EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

People come and stay at our weekend place all the time. Last weekend 23 whole people stayed here and reports are the laundry was staggering. My middle girl Annie who hosted the weekend was here until 10 o’clock Sunday night doing load upon load of sheets and towels. Even so, when I drove up just now to get the jump on this weekend  I saw a few more things: Saw that one guest had gathered all my hair elastics into a nice bouquet. Saw that  n order to have a giant inferno on the little beach another guest had taken out a fire permit by pretending to BE the homeowner, leaving said permit posted on our fridge, edges charred for comic effect. And saw that two other guests had left their underwear. So if any of you folks out there are missing a pair of sexy black boxers and an even sexier Body by Victoria bra, both freshly laundered, then COME ON BY and stake your claim. ‘Til then, could be the lady of the house herself may be using ‘em to jazz up my look a little!

Not sure what to do with steamy temps and rain due in later but playing dress-up comes to mind. Our little guys had such high fevers yesterday reports are they lay side by side in the parental bed like two strips of raw bacon, too limp for Sesame Street even. They were way better by last night though so might come over here today to complete their recovery at TT’s house. (I’m TT. And when I say ‘our little guys’ I mean my grandbabies.) If they were my own babies I’d have brought costumes right to their little sickbeds, propped ‘em up and taken pictures of them – or so it strikes me when I look at this old picture, of my own little boy Michael on his bed back in ’87, ably assisted by costume-master/big sister Annie. It’s the Marotta way! File another one under the category Exploiting the Defenseless: Even the Cat Covers His Eyes at the Shame of It!

It was sweltering yesterday and I had 25 women coming to my house for the big camp reunion. They came from all over. Even my big sister Nan even came from faraway Florida and when Nan is in town things always take a lively turn: In the morning as we were just leaving the house she quick darted into the bathroom, from behind whose doors there suddenly came a scream and loud exclamations. I rushed right over.  “Nan! What’s happening?”

“Nothing. I looked in the mirror.”

The outside temps were set on ‘Broil’ at dawn yesterday and by 10:00 when we went out on that final Party Needs run they had inched up to ‘Self Clean.’ We had just scored a world of soft drinks when Nan saw another store she wanted to duck into on the chance that it might have the food her 1500-mile-away cat is partial to.

“A Pet shop, hey! Stay here,” she said, veering inside it. Then, over her shoulder, “Work on your tan.”

So what could I do but work on it, as I stood all alone with my brimming shopping cart on the  blistering pavement?  I learned way way way WAY back when I was only a little guy: if you want the fun to keep on coming just do what the older one tells you to.

This is not actually Nan and me but the one on the left IS  \Nan’s little daughter Gracie, then six, while the one on the right is my first girl Carrie, then five, but that look of delighted admiration? That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about !

One good way to feel like a dork is to model for Sky Mall Magazine, that glossy publication found aboard all airplanes these days, each issue sporting on its cover the I Dare-You words “Take It! We’ll Replace It!” I take it every time a) because who has to hear THAT twice and also because it often  comes with a cover photo you just can’t forget.

Take this image here of the not-entirely-normal foursome relaxing in the Ahh-Qua Bar®, a kind of large inflatable tub decal from the Sock-it-to-Me era only with the nice hammock-y seats built in and the centrally placed ‘ice bucket’ for your off-brand beverages. Mr. Muscles is  OK except he can’t seem to look joyful for one single second more, and really there’s nothing TOO wrong with Chipmunk Cheeks beside him. And the Lady In Red with the slight squint would be fine if she weren’t wearing her bra in the pool, but will you look at the kid beside her?! When they said ‘Smile Big!’ he DID it by golly and widened his eyes too so you can really see the manic gleam in them!

I’ve had this issue of Sky Mall for over a month and I still can’t throw it out I think because of the lesson that it offers: if ever you  get the chance to do any low-budget modeling you should run as fast as you  can in the other direction or this could be you!

When my oldest was 14, she hassled me continually about my nice cheesy clothes with the wonderful shoulder pads so flattering to the hips.  “Get RID of the shoulder pads!” she would cry, and also “Why do you want to wear new stuff when you can just as easily wear used?” This from deep in the flannel and denim rags she had scored from Dollar a Pound, a clothes emporium with a huge scales in the middle that shares space with The Garment District with stuff was a tad pricier, meaning jeans and men’s suit coats might set you back 4 or 5 bucks.

I hadn’t been to these two stores since the early 90s but I was there this week with three 16-year-olds, and how they exclaimed over the costume section with its American Flag platform boots! How I exclaimed over the gorgeous wear-‘em-with-nothing-over-’em dress bras with their spangly mesh trailing down over a bare tummy! And then – and THEN – I came upon rack after rack labeled “80s Clothes” and almost lost consciousness. Here were the tops I‘d been so unsuccessfully scouring the department stores for! The filmy long-sleeved blouse done in flowing polyester! The smart short–sleeved one done in faux-linen! The high-necked cinch-waisted black velvet top that flared up and outward like a flower vase! I felt like Daisy Buchanan sobbing into the creamy silk and linen togs of the soldier she wouldn’t wait for and so lost forever. “I’m … I’m crying because they’re such beautiful shirts,” Daisy said, near to hiccups with emotion and, well, now I was crying too. I was crying because they were such beautiful shoulder pads. I bought all three of those tops, PLUS a wonderfully flaring skirt, PLUS two long trailing scarves that smelled only a little like an attic – all for just $45.

The kids paid about a third of that on their own whimsical togs.

Then we snapped each other’s pictures, took in some learnin’ at the Museum of Science and caught “Away We Go,” starring adorable John Krasinski of The Office, that master-of-the-deadpan-look, and all I can say is Talk about your rainy day fun!

On the last day we spent together, my cat Charlotte was tending her bad hip, same as always. She used to like to lean it against me as I sat writing in my wide chair, the two of us flank to flank.

On our last day, I had come in at dawn from the coast on the red-eye and was already working in my study at 7 a.m. when she emerged from her favorite sleeping-place under the eaves. During that four-day trip, my husband David had cared for her, setting out the individually-wrapped saucers of wet food I’d made up and keeping both the kibble and the water dish freshly filled.

I think now of what an engine of nocturnal pep she was a kitten, when she would scale the tall cliff-face of our bed to administer wildly-scrabbling scalp massage to our sleeping noggins.

I think of what a sedate lady she later became, in these last years especially when she spent most of her time monitoring joint pain, just like us. And yet she was content; happy to see us always; freshly delighted by every sudden pool of sunlight that opened up on the floor of whatever room she was in.

With this grateful nature and David’s good care it may be that she never missed me while I was gone. It may be that she took my love and care as givens, the way children do who see their parents as eternal fixtures,

ever-sheltering.

If she did I’m glad she did, though it never worked the other way: I never took her for granted. We humans don’t, with our pets, because we see how much they love us, all undeserving. Because we know how likely it is that we must one day go on without them.

At 8 a.m. on the last morning we spent together, I was seated at my laptop with Charlotte curled up against me. But the night-long flight had taken its toll on me and by 9:30 my eyes were closing as I worked.

I don’t know why I did what I did then, since never before in our 15 Junes together had I tried to move her just because I wanted her with me, but it’s what I did that morning. I carried her into the bedroom with me, where, with the lace of the curtains billowing and the softly buzzing sounds of summer wafting up from the street below, the two of us closed our eyes and slept three hours.

She died at 6 that night.

Within minutes I felt her spirit vanish, which means I do not hear a phantom cry at the door and I do not feel the phantom press of her flank against mine.

I do dream of her though and know well what comfort there can be in dreams: Once, about six months after my entirely healthy 80-year-old mother died all unexpected at a celebration in her honor, I dreamed the two of us were trotting down a wide staircase together. When I suddenly looked over at her and said “Mom! You’re running!” she replied, “I know, isn’t it great? I’m not old anymore!”

Maybe it’s the most we can say our dead, that age no longer touches them.

Neither our much-loved pets nor our mothers who did their best for us every day; neither our once-young dads nor our fierce big sisters; neither our brave brothers nor our babies lost before their time: They get no older.

Getting older is what we do. We age, and we remember, and if we’re wise we too show daily thanks for whatever pool of sunshine opens sudden around us.

The time: 5pm at weekend’s edge. The scene: a plane so crowded people’s elbows are deep in eachother’s belly-fat. The hero: a silver-haired man attempting at the end of the long business day to finally study his Wall Street Journal.  The action commenes when the four-year-old child seated directly behind him scootches down and down in his seat til his feet reach the man’s seat back.  Then, with his mommy out cold in the seat beside him, he bends his knees and KICKS, straightens both legs and PUSHES, holds them slightly flexed  and EXECUTES A SMART LITTLE TAP-DANCE, causing the man’s body to jerk and jump and lurch with every blow. The man says nothing, either to the child, or the child’s mother or to the flight attendant. He doesn’t even cast a baleful glance at the people around him who see what is happening. Instead, for the whole of this weary day’s-end flight, just as millions of anxious investors have been doing for nearly a year now, he winces slightly with every blow, hangs on tight and goes for the ride.

Here’s some karma for ya; just when you get through making fun of your local paper’s Police Blotter you end up ON it.

I’d been amusing myself with what passes for criminality here in Tinytown. (Somebody winged a cigarette butt out his car window, somebody got pinched for texting behind the wheel, somebody broke into at childcare center, played on the ride-on toys and ate all the ice cream etc.) but now I’LL be the in the paper too, shame of shames, just because I got locked in the bathroom of my favorite coffee shop.

I knocked faintly on the thick steel door once I realized it really wouldn’t open. “Yo! Lady stuck in the can!” shouted the man at the table closest to the unisex bathroom. The manager arrived on the door’s opposite side. Then the police.  “Couldn’t we just cut through the sheet-rock?” I heard somebody say.

By the time the fire trucks arrived I was super-hungry and wondering if they could maybe slide a really flat cookie or two under the big heavy door.

Also, my feet hurt but the only seat was the prison-cell of a toilet.

Meanwhile the consulting went on outside. “Ma’am! Are you all right ma’am?” the manager kept asking, maybe because I was preserving a dignified silence.

Also because I was also busy trying to text the family member who might be likeliest to see a text.

Also because I was trying to figure out if you could actually eat tampons.

But after an unknown interval they finally succeeded in busting me out.“The cops wanted to shoot the lock but we wouldn’t let them!” the firefighters crowed.

They were tickled  that they’d been the ones to solve the problem.

The manager was tickled that they hadn’t had to introduce her walls to the Jaws of Life.

But the most tickled people of all  I think were my own family members, some of whom confessed to guffawing loudly on hearing of my predicament that it caused heads to turn all over the office – and what can I say to that but GLAD TO BE SO ENTERTAINING!

The Life is the Light

I was at the beauty parlor a few months ago, and Randy was washing my hair before cutting it. As I lay back in the chair passive, inert, feeling his fingers work­ing in my scalp, a question came into my mind:

“Have you ever done a dead person’s hair?” I asked. “Sure,” he answered.

“And was it scary?”“Not really,” came his reply. “In a way it’s easy. You just do the front, of course.”

We were silent then. As he worked, I thought about my own little skull and how the day would come when it would lie all quiet beneath that Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone that Emily Dickinson refers to in one of her poems.

“Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. This was not, I knew, standard beauty parlor gab. But Randy is not your standard person.

“I don’t know about the body,” he said. “But the Bible says the dead are a great crowd of witnesses.”

“Where are they though?” I asked, a question I have thought about every day of my adult life.

He took a breath.

“What I think,” he said, “is that it’s like theater here, and we’re on the stage and the dead are in the audience. They can see us but we can’t see them. You know how that is on a stage? We can’t see them because of a bright light in between…”

“And they’re watching us?” I interrupted, “and think­ing, ‘such a fevered dream, this living of theirs. Such tiny strivings’? Do they look at us and think, of our actions, ‘how paltry and insignificant?’”

“Oh, not at all,” said Randy emphatically. “They’re watching us because our actions are significant. We’re the ones now. It matters very much what we do.”

I’ve thought about this conversation many times since we had it back in June.

A few people are as clear as Randy is as to our place in the grand scheme of things. Many more aren’t.

A young person said to me the other day, “You’re born and then you die. And the whole time you’re here you don’t have a clue as to what it’s all about.”

I look around myself, to see what it’s about:

A little cat hops quick as an eighth-note to the kitchen window sill, arranges herself in a pool of sun that shines on the white stone slab of counter. I see the bright China blue of a fruit bowl next to her, the dazzling large-pored orbs of orange within it, her soft pelt electric with life, as she smoothes it with a wedge of pink tongue.

A cellist rises from her chair in the symphony orches­tra and sits in front, to perform an extended solo. Seated again, she takes the instrument between her legs. As she draws the bow over its strings, and the deep rich tones of the cello roll out over the audience, her throat constricts, as if with great emotion. Her nostrils flare. She keeps her eyes closed as if against the insupportable beauty of the music. When for a brief moment in the piece she opens them, she does not see the audience.

A young man, full of life and high spirits, goes on a youth retreat the first September weekend of his Senior year. Boarding the bus to return home at week’s end, he collapses and dies within minutes of what the autopsy will later show to be a cardiac infection. Another young man, unknown to him before that week away, speaks at his memorial service. He has worked with the sick at a nursing home, he says; he knows this is no fainting spell. He holds the dying boy, in the few seconds remaining. “God loves you, Jermaine,” he tells him. “I love you too.”

If the dead are all around us; if they are watching, as Randy believes, they may say, “See how they shone, at their moment in the light: the little cat; the cellist; the boy who left life early, and the one who helped him to leave it.”

Mother Theresa cradles yet another sickly infant brought in from a dumpster on the streets of Calcutta. She presents him like a bouquet of flowers to the visiting British journalist.

“See!” she says with shining eyes, “There is Life in the child!”

The life is the light. And to all those who feel the light—in them and upon them—this world is shot through with glory.

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)

I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” – to which I say ‘So what?’

Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there’s a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.

It’s what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.

These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes ’til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I’m writing to you.

To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.

Signed,

The Cheeseball as she looked last month.

(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. “I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am.” Today it’s the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn’t comin’ back at the edges too! (that’s what’s known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)