(Towanda!) The Long March

The kind of starting point of the spring that really isn’t a starting point at all, but an unfortunate middleman between the heart of winter proper, and actual spring, when the birds begin their festivities, the night is once more white as cotton, and the temperature no longer takes those killing plunges below zero, scaring the buds and sprouts from surfacing from underneath their protective coats.

A wise woman says March is the month of instability; the month of indecision, or faux-resolve, of getting that really weird haircut, or getting one’s period mid-cycle, or getting just an unnamed itch to be scratched, be it crazy sexual desire, a terrible case of the munchies, or suddenly developing a pressing need to go jogging every morning in the dirt, puddles and last year’s garbage.

People always get the most bizarre, extraordinary ideas in March, the month of both the deepest despair and the purest absurdity as well as downright kookiness. If one is born in the month of March, one is destined for a troublesome disposition, and the mother will have the town’s commiserations for having to raise the hellion that is you. One can pretty much count on all the doors in the house slamming, snowmen collapsing in the yards on their own accord, and utensils falling out of their drawers with no apparent reason, while that long month is on-going. March, that mysterious stranger, creates the most gorgeous little girls, but also the most headstrong, the most pig-headed, the moodiest and the most whimsical.

Alexandra just bought herself a set of new drapes for the bedroom, and a bunch of rhinestone earpieces, the extravagant, the-Bold-and-the-Beautiful -kind you clip on, to soothe herself from her March Anguish. She knows it is detestable behavior, to be a spendthrift like this, but she ate so much licorice after lunch she needs to have a little something to take the edge off messing up her diet again.

Alexandra isn’t a March baby, she is a Leo, but her sister is one, and she has a friend who is Pisces, too. Alexandra has at times pondered on the very real fact that most of the people in her life, the people she relates to the most, who get her, who become important to her, were born in the summer months. The long, dark winter months go by without a single circle, or one at the most, around a date to mark an important day. The funniest thing about horoscope is that it gives you all correct the answers while remaining at the same time completely vague, murky, indefinite, ambiguous, laughable and so obviously bogus.

The licorice was soft and fragrant, and not even an impulse purchase by the counter, but stacked almost hidden in the candy section, and her resolve is so poor now, she and her husband have both gained some weight during the winter, and Alexandra didn’t notice how much, before March came, and the house was suddenly bathed in the suspiciously radiant sunshine that seemed to be mocking her ineffective dusting abilities and need for larger and larger waistlines. She went in to buy some baking soda for cleaning house, and Himalayan rose salt for her pasta, and vanilla sugar for her pancakes, and because it is a store that specializes in basic ingredients, she buys a kilo of everything, amusing herself, as she steps out of the establishment, with the notion of having to explain to the police her tightly packed, blank plastic bags containing a kilo each inside her tote bag, then depresses herself concluding that baking soda is probably what they would think was in it, a middle aged woman like her, what in the world else could it possibly be, besides baking soda?

Towanda, Alexandra thinks heartily and not without some resolve and anger, thinking about Kathy Bates and Mary Stuart Masterson in Fried Green Tomatoes.

Her bra is uncomfortably tight, and she keeps hearing mother’s advice every time she hooks it on, how if you stretch your arms back and another set of breasts appear above the bra cups, you’ve got yourself a size regrettably too small. She is developing those horrible second breasts now, as she stretches hard to get a good look at her fat boobs, after fixing her Primadonna bra on like it is supposed to be put on, fingering both sides to get a feel of where to attach and clasping it from behind, not twirling it around to the front to hook it so that she can see it. The fabric loses its elasticity faster and it is a schoolgirl thing to do, no woman in her family ever hooked her bra from the front, it is considered the mother of bad clothing form, and every time Alexandra sees someone do the frontal hooking and the idiotic rotating, she feels a need to start preaching, but she is able to contain herself, because she is a reasonable adult. (But sometimes she thinks she is going to be one of those old people who starts screaming at the other customers in the fitting room, asking why in the lord’s name they are violating their beautiful brassieres like that, weren’t they taught anything by their mothers as young girls, the scene resulting in security having to carry her out, and her being sent, finally, to an old folks’ home, where she has to first put on her undershirt, before the nude-colored old ladies’ wireless bra, as penance for being so vain and buying only expensive, couture bras her whole life, and she will be miserable and hate her undershirt and bra combo with all the fire that is left in her.)

A to-do list for March, as Alexandra has written down in her to-do notebook, includes changing the soil in her house plants. She has two plants. She used to have three, but the ivy, the one she loved the most, developed a bad case of Tetranychus urticae infestation, like all her ivies before that, and after trying to kill the spider mites in a variety of ways, including creating a soft pine soap solution and spraying it freely on the leaves, and giving the plant controlled “rain showers” under the faucet, shielding the pot carefully from the water by covering it with a plastic bag so that the entire plant wouldn’t drown in the process, and otherwise tending to the needs of the plant exactly per the seller’s advice, she ended up tossing it, and good riddance, too. She will never again throw her money out that particular window. Now she only buys bras and drapes. No spiders there, so far. 

The plant seller is such a lovely old man, though, that she doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she managed to kill the ivy, even with all his pre-emptive advice, and now she just doesn’t go that flower shop anymore, hoping he will forget all about her and treat her as a new customer, when she in time returns to him. It wasn’t, after all, his fault the plant had parasites. The ivy is a tricky business to grow indoors, and not suitable for novices. With her third ivy in the thrash, this is something Alexandra knows.

March is the month when the sunny days finally begin outnumbering the rainy downpours. Because of the sun, it is also the month of cleaning house. That tiresome old goat wants nothing more than to lead helpless housewives head first into the hubbub of mopping the floors and starting to consider washing the windows and taking out all the rugs. Alexandra mops and considers and takes out the rugs with the rest, all the while self-conscious about her enormous rear end as she bends down to water her rags or to change the water or to pick up the vacuum cleaner. She feels she is vacuuming the house constantly now, with her husband bringing inside the same amount of pebbles and dirt in his shoes as she hurries outside. He did, however, tell Alexandra that he loved her plump ass and round belly, that they are particularly lovely now that she is a little fuller in those departments, bless his silly little heart. But enough is enough. Starting Monday, no more treats. That includes ice cream, chocolate, and wine.

In search of her lost resolve, Alexandra eyes sadly the remaining few in her licorice box, thinking how nobody told her this was what it would be like for her, and every other woman on the planet, for the rest of her life, since turning thirty-five all those years ago. Either go thin and hungry, or indulge and feel awful looking in the mirror. Sometimes she feels she can go hungry for ages, and still not come out as thin as she would like. So basically, you are screwed, either way.

She thinks about the widower, who always shops for the same sugared crispbread at the market, a generic brand, and, when they bump into each other on one of the aisles, he tells her and her husband that after the death of his wife, he sits by the window at night, eating slices of the crispbread with a glass of milk. The widower has tears in his eyes when he tells them this story, and in the car Alexandra cries a little, too, because he was once the headmaster in her elementary school, a respected and feared man, and the woman who was his wife for forty-odd years was her English teacher, and something about him sitting alone in his kitchen, eating those sad dry-goods night after night, and stopping by the detergents to share with them the naked, terrible evidence of his immense sorrow makes her heart ache.

She takes her new drapes outside to air them out from the city smells. She sees a message from her husband, but waits until she is finished with the details with the drapes to answer. She thinks about calling Sukie, as she sees from her posts that she is in town, but hesitates. It is already afternoon, almost early evening, and while the treacherous sun of the mock-spring is still shining, crystallizing the snow, making it pretty for a second more before the bloodshed of the melting process begins in April, it is the sunshine of almost horizontal lateness: only perhaps an hour or so of daylight left. She wants to meet people in the morning, if she can, because that is when she is at her most energetic, patient, and sensitive. Everything starts to drag, come evening, and Alexandra’s thought processes go through a cut-and-paste period, she becomes fluxed and kind of flaxen, no longer bright colors but marred, fragmented somehow, she isn’t keen anymore, but embarrassed and absent-minded.

Alexandra dutifully polishes and brushes her shoes in March, it has to be done repeatedly now, because of all the dirt outside, with the snow banks receding from the sidewalks, leaving behind bald spots of gray asphalt, speckled with grit from the multiple sandings in the wintertime. She detests white water lines in people’s shoes, and is abhorred every time she sees one developed on the leather skin of one of her own shoes, in spite of all her efforts. Like with the bra hooks, it is with a strange sense of pride that Alexandra deals with things like these.

Alexandra becomes unraveled so easily in the afternoons, but manages to stay more tightly wound in the mornings, so that the immeasurable burden of the March days is at least partly manageable, her round belly veiled beneath layers of protective clothing, her, according to her sweet husband, juicy butt cheeks bright red from the cold weather; the indisputable beauty of the sun has lured her outside, but the wind is cold, and her exposed parts as well as those not so gravely hidden underneath lots of wool and insulated pants and leg-warmers get rosy and blushed. That’s March for you. The promise of a darling companion, yet the delivery a cold-hearted smack on the cheek, and all of it wrapped in the guise of a wild, horny temptress out of control, waiting to be taken.