Sin of the Month by Abby Bardi

April 2003 Fragments

"How long can I have?" I asked Eric, the Takoma Voice’s editor. The Voice’s normal deadline is the 15th or so. "What’s the outer limit?"

Eric named a reasonable date.

"I don’t think I can do it," I said. "What do I say? I’m worried? I’m outraged? That I’m descending into an abyss of terrible paranoia one minute, and then the next, I’m so glad just to be alive that I’m filled with demented ecstasy? That I want to punch somebody, but I don’t believe in violence?"

"Sure," Eric said.

"How about we just run the word ‘War’ at the top of the page and leave it at that? Just a blank page, maybe with some black borders?"

"Whatever you want," Eric diplomatically replied.

I could tell from his tone that he’d really rather have some text. But by the time the April issue of the Voice goes to press, the war may have changed dramatically. It may be over, or we may be enmeshed in another Vietnam–or both. Though I’m not usually shy about making predictions–some of my friends call me The Oracle–I have no idea how this will turn out, and what its "rubbishy aftermath," as William Faulkner put it, will be.

*

Yesterday I got an email from Ann, one of my best friends from college. She mentioned an article she’d read comparing Saddam to Hitler, and asked what I thought of that. I began a reply expressing my opinion that if anyone resembles Hitler, it’s Bush. I considered inserting a table into my email something like this:

That was as far as I got before I had to leave to go to my exercise class, so I saved the message in my Drafts folder. However, apparently Outlook Express decided that the message needed to go out that moment, so it sent what I had written.

But I didn’t discover that until today, when I tried to go back to my email to finish it and discovered that fate had intervened.

*

I was busy all day yesterday: after my exercise class, I had coffee with my friend Terri, whose husband, you’ll recall from last month’s column, is a Republican. Despite this, Terri is a great person, though whenever Bill Clinton is mentioned, she has a disturbing tendency to get a look on her face that resembles the expression of someone who has accidentally eaten baked rat. We were joined by Susanne, my yoga instructor, who is Danish and therefore has progressive opinions.

"I don’t want to see your husband again until this war is over," Terri said, breaking off a piece of banana nut bagel and crumbling it. As you may remember, Terri had been locked on combat with my husband on a number of political issues at a recent cocktail party.

"I don’t blame you," I said.

Since the war began, my husband has written approximately, oh, give or take, umpteen-gazillion songs about the situation. The other night, at a coffeehouse in Annapolis, he sang two of them, including my favorite, "The Bad President," to a rather large audience. Several people walked out, but most of them cheered, and afterward, many people came and thanked him for expressing their angst so succinctly.

"Let’s not talk about politics," I said to Terri.

This led to a twenty-minute discussion of politics.

"Well, from a defense-industry point of view," Terri said, but I interrupted her before she could get the rest of her sentence out.

"Bush is like Hitler," I said. "Iraq is the Sudetenland."

Whenever I say this, my husband remonstrates. He points out that as much as he despises Bush and his policies, Bush has not put anyone in concentration camps, to which I always respond, "Not yet."

"Furthermore," I said to Terri, "he’s stupid."

"I don’t know why you think so."

"I saw his college transcript in the Washington Post. Whereas Clinton–"

Terri got that look on her face again. She stared at her bagel as if it had suddenly transformed into a doughnut-shaped rodent.

"Say what you like," I went on, "but Clinton is a brilliant guy."

"Well, if they’re all so smart," Terri said, "why did Gore lose?"

"It’s because everyone hated the way he talked," I said.

"And the way he lunged at Bush during the debate," Terri said. "That was horrible."

I cast my mind back over the debates but could not recall a lunge.

"And then there’s Tipper," Susanne said. "She’s gained a lot of weight. First she lost it all, then she gained it right back."

I said that I hadn’t noticed that. "I like Tipper," I said. "I think she’s cool."

"What about all that music stuff?" Terri said. "That wasn’t very ‘cool.’"

I said that the music stuff, in retrospect, struck me as fairly sensible.

"But it’s censorship," Terri said.

"We have censorship now," I said. "When’s the last time you saw full frontal nudity on prime-time TV?"

Susanne pointed out that in Denmark, nudity was no big deal, and for that matter, they were very open about sex, too. At that point, mercifully, the conversation turned to sex, and stayed there.

*

Later that day, I had coffee again, this time on Main Street in the town I live in. I sat with my husband and our weird friend Bob, who likes to start up conversations with strangers and provoke them, somewhat in the manner of the guy on Da Ali G. Show. It was the first day of spring, so people were driving Harley-Davidsons down the street, and we had to yell above them. An old woman from South Africa sat with us for a while.

"What was it like there?" Bob asked her.

"It was horrible," she said. "Especially during Apartheid. And it’s even worse now."

"Do you think Isaac Bashevis Singer is the greatest writer who ever lived?" Bob asked. He is a rabid Singer fan.

"No," she said.

"Who’s better?" Bob asked. "Come on. Who? Who?"

She thought for a minute. "Shakespeare?"

"I thought Willie the Shake might come up," my husband said. It was the first statement he had made in months that was not about politics.

The front section of the Baltimore Sun lay on the table. We rested our smoothies on the headlines as people came and went. None of us said anything about the headlines, not even my husband. It seemed as if everything had already been said, and now all we could do was talk in fragments.

*

That night, my husband and I played at a coffeehouse in Baltimore. He did a stirring rendition of "The Bad President," and his other new song, "The Cowboy President," as well as his latest, "Propagandy." The audience was small and included our chiropractor and his wife, Heidi. When I invited them, I had entirely forgotten that she was a Republican, and had been involved somehow with the hilariously-named "Democrats for Ehrlich." As such, she was not the ideal audience for "The Bad President," but she took it in good part. She had fallen in love with my dog, Henry, who was with us; this coffeehouse is one of the few places that Henry can join us for an evening of music. Heidi told me that they had had a dog for a while, but that the dog, who was part shiba inu and part Australian shepherd, had kept trying to herd their children, and when the children refused to be herded, had bitten them.

"Biting is bad," I said. I was positive about that.

"Does Henry bite?" she asked.

I assured her that he did not.

After they left, we played some more, and my husband sang "The Bad President" again. When we finished, it was time for an hour of open mic. A guy in a tie-dyed t-shirt sat down with a guitar that refused to play in tune. He did a medley of "Blowin’ in the Wind," "Imagine," and "Revolution." For the latter, he had to change some of the words, apparently spontaneously.

"And if you go carrying pictures of, um, Saddam Hussein," he sang, "you ain’t gonna, um, no one will–." He paused, looking confused.

*

This morning I found that both Ann and her husband Bill had written me back, expressing their views on the war. Bill, who is a doctor, had included a list of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam probably had: "small pox, VX gas, anthrax, sarin, ricin, etc.; any of which could be smuggled into this country and delivered in very low tech ways to kill many, many people (with small pox, hundreds of thousands)."

Ann’s email expressed her fear that our differing political opinions could pull us apart.

I wrote back and said that of course that couldn’t happen, that I had known her longer than I had not known her, and for that matter, Bill too, since they’ve been married for a long time. I sang a Judy Collins song at their wedding. I said that I thought that the term "weapons of mass destruction" was willfully misleading, since Bill himself had conceded that these weapons would be delivered in "low tech ways," and therefore, as far as I was concerned, "mass destruction" was a misnomer, as was "weapons." Furthermore, I opined, there were plenty of other people who had these "weapons," and now more of them wanted to use them on us than ever before.

*

Some day, my brain will fit back together the right way; at least, I hope it will, since I’m supposed to take my doctoral exam in the fall. Till then, perhaps song lyrics will continue to whirl in my head–the lyrics to "The Bad President," to "Revolution," to Judy Collins’s "Since You’ve Asked," rap lyrics that Tipper didn’t like, lyrics to songs that haven’t been written yet, about war, about peace, about having coffee with friends on the first day of spring.

*

"I can write a song about anything these days," my husband said as we walked home along Main Street. He looked over at some orange flags guarding a buried cable and sang a little song about it. "See?" he said. We passed the old firehouse, which now houses a new antique store. My husband had tried unsuccessfully to talk the county into turning the firehouse into a center for the arts. As we passed, he sang, "There’s lots of furniture in the store/In case you want to buy/They said they’d do something nice with the firehouse/But that was a lie."

A woman I hadn’t seen in several years walked past us. On her shoulder, she was carrying what looked like an antique column, which she had undoubtedly bought at one of the many antique shops in town.

"What’s that?" I asked.

"It’s a column," she said as she walked away.

Somewhere near Baltimore, that column decorates a living room now, while across the world, one of the oldest cities in the world is burning.