The Vampire's Coffee House

One of the things I really missed in Long Island -- and have reveled in while being back in Austin -- is bakery-cafes. Other than the little place in Oyster Bay that I mentioned last time, the North Shore of Long Island offers expensive dining establishments at one end and Starbucks at the other, with little in between. The local economics don’t seem to permit a place to sit while indolently munching on a croissant. The delis are similarly table-free.

So, yeah, during my week at home, I've spent a fair amount of time at Mozart's and Upper Crust. I had the intention, when I so abruptly booked the flight back home, of organizing a few belongings. Truly, it makes me happy to put old things in new places and call it an improvement (it was the third time I moved the cutlery that Mike threatened homicide). But one night of lying in my old bed made me less ambitious. I started thinking how nice it would be to not take care of anybody. We've had many family trips over the years, some of them spectacular -- like my 50th birthday trip to Britain -- but it's rare that I or any full-time mom has a vacation where she isn't looking after anyone. The vacations we can typically afford involve me and a kitchen.

So as soon as my kid departed to north Texas with her friend, I started the endless grueling regimen: ride bike, bathe in jacuzzi, visit Mozart's, back home for a bit of internet surfing courtesy of my neighbor's unsecured wi-fi, then watch a movie while torturing yarn (one sock finished!). Despite all this opulent time-wasting, I've found one way in which I can still be a good mommy, even though Jesse is far away. I've been reading a book that she was lukewarm about but which she wanted me to read because “all the girls” were reading it these days. It has vampires, she told me. And didn’t you write horror fiction once, Mommy? When Mr. Taft was still in office?

While I'm not the kind of mum who feels obliged to dog her offspring’s literary footsteps, it did seem that my kid was trying to haul me out of the mire of unfashionability. So I decided to meet her halfway, by reading Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer.

Let me repeat with obnoxious parental pride that my kid was lukewarm about this book. She liked the ending, but thought the heroine a simpleton. Twilight, as a tale of teen-meets-vampire is not bad, if you set the bar so low the dogs can’t dig it back up. And I say this as someone who often likes popular fiction. I read Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. I feel appropriate awe at their skills and don't begrudge them a penny in their bank accounts. Twilight is so mediocre I can’t bestir myself to take the novel itself seriously. But that leaves the vexing question of the novel’s popularity.

Sometimes, a writer can tap into a fantasy so profound that mere competence and a tiny bit of innovation is all that's called for. Remember The Bridges of Madison County, a dreadful read that nonetheless effectively mined every mother’s fantasy of glorious and noble self-sacrifice. At its core, Twilight is every bodice-ripper you’ve ever read or heard of, even if no bodices actually get ripped. The story is classic: a little nothing of a heroine, in whose rib-cage beats the heart of a lioness, meets the equivalent of the lord of the manor -- in this case a divinely hot vampire who’s passing for human in senior high. Edward, isn’t just hot, he’s the guy you’d kick Adonis out of bed for. Whenever he looms, the heroine’s heart beats quicker (let’s just call her Polly because she’s so vacuous I can never remember her name). It would appear that Polly is having urges of a non-spiritual nature.

But if Twilight were just a bodice ripper dressed up with some internally consistent fictions about vampires, it would maybe net an $8,000 advance and a 3-week tour on the bookshelves before dying among the remainders. Clearly something else is going on.

If you read the gushing Amazon commentary, it would appear at first glance that the draw for Twilight is just Edward himself. Every chapter dwells longingly and lovingly on the muscles in his chest, his marble skin, his weirdly alternating eye coloration (which would suggest corneal cancer to me but those teachers in high-school don’t seem to be alarmed). Edward is so much the scene stealer, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Twilight’s biggest fans are unable to remember Polly’s real name, too. It’s all Edward, all the time. He’s so gorgeous that in bright sunlight he actually sparkles.

(By the way, the sparkle means that Edward has to live in dim places. Cloudy places. Northern places. Sometimes, even cloudy and northern places. I think Meyer was trying to make some point about northern light being weaker than equatorial light. Fortunately, she caught herself before she might actually have to commit to a real-world fact, like the planet being tilted on its axis and revolving around the sun. I don’t think Meyers much cares for a mechanical view of the universe, and it shows).

Edward may be bonny but he has some very particular ways in which he is not a normal man and I think its these traits that have so beguiled the Twilight series’ adoring fans. First, there’s the way Edward fell in love with out heroine. Being without equal in beauty, and being decades old, urbane and knowledgeable, whatever would he see in the guileless and under-achieving Polly? Your ordinary bodice-ripper has to resort to some pretty fancy foot-work in order to persuade the reader that His Lordship would fall for the homely governess. In the vampire myth, Meyer has found a sledgehammer to crack that particular nut. She posits that vampire aesthetics are not the same as human aesthetics. Edward, we’re told, is very sensitive to smells and the heroine smells really, really good to him. Her scent, her fragrance – pick any olfactorial noun you like but “odor” -- has made him have feelings that are, well, of a non-spiritual kind. These feelings are notably involuntary and unconditional.

And Edward’s love is complicated by another invention of Meyer’s. Have you ever fallen in love and then awakened one day, a few weeks or months later, only to realize that the boy of your dreams is really a boob? What once seemed like his barely controllable passion for you now looks like the incessant pestering of someone who, just as your mother always warned you, has only one thing on his mind. That was great when you also had only one thing on your mind. But now you’ve moved on. And he’s a jerk. Well, Edward will never do that to Polly, not only because of the involuntary nature of his love -- it’s just a sniff thing -- but because his love must be chaste. You think Ironman is strong, but that’s nothing compared to Edward’s speed and ferocity. And just as Edward has no control over his taste for Polly’s scent, he can’t claim much control over his own strength. It seems that vampires, while licking the sweat off your brow, can accidentally put a tongue through your brain. It's all fun until someone puts out an eye. Our chiseled male vampire and our squishy female human will have to confine themselves to some pretty ginger cuddling. Forever.

And another thing about Edward’s love: it’s very, very protective. There’s a long paragraph, not long after he and Polly have declared their undying devotion, where the ever-clueless Polly, when confronted with a complicated seat-belt in Edward’s SUV, gives up trying to strap herself in (Polly is truly an idiot). Anyway, Edward, with the barest hint of tender exasperation, reaches over and buckles his girl in, tightly constraining her for the journey ahead: remind you of anything? If you’ve had a baby and then a toddler in your life, the image of the car-seat will be all too familiar. Thus we have a boyfriend whose love is more like that of a father: involuntary, unconditional, chaste and all-protective. And the innocent Polly is apparently not a near-woman in late adolescence, but a baby.

This novel is anything but the coming-of-age story that is at the heart of the best Young Adult novels. Twilight is instead the anti-Harry Potter. Rather than learning to grow in skill and in mastery of herself, Polly swoons into the arms of the most appalling regression fantasy.

It’s certainly understandable why the young women of today might want Twilight’s vacation from a hyper-sexualized culture. But not every vacation is healthy. When I was young, I was told that sex without benefit of clergy imperils the immortal soul, which meant that any girl -- funny how the focus was always on girls -- who succumbs to passion was basically killing herself, marking her soul for the clutches of Beelzebub. The message was very plain: have sex and you die! Meyers, in setting up a fictional universe where this is literally true, isn’t doing her young readers any favors. While Twilight might promote under-age chastity by raising a girl’s standards -- after Edward, that pimply, satchel-fannied dweeb plucking away at Guitar Hero is going to look pretty pathetic -- it says nothing about the basic merits of just growing up, of learning to say no not because Daddy wants it or because you fear the clutches of the Horned One, but because you’re a human being with goals, goals that can be put at risk by drugs, drink, or hormones, toxic ideologies or superstitious creeds. Poor Polly. Perpetual psychological infancy may ensure perpetual abstinence, but I think she pays too high a price.

More Stuff, More Work

Life in the Age of Limits

Back when William Shatner was young and I was younger still, American family life revolved around the TV schedule. Star Trek, the version without any qualifiers, was perfectly emblematic of its era. We stared at our little ovaloid screen and the Star Trek characters, week after faithful week, stared into their big flat one. Aided by some mysterious spy technology, the Enterprise's crew could see anything on their command deck's TV, no matter how distant or how heavily cloaked by gaseous anomalies. They looked out on a universe of infinite possibility. By proxy, so did we.

Now, four decades later, I'm a Battlestar Galactica (BSG) fan and I can't help noticing that there's no screen on the ship's command deck (Note to anyone who might feel the urge to disclose how the final season ended: don't make me HUNT YOU DOWN). Admiral Adama and the post-racial cutie whose name escapes me, have naught but some WWII-style blips to look at. No big TV for them because there's nothing to see, no infinite plenitude to gape adoringly at. The universe is dark and unknowable and shrunk down to the size of whatever galactic conduit will get the human refugees to the Earth of legend. Humans live small and make do. They recycle everything that the slavering Cylons haven't yet managed to strip away from them. This summer, when BSG has wrapped up its final season against a back-drop of limits, limits in food, limits in oil, you can't help being a little infected by the series' sense of dread.

At least, that's how I felt in Texas. Now, living on Long Island, many miles and two weeks away from all the stuff and all the square footage we had back in Texas, here's what I want to tell Adama and the gang: lighten up, people! Before the Cylons stripped your planet off of you, it was all work, clean, trim, rake, prune, pay bills, work again, ad exhaustium.

When I first wrote about the Wee Cottage a few blog posts ago, I was putting my game face on, hoping, contra the evidence of past experience, that I really would be happy without the two-person shower and the jacuzzi tub and all the other amenities that grace our lives back in Texas. Whatever its faults, our home in Austin certainly has stuff: the frequently used bread machine, the never-touched pasta machine, the two side-by-side fridges, the garage choked with out-moded phones and retired keyboards, with A/V cables, USB cables, component cables, and extension cords (two- and three-wire, American and English). Without all this stuff, would it be like living in a cave?

(My mother had declared that it would be just like "camping out", which was her way of signaling again that any time spent away from her should amount to no more than a long camping trip. But that's a story for another time.)

Well, it's been two weeks and I haven't felt deprived, at least not much. And to understand how I frame my thoughts on this issue, I have to confess what I do at night to fall asleep, confess how dull and predictable it is. First, I mentally recite all the poems I can remember by heart. There aren't many so it's rarely enough to send me off. Then, and instead of deep thoughts about world peace, I run through a mental outline for a novel that's part SF and part bodice-ripper. My current favorite is one where a starship's minor lieutenant, devoted to her duty and indifferent to romance, and who is some kind of alien half-breed, falls in love with a creature very like a Vulcan in his stoic ethos but who looks a helluva lot like Viggo Mortensen. It's important, when trying to fall asleep, not to over-stress the bodice-ripper aspects of this novel. Instead, I dwell on how I might disguise the elements so obviously ripped off from Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and The Rings trilogy. My consciousness, now confronted with the demand to get a single original idea, usually, mercifully, puts me to sleep.

But not always! And that's when I'm driven to indulge in the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, thinking about what my ideal house would be like. On the subject of automobiles, I've always held to a former boss's philosophy that "We don't staff to peak." Lots of families pay hundreds or thousands of excess dollars on a vehicle large enough to cart the volleyball team around exactly two weekends out of the year. That's fine for them, but we haven't found it much trouble to just rent big when we need something big (and some cities have car-sharing schemes now, which is even cheaper).

But despite my miserliness towards automobiles, I've never taken the same attitude towards houses. Next time I'm shopping for a house, I'm going to try to think differently. If we've learned anything living in the Wee Cottage, it's that in the age of headphones, the one-man-one-laptop family can hang out in the same room. Equip a family room with decent cabinetry, enough to hide all that gear and all the docking stations that everyone requires (okay, we're a one-man-one-laptop-one-IPOD family), plus a commonly used TV, and you've saved yourself 300 square feet right there. That's possibly 20% less of your home to clean, to heat, to cool.

I think a lot of people, let's face it, women specifically, would have difficulty giving up on the idea of a formal dining room. But why? This morning, on another splendid walk that has become my substitute for my daily ride back in Texas, I came across a yard sale, where, as always, the natives were more than willing to be drawn into an extended yak-fest about the area. They were selling an exquisite set of bone china, the kind you never come across when you're actually looking for formal china to buy second-hand. The elderly gentleman trying to flog the set to me shook his silvery head and said, "My daughter got that as a wedding gift. She hasn't used it even once. Nobody ever wants to leave the kitchen table, not even at Christmas."

It struck me that an area as nice as this part of New England, where there's a pretty restaurant on every corner, must have plenty of private party rooms one could rent. For the money you saved on roughly 200 square feet of construction, heating and cooling, you could easily rent a hall for that one holiday dinner where all your relatives show up. And, maybe, by hosting the dinner in a separate building, they'll be less inclined to spend the night with you. At least not all at the same time!

As for the small bedrooms, they're big enough. I'll concede that the size of bedrooms and bathrooms complement each other. The 50s 'vanity', where a lady dolled herself up, was a necessity because the bathroom was always tiny and always used by someone else. I could easily adapt to a scheme where I had a bedroom large enough to contain a lovely old vanity (not that I need the work, mind you) and the bathroom could be nothing more than a sink and a capacious tiled shower (a separate WC is essential to me now, after years of having one.) For a bath, I'd like a hot-tub outdoors when I need a soak. I know, I know. People in hell want a glass of ice-water, too.

The only room I can't imagine ever reducing in size is the kitchen. While the lack of any counter-space in the Wee Cottage hasn't been that much of a hassle -- there's plenty of pre-prep around these days -- I miss making my own bread and turning out a stock or a curry from scratch. I realize that 50s housewives in Britain worked at a single detached cabinet, called a larder, but I can't imagine how they did it. My former mother-in-law had one. Larders were smallish cupboards that stood maybe six feet tall and a yard wide, with a pull-down shelf providing a kitchen's only work surface. I remember staring gape-mouthed as my mother-in-law would bring out one course after another: a soup, then a proper English roast with at least four side dishes (my mouth waters as I write), then the Bramley Apple pie with the traditional pouring custard, then the coffee. Perhaps I should have paid better attention to how she managed such a feat in so little space but she didn't like me and as a kid who was moved from house to house every summer, I had never learned how to make anyone like me. Finding common ground around a love for cooking never occurred to me. So her skills parted this earth with her.

I think the main reason I'm so receptive to reducing the size of our house is that so much time has been freed up. Just beating back the Tide of Crud in our Austin home takes at least a couple of hours a day. The Wee Cottage can be made spotless in two hours flat. Per week. And that has given Jesse and I time to feed baby goats, write blog entries, and learn to torture more expensive yarn in new and creative ways (Progress! I had to rip out the sock I've been knitting only five times this week).

But who am I kidding? There's no shelf I can clear that Mike can't fill with books. If I free up the time, I'll just fill it up. After petting this little fellow, I'm thinking how lovely a small goat farm would be . . .