Real Time

Lilly's sick today. She's on the couch across from me, saying random things while I pretend to be answering my email instead of working on my blog. I don't want my children to know about my blog. So far, no one is reading this at all, which is a strange sort of relief.
"Do you stilll write letters any more?" Lilly asks.
I pause, think. "No. I should though."
"Letters are more fun to get."
"That's true."
I used to write letters to all my friends.
"Are you liking your gift?" Lilly interrupts again, fingering it. Oh, yeah. Jay gave me a pink fleece jacket. Then he took me to meet his parents for the first time. Mixed signals.
"Why do you get stuck with men who give you stupid gifts?" She muses. "A basket is more romantic than a fleece."
Ayhan, my ex, an almost unbelievably beautiful Persian professional soccer player. famously gave me a wooden basket on my birthday that also folded into a trivet. I broke up with him. Not immediately.
"I don't know whether I like this book Fifth Business." Lilly says. Lilly got me the book for mybirthday, but pilfered it that night. "I think it's sexist."
"Why do you think that?"
"Well he says, 'I teach in an all boys school, which suits me fine. I never thought girls really profited by an education designed for men, by men.'"
"Does that make the book sexist or the character sexist?"
"Oh, okay." Lilly says. "It's hard though, because Dunny the's I, so you feel like he's the author."
"Well, the perspective will change in the other books."
"Oh, good. I mean, I like him, because he helps Mrs. Dempster so much when he's a kid, but now I'm not sure."
There's a pause. Then she says. "Am I bothering you?"
"No."
"This room is dreary."
"Really?" I look up, dismayed. We've put so much effort into making our basement "the pad" I really wanted it to be a place the kids could hang out in and make their own.
"No, just today. Hey, look at the way the venetian blinds are hanging--wouldn't that make a pretty wedding dress?" That's the difference. I look at the venetian blind hanging crooked on the window in the basement and think Look at that crappy broken blind. Why haven't I cleaned it or fixed it or gotten rid of it. That's just like me. Totally ineffecive. Christ and then I move on to thinking about the garage, or, God Forbid, the furnace room, but Lilly just looks at it and thinks it looks like a wedding dress. It's not reproaching her. And it does look like a wedding dress.
"Will you play pente with me later today?"
"Sure."
"Not now. You don't have to, now, but later?"
"Absolutely."
Lilly is the only person I know who can beat me at Pente.
"We need to get caller I.D." she says, presently. "We're the only people in the world who don't have caller i.d."
"Too expensive."
She sighs. "oh well, I guess it's a way of adding mystery to our lives."
I can hear the garbage truck outside of the house. Of course, I've forgotten yet again to take the garbage out. I have two options at this point: I can chase the garbage men down the street with the garbage or take it to my parents house tomorrow, which is on a different schedule. The garbage men think this is really funny when I do this, and they'll usually stop the truck, but sometimes they just keep going (only if it's a holiday crew, to be fair) I'm really nice to garbage men. For one, one of my best friends in town was a garbage man (he's worked his way up since then--not much---this is what can happen to jazz trombonists, so beware!) and for another, I got to experience Miami after Hurrican Andrew, when the garbage piled in the streets. Garbage men are much more important than you realize, so I always bake mine cookies at Christmas.
"Kaylie says that when she saw Seth's name on the caller i.d. and her mom picked up that she must have done something to Seth and his mom was calling to complain." She laughs.
Seth is a very popular boy at her school who normally doesn't have anything to do with Lilly or her friends, but whose mother called 2 nights ago to invite them to a party.
"Maybe he wants to branch out," I suggest.
"Maybe his mother is forcing him to invite us." I used to twirl baton with Seth's mother, so I think this is probably true.
"Oh," I say weakly. "Surely not..."
"Right." Lilly says. "I'm going upstairs. Don't forget about Pente." She sweeps the quilt around her and goes.
And that's my 1/2 hour. I'm going to go try to catch the garbage truck.