Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
The hunger for sensation collapses into craving. The call seems to rise up from somewhere inside my flesh. It is deafening. My mouth obsesses. Sweets, yes, and the feel of pastry on the skin of my tongue. Nothing satisfies but the hook is in and pulls me from my desk, my book, my deeper pleasures. Continue reading “Pleasure Bank”
Is there nobility in poverty? That’s probably a stretch. At a minimum there is resourcefulness, and that can look like creativity or innovation. Or something. Please indulge me. If I don’t get to live at leisure, at least I can feel virtuous.
The co-worker whose birthday unluckily follows mine has been subject to my noble projects since we started working together. She will enjoy the delight of yet another DIY disaster tomorrow.
In our office, we take turns celebrating birthdays by each taking responsibility for cake, card, and scheduling for the next person in line. The beautiful, polished team-mate whose January birthday I plan also had the poor luck to draw me as her secret Santa at the holiday exchange. She ended up with a home-made bookmark and a second hand cookbook in December. Now she gets to smile politely at whatever I manage to glom together in my kitchen tonight.
I just can’t abide dropping $20 on the designer cupcakes. How could I possibly justify that to myself given our increased payroll deduction and my impending (inshallah) mortgage payment? Even with the time store-bought pastries would save, I can’t bring myself to do it. I mean, a gal has to spend money on all sorts of things she can’t do herself, like root canals and oil changes (and perhaps she’ll get around to tackling the latter sooner or later), so there is no earthly reason to short the kid’s college fund on something so easy. Baking? Come on. Piece of. . .
Okay. Last year, Beautiful Team-Mate mentioned that she likes plain-Jane yellow cake with chocolate frosting. She is an easy-going Midwestern gal who likes just about everyone and whose smile makes the boys swoon, in no small part because she has no earthly idea of her effect on them. She would never ask for anything fancy, so yellow-with-chocolate she had last year.
So, today on my lunch break, I schlep it over to the supermarket and buy exactly one yellow cake mix (the one with Box Top for Education for Bug’s school, of course. Ten cents right there!) I don’t start on the project until nearly 9:00pm, given bath, bedtime reading, lunch-making, dishwashing, and generally lugging around the weight of the world. When I begin, I realize I have no concept how to proceed. I mean, I want to do something special, right? Something more than yellow-with-chocolate, because. . . Why? I don’t know. Because she’s nice and she deserves a little effort? Because this is my playtime? Because I can?
Because it’s just really fun to learn something new?
While the oven preheats, I poke around the kitchen. All these things I never notice appear in the nooks and crannies, items that go bad or go stale, that we forget we bought in a moment of inspiration. Unopened sour cream. A whole cabinet full of liquor. Powdered sugar, gelatins, puddings and extracts. Nuts, chips, candies and sugars. Oh! And already on the shelf? A yellow cake mix just sitting there. I could have saved $1.29!
I visit a website called Yummly and type in “sour cream cake mix kahlua.” A bunch of recipes pop up. This one for mocha cake is the one I follow. More or less. I mean, who knows why — no one in this house eats pudding or even likes it — but I happen to have a box of chocolate pudding on hand. Not vanilla. Also, coffee crystals seem like a good idea, and anyway, it just play. Glop, glop. An extra egg. Who knew you could just pour alcohol right into the batter? And what’s with the pudding? Crack, whip, scrape. The whole blorp of sour cream. A little extra sugar. A few more chocolate chips? I hope the small ones are little enough not to sink. Beat, fold, pour.
An hour later, the faint aroma of liqueur and scorched chocolate drifts into the upstairs bedrooms. The concoction comes out of the oven looking nothing like mama’s yellow birthday cake. It is crinkled and singed and lop-sided. There is a good chance it won’t make it out in one piece. It actually looks a little tubercular, all wrinkly taupe and sunk in its fluted tube.
On the stove waiting for morning is a double boiler at the ready. Poised nearby are chocolate squares, butter, powdered sugar, and the bottle of kahlua with its lid already loose. Mocha glaze may be a bit ambitious for 6:30 am, but the gal’s got to try to save this poor wretch. Where first aid and a transfusion fail, try chocolate. And a hit on the flask.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but a deadline is the ultimate inspiration. If disaster awaits on the other side of the bundt pan, there is always that extra Betty Crocker mix waiting patiently on the pantry shelf. It only takes about 30 minutes in a 9×13 sheet pan, and I can pick up a can of chocolate frosting at the supermarket on my lunch break. I think those go for about $1.49. Beautiful Team-Mate may have her simple, happy cake after all. Even then, I can say, “I made it with my own hands just for you.” Bug’s college fund is safe (for now). I even have an idea of how to use all that old rum and Bailey’s taking up precious space in my dining room.
Tomorrow at 3:00 in the conference room, a dozen of us will get our sugar kick one way or another. I can bask in the glow of my secret treasure, that proud nobility of knowing I swung it all — creativity, learning, play, and even, yes, cake — for the price of a loaf of bread.
A loaf of bread on sale.
For two years, the restrictions have been a willful suppression of pleasure. The diet was imposed by uncertainty. Not knowing how long this journey through the desert would be, not knowing how long the provisions would hold out, required strict limitations on expenditure. That control became so second-nature that it barely required thought. It did, however, require a denial of sensation and a refusal to acknowledge desire or even pleasure except in the dark moments.
Today, a small but noticeable shift occurred. I was able to forgo grabbing lunch out not because I wouldn’t let myself, but because I didn’t want it. Same went for parking that 3/4 mile from the metro and crossing the distance on foot. I was excited to walk and to save that $4.50.
For the first time, I know exactly where my spare change is going.
The condos and townhouses I checked out in the past couple days are within my price range (more or less) and at least one looked just about right for Bug and me. In Northern Virginia’s hot real estate market, simply finding places to see is no small chore. I have visited eight homes on the furthest outer reaches of my commute, and that’s all she wrote. Those are the only properties listed. Can you believe it? Only eight two bedroom properties under $220,000 whose condo fees are in the vicinity of manageable are for sale anywhere in two of the largest counties in the state. And only one of those is both affordable and not a roach motel.
It boggles the mind.
At some point, I have to stop letting my memory wander around the lovely four-bedroom cottage on Lake George that Tee, Bug and I inhabited rent-free a little over two years ago. Or the three-bedroom split-level sitting on the hill overlooking Four Mile Creek in the middle of Pike National Forest in Colorado, when our nearest neighbor was a half mile away and we also paid no rent. No, no use picking at the scabs. Camp was a magical, bizarre chapter in my life. It is the past. This is the here and now.
Here, now: the one condo that has captured my attention. I can afford it and still have a little money left to buy a couch sometime in the next five years.
The place is tiny. It sits underneath a larger townhouse in a crowded community. But it is cute and it backs up to a small playground. It has a fireplace and room for a table in the kitchen. A deck just big enough for a grill and two camp chairs. New kitchen appliances. A bedroom each for my boy and me.
I returned to the neighborhood tonight after work. The commute is tough, but it is not as bad as I had feared. Also, it sits on a bus line that feeds my metro stop. So far, so good.
I walked alone through its cul-de-sacs and back lots in the dark. I saw families inside their kitchens eating meals. A couple leaning close on the front steps. Halloween decorations. Harvest wreaths on glass doors. Mums along walkways. I saw a few folks walking dogs, and a few women, like me, strolling alone in the dark even without dogs. I heard only the faintest traffic hum even though rush hour was roaring along one of the busiest arteries in the region just a block and a half away. I saw people driving with care through the neighborhood. I saw tennis courts. A community room. A pool covered for winter within walking distance along back sidewalks.
I saw places Bug could ride his bike. I saw a patch of soil where I could plant my own mums.
I am not sold yet. I have not fallen in love, but that’s no surprise. My romantic capabilities have always been a bit stunted. In matters of the heart and, it appears, the estate, I tend to delay immersion until I have a good handle on depth and currents. I am learning to see the possibilities here, though, and to feel the swell of pride in knowing I could do this on my own.
When I met with the real estate agent, I had my questions printed in bullets and ready to fire. She answered them all, agreeing to send me copies of contract templates and a few other items so I can be ready to rock when it’s time to put an offer down. Places we are seeing are only on the market 4 days, 5, before they are under contract and gone gone gone. One property that was listed Friday was already under contract by this morning. We have to move. It’s exciting, especially for someone like me who wants to read everything and ask every question.
That means I sit on the metro and read. I curl up on the living room couch and read. I have worked my way through three books on first-time home buying, one for condos and townhomes in particular. I understand concepts that were indecipherable even a week ago. Earnest money. Title insurance. Inspection contingency. I am learning what to ask. I was on the phone again with my loan officer today asking for further clarification on how HOA dues and condo fees affect the pre-approval.
So much to define, to absorb, to sort. So much to learn!
I can see that if I do this. . . no, when I do this, my lifestyle is going to look quite different. But before that, first this: a single mom living on an university administrator’s salary can own a home! She is not helpless or stuck. She can provide for herself and her child while also building a life that is sustainable for the long haul. She even may even be able to replace the cabinets one day and pull up that rotting deck and build something sturdier.
That’s why it was so easy to bring my lunch and walk the mile to the metro. It didn’t require an ounce of self-restraint. The pleasure is not in the immediate quenching of a passing thirst. The pleasure is in walking steadily towards the mirage, and watching with shivering disbelief as it moves closer, grows larger, and resolves into clear relief.
Yes, it is an oasis after all. Yes. It is real.
The bed needed a new orientation. Mildew had flowered on the window panes. Stink bugs had built their incubators and mausoleums in the corners of the wells. All of that had to go. Vacuum and cloth, then clean linens, then the pillowcases with the dragonflies and tiny birds in butter yellow, in the green of ferns.
Now, the head of the bed is to the wall under the cascade of family photographs. Its foot is closer to the windows. The wintry morning light, low in the east, falls through the sheer curtains and rouses me to meet the day.
It is a fine thing to nestle into a heap of feathers and foam, to unfurl the tucked wings of a story. A whole sack of gold is nothing compared to a long moment’s gaze out at a hazy day. Up above, four sepia 8×10’s in their mismatched frames keep a gentle watch. Grandfather, grandmother, father, mother. Such smiles on those faces! And each of them, so young, so very bright.
Now, as before, we share a name.
For eighteen months, I kept them near my feet. Their gazes were unsettling. Their judgment, subtle. In another time and place, I would have stayed. They all did.
When the bed found its new direction, something else slid with a whisper into its proper alignment. From this place, their smiles are guileless. Patient. Even kind. I have stopped looking at them now that they linger above my tousled cocoon. Their presence is still palpable, but less worrying. They are in the place I don’t let my gaze linger: back, behind.
Here, just flesh, just bed. I settle the weight of my 38 years into the embrace of the day as it begins to stir. I feel the give and accept the invitation. My eyes drink in the quiet light, the quilt warming my skin, and the page as it breathes awake, opening in my lap.
Shannon E. Williams 