Three Sides of the Coin (Catherine I) Page 3

  Steve's horror, it is theorized, came as a result of him being part beaver. Beavers have an innate desire to stop the sound of rushing water. So as a result, they build dams to stop the racket. They cannot help themselves, and as a result they are often a nuisance near manufacturing plants when the companies try to pipe their effluent to a nearby stream. Pleasant neighborly requests to kindly stop plugging up the cooling water pipes with mud and sticks always fall on deaf ears and, as a result, the beavers are then given a free moving van trip to another county.

  Steven's beaver DNA is that he can't stand partially painted walls, a trait Catherine understood all too well. After the final head cock, she would declare the paint color winner to an anxious Steven and assure him she would paint the wall herself (A task she could do, but not as well as him.) in a few days. These decisions, interestingly enough, always seemed to fall on Friday night or Saturday morning.

  So it was this particular Saturday that found him finishing up the Sorbet Yellow transformation, when their daughter arrived to the waning afternoon light to discover what he was doing. Steven looked down from the ladder to see her eyes trail across the room, carefully assessing the change. She said "Uh-oh,” backed out of the room, and went to the den to call her mother. Steven, fighting every strand of beaver DNA in his body, left the last few paint strokes undone, climbed down the ladder, sealed up the can of paint, and started to clean the brushes.

  Sunday found a new paint color being applied. Catherine was aghast as their daughter to the color and apologized to Steven, who knew how difficult the task was to pick the perfect color, no matter how temporary it might be. He also knew the "Uh-oh" story would likely outlive him at Christmas gatherings, possibly for generations to come.

  Their son, older by a year and a half than the daughter, also came with unique combination of parental hand-me-down skills and array of customized talents. His parents had told him early on that they would provide him with a vehicle when he turned sixteen, but he would have to provide insurance and repairs on it forever. They neither told him to get a job, nor told him not to get into accidents in order to keep his insurance rates low. He figured that out for himself and did both. Yes, there was the occasional fender bender, and no, the truck was not brand new, but it all worked out. He would come home from the fast food restaurant and with cash in hand would lay out the budget on the kitchen table. "This is for the insurance, this is for gas, this is for the new sound system, and this is all mad money!" he would say with a flourish, fanning the remaining bills in his hand. Steven looked at him over a glass of iced tea. "What about the flat tire?" The boy looked startled and glanced worriedly towards the front of the house, as if he could see through the walls to his truck listing on only three full tires. "I don't have a flat tire,” He offered half-heartedly, but quite hopefully. "No," his father said, "But will you ever?" To his credit, the son never doubted the possibility and created another stack of money labeled "for the flat tire."

  It was the sound system fund that amused, bewildered and impressed his parents. He would buy pieces of a sound system, always the latest innovation, and build boom boxes, electrical cascades and whatever clever concepts that would allow him to connect pieces together where they never were intended to go. This led him to be incredibly resourceful on all sorts of levels. Though Steven was quite adept in the garage, his son, while not exactly avoiding the place, seemed to treat the place like an exotic lab or museum for old people to do craft work. So other than the occasional foray into the garage to borrow a screwdriver or hammer for a skateboard ramp as a small kid, Steven hardly imagined any transfer of knowledge of the manly arts of woodworking to ever descend upon the boy.

  So it was quite as a surprise that Steven found more and more of his woodworking tools to go missing or misplaced. And it was an equal irritant to find piles of sawdust in various places in the garage and to find tools mal-adjusted. "What have you been doing here?" he exclaimed one day, standing before a dune of sawdust and a belt sander belt scrubbed of its grit.

  "Making a sound box," came the reply, with a shrug. To the question of how, the reply involved a detailed explanation of getting boards rough cut at the Home Depot, then glued together and belt sanded for hours on end to get the unique shapes. The boy was stunned to learn that saws were made and in the cabinet that would actually do those tasks in a fraction of the time. And Steven was equally stunned at the imagination and perseverance it took to create the impressive work with only a belt sander.

  The most bewildering element of the process was the fact that less than ten percent of anything the boy bought ever made it into the truck. Either his friends, with little skills of their own, would buy the products from him for their own vehicles; or he would be on to the next newest thing and he would find someone, to whom he could sell the recently outdated item. The resulting skill set of salesmanship and fearless discovery of the inner electronic workings in any vehicle landed him a job in the installation bay of an electronic store where he worked all during college.

  Catherine and Steven were successful in not making clones of themselves, but in helping to create productive and imaginative young adults. The children had turned into baby birds leaving their nests, hopefully, never to need to return.

  So it is not the success of Catherine that is the fascinating story, but her un-fulfillment that is interesting. It is a happy story that a woman raises good kids, unadorned by malicious, obvious tattoos, is married to a kind and generous husband, (with very large hands), who respects and adores her, while providing a decent living. It is wonderful that she does a creative and productive job in a career that suits her. But that sort of story will never make any news. It isn't what the world wants to hear. It is merely what the world expects. What the world wants is to know not of her success, but of her anxiety. For somehow the world will be happier knowing that.

  The thing about all of us is that we are who we love, and who loves us. So to discover Catherine means we will have to know something about her Steven. To discover you, we will need to know about your Steven, or who you would be if Steven was the love of your life.

  Chapter 3: Steven I

  Steven felt that Catherine was the perfect woman for him. Physically she was what mannequins were meant to do. Clothing from the store fit her like they were sewn for her alone. At five foot six, she was slightly tall, a couple inches over the average woman. She was perfectly symmetrical in his eyes, both vertically and in width. Her figure was slender with legs long, but not too long, a nice narrow waist, again not too short and breasts that were neither too heavy nor too slight in volume. But the characteristic that he found he adored the most was her back. It surprised him how much he loved it. It started before he ever met her, with an ad for either some alcohol beverage or suntan lotion where the magazine page was filled with dozens and dozens of swim suited women lying face down on beach towels. At first glance they all seemed the same woman with different suits, but then he realized what great diversity there was in the back symmetry. He found that short backs, on even perfectly symmetrical women were unattractive. Long skinny backs were also unappealing. In the end, he found one, maybe two acceptable woman’s backs out the entire lot of what would have been nominally fifty very good looking women.

  He was probably in love with Catherine before he physically met her. After all the phone calls they had, he knew he really cared for the mind within her. So her physical appearance was a delightful add-in, and when she first turned her back to him, he knew he could never let her get away. He never tired of kissing down her back, or across her neck. It was like unwrapping infinite Christmas presents with her. Every new thing he discovered about her was another thing he was pleasantly surprised about, and at each revelation, he realized how fortunate he was that it hadn't turned out differently. She could have been short backed and in love with polka music and he would have probably still loved her. But a perfect back and a love of classical music were ever so much better.

  She did three th
ings with children that absolutely fascinated him. The first was that she was fearless in outright lying to the children and they knew it, and were never scarred, but were actually improved for the experience. It was never malicious, but productive. For instance; she would cut carrots into little medallions, steam them and slather them in butter (The children had only heard of oleo and if they ever ate any of it at their friend’s house, they never bragged upon the event.) and called them cooked 'Frogs.' What child could ever turn them down? "More frogs please," was an easy refrain at the house, when their friends were turning their noses up to vegetables like carrots.

  The second thing she did occurred each time they stopped at a store or mall. She would turn before anyone exited the car and repeated the mantra, which the kids could and would repeat with her: "No candy, no cokes, no gum, no rides." It covered just about all the no questions that were likely and her trips to the stores with the kids were at lot less hectic than her neighbor's.

  The third thing fascinated him most of all. While none of these little tricks were hand me downs from her mom or aunts or any other source, this last seemed to come from nowhere. Before setting out on a trip, she would tell the kids they needed to go potty. When they replied, "We don't have to go." She would smile and say, "Get all that's hiding." They would then proceed to the restroom and produce prodigious amounts of fluid. Upon reflection he realized how genius this technique was. The children were being honest about not having to go. For them, the time to go is when it is full. To argue that they had to go would be tantamount to accusing them of lying. With her idea of getting all that's hiding, she was preserving their dignity and making a game of clearing their bladder.

  It was things like this that made him respect and eventually adore her. He was impressed with her on every level he could imagine. He never grew tired of talking with her and exchanging ideas. The two of them added to each other's thoughts, spiraling concepts into more complete and delightful designs. Over time he grew to read the tea leaves better and to recognize the difference between a tentative approval and an outright endorsement of a project idea.

  The first was a polite acceptance that inevitably would be reversed upon further review. He was a man who liked to make a decision and then make it happen. Barriers discovered were meant to be overcome through creative solutions and an undying adherence to the final product. Catherine never felt any decision was final and to her credit, most of her re-decisions were for the better. But not all. Hence, Steven made it a rule that no tree, once planted was allowed to be moved around like furniture. This rule was borne of a real experience. We will spare you of the detail and allow you to use your own imagination. It was worse than that.

  For her part, Catherine enjoyed the task-sharing the two of them had developed. More than the guy taking out the trash and her doing the laundry, they found they were a complete duo on any project or endeavor they embarked upon. Thanksgiving dinners were unspoken ballets. Turkeys were basted by someone, the potatoes were mashed by him, the milk and butter and pepper and salt were added at the right time by her. The rolls found the oven at the right time and the dishes were cleaned on the fly. The meal was delivered and everyone went to bed, on time, with a clean kitchen.

  Home improvement projects were also graceful ad-libs on the original concept. Colors changed, dimensions were adjusted and ideas grew along with the respect for each other. He admired her ability to make the tiny pieces come together and she appreciated his ability to stay on long tasks to bring them to completion. They knew that they made each other better.

  It was this ying and yang that made them a great match. It is always an issue to balance the idea that couples should have things in common (birds of a feather flock together) with the old aphorism of "Opposites attract." While both must be true, to some extent to strike us as true, there is the obvious conflict in the two. Their conflicts with each other were few, while their differences were complementary. They were both fairly frugal, but aspired to greater things. As a result they saved some, bought cheap where it made no difference and adhered to the principle, for some things, that "You get what you paid for." So they decided that items like refrigerators and beds, which were used a lot each day, would be expensive high quality items, whereas a car or a truck, which were conveyances to get them from one point to another, merely needed to be reliable. While she did not want to scrimp on his clothing, she conceded that dressing an auditor in very expensive clothes was like gilding the lily. They both felt that dressing her well was money spent "casting their bread unto the water." Through this cherry picked list of sayings, they made their way through life and this eventually led them to an anxiety point.

  After the kids had moved out, and his career involved more and more, (nearly exclusively in fact) trips out of town, Catherine had insisted it was time to move from the East Phoenix area to Scottsdale where she worked each day. The trip, due to increased traffic, had gotten harder and harder each year as she was drawn into the higher volumes and the heavy traffic was always the direction she was going. By the time of their move, she was in the car several hours each day. She somehow sold him on the idea that this would save them money. He knew better than to believe it, but he also knew better than to argue with her. So they set about looking for houses. They knew the price for an identical house would have been higher in Scottsdale, but they also started drifting up in quality. Things came to a head when they wandered into an open house event and “just dropped in for a peek."

  The house was over twice as big as the one they were leaving, even though there would now only be two instead of four people living there. The entry to the house began on the north side, with a series of low long stairs rising to the front door. The shallowness of the approach made one feel that the front door was only a little bit above street level; but in fact the front door opened unto a landing on the second floor of the home. A couple of steps beyond the front door brought the visitor to a railing that overlooked the majority of the bottom floor which consisted of one room, a living room with an open bar on one wall (directly below the landing) and an open, (one hundred and seventy five square foot), kitchen connected with the living room, (in Arizona often called a great room). This room was great in more than name only. The room stretched left to right across the visitor's eyes a total of about forty feet and front to back the same. So the sixteen hundred square foot room was just the beginning of the house. Though the size of the room was awe inspiring, what with the area and the height, (The ceiling, which at the low end of room stood at fourteen feet, versus its height at the peak was twenty seven feet, possessed exposed truss beams and knotty pine planking.), the real jaw dropper was the south side which was wall to wall sliding glass doors opening onto a large swimming pool, with a small lake just beyond that.

  Steven sat in a chair looking out over the lake, with egrets and hawks swirling about, as Catherine and their daughter (In for a second opinion, which Steven always knew would approach Xerox level correlation with Catherine's, so why did she bother?) circulated through the rest of the house opening cabinets, discussing where everything would go. Steven would get one fairly large closet, as long as Catherine controlled all the others. Closets were to women looking for houses what nuggets were for gold miners, enjoyed for their beauty, twirled through their fingers, letting the light catch and dazzle the eye. Catherine insisted he look at the garage for tool storage and investigate the yard for whatever man joy he could find to embrace there. But when she found him sitting in the chair looking at the birds, he stunned her with his opinion that he saw himself living in this house. For Steven was not a man prone to ESP or beliefs in ghosts or spirits. The closest that he ever got to believing in previous lives was a sense that his ability to speak awkwardly and place stones in lovely patterns with one try, might come from him once being a German stone mason. People found his word choices mildly amusing and his stone work a clever, but fairly worthless skill. So he amended his belief to being a fairly poor German stonemason in a previous
lifetime.

  So his pronouncement went straight to Catherine's heart. Steven never stopped being a source of joy to her, from the moment she first laid eyes on his hands in the photograph, to the first meeting where he was funnier than she had hoped and better looking. But, my oh my, better with those large hands than she had imagined. And his cleverness with his tongue made him more valuable yet. We will let the previous statements about his awkward skill with word choice sink in, along with what she was hoping for with his large hands, to allow the reader time to appreciate what lingual skills we are talking about here. But all of that aside, Steven's statement here set a cascade of actions that would lead to the purchase of this house being 1.) Enacted and 2.) Blamed, in a nice way, on him.

  For his part, Steven never imagined the owner would come down in price, as this was the start of a huge home buying binge for the entire country, no more frenetic than here in Arizona. And even if he did, he never imagined the Bank would be willing to loan them the money. The house was more than eight times more expensive than the last one they bought, and even with inflation, more than four times what their old house could possibly be worth, even in this crazy market. But somehow, Catherine, through dint of desire and creativity pulled off the stunt and he found himself signing and initialing endless pages.