My People #3 - Annoying Christians (a poem I wrote last fall after having dinner at the house of a really irritating couple from my church)

The first time I met them I thought,
I’m going to hate your house.


But the whole long drive I kept praying they would surprise me.
I thought,
Please God, let me be wrong, let them surprise me with their hidden depths.
Maybe he paints.
Maybe she lived in Bangkok for a semester.
Maybe they collect vintage salt and pepper shakers.
Anything.

But the further I got from the city –
From the hot glittering lights and noisy traffic
And gleaming office buildings by the river –
The smaller civilization appeared in the rearview mirror,
The shittier the taupe ranch houses with dead yards became,
The dimmer was the possibility of aesthetic salvation.

As I pulled up to a beige house,
With a beige ceramic cross in the window,
I panicked.
These are not my people.

I stepped across the cat-shaped welcome mat into a sea of cheap oak,
And felt a sense of foreboding as the door closed behind me.

The vile ceramic figurines I predicted the moment I met them –
Predicted when I first saw her awful hair and his too-short pants –
Filled an entire shelf next to the birdcage.

Jesus. The birds . . .

The house was a menagerie –
Birds, dogs, cats, ferrets, and a judgmental baby
Who stared at me with open hostility
Like a tiny, red-faced Joe McCarthy.
That was unpleasant enough,
But the birds were flat-out sinister.

As the mother fondled and chatted with them,
Stroking their bellies with a glaze-eyed smile like a serial killer’s,
I felt the walls close in on me.

God, this small sad life.

Their dead-end jobs, their bizarre marriage,
Their ugly mean baby and psycho boarder with her ferrets,
Their cheap oak furniture and their colorless lives,
Filled me with a kind of desperation
That was partly judgment, partly horror, and partly impatience.

I had truly wanted to be wrong,
To learn that that they only appeared beige –
That they wore it like a mask,
That inside they were colorful and passionate and brave,
That they had done things.

I sat there with my watery lemonade, chewing a piece of bread, cringing in shame
As they marveled over my salad.
Having never encountered raspberry vinaigrette,
They gushed like I had brought thousand-dollar caviar
Or slaved all day over a hot stove,
Rather than run into the grocery store on my way to their house
With five cheap ingredients I then dumped in a bowl.

I wanted to say,
No, you’re wrong,
It took no effort,
You could do this too.
Even with a baby you could buy shirts that fit you, you could brush your hair.

(Knowing it was malicious, knowing it was cruel.)

Still I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, endlessly, over and over,
God, do they think they’re happy?
You couldn’t pay me enough to live in this house.

I couldn’t give up Thai food or the theatre or the New York Times.
I couldn’t stand their look of polite disinterest and lack of comprehension
When I talk about politics or “Spinal Tap” or Leonard Cohen.
I couldn’t live so far from color and light,
So far from where beautiful weird people laugh and vote and eat and play . . .
Out here in what might as well be the void of deep space, except with less to see,
This beige nondenominational subdivision
In a house full of figurines and birds.

When I finally stepped outside and breathed fresh air,
I felt tears of relief stinging my eyes.

I thought,
Yes,
My life is painful.

I have sorrows no one else can understand, I have felt extraordinary loss.
My life is not perfect,
It can be black with emptiness or red with rage
Or the tang of metallic gray, like despair.

But it can also be cool, smoky blue like the voice of Louis Armstrong,
Butter-yellow with pink edges like a rose,
Or crisp grass green like the glossy skin of a lime.

Their lives,
I think with some small dark satisfaction,
Are nothing like mine.

The gulf between them and me is as deep as risk
And as wide as passion.
It covers all the interesting parts of the earth.