Would You Like Some Advice With That?

Shopkeepers are wonderful. They sell us soap and batteries, bag it all up with a smile, and then proceed to tell us how to run our lives.

Or maybe that only happens to me.

As a single person, I’m used to getting advice from family and friends, suggestions that I take this class or buy that dress, all in the interests of netting a man. They seem to feel I’ve made a blunder by not getting married, and it’s their duty to help me straighten it out.

But twice now, that well-meaning prying has spilled over into shopkeepers. Once, at a produce store, the man at the checkout stand was weighing my one yam, my one crookneck squash, and my single serving of green beans. He shook his head, looked me in the eye and said, “You need to get married.” Another time, while bagging my items on a hot day, a vendor at the farmer's market asked me if I was heading out to the lake that afternoon. No, I said. She asked if I was married or had kids. No, I said. “Well,” she cheerfully offered, “you might as well go to the lake. It's not like you've got anything else to do.”

Now, I realize these shopkeepers were just trying to be neighborly. But it made me realize that single people are one of our culture’s last remaining punching bags: poor schlumps who have so obviously erred that they deserve—indeed, need—unsolicited advice. There’s probably some patriarchal, Judeo-Christian mumbo-jumbo going on here, but I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to go home and enjoy…the sound of no one talking. The wild taste of a single yam.

WWJFD (What Would Jessica Fletcher Do?)

My grandmother was crazy about Murder, She Wrote. I used to think that was very grandma-ish of her; it made sense that she’d like Jessica Fletcher, a plucky detective who was roughly her age. And a bonus was that she could follow the plotline without having to see the TV screen—my grandmother was legally blind. So, in my mind, Murder, She Wrote joined The Lawrence Welk Show and Gunsmoke as another TV dinosaur that only my grandma could love.

But one day about ten years ago—probably when I was sick, because that’s when I watch reruns from the ’80s—I happened upon an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I’d never really watched it before, but a guest star caught my eye, some comforting face from my childhood like Ben Murphy or Shirley Jones. The plot was a tidy puzzle, with clues scattered like treasures at a mildly intriguing garage sale. It was fun and soothing in a perverse, murder-y sort of way. I watched another. And another.

Before long, I was a full-on fan—an easy thing to be because that show, a darling of syndication, was on freakin’ all the time. But I didn’t go around telling people I watched it; my friends were all coked up on their Sex and the City and NYPD Blue. But most nights found me parked in front of the TV at 7:00 with a plate of burrito on my lap, tuning in to see what tangle Jessica would think her way out of this time.

Eventually I began to think of Murder, She Wrote as a self-contained universe with its own peculiar laws of physics. There, as sure as gravity, the loudmouthed bully always got whacked, the young hunk was accused but always found innocent, and the victim died tidily in the parlor, with a dribble of fake blood on a dress shirt.

But the real attraction became Jessica herself. She handled every twist and turn—every sexist police detective, every ill-mannered eyewitness—with grace, kindness, and aplomb. In a word, she was polite. And as the bodies fell around her and the widows grieved and the families schemed to get the money, her politeness was an anchor that everyone clung to—even me, balancing beans and rice on a fork and thinking about my own exasperating co-workers and family members. The lesson here seemed to be, Politeness may not cure everything, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

I still think of Jessica whenever someone’s rude to me, or when a friend needs a pep talk. I know that the reason she’s wise is because a roomful of writers made her up, but that’s nothing new. In its own way, Murder, She Wrote is like Aesop’s fables, or Greek mythology, or, one might argue, the Bible. They’re all just stories about how we (humans, gods, tortoises) should treat each other. And if the lesson is taught against a background of murder and mayhem, that’s nothing new, either. We humans have always taken the good with the bad, the sweet with the bloody. Such is literature. Such is life.

Poem: The Pasture on Sackett Road

If I chose to sit, I’d find

a bit of bare grass among

mines of manure flaking beige

under the sun, nowhere

to lean, the wire fence rusted

and slack, anything rigid

forbidden: no pails or rakes,

or let alone chairs. Horses

have a gift for entanglement.

At thirteen, my jeans

were filthy from hours

cross-legged on the ground,

passive in a land

of larger forces, fleck

of blue in a brown eye,

quake of flesh,

hocks and gaskins flexed

in everyday elegance,

a sweltering land

of sweet and grass

and the endless perambulations

of a dozen wise horses,

their tails the flags

of our small nation.

(appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, 2004)

List: Suggested Names for Future SyFy Channel Disaster Movies

Meteor Smoosh

Super Duper Nova

Asteroid vs. Serial Killer

The Moon Is Falling Apart!

Does It Seem Windy?

Lava Pop

Cloud!

Sunspotstorm

9.1: A Big One

Crikey, It's Hot

Poem: Reading Arabic

I

This week we read the words aloud,

their meaning less important

than the work of glottal stops

and vagaries of breath and tongue.

Our teacher translates gently:

Bahyd, eggs. Jhutheth, corpses.

Bass, enough. Nine-to-five words.

II

If you stare at a letter–say, yaa’–

long enough, it winds away

from sound and word, curls

into a quiet shape:

the shell of a snail, or the spin

of creekwater as it winds down

into the pipe beneath the street.

III

Bowls of letters swell and taper,

chambers fill, half-fill with air.

Body-shaped words fall prone

in sleep, or sit with a cup of tea

on a bench in the marketplace,

pressed in quiet gossip

among a row of ample women.

(appeared in Faultline, 2001)

DVD Review: Lost in Austen

Over the years, I’ve become a reluctant fan of Pride and Prejudice in all its incarnations. I say “reluctant” because, on the surface, it’s a fluffy romance, the prototype of a jillion stories of star-crossed-lovers. (But oh, underneath—such depth, wit, and barbed social commentary.) So I was surprised to find that I’d missed this four-part BBC miniseries when it aired in 2008. But that’s what Netflix is for.

Lost in Austen’s premise is simple: Hip urbanite Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) finds that she’s mysteriously swapped places with Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, via a little door in her shower. In an echo of Peggy Sue Got Married, Amanda can’t quite believe that she’s been transported to the early 19th century, but she can’t get back and has to muddle through the next few weeks in the strangely familiar setting of the novel she knows so well. (Elizabeth, meanwhile, is marooned in 21st-century London.)

Stranded in the Bennets’ house, Amanda finds that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is just getting underway: New neighbor Mr. Bingley pays his first visit and soon introduces his brooding friend, Mr. Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Amanda, plopped down in Georgian England with her pageboy haircut, leather jacket, and lip gloss, claims that she’s “a friend of Elizabeth’s from Hammersmith,” which the family seems to think is explanation enough.

Amanda looks on in wonder as her favorite novel unfolds, but there’s a problem: Elizabeth isn’t there to meet Mr. Darcy at the first fateful ball. And that flaw in the plot sets other flaws in motion: Bingley falls in love with Amanda, not Jane; Jane, not Charlotte, is wooed by the creepy Mr. Collins; Charlotte threatens to chuck it all and move to Africa; and Darcy has about as much charm as an ingrown toenail. Amanda tries and tries to get the plot back on track, but her schemes spin off more chaotic results. Before long, it’s a mess—not at all what Jane Austen wanted, as Amanda keeps thinking. And how will she ever get Elizabeth back to the 19th century, where she can marry Darcy and complete the story?

The best part about Lost in Austen is that it transcends the parody genre, although it’s funny throughout. At some point, you (and Amanda) have to just throw out the plot of Pride and Prejudice; this story has become a different animal, and old characters begin taking on new dimensions: There’s much more to Mr. Wickham than meets the eye, Mrs. Bennet (Alex Kingston) displays a backbone she never had in the book, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh cheats at cards. Even modern Amanda, who seems made out of snark, shows another side when the question becomes her own destiny and happiness. In the end, she has to write her own novel—as we all do, one way or another.

List: Plausible but Untrue Explanations for Why I Named My Cat “Iniki”

Named for a Finnish hockey star I once slept with, except I was really drunk, so it might have been that guy from Dallas.

Lakota Sioux for “able to locate and step on lymph nodes.”

Named for the Pacific island on which I did all the brave humanitarian work depicted in the Lifetime movie about me, from which I made diddly—well, four thousand dollars.

Named after my Uncle/Aunt Iniki, who was much more cool after the surgery.

Named for Thor Heyersen’s boat.

It’s almost “Bikini” spelled backwards, except that “Inikib” would have sounded weird, and just calling her “Bikini” would have brought up Barbie connotations. All a reminder of my half-assed “environmentalist” phase.

Can’t spell “Inky.”