Sometimes, when Don was alive (let’s face it – these things were far less likely to occur after he died) and I was feeling particularly vengeful (who – me?) because another dickweed dipstick had undervalued me or someone I loved, I used to ask Don if he found my enraged response off the mark. And Don would say to me, “Not at all, Chocolate Muffin.” (He had a lot of names for me, many of them connected to food.) “You are simply getting a little of your own back.”
Don had a lot of expressions like this – getting your own back; a leg up; sleepy bugs; bag them (that last one his harshest and most final commentary) – which were invaluable because they were succinct, absolutely clear, supportive and utterly confirming.
In fact, I have chosen partners who have the ability to name things and who do so fearlessly and quietly. Nothing feels as wonderful or as safe as solid affirmation when one has emerged bloody and battered from thirty years of chaos.
I have to add, too, that generally I tend to keep my thoughts and raging words within these four walls (to be fair, blog entries are also typed within these same parameters). Apart from the occasional outburst through an open car window (well, really, who do those right-to-lifers think they are, telling me my rights?) I seldom take my revenge farther than the front porch.
Not even the cats are fully aware of my anger, which is only to say I don’t throw things around or spit on the floor (which is something, given my Cape Breton roots).
Anyway, today I was sitting here with a Lake Simcoe headache (I know not to put my head underwater, and yet...) clutching my temples, while you know who (= not me) painted the kitchen bulkhead. (It looks lovely, by the way.) And what should come on the television but a new version of Stephen King’s Carrie, Patricia Clarkson playing the role of Carrie’s mad (as in very very angry but also insane) mother.
I watched with sore eyes half open, hot teacup pressed against my throbbing cheeks, trying to take in all the madness. It seems not much has changed between the old and new versions (except Stephen King’s cocaine addiction), although Carrie has taken on a slightly more demented look while her mother’s hair has become noticeably tamer.
Still, there was, and were, the same sociopathic set of students, the same tainted plot, the same bucket of blood, the same good girl (thank God not Amy Irving, but an equally thick-hair-gifted do-gooder) and, more or less, the same outcome for those who deserve bad ones (outcomes, that is).
Anyway, as I sat here watching, now gingerly chewing my onion bread toast, I said to the you know who toast-maker, “Wow. This is what Don meant. Carrie is simply getting her own back.” And for a little second it didn’t quite occur to me that killing off half the graduating student population and several kindly intended teachers was, in fact, not merely kill, but overkill.
I never imagined for a minute that torturesome students didn’t deserve whatever they had coming to them (in this instance, mostly electrocution and death by fire), or that it might be slightly more than unfair that well-intended people had to die, too.
Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say is that you better be nice to me because there’s no telling where my head might take me the next time I have a Lake Simcoe migraine and someone is mean to me.
In the meantime – Carrie on!
