Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

Mimou’s best friend both in elementary school and in junior high was her classmate Marina. Marina’s mother was a teacher in the elementary school, a deeply loved and revered woman among the student body, with endless nerves and a soft, almost girly voice, in somewhat stark contrast to her handsome, tall appearance, and her short, if somewhat unruly, graying hair. Mrs. Underwood was every student’s first choice when having to deal with tardiness or lost notebooks or running around hatless, and it was this universal devotion and respect for the teacher that made everyone get off Marina’s case about the fact that she was a teacher’s kid. It was a small elementary school with less than a hundred students combined in classes one through six, a student body consisting of rural, acquiescent children soft as clay, who abided by rules, and the most intense level of insubordinate behavior was someone yelling “Oh, crap!” once, outside, with no teachers around. The headmaster, who smelled of ...

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If I was your girlfriend, would you tell me all your most appalling secrets as we lie side by side in your single bed with the golden bed posts like Cinderella’s? We both wear pajamas that are becoming too small for our developing bodies, and adore your James Dean poster in the most heated and dedicated adoration only prepubescent girls can. We trade postcards of our favorite singers and actors, bought from the little punk shop in town, the only one there is to be found, and it is our mecca. You buy your first leather studded bracelet there, but I am too afraid my parents wouldn’t let me wear one, so I chicken out. If I was your girlfriend, would you pour us Coca-Cola in the yellow mugs in the middle of the night, as we tiptoe our way into the kitchen, stifling our giggles? One of the glasses from the cupboard falls on the floor, and we laugh at this, laugh at nothing, as we try to tidy the shards away with minimum commotion. If I was your girlfriend, would you come running wi...

Mrs. Dalloway is sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the idea to come. When it doesn’t come, she unloads the washing machine. Clarissa is drawing daffodils and daisies and some tulips, they are the easiest to draw after daisies, and roses, because mother loves yellow roses. Every Friday father brings mother a bouquet from the town where he works, and mother puts the roses in the fancy crystal vase Clarissa isn’t allowed to touch, and the vase is placed on the coffee table in the living room. Clarissa’s crayon is dull now, and it really isn’t the right shade, and suddenly she notices that there is too much yellow now, the daffodils AND the roses? The roses don’t come out pretty, Clarissa isn’t very good at drawing, but she will ask mother to write the names of the flowers next to the pictures, so it’s okay. When the dentist is done, and Clarissa can hop off the horrible chair, she is so excited and crazy with the relief of the check-up being over with she has absolutely n...

When I was pretending to be asleep this morning, I was pretending because I like to feel how you look at me while you are looking for your glasses. You always look for them first in the bedroom, and every time they are to be found on top of the dresser, in the hall. I washed my new tee-shirts from the thrift shop we went to while we were arguing, and found one of your black socks among the all-white batch when it was done. I should, by now, be wiser about the washing machine, and check it every time after I know you have used it, but I am not. The shirts look wonderful. No accidental dyeing. So I forgive you. You are home now, taking a shower after work, and I tell you my head hurts from staring at the computer screen all day. What I want to tell you is that I am sorry, and that I know it was my fault, many times it is my fault. What I do tell you when you hold me, is that I had a dream where I lost you, but I do not tell you I woke up crying. When you are making your brea...

”Men are total assholes!” I declared the other day, arriving characteristically early, in my usual epic grandeur, at work. My man and I aren’t exactly what one would describe as a docile couple. When all hell breaks loose, it really does break loose, and while it, fortunately, breaks loose a little less these days than, say, a year ago, the times it does, my entire building becomes aware of the fighting. When we moved to our current home, the first thing we noticed when carrying the endless book boxes to the apartment was the sounds of a couple arguing in the next door apartment. Instead of becoming irritated over hearing the sounds of distress, I was totally relieved. Finally a building where we would not be the only ones going at it loudly!  “I’ve been cleaning house this whole week, something every day so that after today I could just concentrate on my writing on my days off”, I began while getting a cup from the counter and pouring myself some coffee from the alrea...

While the point of the Courtney Barnett song quoted above isn’t what I’m writing about, the line is, in my opinion, appropriate here, too, and not only because it is a terrific line, and the one I always remember first when thinking about Pedestrian at Best, but also because I think it embodies something else vital, too, about these times of ours, other than being an accurate depiction of a borderline personality disorder. I thought I had come to terms with what I do for a living by the time I was thirty, but at times I still experience those bad vibes of inferiority and being poor that seem to have magically eluded the rest of my age group. Everyone else seems to have it down. Life. They seem ignorant to the problems I tackle with. The terror of making or never making it in the real world. The Breakfast Club no longer meaning a thing for others. Being seen as a failure. Doing something financially worthless, but otherwise beyond measure. Turning forty and realizing certain things...