My Mail-Order Philosopher

by Peter Morrissey

It was clear that things weren’t getting any better for me, but I’ve always found that the barometer for good and bad is entirely relative, so I cracked open the National Geographic once again and thumbed through the pictures of famished women in third world nations who wore steel rings to lengthen their necks and make themselves more appealing in the eyes of bare-footed nomadic males. It made me feel a little better since, having achieved both a job with healthcare benefits and a balanced lunch, I was by comparison successful. Sure, I felt a tinge of guilt, but it was a fair exchange. In the third grade, I had donated a dented can of soup to a food drive. In return, they exonerated me for not getting into medical school 15 years later, or taking the MCAT, or finding out where it was given.

As I turned the page, I detected the hint of a smile on one peasant woman’s face and felt a little betrayed. Her rosy, toothless grin was more than I’d been able to muster in months. Perhaps, it was just the novelty of a camera crew in her village that made her smile. Or maybe they had bribed her with candy so that she’d stand still for the photographers. The caption below explained with a laudable use of clinically sympathetic language, which escapes me right now, that the woman had sutured her vagina with hot coals because her husband liked it snug.

Of course, I hadn’t always had to resort to such means to elevate my self-esteem. For instance, I once took up correspondence with a mail-order bride from some eastern European country that had many syllables and an ambiguous multigenerational conflict. Her letters were mostly illegible, aside from the continual references to her need for a “generous gentleman.” I felt this might hinder our prospects for a long-term relationship. I was not generous with either the covers in the wintertime or money, but nothing much was on television so I told her to come on over.

When I picked Svetlana up at Newark airport three weeks later, she had a one-month traveling visa. This would eclipse my previous longest relationship, with a hooker named Flo, by about 28 days. I was surprised to find that Svetlana was not 22 years old as she had said in her letters, but in fact 48, and her “model looks,” were actually a reference to the confused way in which she gazed at machinery and brightly colored objects. Her pores were as wide as sewer grates, to which she had applied a thick coat of makeup like sun block on an albino. She had a sort of loose-flesh sexiness though, the kind that makes truck-stop waitresses look appealing after 10 hours on the road.

“Ah, my baggage,” she pointed to the conveyor belt where 10 pillow-sized parcels wrapped in brown paper were going by. I lifted them with surprising ease, and she explained that they were in fact 10 throw pillows that had been knitted by her late grandmother. Deducting the cost of shipping, I calculated that they were each worth about negative 50 dollars.

“Do you live near the Central Perk Café?” she asked, putting on an air of sophistication. “Or perhaps the coffee shop of Jerry Seinfeld.”

“There’s a deli nearby,” I told her. “You can get coffee there.”

The incompatibility of our individual goals quickly became apparent. Right after we had sex that first night, Svetlana got up from the bed and stood on her head balancing her lanky body against the wall. As the blood rushed to her cheeks, she explained, “to make baby.” I let her know that according to my pre-med courses such things were normally done lying down and with someone who’s not sterile.

When I came home the next evening, she had the dictionary out and, an hour and a half later, the shit really hit the fan when she figured out what sterile meant.

“I am mad with you!”

The baby was supposed to seal the deal and make her a full-fledged citizen. To her credit, Svetlana had come to America for more idealistic goals than mere economic advantages for her and her offspring. She wanted to fulfill her great dream of voting in a democratic nation.

In her small Baltic country, where leadership was decided by kielbasa-eating contests, her small-stomached, vegetarian clan could never gain any political representation. The system also virtually assured the continual monarchy of the Stromanoff family, who all suffered from tapeworms.

“I want democracy baby!” she screamed.

I tried to convince her of the merits of a system that rewarded disease instead of stigmatizing it, but she would hear none of it. Clearly, she carried a streak of the far right. She believed the eventual endpoint of affirmative action to be a nation ruled by crippled dwarves and the obese.

“I want democracy baby now!” she screamed louder.

Her height gave her an advantage in the argument. She was six foot two while I, at five foot one, stand somewhere between the average Japanese women and the hairiest guy in the fifth grade. Our height difference never bothered me though, except when she was standing up or talking about her goddamn pony.

“I had pony when I was little girl,” she’d go on. “Oh, it was sooo beautiful.” Not only did I have to be five foot one and single at 35 years of age, but I had to listen to a 48-year-old mail-order bride weep about her beloved horse that got made into sausages for an election.

We did have our good days though. One Sunday, on a trip to the shore we were sitting quietly on the beach when she turned to me and said, “Ocean very big.”

“Yes, Svetlana. It is very big,” I agreed.

“And blue, too,” she added somewhat philosophically.

A half hour passed and she didn’t say a peep about her goddamn pony. I grabbed her hand and slipped it under the towel on my lap letting her massage my testicles in complete absorption. Just when things couldn’t get any more pleasant, she whispered one of those sweet nothings that let lovers know they are operating on parallel planes, which need not intersect in order to form a union.

“And very blue too,” she said. I realized then that Svetlana wasn’t just another aging Baltic women lying about her age in order to score an American husband. No, she actually believed she was still 22 years old. For Svetlana, time didn’t pass in a regular sequence of seconds and minutes. There were hours, days, maybe even entire weeks missing from her life when she fell into a trance-like void trying to formulate a single sentence.

I couldn’t help but to fuel the fire. “And so watery,” I said and she didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon. Needling the soft bulk of her thighs into a fleshly pillow, I lay on my back watching the seagulls circle above in silence. It was a lovely day.

Sure enough, when I got home from work the next evening the dictionary was out. The concept that a thing could have the very quality of what it was blew Svetlana’s simple, farm-girl mind. From then on, whenever she wanted to impress people she’d remark that clouds were cloudy, drinks were very drinky, and trees were somehow so tree-y. That was my six-foot mail order philosopher, expounding on a thing’s thingliness as time stood still for her.

I, too, had learned a new trick. “Tell me more about your pony, Svetlana,” I’d say to egg her on. “Was it… very pony?” You could almost smell smoke rising from her bleached blond scalp. The ramifications of adding a Y to word that already had a Y—now, that was too much!

She wasn’t always placated by my mystifying use of adjectives. Occasionally, she would rant about my uselessness. “You are loser! You can’t even make democracy baby!” But I knew that it was just the ovaries talking. With all the unaccounted for time of endless contemplations, she genuinely believed that she was still ovulating, even though menopause had long come on like a cane over the hips of a poor vaudeville act.

Proof of this was that she still bought tampons even though I saw the still-cottony white tubes in the garbage basket when I emptied it. For her sake, I kept up the charade, conceding that all she really needed was to find an eligible man, or “democracy papa,” so that she could conceive an American child and become a citizen.

On the streets she ruthlessly solicited passing men to impregnate her for voting privileges. Befuddled construction workers would look at me questioningly. I shrugged as if to say, that is the way they do things in her country and, yes, she doesn’t look so half bad after a few beers.

There were benefits for me as well. Her ass smelled like roses. Literally. On the second day, she found a tin of potpourri on the toilet lid. Having no knowledge of deodorizing agents, she thought it was some sort of personal hygiene product. I know nothing of the mechanics of what transpired, but I quietly replaced the tin each week. The backside of a 48-year-old woman is much like the front side of a 22-year-old girl, only a little naughtier, and hers held the fragrance of a garden on the first day of spring.

“Poo-poo,” she said to me one night. She couldn’t pronounce my real name, Joe, so she called me Poo-poo. Her language, I reasoned had no J’s. “Is Manhattan really an island?”

“Yes,” I said patiently. “But this is New Jersey.”

She sighed and nuzzled against my chest. The world was entirely too confusing. She’d come 5,000 miles and was off by 10. The next morning I bought her a bus ticket to Manhattan where sensitive, single comedians sit in diners all day drinking coffee. We loaded the 10 throw pillows in the undercarriage, and later that day I got a subscription to National Geographic. We do what we must to get along.

Still, sometimes I miss Svetlana's playful banter and the little voids she would slip into. Occasionally, I too would slip into a Svetlana-like void where the passage of time went unnoticed.

“Poo-poo,” she’d remark. “You look so lonely-ey.”

Indeed.