City Excursions

I am a prisoner in a scentless world. Around me, others flaunt their enjoyment. Shovelling snow off of their lawns, the brown earth peeking through, the matted grass flattened under the weight of winter. They smell, I imagine, the long-dormant earth, the wonderful smell of decay that is the promise of new life. I see them, my neighbours, sipping their morning coffee on their porches. The warm aroma. But me? All I see is hard work and frequent urination. I cannot enjoy these spring labors; I cannot enjoy the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

Is life in the suburbs really that bad, you ask?

It is when you have a sinus infection.

Indeed, this post is at least partially about one of the advantages of the suburbs: fresh air. Yes, having a head-cold in the suburbs is absolutely better than having one in the city. I know, because I’ve been to the city a lot this week, and the smell of exhaust in the metro is something that even the fortress of mucus that has become my cranial cavity cannot withstand. What I can’t smell, I can feel.

I’ve also been looking at apartments. In the city. (Yes, this blog is of limited tenure.) And what has struck me is how used to my house in the suburbs I have become. In the city, smokers are slotted on top of one another, creating corridors of second hand smoke. The apartments themselves: expensive, small, black mold growing on the ceilings of the bathrooms, walls yellowed from years of chain-smoking. Outside the buildings, dog poop lining the sidewalks half thawed, tendrils of swill melting off them in patterns of lace. Not being able to smell it, I am still able to see it. In this respect, the head-cold is actually a defense.

What this means, I think, is the suburbs have changed me. I’m used to having nice green things around me, and not too many people. It’s not that the suburbanite is more virtuous, it’s that he’s less populous. And as such, his bad habits are less obvious.

The city: overcrowding, homelessness, stripper bars, corruption and pot holes. But also, yoga studios, people, music, art.

The suburbs: cliques, consumerism, over-consumption and isolation. But also, gardening, family, open space and sky, fresh air.

The lesson: the prison is not the suburbs; the prison is my head. Quite literally, but also in a deeper sense. 

Mr Bald Balls

      I’d had a slew of online dates. Not bad exactly but not good either. And certainly, if you’re a single mom this is definitely the question, not good if you’ve had to pay a babysitter or beg a friend to watch your child for the night. So after numerous bad “online” dates in which I mostly sipped a beer and listened to how crazy some woman before me was, I thought there was something promising when a local friend of mine introduced me to a bonafide bachelor (okay, recently divorced but close enough). I’d been mostly dating guys in the city, thinking city guys were a better bet. Am I right? Well read on, and let’s see.

For the sake of anonymity let’s call this guy B, which is appropriate because it is a shortened version of his moniker (Mr. Bald Balls) from my former post, and because it’s probably how this guy has rated all his life: a safe pass, but nothing that is going to get you into Harvard. I’d met him once before, but the meeting had been brief. There was something about him that I couldn’t quite place; he looked good—clean, tall, good-shape, but while there was nothing to really repel me, there was nothing to really attract me. He reminded me of an undercover cop or a super model or maybe even a serial killer. B was a Blank. Still, I was hopeful. It was possible that this guy would be someone I could date. A real suburbanite, and perhaps the first person who had ever come to my house to pick me up for a date.  When he leaned in to kiss my cheek (this is Montreal, you know, and people still do that), I got a whiff of his cologne and felt the brush of a perfectly smooth cheek. Scent is important. It's what makes us real animals. This guy smelled like The Bay. 

You can learn a lot about a guy from the way he chooses to spend his Saturday off. For me, Saturdays are sacred. Sunday is usually Church, Friday is tired movie night, so Saturday is the day, you know like that De La Sol song. B didn't spend his Saturday roller skating, or even ice skating. B spent his Saturday shopping for mattresses. That’s where our conversation quickly landed us, as we sat across the table from each other at Steak Frites, a restaurant that he chose, but which I, oddly enough, consented to. I had never been to this restaurant before, and I had never been on a date with someone this… boring?... but that’s not really quite the right word. I felt like he was hiding from me... I felt like there might actually be a real person underneath the surface.

But wait a second here, how is it that a person spends all of Saturday shopping for a mattress? Well, by going to a lot of stores, lying on a lot of mattresses, and then, not buying one.

           Me:  “You didn’t even buy one?”

           Him:“I got ripped off on my last mattress. I’m trying to be more careful.”

He told me that his old mattress was only five years old and had been uncomfortable for the past year.

            “You mean, the springs are broken.”

            “No. It’s just I can’t sleep. I wake up and think it’s the mattress.”

            “When did your wife leave?”

            “A year ago.”

            “Do you think that might be why you can’t sleep?”

            “Why would that matter? The matress wasn’t moved. She moved out.”

            “That’s not what I meant.”

            “I think I must have been ripped off. That’s why I’m being more careful about this new mattress.”

            I drank at least half a bottle of wine at the restaurant, which was easy to do because he did a lot of talking. What did he talk about? His work (assembling airplanes). It was like listening to a IKEA manual. Half a bottle is actually a lot for me these days, and I was feeling quite tipsy, so when B offered to take me to his place I said yes. He must have had at least as much to drin k but said he was okay to drive, so we got in his car and drove out and out and out and out. We were already in the suburbs but now we were really driving out, and I started to think about whether I was going to end up in this guy’s freezer or a ditch somewhere off the highway 40. It wasn’t that bad, but almost. I ended up in a prefabricated house in the middle of nowhere. All the houses on his street looked exactly like his house. I almost expected to smell cow shit, but it’s winter, so of coruse I didn’t. What I did smell, or actually, what I heard, was the sound of a Glade dispenser, a machine that emits a disgusting chemical scent into the air on a timer. I mean, WTF! Totally something a psychopathic serial killer would have, right?

He gave me the tour: everything in its place, no mess. There was a TV on every floor of the house. The art on the walls? Purchased at Brault and Martineau to match the furniture. The man himself approached. It was the moment. I was either going to be kissed, murdered or arrested. He kissed me, but I felt nothing. It was like kissing Ken. There was nothing behind it. I doubted that he was attracted to me, so why was he kissing me? Were there cameras somewhere?

Of course, I had to see the mattress. I went with him up the stairs. There was a scale in his bedroom beside the bed.

“I used to be fat,” he said. He said this with his face downcast. I felt something in me stir.

  I lay on the bed. It was fine, comfortable.

“The mattress is fine,” I said. “I need to pee.”

I went to the bathroom, which had a jacuzzi. “Nice bathroom!” I hollered.

“My wife hated the bathroom,” he hollered back. 

I came back into the room and we made out some more, this time on the bed. I still felt nothing. I felt nothing coming off of him. He had no scent. I had this idea that I was kissing a glade dispenser. It felt like we were waltzing, like someone had taught us how to do it, and so we were doing it because it was what people did. Or it felt like we were assembling airplanes, but we were working on different parts of the aircraft. Then he took his shirt off. He had removed all his body hair. I could see the bumps where some of them had been cruelly ripped from their follicles. I told him to lie down on his stomach. 

“What?
“Roll over” I said. “Onto your stomach.”

“Why?” he asked. This clearly wasn’t part of the script.

“It’s a yoga thing. Trust me.”

And he did. He rolled onto his stomach with his pants on, and I took off my dress and tights and got on top of him, like a human blanket.

“That feels nice,” he said.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. I pressed my cheek against his back, between his shoulder blades. I let my weight rest on him. We stayed like that for about five minutes.

Then I got off of him. We didn’t kiss again. We got dressed, and he drove me home.

            “When can I see you again?” he asked.

            “Whenever you want,” I said. “Call me.” Of course he wouldn’t. We both knew that.

Mr. Bald Balls? you’re asking. Yeah, you know they were. Some things you don’t have to see to know.  

Happiness Is Overrated

The first entry should act as a sort of mission statement. A manifesto of the single mom in the suburbs, a person who is, for various structural and economic reasons and by pure happenstance, somewhere she would rather not be. Poe said that a good story should be read in one sitting. Then someone else said that a good story should be written in one sitting. I'm trying to do this, which is why I don't have time to look up who said this.

But this not really a short-story. It's more of an investigative tramping expedition... the intention here is to shed light and humor on a sometimes dullish but mostly wonderful existence...

The plan is to document my life in the suburbs in the spirit of making lemonade from life's lemons. And why, you ask, is life in the suburbs so horrible for a single mother? Surely, with divorce rates sky-rocketing and single-parent households increasingly the norm, a single mother shouldn't stay single for long. "Perhaps," you might say, "it is your own fault you are single and not the fault of the suburbs, and why not move to the city if you're so unhappy?"

"Perhaps," I would respond, "you are right. It may very well be my fault. I do plan on moving. But it is not actually accurate that single parents are increasing. Divorced ones are." I happen to be single. Being in a shared custody relationship is not the same as being single. In some ways, single is easier. I can move whenever I want, raise my daughter how I want. Bref, there is no negotiation. But a woman in a shared-custody relationship has one benefit that I do not have: the odd Friday night off. And let's face it, I'm not going to invite some guy to my house to meet my kid on a first date. So, I should add to my title-- sexless in the suburbs, or worse, sexless single mom in the suburbs. (If I add that, I might actually attract some fans.)

But let us get at this sex-problem a bit. Because really, I'm not so poor I couldn't hire a babysitter, and it's not like there aren't any men around. I see them, at the gym, blowing snow off their driveways. I've even been approached. They are mostly illiterate, lonely, materialistic and.... married. If they are not married, they are so recently divorced that they might as well be. If they are genuinely single, and still choose to live here, what the fuck is wrong with them? Well, check out the other three adjectives on the list.

I would finally respond that being unhappy makes far better blog-material than happiness. If I was happy, I would write a book about it. You would find it in the self-help section of your local bookstore. But the fact is, I don't want to be happy. I want to be unhappy in interesting ways. I think this is our birthright. It is actually the secret to real happiness in the West (where most unhappiness is an attitude problem anyway). My desire to be unhappy in interesting ways is precisely what makes me unhappy in the suburbs where everyone is living The Dream. Logic dictates that someone who is "living The Dream" is asleep.

But I can't leave this life behind without first documenting it, because it is, in its own way, worth something.

So let us interrogate this situation, shall we? Let us embark on a journey of what life in the suburbs is really like for a single mother, and if the misery, monotony and (in)voluntary celibacy are not interesting and amusing. There are also moments, I might add, of real joy and beauty. I will include all of it. I promise I will try to be funny. And really, what could be more funny than dating? Especially online dating. I've been doing a bit of that recently, so let me give you an account of a real, bonafide single-mother-in-the-suburbs date. This guy, he's named X, and he's what I'd call a real S.O.C. (Suburbanite Of Choice)


My next post is titled-- "Mr. Bald Balls"-- stay tuned...