Caroline Allen’s CCS Profiles and Features class in Spring 2007, now in blog form.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Mrs. Bit O Honey: A story in Joseph Mitchell Style

Lee Desser had straight mousy brown hair, a reserved complexion and very dirty shoes. “Shoe’s don’t say anything about a person,” she said. “And they certainly don’t say anything about me.” She came to Santa Barbara in 2007, expecting sunny days, rich friends and, above all, a tranquility that would be her excuse for her failure as a writer. She was born into a family consisting of her father, mother, and younger sister , which unbeknowengst to her sister, she held in the highest regard. As a primer expert on how to overcome psychological and behavioral problems in order to receive pets from her parents- one cat and one dog- she knew that her life would be in order. As a middle school material girl, Claire retained a dignity from prominent adults often lost with the application of makeup, addition of short skirts, and removal of nail-polish individuality. “Claire’s like one of those pretty magazine girls that you convince yourself is secretly suffering from low self-esteem in order to make yourself feel better,” she frequently brought up. “If you ask her ‘How are you today?’ you can’t help but shutter from the answer because when she replies ‘Just great,’ you can’t help but feel that she actually is, which just makes it all the more unbearable.”

In my time spent with Lee, she rarely referred to her father. When her sixth grade humanities teacher displayed charts of a rollercoaster and of a straight line and asked, “what are your relationships with people like?,” she thought ‘like a rollercoaster with the exception of my father.’ “My father would have the kind of funeral that others dream their lives for,” she said. People he had lost contact with would come to the podium and tell brief anecdotes about the time he treated their nineteen person table to an all-you-can eat brunch or how he took the role as the father figure for their son, they would say. He lived a kind, decent life; one Lee aspired both to live and avoid. His success as a person and failure as a freak intimidated and disinterested her like a solved Rubics cube. “We rarely fight, but the only time I reveal myself is when I’m having problems with my mom.”

Lee used to think that her mother secretly despised her because she gave up her career in order to have kids. “When I was little, it always seemed like my mom was pregnant, but no babies ever came out. I wonder if she was depressed or relieved,” she said. In recent years, she has accepted that when parents say they love their kids equally and couldn’t imagine their lives without them, they’re full of bull. “From what I can fathom, parents are a lot like kids, just older and less curious.” Her dream is to live in a Alzheimer’s retirement home on Ocean and Montana.

Lee loves her family and hopes that one day her kids will write a favorable short biography of herself. She hopes that she doesn’t die of type two diabetes from eating too much candy bit-o-honey which can be found at K-Mart.

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