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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101199961 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 281 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Part One \ Backward
Phone Home
I call my mother almost every day from my position as a Communications and Account Services Representative at a software company that I have begun to refer to as "The Jerry Corporation" or "Jerry Corp," named so for its president, a man three years older and much shorter than I am. At twenty-eight, Jerry is the thumbnail-chewing, bird-boned leader of a handful of office workers, including me. It is difficult to respect him because he is often mean and wears light-green dress slacks. He attributes his fits of verbal cruelty to his superior intelligence and Irish ancestry, and I am the only one who challenges him on this because I am part Irish, and I don't have a family to support, or even a decent car, and I don't care if I get fired.
"You Minnesotans are so reticent, you take everything personally," Jerry said to me once.
"I don't think it's only a matter of geography," I said.
"Well then," he said, "If you think I'm being an asshole, Olson, why don't you go ahead and call me an asshole."
"You're being an asshole," I said.
"Okay," Jerry laughed nervously and put his hand on my back, patting me gently and leading me out of his office and back to my desk. "Okay," he said, "I think we have an understanding."
Because he is shorter than me and perhaps by some reflex, I patted him on the head. "Okay, Jerry," I said. "All right."
For many reasons, only one of them my insubordination, my continued employment surprises me. Though it shouldn't, since my father got me the job; his best friend is the CEO, and also Jerry's father-in-law, and even he thinks Jerry can be a jerk.
"Hi, Flo," I say, when my mother answers the phone.
"Well, what are you doing today?" she says.
"Not much," I say.
"They pay you for that?"
"Apparently they do."
"No, seriously," she says, "don't they have anything for you to do?"
"Not really," I say. "I'm supposed to be writing a brochure, but they haven't finished designing the product, and they don't know who they're going to sell it to when they do."
"Well, can you find something to do?" she says.
"I already went and got a Little Debbie snack cake. I've had three cups of coffee. Now I'm calling you," I say.
"Well, I can't think of anything for you to do," Flo says, laughing at her own joke. "Things have certainly changed," she says. "Your grandmother worked so hard. If there were no customers, she'd dust the shelves. She'd dust every bottle of lotion in that drugstore."
"Grandmother was obsessive compulsive," I say. "She wore her bra to bed."
"She was afraid her breasts would sag," my mother says. "Her sisters did the same thing."
"How would you know if your breasts were sagging if you never took your bra off?"
"Well, what can you do to keep yourself busy around there?" my mother asks. "Can you help someone else?"
"There's no new business."
"How does that company stay afloat, I wonder?" my mother says.
"There's stuff to do, it's just not in my area."
"Oh," says Flo. "Well, I better go. I've been tired all day."
"It's only ten thirty," I say.
"I have a lot to do before my city council meeting tonight. I'm going to want a nap." My mom is on the city council in the small Minnesota town where I grew up. It means that every Wednesday night she's on local cable, arguing with the mayor about how high the sign for the new Kentucky Fried Chicken should be, and badgering him about planting trees in the new pharmacy parking lot. It means she's learned a lot about solid waste management and landscaping around the Minnesota River to prevent flooding. And it means that everyone says hello to her in the grocery store.
I call Flo again before my lunch break. "Hey there, Flo," I say.
"What is it?" says my mother. "Did you look at the clock?"
I look at the clock. The Bold and the Beautiful is on.
"Sorry," I say.
"Uh huh," she says, and hangs up.
Because it is Wednesday, I go to the grocery store to assemble a lunch. It's sample day, and I compose a meal of: New, Thinnest Ever! Crust Pizza; a Tyson Chicken Patty balanced on a toothpick; pasta salad in a tiny plastic cup; kiwi and papaya slices rationed out by a smiling lady with orange hair and a white laboratory coat; and a miniature ice-cream cone. I pick up a twelve-pack of Diet-Rite raspberry soda to take home.
At the bank I deposit my check and sign up for the Treasure Days giveaway, an all-expenses-paid trip to Cancún. Second prize is a TV with a built-in VCR. I drink some complimentary apple cider and nibble on a cookie. With my deposit, I am given a key to the treasure chest in the middle of the lobby, which pops right open when I try it.
I win a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like cows, with big sad eyes and holes in the tops of their heads for the black and white specks of flavor to come out.
My Boyfriend
I have been dating the same person for three years now. I call him almost every day from the Jerry Corporation, too. He is often unemployed, and so when he's not asleep he can take calls.
We met on a street corner right after I'd graduated from college. I had my first apartment in Minneapolis and was working in a used bookstore and coffee shop, shelving battered paperbacks and struggling with the milk steamer. Mostly I had no idea what I was doing-my espresso drinks were always too watery, the steamed milk lukewarm-but I was good at making small talk. I was so good at making small talk with the customers, with my coworkers, with the people who worked in nearby shops, that eventually I got fired. Also, the boss was creepy. He mumbled a lot and had trouble looking us in the eye. His sad shuffle, coupled with his chain-smoking habit, made us believe he had a tremendous amount of pent-up energy. His hands often shook and I think he secretly wanted to sleep with all the female help.
My boyfriend was working at the Rollerblade shop down the street. For a while, we just exchanged meaningful glances on the street. He was hard not to notice, with his sculpted cheekbones and linen shorts that nicely cupped his firm little butt. He was hard not to notice, and I was eager to get laid. At twenty-two, I had never had a boyfriend and hadn't ever slept with anyone. In college I'd had a few flings with guys I knew, but mostly we were too drunk to figure out where to put anything, and the next day, in class, we'd pretend nothing had happened.
My boyfriend (I had already started calling him this before I ever met him; when I saw him on the street I'd say to my coworker, There goes my boyfriend) finally approached me one day when I was waiting at a stoplight, on my way up the street to get a sandwich. He was on lunch break, too, and sidled up next to me on the corner, just behind my right shoulder, and said, "Havin' fun?"
I always give people credit for trying in those kind of situations. "Not really," I said, watching the traffic go by.
This initial interaction would pretty much sum up our relationship for the next few years.
We went to lunch that day, and he told me stories about his childhood in Amsterdam, growing up on a houseboat, sharing one small room with his mother and sister. His father had long since left, and his mother had followed her ex to New York and then to Amsterdam, even though he was with someone new. She finally gave up when they all landed in Mexico; when they were south of the equator and in a tiny town where she couldn't speak the language, she returned to Minneapolis with her two kids. This was a mystery: Why would she follow someone who clearly didn't want to be with her? And it should have been some kind of signal to me, a red alert, "Distressed childhood! Take cover! Abandon ship!" But I was fascinated. I had never met anyone who had moved so much, who had such an eclectic background. I had grown up and lived in the same house, my entire life, except during college, but even then I could return to my home, my parents' home, on the weekends, in the summer.
"So, you're a rich doctor's kid from the suburbs?" my boyfriend-to-be said at our first lunch.
"Not really," I said. I explained that it was a small town, outside of the suburbs. That I had grown up with cornfields behind our house, and cows from the neighboring farm grazing in nearby fields. That I had spent most of my childhood just watching cows. That my dad was a general practitioner, and that I believed he sometimes took pies as payment, quilts and cartons of fruit. That he still made house calls and had lots of elderly patients who liked him because he listened to their stories.
My boyfriend told me that he was taking night classes at the university so that he could work during the day to put himself through school. His seeming self-sufficiency attracted me; I had grown up near the end of a dead-end street.
When I call my boyfriend around two thirty in the afternoon, he's just woken up. "What are you doing?" I ask him.
"Playing video games with Doug," he says, referring to one of his roommates. I imagine their gnarled bed-hair, that they are both in their boxers, wearing dirty sweatshirts.
My boyfriend is three years younger than I am. Still, it is hard for me, sometimes, to believe that I am dating someone who plays video games.
"Oh," I say. "I'll let you go."
He starts telling me about Foucault's Pendulum, how it's really hard, how it's really dense, but still, I should read it, have I ever read Eco? This is punctuated by video game noises.
"No, I haven't," I say.
"It's taking me forever to get through it," he says.
"I thought you had class today," I say.
"Ummm, no," he says. "No, I don't. I mean, I don't think I need to go. I got the lecture notes from someone else."
Because sometimes my boyfriend's voice simply irritates me, I get off the phone, preferring instead to stare at my cubicle walls.
When we first met, my boyfriend was working at a Rollerblade shop and at the Kinko's up the street. He was also taking classes, he told me, or was getting ready to take classes again-it was never quite clear. He had taken some time off and was dealing with the bureaucracy at the university, trying to get some financial aid. He was interested in political science and Spanish, and wanted someday to direct films.
"What do you guys talk about?" one of my friends asked me.
"Well," I said, since mostly we had sex, made dinner, watched movies and had sex, "collating. How paper jams. He seems to know a lot about copiers."
My boyfriend was still living with his mother at the time, his mother and his two younger brothers. I would meet them only once. He didn't seem to like being around them. His brothers, he said, were brats.
One of them, a senior in high school, got a sophomore pregnant and they were still deciding what to do. His younger brother, he said, had three rabbits, a guinea pig, four salamanders, and bad personal hygiene. And wasn't I allergic to most animals? His mother, he said, was usually too exhausted for company. She worked long shifts in the pay booth of a downtown Minneapolis parking ramp, a fact that would later seem odd, when we were both seeing my boyfriend, her son, off at the airport, because he was leaving for six months to go live with his father in Mexico. As we left the airport together, she couldn't remember where she'd left her car in the ramp. I would spend half an hour helping her find it.
My mother had always made a game out of remembering where we left the car. It was a game to see who could remember where we had parked, and it always ended in a tie. We all always remembered. My mom always made sure that before we went anywhere, we knew where we had been, and how to get back.
Evelynn
I grew up next to Evelynn, who got smashed regularly and then went out into her garage and smashed old jars meant for preserves. "Goddammit, Ray!" Smash! on the cement floor. Smash! Smash! "Goddammit!" Shards of glass underneath the lawn mower, the snow blower, the trash cans. Back then I couldn't understand why a woman would be so angry.
It was her signal to Ray, my mother says now, that he should come home.
Ray was her husband, and he spent his days with married women, fixing their faucets, says Flo, adhering carpeting that had let go of the floor. Ray had grown up on a farm and knew how to fix almost anything, and he loved women, Flo says. Nothing ever happened, that I know of, but he loved to flirt.
Ray was retired, but he liked to work with his hands, liked to be busy. "He bought Evelynn the best of everything," says Flo. "Their basement had a whole wall of cupboards and shelves, built by Ray, that were stacked with boxes of things that Evelynn had never used. Steak knives, silverware, dresses and fur-collared coats, but nothing ever made her happy."
I remember Evelynn's fuzzy auburn hair, always looking as if she'd just woken up. Her thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Her house dresses made of polyester. Her sharp, crowlike voice that cawed Ray, Ray, Ray. The way she flapped around in the garage like an injured bird, stumbling and crashing into things, drunk at all hours of the day.
She drove around town on surveillance missions, looking for Ray and crashing into the occasional lamppost, piloting their Chevrolet back to the end of the block, and sometimes parking on the lawn.
"Ray is the one who finished our basement and made those blocks for you kids," says Flo. And when I ask her which came first? Evelynn's drinking, or Ray's wandering eye? she says she doesn't know. Ray and Evelynn had both grown up in the same small town, had married, owned a liquor store and bar, had retired and moved here, the last house at the end of the street. Sometimes people come together like a bad chemical combination; sometimes two people bring out the worst in each other.
My Boyfriend
Eventually moved out of his mother's house and took an apartment a few blocks away from me, though we spent almost all our time at my place. I didn't have a roommate then, and his roommate, he said, was a little nuts and was always there with his girlfriend.
"I thought he was gay," I said.
"He's not gay," said my boyfriend. "Why would you think that?"
"I don't know," I said. "When I met him I just thought he was gay."
My boyfriend has never owned a lot of things, because, he says, they moved so much when he was growing up. He's just never really had a chance to establish himself. And now, he says, he doesn't need much.
When he was living just a few blocks away, things from his apartment, bit by bit, started appearing in mine. At first it was a CD player, and then some CDs. Then it was some pots and pans, which he said he didn't need, since his roommate had a lot of really nice kitchenware.
"Where does he get all his money?" I asked. "I thought he worked retail."
"He does," said my boyfriend. "I don't know. Sometimes he waits tables, too."
I would usually leave my boyfriend sleeping in the morning, and I would go off to work at the bookstore. When I suggested once that perhaps we should begin to see other people, that I'd met someone I might like to get to know, I came home that night to find that my hardwood floors had been washed, the rugs vacuumed. There were fresh flowers on the table and he had almost finished making dinner. Pots were boiling on the stove and he had already cleaned and ripped the lettuce.
"You know," he said. "You're never going to find someone who will take as good care of you as I will." He had bought my favorite chocolate for dessert. "You don't know how to cook," he said, putting an arm around me. "Who else would put up with you?"
Our Level
At some point in my adolescence my father said to my mother, "Flo, you mustn't encourage them. Don't stoop to their level."
"Them" was my sister and me, and perhaps our older brother. What defined our level is not exactly clear, but he said it so that we could hear him-as if some feature of our behavior, some strange climatic condition of our level, had rendered us deaf. There had been, perhaps, between my sister and me, too many jokes about poop. Too much pounding and stomping. Airborne curling irons during our morning hygiene wars. "Let me in the bathroom, you bitch! Take off my shirt, you bitch! You used all the hot water, bitch!"
My father began leaving for the hospital at 6:30 A.M. to make his rounds, but my mother had no such escape. Her work was our home. We were her work. So she stayed in bed until we left for school in the morning. She slept while we fought over clothes. She bought an extra curling iron so we wouldn't fight over the one we had. She had a second bathroom put in downstairs so my father and brother could shower in peace. The men's room.
Was she making concessions or just managing?
"Don't encourage them," my father said, when she couldn't help laughing at our dirty jokes.
But it was too late. It was the seventies. She had already admitted to us that she wasn't a perfect parent. "I make mistakes, too," she'd say. "Do you think this job is easy? I love you but I do not love your behavior right now."
Our father had drawn the lines of power and control more exactly. When, for instance, my brother, in the throes of a heated argument with my mother, called her a bitch, my father came storming out of the bathroom where he had been reading and smoking and whapped my brother over the head with a rolled up Time magazine, chasing him down the hallway as he attempted to retreat to the safety of his bedroom, his stereo, his piranha tank and science journals. "Do not talk to your mother that way!" Whap, whap, whap. My mother stood, stunned. My sister and I giggled: new territory had been forged, the envelope of disrespect pushed, and my father's belt had still been undone, twanging back and forth as he marched my brother down the hall, hitting him over the head with a weekly periodical. We giggled, but we also felt sorry for our brother, because in our own hormonal states we realized these things could happen: you were bound to say things you only meant for the briefest moment. And we believed our mother understood that.
The family joke years later would be that at least Time was good for something.
— Reprinted from Welcome to My Planet by Shannon Olson by permission of Viking Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Shannon Olson. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
What People are Saying About This
A wonderfully funny and elegant and compelling book about love and confusion in Minneapolis, and what knocks me over is the plain nakedness and integrity of it: all the way through, the author sounds exactly like herself and nobody else, and you start to think of her as your daughter. There are some good digs at psychotherapy, American guydom, and Lutherans. And it has Flo, who is one of the great moms of American fiction.
From the Author of The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing
This is one of the most hilarious and moving mother-daughter acts of all time. I stopped reading it only to laugh my head off, quote passages to my friends, and to make it last.
From the Author of A Lover's Almanac
Shannon Olson has written a remarkably brave book, full of grief and laughter, portraying a young woman's search for her own story so entangled with family and the vast landscape of American culture. Her many tales are a confrontation with memory, longing and a harsh, though often hilarious, reality. Olson has written a Scheherazade of a novel that reveals the many dodges and delaying tactics of narrative which will move and entertain her readers. Welcome To My Planet is a plea for life.
Olson's tongue-in-cheek humor makes Planet as quirky and clever as its main character. —People
A funny, feeling novel...you'll find Olson's coming-of-age chronicle winning and uniquely real. —Glamour
Witty, warm and delightfully topical. —Chicago Tribune
One of the best mother-daughter acts of all time. I stopped reading it only to laugh my head off, quote passages to my friends, and to make it last. —Melissa Bank, author of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
From the Author of The Body is Water
Part wacky comedy, part chaotic examination of the narrator's inner life. Reading Welcome To My Planet is like tumbling headfirst into a series of intimate revelations -- each more truthful, comic, and irreverent than the one before.