mater’s sticker across the back window.

Actually, I barely notice it myself now, but every once and a while I’ll get something like a realtor’s business card left on the windshield that says, “Hey, fellow Carl! Please call me if you’re ever looking for a house in the Bay Area!” (Cute or annoying? You decide!)

And just a few weeks ago a friend’s husband offered to ran out to my car for something and not knowing whether he knew which one was mine I started to say, “It’s the silver Subaru–” and he jumped in “–with the Carleton College sticker. Yeah, yeah, I know it.”

It’s not like I have anything against Carleton. I mean, aside from the fact they swiped my small liberal arts college’s former president. News of which came through to Mark and I via our respective alumni newsletters. Kenyon’s two-bit pamphlet-like paper arrived one day with a pathetic entreaty that “the search was on” for a new president. The cover story seemed nearly as desperate as, “Hey, know anyone who’s kinda smart and willing to live in a fancy house in hell-and-gone rural Ohio for not much money but a noble job? We’re looking for a new president. (See reverse side for application.)”

Or at least in my mind it seemed that way.

The Carleton alumni rag is all schmancy, printed on stock only a former magazine hack could love, with stunning close-up cover photos of former students who are off excelling in some dazzling job you never even knew existed but is utterly world-bettering, death-defying, and/or hip. Let’s just say that the issue of The Voice that came to us a couple weeks after Kenyon’s sorry ass we-don’t-got-no-president newsletter was a gloating tribute to their new glorious leader.

It was all so tragic I don’t think Mark even had much fun chiding me for it.

And to think that on a daily basis I drive around the Carleton-mobile that has a sticker on it that everyone I know has seemed to notice and comment on at one time or other as if the whole car is wrapped in that plastic sheeting advertisement stuff they did a lot of before all those kooky dot coms with animal names folded a few years back.

So this morning I’d just parked outside my new chiropractor’s office when a guy pulled up alongside me in a way that set off my paranoid mind to wondering if I’d taken his spot, leveled a parking meter, or had the end of my scarf dragging out the door on the street for the past seven miles. Instead the guy is kinda smirking, motions for me to roll down my window, and calls out as if I’m on the other end of a wind tunnel and he needs me to grab a safety harness, “CARLETON! I see the Carleton sticker on your car!”

“Yes,” I say wearily, preparing for his let-down when I have to eventually tell him I don’t know the double-secret Carl handshake. And feigning interest: “Did you go there?”

“YES! I DID!” he shouts enthusiastically and unnecessarily. “Do you have a child that goes there?!”

[Sudden sound of needle scratching across record] A child? A child?

Okay, so I think Mark and I need to talk about that sticker finally coming off. Or maybe me just getting a new car altogether. The Sube is clearly not doing anything to uphold my youthful image.