cosmicomedy
by lavinia plonka

I’m expanding. There’s no doubt of it. A couple of my small gardens have grown to the point of almost meeting. There’s a silly patch of grass and relentless mint in between, and the whole mess needs a fence.

Of course, I want to save money. So I will not patronize the designer garden emporiums with gleaming tools and ruggedly handsome young men wearing Bob Vila plaid shirts to wait on me. I know that once inside those homeowners’ paradises, I whirl madly from the must-have self-propelled, self-mulching $500 lawn mower to the seductively antiqued poly-resin outdoor urns cascading with swedish ivy, calla lilies, magenta petunias and other plants that die upon landing on my patio. I know I will eventually leave with sea foam motif bathroom tiles for a project I haven’t even hatched, but no fence.

Instead, I go to Hanover Fence. I enter a cavernous quonset hut, packed from one end to the other with more types of fence than any woman would ever want to look at. I had seen a kind of fence that has tight holes on the bottom, gradually getting larger at the top. Graduated farm fence someone had called it. It will be perfect for my woodchuck/deer varmints. But now, confronted by the staggering choice, I wander amongst the chicken wire and chain link, the picket and the slat fence, dizzily debating my decision.

The salesman appears. Elderly, curt, the worn look of a life long laborer. “Help you?”

“Gee, I hope so,” I smile brightly. Sometimes if you’re cordial, they’re actually helpful and can guide you to what you need. “I’m looking for a fence for my garden, you know, to keep the woodchucks and the deer out. I’m not sure....”

“How high you want it?” OK, he’s a cut to the chase kind of guy.

“Well, I was thinking about eight feet. You think that’s OK?”

“We got eight feet, five feet, whatever you want. There’s the 2x4 grid, or 1x2. You got that wire over there, galvanized or plain. How much do you need?”

I manage to mumble “100 feet.” My mouth is dry.

“This is a 100 foot roll. Here’s two 50’s. You need a hundred exactly?”

“I, uh, was thinking about graduated farm fence. You have that?”

“That come in really long rolls. You don’t want that.”

“Can I see it?”

“It’s not out here. It’s got the small holes at the bottom, bigger at the top. But you gotta buy minimum 300 feet for eight foot height. Forget about it.”

Right. OK. Forgotten. He obviously knows what I need.

A lawyer friend of mine once showed up with an outrageous new hairdo and a rather shell shocked look on her face. “I went to a new hairdresser,” she explained. “ I was greeted at the door by two girls in very high heels and breathy voices offering me cappuccino or wine, copies of Vogue. The hairdresser, a man, looked at my hair. ‘You need a new look,’ he said, pulling my hair in all different angles and staring at it as if it wasn’t attached to me. I whimpered, ‘I was thinking a little trim on the...’

‘You were thinking, you were thinking. Don’t worry that pretty little head. I know exactly what you need. Besides, I’m feeling creative,’ he said. And the next thing I knew, I looked like this!”

What happens to perfectly competent adults the minute they step out of their milieu? Where does this fearful shrinking come from the minute someone appears who apparently knows more than me? At first I thought it was a woman thing, until I spoke to a man who told me a horror story of trying to buy sheets and curtains for his new bedroom, intimidated out of his original choice by an overbearing saleswoman. He winces each time he goes into his room.

I leave the fence store feeling violated, with a huge roll of shiny, galvanized fence in the trunk of my car. It sits in the yard, untouched. I entertain fantasies of taking it back and reporting the salesman to the manager. My father always demanded the manager. “Let me speak to the Manager!” he would make his voice deep, straightening up to his full 5’4” and puffing out his chest. Then he would point his finger at the hapless clerk.

“Listen, Buddy,” he’d say, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with here. I didn’t just get here on the boat, you know…..”

I picture my conversation. “Hello, sir, are you the manager? I’d like to return this fence. No, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not what I wanted. Why did I buy it? Uhh, I’m not sure, uh….”

No. That will never do.

“Let me speak to the manager please. Yes, I’m returning a fence I bought. Because your salesman convinced me that this was what I needed. No, it’s not what I needed. Why did I buy it then? Because, because…..”

Oh my god.

"Are you the manager? Yes, well, I’d like to lodge a complaint and return this fence. You see, your belligerent sales clerk intimidated me into buying this even though I didn’t want it. Why did I come to a fence store? Because I needed a goddam fence. Just not that one.”

Now I’m getting somewhere.

“Hey you. Where’s the manager? Listen here, Buddy, you’re going to listen to me, and you’re going to listen good…..”

My fantasy is starting to develop a Polish accent.

Each time I walk by the fence, I notice that my shoulders rise, my body tenses, a little knot of fear grabs in my chest and stifles my breath. Slowly, it dawns on me. I had communicated to that salesman that I was insecure because I didn’t know everything. Like a cornered animal in the last stages of the “fight or flight” response, my body language had made him feel superior. For a moment, he was king of the jungle, I was the prey.

Here I am firing adrenaline and amino acids, neurotransmitters are wildly coursing to my gut as if I was about to be devoured, all because I’m frightened by a fence salesman. Now if I had come in full of the confidence of a fence expert and had said, “Yes, you can help me. I want some of that graduated farm fence. What do you mean you only sell it in 300 foot rolls? Why I could get it over at Rockaway Fence in 100 feet. So either sell me 100 feet or I’ll just go over to Rockaway and you’ll lose the sale…….” that salesman would have run to the back and retrieved the fence, bowing and scraping along the way.

In a heartbeat, I can transform from an educated, confident adult into a wimpy crybaby. It’s like when I parallel park my car. If I’m alone, or with another woman, I’m awesome, I slide right in, even garnering murmurs of appreciation from my passenger. But if I’m driving with my husband Ron, my eyesight gets blurry, my depth perception goes on hiatus. I cut in too soon, I have to go forward and back a dozen times, hitting both cars in the process, and end up either three feet away from the curb or on top of a pile of garbage. Ron is absolutely convinced that I’m just a "typical woman driver", and I get so sputtering mad and nervous that I prove him right every time.
People with dissociative disorders (formerly known as multiple personality) completely change their body chemistry. One personality wears glasses, or is diabetic, the other is not. They can even change their eye color. They are living several lives simultaneously.

So which me is the real me? And what causes the change? Suddenly I’m feeling an awful lot like an electron swimming around in a quantum soup. Confident? Hysterical? Particle? Wave? Awesome? Wimpy? Particle? Wave? They say it depends on the observer. But is the observer the fence salesman, me, or some other dimensional scientist looking down at me and taking notes? And what if that other dimensional scientist is actually seeing both sides of me at the same time?

On second thought, I’ll keep the fence.

Lavinia Plonka is a certified Feldenkrais practitioner, workshop leader and author of What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide To Courageous Living.

When not on ruthless search and destroy missions in her bug filled garden she is trying to figure out the meaning of life. Solutions to either dilemma are welcomed at laviniaplonka.com.