Kissing Cousins
by
Barry Rachin


SMASHWORDS EDITION


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Published by:
Barry Rachin on Smashwords


Kissing Cousins
Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin


Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.


This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.


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Table of Contents

Kissing Cousins

Legal Procedures

Sextillions of Infidels

Six Catholics and an Atheist

Small Favors

Gerasim’s Dilemma   	

Canary in a Coal Mine

Hummus

The Invisible Hand

Call of the Beguiled

Still Virgin

The Prize

The Reticent Storyteller

The Unfinished Face

Thyroids, a Love Story

Fun with Dick and Jane


Kissing Cousins



Shortly after Phillip Peters landed his first teaching position at Brandenberg High School, the young man began hearing disturbing rumors about his father's identical twin brother. "Your Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot, has gone back to nature," his mother giggled maliciously. Mrs. Peters absolutely hated the man - hadn't spoken to her brother-in-law since her husband's death, although, properly understood, the feud, grudge, bad blood - whatever the hell it was – predated the marriage with Uncle Ned never even showing up for his brother's wedding. 
"The nerve of him!" Mrs. Peters hissed on more than one occasion. Why Uncle Ned loathed his mother was never explained by either parent. Phillip's father never spoke badly about his brother; it was Mrs. Peters who detested the man with a homicidal vendetta worse than anything a Sicilian Mafioso could dream up. "I heard the fool bought several acres of farmland off route 123 in Rehoboth. Gonna build a log cabin and live the life of a back-to-nature recluse." Where Uncle Ned was concerned, Mrs. Peters favored one of several strategies: she either ignored her brother-in-law or ridiculed him mercilessly. "A fifty year-old Paul Bunyan," she tittered. "What a hoot!"
Phillip had met the man only once in thirty years when he showed up for his brother's funeral, and it was a thoroughly eerie experience. An identical twin - he resembled the deceased in every way except that he wasn't laying stone cold in a mahogany box waiting to be lowered into a freshly opened grave. Dressed in a dark suit, Uncle Ned stood off by himself near a gnarled birch tree. Wearing a solemn demeanor, he spoke to no one. Before the priest even finished his eulogy, the stocky man wiped his eyes and drifted from the ceremony. No mention was ever made of his presence at the gravesite. On the rare occasions when his name came up in mixed company, Phillip's mother still referred to her estranged brother-in-law as the ‘eccentric old coot’.

One morning in late spring, Phillip pulled into a gas station on the Rehoboth line. "Anybody building log cabins in the area?"
The cashier, a kid in his early twenties shook his head. "Naw, no log cabins… just some old crackpot with a camper puttering about in the woods."
"And where might that be?"
"Three miles up on the left. There's a dirt road and a 'No Trespass’ sign nailed to a scraggily maple tree.
Continuing up the windy country road, he located the property. A dilapidated, worm-eaten slab of wood that passed for a mailbox had been jury rigged at a cockeyed angle alongside the gravelly road. Scrawled in red latex paint, the name on the battered box, which had no lid, read Ned Peters. Pulling off the road, Phillip locked the car and continued a good two-hundred feet down a rutted trail to a clearing where an older man was puttering about a muddy foundation. The fellow, who stood about five-eight, was sturdily built with a bushy mop of brown hair shot through with gray, cascading down over his ears. The jaw was wide, forehead broad with a scattering of crow's feet dimpling the eyes. "Hello, Uncle Ned!"
Squinting at the intruder with a menacing scowl, the older man’s leathery features gradually softened. "Oh, hello there, Phillip." He came over and shook his nephew's hand as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. 
"What are you doing?"
The man wandered back to the rectangular plot. "Getting the foundation ready." 
Phillip glanced about the property. There was nothing, just an endless profusion of knotty pines, maple and oak trees. A tangle of poison ivy nestled at the base of a chokeberry tree; the tiny, red-to-black, apple-like fruit had long since fallen away. "For what?"
"Log cabin. Twelve-hundred square feet." His uncle pulled a flat, carpenter's pencil from his pocket and marked one of the twelve-inch boards buttressed in a rectangular, knee-deep trench that ran forty feet and presumably defined the front of the dwelling. On the ground was a collection of threaded rods with nuts and silver washers. "Cement truck is delivering a load later this afternoon. Sure hope they can negotiate that twisty trail."
He moved a short distance away, ran a tape measure along the foundation and methodically scribed another pencil mark. "Sill plate's got to be anchored to the foundation. Before the wet cement cures, I'm gonna sink these quarter-inch, threaded rods into the mix so the outside walls can be bolted down. It's just an added precaution."
Adjusting to the late morning light filtering through the trees, Phillip surveyed the worksite. A rusty camper was parked a few hundred feet off to the left by a small pond, but there were no commercial-grade construction tools - no chain saws, nail guns, staging or even a suitable workbench. "How are you going to mill logs?"
"Structure's prefab. I ordered an A-frame, cabin from a commercial supplier in Bangor. Everything required is being shipped tomorrow afternoon. I just put it together." Phillip blinked and the man standing there in the dirty jeans and plaid, flannel shirt was his father resurrected from the dead. He blinked again and the older man morphed back into Uncle Ned, the eccentric old coot and his mother's sworn enemy. "Because the structure isn't overly large, I can get away with twelve-inch diameter logs, which will be more manageable for an old fart like me." 
"Of course, there are a number of choices for securing the logs at the corners, including the lock-joint, dovetail, and butt and pass method…" Uncle Ned went off on a rather lengthy rant explaining all available options, but Phillip wasn't listening anymore. He was feeling light-headed, out of his element… no longer sure what to think. His mind had scurried off down a rabbit hole straight out of Alice and Wonderland, a cul-de-sac littered with all sorts of emotional excess baggage. 
"I teach tenth and eleventh grade science over at the high school." The words emerged in a garbled, disjointed heap, and he was talking much too loud. "We get summers off. I want to do something. I want to help you build your log cabin."
The older man just stood there, perfectly calm and serene. A noisy blue jay flitted among the budding leaves of a slender poplar that leaned precariously close by the clunky trailer. Somewhere in the wooded distance, Phillip could hear a brook or small stream gurgling a bucolic, back-to-nature refrain. Uncle Ned rubbed his sunburned neck and smiled mischievously. "I'll have to pay you under the table," he quipped, "and, except for splinters, poison ivy and the ravenous, late-afternoon mosquitoes, there ain't no benefits."


Later that night at his apartment, the thought occurred to Phillip that his Uncle was nothing like the family pariah, the social grotesque his mother concocted over the years. But why the animosity? Why the disparaging and degrading caricature which didn't even begin to resemble the man laying sections of threaded bolt along the perimeter of his middle-age dream? As he was leaving the Rehoboth woods, Phillip asked, "Building a log cabin in the woods from scratch and at your age… why are you doing this?"
His uncle released the locking mechanism on his yellow Stanley, twenty-five foot tape measure and watched the blade snake back into the metal carcass. "When did the thirteen, original colonies come together as a nation?"
Phillip stared at him vaguely. "I don't know… after the British threw in the towel, and the redcoats sailed home to England."
"I'm a history buff," Uncle Ned explained. "The colonists were paranoid as hell at the prospect of being taxed to death by their own kind much as the British had done a decade earlier. It wasn't until the Second Continental Congress that the individual colonies agreed - with great misgivings - to give up their individual rights and form a nation." Uncle Ned spoke quietly directing his words at the clayey earth. "I want to live a more stripped-down existence… simplify things." There was no hint of bitterness or defiance in his voice. The man spoke calmly, almost philosophically and, in that moment Phillip felt an affinity for his estranged uncle that left him shaken if not thoroughly humbled. 

Phillip told nobody about his clandestine meeting. A plumber by trade, Uncle Ned negotiated the worksite on sturdy legs with a comfortable, loping gait. Measuring, marking, double-checking the forms embedded in shallow trenches extending just below the frost line - there was no wasted effort, all his movements methodical and unhurried. Ned Peters said little else the remainder of the time they were together, but Phillip understood, at some visceral level, that the man was capable of completing anything he put his mind to. 
The middle of the following week he went back to the woods. The cement had been poured and a smooth, gray slab defined the foundation of the new structure. Just as Uncle Ned intended, the metal rods, like dutiful sentinels, stood perfectly erect every few feet around the outer perimeter. Several piles of machine-hewn, twelve-inch logs were scattered around the clearing. "Looks like the cat's up the proverbial tree." Philipp came up beside the grizzled man, who was securing the two-by-six sill plates to the foundation with a metal ratchet. 
"You come to make fun of an old geezer or do serious work?" his uncle shot back with a challenging grin.
Phillip pulled a leather tool belt and framing hammer off the backseat of his car. "Let's build a log cabin!"
From the morning straight through to the early afternoon, they laid floor joists, sixteen-on-center, securing everything in place with eight-penny nails. "Things would go faster if I had a nail gun," Uncle Ned noted, "but nobody's punching a time clock.”  
Around ten o'clock they took a coffee break, boiling the water on a small hibachi with a propane fuel tank. "Uncle Ned, why the bad blood between you and my mother?"
The man cracked open a package of sugar cookies and hand a few to his nephew. "Your father - may the poor man rest in peace - died three years ago on the fifth of April. The coroner's report mentioned something about thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain, but it was living with your monstrosity-of-a-mother that sent him to an early grave. The medical examiner should have put that on the certificate of death." He bit into a cookie and washed it down with a swig of scalding black coffee. "Cause of Death: toxic wife syndrome."
Phillip would have offered up a rebuttal, something in his mother's defense, but knew deep down in his heart-of-hearts that every word was true. Uncle Ned stared at the dark liquid ruminatively but refrained from drinking. "I asked your father once… I said, 'Whatever possessed you to marry?' and do you know what he said?" As if on cue, a throng of crows secreted away in the branches of a hemlock tree began cawing a loud, throaty protest. "As personnel manager for a large insurance firm, your father used to screen new hires. He claimed that few applicants were ever really interested in the sales position as advertised. Rather, they puffed themselves up with delusions of grandeur and interviewed for the job-in-the-abstract."
"Every applicant was a super-salesman. Sitting there in the personnel office, their skills were boundless,… unimpeachable. Only problem was, they couldn't sell shit,... hardly a single life, car or medical insurance policy, once your father gave them the nod and sent them kicking and screaming out into the real world. It was all false bravado."
"But what's that got to do with my parents’ marriage?"
"In one of his darker moments, your father confided that your mother approached their marriage as just another 'job-in-the-abstract'. The woman was an insufferable egomaniac - a nag and malcontent. She never cared one iota for her husband’s welfare and, after so many years of beating his goddamn head against a brick wall, my brother simply gave up the fight." Uncle Ned tapped his nephew lightly on the forearm. “Do you ever watch the Nature Channel on cable TV?". 
"Yeah, they have some nice documentaries. Why do you ask?"
"I've seen feral animals on the Nature Channel that were more accommodating to their mates than your mother was to my poor brother during their marriage."
"Nice sentiment," Phillip replied. 
Uncle Ned tossed off the rest of his coffee and rose to his feet. "Twenty years, Phillip," the older man was strapping on his tool belt. "I think that about brings us up to speed." 
What the older man conveniently omitted from his narrative was equally as damning. Six months Eleanor Peters mourned, playing the grieving widow like some character actor in a Greek tragedy. Then without fanfare, Phillip's mother rushed off to a justice of the peace and married a man twenty years her senior who owned a string of butcher shops over on the east side. 
What struck Phillip most was his uncle's utter lack of pettiness. He spoke in a slow, plodding manner, the voice thoughtful, ruminative, devoid of malice. This is what happened. Here, let me tell you about how your   mother tore my identical twin brother's heart out. In the end, the physical entity was damaged beyond repair, but, early on, it was the ephemeral organ that gave up the ghost and caused the medical train wreck. 
"Are you ready to build a log cabin, Phillip?"
"Today's as good a day as any," he replied. There was no more talk of Eleanor Peters, and it was clear that, as long as Phillip scrupulously avoided the topic, his uncle would never mention his sister-in-law again. They cleared away a mound of brush and grabbed a quick lunch at a sub shop near the center of town around two in the afternoon. By the time the sun began to dip below the trees and the mosquitoes drove them off the property, all the metal joist hangers had been secured in place along with a ten-inch main beam that ran the length of the building. The huge beam had to be shimmed in a few places and checked for level, but it was a very auspicious beginning!


The next day Phillip visited the woods, his uncle was already bustling about, loosening the forms around the foundation. “More lumber arrived late yesterday.” A huge stack of logs had been arranged in three, neat piles around the worksite. Some were considerably longer than others and, even with an army of helpers, Phillip couldn’t imagine lifting them into place. Meanwhile, Uncle Ned was arranging a collection of ropes and pulleys on the ground. 
“Give me a hand.” The older man had abandoned the chaotic tangle of rigging and was pawing at a short length of wood. Together they lugged it to the right side of the building and positioned it with the notch facing up on the foundation. “One down,” Uncle Ned chirped. “Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go!” When Phillip’s mouth went slack, his uncle slapped him on the back. “A sick joke... nothing more!” They positioned the matching log opposite, then laid the two, smaller pieces on either side that framed the front doorway.
“Here’s where things get interesting,” Uncle Ned noted. The heaviest logs that ran the entire length of the rear wall were lying off to one side. They rolled, pushed and dragged one into position behind the foundation. Uncle Ned draped two pressure-treated poles over either end of the concrete lip. Rolling the unwieldy log over the rigging, he secured the line with a double half-hitch. “Put my truck in low gear and back up slowly. Only now did Phillip notice his uncle’s Ford-F150 parked fifty feet away with the tail end of the rope secured to the bumper. “That truck,” his uncle explained, “is rated with a tow capacity of eleven thousand pounds. These toothpicks should be a piece of cake!”
Phillip climbed into the cab and fired up the engine. Five minutes later the unwieldy log had been dragged up the impromptu, pole ramp and was seated in place with Uncle Ned binding the joints with huge twenty-penny spikes. In this makeshift manner, they raised the walls on all four sides another foot. “One more row,” Uncle Ned announced and we’ll have to take window openings into account.”
“Shouldn’t we break for lunch?” It was already past noontime.
“Food is being delivered... not to worry.”
Fifteen minutes later a brown Toyota puttered down the trail and a skinny wraith-like blonde with alabaster skin and dark glasses approached the worksite. "Cousin Phillip?" The odd-looking girl reached up on her toes, kissing his cheek. “I’m Katy.”
“Enough with the smooching!” Uncle Ned barked. “You got the food?”
“Yes, Daddy.” She traipsed back to the car and returned with an armload of bags. Firing up the hibachi, the girl began preparing the meal.
Uncle Ned scared up a couple of folding chairs out from behind the camper and they sat watching the blonde girl working over the grille. The sloppy, unassuming kiss caught Phillip totally off guard and even now as he studied the strange creature he didn’t quite know what to make of her. Dressed in cut-off jeans and a plaid blouse, her slim white legs seemed to go on forever. She was cute as hell but certainly not beautiful in the traditional sense. A squat nose perched above lips frozen in a perpetual smirk. The skin was flawless, the eyes the palest liquid blue. She strutted about with almost a clunky, childlike grace. 
"Katy,” Uncle Ned noted, “she ain't the brightest bulb in the firmament, but that girl's got a heart of pure spun gold." He reached out and thumped his nephew on the arm to further drive the point home. "Simple creature like her, she don't interview for ‘jobs in the abstract’... ain't shrewd or conniving enough. My daughter's got her PhD in horse sense. She's the real deal!" 
Katy approached with a paper plate weighed down with potato salad, a cheeseburger and tossed salad. "Here, Cousin Phillip. This should keep you occupied ‘til the hotdogs are done." The girl flashed an angelic smile before retreating back to the smoky grille.
"The other day,” Phillip stabbed at the potato salad, “you mentioned the Second Continental Congress and made it seem like the colonists didn't trust each other any better than the British."
An orangey monarch butterfly emerged from a profusion of flowering weeds and fluttered around the edge of the pond. "The northern colonies had their own commercial interests - whaling, fishing, lumber, which the British needed desperately.” Uncle Ned stopped talking just long enough to savor a bite of his hamburger, washing it down with a splash of soda. “The southern colonies had tobacco, cotton and the lucrative slave trade, exporting their goods." "They didn't get around to actually ratifying the articles of confederation until March of 1781. This country has  gone steadily downhill ever since." 
He waved a hand distractedly at the mish mash of logs and tools. "In another year, when this cabin will be habitable, I'm gonna buy some chickens, a cow and clear enough land to grow my own vegetables."
"Now you sound like a survivalist."
"No, just an old-fashioned, bona fide American."  
After the food was done, Phillip walked down the pond. The log cabin was coming together nicely, but he couldn’t imagine his uncle using the truck and crude pole ramp to raise the log walls more than another few feet. Because of the sharp incline, any logs hauled beyond that height would be extremely dangerous. Uncle Ned surely understood this and was hiding an ace up his sleeve. 
A chain saw fired up and Phillip could hear the two-cycle engine revving. Uncle Ned had mentioned clearing a section for a chicken coop. It was all part of his 'Grand Scheme'. He would acquire several dozen chickens, both for laying and eating, a dairy cow and small tractor. The tractor would allow him to grow enough vegetables for his family’s needs and to sell at the annual Triboro Farmer's Market. Each autumn he would gather and split timber to heat the place with a wood burning stove. The goal was to sever as many ties that bound him to the cradle-to-grave welfare state. As fatalistic as he was about the country’s future, he was every bit as intent, groping his own way, inch-by-solitary-inch, out of the national morass.
Heading back toward the clearing, Phillip stumbled across Katy wielding a McCulloch 18-inch, 40 cc chainsaw. Seeing him, she shut the machine down. "Are you leaving?" Phillip nodded. Draping an arm casually over his shoulder she leaned forward and bussed him on both cheeks. "Hope you enjoyed the barbecue." She buffed the wetness away with the heel of a hand.
The girl, Phillip learned earlier from his uncle, worked second shift as an LPN at the Pine Haven Nursing Home. "Everything was just fine."
"Two decades is a hell of a long time between visits. Don't be a stranger, Cousin Phillip."
"No, I won't." He wanted to say more but the gawky girl, who had already turned away, pressed the primer bulb on the chainsaw - once, twice, thrice - and the humongous machine fired up with a mind-numbing roar, killing any possibility of further small talk.

Over the remainder of the month they erected the walls to a height of one row below the front door before Uncle Ned called it quits. "Too dangerous."
"What now?"
"Yesterday, I hired a contractor with a hydraulic crane and a construction crew. He'll finish the last few rows and also raise the roof." He grabbed a bucket of half-inch lag screws. "Got to get the sill ready for the subfloor."
Katy stopped by pretty much every day. In the early afternoons she disappeared into the camper, emerging in white scrubs and a pink smock before heading off to her shift at the nursing home. She continued to kiss, pet and paw Phillip like a younger sibling or lapdog. There was never anything overtly sexual or inappropriate to the girl's dopey antics. In many respects, she was her father's daughter. 
"Got a boyfriend?" Phillip asked.
“Now and again," she replied with an insouciant half-smile. They were laying down a half-inch thick subfloor in anticipation of the outer shell being completed and the building finally enclosed. Katy was on her knees pounding anodized nails along a blue chalk line snapped over the parallel joists. Every five seconds she had to pause to push her glasses back up on the bridge of her pudgy nose. 
Phillip nodded but had nothing to say. Uncle Ned had been grousing the previous day that his daughter, who had a wild streak, sometimes went off carousing and didn't come home for days. "What about yourself, Cousin Phillip? You spending timed with any of those erotic educators over at the high school?"
 “Lately I've sworn of women,... taken a vow of celibacy." Swinging the hammer in a broad arc, he buried the nail almost to the nubby head then set his hammer aside. 
They completed a row of finished nails and shifted over to the next sheet of exterior-grade plywood. Katy draped an arm over her cousin's shoulder and pressed her lips up against his ear. "And why is that?"
"Don't want to end up like my old man." Phillip gently tapped a nail into a penciled mark on the plywood. Draping a chalked line over the head of the nail he moved to the middle of the floor and held the powdery string over a parallel mark while Katy lifted vertically and snapped the line.
"What happened to him?"
"Married a shrew who sent him to an early grave," he shot back morosely.
There was a brief moment of silence before Katy, in typical fashion pulled an outrageous prank. The girl farted. Intentionally. She let loose with an obscenely silly expression of disdain for Phillip's moody digression. "Geez! Lighten up, Cousin Phillip!" Coming up behind him, Katy snaked her arms around his waist, pulling him close. Her breezy playfulness coupled with the vulgar, low-brow shenanigan’s took all the sting out of his diatribe. Earlier in the week when Phillip was trying to engage her in another serious conversation, the girl jumped on his back - literally - demanding a piggyback ride. Katy was hedonistic, impulse ridden, a scatterbrain with the attention span of a flea, a live-by-the-seat-of-her-pants sprite born to kiss, hug and tease her way through life with never a heartache nor solitary misgiving. 


The weather stayed dry straight through the middle of the following week when wind-driven rain pelted the ground into a muddy mess. Uncle Ned and Phillip drove over to Tony's Pizza for an early lunch.
"Buon giorno, paisano!" the olive skinned man behind the counter looked up when they entered the eatery. "Whatchawanna eat for lunch?"
"And good morning to you," Uncle Ned returned. They placed their orders and settled into a booth near the front of the store.
"And wheresa ya lovely dotta?" Tony asked.
Uncle Ned's expression darkened. "Katy went out bar hopping after work... came home skunk drunk. She's home sleeping it off."
"Marone!" Flexing his wrist, Tony made a tipping gesture with his right hand. "Too mucha da vino," 
"Yeah, too much vino, Jack Daniels, vodka and God knows what else."
Five minutes passed. It was still quite early, and they were the only customers. Behind the counter, the owner was jibber-jabbering with a coworker in a guttural tongue that was impossible to pigeonhole. Phillip leaned closer over the table, "What's that weird language?" 
"Arabic. Our Italian host, Khalid Mohammed, took the long way here via Southern Lebanon." In response to Phillips baffled expression, Uncle Ned explained that the owner of Tony’s Pizza emigrated from Lebanon in nineteen eighty-three after the Israeli invasion. The IDF ran Merkava tanks through the tiny hamlet where he lived with jets raining cluster bombs down on the olive and fig trees. The commercial building that housed his falafel business was leveled. "Khalid's Pizza Emporium - that was his first choice, but then someone pointed out the potential liabilities of such a name what with nine-eleven, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Uncle Ned waved good-naturedly at the man behind the counter and Khalid Mohammed - aka Uncle Tony - rewarded him with a toothy grin. In truth, the slim man with the bushy moustache and classic, Mediterranean good looks could have easily passed for Italian, Sicilian or Greek. "The colorful, inflections… that’s just a harmless ruse," "In another half hour when the lunch crowd arrives, he stops talking Arabic in favor of the Italian shtick." Uncle Ned began chuckling as though at some private joke. "It's great for business and really quite funny when you think about it."
An Arab falafel hawker managing an authentic Italian pizzeria - nothing was ever what it seemed to be. When the lunchtime crowd reached its peak, did Khalid launch into an a cappella version of Oh Sole Mio? 
Back outside in the parking lot, the older man kicked at the wet ground with his work boot and rubbed his stubbly chin with the heel of his hand. "Cluster bombs… a modern-day version of napalm. Nasty stuff!" "Of course, the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon was a classic example of the tail wagging the dog," Uncle Ned added, "with the army pretty much running amok while the Jewish government acted as little more than a rubber stamp for religious fanatics’ messianic policies."
"How's that?" Phillip was having trouble following his uncles fracture commentary.
"For two thousand years, dating back to Hagar and Ishmael,” his mind teetered off in yet another obscure perambulation, “they've been going at it. Nothing ever changes." The older man moved several steps further away from the truck. "There's something I've been meaning to tell you about my daughter." He winced, as though whatever it was he had to confide carried a steep price. "What I'm gonna say about your Cousin Katy is in strictest confidence, and I would hope that -"
Before he could make his way to the central point, a cell phone began to twitter insistently and Uncle Ned fumbled about in his back pocket. A window supplier needed to recheck dimensions for all rough opening. Uncle Ned climbed back in the cab of the Ford 150. There was no more mention of Lebanese restaurateurs conducting business under false pretences or Cousin Katy's personal affairs. Back at the worksite, Uncle Ned disappeared into the camper in search of the building plans. When he finally emerged, Phillip said, "Cousin Katy… there was something you wanted you tell me?"
"Not now," his uncle was in no mood for small talk. "I got to get back to the supplier with hard figures or the windows won't ship."


The construction company – eight, beefy carpenters and a crew chief arrived the third week in August and, with a hydraulic crane, the rest of the logs were set in place, the roof raised and shingled. 
"This calls for a celebration.” Uncle Ned was staring at the finished shell of his log cabin. “Saturday night at the Boneyard Grille." The Boneyard was a quasi-respectable rib joint that catered to locals and a handful of bikers who tended to rowdiness, especially on the weekends. They served pulled pork, blackened catfish, steaks and an assortment of Cajun-style chicken dishes. "Eight o'clock," Uncle Ned slapped Ned on the back. "My treat and bring your appetite."


They were wedged in a booth at the Boneyard Grille having finished eating almost an hour earlier. Uncle Ned wagged a finger in the general direction of the bar where Katy was sipping a beer and commiserating with a fat, bearded man wearing a Harley Davidson dungaree vest. An elaborate series of tattoos extended from the biceps to the wrists. The hairy biker cracked an earthy joke and Katy, decked out in a tank top and cowboy boots doubled up in laughter. "Now there's a social deviant interviewing for a job in the abstract," Uncle Ned fumed, "and my damn fool of a daughter’s buying up every counterfeit word of it!" 
Both Phillip and Uncle Ned had been drinking gin and tonics to celebrate the completion of the first phase of his 'Grand Scheme'. The man sipped at his liquor. "My daughter... heart of gold but a first-class dope!"
Interviewing for the job in the abstract. Earlier in the day, Phillip shot by his mother's place. He hadn't seen or talked to the woman in almost a month. Flying to Miami in the morning, the butcher was taking her on a ten-day cruise of the islands. The former Mrs. Peters bought a new wardrobe at the Chestnut Hill Mall, had her hair and nails done. Phillip had never seen his mother, who shed twenty pounds in anticipation of the adventure, looking so svelte. On the other hand, Murray - that was the butcher's name - looked decrepit. "Everything turns to shit," Phillip muttered.
"What’s that?" Uncle Ned cupped a hand over his ear.
Between the tank top, cowboy boots and old-maid-librarian, dark glasses, Phillip couldn't decide if his favorite cousin was infuriatingly cute or a few months early for Halloween. "That Harley Davidson tub of lard...” The sight of Katy at the bar making goo-goo eyes with a three hundred pound degenerate left him so distraught Phillip couldn't even finish the sentence.
"Talk's cheap," Uncle Ned shot back gruffly. "Why don't you get off your schoolteacher's ass and do something about it?"
"Like what?"
"I dunno." He raised his glass and waved it in the smoky air. "Ask my daughter out on a date… marry her, copulate and raise a dozen latchkey brats."
With Uncle Ned’s last, outlandish remark Phillip's brain was virtually shutting down. "They got a two-syllable word for that abomination, and it begins with the letter 'I'."
"Katy's not my biological daughter, you idiot!" Uncle Ned rubbed his eyes with the tips of his calloused fingers. "Her mother was married and divorced before we ever met. She’s the byproduct of  a previous marriage and no blood relation to either one of us."
What happened after that was a dizzying blur of noise, mayhem and buffoonery. Phillip staggered to the bar and said something to the beefy biker who promptly, climbed off the stool and punched him on the side of the head - a single chopping blow. Phillip's legs turned to spaghetti al dente and he ended up on the floor in a heap. The biker, who never even broke a sweat, conveniently slipped out the side door without paying his tab.
Five minutes later, when Phillip finally came to, Uncle Ned helped him up to a sitting position. “I’m okay now.” Staggering to his feet, he almost toppled over a second time.
“What with the liquor and the fight,” Uncle Ned relived him of his car keys, “you’re in no condition to get behind the wheel.”
"I can give him a lift home," Katy volunteered. "It was all my fault. 


On the ride home Phillip sat with his throbbing head mashed up against the passenger side window. "You knew all along that we weren't related by blood."
"I was in kindergarten when my mother met your uncle."
 Reaching his apartment, she asked, "Do you have any cocoa mix, Phil?"
"Yes, why do you ask?" Even in his debilitated state, it hadn't escaped notice that Katy omitted the familiar prefix and foreshortened his name by half.
"Maybe I should come up and fix you a cup of hot chocolate." Reaching out she ran a fingertip over the bruised skin. "That's a nasty bump." She lowered the hand letting it come to rest on the side of his neck. "I'm coming upstairs, Phil, to get you situated… however long it takes."
Phillip didn't quite grasp what Katy meant by the tail end of the previous remark. “Well, I really am in an awful lot of pain, and a cup of hot chocolate might help set thin

Return to Table of Contents

Legal Procedures


Shortly after arriving at the Emerald Square Mall, Phoebe Marsalis located Aunt Janet sitting on a bench next to the Victoria’s Secret outlet. At two hundred and thirty pounds on a five-foot, six-inch frame, the black woman was hard to miss. Despite the weight, Aunt Janet was still a modestly attractive woman with flawless skin and regal cheekbones. When she rose, the girl kissed her mother’s sister on the cheek and announced, “I’ve got a problem.”
The older woman studied the advertising displays of bras, French-cut thongs and risqué negligees  modeled by svelte females in various stages of undress plastered across the plate glass window - skinny minnies every one of them. Aunt Janet didn't, as a rule, do much business at Victoria's Secret. “You’re pregnant?”
Phoebe cringed inwardly. “Nobody mentioned sex.”
“Thank God!” She blew out her cheeks, pulled the girl close and kissed her a second time for good measure. “I’m famished!” She gestured toward the food court at the far end of the building “Let’s grab a bite.” 
At two-thirty on a Sunday afternoon with the New England Patriots playing just down the road in Foxboro Stadium, the mall was dead. They settled in a booth by the windows overlooking the parking lot. Phoebe ordered a Greek salad while her aunt chose the lasagna dinner with a side order of garlic bread. "This ain't no normal size portion!" Aunt Janet stabbed indignantly at her food with a plastic fork. "They gave me the runt of the litter." Jutting her jaw, she lowered her voice several decibels. "Maybe that doofus behind the counter got issues with plus-size, black women." 
In a huff, Aunt Janet picked up her platter and lurched to her feet, but Phoebe deftly maneuvered in front of the woman blocking her way. "That's a perfectly normal size serving, no bigger or skimpier than the rest. You're just going to make a scene for no good reason."
Mollified, she sat back down. “I started a new diet last week,” Aunt Janet remarked guiltily, "so this morsel will do just fine."  She dabbed the crusty garlic bread at the meat sauce on her plastic plate. "So, if it ain't sex, what's your problem?"
"There's this Jewish guy from school who’s been tutoring me in my legal procedures class and…" The sentence just petered out, and, without warning, a flood of tears dribbled down the side of her ebony nose in briny rivulets.
Aunt Janet glanced at her niece and raised a slab of lasagna smothered in tomato sauce to her lips. "Sammy Davis Jr. was Jewish."
"It's not funny." Phoebe sulked, drying her eyes with a clean napkin.
"What's funny," her aunt shot back with a droll expression, "is that you choose the family member with the worse track record to confide your romantic woes." The black woman patted the girl's wrist. "You ain't pregnant?"
"I just told you a moment ago."
She raised her hand in a placating gesture. “Yeah, yeah. I heard you right the first time." 
Phoebe pushed the feta cheese to one side with the tines of her fork and speared an olive. Half her aunt’s lasagna was already gone and the girl had hardly touched her salad. “This past September when I started my sophomore year at college..."
“Hold on a minute.” Aunt Janet pushed her plate aside. She rose from the chair, a surprisingly spry motion for such a heavyset woman, and disappeared in the crowd. A moment later, she returned with a mocha latte cappuccino and chocolate éclair. "I gotta get properly settled in a listening mode."
“What about your diet?”
"Yeah, the diet." Aunt Janet eyed the wedge of chocolate frosting drizzled across the top of the pastry. "The diet can wait. Tell me about this Jewish dude who's got two, good eyes and don't sing or dance half as fine as Sammy Davis Jr."

* * * * *

As Phoebe explained it, she was doing reasonably well in all her classes except Legal Procedures. Signing up for the elective on a whim, she soon discovered she had no affinity whatsoever for law. Her first test Phoebe scored a sixty-nine. The second test she dropped eight points lower. After the failing grade, Professor Birnbaum took her aside. "You need a tutor."
"I can just barely afford tuition much less the added expense of paying someone to cram for tests."
"Finkelstein will tutor you for nothing."
Finkelstein - Phoebe had to think. The skinny Jewish boy with the pale complexion and dreamy eyes. His gaunt face was dominated by a mass of fury, charcoal eyebrows that congealed in the middle each time his forehead wrinkled in a frown. The uncharacteristically adolescent features gave new meaning to the term baby face; the boy, who had just turned twenty, looked all of fourteen and that was stretching it. Arnold Finkelstein was the wiz kid, the brainiac with the encyclopedic mind. During class discussion, he had every answer on the tip of his facile tongue. "How do you know this?"
"I told Arnold that, if he helped you out this semester, I'd give him extra credit and recommend him for academic honors."
Phoebe stared at the rows of empty seats. She was holding her own or better in every academic subject - everyone but legal procedures. "How soon can I start?"


They met in either the student lounge or cafeteria - depending on which was quieter - three evenings a week. Arnold had this quirky ability to make the most arcane, legal gobbledygook seem interesting, almost bearable. "What are the four elements of a tort?"
"I don't remember," Phoebe stammered.
Arnold rubbed his chin. His face was utterly hairless - smooth as a baby's bottom. Phoebe doubted that he had ever owned a can of shaving cream much less a razor. "Who in your family's the biggest whack job?"
"Whack job?" Phoebe gawked at him in disbelief. They were sitting in the cafeteria on a Thursday afternoon.
"Who is the most disreputable family member?"
"Oh, that would be Uncle Ray, my Aunt Janet's fourth husband. He gambled and did some loan sharking on the side. They're divorced now."
Arnold stared at her with a blank expression. "How many times has your aunt been married?"
"I'm not sure… five or six times not counting live-in lovers." 
"Okay, so let's say Uncle Ray is out in the back yard in late November burning a pile of leaves. The phone rings. It's his bookie with a hot tip on the third race at Suffolk Downs. When your uncle goes off to answer the phone, he leaves the fire unattended. A half hour later, the flame spreads to a nearby lot and burns down somebody's storage shed." Arnold cracked his knuckles one by one and took a sip from a bottle of all-natural peach juice. "All four elements of a tort come into play - duty, breach, injury and causation."
Phoebe considered what he had just told her. Why was it that, when Professor Birnbaum explained things, it all got jumbled up in a meaningless muddle, but add Uncle Raymond, the hapless nitwit, into the mix, and the legal ramifications pulled into clear focus. "His leaving the burning leaves unattended is the proximate cause of the injury," Phoebe volunteered. "It was Uncle Ray’s duty to keep the fire from spreading and by going back in the house he put neighbors at risk. The destruction of the shed and damage to any of their personal possessions represents legal injury."
Arnold ran a tongue over his top lip and the brown eyes flared with sober intensity. "Duty, breach, injury and causation - you just identified all four elements in a tort, which is a civil wrong."

Three weeks later, Professor Birnbaum pulled Phoebe aside. "Regarding that makeup test for the quiz you flunked," the older man paused for dramatic effect, "you scored an eighty-eight."
Phoebe felt a lump expanding in her throat. She knew she aced the test before the ink was dry but still needed to hear it from the instructor. "Thanks."
"You did the work," he deflected the praise back at the girl. "I take no credit for your achievement." 
Professor Birnbaum removed his wire-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. "Arnold's a bit high strung…a tortured soul but a very nice boy. I had a feeling he would help you get back on track." A steady trickle of sleepy-eyed students filtered into the lecture hall, opening loose-leaf binders and perusing texts.
"Tortured soul… what did you mean?"
The man seemed slightly embarrassed, as though his light-hearted banter had inadvertently veered off track. "The most important consideration is that he is helping you with the course work, and that's all that really matters." 

* * * * *

"Do you understand the concept of assault and battery?" 
It was the first week in November. A light dusting of snow peppered the ground, a premonition of things to come. They were sitting on a bench in the solarium alongside the sports pavilion. A steady stream of jocks lugging equipment bags were heading either in the direction of the Olympics-size swimming pool or the gymnasium.
"Yes, of course. That's pretty straightforward."
Arnold leaned over her and let loose with a fake sneeze. "So sorry!" He wiped the imaginary snot from her forearm. Phoebe pushed him away, shaking her head in disbelief. "What I just did… does it fulfill the basic requirements of assault and battery?"
Phoebe thought a moment. "Assault implies an intentionally threatening word or action. But the sneeze was accidental, involuntary… something beyond control, especially if you had a head cold."
"What about the other part of the legal equation?"
Phoebe cracked a thin smile. "Even that might be called into question, because the act was unintentional and lacking malice."
Arnold's head bobbed up and down energetically. "My cousin, Jacob, is getting bar mitzvahed a week from Saturday. Did you want to come?"
"A bar mitzvah?"
"It's a spiritual rite of passage."  
"Yeah, I guess so," Phoebe replied. After she had a moment to digest the information, she added. "My parents might get the wrong idea if some emaciated white kid with a yarmulke pulled up in front of the house on a Saturday afternoon, so we'll need to make arrangements regarding transportation."

The function was held at Temple Beth David in Sharon. Phoebe met Arnold in the college parking lot and they drove to the temple together. Dressed in a tallit, prayer shawl, with phylacteries draped over his forehead, the young boy read from the torah in Hebrew. When the ceremony was finished, they went into the communal hall where a catered buffet was spread across the entire length of the far wall. In the middle of a smorgasbord of Jewish delicacies - herring, latkes, spicy, meat-stuffed knishes, gefilte fish with red horseradish, kreplah and hummus - was a swan fashioned from chopped liver and a pair of glistening ice sculptures.

Baruch atoh adomoi elohainu melach ha'olum… The rabbi blessed the food. A Klezmer orchestra consisting of a clarinet, cornet, violin, drummer and accordionist were warming up near the parquet dance floor. "Where do you know Arnold from?" Mrs. Finkelstein asked. Like her son, she was a short woman with dark hair and fastidious features.
"We're in the same class together," Phoebe explained. 
She pulled the black girl close and whispered. "Don't get frightened when the band starts up. The music, especially the brisk numbers, can sound a bit schizophrenic to people unfamiliar with the eastern European, traditional melodies." She patted the girl's hand indulgently before running off to greet another family member.

* * * * *

Phoebe didn't see Arnold again until the middle of the following week."I want to tell you about Uncle Nathan, the bar mitzvah boy's father." 
"The heavyset guy with the fancy skullcap?"
"He's a gonif," Arnold replied. "A good-for-nothing crook, who was indicted for fraud and racketeering a couple years back. His double chin and gold-embroidered yarmulke were plastered all over the news media." Reaching into his backpack, Arnold withdrew a newspaper article. The garish headline stretched across the top right-hand corner of the page in bold, sixteen-point print.

Regional Food Inspector arrested on multiple Felony Charges.

Directly below the caption, a rotund man wearing a dark suit was being lead into court by local police. According to the district attorney's office, Uncle Nathan had been shaking down a couple of food distributors selling tainted merchandise. A year into the shakedown, the retailers decided turning state's evidence was the lesser of two evils and ratted him out.
"They got my dopey uncle on videotape," Arnold tittered. The footage broadcast on the Channel Ten Eyewitness News supposedly showed Uncle Nathan standing next to his Cadillac Esplanade with the trunk open, while employees from Edgemont Produce loaded the rear with boxes of vegetables, fruits, sausage and bacon. A separate carton containing an assortment of expensive liquors was carefully positioned in the front of the vehicle on the passenger side. "With longevity and benefits," the normally soft-spoken Arnold was musing out loud, "Uncle Nathan was pulling in well over a hundred grand." 
"So what happened?"
"The schmuck pleaded nolo contendere, and they sent him away to a country-club prison for eighteen months. Then he took early retirement and still got to keep his state pension – proof positive that crime pays."
"One thing I don't understand," Phoebe handed him back the clipping. "If your uncle is so religious, how could he have gotten caught up in anything this sordid?" 
They were in the student cafeteria. On the table Arnold arranged a paper plate with a half-eaten cheeseburger in front of Phoebe. Smoothing a soiled napkin, he placed it to the left together with a plastic fork and knife. "Tell me what you see."
"What's this got to do with Uncle Nathan?" Phoebe protested
"Just answer the question," he demanded tersely.
"A table setting."
Arnold's expression was morose. "As an ultra-orthodox Jew, Uncle Nathan follows the Shulchan Aruch, a system of Jewish beliefs governing every aspect of behavior from prayer to marriage to business and finance." "Shulchan…table, aruch…set," he translated from the Aramaic. "If you faithfully follow the religious precepts, every aspect of daily life will be as harmonious and efficient as a properly set table. Nothing can ever go wrong, unless, of course, havoc is imposed from an external source."
"But if God provides everything needed to live a humble life, where did your uncle go wrong?"
Arnold's features convulsed in a tortured grin. "My saintly uncle suffers from hubris, spiritual pride. He's an incorrigible asshole!" 

* * * * *


Over the next four months, Phoebe and Arnold slogged through duress and undue influence, contractual capacity, discharge of obligations, remedies for breach of contract, sports and entertainment law. In Each instance, he ignored the assigned reading in favor of the here and now. Married and divorced a half-dozen times, even Phoebe's bulky Aunt Janet was dragged into their legal give-and-take - especially when Arnold needed to bolster a point regarding cohabitation, common-law arrangements and breach-of-promise.
Reaching out with a stubby index finger, Arnold tapped the iPod dangling from Phoebe's neck. "Let's say you make an offer to sell me your iPod. You don't really have any intention of getting rid of it. You're just fooling around… acting silly." "Of course, the court has no interest in what might be in the mind of the person making the offer," he continued. "You may be bullshitting me, but if a reasonable person would interpret the joking behavior as a serious offer, that would establish legal intent."
Phoebe considered the possibilities. "So a person could actually be held accountable for something said in jest."
"Yes, absolutely," he shot back. "For example, if I told you that I was madly in love with a young girl and couldn't imagine living apart even though we had infinitely more going against us than otherwise…" 
Several students at adjacent tables looked up. Arnold had begun to cry, making horrible snuffling sounds. Phoebe reached out and grabbed his hand, but he promptly pulled away, lurching to his feet. "Now I've ruined everything." He rushed out of the cafeteria without bothering to separate out his recyclable trash or place his food tray on the conveyor belt leading to the commercial-grade dishwasher. 

Phoebe should have seen it coming. When the orchestra played Sunrise, Sunset  in a lilting, three-four time and Arnold escorted her onto the dance floor, he nuzzled his chin just a tad too comfortably against her neck, draping his arms around the small of her back and pulling the girl gently up against his chest. It was a joyous celebration. Everyone was having a splendid time so why read anything into it? And anyway, by now Phoebe was thoroughly comfortable with Arnold's irreverent humor - his kooky nuttiness and thoroughly weird take on the human condition. The slapstick buffoonery taken aside, he always got the essentials right; he never compromised the serious stuff. What was that errant remark Professor Birnbaum let slip that late October afternoon following the makeup quiz - something about Arnold being high strung…a tortured soul? Now the proverbial cat was up the tree and it was one hell of a tall shaft of old-growth lumber!

* * * * *

"Since his emotional diarrhea, you ain't seen or heard from the Hebe?" Aunt Janet pressed. 
They were at the cosmetics counter of Filene’s Department Store, where a collection of complimentary sprays were arranged on a silver tray. Though she seldom bought any, Aunt Janet liked to sample the designer perfumes and body lotions. "I left messages, but he won't return my calls."
Aunt Janet spritzed her thick neck from a sampler bottle of Paco Rabanne. “When I was your age I was already with child and separated from deadbeat husband number one." 
"I thought I could talk to him between classes, but he never showed up on Friday."
"What nerve!" Aunt Janet pointed indignantly at the perfume she had just sampled. “Eighty-five bucks for less than three, fluid ounces and it don’t even smell all that hot.” She immediately wandered over to a display featuring an Israeli skin rejuvenator manufactured from organic salts and minerals harvested from the Dead Sea and rubbed a small amount of the pearlescent, exfoliating goo on her wrist. "You’re old enough to attend college and make your way in this world. What you wanna do with this guy?"
"I don't know." 
They left Filenes and took the escalator to the lower level. Before leaving the mall, Aunt Janet always made a pass through the pet store. After inspecting all the gerbils, hamsters, turtles, rabbits, exotic fish and kitties, she approached a clerk and asked to take a closer look at a cuddly, chocolaty pug. Overjoyed to be free of the metal cage, the puppy was slobbering all over Aunt Janet's leather jacket. She tickled the pooch under the chin and, nestling in her forearm, the dog promptly rolled over on its backs. "What if your Jewish friend was the color of this dog - would that make a difference?"
"That's a hypothetical statement," Phoebe blustered. "What difference would it make?"
"You conveniently answered my question with a dumb-ass question of your own." Crumpling her hand in a fist, Aunt Janet wrapped the knuckles on Phoebe's forehead rather forcefully. "At least, the lovesick Hebe's in touch with his feelings, which is more than I can say about you." Her aunt rubbed the dog's stomach and kissed it on the snout. For his part the dog, who had been fidgeting like a speed freak on meth, suddenly went limp and fell off to sleep, its preposterously long tongue dangling down the side of its mouth. Aunt Janet petted and talked gibberish to the puppy for the better part of ten minutes before whispering, "Eight hundred freakin' bucks! Who the hell's got that sort of money for some flea-bitten, lop-eared mutt?" She deposited the bewildered pooch in the clerk's arms and sauntered out the door.
Pulling up in front of the main entrance, Aunt Janet sniffed the underside of her right wrist, then the left. “Like this?” She stuck her fleshy forearm up under Phoebe’s nose, revealing a light lavender scent from one of the complimentary perfume testers. 
"Yeah it's subtle… flowery."  
They passed out into the open air. The temperature had dropped to the low fifties but the sun was out and a wintry breeze felt crisp. When they reached the curb, the woman grabbed her niece by the wrist. "Where's this Hebrew kid live?"
"On the east side over by the community center. Sixty-four Jasmine Court."
"Sounds elegant! Let's go pay him a visit."
"You can't be serious?" When there was no immediate reply, Phoebe added, "You don't think that's a bit extreme?"
"Six husbands and an endless parade of live-in lovers," her aunt shot back in a gravelly monotone, "that's extreme!" She sniffed her other wrist. "On second thought, maybe the Paco Rabanne is worth the money." Aunt Janet cocked her head to one side. Her eyes were pellucid, perfectly clear. "Well, what's it gonna be, girlie?" 

Return to Table of Contents


Sextillions of Infidels


Hazel and Jorani broke down twenty miles shy of Bangor with the late November sun fading away to bone-chilling darkness. Half an hour passed before the black, rust bucket of a pickup truck pulled up behind them. A lumpy woman in her mid-forties climbed down from the truck. "Left rear tire's all shot to hell."
Between the bitter cold and sense of helplessness, Hazel felt her brain growing numb. "I tried to change it but the wrench kept slipping."
"Tire iron," the thickset woman corrected. "It's called a tire iron." One of her teeth in the front was chipped which, along with her raggedy clothes, contributed to a slightly derelict appearance. A tangle of scruffy, blond hair was three-quarters washed away by silvery gray. "Your friend sick?" She gestured at the dark-skinned girl curled up in a fetal position on the passenger side and whimpering softly.
"No, Jorani forgot to bring a warm jacket. She's just cold and upset. We drove up here from Boston. My folks have a summer cottage near Bangor."
"It's the middle of the freakin' winter." There was nothing maternal or even modestly sympathetic in the woman's demeanor.
"Yes, I know, but -"
Before Hazel could finish explaining how they traveled north on a lark, a senior year, escape weekend, the woman retreated to the rear of the car and began rummaging in the trunk. 
"That old fleabag," the dark-skinned girl blubbered, "is probably an escaped lunatic from the hospital for the criminally insane. She'll change the tire, steal the car and leave us for dead."
"Shut up, Jorani!"
A minute later the woman returned. "This ain't the right tire iron. Don't hardly fit the lug nuts… probably metric."
"What do you suggest?" 
The woman bit her lips and, scrunching up her face in an impatient frown, stared out into the blackened countryside. "Too late to call for a tow, and no service stations stay open this late at night." She pointed a second time at Jorani who was sobbing quite stridently now, her chest heaving with each intake of breath. "You sure she don't need medical help?"
They were stranded two hundred miles from home in the middle of nowhere on a blustery November night, and Jorani, an insufferable crybaby, was in hysterical meltdown mode. "What do you suggest?" Hazel forced the woman's attention back to the central issue. 
"Name's Marla... I live just up the road a piece. If you don't mind roughing it, I could put you up for the night; we'll get your car situated first thing in the morning."
Somewhere in the thickly wooded, New England countryside an animal let loose with a mournful howl. Another beast a good half mile away picked up the plaintive note, relaying it further up the mountainside. "What was that?" Jorani whimpered.
"Hyenas," Marla replied. "Those feral buggers don't like the cold any better than humans." 
"Hyenas live in Africa," Hazel corrected.
"Geography was never my strong suit." The woman grinned and pointed at Jorani curled up like a tight fist with her soggy face buried in her hands. "Probably just a pack of ravenous, meat-crazed timber wolves." 
In the short time since the sun had set, the temperature plummeted another ten degrees, hovering a few degrees below freezing. Worse yet, a stiff wind curled through the hilly ravine, pushing the wind chill to single digits. Hazel removed the key from the ignition and reached for the door handle. "Yes, if it's not too much inconvenience…" 

Piling in the truck, Marla fired up the engine and drove five miles down the highway, turning off on a dirt road. "That's my place up ahead." Hazel squinted out the dirty-streaked window. A smallish clapboard cabin was nestled between a stand of birch trees.
Unlocking the side door, Marla brought them into the kitchen where the room was a toasty seventy degrees. "I was just getting ready for supper and realized there was no coffee or eggs for the morning so I scooted out for groceries. Otherwise, you might have been stranded through the night."
Cocking her head to one side, Jorani, who had finally regained her composure, sniffed the air."What's that heavenly smell?" 
"Curried chicken in white wine sauce. It's my specialty." Shuffling over to a Crockpot resting on the counter, Marla lifted the lid. "If you girls haven't already eaten, you're more than welcome to join me."
"We haven't had a bite to eat since leaving Boston," Jorani blurted.
Hazel flashed her friend a dirty look. "You've already done so much for us, and it's not like you were expecting company."
"Actually, I was expecting company," Marla corrected, "but that's none of your concern." Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. A stocky man with a curly beard and red plaid jacket was standing out on the front stoop. Rather than invite him in, Marla stepped outside, closing the door behind her. They could hear the bearded man mounting a furious protest, but after five minutes the woman returned and bolted the door behind her. "Let's eat!"


In the living room, a table had been set with a linen tablecloth, salad bowls, a fresh loaf of sourdough bread and bottle of apple cider. "Spread a bed of basmati on your plates," Marla suggested, indicating a pot of aromatic rice, "and ladle the curried chicken over it." She lit a pair of scented candles. "The fruit, "she gestured at a bowl of pineapple chucks, "goes on top of the curry sauce."
"What are the greens?" Jorani asked.
"Minced scallions. I throw everything in - bulbs and all."
"You invited your boyfriend for dinner," Hazel said guiltily, "and we traded places, so to speak… put him out in the cold."
Marla made a dismissive gesture. "There's an all-night diner just up the road… caters to truckers, prostitutes, local riffraff and insomniacs. Duane will grab a bite there."
He might fill his gut, but he certainly wasn't going to enjoy a fancy sit-down meal like this! If the scented candles were any indication, Hazel mused, the girls had put the kibosh on a romantic soiree. Not that Marla seemed to care. Twenty minutes later, after the curry was finished, she threw another log in the wood-burning stove and served a crumb cake with mocha-flavored coffee.
"You see how things turn out." On a full stomach, Jorani's self-possession had miraculously returned. "One minute we're stranded, half-frozen in the middle of nowhere, and now this!"
"Jorani," Marla broke off a section of the cake and waved it in the air. "What sort of name is that?"
"Cambodian… it means radiant jewel."
"You weren't looking so radiant," Hazel quipped, "when the car broke down." She turned her attention back to the older woman. "She's an instigator,"
"How's that?"
"Jorani was born here, but her parents immigrated from a farming hamlet where there was a very large, extended family. When they came to America, they bought a two-decker tenement in Attleboro and the whole clan - aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews - moved in together."
"When my brother wanted to take a girlfriend to the movies last summer," Jorani interjected. "They send my aunt and two nephews as chaperones."
Marla freshened their coffee. "The trip north was Jorani's idea," Hazel explained. "I wasn't so keen about traveling north this late in the season, but she wanted to get away, even if just for a night, to see what it would be like to be out from under her parents' thumb." 


Ten minutes later, a muted, rhythmic sound was emanating from the far corner of the room where Jorani had curled up on the couch sound asleep. "Looks like your friend's had a little too much excitement for one day."
"We loused up your evening," Hazel repeated.
"I like it better," Marla replied cryptically, "when things don't necessarily go according to plan. With the comforting warmth from the stove, her cheeks had taken on a ruddy glow; a sedentary easiness settled over the woman, who didn't look nearly as hardscrabble or washed-out. "The past month or so, I've sort of been in a holding pattern," she confided. "I was tending bar at a lounge in Old Orchard Beach, but I got to drinking as much as I was serving some nights so I quit work." She held a hand straight out in front of her and smiled self-consciously as the stubby fingers fluttered ever so gently before the tremors melted away. "Stopped drinking six weeks ago. Cold turkey."
"You're okay?"
"I've my moments, but managed to avoid the booze." Marla gestured at the figure curled up on the couch. "Your friend's got one hell of an appetite."
Jorani devoured three helpings of the chicken curry and polished off what little was left of the fluffy rice. "Her parents are over-protective," Hazel explained, "And she's suffers from anxieties." "Jorani says her relatives suck all the oxygen out of the air with their pettiness and old-fashioned beliefs."
"And your folks, what are they like?"
"My situation is quite the opposite." Hazel ran a poised finger around the rim of her coffee cup. A taut sourness nestled in the corners of her mouth as she collected her thoughts. "My parents are getting divorced" 
"When did you learn this?"
"Middle of the week." A grandfather clock near the bay window struck eleven o'clock. "My father was having an affair with a coworker. Rather than repair the marriage, my mother returned the favor in kind."
An orange tabby sleeping near the stove awoke. The cat stretched, splaying its front paws. Marla fed the cat and they watched it eat in silence. When the cat was done, it hovered by the door, the plumed tail arched over its back. Marla cracked the door open and the cat scooted out into the cold.
 "I still don't really understand how everything works," Hazel spoke tentatively. "You know, becoming grownup,… life in general."
"Truth be told," Marla spoke harshly, her voice tinged with sardonic humor, "nobody ever grows up. That's just malarkey - a common misconception. You bumble along and, if you don't step on too many toes, eventually, things just fall into place.” 
Marla disappeared into the back of the cottage. After rummaging about, she returned with a sleeping bag, blanket and pillows. Lifting Jorani's head she slipped the pillow under her cheek and draped the blanket over her shoulders. The plump girl never stirred. "Maybe when Jorani gets home, she'll realize that having a truckload of incestuous kin running about is more blessing than inconvenience." "They had that horrible war over there what with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge."
"Where did you learn about that?"
"Being poor don't make you stupid." Marla spoke with just enough self-deprecating humor to blunt the sarcasm. 
"She thinks she's ugly," Hazel murmured. "She tells me so every five minutes."
"And why is that."
"Because of her weight."
"She's not that fat… nothing she couldn't get a handle on with diet."
"And her nose. She wants a perky little button nose like Barbie. Her nostrils are too wide… fleshy."
"So are mine, if you hadn't noticed."
"Yeah, but you're Caucasian. She thinks all Orientals are ugly."
"Poor kid!" She handed Hazel the sleeping bag and other pillow. "You can sleep on the rug. It's not nearly as comfortable as the couch but plenty warm."
Yes, this would do just fine - a sublimely perfect end to what might have been a catastrophic evening. Collecting the coffee mugs, her hostess shuffled into the kitchen and began rinsing out the last few dishes, while Hazel spread the sleeping bag on the floor. Marla was humming to herself in the kitchen, a James Taylor song from the late sixties, but then the impromptu music died away and the woman began speaking in a low-keyed, meditative monologue.
"What was that?" Hazel approached and stood in the doorway. 
Marla was storing cutlery in the drawer. "I was saying how up here in the boondocks the neighbors don't give a rat's ass about proper etiquette. They'll stop by any time day or night to chew the fat or just to make sure you're doing okay."
"Morris, he's a good one for that," Marla continued in rambling fashion. Only now did Hazel notice the wispy grin curling up the side of the older woman's mouth. "He just shows up in the middle of the night unannounced with no clear-cut agenda." The woman gestured with a flick of her head at the window over the sink. Thirty feet away in the back yard stood a full-grown, bull moose. A full moon in a cloudless sky threw down just enough light to reveal the six-foot rack of antlers and grizzled, elongated muzzle.
"Morris forages vegetation from a pond on the far side of the hill and wanders over here most nights after supper." She dried the pot that she used to steam the rice, placing it on a shelf in one of the lower cabinets. 
Ten Minutes later, there was a scratching at the back door and Marla let the cat back in for the night. Killing the lights, she went into the bedroom and changed into pajamas. "Do you like poetry?" Hazel could see the woman's bulky figure in shadowy silhouette. The countryside had gone completely silent locked in winter's icy grip.
"I guess so." Hazel wasn't much of a reader. A steady diet of Shakespeare, Beowulf and Chaucer through middle school had pretty much destroyed her love of literature.
"I was never big on the modern poets," Marla rambled on. "Merrill, Ashcroft, Berryman… they all left me flat. I could never make much sense of their mindless prattle. That ain't poetry, it's just literary mush." The woman fell silent and, as a guest in the home, Hazel wasn't sure whether she was obliged to add something to further the conversation. "Now Robert Frost - there was a man with talent and a keen sense of the human predicament."
"We studied The Road Not Taken in school last year," Hazel offered.
"And Theodore Roethke - now there was another first class poet." Marla, who was resting on the arm of the sofa, bent over and adjusted the blanket up around Jorani's shoulders. The girl moaned - more like a deep sigh of contentment - shifting over on her side away from the conversation. "Did you know his family owned a greenhouse and nursery business?"
"I wasn't aware of that." Hazel had no idea who Theodore Roethke was. The girl was sleepy and could only just barely follow the meandering thread of Marla's random musings.
"Well anyway, many of the themes in his poems were dredged up from his youth working with the plants in the greenhouse, gathering moss for cemetery baskets, growing plants from seed, that sort of earthy reminiscence."
Hazel yawned. "That's so very sweet!" Her eyes were closed, the breath coming in shallow puffs. In the corner near the heater, the cat was cleaning itself, settling in for the night.
"A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels," her host reflected.
"How's that?" The strange fragment momentarily jolted Hazel back to consciousness.
"It's a fragment of a Whitman poem," Marla clarified. "Probably from Leaves of Grass, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. All that talk about Roethke reminded me of it." Marla rose and drifted away in the direction of her bedroom. "Doesn't matter all that much, if we're talking mice, moose, or Cambodian girls with doting parents and eating disorders - they're all equally precious in their own right." 
Finished with her physical hygiene, the tabby rested her head on her paws. "What about me?" Hazel blustered. 
"Ditto," Marla added curtly, "on the infidels!"


In the morning, Hazel awoke to the sound of a cell phone twittering. In the bedroom, Marla was alternately talking softly and laughing at some raunchy humor. She rolled over in the sleeping bag. Jorani was still dead to the world. A rooster began crowing. A half hour passed and Marla, dressed in flannel PJ's, came into the room. "Car's fixed."
"What?"
"Duane has one of those T-shaped tire irons with multiple socket settings. He stripped the flat tire earlier this morning and replaced it with the spare. Even ran the flat down to the garage where they cemented a rubber plug in the puncture hole." Jorani was wide awake now and sitting up on the couch. "A roofing nail… that's what caused the entire hullabaloo. A stupid, half-inch roofing nail." Marla drifted toward the kitchen. "I'm fixing breakfast. Nothing fancy just buckwheat pancakes and coffee, if you girls care to join me."
"What’s buckwheat?" Jorani whispered.
"A special flower mixed with buttermilk." Hazel told her about Morris.
"A wild moose and you couldn't be bothered to wake me!"
"You were snoring… embarrassingly loud." Hazel threw a bucket of cold water on her indignation. "But more to the point, the car's fixed and everything is back to normal."
Well, not exactly. My parents are getting divorced and yours will manacle you to the radiator in the tenement basement when they find out what we did this weekend. 
"We ought to leave money for the tire," Jorani said reaching for her wallet.
"That's already been settled," Marla clarified. She cracked an egg in a bowl of flour moistened with milk and a tablespoon of vegetable oil, mixing the ingredients with a metal whisk.  "Duane says he'll take payment in free meals over the next month along with certain sexual gratuities to be named at a later date."


At eleven-thirty after retrieving the patched tire, the girls were back on the road headed south. "You realize something very special happened back there?"
"I may be a crybaby, but I'm not an idiot," the Asian girl replied softly. 
"At breakfast you ate three helpings of flapjacks." 
"I was hungry."
"You were hungry last night," Hazel corrected. "Today you were just a glutton."
Jorani smirked and licked her lips. "They were so good!" Marla peppered the pancake batter with wild blueberries picked throughout the summer from bushes in back of the cottage. The fruit was packed away in cellophane bags in the freezer and rationed as special treats during the frigid winter months. An hour later as they came up on the Portland exit, Jorani cleared her throat. "There's a rest area with a Dunkin' Donuts three miles down from here."
"How would you know??"
"I noticed it on the way up."
Hazel gawked at her friend. "It was pitch-dark when we passed through this section of highway last night, coming from the opposite direction."
"I saw it all the same. Maybe we could…"
"Yes, it's a long ride home," Hazel depressed her directional and shifted over to the far right-hand lane, "and there's no reason why we can't take a brief break." 

Once seated in the restaurant, Hazel blurted, "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."
"Sex what?"
"It's from a Whitman poem. With her free hand, Hazel caressed her friend's face. "Your Cambodian nose is just fine." 
"What's my stupid nose got to do with a mouse or whatever you're prattling about?"
"Marla says not to worry because we're all damaged goods."
"She said that?"
Hazel sipped at her cinnamon cappuccino. "Well, not exactly, but some sweetheart of a guy is gonna go bonkers over Jorani, the radiant jewel, one of these days, and it will be sort of like Duane and Marla." 
"That weird Whitman poem," Jorani's eyes clouded over. "Say it again." Hazel repeated the verse. "Are you going to finish that apple cheese Danish?" Jorani indicated a half-eaten pastry that her friend had pushed to one side with the soiled napkins."
"Why do you ask?"
"No reason, in particular."

Return to Table of Contents


Six Catholics and an Atheist


Kirsten Hazelton, the discharge planner at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, was sitting alone in a rear pew of the prayer chapel, when Dr. Wong entered and slid down on the polyurethane oak next to her. “Strange place for a patient conference,” the osteopath noted. With his round, boyish face the stocky, middle-aged man was old enough to be her father. 
“The chapel was closer to the wards than my office.” She didn’t bother to state the obvious, which was that, except for a few diehard Catholics, hospital staff seldom ever visited the somber prayer room. "Mrs. Edwards is leaving us tomorrow." The elderly woman had tripped over a frayed rug two weeks earlier and fractured a hip. Surgery was uneventful, the patient already up and about with the aid of a walker.
"She's being released to rehab for a few weeks before going home," the doctor confirmed.
"Yes, well that was the original plan." Kirsten was staring at a picture of the Holy Mother alongside a gold crucifix that adorned the altar. "Her son, Brandon, apparently wants the woman placed in a nursing home so he can put the house in the hands of a real estate broker."
Dr. Wong listened impassively, staring at a pile of missals and hymnals arrayed on a rack near the holy water. "What does the patient want?"
"To return home, naturally. Mrs. Edwards is quite upset."
The osteopath rubbed his chin. "Have you thought about asking Father McNulty to intercede… plead her case with the family?"
Kirsten's features cycled through a series of unflattering contortions. In his later sixties, Father Evan McNulty was a hellfire and brimstone ideologue with no social graces to speak of. The skinny cleric suffered from rosacea - the cheeks, nose, chin and eyelids mottled with spider-like blood vessels and chronic eruptions. He much preferred the challenge of defeating evil in the abstract to the mundane banalities of parish life. "Father McNulty would be my last choice."
"Yes, I know what you mean." The doctor leaned back in the pew extending his legs beneath the velour kneeler. "Mrs. Edwards is only in her seventies. Once the bone mends, that woman's got another decade of active years ahead of her."
"Which is just my point: she doesn't belong cooped up in some drab, geriatric facility playing bingo and trying to make small talk with residents who can’t recall what day of the week it is." 
Dr. Wong smiled and patted her hand reassuringly. "I'll drop by Mrs. Edwards' room later today and make sure she doesn't get bullied into making a bad choice." The older man seemed momentarily lost in some private reverie. "You get solace from your faith?"
"Yes, of course. Don't you?"
"I'm an atheist."
Kirsten burst into a fit of laughter, which quickly ebbed away to nothing when she realized that the physician was not responding in kind. "You're serious?" He shook his head. "But you work at a Catholic hospital."
"What difference does that make? Doctor Shapiro is orthodox Jewish and the chief of oncology; Dr. Watanabe, is a practicing Buddhist. Being godless doesn't imply a lack of morals." He rose to his feet. "Maybe I better speak with Mrs. Edwards before Brandon badgers her into giving up her independence." 


The following day Kirsten ran into Dr. Wong eating lunch in the hospital cafeteria. No sooner had she sat down then the physician's cell phone twittered. He spoke briefly and hung up. "My daughters are coming home for the holidays, and my wife is already frantic about the preparations. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
"Keeping my options open," Kirsten replied evasively. She had been dating an intern since the summer, but the relationship fell apart when the doctor got offered a position at hospital in Connecticut. Her parents didn't know about the breakup and the notion of going home alone was terribly unappealing. 
Truth be told, Kirsten was relieved Jason had taken the new job and moved away. The man had his priorities - a lucrative medical practice and rapacious sex - mapped out from the day they met. Her boyfriend used the bedroom to unwind, as a diversion from the strain of twelve-hour shifts and academic studies. Kirsten somehow didn't see that ever changing. For the young medic, romance was a novelty. Away from the emergency room, he had few hobbies or outside interests. What Kirsten needed was a younger version of Dr. Wong - not that she was the least bit attracted to the roly-poly physician, but still, at least he golfed on weekends, took his youngest daughter to figure skating lessons at the Lynch Arena in Pawtucket and baked homemade breads. Perhaps a brief ad in the personals section of the local paper might jump-start a new romance, get Kirsten's pitiful social life back on track:

Thirty-something female looking to meet devout Catholic with no major vices, social diseases, sexual aberrations, fetishes or incurable neurosis. Must be family-oriented, compassionate, love children and not be married to the workplace. Smokers need not apply.


"I spoke with Brandon Edwards," Dr. Wong said, interrupting Kirsten's private reveries, "and informed him that ultimately his mother should choose what's in her best interest… even waved a Patient's-Bill-of-Rights form under his nose." 
A few years back, Kirsten had used a similar ploy with another dysfunctional family. It was nothing more than a bluff, a hollow show of bravura. "And what was his response?"
"Brandon promised to honor his mother's wishes." He leaned across the table and tapped Kirsten's forearm. "Problem is, I don't trust that guy. He gives me the creeps."
Kirsten briefly met the son, who had only visited his mother twice in all the time she was recuperating at the hospital. The day of his mother's surgery, Brandon never even bothered to make an appearance and didn't resurface until a week later. "And do you believe that malarkey about honoring his mother's wishes?"
"No, not really, but there's only so much we can do."
Kirsten agreed wholeheartedly with the doctor's assessment of Mr. Edwards. The fellow had a distracted, morose manner, responding to the discharge planner's light banter with monosyllables. Kirsten slit open a packet of creamy poppy seed dressing and drizzled it over her garden salad. "I've been researching atheism," she deflected the conversation.
The doctor looked up with mild surprise then grinned good-naturedly. "And what have you discovered?"
"A meager two per cent of the world's population identify themselves as godless."
"Yes," Dr. Wong replied, "that's absolutely true, but in the Scandinavian countries, those numbers are inverted." His tone was more instructive than argumentative. "In Japan upwards of sixty-five per cent don't believe in God at all and in the Nordic countries such as Sweden the figure climbs to eighty-five - just a few percentage points lower in Denmark, Norway and Finland."
Kirsten stumbled across similar statistics when she Googled the topic on the internet. Among the intelligentsia, belief in personal gods or a heavenly afterlife were at an all-time low, the implication being that more educated and cultured individuals felt no compelling need to fill the churches. Similar findings had been duplicated in studies dating back to the late nineteen twenties, establishing an inverse correlation between IQ and religiosity. "In the U.S., those communities with the highest percentages of atheists tend to have the lowest murder rates," Dr. Wong mused, "while in rural communities where people are the most religious, violent homicides are considerably higher than average."
Kirsten speared a cucumber wedge and raised it to her lips. She had no desire to debate the issue. Dr. Wong’s logic was rock solid, any opposing position indefensible. "Less than one per cent of the prison population is made up of non-believers while atheists are historically more tolerant toward women and homosexuals. We also beat our children less often and tend to donate more to charitable causes."
"Ouch!" Kirsten raised her hands in an attitude of capitulation. "Okay, I'm throwing in the towel!"
"No, please don’t!” “Unlike that gasbag, Father McNulty, you're one of the good Catholics. The church needs you more than we do," he parried the humor like a tennis ball across a sagging net. "I just wanted to make the point that we non-believers aren't ogres."



Later that night Kirsten babysat her nephew, Wilbur. Her sister, Alice, had a PTO meeting and her husband was away on business. 
"Tell me a bedtime story," the boy insisted as she was settling him under the covers.
"What would you like to hear?" Kirsten drifted over to a bookshelf crammed with illustrated offerings - Junie B. Jones, Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Richard Scary series and mishmash of Disney picture books. 
"No, I don't want any of those. Make one up."
"Off the top of my head?" Kirsten settled into the rocking chair alongside the single bed and sat thinking for the longest time.
"I like the crazy ones," Wilbur insisted. Over the past year, as her personal life caromed further and further out of control, Kirsten's impromptu stories had become equally offbeat and bizarre. 


Penrod and Sarah Smithers lived all by themselves. Totally, completely and utterly alone. And that’s the way they liked it. Penrod was twelve years old; Sarah turned eight on June 6th. It was a smallish but very pleasant birthday party. Just Penrod, Sarah and their pygmy goat.
"What was the goat's name?" Wilbur demanded.
"Lambchop."
Exactly a year, three months and twelve days earlier, their parents decided to vacation in Africa. The Smithers wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in northeast Tanzania and shoot a few elephants, crocodiles and water buffalo. It never occurred to them that certain African animals might be endangered or that Penrod and Sarah were ‘endangered’ in a different sort of way.
There are exactly thirty-five TV dinners in the freezer,” Mrs. Smithers counseled as she piled the luggage into the trunk of the Volvo. The Smithers always bought Volvos. They were very safe and reliable autos and, when it came to family transportation, you didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. “The TV dinners should last a while, and we put some extra money in the dresser drawer under your father’s silk underwear. But that’s only for emergencies.
Mr. Smithers wagged a finger under his son’s nose. “Don’t squander the money,” he counseled. “If you get sick and tired of TV dinners and want a pepperoni pizza,” Mrs. Smithers added, “that’s perfectly OK.” The parents were only suppose to be gone a week. How many water buffalo can a person shoot? And how many dumb snow-covered mountains can you climb before the stupendous, African safari vacation becomes boring with a capitol B? 

"What's a Papist, Auntie Kirsten?" Wilbur blurted.
Kirsten stared at the child in disbelief. "Why do you ask?"
Rolling over on his stomach momentarily, he punched the pillow, propping it up against the headboard. "My daddy calls you the Papist,… the goody two-shoes Papist, so I was wondering…"
Kirsten felt her cheeks flush. She knew her brother-in-law had no use for religion - not that he held any sophisticated, teleological convictions similar to Dr. Wong's - but this was too much!. "A Papist is a Catholic, but it's not a particularly nice term." "Do you attend church on Sundays?"
"Can't"
"Why not?"
"Interferes with soccer practice." The boy wiggled his rump under the covers. "You can continue with the story now."

Well, a week passed and then a month. The folks sent post postcards and tons of colorful pictures. One showed Mr. Smithers sitting on top of an elephant. The elephant was lying on its side with its mouth open and a big red tongue hanging out. Its eyes were open but the lumpy beast didn’t seem to be focusing on anything in particular.
“That’s one saaaad looking elephant,” Sarah said, drawing out the vowel for dramatic effect. “Do you think it’s just sleeping?”
Penrod studied the picture for the longest time. He stared at the huge gun his father slung over his shoulder and the crisscrossed cartridge belts full of hollow-point bullets draped around his neck. “Sleeping,” Sarah's brother confirmed. “Definitely taking a mid-morning snooze.”In another picture the parents were standing at the top of a mountain looking down through hazy clouds - yes, the clouds were below them - at a huge African plain.
Well, the Smithers were having such great fun they simply forgot to come home. They sent pictures and flowery postcards but that was pretty much it. But Penrod and Sarah didn’t mind. They grew comfortable in their parentless solitude. They looked after each other, which is what brothers and sisters are supposed to do. When one of the super-duper, nosey neighbors said something like, “Haven’t seen your folks around lately,” Sarah would reply, “Oh they're very busy people.” The children never lied. That would be wrong. They omitted a few minor details but never ever told a lie. 
Now you might think that a couple of children abandoned by their selfish, good-for-nothing parents would be scared to death, but not Penrod and Sarah Smithers. Heck no! From the day their parents waltz out the door on their glorious African safari, Penrod had a plan. “I’ll cook and you clean," he told his sister. “We’ll be just fine. Who needs parents anyway? They just boss you around and act more irresponsible than a bunch of dopey kids.”
 “We’ll be just fine,” Penrod repeated with a confident wave of his hand. “This is the beginning of an awesome, stupendous, splendiferous adventure.”
“Splennndiferous,” Sarah repeated in a soon-to-be-fourth-grade, singsongy voice.


A gurgling snore cut the narrative short. Wilbur was sound asleep. Kirsten shut the light off, drifted into the kitchen and fixed herself a cup of coffee. An hour later she recognize the purr of her sister's Honda CRV as the car crawled up the driveway.

"How was Willy?" Alice slipped off her high heels. 
"He's never any problem." Kirsten was trying to decide whether to confront her sister with her husband’s crassness. "Do you know any atheists?" 
. "No, why do you ask?" She teased a pearl drop earrings from a fleshy lobe then withdrew its mate
"There's a well-respected doctor over at the hospital who doesn't believe in God."
"I'm not surprised," Alice countered. "Modern life has become too hectic for a lot of people. Organized religion’s optional,... a luxury."
"Not for us goody two-shoes Papists," Kirsten muttered.
"What was that?" Alice loosened the buttons on her cuffs. "I didn't catch that last remark.


Tuesday morning on the way to work, Kirsten swung by the Braintree Rehabilitation Center. "I'm looking for Dorothy Edwards."
"Second floor, room twenty-eight," the receptionist replied.
Kirsten rode the elevator up one flight and found the white-haired woman sitting by herself in the solarium. She greeted Kirsten warmly but looked haggard. "There's been a change of plans." She pulled the hospital-issue bathrobe up around her wrinkled throat. "I'm transferring to Briarcrest Nursing Home next Tuesday."
Kirsten felt her brain grow numb. "But I thought - "
"My son, Brandon feels it's for the best."
The fight had gone out of her. A vibrant women, who, after her husband died, attended college and raised three children had been reduced to disposable chattel. "What do you want, Dorothy?"
"I'm an old woman."
"Your son bullied you into changing your mind, didn't he?"
"My best years are behind me." Her voice cracked but, through an effort of will, the widow maintained a semblance of composure. "It's time to move on."

My best years are behind me. It's time to move on. Mrs. Edwards was talking a cryptic, Morse code. Her son, Brandon, in all likelihood, had gotten himself into a financial mess and needed to sell off his mother's estate in order to set his own pathetic house in order. No matter that Mrs. Edwards lived out her final years sharing a sardine-can-of-a-room with mental defectives who talked gibberish and crapped the bed every five minutes! Brandon required financial liquidity. He didn't have a pot to piss in and his mother's property represented a disposable asset. And the worthless bastard was probably a practicing Catholic!


Around midday, Kirsten slipped out of her office and visited the hospital chapel. The room smelled faintly of incense. Except for a handful of votive candles and a solitary row of track lighting near the front, the room was dark and utterly still. She prayed to the Holy Mother asking her to watch over Mrs. Edwards - to make sure that the elderly woman got a reasonably spacious room with a scenic view plus a roommate equally alert and pleasant. Then she prayed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that He help her make sense of the ludicrous farce that was her personal life. For good measure, Kirsten followed the petitions with a dozen Hail Marys. 
Slouching down in the pew, she closed her eyes. Somewhere back in her college years Kirsten stumbled across a silly creation myth. According to the Blackfoot Indians, the Spider God fashioned the universe. Everything worked out fine except for the humans – even among native Americans, a handful of Brandon Edwards types slipped through the cracks, mucking things up – and so the Spider God flew into a rage. Throwing down fireballs, he incinerating the planet and started over from scratch. But the troublemakers and shady characters got the upper hand and, a second time, the Spider God put the match to his organic masterpiece. By the fourth or fifth try, he finally despaired. “Let the crazy earthlings works things out on their own terms.” The Spider God was far too busy with other celestial tasks to worry about Brandon Edwards finessing his mother out of her life savings. Properly understood, the Blackfoot deity was neither unsympathetic nor indifferent to human misery. It wasn’t so much a flawed theology but human pathology that gummed up the works. As she was rising to her feet, the door opened, and Father McNulty shuffled into the prayer chapel.
"Miss Hazelton," the priest greeted her with an unctuous smile, "what brings a young professional here so early in the day?" 
"Do you remember Mrs. Edwards?"
"The woman with the broken hip."
"Her son is putting her into a nursing home." Her tone was leaden.
The priest removed his glasses and rubbed the side of his thin nose. The rosacea was particular bad today, the cheeks streaked with dark purple."Yes, well, at her age,…" the priest began philosophically but never bothered to finish the thought.
"At her age what?" When there was no immediate response, Kirsten rose from the pew, lunged forward and stuck her head up under the priest's mottled chin. "You're an asshole, Father McNulty." The man staggered backwards. "Has a disgruntled parishioner ever told you such a thing or do you assume that, as God's divine emissary, everything you say or do is above reproach?"
If he was taken aback by the outburst, it didn’t take the priest long to regain his composure. "This is the house of the Lord. Leave the chapel and don't return until you have properly atoned for this disgraceful behavior." 
"Yes, I'll leave," She retreated several steps, "but that changes nothing. You're still an insufferable asshole."


"I ran into Father McNulty.” Dr. Wong tracked down a despondent Kirsten Hazelton in the solarium drying her puffy eyes. He said you became irrational, foulmouthed,… emotionally unhinged." He shared the observation with a flippant smile, implying that he didn't put much credence in the priest's account. "By his reckoning, you belong on a locked ward over at the Institute of Mental Health." The Institute of Mental Health was where the most incorrigible mental defectives were warehoused once less drastic resources had been exhausted. 
"We had a difference of opinion," Kirsten sputtered, "and I told the crusty old fart things no one else ever had the nerve to say." 
"Apparently that didn’t go over very well."
Kirsten grinned weakly. She was grateful Dr. Wong hadn't demand specifics. The soft-spoken physician had done his best to safeguard Mrs. Edward's dignity and would have been devastated to learn the truth about the son's treachery. 
"What are your plans for the holiday?" Dr. Wong asked.
"Not much. I'm just staying home."
"An emotionally unhinged coworker with nowhere to go on Thanksgiving…" Pulling a pen from his pocket, he scribbled an address on a slip of paper. "We live over by the Brandenberg Community Center… seventy-five Aspen Drive. It's a slate blue colonial with white shutters."
"I can't impose -" 
"Show up around noon. I'll tell my wife to set another plate at the table." Dr. Wong hurried off down the corridor.

The next day, Kirsten did her makeup and pulled her hair back in a tight bun which she fixed with an ivory pick. She opted for low heels and a lavender dress that showed her figure to best advantage without being in the least bit provocative. Arriving at the Wong's house, she was ushered into the vestibule by a chubby woman a year or two younger than herself. "So there you are!" Dr. Wong rushed over and, with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, wrapped her in a bear hug. "Here, let me introduce you to my family, and I must warn you from the outset, I'm feeling quite outnumbered."
"In what way?" Any reservations she might have experienced were blown away by the combination of savory aromas and festive faces. 
My wife's family is originally from Nanjing Province on the Yangtze River in southern China."
"Which means nothing to me."
"For centuries, foreign missionaries spread their religions through the coastal routes. A recent census suggested four million, Chinese Catholics, but the true figure is much closer to fourteen." The man gestured at the oriental women gathered together in the next room putting the final, decorative touches on the table. "Four daughters and a wife - all devout Catholics."
Mrs. Wong, a short round woman, looked up and smiled slyly. "Even my son has gone over to the enemy camp, attending Mass over at Saint Andrews!" He led the way into the main dining room as a tall, well-built man in his mid thirties came down the stairs from the upper level. "Joshua, let me introduce you to Miss Hazelton, the discharge planner at our hospital." 
"We'll be eating in a moment," Mrs. Wong announced.
"Perfect timing!" The doctor led Kirsten to a seat alongside his son. "Did I mention that Joshua, like his illustrious father, is an osteopath over at Beth Israel?" He shook his head up and down energetically, as though in answer to his own question. "Well, at any rate, he can bring you up to speed on that." The man retreated to the far end of the room.
Joshua leaned forward and said, "I've been dying to meet you?"
"How's that?"
"My father's always been rather close-lipped. He hardly ever has anything much to say about the people he works with, but he's been singing your praises all morning." He raised a bottle of bottle of wine. "Would you like some?"
Kirsten brought her glass up to the neck of the bottle. "Yes, I don't mind if I do."
At the far end of the table Dr. Wong - the senior Dr. Wong, that is - had just cracked a joke and was laughing his fool head off.

Return to Table of Contents


Small Favors


"Toilet Paper!" a female voice bellowed. "I need a fresh roll, ASAP!" As though struck by a battering ram, the bathroom door flew open. From his vantage point thirty feet away in the den, seventeen year-old Lenny Berman could see the chunky woman hunkered down on the toilet with a copy of the National Inquirer spread discretely across her broad lap. A pair of shapeless, tan panties nestled around her ankles. "Who's out there? Is that the Berman boy?" 
The raucous outburst blindsided Marcie Callahan, caught the girl totally unawares. "Yes, it's Lenny.” Turning beet red, she staggered to her feet. In the hall closet Marcie located a fresh roll of Charmin extra-soft. Her mother unraveled a handful of sheets, positioning the plump roll on the floor next to the bathtub. "Hi, Lenny!" Mrs. Callahan tittered. "You caught me in a compromising situation, if you know what I mean." 
The boy, who wasn't sure about social protocol, nodded. Lenny and Marcie were reviewing notes for an upcoming English test. To Kill a Mockingbird - over the past three weeks the class had slogged through the Harper Lee classic. The test was on Friday. A moment later, Marcie returned, her eyes fogged over with tears. "Do Jewish mothers defecate with the bathroom door wide open?"
"It wasn't that bad," Lenny affected a mollifying tone. Actually it was that bad and worse. The woman clearly had no sense of privacy or personal boundaries. Mrs. Callahan wore every vapid emotion on her sleeve like a badge of honor. Privacy was a four letter word with every bit of family business, gossip, scandal and tittle-tattle in the public domain. Scrunched together in a modest, three-bedroom cape far too small for a family with six siblings, the Callahan clan subsisted like bees in an overcrowded hive. The children, even the oldest, were doubled up in bunk beds and the line outside the bathroom at seven-thirty in the morning stretched down the hallway with considerable squabbling and discontent especially from the younger set. 
"Since I was a toddler," Marcie seethed, "this is the way my parents act. They run around the house in their freakin' underwear and leave the bathroom door wide open; they belch and fart and do all sorts of gross and disgusting things." She whipped around and stuck her soggy face up under his chin. "Do you know what it's like living in a house like this?" 
Lenny was getting frightened. Shutting the door so no one would hear, he put a hand on her arm but she sloughed it off. It's like those goddamn illiterate, dirt farmers in the Harper Lee novel. The Ewell clan… Mayella and Bob. Those inbred, hillbilly morons who don't have a stitch of class or culture or brains or social graces - that's my family, if you care to know. So what do you say to that, huh?" Marcie tilted her pretty-ugly, tear-stained face at a sharp angle. "What do you say to that, Lenny Berman?" 
Lenny gawked at the maudlin mess that was his best friend since middle school. She had dirty blond hair cut short, a broad fleshy nose and eyes the color of the Atlantic Ocean on a staggeringly sunny day in late August as viewed from the pearly sand dunes of Cape Cod's Horseneck Beach. Slipping an arm around her waist, he kissed her on the mouth. Nothing tentative, he kissed her long and hard. "I don't care about your debauched family. I’m crazy about you."
It took the better part of a minute for the girl to catch her breath. "What'd you just say?"
"It doesn't need repeating," Lenny muttered. "You heard me right the first time." He kissed her a second time even more insistently. When the kiss was done, Marcie flopped down on the sofa. 
Lenny touched the side of her face with his fingertips. "I want you for my girlfriend."
Marcie considered the request. "Yes, I'll be your girlfriend, sweetheart, sex slave… anything you want, but I need a small favor and it's a bit complicated." 
After she explained herself, Lenny said, "Okay, that’s no problem. What about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird?"
"It's been almost five minutes," Marcie observed. "I'm sure my lovely mother is finished moving her bowels; we should be able to study without further distractions."


Yes, I'll be your girlfriend, sweetheart, sex slave… anything you want, but I need a small favor. After the flurry of kisses, Marcie Callahan told Lenny that she desperately needed to understand how 'normal' families functioned. Lenny tried to explain that all families were dysfunctional, but she wouldn't hear it. The Jewish holidays were the following week. She wanted to spend time with a family that neither belched nor farted, people who didn't have to tie a string around their index finger in order to remember not to do gross, lewd and disgusting things when they crawled out of their simian cave each morning.   
Later that night after supper, Lenny approached his mother as she was clearing the table. "There's this girl from school, Marcie Callahan."
Lenny's sister, Elsie, wandered into the room. Dark-haired with a pear-shaped physique and wide, mannish jaw, she was a year younger. "Yes, a girl from school," Mrs. Berman repeated absently.
"Could bring her to Passover Seder?"
"Who is this girl?"
"Marcie Callahan… she's in my English class."
"A frumpy blonde with a family of knuckle-dragging buffoons right out of the stone age," Elsie interjected. "The father stops by here at least once a week."
"How's that?" Mrs. Berman placed a chafing dish in the sudsy sink and turned to face her daughter.
"Mr. Callahan drives the town garbage truck," Elsie elucidated. "An older brother got suspended for bringing liquor to a high school football game last year."
Lenny cringed. This was vintage Elsie. Given the choice to say something nice or run a serrated bread knife across Marcie Callahan's guileless throat, she always opted for the latter. "Marcie gets good grades and is president of the French club."
Elsie made an ungracious, snorting sound through her beaky nose. "Better hide the silverware and anything else of value."
"A disadvantaged child joining us for the holidays," Mrs. Berman weighed the request. “Consider it a mitzvah, an act of charity."  
"She's not disadvantaged, at least not in the way you're thinking."
"If she earns good grades," Mrs. Berman continued, "the girl shouldn't squander her potential. She needs to expose herself to enlightened values."
"Expose herself?" Elsie erupted in another fit of shrill laughter. "Such an interesting choice of words!"
Mrs. Berman began scrubbing the chafing dish with a dishrag. "Just have Marcie's mother call to confirm and I'll set another place at the Passover table."


Just have Marcie’s mother call… Would Mrs. Callahan be calling on a cell phone from her strategic vantage point in the bathroom, door ajar and latest edition of the scandal sheet spread across her mountainous thighs? Later that night after her shower, Elsie padded into her brother's bedroom. Her fresh-washed hair was wrapped turban-style in a crimson towel. "The Callahans… they're trailer park trash, the whole lot of them. They got no class, no pedigree."
"Dogs have pedigree," Lenny corrected. He was lying on top of the sheets reading near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird where townsfolk, intent on lynching the black man, Tom Robinson, converge on the jail.
"You damn well know what I mean," Elsie hissed. "Her freakin' father drives a garbage truck. Why are you hanging around with the likes of her?" Lenny stared at his sister. Elsie was the sum total of everything Lenny detested in a person and it was his great misfortune that, by some sardonic quirk of fate, she was his sibling. "Can you keep a secret?" Elsie lowered her voice several decibels. She snugged the towel wrap more firmly on her wet hair. ""Joel' and Miriam are getting divorced."
"What?" Joel was their older brother. After completing his residency at medical college, he married Miriam Rabinowitz, an intern and was living in Upstate New York. 
"They been fighting like lunatics. The marriage is over, kaput… fini la comédie.” 
"They've been together less than a year!"
"Well, the novelty wore off, and now they hate each other's crummy guts. There was a horrible fight and Joel gave her a black eye. The police came and removed him from the condo. Dad had to send money so Joel could rent a room at the local motel until he finds more permanent lodgings."
"When did he hit her?"
"I dunno. Over a month ago… maybe two. What's the difference?"
"How come nobody told me?" Lenny ignored the question.
"Because you're an asshole who invites trailer park trash to the Jewish holidays, that's why." 
"They're not coming for Passover?"
"Only Joel. The folks will make up some tawdry excuse… say that Miriam's sick with a sinus infection or that she flew to India to visit the Dali Lama or some other mindless nonsense. Whatever you do, don't mention anything about the missing sister-in-law. Just act like everything's normal… hunky dory." Without further elaboration, Elsie adjusted her ruby red turban and shuffled noiselessly from the room.


Joel and Miriam Berman’s wedding reception the previous summer was held in the Georgian Ballroom of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. The ritzy landmark boasted floor-to-ceiling windows, two-story Baccarat crystal chandeliers and white glove service. Prior to the fancy-schmancy wedding, the female entourage attended a complimentary private menu tasting and bridal tea with ivory, floor-length linen and matching napkins. Lenny heard about it second hand from Elsie who went absolutely gaga over the extravaganza.
But the proverbial train ran off the rails several days later at the gazillion-dollar wedding reception when an electric transformer at a substation several miles away blew, effectively shutting down the air conditioner. Temperatures in the ballroom soared to ninety degrees. The bride, a petite dark-haired sparrow of a woman, stormed about the lobby in her wedding gown and floral tiara, threatening to sue the hotel. Pretty but in an oddly nondescript, bland sort of way, an obdurate petulance lingered about the cupid bow lips. As the woman aged and became more settled in her ways, the harshness might gain the upper hand, but for now she was a pint-size package of feminine perfection.
“This is the happiest day of your life, Miri darling.” Rabbi Hurwitz, an emaciated man with a wispy beard, tried to calm the bride. “Baruch Ha’Shem! Baruch Ha’Shem! Don’t let a minor inconvenience spoil the sacred moment,” he cooed. 
Baruch Ha’Shem! Praise God! The man was in the habit of repeating the salutary phrase over and over when he was unable to contain his emotions. Rabbi Hurwitz grabbed her left hand, raised it to his lips in a theatrical flourish and kissed the bulbous diamond on her finger. “B’Tabaat zu, art mikoodashet li.” “With this ring,” the rabbi translated, “you are sacred unto me.” He wrapped his arms around the despondent bride. “Baruch Ha’Shem! Baruch Ha’Shem! What you do is this; you concentrate on all the happiness, all the nachas and glick that awaits a new bride and forget about the silly air conditioning.” The rabbi threw in a few more Baruch Ha’Shems! for good measure and kissed the newly-minted Miriam Berman on either cheek.
The hotel lobby grew silent. Miriam took a step back in her designer wedding gown purchased from Priscilla’s of Boston. The Melissa Sweet, one shoulder, silk Garza gown with ruched waist and clusters of beaded floral appliqués on the bodice had cost well over five thousand dollars. “Enough already with the Baruch Ha’Shems!” Miriam screeched. “I want the fucking air conditioning fixed, or I’ll have the maitre d’s testicle on a platter!” The rabbi sighed, shook his head and hurried away without further conciliatory remarks. Fifteen minutes later an emergency generator in the basement of the building got the air conditioner, which was on a separate circuit, running again. As the temperature in the ballroom gradually settled back into the low seventies, Miriam was transformed – in true Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion – from bride-from-hell to blissful newlywed. 
Following the wedding, the couple honeymooned on an island off the coast of Greece. “What a firecracker!” Lenny's father chuckled the following morning at the bridal brunch. “The maitre d's testicles on a platter,” he repeated Miriam’s vulgar threat, and the guests howled, hooted, jeered and laughed hysterically. Even Elsie considered her new sister-an-law’s gauche antics priceless. But now that Joel had assaulted his wife and been thrown out of the house without even a year of marriage to show for the lavish wedding, Lenny didn't know what to think


"How are Joel and Miriam doing?" Lenny asked in the morning before leaving for classes.
"Good," his mother replied. Did he detect a slight tightening of the vocal cords, causing her tone to drift upwards in pitch? "Why do you ask?"
"I dunno. He hasn't called in a while."
"Well he's busy with his medical practice and new wife," his mother replied.
What new wife? He beat her up. The police came and evicted him from the goddamn, luxury condo! "So he's coming for Passover?"
"They're coming," his mother corrected. "By the way, I spoke to Mrs. Callahan."
"Yes, I know."
"Such a sweet woman!" Mrs. Berman, who was repotting an aloe plant that had outgrown the decorative ceramic bowl, looked up. "A bit intellectually limited but a perfectly decent sort." She sprinkled water over the vermiculite. "Not all goyim are dreck."
 

"There are a few things you need to know before coming to Seder," Lenny cautioned. "Let's begin with the Botox smile." They were sitting in the living room of the Callahan house. Marcie had three older brothers and twin sisters so there were constant throngs of young people traipsing through the house at any given moment. Initially, the bedlam stood Lenny back on his heels, but over the years he had become inured; at a deeper level he may have actual begun to look forward to his regular visits.
Were the Callahans tacky? Yes. Were they loud and crass? Absolutely! Were they kind, boorish, fun loving, ignorant, gracious, ill-bred and welcoming? Well, yes again. Just the other day, one of Marcie's older brothers, who played defensive end on the varsity football team, tiptoed up behind him. The muscle-bound goofball cuffed him playfully on the side of the head with the flat of his hand. "There's pepperoni pizza in the kitchen, but you better hurry 'cause it's going fast." Lenny glanced warily at the husky teen. There was nothing mean-spirited in the physical act. It was just the way the Callahans were - direct to the point of raunchy inappropriateness. 
"The Botox smile," Lenny repeated. "When you first arrive at Passover Seder, you will notice everyone smiling nonstop as though they just returned from the gates of heaven or a plastic surgeon."
"You're not even remotely funny," Marcie replied sourly.
"The reason for the euphoria," Lenny ignored the remark, "is they're all covering for my brother's marital problems. Nobody's supposed to know any of this so we 'pretend' everything's peachy keen."
"Will Joel's wife be there?"
"No, Miriam will not be coming for Passover and don't mention her name or draw attention to the fact that my brother is alone."
"And I thought my family was weird!" Marcie patted him sympathetically on the wrist. "What else?"
"My sister Elsie has a vindictive streak and will assault you with an endless barrage of catty remarks. It's what she lives for. Don't take it personal."
"Anything else?" Marcie was beginning to look frazzled.
"Yes, one last thing: Goyim, non-Jews, are grossly inferior. It's their manifest destiny to never quite measure up. Essentially pagans and idol worshippers, they drink to excess, cheat on their spouses and their morals are so badly flawed as to be virtually non-existent."
"What about your brother and his foulmouthed, estranged wife?"
At the opposite end of the claustrophobically small house, Mrs. Callahan was hollering for someone to fetch a fresh roll of toilet paper; out of the corner of his eye, Lenny caught sight of one of the twins bolting down the narrow hallway. "Oh no," he shot back flippantly, "that doesn't count. Joel and Miriam are the exception that makes the rule."
"Well then," Marcie replied, "I'll see you tomorrow night."


The following day at Brandenberg High School, Lenny cornered Marcie in the school cafeteria as they were sitting down for lunch. "My brother's bringing Miriam to Seder."
"But I thought -"
"Apparently they reconciled and are trying to salvage their shitty marriage so try to act normal."
"I don't get it."
"Nobody's supposed to know my brother beat his wife up or that they were living apart."
"I thought Jewish men didn't hit their wives."
"Just try to act normal, that's all."
"That's the second time you told me," Marcie observed soberly.
"Told you what?"
"To act normal."


Marcie arrived for the Passover Seder dressed in a blue frock and low, patent leather heels. Before the ceremony began, Mrs. Berman explained the symbolism of the various delicacies spread across the dining room table. "This mixture of apples, nuts, wine and spices," she pointed to a small bowl, "is called charoset . It reminds us of the mortar the Jewish slaves made in their building for the Egyptians." Next to the charoset was a dish of parsley to be dipped into salt water, representing the tears of the Jews exiled from their ancestral homeland. "When we dipped the greens in the water," Mrs. Berman explained, "we share in the bitterness and suffering of that Biblical time.

Baruch atah Adonai,
Ailochenu melech ha'olem…

Once Lenny's mother had finished explaining the symbolism, Mr. Berman recited the blessing for the wine. Twenty minutes later after reading the Four Questions, the ritual Passover meal was served. As appetizer, a glistening heap of gefilte fish was passed around along with a separate dish of horse radish. Mrs. Berman and her daughter-in-law shuttled the steaming platters of baked brisket, steamed beans, potato and lokshen kugels from the kitchen. 
"This is absolutely heavenly!" Marcie waved her fork over the tsimis. "What are the flavorings?"
"Sweet potatoes," Mrs. Berman replied, "carrots, a dozen or so pitted prunes, raisins, brown sugar and cinnamon. The concoction is simmered in a cup of orange juice for the citrusy tartness. Some people substitute diced pears and apricots along with a large sweet onion." 
Lenny surveyed the room. Mr. Berman, who drained several glasses of Manischewitz wine before the ceremony got under way was feeling no pain whatsoever. Joel looked constipated. Sitting to his left, Miriam exuded a glacial, haughtiness. Whatever joy she might have felt lost traction, degenerating in diffuse indifference. She was clearly attending the family gathering under protest. Acting like she was hopped up on amphetamines, Mrs. Berman was talking nonstop, and Elsie was just plain old Elsie. 


Around eight-thirty, Lenny approached his mother sorting leftovers in the kitchen. "I'm walking Marcie home." 
"Such a lovely girl! I'm so glad she came." Mrs. Berman seemed overwrought, almost manic with relief that there had been no unpleasantness. Nobody mentioned the maitre d's testicles, Joel's fisticuffs or Miriam's predilection for obscenity-laced temper tantrums. It was like the Jewish version of the Emperor's New Clothes except none of the Bermans got to prance about au naturel. 
"Are Joel and Miriam getting divorced?"
"Bite your tongue!" Mrs. Berman hissed. "Why would you suggest such absurdity?" 
Lenny was dead tired. He felt like a bit player in an off-Broadway theater production after the final curtain had descended and the actors rushed off to their respective dressing rooms to shed costumes and makeup. "I'm gonna walk Marcie home," he repeated, ignoring the question.
"If there was some misunderstanding between your brother and his new wife," his mother spoke a bit too quickly, running all the words together in a frenetic heap, "it's all in the past now and everything's back to normal."
Elsie lugged the last of the dirty dishes into the kitchen, setting them on the counter before drifting back into the dining room. "No it isn't," Lenny blurted. Mrs. Berman eyed her son nervously. "It's getting late. I gotta take Marcie home."


When they were two blocks from the house, Lenny pulled up short. "I'm sorry about the Passover Seder."
"It's not your fault," Marcie noted. "Not everyone can have a perfect family like mine." She grabbed his face in both hands and kissed his mouth. "We're probably going to spend the rest of our lives together."
"Yes, that's fairly obvious," Lenny held her close. Somehow the endemic heartache he associated with his own cracked-egg-of-a-family, merged; it comingled and morphed into a sublime presentiment. "But we will need to create a new world order, a community of like-minded individuals."
Marcie paused a moment, considering the task at hand. "Something midway between Scout, Jem and Atticus Finch." 
"With a smattering of Boo Radley thrown in for good measure." Lenny nuzzled her cheek with his lips.
"Yes, I totally forgot about Boo." Her arms snaked up behind Lenny's shoulders, holding on for dear life.

Return to Table of Contents


Gerasim’s Dilemma


Detective Lucinda Gomez noticed the navy blue coat with gold buttons lying in a wrinkled heap in the frozen snow near the Salvation Army collection box. People in a hurry were always abandoning their donations near the metal container. Half the offerings were discarded junk, rubbish you couldn’t hawk at a low-end flea market. Because the Brandenberg trash collection allowed only one, medium-size container, people carted unwanted crap to the Salvation Army, got a tax-deductible receipt and avoided paying the dollar and a half for a town-sanctioned garbage bag. 
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Like a mortally injured animal trapped in a steel snare, the navy blue coat fluttered a fraction of an inch off the frozen ground before settling back down in the powdery snow. Detective Gomez made a U-turn in the Walgreen parking lot and doubled back. A light snow peppering the hood of her police cruiser, it was three in the morning with the temperature hovered in the low teens. Lucinda stepped from the car and ran the silvery beam from a halogen flashlight over the wool garment. A pair of suede gloves protruded from the sleeves of the coat; a woman’s legs curled stiffly up under the hem.
Thirty, paltry seconds out of the cruiser and her nose was already tingling, the lungs singed with every influx of brutal cold. A warning had gone out on the six o’clock news for homeowners to bring pets, even robust large-breed dogs, indoors overnight. Lucinda stepped closer.  It was probably some stumblebum passed out, stone-cold drunk before reaching the safe haven of a homeless shelter. Or maybe it was one of the habitual druggies or mental defectives who subsisted on food stamps and disability checks at the subsidized housing off of Dyer Avenue. “Lady, can you hear me?” There was no reply. Lucinda rolled the body over. 
 “Dear God!” The shock of recognition caught her off guard. Her mind went blank and a morbid terror raced through her gut. Hurrying back to the sedan, Lucinda reached for the radio handset. “I need an ambulance at the Salvation Army on County Avenue.” In response to an inquiry from the dispatcher, she added. “A young woman, half frozen to death in the snow.”    

Returning to the fallen woman, Lucinda lifted the head cradling it in her arms. It was a serenely angelic face, tinged with an austere, understated beauty. The young woman with creamy, alabaster skin moaned once but never quite opened her eyes. A thin plume of icy mist streamed from the blanched nostrils. “Esther, can you hear me?” There was no response. Lucinda lowered her mouth to a frostbitten ear. “Help’s coming. Let’s get you out of the cold.” 
Lucinda pulled the police car alongside the collection box and dragged the unconscious woman into the back of the cruiser. Moving to the front of the vehicle, she flipped the heater on full blast. Within ten minutes, rescue arrived. Transferring the patient to the rear of the ambulance, the medics draped an oxygen cannula over her nose and started an IV drip. “What happened?” the man asked.
“No idea.” A swirl of frigid air knifed through Lucinda’s coat. The ferocious gusts had sent the wind chill plunging well below zero. “The woman’s name is Esther Gold. We went to school together.” The medic shook his head grimly. Leaping into the cab of the ambulance he turned the flashing lights on and sped away. Before the van disappeared from view, Lucinda heard the keening wail of the siren trailing off into the blackened street. 
Back in the warmth of the cruiser, Lucinda breathed out heavily and massaged her eyes in an undulating motion with the heel of both hands. Her fingertips still throbbed with burning pain from the icy cold. Esther Gold. The dark-haired girl with the dreamy, otherworldly smile lived off of Baxter Street with her parents and a younger sister, Maryanne. At least she did when Lucinda rode the yellow school bus through all four years of high school. 

Lucinda caught up with the ambulance as it passed through Brandenberg Center. The driver radioed ahead and a trauma team was already waiting in the emergency room lobby. “Pulse is thready,” the intern, a pudgy Oriental with a mop of unkempt, bushy hair, noted. “Skin cyanotic, blood pressure dropping.” Removing the plastic cannula, he pressed an oxygen mask over her face and waved an arm frantically in the air. “Run a pulmonary angiography plus a D-dimer. Stat!”
A second doctor, a short man with a Van Dyke beard and thick, horn-rimmed glasses seemed to have a separate, less urgent agenda from the other medical staff. Sidling up to the patient, he raised Esther’s left eyelid gently with a poised thumb directing the light from a thin, tubular flashlight at the cornea. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. He angled the beam closer and closer to the eye until the instrument was no more than a hairsbreadth away. Lifting the other eyelid, he repeated the procedure. 
Killing the light, the short doctor stepped away from the examining table and leaned against the wall in the far corner of the room. He scratched a bald spot on the back of his head, crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the glossy linoleum.
A nurse drew a single tube of blood and, shifting away from the examining table, began writing on a label with a felt-tipped marker. “What’s a D-dimer?” Lucinda asked. Her eyes were still adjusting from the gloom of the Salvation Army parking lot to the intense brightness of the ER with its medicinal smells – a noxious potpourri of alcohol, Phisohex and antibacterial scrubs. Everyone was talking overly loud, the doctor shouting directives while the nursing staff scurried about, wheeling diagnostic equipment back and forth in choreographed chaos. Even from where Lucinda was standing alongside the doorway, the frenetic hysteria merged in a dizzying white noise. “What’s a D-dimer?” she repeated more insistently.
The blond woman didn’t bother to look up. “A clinical test to pinpoint deep venous thrombosis.”
“That certainly doesn’t sound good,” Lucinda muttered.
“Start a heparin drip,” the Oriental barked, “and get a tissue plasminogen activator ready.” On the LCD monitor displaying vital signs, the systolic reading dipped precariously another five points. 
Turning to leave, the nurse scowled at Lucinda. “No, not good at all.” 
An older nurse with frizzy, gray hair approached. “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave now.” 

* * * *

In the morning, Chief Polanski beckoned Lucinda into his office and shut the door. A tall man with an angular, bony face, he slumped disjointedly into a swivel chair. “At two forty-five last night, that woman you found unconscious in the snow died.” He scratched an earlobe. “According to the coroner’s report, a blood clot in the leg broke free, travelled through the body and lodged in the main artery of the lung. There was nothing the medics could do.”
“What about family?”
Just outside the doorway, a uniformed officer was leading a heavyset youth from the booking area toward lockup. The adolescent’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but he still managed to mutter profanities under his breath at everyone he passed as he shuffled along with a rollicking swagger. “Family’s been notified.” The chief leaned forward across the desk. His voice, normally no-nonsense, hard-edged, was uncharacteristically sympathetic. “You knew the deceased?”
“Went to high school together. Played on the varsity basketball team.”
“Well, these things happen,” he muttered philosophically.
“Really?” Lucinda shot back caustically. “How many twenty-eight year old women do you know who collapse in the snow for no apparent reason?”
The chief eyed her uneasily. Over the intercom system, an Officer Bullock was requested to report to the front desk. “You followed the proper protocol, and even under the best of circumstances - ”  
“But she died anyway,” Lucinda didn’t allow Chief Polanski to finish. “Esther Gold was not some homeless junkie or demented alcoholic with a pickled brain! These things don’t happen.” 
She waved her arm in the direction of the hallway. “If that cheap punk, who passed by just a moment ago, on the way to lockup fell down stone cold dead in the snow in front of the Salvation Army collection box, it would be no great loss to society- a blessing of sorts!”  She stormed out of Chief Polanski’s office, leaving the door wide open. 
What she said was for the most part true. The druggies, sociopaths, small time hoodlums and riffraff seldom, if ever, died of freakish anomalies. They didn’t get blood clots or brain tumors or get sideswiped by a pickup truck while crossing the street. They led lives of shameless debauchery, went on welfare and subsisted off the dole for the rest of their decrepit existences. Decent and honorable girls with everything to live for got blood clots on the coldest day of the decade and collapsed in the snow. The teenage thug mouthing filthy epithets under his breath had a secret talisman protecting him from the vagaries of life. 

Buddy Ryan, a patrolman on the day shift, flagged Lucinda down before she reached the exit sign. “Found this in the back of your cruiser, when you came off duty last night.” He handed her a thin, well-thumbed paperback. She glanced at the title: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. The book must have fallen out of Esther’s coat in the feverish commotion when the medics were transferring the sick woman from her police car to the ambulance. 
“Yeah, thanks.” She hurried away without further elaboration.


Later that night, Lucinda fished her senior high school yearbook down from a shelf in the closet. A picture near the back of the book showed a graceful girl with luxurious, raven hair. The expression was serious with only the vaguest hint of a whimsical smile. Lucinda could take no comfort in the coroner’s findings or Chief Polanski’s awkward kindliness. Esther Gold’s demise was callous, meaningless. It wasn’t like some Biblical metaphor—the Book of Job. In the end Job recouped everything lost.  
Thumbing backwards randomly through the yearbook to the front, she found a half-page picture of the girls’ varsity basketball team with Esther kneeling third from the left in the front row. Lucinda played guard. Esther, always a high scorer, was a power forward with a deadly fall-away jump shot. Lucinda was jealous – not so much for her Jewish friend’s athletic prowess but rather because of the way the boys fawned all over her. Shuffling down the corridor together on the way to classes, male students would gawk slack jawed or steal a surreptitious peek at Esther, avert their eyes then look again. The young girl understood the hormonal effect she had on the opposite sex, but laughed it off. She felt no compulsion to flaunt her loveliness.
One rainy day in late November, Lucinda brought Esther home to study for a physics exam. Her brother, Miguel, came into the den after Esther was gone. “Una chica muy hermosa!”
“Yes, she’s very pretty.”
 “Fix me up with the dreamboat.”
Lucinda scowled at her older brother. Miguel, a horny Casanova who listened to gangster rap, greatly preferred bling-bling over substance where the chicas were concerned. “Esther’s not your type.”
“I promise,” Miguel snickered, “not to fondle her below the waist on the first date.”
Lucinda cringed. The thought of her best friend making time with Miguel, caused her brain to momentarily shut down. “You’ll be fondling yourself below the waist,” she noted, in a tone devoid of humor, “before you spend any quality time with that woman.”

* * * *

Later that night Lucinda curled up on the bed with the torn, dog-eared paperback. Any lingering doubt about the book’s previous owner was put to rest. In the left-hand corner of title page the words ‘Esther Gold’ were scribbled in pencil. She started to read, but, almost from the opening paragraph, her brain balked at the printed matter.  
Over the years she had become inured to the random violence and pathology that police work served up with predictable regularity. Bad people got what they deserved, participating actively, energetically even, in their own demise. It was their manifest destiny to implode, self-destruct. In Lucinda’s line of work, sentimentality was a liability.  But a woman with such promise half-frozen to death in the snow. Una chica muy hermosa! It made no sense. 


The next couple of days passed in a blur. Lucinda caught a pimply-faced, twelve year old girl, a street over from the athletic field, smashing mailboxes with a Louisville slugger. The petite, under-aged thug had several prior arrests for malicious vandalism and was under the court’s jurisdiction. On Wednesday, Lucinda handed out a citation to a twenty-something, Brown University student with a Gucci handbag for parking her Lexus coupe in a handicapped space. 
Still later in the week a homeowner on Juniper Ave accused a neighbor’s dog of intentionally—how does a Labrador retriever demonstrate malicious intent? - crapping on his lawn. Standing next to a row of shrubs the angry homeowner identified no less than seven, rather bulky ‘deposits’ frozen solid in the snow. 
“Have you approached your neighbor about the problem?” Lucinda asked. The neighbors hadn’t spoken in thirteen years. They made the Hatfields and the McCoys look sociable by comparison. In short, choppy sentences, she. took notes longhand on a lined pad, went back to the station and typed a formal, more detailed report in the word processor. 

Mr. Buckowski’s states that his neighbor’s Labrador retriever, Spade, was seen running loose at seven thirty-five a.m. on Wednesday, February 5th.. The dog defecated to the right of the front entrance to the home, which is located at 735 East Avenue and, on six separate occasions, large mounds of putrid smelling feces was discovered…

Lucinda actually enjoyed the silly distraction. If nothing else, it took her mind off Esther Gold’s senseless death. Around mid-week her mother called. Lucinda told her about the body in the snow. Mrs. Gomez said, “It’s God’s will.”
Lucinda’s brain short circuited. “If it was God’s will,” she hissed, “then the Supreme Being leaves much to be desired.” 
Dead silence. They talked about other things and finally Mrs. Gomez hung up the phone. Her daughter never apologized for the nasty outburst. 

Remembering the night, Lucinda couldn’t free herself of the macabre image of the squat, officious neurologist with the Van Dyke prying Esther’s sightless eyes open. 
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. 
Esther Gold was a lost cause. He knew it. The broken body would soldier on without purpose – an involuntary, reflexive gesture, but the soul had long since departed to more celestial realms. The bearded doctor, who clearly had better things to do than minister to the fatally injured, went and stood in the corner. His work was finished. Arms crossed he stared morosely at the floor and waited for the inevitable. 
It’s God’s will. Lucinda shouldn’t have sniped at her mother that way, but spiritual fatalism and sugar-coated, religious malarkey made her crazy. During the rest of the week, Lucinda tried to makes sense of the Tolstoy novella, but by Saturday she had only plodded through twenty, meager pages. The story of a wealthy Russian who lived beyond his means was tediously dragged out. Each night after a few minutes, she lost patience, throwing the book aside. 
Where writers were concerned, Lucinda favored her own kind - Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Amado, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda - she devoured them in the original Spanish, since English translations were often little more than bastardized versions of the genuine artifact. By comparison, the Russian story wasn’t nearly as clever or interesting. 

* * * *

Saturday evening Lucinda took a domestic disturbance call over at the Jasonville public housing complex. The apartment was on the third floor, but the elevator was broken so she used the stairwell which reeked of urine and sour wine. 
“Got a call about a public disturbance.” She scanned the living room which was cluttered with a mishmash of soiled clothes and empty beer cans. A haggard looking woman missing several teeth was standing next to a shirtless, scrawny man old enough to be her father. A large peacock with fading plumage fanning out in all directions was tattooed across his emaciated chest. The living room smelled of rancid food and body odor. A dark-eyed girl appeared momentarily in the bedroom doorway, but the woman leered malevolently and the child crept back out of sight. “What’s your name?” Lucinda addressed the mother.
The woman stuck her tongue in her cheek causing the skin to bulge and, with a muddled expression, peered distractedly at her calloused hands. “It wasn’t a trick question,” Lucinda spoke impatiently. 
“Perkins,” she replied hoarsely. “Adrian Perkins.” She ran the back of a hand over a moist nose.
She turned to the shirtless man. “And you are?” 
“Phil Perkins,” the tattooed man blustered. The spastic body language and feral eyes that flitted distractedly about the filthy apartment suggested otherwise.
“Can I see some identification, please?”
As the man rummaged about in his back pocket, the dark-eyed girl reemerged from behind the door. “Ain’t got nothing with me right this minute.” He smiled congenially and rubbed his scrawny neck, with arthritic fingers causing the peacock to do an impromptu mating ritual.
“Why don’t you just take a seat over there, Mr. Perkins,” Lucinda pointed at a Naugahyde sofa, “until we can sort things out.” Reaching for her radio, she pressed the call button. “I’m going to need another squad car, preferably two, over here at the Jasonville Complex.”
“Mind if I put my shirt on?” the man asked in a wheedling tone.
“Not right now,” Lucinda replied. “We need to figure out what’s going on here.”


Phil Perkins was really Gerald Prescott, a level-three sex offender who failed to registered with the local authorities when he was released from prison the previous March. 
“The guy’s a pervert,” Lucinda said to the girl’s mother after Gerald had been read his Miranda Rights and led away. “But you let him stay in a home with young children?” 
“I don’t know nothing about that.” The woman had since become increasingly sullen and uncommunicative.
Lucinda fished a pair of handcuffs from a leather case fastened to her belt. “We ran your social security number through the computer, and there’s a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice.”
“I done nothing wrong.” There was little to no conviction in the bland assertion. 
Lucinda pulled the woman’s hands behind her back and slipped the cuffs in place. “You don’t recall anything about a check forging scheme?”
There was no reply. Another uniformed officer who had just arrived took Lucinda aside. “Social services is going to be delayed picking up the youngster. Chief wants you to shuttle her over to the hospital to be checked out.” The girl, whose name was Veronica, was still hovering skittishly in the doorway watching events unfold like something out of a sordid, B-rated movie. 
When the mother was finally removed from the home, Lucinda approach the child and introduced herself. “We’re going for a ride.” 
“Where to?”
“The hospital.”
“I ain’t sick.”
“Well, that’s good to know.” The girl found a winter coat in her closet. Lucinda grabbed the girl’s hand, and they went down the smelly stairwell back out into the wintry street. 
“He’s not my father, you know.” They were a mile and a half from the hospital. Veronica was sitting in the front of the patrol car with her smallish hands clasped in her lap. She was a rather plain looking girl with wide, black eyes and coarse features that stood in stark contrast to her breathy voice and dainty mannerisms.” She wasn’t ugly, per se—just not demonstrably pretty. An unremarkable face like that could grow more agreeable. It just took time.
“Yes, I know.” The dispatcher had radioed moments earlier to say that a Doctor Mendelssohn would be meeting them in the hospital main lobby. “Male or female?” Lucinda queried. The dispatcher wasn’t sure about the examining physician’s gender. 
“Gerald was a dirty pig,” she girl muttered with revulsion. “A dirty, stinking pig!”
A shudder rippled through Lucinda’s body. Only a few days earlier she had followed the ambulance with Esther Gold’s broken body straight to Brandenberg County Hospital. Now another, equally grotesque trip. Yes, Gerald Prescott was a revolting pig. Pigs wallowed in mud; they dined on garbage, belched and farted. But they didn’t commit unseemly acts of sexual depravity. The predatory Gerald Prescott, in all probability, would be long dead of natural causes before his next prison stretch expired. And there would be no children where he was going, which was small consolation to Veronica Perkins.

Janet Mendelssohn was sitting in the front lobby perusing a copy of Time Magazine. A matronly brunette with a pair of bifocals hanging on a beaded chain, she introduced herself. “I told the police lady I wasn’t sick,” Veronica explained.
“Yes, I understand, but I still have to ask you a few questions and make an examination. It won’t hurt in the least and shouldn’t take more than a half hour.”
Lucinda smiled stiffly and tousled the girl’s hair. “I’ll be waiting here when you finish.” 

After Veronica went off with the physician, the sobering thought occurred to Lucinda that the child had never once asked about the hapless nitwit-of-a-mother who put her daughter in harm’s way. She got a cup of coffee from a vending machine. An hour and fifteen minutes later, Dr. Mendelssohn reappeared with Veronica in tow. “We’ve had a nice little chat and are all done now.” She slipped her diminutive palm into Lucinda’s outstretched hand, and the girl, who smiled sleepily, seemed none the worse for whatever had transpired. 
Lucinda suddenly let go of the hand, knelt down and grabbed the child by her shoulders. “Wait here. I’ll be just a moment.”
She took the doctor aside. “What happened?”
The physician’s face darkened. “Medical finding are strictly confidential.”
“Yes, that goes without saying.”
A middle-aged woman with a cast on her leg limped by on crutches. When she was gone, Dr. Mendelssohn turned to Lucinda. “The hymen’s broken. There’s multiple scarring, which would suggest …” She thought better and didn’t bother to finish the thought. The doctor cleared her throat of a non-existent obstruction. “We had a brief chat. Mr. Prescott did numerous obscene and inappropriate things to the little girl.”
“What things?”
An ambulance passed through the parking lot heading for the emergency room. “The specifics will be fully documented in my report.” Dr. Mendelssohn removed her bifocals and began fidgeting with the beaded chain. After a moment she added with cool clinical detachment, “The child has a resilient temperament.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lucinda said dully. 
“I’ve been doing this sort of thing for several years now. Some of these kids wither up like drought-stricken fruit on the vine after what they’ve been through. Others have a stronger survival instinct.”
“Like the inmates at Auschwitz,” Lucinda offered bleakly.
The doctor raised her hand and waved several fingers at the small girl sitting primly on a plastic chair fifty feet away in the admissions lobby.  “Yes, something of the sort.” 


With Veronica Perkins dozing comfortably in the rear seat of the police cruiser, Lucinda drove back to the station. “Where’s social services?”
The officer manning the front desk looked up. “Out on another emergency. They won’t be able to pick up the girl until tomorrow morning.”
Lucinda’s brain was shutting down, slipping into automatic pilot mode. “I’ll take her home with me for the night and bring her back in the morning when I go on duty.”
“I’ll let them know,” the officer said.
“Where’s Gerald Prescott?”
The officer gestured with his eyes. “Downstairs. After the arraignment at district court tomorrow morning, the paddy wagon will cart his perverted carcass off to the ACI.”
Lucinda ducked down the stairs to the lower level and found the older man wearing a V-necked T-shirt covering his skin art. Staring at him in the locked cell was like ogling a monstrosity at a carnival freak show. Gerald seemed lost in his own private reverie. 
“No more penny candy where you’re going.” He just stared at the Hispanic woman with a dumb expression. Lucinda raised her right hand ever so slowly and balled all the fingers together except for the index which she extended like the muzzle of a loaded gun. She pointed the weapon at the man’s genitals and, recoiling under the kickback, pulled off an imaginary round.

* * * *

Lucinda had filled a pillowcase with Veronica’s clothing for the protective services worker before they cleared out of the apartment. All the items were either soiled or badly frayed. In the top bureau drawer a translucent, coffee-colored cockroach scurried across a pair of dingy socks. Lucinda emptied the contents of the drawer onto the unmade bed and sorted through the underwear piece by piece tossing aside anything that seemed unsalvageable. 
When they reached home, Lucinda helped Veronica change into her pajamas. Settling her under the covers in the spare bedroom, she kissed her cheek and cupped the child’s face in her hands. “Go to sleep now. Tomorrow’s another day.” She rose to leave, but Veronica grabbed her wrist. “My mother’s in jail.”
“I’m sorry, but she will have to sort that out on her own.”
The girl sighed and turned over on her side toward the wall, crooking a slender arm under her cheek. “Your house is very clean.”
Lucinda rose to her feet. “I’ll be in the next room if you wake in the middle of the night and need anything.”
She went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. She hadn’t even thought to remove the nightstick or gun which was still resting in the holster with a leather fastener clipped over the firing pin. The events of the past week were merging in a phantasmagoric bouillabaisse of ugliness. Esther Gold’s death, the neurologist prying open the stricken woman’s sightless eyes, Gerald Prescott’s absurd peacock, Veronica’s homely, utterly sociopathic mother – it was an endless onslaught of meaningless absurdities.  And tomorrow evening at the Townsend Funeral Home was Esther’s wake!
She stripped off her clothes, took a quick shower and crawled into bed. Reaching for the Tolstoy, Lucinda began reading from where she had left off. Ivan Ilyich, the wealthy Russian official, was sick now and dying of some untreatable ailment, most likely stomach cancer. The only person who cared was a young peasant, a servant boy named Gerasim. Lucinda read straight through to the end of the story. It wasn’t really as bad as she thought. Not as good as Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa, but a reasonably interesting, old-fashion tale. She tossed the book on the bedside table. It was two o’clock in the morning. She tiptoed into the spare bedroom. Veronica’s body was bunched up in a modified fetal position, the child’s sweet face stripped bare of emotion, unencumbered by past or future misery. 
Back in her own bedroom, Lucinda killed the light and lay back staring at the ceiling. She had a compulsive habit of reviewing the events of the day in flashback before fading off to sleep, but that didn’t seem like such a great idea. Ten minutes later she slid through the thin ice of consciousness into a fitful sleep. And then she dreamed.

Esther Gold was sitting on the comforter at the foot of the bed. “What will you do with the girl?”
Lucinda sat up in bed, wrapping her slender arms around her knees. “I can’t save Veronica any more than I could save you that night in the Salvation Army parking lot.”
Esther shrugged. A soft moan floated back to them from the other room. Was Veronica having a bad dream - properly understood, an ugly nightmare within the context of a benign dream? “I’m dead – no more than a figment of your imagination – but the child in the other room is very much alive.” 
“Did you like the Tolstoy book?” Esther asked, shifting gears. When there was no reply, she added, “I purposely left the book behind.”
“How’s that?”
“The book didn’t just fall out of my pocket by chance.”
Lucinda stared at the woman queerly. The dream, which started out pleasantly enough, was beginning to creep her out. “The bitchy wife left much to be desired,” Lucinda said, “but Ivan’s servant always managed to do the right thing.” Toward the end of the story in a particularly poignant scene, Gerasim, the peasant boy, bends over and lets his master use his shoulders as a footstool, this being the only position that relieves the sufferer’s unbearable pain. After a while, Gerasim falls asleep in this awkward position, balancing the sick man’s legs in the air. “Gerasim was the only person who rose to the occasion.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Esther agreed. “Did you find my note?”
“Yes, I found it.” On a page near the back of the Tolstoy tale, Lucinda discovered a note scribbled hastily in the right-hand margin: 

We must become more like Gerasim. 
In any given situation, 
what would Gerasim do? 

What would Gerasim do? Gerasim was a fictional character in a story written over a hundred years ago by a God-crazed Russian. The message no longer applied. Lucinda, who had more to say about Gerasim, Ivan Ilyich and his spiteful wife, suddenly felt the warm comforter lifting away from the bed as a soft object brush up against her stomach. 
“Couldn’t sleep,” Veronica murmured. The girl snuggled up against her warm body, sending Lucinda’s bizarre dream scurrying into oblivion. Wrapping her arms around the small torso, within five minutes the child was lost in deep slumber. 
What would Gerasim do? The question was absurd, an affront to the young woman’s sensibilities. The child breathing moist, sweet air on Lucinda’s neck was being delivered to social services; in three, short hours she would transfer a pillowcase stuffed with clothing and a small girl with a badly scarred hymen to foster care where she would become another anonymous statistic. 

* * * *

In the morning they stopped by Ryan’s diner for breakfast. The restaurant smelled of hickory-smoked bacon, home fries with caramelized onions and fresh-perked coffee. The waitress took their order and returned with a cup of coffee and glass of milk. “Which school do you attend?”
“Carter Elementary.”
Lucinda pursed her lips. “That’s close by to where I live.”
“Yes I know.” The girl sipped at the milk. “Our school bus passes down your street every day.”
“What’s your favorite subject?”
“Last week in math we learned addition and subtraction with negative numbers.”
“And how exactly does that work?”
Earlier the waitress had brought a box of crayons and Veronica was doodling energetically on the children’s placemat. She grabbed a red crayon. “Let’s say you have two numbers, eight and negative thirteen.” She scribbled the numbers on the placemat. “Because the negative number is larger than the positive, the correct answer is negative five.” Veronica stacked the two numbers in a column, drew a raggedy line and wrote the answer below.
The waitress returned with their food. Lucinda reached across the table and thumped the edge of placemat with an index finger. “And what if the numbers were reversed with negative five and positive thirteen?”
Veronica considered the problem briefly. “The answer would still be the same except the bottom number would be positive.” She grabbed a container of maple syrup and spread a gooey pool of brown liquid on the dish next to a row of blueberry pancakes slathered in whip cream. “Integers.”
Lucinda raised her head. “Excuse me?”
“Integers. Numbers are called integers.”
“Yes, that’s right.” She peeled the foil away from a pad of butter and smeared the creamy square over an English muffin. Veronica Perkins, who had nothing more to say about elementary education, was wholly engrossed in her meal, devouring the pancake with methodic deliberation. Lucinda flagged down the waitress as she breezed by their table. “When you get a spare moment, my little friend here could use another glass of milk.”


The DCYF social worker, a cherubic blonde who looked all of twenty-five, was waiting at the police station when they arrived. Lucinda handed her the pillowcase with Veronica’s belongings. “This nice lady is going to take over from here.” She bent down and hugged the girl. “I’ll stop by for a visit once you’re situated.” The phrases sounded stupid, clichéd, disingenuous, thoroughly bogus. Veronica smiled meekly. The girl who had a firm grasp of positive and negative integers didn’t understand a thing about social service administration. The case worker handed Lucinda a business card. “How long have you been working protective services?” 
“Three months,” the blonde replied.
“Three lousy months,” Lucinda mused as she watched them disappear out the Brandenberg Police Department front door. She knew an administrator over at DCYF. The attrition rate for fledgling caseworkers was insane - turnover on a yearly basis running eighty-seven percent! Most new recruits crashed and burned well before their first anniversary. Despite her perky disposition, the chubby blonde would probably be reduced to road kill, just another ugly statistic, before the following Christmas.
 Lucinda went down the hallway and turned in at the third door on the right. “I need a favor.” A detective in street clothes, Mike McNally, looked up from a computer screen. “A woman by the name of Adrian Perkins was brought in last night.”
“She’s already gone. They hauled her sorry ass down to the ACI earlier this morning. Something about extradition to Boston on an outstanding, check fraud warrant.”
Lucinda leaned over the desk, resting her palms on the polished surface. “Find out,” she spoke in a confidential tone, “the particulars of the previous conviction – what Ms Perkins is looking at for jail time.”
“As a fugitive from justice,” The detective noted, “the district attorney’s gonna throw the book at her.” He stared at the dark-skinned woman with a dour, close-lipped smile. “I’ll make some calls and see what I can scare up on the dopey, ever devious Ms. Perkins.”

* * * *

The Townsend Funeral Home was already packed to overflowing with mourners when Lucinda Gomez arrived to pay her respects. Mercifully, the Gold family, following their religious tradition, opted for a closed mahogany coffin with a framed picture of the deceased perched discretely on a stand near the reception line. After paying her respects, Lucinda sat in the rear of the room. A rabbi wearing a black skullcap recited a prayer in Hebrew. After the rabbi finished his remarks, Lucinda retreated to the lobby. Esther’s sister, Maryanne, was standing near the pedestal with the guest book.
“Thank you for coming.”
  Lucinda nodded. They stood quietly watching the mourners come and go. “I have something that belongs to you.” She told Maryanne about finding the paperback abandoned in the cruiser.”
Maryanne shook her head with a somber smile. “Tolstoy was Esther’s latest fad. Before that, Krishnamurti and Hermann Hesse.” The woman chuckled lightly. “My sister was always on a spiritual quest.” 
The door opened and several women, former teammates on the basketball squad, filed into the funeral home. “But I thought - ” 
“You and everybody else.” Maryanne noted, waving a hand abruptly. “Beneath that confident veneer, Esther hid a ton of insecurities. She was always questing after some ephemeral truth.” 
Lucinda’s mind didn’t work that way. She went to Mass Sundays - made a novena when someone was ill or suffering mental anguish - but felt no compelling need to delve any deeper into the human condition. The Tolstoy story with its queer message about mortality and spiritual redemption could make you thoroughly crazy if you took the message too literally. 
Lucinda drifted back into the spacious room with the coffin, flowers, muted religious music and heartbroken guests. Now, sitting alone in a darkened corner with the muffled sobs and sniffling as a backdrop, she could think more soberly. What if the Tolstoy novella contained something more than bland niceties? Esther Gold scribbled a solitary note in the margin of her tattered book. She carried the slim volume in her pocket, a legacy of sorts the night she died.  We must become more like Gerasim. In any given situation, what would Gerasim do? In any given situation, what would Gerasim do? In any given situation, what would Gerasim do? In any given situation …


When she reached home, a message from Detective McNally was flashing on her answering machine. She called the station. 
“Adrian Perkin’s is going to the clinker for an extended stay. Bank of America was the plaintiff in the original criminal case.”
“She forged checks against one of their accounts?”
“Several of their customers’ checking accounts,” the detective corrected. “The original sentence was three-to-five so, as a bail jumper, she’ll get the maximum with no likelihood of early parole.”  Detective McNally made a nasty snuffling sound through his nose. “Ms. Perkins is totally screwed!”
Lucinda hung up the phone. In the kitchen she fixed herself a cup of tea with honey. Finishing the tea, she took an extra long shower, washing her hair and settled in with the evening news. At nine-thirty she dialed the blonde case worker on her cell phone. “This is Lucinda Gomez. How’s Veronica doing?”
“She’s fine. The place we have her at is just temporary, but we’re hoping - ”
“Wait a minute!” Lucinda, who was pulling a wide-toothed comb through her damp hair, threw the comb aside and sat bolt upright. “I thought, when I brought her to the station, you already had living arrangements worked out.”
“Only temporarily,” the woman qualified. “We’re moving her again in the morning.”
“Where to?”
“Don’t know yet,” the blonde hedged. “Foster care housing, especially this time of year, is rather limited so we’re playing it by ear.”
“I’ll take her.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll take her on a permanent basis,” Lucinda blurted the words all in a manic heap. “Where is she staying? I’ll go get her right now.”
“This is rather unusual.” After a brief pause the case manager said, “I don’t know what departmental policy - ”
“Veronica slept over at my apartment the night her mother was arrested,” Lucinda interjected furtively. “And I brought the girl to the hospital to be examined. That’s got to count for something.”
“She asks for you every time I visit. You obviously made quite an impression on that little girl.” The case manager blew out her cheeks and groaned. “I can’t tell you what a nightmare this job is lately. Four new intakes this week alone, and one of our foster care providers slipped on the ice and broke her goddamn leg - compound fracture in two places.”
Lucinda patted her frizzy hair. The front was reasonably dry and she could secure the rest in a tight bun and cover it with a pullover, woolen cap. “I’ll come get Veronica right now, but I need an address.”
“DCYF – it’s such a crazy business.” With a sympathetic ear to bend, the case worker was blowing off steam. “Tuesday a coworker resigned. Quit with no notice. They’re going to split her caseload among the rest of us. Sometimes I feel like an over-the-hill, punch-drunk fighter who - ”
“The Carter Elementary School where Veronica attends is right around the corner from my home,” Lucinda noted. “She wouldn’t have to be uprooted or adjust to new teachers.” Dana raised her voice shrilly. “But I need an address.”
“Three forty-nine Elmhurst. First floor. Ask for a Mrs. Sanderson.” The blonde coughed uncomfortably. “For lack of space, they got her situated on the floor in a sleeping bag. But, like I said, it was just a temporary arrangement until - ”
“Call ahead and let them know I’m on my way. Tell them Lucinda Gomez with the Brandenberg PD will be coming by in fifteen minutes to collect Veronica Perkins. I’ll need the clothing and personal effects I gave you the other day.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. Goodbye then and thanks for helping out in a pinch.”


On the drive through the frigid night, Lucinda’s brain wasn’t functioning normally. But, if she understood nothing else about the human condition, she knew perfectly well and without a scintilla of doubt that Leo Tolstoy was not nearly as good a writer as Gabriel García Márquez. Any self-respecting Hispanic with a fourth grade education knew that. And Pablo Neruda’s poetry put anything that Robert Frost ever wrote to shame. And the sum of two integers where one was positive and the other negative …

Return to Table of Contents


Canary in a Coal Mine


Jason Endicott, court reporter for the Brandenberg Gazette, arrived early and was hunkered down with his notes on a hardwood bench in the back of the district courtroom. The town solicitor had been caught ‘soliciting’ something off the beaten path and was due for arraignment shortly. His defense lawyer was elsewhere in the building haggling with a representative from the district attorney’s office. In the meanwhile, a young girl in her early thirties, Madison Riley, was standing before a rather irritated Judge Felicia Kirk
Judge Kirk’s weathered face offered little encouragement. When she attempted anything resembling warm emotion, the pendent bottom lip jutted forward in a disconcerting leer and a ribbon of crow’s feet dribbled away like a pair of dried up riverbeds above the cheeks. After years covering Judge Kirk’s courtroom, Jason had begun to wonder if the diminutive woman, who stood a tad under five feet in her birthday suit, didn’t suffer a Napoleon complex with all the psychological excess baggage. 
“You spent the night in the lockup Ms. Riley?” Judge Kirk noted.
In stark contrast to the judge’s shriveled physique, Madison Riley, the dark-haired girl sitting in the straight back chair twenty feet away was tall and muscular with broad, shoulders and a dusting of freckles around the hazel eyes. The athletic looking girl had a disheveled appearance. “Yes, that’s right,” she murmured contritely. 
“Would you like to tell the court, why you were arrested yesterday afternoon?” The judge spoke in a lilting drawl, calculated, like a vaudeville shtick, to enhance both the courtroom drama and casual onlookers’ suspense. Over the years, Jason had seen Judge Kirk bait defendants with a similar infantilizing tone.
The young girl’s lips pressed together so hard they blanched white. The mouth twisted perversely as she stared at the tiny woman in the black robe elevated on the dais. But Judge Kirk had pivoted in her seat facing the far wall and never witnessed the defendant’s Jekyll and Hyde transformation. “I’d rather tell you what I didn’t do and work backwards.” 
The bailiff, a robust man in his late thirties with a sleepy face, gawked at the headstrong girl. Judge Kirk demanded discrete decorum in her courtroom, and God help anyone who, resorting to theatrics, thought they could bend the rules. “What didn’t you do, Ms. Riley?” The judge said sourly, peering over her bifocals.
“I didn’t murder anyone, prostitute myself, rob a bank or embezzle money from an employer.” 
“But you did run up a tab of a hundred and eighty-five dollars in unpaid parking tickets.” 
Madison breathed out sharply, expelling all the air from her lungs forcefully. “I work for a temporary placement firm on East Avenue and commute downtown to visit my clients on a regular basis. But there’s never any on-street parking, and the meters eat up all my spare change.” 
 “A crummy quarter buys fifteen minutes on a municipal parking meter,” Madison said bitterly. “If the city cared about local merchants or small businesses, they’d do away with meters altogether. It’s just legalized extortion.” 
The judge picked up the mahogany-colored gavel and ran a finger over the broad head. “You’re wasting the court’s valuable time.”
“I am the court.”
Judge Kirk winced. She sat up straight, waving the gavel at the young girl. “What did you just say?”
Madison Riley rose to her feet behind the defendants’ table. “As a citizen, my tax dollars provide for all this.” She waved a hand in a sweeping gesture. “I don’t pay your salary as a public servant so you can talk to me in that officious, condescending tone.” 
The bailiff leaned forward, crooked his head to one side and gazed at the judge trying to decipher her intent. Did the young lady need to be restrained? Removed from the court? No one had ever been so outspoken. They wouldn’t dare. There were no precedents. “That bit of histrionics,” Judge Kirk returned coolly, “just cost you another hundred and fifty dollars added to what you already owe.”
“Which is to say,” Madison lowered her voice in a baiting tone, “you run your court like a cab company, where the meter keeps ticking until patrons reach a final destination.”
Judge Kirk chuckled, but it was not a terribly comforting sound. “You can debark, get out right here by paying the various fines, if you like,” she shot back, “or try my patience further and see where that gets you.” 
Now Danny Sullivan, the bailiff relaxed, leaned back again and rubbed his wide, clean-shaven jaw with an oversized fist. Danny had been working the district court, specifically Judge Kirk’s courtroom, for the past fifteen years, and Jason doubted the bailiff had ever seen anyone go at the judge like this spunky defendant. 
The court reporter was familiar with a broad range of miscreants. There were the surly, inarticulate types too stupid to hold their own with the irascible judge. Most - a solid eighty per cent – were grungy lowlifes, gamblers, petty crooks, alcoholics, druggies and middle-aged, recidivist hoodlums with anger management issues. Madison Riley didn’t fit neatly into any of these categories. The robust girl lowered her eyes and seemed lost in private reverie for the better part of a minute. When she finally raised her head, the body language was thoroughly relaxed, congenial almost. “Two things,” Madison spoke easily, measuring her words. “After spending a wretched night in jail, I came into your courtroom this morning with the intent of paying the tickets, but now I’d rather rot in hell than submit to your vindictive whims.”
Dead silence. Judge Kirk removed her glasses letting them slip down on a beaded, gold chain. She made a tent with her hands, flexing her knuckles in and out. “Two things. You said there were two things you had to say.” 
Madison glanced at the judge for a brief second then directed her words at the empty stenographer’s chair. “Autocrats rules by decree. They are cruel, despotic and overbearing. They value nobody’s opinion but their own. You are an autocrat.”
A wave of jittery uncertainty swept over the courtroom. The bailiff, who had been staring intently at the freckle-faced woman, blinked violently and averted his eyes. Several visitors squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. Judge Kirk kicked at the floor sending her leather-padded executive chair spinning a full hundred-and-eighty degrees. As though she had disappeared behind inch-thick chamber doors, the woman lingered facing the wall for a solid minute before swinging back around. 
“That sophomoric remark, Ms. Riley, earned you another night in jail. I’ll see you again tomorrow morning, and we will pick up where we left off.” She lifted the gavel high in the air. “Additionally, I’m assigning your case to a public defender who hopefully will prove a bit more familiar with judicial protocol.” She brought the gavel down with a resounding crash that startled several spectators, causing them to lurch about spastically in their seats.
Jason watched Madison as she was led in handcuffs from the courtroom. The girl’s demeanor was bland, indifferent. What had she accomplished by badgering the judge? The more Jason thought about it, Madison’s surly nonchalance as she was lead from the room suggested that there would be even worse fireworks in the morning.

The town solicitor’s arraignment was postponed to the following day. Apparently he copped a plea with the district attorney’s office and the two sides were still hammering out the sordid details. Deserting the courtroom, Jason crossed the street to a Tim Horton’s coffee shop where he ordered a mocha cappuccino. The reporter was trying with minimal success to get a handle on what he had just witnessed. 
What awful crime had Madison Riley committed? The young woman was far to clean cut – like some toothy, wild-eyed innocent in a Norman Rockwell original. Jason was convinced early on by her contrite body language and soft-spoken demeanor that she had every intention of cutting her losses and making good on the parking tickets. Only when the judge began berating her in that syrupy, patronizing tone did everything fall to pieces. 


A year earlier in celebration of her tenth year anniversary at the courthouse, the newspaper published a full-length article on Judge Kirk. The senior editor had suggested that, rather than focus on her professional achievements, which had already been documented ad nauseam; perhaps Jason could take a human interest slant – research the early childhood years long before the diminutive woman ever considered a career in law. Jason called her at home later that evening; Judge Kirk was ecstatic at the prospect of a feature article cobbled together with a lavish spread of full-color pictures in the Sunday supplement.
Felicia Gwendolyn Kirk was the only child of a neurosurgeon with a three-story brownstone in the posh Chestnut Hill section of Newton. The doctor owned a second, vacation home on Block Island. “We stabled horses. It was a bucolic existence, like something out of a Victorian novel,” the judge gushed.
 “Pride and Prejudice,” Jason offered. 
“Yes, exactly that sort of rustic perfection.” As they chatted, the photographer scampered noiselessly about the living room snapping photos. Judge Kirk’s husband, who joined his wife for pictures, had since gone off elsewhere. “All summer long, I rode bareback through meadows filled with tiger lilies, salt spray roses and local wildflowers. From June when school got out straight through to Labor Day, I hardly ever wore a pair of shoes.” Jason thought the last remark a bit of a stretch, but obviously the youthful Felicia Kirk lived a blessed life far removed from the humdrum monotony that most middle-class working stiffs endured. “Our summer home was a mile and a half from the Southeast Lighthouse. A favorite tourist spot, it draws thousands of visitors to Block Island each year.”
“I toured the structure during a trip to the island a few years back,” Jason remarked. The lighthouse featured a six-sided, red brick base leading up to a formidable steel enclosure which housed the light element. An attached, three-story building with scalloped windows was only slightly shorter than the massive light itself.
“There is so much history in the region,” Judge Kirk gushed. “The area around Block Island has been the site of numerous shipwrecks, including the Steamer Larchmont in 1907.” 
“I wasn’t aware – “
“And, of course,” she was almost tripping over her words, “the wreck of the Princess Augusta, also known as the Palatine ship which was later immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier in his famous poem, The Wreck of the Palatine”. The judge sat up straighter on the sofa just as the photographer sneaked around the walnut coffee table to snap a flurry of additional pictures. Raising an arm in a theatrical gesture, she recited from memory in a stilted, breathy monotone.

“Circled by waters that never freeze, 
Beaten by billow and swept by breeze, 
Lieth the island of Manisees,…”

“Very nice!” Jason responded when she was done with the poem. He felt like throwing up. This dwarfish gnome, who sat in judgment throughout the week and sent people off to jail with a resounding crash of her mahogany gavel, hadn’t a solitary clue how the other half lived.  The woman, who spent her childhood summers galloping frenetically around an historic island off the Atlantic coast, clearly considered herself royalty, an aristocratic breed apart.  
Jason wrote the article, which appeared the third weekend in July. Readers found the story of Felicia Kirk’s early years bewitching, magical. As a child, Judge Kirk enjoyed a fairy tale existence. If she was an insufferable egomaniac with an atrocious sense of entitlement, it didn’t come across in Jason’s article. Or perhaps it did, but most people chose to ignore it. 


The feisty Madison Riley worked for a temporary agency over on East Avenue.  Jason thumbed through the Yellow Pages and located a listing for Quality Temps. Maybe someone over at the agency could bring him up to speed on the young girl presently moldering in a cramped cell in the basement of the Brandenberg courthouse. Jason ran an index finger down the directory in the lobby of the professional high rise before riding the wood-paneled elevator to the fourth floor. “Is the director in?”
“And you are?” the gray-haired receptionist asked.
“Jason Endicott with the Brandenberg Gazette.”
Five minutes later Jason was sitting opposite Elliot Rubin. A slim, clean-shaven man in his early thirties the director exuded a pensive, easygoing charm. A navy blue sports jacket was draped over the back of his chair. “One of your employees got into a legal bind last night.”
Elliot squinted. A dusky, five o’clock shadow was already spreading across the businessman’s pallid jaw. “Who, exactly?
“Madison Riley.”
Elliot’s face darkened and he became noticeably agitated. “Is this a joke?” 
“Madison’s presently in jail.” Jason told him what happened. 
Somewhere in the building a manual typewriter was clacking away. The telephone rang making a musical trilling sound and, after a moment, the intercom buzzed.  Elliot took the call. “Over the summer, Madison rented a studio apartment but eventually had to move back home to care for an invalid mother who’s confined to a wheelchair. I wonder if the girl’s mother knows why Madison didn’t come home last night.” Elliot rose to his feet and led the way back to the main lobby. “I’m going out for a while,” he told the receptionist. 
“There’s a staff meeting at eleven.”
“If I’m not back by then,” Elliot replied, “let them start without me.”

Two blocks down on the right was a wooded, municipal park with a playground. They sat down on a bench opposite the swings. It was a dazzling October day, Indian summer with temperatures hovering in the mid sixties. The plush carpet of decaying, earth-colored leaves – blood red, chocolaty brown, yellow, burnt sienna and mottled orange - would soon be blanketed over with New England snow. Fifty feet away, a toddler was climbing hand-over-fist up a rope ladder to a plastic corkscrew slide. “When she first came to work at Quality Temps, Madison worked out of our secretarial pool,” Elliot spoke slowly, measuring his words. “One day after she had been with us for three years, an in-house position came available for a placement supervisor and we offered her the job.”
“Our agency staffs hospitals, nursing homes, lawyers’ offices and several local insurance companies. Madison had a knack for choosing the best people – only the best. For every ten, applicants who showed up at the agency, she hired no more than two or three, dramatically fewer than any of her coworkers. But where the other new hires crashed and burned after only a handful of days on the job, virtually all of Madison’s placements lasted well beyond the six-month probationary period.” “You said Madison ended up in Judge Kirk’s courtroom?” Elliot muttered, abruptly shifting gears. Jason nodded. 
“Last year I waded through an ugly divorce,” Elliot confided with obvious distaste. “My ex-wife suffered mental problems; she sucked all the oxygen out of the room with her insatiable neediness.” He rubbed his jaw meditatively. “A month after the honeymoon, I caught her sleeping with a casual acquaintance, some horny asshole that she met at an aerobics class.” Elliot’s voice was tinged with self-deprecating humor, as though he might have been describing someone else’s marital misfortunes. 
“At first, we bickered back and forth through lawyers, dividing up joint property and assets. Mediation - that’s what they called it. A legal give and take. For the most part, I gave and my ex-wife graciously took everything but the Fruit of the Loom underwear I was wearing. When the legal rigmarole was finished we moved on to the final, settlement phase and had to go before Judge Kirk.” 
“Tough luck!”  Jason said, shaking his head sympathetically. 
“There was no reasoning with that prune-faced bitch.” Elliot watched as the young boy, who had earlier climbed the rope ladder, spiraled back down the chute into his mother’s outstretched arms. “I don’t know which was worse – the divorce itself or the nightmare of ending up in Judge Kirk’s courtroom.” Elliot fell silent. He loosened his silk tie, pulling it away from the collar. “I’ll put up the money for Madison’s bail,” he blurted.
“There is no bail,” Jason brought him up short. “At least not until after the hearing tomorrow morning. And that presupposes Madison doesn’t do something totally off the wall.”
They spoke a while longer and finally Jason said, “I’m going to try to visit her later this afternoon.”
“I’ll join you.”
The youngster over by the ladder was pulling himself up to the slatted wooden landing a second time while his mother hovered close by. “I know the bailiff. He’s a decent Joe, but I’ll be lucky enough to get in alone.” Rising to their feet, the two men exchanged business cards. “Call me later this evening, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”
Elliot watched a squirrel foraging for nuts pick his way helter-skelter across the leaf-strewn lawn before disappearing up the scarred trunk of a maple tree. “Madison has been with me at Quality Temps eight years now. Five, sometimes six days a week, we’re together managing the company.” He chuckled and pawed at the leaves with the toe of a tan wing-tipped shoe. “A Platonic, business relationship can be more intense than a goddamn marriage.”
   “Nights taken aside,” Jason observed, “you probably spend more quality time together.”
A dark-skinned woman pushing a double stroller passed through the park heading toward the playground. Elliot’s face had assumed a focused intensity, as though he was trying to ferret out some elemental truth that kept slipping out from under his slender fingertips. “Even without sex or raw emotion, you get to know people— as Dostoyevsky would say, ‘in their heart of hearts’.”
The black woman pulled up twenty feet away at the same bench where they had been relaxing just a moment ago and sat down. Immediately, one of the babies began to fuss, and she reached into the stroller to settle the child down. “A canary in a coal mine,” Elliot muttered.
“What was that?”
“I was in shock, in massive denial for the first few years of my pitiful farce-of-a-marriage. One day I came to work. Madison was in the copy room running off a pile of interviewing forms, and I said to myself, ‘That woman is only five years younger than Ellen, but where my wife is essentially a thirty-eight year old, promiscuous adolescent, Madison’s a grownup. Like a fine wine, she can only continue to mature with age.’ The next day I contacted a lawyer and filed for divorce.”  
“Madison Riley,” Elliot repeated, “was my canary in a coal mine.” 
They had reached the street now and were making their way back to the temporary employment agency. Jason wasn’t quite sure what to say. The metaphor was a bit strained. The canary gave its life, suffocated so others ultimately might be saved. No, it was not a particularly good analogy at all. Still, he understood perfectly well the oblique truth that Elliot was flailing at. “If I didn’t know any better…” Leaving the unfinished sentence dangling in the air, Jason waited a discrete interval, but Elliot opted to let the observation die a silent death.


Back at the Brandenberg Gazette, Jason checked messages and set to work on the lead article describing the town solicitor’s fall from grace. The community would be outraged. A longtime, city employee, who received a generous salary plus benefits, caught ripping the system off, betraying the public trust – the taxpayers would scream for blood. 
Jason thumbed through an early morning copy of the paper. In the letters-to-the-editor section following the local headlines was a lengthy commentary: Ethical Considerations in Civil Litigation by Felicia Kirk. Jason cringed inwardly as he read through the heavy-handed, stodgy prose.  
On a regular basis, Judge Kirk mailed editorials – more like bombastic harangues - to the editor of the Brandenberg Gazette.  Because of her prominence in the community, the senior editor felt obligated to publish Judge Kirk’s thoughts on a wide variety of topics. Jason edited the copy, correcting any grammatical or syntactical problems but always left the grandiose, purple prose intact. When the senior editor questioned him on the matter, the reporter insisted that he didn’t want to ‘tamper with the judge’s unique, literary style’. The senior editor, who hated the woman almost as much as Jason, sniggered, made a vulgar remark regarding the judge’s physical stature, and walked away.

The previous December the local art museum held their annual fundraiser. Wine and hors d'oeuvre were served in the lobby while a string ensemble performed Mozart preludes further back near a collection of lithographs. Local artisans in various media – paint, sculpture, woodworking, pottery and jewelry – donated pieces to be auctioned off. The proceeds helped fund museum programs. Jason covered the event for the newspaper. The mayor showed up with several councilmen and other dignitaries. And, of course, when Judge Kirk, who sat on the museum’s board of directors, arrived with her husband in a chauffeured limousine, the guests at the black tie event greeted her like a local celebrity. 
Now she was playing coy, laughing in a high-strung titter at some clever joke or offering her opinion about a artist’s clever use of chiaroscuro and pointillism. A moment later she was advising the head of the city redevelopment commission about planned renovations to the district court. Freethinker, selfless philanthropist, legal scholar, and community activist - a few dozen years from now when her bones were decaying in the grave perhaps the town fathers would dedicate a park, library wing or municipal building in her memory. Why not a four-foot eleven-inch, bronze statue? No one would remember the legal sodomy perpetrated on Madison Riley. Verisimilitude – nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Nothing was ever what it ought to be


Over the remainder of the morning into the early afternoon, Jason polished the article about the wayward town solicitor. Two more pieces had to be proof read before sending them off to the printer. Shortly after lunch, a group of students from the local high school had arranged to visit the paper on an informal walking tour, and Jason invited them back to discuss the print media in general and field questions. 
What did he like best about journalism? Well, journalism, at its best, was a rather glorified term for unearthing the subtle nuances hidden away in seemingly innocuous stories. What was it H. L. Mencken had said about the profession? Journalism was about facts while literature and poetry dealt with truth. Yes, something to that effect. Felicia Kirk could ride bareback through the wildflower meadows of Block Island, recite Whittier’s poems by heart and schmooze with politicians, but she was still nothing more than a crotchety fact, never a sublime truth.


Leaving the office, Jason drove back to district court. He cornered Eddy Sullivan as he stood outside the room where jurors were sequestered. The bailiff was clutching a can of soda in his large fist. “That girl, Madison Riley, with the unpaid parking tickets…” 
“That’s a sad case.” The officer looked genuinely uncomfortable. 
“Where are you keeping her?” Jason pressed.
“Downstairs in the lockup.”
“Can she have visitors?”
Eddy shrugged. “I just looked in on her five minutes ago. She asked if I could get her a drink.” He handed the can to Jason and pointed toward a stairwell leading down to the lower landing. “Third cell on the right.” He stooped over and lowered his voice to a whisper. “We never had this conversation.” Pulling himself up to his full height, he disappeared into the jurors’ room.

Jason found Madison sitting on unmade bunk in a brightly lit cell. “I’m Jason Endicott, a reported with the local newspaper.”
“I noticed you in the courtroom this morning,” Madison replied. The girl looked haggard now. 
“Did the judge set you up with a public defender?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head fitfully as though trying to clear the cobwebs. “Ernie Something-or-other. The fellow had a speech impediment and couldn’t seem to organize his thoughts.”
“Well, that’s a nice start.” 
Ernie Something-or-other would be Ernie Smoltz, Esq., a trial lawyer who had been disbarred several years back for misappropriating an elderly client’s funds. He had since made restitution in full and been reinstated. Ernie was considered semi-retired and generally held in very low regard by the other legal staff. In all probability, Judge Kirk spoke with Mr. Smoltz, instructing him how she wanted the case handled. Short of delivering a typewritten script, the judge would be manipulating the newly-assigned defense attorney like a marionette on a row of vertical strings. The defendant would have no real say in how the proceedings played out. Journalism and jurisprudence – tedious facts juxtaposed with uncomfortable, edgy truths. Nothing made much sense anymore. “Did you agree upon a strategy for tomorrow’s hearing?”
Madison flicked a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Ernie suggested that I offer a formal apology for the ‘autocrat’ remark and then agree to pay the fines and penalties.”
“A sensible approach,” Jason noted. 
“Yes, perfectly sensible,” Madison agreed. “Which is why as soon as we stand before the judge in the morning, I plan to dismiss legal counsel and go propria persona.”
“Pro se,” Jason interjected.
“Yes, I’ll represent myself in court.” 
God forbid a humble citizen should decide to match wits with a legal dolt like Ernie Smoltz and turned the sturm und drang of a third-rate mind on its ear! Law as the art of persuasion cut both ways, and lay people seldom played the game by tacitly accepted rules. For ingenuous souls like Madison Riley, their brains weren’t necessarily wired that way. Their sense of moral indignation trumped judicial considerations. Law as the fine art of persuasion was reasonable, but they’d rather go to jail sometimes than pay a stupid fine.. 
“Life has an ugly habit of kicking you in the shins,” Madison observed bleakly. Every once in a while, though, you have to stand up for something.”   
 Jason had rushed over to the Courthouse with a strong sense of conviction, but now that he was face to face with the woman slouching listlessly in the cell ten feet away, he didn’t quite know what else to say. He handed her the Coke through the bars. She flipped the tab and drank deeply, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. “I spoke with Elliot Rubin. He wanted to post bail, but I told him the contempt of court ruling precluded bail.”
Madison grinned and sipped at the cold drink. “That guy’s a regular sweetheart!”
Directly above, they could hear the sound of bodies being led out of the holding room down the main corridor. A new jury was being impaneled in the criminal division. “What if,” Jason offered, “I could get all your outstanding tickets and fines thrown out?”
“How will you manage that?” 
“Let me handle the details. Would you be willing to pay any future parking tickets, if I made the immediate problem go away?”
Madison considered the question. “Yeah, I suppose so.” “I probably would have paid up this morning if the judge hadn’t been so nasty.”

Canary in a mine shaft. Jason remembered Elliot’s private reflection. The trusting songbird led deep into the darkened pit in a metal cage, warned miners of impending danger. Not that the sacrificial canary benefited in any way. Problem was, Jason didn’t really have any game plan for finessing Judge Felicia Kirk into reducing, much less dismissing, Madison Riley’s penalties. 
That wasn’t completely true. There was a possibility but it was a long shot. Judge Kirk was a powerful, public figure in Brandenberg. Appointed by the mayor, she sat on several corporate boards and, as with her frequent commentaries in the local newspaper, never missed an opportunity to thrust her name in front of the public. The woman had only one weakness: her insufferable vanity. 

Later that night, Jason called Elliot Rubin at home. “I saw Madison earlier.” He told her about their meeting and the girl’s plan to jettison the court-appointed lawyer. “I thought I might do some crisis intervention before all hell breaks loose in the morning, but I need your help.”
“What exactly did you have in mind?” Jason told him. There was dead silence when he finished his remarks. “Yes, that might work,” Elliot said bluntly, “but I’ll want to be a part of this.”
“There’s no need - ”
“We can meet outside the courthouse around eight.” Elliot was not to be denied. 
“What we’re doing amounts to emotional blackmail,” Jason felt obligated to say as much before hanging up the phone.


In the morning, Jason intercepted Judge Felicia Kirk as she was approaching the granite steps of the Brandenberg District Court. “About the young girl, Madison Riley, with the outstanding parking tickets ...”
Her face contracted in a pugnacious expression. “And you are?” 
“Jason Endicott, a reporter with the local newspaper.”
If she recognized Jason from the Block Island article, the woman clearly felt no urge to renew the acquaintance. The judge pushed passed Jason and bounded up the stairs on her stubby legs. “The matter will be decided in a few, short hours.”
“Not necessarily,” Jason raised the stakes. “Ms Riley will be dismissing Mr. Smoltz, the court-appointed lawyer, opting to represent herself pro se.”
“And how do you know this?” When there was no reply, she turned and stared at the man in the pin-striped suit standing next to Jason. “Who are you?”
“Elliot Rubin, the director of Quality Temps where Madison Riley is currently employed.”
“Somehow, you look familiar.” She glowered at Elliot then glanced at her wristwatch. “After two days in the lockup, the young lady with the caustic tongue is still spoiling for a fight?” 
“You’re going to want to hear what we have to say,” Jason said.
“Or what, Mr. Endicott?” she shot back acidly. 
“Or you can read about it in tomorrow’s newspaper.” 
Judge Kirk’s smallish eyes narrowed to tiny slits. She shifted an attaché case she was carrying from one hand to the other. People – litigants, witnesses, lawyers and relatives - were beginning to line up in front of the courthouse doors. “I’ll give you five minutes.” 
“It might take a bit longer,” Elliot noted flippantly, “but we’ll make it worth your while.”
Judge Kirk led the way through a side door. Once past the metal detectors, she brought them to an office on the second floor. As in the courtroom proper, the judge’s desk was positioned on a raised platform with a pair of chairs angled to the front.  “Madison Riley is a decent woman,” Elliot began once they were finally situated in the judge’s chambers.
“Her character is open to debate,” Judge Kirk qualified. “From my vantage point, Madison Riley is a hothead with no respect for the law.” She rested her head at a sharp angle on a balled fist.
 “I could tell you,” Elliot continued, ignoring the last remark, “about Madison’s utterly unique approach to human resources, but don’t think it would hold your interest very long, and it’s doubtful you want to hear how, as power forward on the high school, varsity basketball team, she took Brandenberg to the women’s regional finals.”
“I covered that game,” Jason interjected. “She had a deadly, fall away jump shot.”
“None of this sugar-coated malarkey is going to get your friend out of jail,” the judge remarked dyspeptically. 
“Did you know,” Jason offered, “that Madison Riley lives at home with her widowed mother, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis?” Judge Riley gawked at the reporter with a stony expression, never bothering to lift her head off the fist. “Mrs. Riley fell and broke a hip last summer. At first the doctors thought it was a freak accident. She got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and tripped over a scatter rug, loosing her footing on the ceramic tile.”
“But it was no accident,” Elliot picked up the thread of the conversation. “At least not in the conventional sense, because the brittle bone snapped before the woman keeled over and hit the floor.”   
Judge Kirk glanced over Elliot’s right shoulder at the clock on the far wall. Five minutes to nine. “What you’re telling me might make sense in the context of a soap opera, but has no bearing whatsoever on the daughter’s legal problems. Why are you wasting my time?”
 Jason rose from the chair and began pacing the floor in front of the raised platform. “Doctors were treating the woman’s rheumatoid condition with corticosteroids, prednisone specifically. Of course, that was back before the medical establishment understood that, over time, prednisone drains calcium from the body leading to osteoporosis.” 
“Now Madison’s mother is confined to a wheelchair,” Elliot added, “and her loving daughter, who you incarcerated on a civil matter of no great consequence, is unable to care for the invalid.” He shook his head and groaned in an overtly melodramatic gesture. “It’s so terribly sad when older, medically disabled people are left to suffer unnecessarily!”
Jason shook his head energetically and, not to be outdone, grunted in sympathetic agreement. “I’m considering writing a human interest story. Let the public know about Madison Riley’s meteoric rise in the temporary personnel field and her mother’s tragic mishap with crippling illness. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t tie everything together with what’s presently going on in your courtroom.”
For all her shrewd and meticulous intellect, Judge Felicia Kirk was blindsided by Jason’s ploy. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair on the improvised dais, coughed several times and cleared her throat. “What exactly do you buffoons want?”
“I want you to make everything go away. The traffic tickets, the contempt of court fine, everything. Abracadabra!”
“And what do I get in the bargain?” 
“Ms. Riley has already agreed to pay any future parking violations,” Jason replied. “And, of course, you keep your unsullied reputation.”

“Canary in a coal mine,” Jason said. They were loitering outside the building in the crisp, autumnal air. “Madison helped you out of a bind with your marriage and you just returned the favor. Did it ever occur to you …” For a second time in as many days, Jason didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Madison Riley emerged from the courthouse and was hurrying down the granite stairs. Elliot Rubin features turned to mush and his walnut-colored eyes fogged over with a look that was almost embarrassing to witness.

Return to Table of Contents


Hummus



“Naomi Shamir is on the phone.” Sonny Gossage’s mother was standing on the second floor landing just outside her son’s closed bedroom door. “She wants to speak to you.”
Sonny was thumbing through a back issue of National Geographic, ogling pictures of an annual West African fertility ritual. In an open field, teenage virgins were parading in front of the tribal leader. Decked out in leopard skin robes, the grizzled ruler sat on a rickety, straight-backed chair. The debilitated king, who appeared to be in his eighties, smiled regally as over a hundred bare-chested woman passed in review. The girls wore necklaces of gold, silver, ivory and shells at their throat and sported similar finery on their wrists and ankles. Everyone, especially the geriatric ruler, seemed to be having a splendid time.
 “Don’t know anybody by that name,” the boy replied as he scanned the column of dark-skinned beauties waiting to present their physical assets. 
“The Israeli woman whose husband ran off last summer,” Mrs. Gossage clarified. “She lives with her daughter in that fancy schmancy, split-level house with the green shutters.
Sonny felt his heart begin to race out of control. Throwing the magazine aside, he rose from the bed and made his way to the telephone. “Hello?” There was a brief pause. “Yes, that was my flyer.” After a moment, Sonny hung up the phone and grinned self-consciously. “She wants me to mow her lawn twice a month.”  
A week ago Tuesday, Sonny hoofed it up and down the neighborhood stuffing mailboxes with flyers. 

Lawn care and landscape services.
Reasonable rates!
Call 508-226-5987 for a free estimate.

Sonny had no idea what he meant by ‘landscape services’. He was using his father’s beat-up mower and an electric weed whacker with a hundred-foot extension cord. “Now I got thirteen accounts, including the Jewish lady.”

Mrs. Shamir was a dark-skinned Sabra, native born Israeli, who moved into a spacious ranch house at the far end of Baxter Street. A year ago the husband disappeared, flew the coop. It was rumored he deserted his wife and returned to Israel. Naomi was an ophthalmologist who did eye exams at the Vision World up the road in Wrentham. Sonny had seen her returning from work in the late afternoon. Sometimes she wore a short, white jacket like a medical doctor, her lush, dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. The woman had a daughter in first grade, drove a beige BMW and grew her own vegetables in the back yard. 
The other week, a pickup truck dumped a load of smelly manure by the side of the house. Later that afternoon, Sonny watched from his upstairs window with binoculars as Mrs. Shamir, dressed in cut-off dungarees and a flimsy halter, made multiple trips with a fire engine red wheelbarrow, lugging the smelly cow-poop to the back yard where she raked the brown gold out over her newly seeded vegetable garden. Observing the voluptuous, brown-skinned woman wield a short-handle spade was even more arousing than viewing glossy pictures of West African natives parading in front of their king naked from the waist up.

Timing was everything. Sonny trimmed three other lawns and pruned a fifty-foot hedge over the first half of the following week. Then it rained, a spitting drizzle, straight through until Saturday morning when the sun emerged and the temperature soared into the high eighties. The boy dragged the Toro twenty-one inch, mulching mower over to the Shamir home at ten o’clock in the morning. Naomi was already out in the rear puttering in her garden. Her dark-haired daughter was pushing herself on the swing.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Naomi stood up and brushed the dirt from her hands. A six-pointed star dangled from a silver chain, her jet black hair knotted in a pony tail. Sonny could smell the pungent dung, but it was pleasant. A noisy band of crows flitted back and forth among the Scotch pines that bordered the property. “Why don’t you start in the front?”
The girl said something to her mother in a gruff, guttural language and the mother responded in kind. “This is Ruth.” She pronounced the word as though there was no ‘h’. The girl, who shared the mother’s olive skin tones and hooked nose, wasn’t nearly as pretty. 
Near a clump of lilacs, the woman had planted a profusion of tulips and assorted wild flowers. Taking care not to damage any of the blossoms, Sonny mowed the front lawn then both sides. Where the stringy weeds had grown right up to the foundation he ran the weed whacker, paring the unruly mess away to nothing. The temperature had climbed steadily throughout the morning into the low nineties. Sonny would have preferred to peel his T-shirt off but felt self-conscious. By the time he reached the back, Mrs. Shamir had finished her gardening and gone inside with her daughter. He shut the mower down momentarily to move a picnic table and when he looked up the Israeli woman was standing to one side with a glass of soda.
“You poor boy!” The tone was more humorous than genuinely sympathetic. “We get such oppressive heat in my country throughout the summer months. It’s called ‘hamseen’. When the heat gets nutty, so does the population, and there’s an epidemic of traffic accidents, mental breakdowns, robberies and reports of husbands beating their wives. The searing heat makes people crazy in the head.”
She handed him the soda. Sonny didn’t know what to say. She was so insanely pretty with her high cheekbones, plump lips and exotic accent. “Last Sunday,” she continued with the same devilishly engaging smile, “I was taking little Ruthy out for breakfast and saw your family leaving church after Mass.” 
Mrs. Shamir pursed her lips. “Everybody imagines that Jews don’t believe in Jesus but that’s not completely true. We tend to think of him as just another Biblical prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah, Jonah, Micah or Ezekiel.” She tapped her lips with a slender finger. “He spent some time wandering about Nazareth, you know?”
Sonny’s brains were a bit muddled with the heat and physical exertion. “Who’s that?”
“Jesus Christ.”
The boy felt like a total dunce. The woman spoke with such unassuming, matter-of-factness that Sonny thought she might have been referring to a mutual acquaintance rather than the Son of God. “Yes, of course,” he blustered, gawking at her chest. Naomi Shamir’s magnificent breasts were unearthly huge. Not to be denied, they jutted out from her cotton blouse like a pair of perky sentinels.
“I lived in Upper Nazareth with my family all through high school. Your savior was a neighbor a few centuries removed.”
 “Never thought of it that way.” Sonny chuckled. “You must attend the synagogue over by the mall.”
A disagreeable expression engulfed her features. “No, I’m not religious. Not in the least.”
“You’re an atheist?” Sonny pressed.
“Agnostic,” she clarified. “Do you know the difference?” Sonny, who wasn’t totally clear on the subject, shook his head from side to side. 
“You must be familiar with the Holocaust and what happened during Second World War.”
“Yes, we studied that in history last year.”
“Following the war, many Jews tried to understand how a compassionate God could turn his back and let six million innocent people perish in concentration camps.” Her tone was sober, almost clinical in its detachment. “Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, wrote a short book, The Eclipse of God. He said that during the Nazi evil, God was eclipsed – hidden behind an impenetrable shroud of human wickedness.” 
Ruth came skipping down the front stairs and wrapped both her stubby arms around her mother’s lovely thigh. “Buber reasoned that God wasn’t insensitive to the suffering of his people. Humanity was its own undoing.” She reached out rather suddenly and tapped him playfully on the shoulder with a taut index finger. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I get it, but why are you telling me this?”
“I didn’t want you to think that a Jew, arrived straight from the Holy Land and who doesn’t go to temple, is necessarily ignorant of such things.”
“I would never do that,” Sonny promised. 
Naomi Shamir retrieved the empty soda glass. “Good!’ The serious mood dissipated and a radiant smile suffused her dark face. Digging deep in her pocket, she pulled out a twenty dollar bill. “See you in two weeks.” Handing him the money, she swept her daughter up in her fleshy arms and disappeared back into the house. 
Pushing the mower down the street, Sonny’s brain was in such a state of upheaval he couldn’t manage to string two coherent thoughts back to back. A perverse thought occurred to Sonny: Mr. Shamir had been driven away by his wife’s beauty. No one could live in that blinding white light of human perfection for any length of time without going bonkers, drooling like a mindless idiot. Of course the prickly heat didn’t help. What was the Hebrew word she had used? Hamseen. Normally mild-mannered, respectable husbands’ beat their wives; drivers negotiated the highway like they were competing in a demolition derby. But that didn’t explain everything – not even the half of it.
Later that night, lying on top of the covers in his bedroom, Sonny’s mind was fixed on his Hebrew neighbor like a compulsive fetish. Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, Naomi Shamir, …


Mrs. Gossage claimed Jews were the ‘People of the Book’. They were real smart and rich and good in math and science and banking and just about everything else. The freckle-faced woman had gained fifty pounds since Sonny left middle school. At about the same time her waist began to spread like an over inflated truck tire, Mrs. Gossage switched over to the Charismatic wing of the Catholic Church. She liked their emotional spontaneity and exuberance. Unfortunately, neither Mr. Gossage nor her son shared her enthusiasm and stayed put at Saint Phillips on the west side of Brandenberg. 
Agnostics took no stand on the existence of God. They simply didn’t care one way or the other. If God was dead or simply a figment of some fanatic’s delusional mindset, so be it. Sonny wasn’t about to tell his mother about Mrs. Shamir’s religious predilections for fear the woman with the bowling pin legs and pear-shaped physique would blow an ecumenical gasket! 
The previous May, Sonny, his father and eight year-old sister, Laverne accompanied Mrs. Gossage to a Charismatic service in Holdenville. Just once. Toward the end of the raucous service, several wild-eyed parishioners began to dance ecstatically in the aisles waving their arms over their heads. One elderly couple was making weird, glottal noises that sounded like gibberish. “What the hell are they doing?” Mr. Gossage hissed.
“Talking in tongue,” his wife replied pleasantly as though the antics were totally normal, commonplace.”
“Those lunatics belong in straightjackets,” Sonny directed his remarks at the linoleum tile.
“I’ll just wait outside until the Mass is finished,” Mr. Gossage muttered, rising from the pew. Sonny followed his father out the door. Laverne, who appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the three-ring circus, opted to stay.
A half hour later parishioners began filing out of the building. “I fear,” Sonny’s father noted with a poker face, “your mother has gone over to the dark side.”
Bedlam. Goddamn, hedonistic bedlam – that was Sonny’s terse assessment. True enough, the service had a surrealistic, otherworldly quality. At any minute, the boy would not have been overly surprised to see white-coated orderlies burst through the sanctuary doors to haul the true believers off to the loony bin! After the fiasco in Holdenville, Mrs. Gossage continued to attend Charismatic prayer meetings several nights a week. She went alone and said nothing to her family about any extravagant behavior or emotional excesses. 


Two weeks later, Sonny was back at the Shamir residence. The BMW was in the driveway but the front door was locked tight. He primed the Biggs and Stratton engine and pulled fiercely on the starter cord. Running the mower the length of the backyard, he turned around and walked back, keeping the inside of the wheels firmly planted in the previous cut mark. This conservative approach added another half hour to the time normally required to do the job, but guaranteed a perfect cut with no holidays. 

Throughout the summer, Sonny serviced his other accounts. Mrs. Reardon, a widow who lived in a shabby, run-down place at the far end of the street, requested a senior citizen discount. The old lady had a heart condition and was getting by on social security so Sonny didn’t mind cutting her a break. But he didn’t feel quite so magnanimous toward the real estate broker diagonally across from the invalid. 
“Your prices are a bit steep,” the man groused.
Sonny eyed him mistrustfully. He had already mowed the lawn, trimmed thirty feet of hedges and swept the clippings into a recyclable rubbish bag. “My prices are reasonable, and you didn’t mention any problem when you called me last Thursday to do the work.”
“I didn’t mention anything,” he replied glibly, “because, as a businessman, I always prefer talking to a people face-to-face.” He gesticulated vaguely with his chubby hands. “It’s so much more personal that way.” His eyes settled on Sonny with brittle authority. Short and sporting a beer belly that hung far out over his pants turning the buckle inside out, the man was closer to his father’s age. The broker pulled some bills from his pocket and kept waving them enticingly in the air but without any clear indication that he would relent and fork over the money. “Any chance you can you cut me a break?” 
“I give discounts to cripples and senior citizens,” Sonny’s voice cracked but he didn’t waver. “If I charge you less, I might as well give all my other full-paying customers a rebate. What’s fair is fair.”
“Then don’t come back any more,” the real estate broker barked gruffly, flinging the money at his feet and turning way. “You don’t know the first thing about business etiquette.”
Sonny counted the crumpled bills. He was short five dollars. The man never intended to pay him the full amount - probably would have offered even less if Sonny lost his nerve. “Asshole!” he muttered under his breath as he rolled the Toro mower down the street in the direction of his house. “Stingy, two-bit asshole!”


On Saturday several weeks later Sonny returned to the Israeli woman’s home. The car was gone from the driveway. He rang the doorbell but then noticed a note scotch taped to the screen door.

Sonny,
     I got called into work. Go ahead and mow the lawn. I’ll touch bases with you sometime during the week.

Thanks,
Naomi Shamir


“Aw, crap!” Sonny primed the engine and pulled on the starter cord. He ran the mower the length of the backyard, turned around and walked back again. Sonny ran his Black and Decker fourteen-inch GrassHog weed whacker around the perimeter of Mrs. Shamir’s flower beds. Then he used the edger to tidy up the flagstone walkway leading to the front steps. All of the extra work was gratis. He wouldn’t get paid an extra cent, but, for some inexplicable reason, it made him feel good. An hour and a half later, Sonny went home.
He had been looking forward to seeing the lovely woman and perhaps having another conversation. No one ever took him half-serious – certainly not his God-crazed mother. Had she ever heard of Martin Buber and The Eclipse of God? The other day Mrs. Gossage asked Sonny if he might like to accompany her to the Tuesday night prayer meeting. Laverne had long since lost interest with the metaphysical buffoonery, and the woman had better sense than to ask her husband.
“No Thanks,” Sonny mumbled.
“There are some wholesome, young girls your age who attend,” Mrs. Gossage replied coyly.
Sonny recalled a flat-chested, pimply-faced blonde at the prayer service he attended with his father. When the religious chaos had reached a crescendo, the girl collapsed on the floor writhing about like an epileptic experiencing grand mal seizures. If the goofy girl had torn her clothes off and danced an Irish jig, the tawdry sideshow could not have been more revolting. “In the Bible,” Sonny replied, “it says that a person should go in a closet and pray quietly.” He fixed his mother with a challenging expression. “Pray quietly and alone,” he repeated. “Don’t make a big show of your devotion.”
Mrs. Gossage grinned defiantly at her son; her double chin and squat nose lent the face a vulgar coarseness. “The reading you’re referring to is from the Old Testament. Charismatic believers tend to worship more energetically.”
On the far wall to the right of the fireplace mantle was a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Gossage on their wedding day. Twenty years earlier and fifty pounds lighter, the woman was modestly pretty, if not exactly gorgeous. Somewhere between the honeymoon and their second child, she had let herself go – like a lawn overgrown with weeds, the unkempt grass gone to seed. And now all this Holy Roller religious mumbo jumbo! “I’m not going.” Sonny said tersely and his mother hurried out the door. 


Throughout the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Shamir was away from home more often than not when Sonny showed up to trim her lawn and the relationship that had seemed so promising fizzled away to nothing. Sometimes she dropped off the money on the way home from work. By late August the lawns were all burned to a crisp with a water ban in effect. There was no greenery to speak of just rubbery crabgrass, a handful of tenacious dandelions and ugly weeds. The last week in August, Mrs. Gossage took Sonny to the mall to buy pants and long sleeve shirts. In two weeks, he would begin his senior year of high school.
“Sonny! Sonny!” One evening in late October, Mrs. Gossage came rushing up the stairs like a bull elephant on the rampage. Her voice was shrill, borderline hysterical.
“What’s wrong?” Sonny was sitting at his desk finishing a chemistry assignment.
“Mrs. Shamir,” the woman gasped, still out of breath from climbing the stairs, “is here and needs to speak to you.”
Sonny closed the book. He hadn’t seen the woman in over two months. “What does she want?”
“It’s a long story.” Mrs. Gossage, still gasping for breath, waved her hand fitfully implying that he should speak directly with the woman. 
Naomi Shamir, dressed in a strapless black evening gown and high heels, was standing in the foyer with Ruthy clutching her mother’s hand. “A calamity,” Mrs. Shamir announced with a pained expression. “I have a dinner party this evening, and my babysitter called out sick at the last moment. Is there any chance you could mind Ruthy for a few hours?”
Sonny stared at the woman. Something was subtly different. Cosmetics – the woman never wore a stitch of makeup. But tonight she sported a glossy, wine-colored lipstick and eye shadow. Nothing more. That was all she needed. The steep V-cut in front of her dress left nothing to the imagination. “I didn’t finish my homework,” Sonny stammered. “Can I bring my books?”
“Of course. My date is due in due in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be over in five,” he replied.
She angled her dark eyes toward the ceiling and murmured. “Barooch haShaim!” 
“What’s that mean?”
“Thank God!”
“I thought you weren’t religious.”
“It’s just an expression.” Naomi clarified.


Mrs. Shamir’s date arrived promptly three minutes after Sonny. He was a solidly built, rather handsome Israeli man with angular, chiseled features and a wide jaw. From the minute he entered the house he spoke in rapid-fire Hebrew, ignoring Sonny altogether.
“If you’re hungry,” Naomi said, “there are bagels and cream cheese, some leftover pizza and a plate of hummus.” 
“What’s that?”
She brought him into the kitchen. Cracking the refrigerator open she pointed to a dish containing a coffee colored sauce. “Hummus – ground chickpeas, jalapeno pepper, lemon, parsley, garlic, a dash of olive oil and tahini, which is a paste prepared from sesame seeds. You can eat it with bread or crackers. Whatever.” In the living room, Mr. Solomon, was pacing about rather impatiently.

When they were gone, Sonny looked at Ruthy. “You got half an hour until bedtime. What do you want to do?”
The girl, who was already dressed for bed in flannel feety pajamas, scampered into the living room. “SpongeBob SquarePants!” She jumped up on the couch and, grabbing the TV clicker, channel surfed until she found her favorite cartoon. When the program finished, Sonny let the girl thumb through some picture books while he polished off his chemistry homework. Finally she threw the books aside. “I’m tired.” He took her to bed and ten minutes later the child was sound asleep. 
Sonny wandered into the kitchen. Removing the hummus from the refrigerator, he fished a spoon from the drawer and a box of Ritz crackers. The Middle Eastern delicacy definitely had a distinctive taste, like nothing he’d ever eaten before. Like savoring a fine wine, he let the creamy dip linger on his tongue relishing the exotic seasonings.  A half hour later the food was gone, the entire plate wiped clean. 
Having finished with the hummus, Sonny wandered through the house. Every room was neat and tidy. In the master bedroom a large hard cover text lay on the bedside table: Diseases of the Eye: etiology and treatment options by Dr. Rudolph Heffernan. Sonny slid his thumb under the bottom cover and lifted the text. The book ran to over a thousand pages. 
The queen-size bed was covered with a patchwork quilt comforter, a pair of pillows propped at the headboard. What would it be like to crawl into bed next to Naomi Shamir and, when she was finished reading a chapter or two of Dr. Heffernan’s seminal work, to snuggle, pet, comfort, cuddle, make love and to do all that was required?
Sonny went back to the living room and began an English assignment due later in the week. Around eleven Mr. Solomon brought Naomi home. She didn’t invite him in. Rather she kissed him on the cheek rather abruptly, said something in her native language and the man drove off. “Let me change out of this silly Halloween costume. Kicking her high heels off, she hurried into the bedroom and emerged a minute later in jeans and a cotton pullover. She went and checked on her daughter.
“Everything okay?”
“I ate all your hummus,” Sonny confided. “It was very good.”
“No great loss. It only takes a short while to mix up a fresh batch. “Did Ruthy give you any trouble?” 
“No, she was good.” Sonny stole a glance at her chest but, since abandoning the svelte evening dress, there was nothing to see now. Still, he couldn’t get his brain disentangled from Naomi Shamir’s stunning cleavage. By all estimates, it had been a vertical drop of six or eight inches from the beginning of the voluptuous furrow to the steep ravine that disappeared beneath the delicate lace material that defined the top of her evening dress.  “How was your date?”
Naomi pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side but did not answer immediately. “A bit of a disappointment.”
She went a second time to check on her daughter who was scrunched up like a tight fist under the covers sleeping peacefully. “Americans tend to be rather …” She stared at him helplessly. “I know the words in my own language but not in English.”
“In Hebrew, what would you say?” 
“Metoosbach and Metooskal,” She threw the odd-sounding words out with confident authority. “A person, who worries about the silliest things and can’t simply get on with his life, is ‘metoosbach’.” She nodded her pretty head up and down as though confirming the truthfulness of what she was telling him. The other word is quite similar.”
“Compulsive. Neurotic.”
“Yes, that’s it! You said it perfectly!” Naomi’s eyes brightened and her strong white teeth flashed with satisfaction. “It’s not good to be a tortured soul, but a certain amount of hardship builds character. Mr. Solomon unfortunately is like…” Again she was floundering at a loss for words, stymied by the unmanageable language.       
“He resembles a bowl of hummus,” Sonny offered, “with just the mashed up chickpeas – no garlic, parsley, olive oil or tahini. No seasoning at all.” Naomi smirked—a conspiratorial gesture—and Sonny grinned back at her. Mr. Solomon was an arrogant dolt. The cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, had more personality, if somewhat less innate intelligence, than the Israeli Adonis. “Are you going to see him again?”
“He already asked me out, but I don’t think I’ll accept.”  

A week later when Sonny returned from school in the late afternoon Laverne, was standing next to her mother grinning foolishly. “Your girl friend stopped by,” his sister announced in a taunting singsong voice. “Brought you a little present.”
Sonny turned to his mother. “Mrs. Shamir was here about ten minutes ago.” She went to the refrigerator and removed a plastic Tupperware bowl with a green lid. “She dropped this off by way of thanks for helping her out the other night when the babysitter stood her up.”
Sonny cracked the lid and sniffed. “What is it?” Laverne pressed.
“Hummus. It’s what they eat in the Middle East. He returned the container to the refrigerator and, with a newfound sense of pride, lumbered upstairs to start his homework.
Later that night Sonny spooned a generous helping of the brownish dip onto a dish and left it on the counter to warm to room temperature. A half hour later he tore some pita bread into small pieces and settled in with his exotic treat. Laverne sidled into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “How is it?”
Sonny dabbed the bread in the plate, sopping up the hummus. “Goddamn good!” He plunked the soggy bread in his mouth and reached for another piece.
“No need for foul language.” Mrs. Gossage was standing in the doorway.
“What’s it taste like?” his sister sniffed the air to no avail.
“Impossible to describe.” He tossed a crust of bread across the surface of the table and watched with a smug grin as Laverne shoveled the bread the length of the plate before plopping it in her mouth. “So what’s the verdict?”
Laverne’s eyes became glassy and the girl’s features melted into an ecstatic grin. “Double-damn good!”
Mrs. Gossage cringed. Lurching forward, she grabbed a piece of bread. When the plate had been wiped clean, she added, “It would appear that our Israeli neighbor is a woman of many talents.”


From late October leading up to Thanksgiving, Sonny babysat for Mrs. Shamir on three separate occasions. For a variety of reasons, none of the would-be suitors measured up and, falling back on the ‘hummus metaphor’ that worked so well with the rather crude, stiff-jawed Mr. Solomon, Sonny discretely offered his unsolicited two cents on the matter. “I am making a trip to my country the beginning of December,” Mrs. Shamir said, “and I was wondering if you could look after my property while I’m gone. Water the plants and just keep an eye on things until we return.”
The announcement caught him off guard. “How long will you be gone?”
“A month, that’s all.”
A month, that’s all. Sonny felt panicky. “Yeah, I can come by every week. If there’s anything seriously wrong like a broken pipe, my father will know what to do.”
Suddenly and without forewarning, the woman swept Sonny up in her arms and planted a sticky kiss on both cheeks. “You are the sweetest boy imaginable! Just like mishpachah, family.” She abruptly thrust him away at arm's length, fished about in her pocket and handed him a brass key. “How can I thank you enough?”
Sonny rubbed the wetness on his cheek. “I think you just did,” he muttered. He wanted to say more but Mrs. Shamir had already gone off to check a pot roast in the oven. How many times had he seen her sweep little Ruthy up in her resilient arms and spontaneously shower the girl with affection? The kiss pierced his soul like a benediction – a wondrous, ineffable blessing. 


The Saturday before Christmas the snow came down in a wet slurry. Mrs. Gossage, who had been out shopping for groceries, trudged upstairs. Sonny was lying on the bed reading National Geographic. He wasn’t looking at the bare-breasted woman of West Africa. That didn’t interest him quite so much anymore. Rather, he had located an article: Potable water and the Gaza Strip: a humanitarian crisis. “I got you something special in the deli department.” She winked impishly and left the room. Sonny threw the magazine aside and went downstairs.
On the counter next to the electric can opener was a small container of Athenos original style hummus. “They also sell roasted eggplant and another brand with artichokes and garlic,” Mrs. Gossage explained, “but both sounded a bit extravagant.”
Sonny cracked the lid open. The gritty texture didn’t look terribly appetizing. He found a spoon in the drawer and sampled the mix, which tasted like sawdust. “Well, what do you think?” Mrs. Gossage was leaning forward expectantly.  
“Actually, it’s quite good,” he lied. Replacing the lid he went back upstairs. Closing the door, he flopped down on the bed, curled up in a fetal position and began to cry.
What if. What if. What if. What if…
What if Naomi Shamir never returned? She got the obnoxious real estate broker, who flimflammed him out of the five bucks, to put her property on an internet multiple listing website? Now that certainly wouldn’t present itself as an Eclipse of God, a human tragedy on the scale of what happened in the nineteen forties, but it didn’t make him feel any better. A half hour later, he washed his face in the bathroom, patting his eyes dry. 
Since the Israeli woman took the early morning connecting flight to New York, Mrs. Gossage noticed Sonny moping about the house. Her religious nuttiness taken aside, she had the common decency to leave him alone and not make things worse. The hummus was a simple act of motherly devotion. Not that the gesture helped one single iota. All Sonny could do now was go over to the house with the emerald green shutters, water the plants, check to make sure everything was in order and wait. Again, he reached for the National Geographic. The problem of clean water for the Palestinian residents of Gaza – he would learn a thing or two about why one group of people had glistening, perfectly clean water to cook, bath and even wash their pets with while their neighbors subsisted in abject filth.


The day after New Years Sonny visited Vision World. “Can I help you?” A middle-aged lady in a lab coat behind the counter was inserting a tiny screw into an earpiece with a spindly screwdriver.
“Is Doctor Shamir in today?” He tried to act blasé, as thought he hadn’t a solitary clue that the woman was on the other side of the planet.  
“No, she’s away for a while. Can anyone else assist you?”
“No I don’t think so. Do you know when she’s expected back?”
“Another week and a half,” the woman replied. “She’s visiting relatives.”
Sonny shifted back and forth on the balls of his feet. “She didn’t quit or anything?” 
The lady lowered the tiny silver screwdriver and peered at him over the tops of her bifocals. “Is this an emergency?”
“No, I’m just looking after her property while she’s away and wanted to make sure everything was all right.”
With no great sense of urgency, the woman removed her glasses. She sprayed the lenses with a mist from a small bottle and rubbed the lenses in a circular motion with a polishing cloth. “Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?”
Sonny felt the façade disintegrating, coming apart at the seams. “No, I just …”
Having finished polishing her glasses, the woman held them at arms length scrutinizing the sparkling glass. “Why don’t you wait here a moment and I’ll check with another staff person. She went off down the hallway. As soon as the technician was gone from sight, Sonny bolted for the door.

Back at the house, Sonny did psychological damage control. What had he accomplished as a consequence of his moronic visit to Vision World? He had learned nothing more than what he already knew before his abortive trip. To get his mind off the Vision World fiasco, he went over to the Israeli woman’s house and watered the plants. He pushed the heat up on the thermostat. The boiler immediately fired up. He lowered the temperature and the aquastat shut down. He checked the basement. Everything looked dry. The electric iron was unplugged. Right is tight; left is loose - both water intake valves on the washing machine were closed.
Back upstairs he went and looked in the woman’s closet. The faint smell of perfume clung to the evening wear. He sighed and slid the closet door shut again. Next to the night table, something was sticking out from under the dust ruffle. Sonny bent down and fished Dr. Heffernan’s weighty clinical text out from under the bed. A ragged slip of paper was wedged between the pages. Sonny sat down on the bed and cracked the book open.


Histoplasmosis is a disease caused when airborne spores of the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum are inhaled into the lungs, the primary infection site. This microscopic fungus, which is found throughout the world in river valleys and soil where bird or bat droppings accumulate, is released into the air when soil is disturbed by plowing fields, sweeping chicken coops, or digging holes.

What was he doing? His only legitimate purpose in being there was to water the stupid plants and check for problems. Sonny had a premonition that such voyeuristic behavior could only end badly. He slammed the book shut and sat listening to the silence. A minute passed. An oil delivery truck turned the corner and sped off down the street. Naomi had topped the tank off before leaving; the floating gauge over the metal, heating oil reservoir in the basement still registered three-quarters full. Sonny ran the palm of his hand over the binding, reopening the book to the flagged page.

Histoplasmosis is often so mild that it produces no apparent symptoms and any symptoms that might occur are often similar to those from a common cold. In fact, if you had histoplasmosis symptoms, you might dismiss them as those from a cold or flu, since the body's immune system normally overcomes the infection in a few days without treatment. However, even mild cases, can later cause a serious eye disease called ocular histoplasmosis syndrome (OHS), a leading cause of vision loss in Americans ages 20 to 40. 
Scientists believe that Histoplasma capsulatum (histo) spores spread from the lungs to the eye, lodging in the choroid, a layer of blood vessels that provides blood and nutrients to the retina, the light-sensitive layer of tissue that lines the back of the eye. Scientists have not yet been able to detect any trace of the histo fungus in the eyes of patients with ocular histoplasmosis syndrome. Nevertheless, there is good reason to suspect the histo organism as the cause of OHS, and in cases where …


Sonny slammed the book shut a second time, placed it back under the bed and went home. In less than two weeks, Naomi Shamir, the unrequited love of his life, would be returning home. Hopefully, if between now and then, he contracted ocular histoplasmosis syndrome, his vision would hold out for a few weeks longer.
Back home Laverne was waving a postcard teasingly up over her head. “Mail man just delivered a love letter from your Hebrew sweetie pie.” 
Sonny relieved her of the card which featured a picture of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Arab East Jerusalem The dome of the six-sided, ornate shrine was covered in gold, the upper portion decorated with blue and pale green mosaic tiles. Ivory marble columns lined the front entrance. On the back, Naomi had scribbled: See you soon. So much to tell! Love Naomi and Ruth.


Late Thursday the third week in January, Mrs. Shamir’s snow-covered BMW drove down the street. Sonny’s father was in the driveway clearing snow from the most recent winter storm.  He went back inside. “That Jewish lady’s home now,” he said. “They’re probably all tired out though from such a long trip, so you might want to go over and help shovel them out.
“Already did,” Sonny replied. After every snow storm, the boy had cleared away Naomi’s driveway. He even went back the following day to dig out the rock-hard slabs of frozen ice left behind by the municipal plows and street sanders.
“Well that’s good.” Mr. Gossage went back outside.
Sonny didn’t go over right away. He waited until the weekend. Friday night after supper he put on his khaki Docker slacks and a plaid sport shirt. He combed his hair and dabbed some English leather cologne on his neck but thought better of it and washed the sharp scent away as best he could. Then he plodded through the packed snow down to the Shamir house. 
“Did you get my card?” She invited him into the house. He was hoping for a welcoming hug, but the woman didn’t seem in a particularly playful mood. Ruthy, who was hunkered down in the den with a coloring book and fistful of crayons looked up momentarily before settling back down.
“Would you like some coffee?” Sonny shook his head. A half-empty bottle of wine and a glass rested on the kitchen table. Ruthy wandered into the kitchen. She grabbed a banana, tore the peel away and retreated back to the den. “When I’m in Israel,” Naomi spoke softly, “I wish that I was here, and when I’m home again, I wish I was back in the Holy Land.” She poured herself a drink filling the glass almost to the rim. Lifting the wine to her lips, she hesitated and placed it back on the table.
A weak glow as though from an infant’s nightlight was flickering on the Formica counter next to the toaster. Sonny went to take a better look. The light sputtered dimly from a thick tumbler filled with milky white wax. The wick had burned down three-quarters of the way to the bottom. A piece of paper with Hebrew lettering was glued to the outside. “It’s a yahrzeit candle,” Naomi said by way of explanation. “Jews light a candle on the anniversary of a family member’s death. My mother died a year ago today.” Again she picked up the glass, sloshed the pale liquid in an undulating motion then set it down without drinking. “I was here in Massachusetts a thousand miles away when she passed.”
“I’m sorry.” Sonny didn’t know what else to say. The Israeli woman was even more beautiful than he remembered - if that was humanly possible. All his smutty and indecent fantasies fell away in an instant. He wanted to hold and comfort her, to say something profoundly grownup, brilliant and resolute to blunt her sorrow. 
You got my postcard?” He nodded. “The Al-Aqsa Mosque is very close to the Jewish quarter, so after I said a prayer at the Wailing Wall for my mother I went to an Arab kiosk and bought the card. I thought to myself, ‘Sonny will like this one, for sure.’” She rose abruptly, tossed the wine in the sink and put the bottle away. “Like I said, when I’m here I’m homesick for my family in Israel, but when I’m there visiting I can’t wait to return home.”
Sonny thought a moment. “Which is home – here or there?”
Naomi smiled sadly. “Both. In the spring I shall apply for American citizenship. It won’t make the pain go away, but it’s a step in the right direction.”
Mrs. Shamir, a self-professed non-believer said a prayer for her departed mother at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Was it a logical inconsistency or just another example of Sonny’s all-encompassing ignorance? 
In the den Ruthy was singing along with the silly tune that opened Malcolm in the Middle.   

You’re not the boss of me now.
You’re not the boss of me now.
You’re not the boss of me now,
and you’re not so big.
Life is unfair….

“Just in case you came home early, I shoveled out your driveway every week,” Sonny said, “and threw traction gravel on the flagstone walkway and back stairs.” Mr. Gossage had bought a sixty pound bag at the beginning of the winter. Sonny filled a pail and hauled it down to the Shamir residence each time after cleaning the walkways. The heavier crushed stone was a better choice over playground sand or rock salt, which could discolor or damage the mortar in the brickwork. 
The dark-skinned woman was puttering at the sink and he didn’t think she heard him. “I’m tired,” Naomi announce. “I’m going to bed now.”


Saturday night Mrs. Shamir had a dinner engagement. Sonny arrived a half hour early. Naomi was dressed rather conservatively in a dark blue dress that looked like something more appropriate for Vision World than a romantic soirée. “Mr. Klezmer is treasurer of the brotherhood at Temple Agudas Achim. Tonight is the board members’ installation dinner-dance.”
“But I thought you weren’t religious?”
Naomi grinned devilishly. “That’s our dirty little secret.” She was fumbling with an earring; the backing kept coming loose. Rushing back into the bedroom, she slammed the door. Sonny drifted into the kitchen and cracked the refrigerator open. Removing a small dish covered with cellophane, he placed it on the counter. 
The doorbell rang. Mr. Klezmer was a stocky man with dark-framed glasses and gentle, almost feminine features. He wore a shapeless brown suit with wing-tipped shoes and possessed a firm, no-nonsense handshake. Despite a boyish charm, he suffered from a bad case of male pattern baldness. In a few short years, Sonny mused, the few remaining tufts of frizzy brown hair would be ancient history and the middle-aged man would look positively prehistoric. “Mrs. Shamir is still getting ready. I’m the babysitter.”  
He led the way into the living room just as Naomi cracked the bedroom door open and gestured to Sonny with a crooked finger. “I found a run in my nylons,” she whispered pettishly. “I’ll just be a minute longer, if you could keep Sheldon occupied.”
He went back into the living room, where the man was studying an oil painting of an Arab village with stucco, sand-colored houses and a cedar forest fading into a mountainous background. “A humanitarian crisis exists in the Gaza Strip, and many of the residents don’t have safe drinking water,” Sonny blurted the words out all in a jumbled heap. 
Sheldon stared at the young boy through thick glasses and ran a hand over his balding head. “I didn’t realize you were Jewish.”
“Actually, I’m Catholic,” Sonny stammered. “Last month National Geographic featured an article on Gaza, although I can’t say as I understood the half of it.”
As Sonny explained it, the journalist who wrote the report flew over the region in a small, single-engine plane. On the Jewish side were verdant fields, farms, flower gardens and even luxurious swimming pools filled to overflowing. But less than a mile away in Gaza, the water—what little existed—was foul-smelling, polluted and undrinkable. The Israelis, who controlled the pumping stations rationed water to the Palestinians while refusing to allow them to build modern purification facilities. Many of the Arab children were malnourished and sickened with diseases spread by the putrid water. 
When Sonny finished talking, Sheldon observed, “Objects that we sometimes consider extremely precious like diamonds frequently have little or no practical value, while the opposite is equally true: something that has enormous value in use, might be taken for granted simply because it’s plentiful.”
“Like water,” Sonny ventured.
“Smart boy!” Mr. Klezmer winked playfully. “When you think about it, nothing is more useful than water, but its cost is negligible. A diamond, on the other hand, has few if any practical applications outside of fashion or as a sharpening agent, and yet we pay a small fortune for a single gem.” 
“I don’t see how any of this applies to the situation in Gaza?”
Mr. Klezmer cracked a dreamy, introverted smile. “The value of water depends inversely on the thirst of the person and availability. Suppose a Palestinian is dying with thirst and there is a little fresh water available but beyond his reach, the Arab will give everything for that water, even a sack full of precious diamonds.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“I studied finance in college,” Sheldon replied. “It’s all part of eighteenth century economic theory.” The congenial demeanor faded away and his expression turned bitterly grim. “The Israeli government’s policy toward the Arabs is inhumane; it’s why Gaza is little better than an open-air prison with hundreds of security checkpoints and Jewish soldiers as wardens.” Mr. Klezmer looked Sonny full in the face. “But water tainted with raw sewage is symptomatic of a deeper moral malaise.”
“Then what’s the solution?”
 Sheldon smiled in his silly boyish manner and was just about to say something, but the bedroom door burst opened and Naomi rushed from the room.
“So what have you men been gossiping about?”
“The shortage of clean drinking water for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” Sheldon replied. “It appears your babysitter has been reading up on the subject.”
Naomi’s eyes brightened as she turned to Sonny. “Since when did you become an expert on Middle Eastern diplomacy?”

When they were gone, Sonny brought Ruthy into the kitchen where they sat together silently devouring the hummus. The plate licked clean, they went back to the den and curled up on the couch together watching the latest episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Patrick and SpongeBob were capturing baby jellyfish in butterfly nets, but then a grownup jellyfish interrupted their fun electrocuting them with high-voltage shocks. Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! Zap! It reminded Sonny of the cautionary tale Mr. Klezmer told him before Naomi emerged in her new hosiery.
Mr. Solomon, the chisel-faced Jew, was a tank commander in Tzahal, the Israeli Defense Force. Sonny could picture the reptilian oaf single-handedly shutting every spigot in the Arab households of Gaza. No more water, clean or otherwise, for you rotten Palestinian bastards! Yes, he definitely seemed the type. 
Sonny made a joke of it. Mr. Solomon – his first name was “Ariyah’, which meant lion in Hebrew - was hummus minus all the rapturous herbs and spices – no tahini, no garlic, no fresh lemon, no jalapeño pepper. No nothing. On the other hand, Mr. Klezmer, despite a receding hairline and myopic eyes, was just the person to ease Mrs. Shamir’s heartache in a year’s time when Sonny was far away at college, and she had to light yet another funny little candle in the thick glass tumbler.

Return to Table of Contents


The Invisible Hand


Claudia Lanni was stripping the bottom plate from a Hoover WindTunnel II vacuum cleaner when a customer stepped over the threshold of Vacuum World. The man, who was in his late thirties, dangled a smallish rubber belt between a thumb and indexed finger. The band had ripped apart in a jagged line with a shiny black burn mark where it had run off the metal shaft.
She took the belt, turning it over in her hands. “Orek XL two-thousand?”
The fellow nodded. Claudia rose from where she was hunkered down with the various parts of the vacuum cleaner splayed out across the floor and went to a display near the cash register. At six foot one, her torso wasn’t fat so much as doughy. A person standing in front of Claudia didn’t see hips, breasts, shoulders or thighs. They saw a bleary-eyed, thoroughly unremarkable woman with a weak chin and flaccid lips that lacked contour or definition. Makeup might have helped but she never bothered with any – not even a hint of blush to brighten her pallid skin tones. She wore lumpy corduroy pants that hung shapelessly on her skinny waist and flannel shirts that were always clean but seldom ironed. The unfashionable, wire-rimmed granny glasses were a throwback to the hippy-dippy psychedelic sixties. 
 “Give me a couple belts,” the man said.
 “Need bags?” 
The man shook his head. “No, I got plenty, thanks.” 
She rang up the sale and made change. The customer had already made his way to the door when she spoke again. “What’s that you’re reading?”
He pulled a tattered paperback from a back pocket, waving it in the air. “The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.”
Having just separated the rug beater from the undercarriage, Claudia put the Phillips head screwdriver aside. “Most economists consider that to be his most influential work, but I always preferred Theory of Moral Sentiments.”
The middle-aged man balked, stood frozen in space. Then he closed the door and came back to where she was sitting on the floor. His dark hair was thinning at the temples and the nose was rather long with a pronounced hump. “You studied economics?”
“No, not really. I’m a bit of an intellectual dilettante.” In college Claudia pursued an eclectic program, favoring philosophy and business theory. She got a degree in neither. Nothing of a useful nature held her interest for more than two seconds back-to-back. “Theory of Moral Sentiments was where Smith first referred to the ‘invisible hand’.”
The man was standing directly next to Claudia, who was digging a clot of hairballs, yarn, crumpled paper and assorted debris from the intake hose in the bottom of the machine. “And what exactly is the invisible hand?” 
“The benefits to society of people behaving in their own interest.” 
“That’s strange! A passage describing a similar concept appears in the editor’s preface.” The man thumbed through the first few pages of the paperback until he found the paragraph he was looking for. 

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

“The invisible hand—yes, that’s it!” Claudia reached out with a taut index finger and repositioned the wire-rimmed glasses which had slid down on the bridge of her slender nose. Without bothering to look up from her work, she added “Conscience arises from social relationships.” 
The customer pursed his lips and seemed lost in thought for a brief moment. “Which is to say that mankind can still form moral judgments, in spite of a natural inclination toward selfishness.”
Only now did she bother to look him full in the face. A wan smile creased her lips. Claudia began reassembling the scattered pieces that lay on the floor. The customer with the broken drive belt sat down on a folding chair alongside an impressive display of spiffy vacuum cleaners. Vacuum World serviced other models but sold Hoovers exclusively. The display that ranged along the entire front of the store featured the top-of the-line Platinum Collection Cyclonic bagless, the WindTunnel II upright, the Anniversary self-propelled Model and a host of lesser expensive, stripped down models with price points a tad under two hundred dollars. 
"Society, according to Adam Smith,” Claudia picked up on the thread of his previous remark, “is the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking."
“Yes, that’s vintage Adam Smith,” He rose from the chair and rubbed his face distractedly with the palm of a hand. “Are you doing anything later tonight?”
 Having finished the repairs, all that remained was to stretch the decorative rubber molding around the base of the machine. Claudia’s unlovely face betrayed no emotion. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

* * * *

Lawrence Lanni took the call from his mother in his office at Brandenberg Mental Health Services. She was crying – blubbering hysterically – and making little to no sense. Claudia had gone mental – had a nervous breakdown or some similar form of acute psychological derangement. Could Lawrence stop by the house after work and please not to tell anyone about his sister’s emotional collapse? “You’re going to have to set things right,” his mother sobbed. “Put things back the way they were.”
Put things back the way they were. Lawrence didn’t know if that was such a great idea. As he understood his mother’s account, his sister, who had led a morbidly safe and predictable existence over the past twenty years, went out for drinks with a customer and slept over the man’s apartment. “Where is Claudia now?”
There was a brief pause as though his mother didn’t understand the question. “She’s where she always is – at the vacuum cleaner store.”
“So she didn’t really fall apart?”
“No, she’s at work, fixing broken motors and selling Hoover vacuum cleaners.”
Lawrence glanced up at the clock. His ten-thirty appointment, a paranoid schizophrenic with a Jesus complex would be waiting downstairs in the lobby collecting faults and injustices. “So she’s not in any immediate distress.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Mrs. Lanni hedged.
“Besides the sexual escapade, what other crimes did Claudia commit?”
His mother’s voice trailed away to an embarrassed whisper. “Nothing I care to discuss over the phone.” The line went dead.  A moment later the intercom buzzed. Lawrence’s next appointment was waiting impatiently for his fifty-minute counseling session.”

* * * *

Lawrence arrived at his parent’s house shortly after seven. His father, who looked haggard, opened the door and ushered him into the living room where his mother was curled up on the sofa clutching a box of Kleenex in her lap. “Where’s Claudia?” Lawrence asked.
“Gone out,” his father said in a flat monotone.
Claudia seldom went anywhere after work. She watched the evening news; she read; she did needlepoint and macramé.  Outside the immediate family, she had no personal life. “Gone where?”
“That’s what we need to discuss,” Mrs. Lanni replied, dabbing her swollen eyes with a tissue. As his mother explained things, Claudia had gone off to work Tuesday morning but never showed up for supper. She came home the following morning and then only to take a quick shower and change her ratty clothes. “I asked her,” Mrs. Lanni continued, ‘Where were you all night?’, and she says, ‘I spent the night with a customer catching up on lost time.’” 
“That’s a euphemism,” Mr. Lanni picked up the thread of his wife’s conversation, “a polite way of saying that Claudia - ”
“I understand,” Lawrence interrupted, “perfectly well what you’re saying.” In his practice as a clinical psychologist, Lawrence met woman who were pathologically promiscuous, hedonistic in the extreme. Some tried to pass their sexual gluttony off as a form of enlightenment - libertarian fervor. This is the way I choose to live my life, and it’s none of your goddamn business! That was all well and good as long as the carnage and collateral damage was minimal. But of course, none of this applied to Claudia. She had always lived a reclusive, staid, stolid and utterly prudish existence. For the past fifteen years she went to work every day at Vacuum World. She attended Mass with her parents on Sundays; she subscribed to the Atlantic and the New York Times Review of Books. Claudia played on the tennis team in college. A few years back she joined a tennis club but after injuring her groin attempting an overhand lob, that, too, fell by the wayside. “Who is this guy she slept with?”
 “That’s the problem,” his father said. “We know nothing about him.”
“Claudia and the man who took advantage of her naiveté—apparently they share a common interest in economics.” Mrs. Lanni seemed frightened dazed. The older woman tapped her forehead with a taut index finger as though trying to recall some tidbit of incidental trivia. “Your sister was prattling on and on - some crazy nonsense about invisible hands and eighteenth-century, English mercantilism.”
Yes, that would be typical Claudia! Lawrence massaged his eyes and stared out the window. Across the street, the Hispanic neighbor was running a noisy riding lawnmower along the perimeter of his property. The Morales family – they emigrated originally from Guatemala. Nice people. Very sedate and proper. Not like the Lannis, whose nymphomaniac daughter was whoring herself out to every Tom, Dick and Harry who needed a replacement drive belt for their vacuum cleaner.
“I’m going to fix myself a cup of tea.” Mr. Lanni edged toward the kitchen and, with a flick of his eyes, indicated that Lawrence should join him. When they were safely out of earshot, the older man said, “Your sister’s always been a frugal, business-minded sort.” He put the water on to boil and setting a teabag in a cup alongside the sugar bowl. “Less than ten years after buying the Vacuum World franchise, she’d squirreled away enough savings to buy the building outright.” 
 His father wasn’t telling Lawrence anything he didn’t already know. “What’s your point?”
Mr. Lanni removed a spoon from the drawer and laid it next to the teacup. “No one’s ever shown any romantic interest in Claudia. A parent can’t help but worry that this fellow – whoever the hell he is – might be some conniving gold digger taking unfair advantage of your sister’s loneliness and emotional vulnerability.”
“A gold digger is usually a treacherous woman who flimflams men.” Lawrence stared at his father in mild disbelief. “You’re using the term incorrectly.” 
Mr. Lawrence waved both hands over his head in exasperation. “You know perfectly well what I mean!” The water had come to a boil and he removed the kettle from the heat. “Claudia’s got a small fortune salted away. She’s acting out of character. Something has to be done to protect her.”
Put. Put. Put. Put. Through the side window Lawrence could see Mr. Morales puttering along the portion of his property that bordered the street. His youngest daughter, a chubby, chocolate-skinned girl with Mayan features, was sitting on his lap, clutching a doll. “And what the hell am I suppose to do?” he fumed.
“Go visit Claudia. See out what the hell is going on with this shady character. Find out what his modus operandi is.”
“In addition to mental health,” Lawrence groused, “now I’m a private investigator?”
Mr. Lawrence patted his son on the shoulder. “Do it for your mother’s sake.”
Lawrence was tired. After listening to other people’s problems for eight solid hours the last thing he wanted was this. He often thought of Brandenberg Mental Health as a veritable Pandora’s Box of human anguish and nuttiness. Many of the clients, like the paranoid fellow zonked out on stellazine he met with after his mother’s phone call, were incorrigible. No, that was a poor choice of words. Crooks and pathological liars were incorrigible. The mental patients reminded Lawrence of characters in a Greek tragedy where their miserable fate was preordained. 
But what to do about Claudia? 
Mr. Lanni removed the teabag from the cup and returned it to the carton in the oak, raised-paneled cabinet. He put the spoon, cup and saucer away. He hadn’t wanted anything to drink. It was just a ruse to get Lawrence alone, subterfuge of a benign sort. “I saw your sister for a few brief minutes earlier tonight before she ran off to spend quality time with her mystery man.”
“And how did she seem?” Lawrence asked.
“Like a completely different woman. Insanely happy! Her eyes sparkled and cheeks were flushed. She was brimming over with ...” 
“Passion?”
Mr. Lawrence grimaced. “Not necessarily my first choice of words but, yes, that too.”

* * * *

When the young children were young, Lawrence’s eighty year-old maternal grandmother came to live with the family. Grandma Sylvester hated her son-in-law. She always felt that her daughter could have done better and told anyone who cared to listen that the marriage was a disappointment, an unfortunate lapse of judgment and common sense that could only be rectified by divorce. No matter that Lawrence’s parents got along just fine and had a marriage better than most. 
Knowing how she felt, Mr. Lanni ignored his mother-in-law. When the incessant nagging got unbearable, Mrs. Lanni would shout, “Shut up you insufferable witch!” But the woman, who was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and navigated the house in a motorized wheelchair - courtesy of her hated son-in-law - was fearlessly outspoken. She actually enjoyed the strife. 

“Every time she does something hateful, Grandma acts like she’s having multiple orgasms,” Claudia observed mirthlessly. After each spiteful harangue, the girl noted how the elderly woman smiled gleefully, seemed more physically animated. 
“What’s an orgasm?” Lawrence asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Grandma Sylvester viewed Claudia as a major disappointment. “It’s a shame you’re not pretty like your mother.” 
Claudia winced but caught her emotional second wind and replied, “You say something wickedly cruel and offensive, and then you smile at the victim of your abuse. That’s sadistic.”
“Well it’s perfectly true. Just go look in the living room mirror if you have any doubts.”The simpering expression faded noticeably. 
“I have no illusions about either one of us,” the young girl shot back. The old woman stared at her with unbridled malice. 
  
One day Grandma Sylvester was badmouthing Mr. Lanni in front of the children when Claudia muttered, “Let’s go for a little ride.” The girl was thirteen years old at the time, Lawrence two years younger. She wheeled her grandmother out to the curb next to the trash barrels and pulled up the rubber brake pads firmly against the wheels. Claudia dropped down on her haunches and stuck her nose in front of the decrepit woman’s wrinkled face. “I dragged the trash barrels out to the street earlier this morning.” She pointed to a green container resting no more than a foot from the woman’s right elbow. “Some animal must have ripped the bag apart, because there’s about a million and a half maggots crawling around under the lid.”
“You’re full of shit up to your eyebrows,” The grandmother hissed.
“Really?” Claudia removed the plastic lid. She grabbed the handle and tipped the barrel at a forty-five degree angle. A swarm of white, frothy worms were writhing along the inner surface of the putrid container. “I’m going to leave you here so the sanitation engineers can haul you away with the rest of the smelly garbage.” 
Mrs. Sylvester began to cry and whimper and moan and make queer little animal sounds that were painful for Lawrence to listen to. “This isn’t funny, Claudia,” Lawrence cautioned. “I don’t like what you’re doing.”
She grabbed her brother by the shirt collar and dragged him back in the house. “It’s June. Seventy degrees with bright sunshine. The old coot isn’t going to shrivel up and die.” 
Lawrence began to cry. He went and looked out the window at his grandmother slumped over, her scrawny shoulders heaving up and down with despair. His father was at work. Mrs. Lanni had gone to Stop & Shop for groceries and wasn’t due back for another half hour. “You can’t just leave her out there.”
“Shut up!” 
A blue Toyota cruised by and the driver waved at Mrs. Sylvester. At the far end of the street the car pulled up at the stop sign before continuing on its way. “What if a neighbor sees her and calls the police?”
“For as long as I can remember, that horrid woman has been saying cruel and hurtful things. Now she gets a dose of her own medicine.”
Five minutes passed. Claudia went out to the curb and retrieved her grandmother. “If you say a word about this to anyone,” the girl said in a perfunctory, offhand manner, “I’ll come into your room late at night and hold a pillow over your pus-ugly mug until all the hatefulness is choked out of you.” The woman who had a nasty and vindictive rebuttal for every occasion, seemed in a fog. “I’m only ugly on the outside,” Claudia added as an afterthought. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Thirty-five minutes later Mrs. Lanni returned home. “Children, go get the groceries from the car.” She turned to the listless, subdued woman in the wheelchair. “You seem a bit peaked. How are you, mother?”
Mrs. Sylvester wet her lips. She crooked her neck to one side and stared pensively out the bay window toward the curb where the noisy diesel-engine garbage truck had just pulled up alongside their house. A dark-skinned man deftly lifted the thirty-gallon, plastic barrel dumping the contents – maggots and all - into the rear. “I’m fine,” she croaked. “Everything’s just swell!”
Later that night, Lawrence shuffled into his sister’s bedroom and stood by the night table. “I don’t think you’re ugly.”
His sister reached out and grabbed his slender wrist. Pulling it close, she planted a wet kiss in the palm then closed the fingers one-by-one in a loose fist. “I am rather homely,” Claudia said, “but there’s infinitely more to life than fashion and glamour.”
“I wouldn’t love you a tiny bit more even if you looked, danced and sang like Hannah Montana,” the boy said haltingly. There was no reply. “Would you have suffocated Grandma Sylvester if she told on us?”
“For all her hatefulness the woman is basically a coward,” she came at the question obliquely. “After that business with the maggots, she would never risk finding out how psychotically demented I am.” A moment passed and Claudia began to giggle.

* * * *

Lawrence said nothing to his wife about Claudia’s one night stand or the visit with his parents. He wanted to think things through, process the information. But what information was there? His forty-three year-old sister, who up until the previous Tuesday was undoubtedly an unsullied, pure-as-the-driven-snow virgin, was having a raunchy sexual escapade. What was it his mother had said earlier on the phone? You’re going to have to set things right. Put things back the way they were. His brain balked at the notion of tampering with Claudia’s eccentric lifestyle.
His wife entered the bedroom, her damp hair wrapped in a terrycloth towel. “How were your parents?”
“Good,” Lawrence replied absently. “Just fine.”
He never really felt sorry for Claudia. Back to elementary school, she had always been an odd duck. Not crazy or pathological or mentally defective or troublesome. His sister came at the universe from her own quirky perspective. That’s why she never accomplished a damn thing with her education. She wrote a master’s thesis on some abstruse concept in Keynesian economic theory, but bought a vacuum cleaner franchise rather than share her formidable, intellectual gift with the academic community. Still, Claudia had made a life – a life apart – and who was to judge the intrinsic worth of the decisions and choices she had made along the way. By comparison with the rogue’s gallery of personality disorders and mental defectives who plodded through the Brandenberg Mental Health Clinic on any given day, Claudia Lanni could serve as poster child for a healthy and mature lifestyle. Well, at least up until a week ago last Tuesday.

* * * *

Wednesday in the late afternoon, Lawrence swung by Vacuum World after leaving the clinic. He called ahead to tell Claudia he was stopping by. The ‘CLOSED’ sign was hanging in the front door but his sister’s maroon Audi was still parked near the dumpster. He went and rapped on the plate glass door until she finally came out from the back room.
“I was wondering who was making all that fuss,” she said with a relaxed grin. Claudia led the way to the rear of the store where she had a small office. On the computer screen a software program was cycling through a series of administrative tasks. “Every so often, “she said by way of explanation, “I have to purge dead files from my bookkeeping program or the software slows down to a zombie-like crawl.”
Lawrence stared at the screen, which offered a statistical readout every so many seconds of which obsolete files were being cleaned from the hard drive. “You look different somehow.” It certainly wasn’t the clothes. His sister still dressed like a geeky, over-the-hill tomboy and her wedge-shaped suede shoes exuded a distinctively klutzy, unisex aura. No, it was something more subtle. 
Claudia looked utterly radiant. 
Her skin glowed. She was smiling – something she only did rarely and with negligible enthusiasm in the past. Her pale blue eyes twinkled with a luminous fire, and she was breathing differently, too. Lawrence had never been aware of his sister’s body as anything other than a passive, non-participating lump of flesh. Now with each joyful gesture and flash of emotion, her chest heaved and nostrils flared. And it wasn’t his imagination. 
“Must be the company I’ve been keeping lately,” she shot back coyly. “I’m seeing someone.”
“Yes, I know. Mother is rather upset. She thinks you lost your mind.”
Claudia pursed her lips and cracked a mischievous grin. “You’re the mental health professional. Do I need psychotropic medication or a straight jacket?”
“That depends,” Lawrence replied evasively. He didn’t want to match wits with his sister. She was smarter than him. Always had been.   Claudia’s brain could process information deftly, with a blinding clarity that left most everyone else in the dust.  
The computer had finished purging documents. Half a gigabyte of memory had been freed up. Claudia scrolled through the statistics then ran the figures on the screen through the printer.  “I need a favor.”
Lawrence sat down on the edge of the desk. “I’m listening.”
“I’m closing the business for the entire month of August and going backpacking though Europe with Fred.”
Fred. This was the first time he heard the man’s name. “Have you ever even been outside New England?”
“I need you,” she sidestepped the question, “to run interference for me with the folks. They will assume that I’m bonkers and acting irrational.” She stuck a flash card in a USB port on the front of the computer, backed up her files and turned the machine off. 
“It’s all very sudden, don’t you think.” Lawrence spoke in a neutral tone. He had no desire to become judgmental or resort to mind games. That was his mother’s specialty.
“Fred had already planned a backpacking adventure through Europe with a side trip to North Africa from last winter. Bought the Eurrail pass and set aside plane fare. Last night he asked me to join him.”
Lawrence wandered over to a file cabinet. A row of bottles containing inks – solid black and the three primary colors was arranged alongside a collection of syringes and hypodermic needles. Picking up a syringe he tapped the blunt needle with the fleshy portion of an index finger. It drew no blood. The sharp end had been trimmed away and lay perfectly flat. Claudia used them to inject ink into her DeskJet printer cartridges. At the business supply stores, a single replacement cartridge cost thirty-five dollars. She could refill empties for less than a buck. So she drilled tiny holes in the plastic lids, squirted a syringe full of ink into the porous lining then sealed the top with a conical rubber plug. A month later when the printer ran dry, she repeated the process.
In late April Lawrence stopped by the store one day and found his sister mopping a puddle of dark ink from the surface of her desk. Drip, drip, drip. She had the leaky cartridge propped over a plastic cup. The ink – what little was left - was draining away to nothing. “What happened?”
She pointed to the new printer. “It’s a two-stage, gravity feed design. The ink has to wick from the empty compartment on the right into the spongy material on the left. I should have sealed the bottom vent before adding ink.” A minute later the cartridge was empty. Claudia secured a flat plastic disk over the quarter-inch hole in the base of the cartridge and refilled the container. The ink seeped from the right compartment, bleeding gradually into the sponge on the left. 
“Now what?” Lawrence asked.
His sister squirted more ink into the plastic container raising the level to the top and replaced the sealing gasket. “Now we wait for the pressure to stabilize.” Ten minutes later, Claudia gently removed the plastic disc covering the hole. A fat glob of ebony ink dripped into the soiled coffee cup. One drop and no more. “Success!” She slid the ink cartridge into the Cannon printer and closed the lid.

Lawrence drifted back to where his sister was working in the computer. The late afternoon sun was fading to dusk, the room crisscrossed with shadows and murky images. Gold digger. His father had used the term improperly but, for sure, his parent’s fantasies were running amok. “When do I get to meet lover boy?”
“I told him about your visit, and he will be stopping by the store momentarily.” 
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Lawrence muttered. There was no acrimony in his protest.  
Just the other week, a psychologist at the clinic announced that he was getting divorced. The guy planned his life out like a roadmap - college, graduate school, decent job, wife, family, mortgage, grandchildren, on and on and on and on. So what went wrong? Some essential bit of minutia in the cosmic scheme snapped, went awry. Now he was sleeping in a one-room efficiency apartment - a temporary arrangement until the divorce was finalized - and visiting his children on Saturday mornings. And Claudia Lanni, who hadn’t taken a ‘real’ vacation in over twenty years, wanted to go traipsing around Europe for a few short weeks. Where was the harm in it?
There was a rapping on the front door. “That’s Fred.” Claudia hurried to the front of the building. She unlocked the door and the man stepped over the threshold triggering a melodic tinkling chime that alerted Claudia, when she was away from the selling floor, that customers had entered the store. The man reached out and grabbed Lawrence’s hand before he could even think to raise it. “You must be Lawrence.”

* * * *

Later that night Lawrence told his wife, Sophie, about Claudia and her lover. “What a hoot!” his wife tittered. 
Lawrence slumped down on the edge of the bed and began peeling off his clothes in preparation for bed. “Do you remember when we were dating and I used to recite those mushy love poems by Pablo Neruda?”
“Oh, please don’t go there,” his wife protested with mock distress.
Lawrence raised a hand theatrically in the air and, in a breathy whisper, began to recite from memory:

... I love you because I know no other way that this: 
where I does not exist, nor you, 
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, 
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.    

His wife shook her head. “Claudia’s that far gone?”
“Infinitely worse!” he groaned. 


In the late afternoon as the threesome talked together in the gathering dusk at Vacuum World, Lawrence observed his sister and her soul mate. They never touched, hardly looked at one another. They didn’t have to. The devotion was palpable - embarrassing. “He seems like a nice guy.”
“How old is this nice guy who, coincidentally, is ravaging your sister?”
“I don’t know. Early forties.” Fred was studying towards a doctorate in political science while teaching at the community college in the undergraduate night school division. He seemed bright and idealistic. When he spoke to Claudia, his eyes stole across her face betraying a gentle, self-effacing reverence. “I love you because I know no other way than this,” Lawrence repeated the opening line of the Neruda poem, and then turned to his wife with a sick smile. 
Sophie tussled his hair. “Put your pecker back in your pants, lover boy. After two hard labors and a Cesarean, we ain’t going down that rocky road again.”
He pulled her close and kissed her shoulder. Through the first few years of marriage, they sustained an ardent passion. Then children came and things became more settled, sedate, and predictable. They stretched sex from three times a week to twice to weekly to biweekly to on an as-needs basis, which wasn’t a bad thing. It’s what you did to accommodate middle age, an inguinal hernia, endless domestic responsibilities and a burgeoning waistline. “Two weeks.”
“Two weeks what?” his wife asked.
“Fourteen day and Claudia Lanni, the least likely woman on the planet to find a spiritual soul mate, runs off to Europe on the adventure of a lifetime.
His wife fluttered her eyelids suggestively, “All this talk about Claudia and her hot-blooded Casanova is making me horny as hell.” She slid down on the bed and loosened the top of her negligee revealing a plump breast.  

* * * *

Two weeks later, Lawrence drove Claudia and her lover down Interstate 95 through downtown Providence to Greene Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island where they caught a connecting flight to New York and they were gone. Off to Europe and wherever else on the planet they cared to visit as their plans were never really finalized, everything left open to sentimental whim. The excitement had only grown stronger as the date of departure approached. Claudia hung a large sign on the front door of Vacuum World: 

CLOSED FOR VACATION
MONTH OF AUGUST!

Lawrence promised to look in on the property at least once a week, collect mail in her absence and handle emergencies. What emergencies? It wasn’t like she was running a bed and breakfast or construction company. Claudia bought a whole new wardrobe for the trip and, although her taste in fashion hadn’t improve all that much, at least she abandoned the tacky corduroys and klutzy shoes. “We’ll send postcard from every town we visit,” Claudia kissed her brother’s cheek. “Dozens if not hundreds of colorful postcards!” She slung a backpack stretched on an aluminum frame over her thin shoulder. The Kennedy-bound plane was loading luggage at gate number four. When they were gone from sight, swallowed up in the throng of passengers heading down the narrow passageway that snaked toward the nose of the airplane, Lawrence felt his eyes mist over and a lump in his throat that hurt almost as much as the one in his chest.

A week later the postcards began to arrive almost on a daily basis. There was a magnificent, scenic view of the Swiss Parliament set on a grassy knoll overlooking a huge river lined with hundred year-old trees. The ancient, massive gray brick structure was capped with three huge copper domes that had oxidized to a minty green hue. They were touring Berne that particular day and on their way to a beer garden and the local zoo.
A few days later they were in Austria having just arrived by rail from Munich. Another postcard pictured the entrance to the University of Vienna. A bronze angel with wings spread wide was perched on top of a stone base which rose fifty feet in the air. The golden angel guarded the traffic rotary in front of the college entryway. The quaint buildings in the background exuded the mystique of old-world elegance. They had originally planned to descend through the northern mountains into Italy proper but, for some inexplicable reason, headed off in the opposite direction, and the next postcard arrived from Malmo, Sweden. Reaching the end of the land line by train, they took a hovercraft ferry across the narrow waterway. The postcard showed a rustic, burgundy clapboard farmhouse perched by the ocean with a hodgepodge of small skiffs moored to the dock. The theme was more somber and melancholy, but not the accompanying message.

Splendid weather! Everyone has been so kind and considerate. A slight change of plans, though. We will be heading off to southern Italy and crossing over the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. Bye for now. Much love! 
                                      Claudia.

On Saturday Lawrence dropped by his parents house. His mother wanted to plant a vegetable garden, and he volunteered to repair the chicken wire fence, which was badly damaged over the previous winter. “Any postcards this week?” Mrs. Lanni asked.
“Nothing since Monday.” He laid a fifty-foot roll of the pliable wire mesh out on the grass and cut off a small section for the door with a pair of tin snips. Over by the rock garden a humming bird was flitting back and forth among the Scotch pines.
“I don’t like it,” his mother said petulantly.
“Don’t like what?” Lawrence pulled the rotted wire away from the green metal stake and began securing the new section around the plot.
“Your sister is a creature of habit.”
“Anal-compulsive – that’s the technical term.” Satisfied with the way things looked, Lawrence grabbed a pair of pliers and bent the securing tab on the stakes firmly up against the wire. The biggest threat was groundhogs. A family of cuddly rodents could clean out a new garden in a single night. But there was nothing technically a homeowner could do, because it was against the law to trap the animals and their burrows ran deep underground with multiple entrances and exits. “Once your vegetables start coming up, you’ll have to keep this gate closed at all times, especially at night when the animals forage for food.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Mrs. Lanni thumped him on the shoulder. “The last card was from Napoli. They were sailing to Haifa on a small ferry.”
Lawrence shrugged as though to make light of the matter, but he, too, had begun to worry after the third day without hearing from his sister. Claudia finding happiness in the twilight of her life – the notion was outlandish, simply too good to be true. Claudia who was kind and gentle, never mean-spirited – why shouldn’t she have what other less-deserving people considered their natural birthright and blithely took for granted? “I watched the world news this morning,” Lawrence said. “There were no reports of ferry accidents.”
“God forbid!” Mrs. Lanni made a fluttery gesture with her hands. “Did I tell you, Aunt Rita and Uncle Sid saw the love birds at the Olive Garden the night before they left?” Lawrence shook his head. Mrs. Lawrence began to giggle like a silly school girl. “Claudia and her new friend were sitting off in a secluded corner eating salad and bread sticks. As soon as she recognized Aunt Rita, Claudia dragged the boy right over to their table.”
“Fred,” Lawrence interjected. “His name is Fred and he teaches political science at the community college.”
“Whatever. Rita says they were holding hands throughout the meal. Can you imagine that - eating spaghetti and meatballs while holding hands!” Her eyes filled up and Mrs. Lanni had to turn away to compose herself. 
“I liked the guy,” Lawrence said soberly. “He seemed sensible and down to earth.”
“Like Claudia.” Her son nodded. Mrs. Lanni pawed at the loose soil with the toe of her shoe. “You’re not just saying that to humor me?”
“No, I got a good feeling about this guy.”

* * * *

On Saturday, Mrs. Lanni called around ten-thirty. “Did you get the mail yet?”
“No, it doesn’t usually come until after noon.”
“Four postcards arrived from Claudia. Apparently the overseas mail got delayed. They’re still touring the Holy Land. Already visited the ancient ruins at Jericho and Bethlehem.”
Lawrence felt a wave of relief. “All that worry for nothing.” When his mail finally arrived, in addition to a handful of colorful postcards from various locations, a flimsy aerogram was propped up on top of a pile of store circulars and junk mail.

Dear Lawrence,

Yesterday we visited Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city. It’s a busy port as well as popular tourist resort, located at the northern tip of the Red Sea. The city is adjacent to the Egyptian village of Taba to the south, the Jordanian port city of Aquaba to the east, and within sight of Saudi Arabia to the south-east, across the gulf. The night was so warm and humid that we decided to sleep out on the beach under a canopy of stars, which proved a bad decision because of all the little stones and pebbles embedded in the sand. Still, we woke up the next morning to the sound of seagulls cawing and waves lapping the golden beach. Presently we are touring the lower Galilee. 
There is a rare psychological aberration that affects a handful of pilgrims each year whereby they become quite overwhelmed by the Holy Land with all its religious and mystical implications. A younger man, a Methodist, we were travelling with had to be admitted to the local hospital because he began to imagine himself a latter-day saint. After a night in the Kfar Shaul Hospital, the fellow came to his senses and is doing just fine. 
Jerusalem Syndrome – that’s the name of the bizarre affliction that had him talking gibberish to himself and spouting Biblical prophecy. Are you familiar with the mental disorder?  For sure, this wild country holds a magical charm that’s overwhelming for some folks.
Fred wants to visit Spain and North Africa before returning home so we will be extending the trip by another two weeks. We can pass over the Pyrenees by train then cross the Strait of Gibraltar from Algeciras to the Moroccan coast. Please go by the store and change the sign to read ‘September 15th’.

                                              Much love,
                                              Lydia 


The third week in September, Lawrence stopped by Vacuum World in the early afternoon. Nothing much had changed. Claudia was explaining to an elderly couple that their beat up machine, a fire engine red Dirt Devil, was damaged beyond repair but still serviceable. She had pulled the front plate away from the housing. “I can’t fix this cracked tab,” she explained. “The centering pin that holds the collection bag in place is broken away altogether.”
“We’re retired and live on a fixed income.” The husband clearly had no intention shelling out money for a newer model.
 Claudia cut a piece of black electrical tape from a roll, knelt down and wrapped the bottom portion of the tape around the left, outer edge of a new bag then pressed the remaining two inches of sticky tape firmly against the intake nozzle. The mouth of the bag slid up and over the two-inch diameter plastic intake hose. “The old bag was full to overflowing so I threw it away. This new one should hold you for a good six months.” She pressed the front plate snugly over the jury-rigged dirt bag and handed the vacuum cleaner back to the older man.
“How much do I owe you,” he said reaching for his wallet.
“Nothing. All I’m out is a piece of electrical tape.”
“But you also replaced the bag,” the wife ventured.
Claudia shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”
When they were gone, Lawrence asked, “How was your trip home?”
“Uneventful. Well not exactly. As the plane was over the Irish coast, Fred got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.”
Lawrence stared at his sister with a sense of numbed joy. Nothing surprised him anymore. She still looked blissfully happy. “And what did you say?”
“We’ve known each other just barely two months and a day. Even by Hollywood standards, such a marriage would be impetuous. I suggested we live together and reassess things in another six months.”
“A reasonable decision.” 
“Mom and dad value your opinion. I’m counting on you to run interference for me.” 
“Yes, of course.” A middle aged lady entered the store. She dropped off a rug shampooer that needed repairs and went off with a service ticket. “How did the Methodist with delusions of grandeur make out?”
Claudia was clearing some papers from her desk. “We ran into him on the way home at the Port Authority in Haifa. Apparently there was no lasting damage. He doesn’t believe anymore that he is the son of God.”

After receiving the aerogram, Lawrence pulled a thick American Psychiatric Association text from his professional library in the den and perused the list of pathological conditions indexed at the rear of the book until he reached the J’s. Jerusalem Syndrome was not listed nor was it referenced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Fourth Edition. But in another reference of rare and exotic manifestations he discovered the following: 

The Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, or delusions that are triggered by, or lead to, a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not endemic to one single religion or denomination but has affected Jews and Christians of many different backgrounds.
The best known, although not the most prevalent, manifestation of the Jerusalem syndrome is the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of  psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem. The psychosis is characterized by an intense religious theme and typically resolves to full recovery after a few weeks or after being removed from the area.

 “The Methodist took an hour-long bath to cleanse himself of impurities then borrowed a white bed sheet from the Beit Zion Youth Hostel where we were staying the night.”
Youth hostel. Lawrence smiled inwardly at the notion of his forty year-old sister rubbing shoulders with beach bums and dopey, hormonal college kids on summer vacation. “You didn’t say what he did with the bed sheet.”
“Fashioned an ankle-length, toga, a gown like something an Old Testament prophet would wear.” She began to chuckle contagiously. “Then he went out in the street and began shouting verses from the Bible and singing religious hymns. That’s when a Mogen David ambulance arrived and they carted him off to the mental hospital.”
Lawrence sat quietly digesting what he had just heard. “From Biblical prophecy to vacuum cleaner repair.”

A UPS truck pulled up into the parking lot and the driver delivered a pile of boxes. Claudia signed for the merchandise and the man in the brown uniform drove off. She arranged several new vacuum cleaners in the supply room. “What’s that?” Lawrence asked, indicating a small cardboard box with a bright red label.
“Electrical components for small motors.” She cracked open the lid and took visual inventory. The box contained an assortment of cylindrical brushes, tiny springs, armatures, circuit breakers, and field coils. In recent years, Claudia had taught herself to clean and polish commutator using a fine grade of sandpaper; how to inspect for pitted or discolored bars - an indication of an open circuit in the field coil; how to check the internal brushes and spring pressure to ensure solid contact. She knew how to use a voltmeter by touching the electric probe to adjacent bars; if the reading was a low, she could replace a damaged coil and rebuild the unit. Lawrence had watched his sister strip motors, hunting down a pesky electrical problem. Not this. Not this. Not this. That! By process of elimination, she discovered what was wrong, then repair or replace it. 

The front door burst open and several customers fanned out in separate directions. One portly woman with a speech impediment who kept tripping over her b’s and k’s was shopping for a newer model vacuum cleaner with an air filtration system. She suffered from chronic asthma. As if to underscore the seriousness of her health issues, the woman reached into her purse, extracted a pump-action bronchial dilator and shot a stream of medication into her damaged lungs. Claudia listened attentively. She didn’t interrupt the woman when she became stuck on an unruly consonant nor did she anticipate her thoughts by finishing sentences for her.
When the customer was threw speaking, she said, “You might find the Hoover Cyclonic Bagless Upright model helpful. The HEPA filter traps ninety-nine per cent of dirt, dust, and pollens down to point three microns, for cleaner air than standard allergen media.” She pointed to the base of the vacuum cleaner. “The high intensity LED headlight illuminates your cleaning path and the extra long, forty-foot cord is a nice feature.”
“What about accessories?”
“This model,” Claudia explained, “features a combination dusting brush for blinds and delicate draperies. There’s also an upholstery head, aluminum extension wand and crevice tool.” She laid the crevice tool she had been demonstrating aside. “The vacuum normally sells for two ninety-nine, but it’s on sale fifty dollars off list price until the end of the month.”
Lawrence unobtrusively backed away and let himself out without bothering to say goodbye.

Return to Table of Contents


Call of the Beguiled


The first time I laid eyes on Cheryl Oliphant the young girl was sitting in the feeding station of the Brandenberg Park Zoo with a South American Tree Boa nestled in her lap. While the snake’s bulky body lay relatively dormant, the four-foot, emerald green python was wriggling its tail in a repetitive, undulating motion. “Are you familiar with green tree pythons?” Cheryl asked in a matter of fact tone. I shook his head and teetered backwards toward the door. The snake she was fondling measured three inches thick at the middle. “A tree python lowers its tail and wiggles the end to attract prey.”
“That’s always nice to know.” I took another step backwards and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the main entrance. I’ve seen a lot of nuttiness in my fourteen years on planet earth, but a girl my own age making nice-nice with a boa constrictor is just a tad bit too weird for my predilections.
The dark-haired girl stroked the python’s scaly head as though she was petting a lovable puppy. “Younger reptiles exhibit this behavior more often than adults. Captives will also use tail luring when hungry. But you don’t have to worry. She already ate breakfast half an hour ago.” 
I didn’t particularly care to learn what the girl had fed the lemony green snake. My best guess would be frozen mice. The zoo director probably bought them wholesale from an exotic pet food distributor. But then what? Did they leave the icy rodents out overnight to thaw or defrost them in the microwave? And how many minutes did you have to zap a frozen mouse so the boa didn’t get heartburn? The eccentric girl reached out with a free hand. “I’m Cheryl Oliphant and my scaly friend is Nicolena.”
“I’m Teddy Rasmussen.” I took her smallish hand and gave the fingertips a gentle squeeze. 

The Brandenberg Zoo was small but cleverly designed. The open enclosure that featured kangaroos near the entrance gate was home also to Charley, the donkey, a party of domestic white-tailed deer – spotted red markings in summer, diffuse, brownish-gray coat through the chilly winter months – and three mischievous wallabies. An indoor rain forest was kept well misted and heated to a sauna-like eighty degrees; the building housed a colorful array of tropical birds, fruit bats and a nocturnal marsupial from Indonesia that kept scrupulously out of sight during the daylight hours. A separate brick structure at the far end of the zoo sandwiched between the monkey house and rodent display was maintained in perpetual darkness. A collection of garish turtles, lizards, salamanders, snakes and exotic fish called this gloomy repository home. 
Truth be told, Nicolena, the South American tree boa, made more of a lasting impression on me than Cheryl Oliphant. The girl – she looked to be about the same age as me – was short and dark with a compact frame that was neither fat nor particularly svelte. The hair was jet black and close-cropped, the eyes a deep chocolaty walnut that accentuated her earthy complexion. She wasn’t unattractive but the infuriatingly dour girl never smiled once in all the time she sat there stroking the god-awful reptile. And there was an oppressive sadness about her, a melancholy that seeped from her limpid eyes like dead weight. 
And one other thing - she was bright as hell, a regular zoological brainiac! Not that I’m a slouch when it comes higher education. I’m a solid AB student except for the stupid subjects that no one has any practical use for like physics or chemistry or trigonometry or calculus or stuff like that. Then my grade might slip an academic notch or two. But that’s by choice, which is to say, I voluntarily choose not to perform up to my full potential. It’s never a matter of laziness or faulty IQ. Cheryl had been taking summer classes at the zoo straight through from elementary school and now was helping out as an assistant zookeeper, an adolescent docent assisting newcomers to the camp program. “Well, anyway, welcome to the Zoofari summer camp,” Cheryl added. “We’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other over the next few weeks.”


At four o’clock in the afternoon, my mother arrived. “Well, what’s the verdict?” she asked as I stowed his backpack in the rear of the Jeep Grand Cherokee. 
“Yeah, it was tons of fun.”
“And how are the other kids?”
“Most of them commute from Mansfield and North Attleboro. There’s only one kid that I recognized from middle school. And there’s a helper, Cheryl.” I had almost forgotten about the stony-faced Oliphant girl.
“And what’s she like?”
“I dunno. Hard to say.” I flipped on the radio and fiddled with the knob until I finally located a country and western station blasting a Kenny Chesney tune. 
Cheryl Oliphant’s father also pulled into the parking lot the same time my mother drove up in the Jeep. He was a dead ringer for the daughter – short compact torso with dark hair and fastidious features. Despite the short stature, he appeared quite handsome. The blue pinstriped suit was definitely not bought off the rack from any discount department store. The designer shoes, likewise, probably set the guy back a solid two hundred bucks. Mr. Oliphant grabbed his daughter’s hand and led her to a Jaguar convertible. Her face remained blank, expressionless. Nicolena, the South American tree python exuded more pizzazz – infinitely more joie de vivre – than her underage handler.


Later that night after supper, my mother positioned a sack of King Arthur flour on the kitchen table along with a container of sour cream, orange juice and dried apricots. “So what did you learn today?” 
“The zoo staff … they talked a lot about global warming, endangered species and protecting natural habitats.” 
She sifted three cups of flour into the Teflon-coated baking pan of her bread machine then added a generous dollop of sour cream. “Did you get to see the sloth bears?”
“Oh, yes!” I perked up. “They’re originally from the jungles of Sri Lanka and eat pretty much everything including ants, honey, fruit, grubs, grass, flowers, eggs and carrion.”
“I’m impressed!” My mother tossed a half cup of orange juice into the mix along with two eggs and began chopping the apricots into thin bite-size wedges.
“Here’s the funny part,” I grinned good-naturedly.  “Sloth bears love termites. The bugs taste like candy to them. In the wilds, a bear digs open a termite mound with its claws, blows away the dirt particles, then pushes its snout against the hole and vacuums up the insects.”
“Ouch! Now that could be painful proposition.” The woman threw the chopped apricots into the pan along with a teaspoon of salt and several rounded tablespoon of yeast which she spread away from the salt. “Here, smell this.” She sprinkled a small dusting of herbs from a spice bottle into the palm of her hand and held it under my nose.
“Mmmmm. What is it?”
“Fiori di Sicilia flavoring.” She measured out an eighth of a teaspoon, spreading the aromatic spice around the perimeter of the pan. “Now tell me more.”
“To keep from being bitten by the angry termites, sloth bears seal their nostrils using specialized nose flaps.” 
The regular zoo staff delivered the background information about the exotic beasts, which were playing in a large open-air pit specifically designed for the shaggy creatures. Cheryl, the unflappable docent, offered up the curious tidbit about the bear’s specialized nose flaps. While the somber-faced girl was giving her spiel, one of the creatures let out a collection of atonal roars, squeals, yelps, huffs, rattles and gurgles that carried a good two hundred feet all the way to the front gates of the zoo. The girl spoke in a dull monotone like she was regurgitating the  material from a memorized script. No getting around it, when it came to the animals, she probably knew as much if not more than the regular staff. Still, the tortured soul shtick was beginning to grate on my nerves. The girls I knew from middle school – some were goofballs, weirdoes, bimbos, flirts, and ditz brains, but at least they had a life! This one looked like she was engrossed in some heavy-duty weltschmertz.

 “That business about the sloth bears,… how absolutely intriguing!” my mother tittered. “It’s only the first day of camp and you already learned a ton of interesting things.” She closed the lid of the bread machine and pressed the one-and-a-half pound loaf button. After a moment the small spindle on the bottom of the machine began to whirl in intermittent half-strokes. A minute passed and the mixing arm spun continuously churning the ingredients in a loose ball of sticky dough.
“What the heck are you making?”
“A sour cream apricot loaf. I’ll bake it up tonight and place a fresh slice in your lunch bag for tomorrow’s session at the zoo.”

    

In the morning, I found Cheryl Oliphant over by the otter display. The zoo designed a rather ingenious habitat for the eight river otters permanently on display. A deep swimming pool emptied out to a shallower, fifty-foot long channel that fronted on the pedestrian walkway. The otters would belly-flop into the pool at the far end and race in a swirling corkscrew fashion up to the Plexiglas wall before flipping end-over-end and hurtling off to the far side only to repeat the process again and again. It was one of the most popular attractions at the zoo and the rodents never failed to hold up their end of the bargain with outrageous feats of gymnastic prowess. 
“River otters are members of the weasel family, like skunks and ferrets,” Cheryl recited with clinical detachment, “and can hold their breath under water uninterrupted for eight, whole minutes.”
“All they ever seem to do is play and sleep,” I fidgeted, shifting the backpack higher on my shoulders. Cheryl was sort of pretty – not like the fashion plate, blond-hair-blue-eyed cheerleader types that sashayed around the middle school with their perky noses angled skyward. Rather, hers was a hopelessly neurotic, muted loveliness. 
“Well, yes, they do that too. River otters are environmental indicators and only stay where the water is clean. Industrial pollution has driven the rodents from much of their traditional range.” She glanced up momentarily to make sure I was paying attention. “The good news is that cleanup and relocation programs are helping the animals make a comeback.”
“Swell.” I was getting weary to death of her endless zoological prattle. To be sure, the girl was bright as hell – a hundred times smarter than any of my Zoofari classmates, but after a while the drip, drip, drip of meaningless trivia wore a person down. “What are you reading?” I indicated a small paperback sticking up from a pocket in her backpack. 
“Jack London. A collection of his short stories.”
“I read Call of the Wild,” I said. 
“The Sea Wolf was my favorite.”
“Yeah, me too.” Cheryl seemed impressed that I had read both books. Actually that wasn’t completely accurate. I had only skimmed Call of the Wild, leapfrogging over the last hundred pages in order to write an overdue reading assignment for seventh grade English. As I remember, I squeaked by with a sixty-five and a sarcastic, cautionary warning from the teacher scrawled in red pen. I never laid eyes on The Sea Wolf and only said I did to impress the girl.
Cheryl pulled the book free of the flap. “There’s a story, To Build a Fire.” She lowered her voice even though no one else was within a hundred feet of where we were talking. “It’s about a gold prospector in the Canadian Yukon who falls through the ice as he’s traveling alone in the wilderness returning to camp. He has to light a fire in order to dry his wet clothing and keep from freezing.”
“It’s cold as hell up there.”
“At seventy-five degrees below zero spit freezes as soon as it leaves the mouth, making a crackling sound like a small caliber gunshot.”
I stared at her uncertainly. Several camp counselors passed by nodding as they headed toward the main office. “Jack London wrote two versions of the same story. The original had a happy ending, the second not so pleasant.” A blue jay nestled away in the dense foliage of a maple let out a barrage of energetic squawks before flying away. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write multiple endings to events in our lives? Pick the ones that suit us best.”
“Unfortunately, most people have no choice in the matter,” I muttered. “I saw your father yesterday afternoon when he picked you up after class. Your old man looks just like you.”
The girl’s features contorted in a foul expression. “That’s where the similarity ends,” she replied gruffly. “My father has affairs with women half his age and treats my mother like garbage. My parents shouldn’t really even be together, but that’s for them to work out.”
The outburst caught me unawares. I shifted uncomfortably on the balls of my feet and watched the otters make another pass in front of us before lithely doubling back to the wider end of the pool. One of the sleek brown rodents crawled out of the water long enough to devour a chunk of raw fish in the feeding trough. “I have a problem with my filter,” Cheryl muttered apologetically, almost as an afterthought. It was clear she regretted the emotional flare-up and was trying to make amends.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I replied, wishing I had gone directly to the staging area rather than pausing to commiserate with the eccentric girl. Cheryl Oliphant had seemed so engaging and sensitive when we first met. But now I was experiencing major doubts. Maybe what I mistook for an offbeat, quirky personality was a brittle façade masking morbid tendencies – a proverbial Pandora’s Box of adolescent pathology! And what was that crazy business about filters. There were oil and air filters on cars – fuel filters on the domestic oil burners my father serviced. The week before Zoofari, I went on a service call with my old man to a home where the filter on a four-hundred gallon oil tank was clogged with sludge and sediment. He replaced the cylinder and bled the air out of the gravity feed line.  
“My mother says that I have this pathological tendency to say every foolish thing that crosses my mind without filtering content. I blurt things out impulsively … things that, even if true, are inappropriate.” Cheryl blinked several times and her voice cracked. “They sent me to a psychiatrist. He gave me some pills.”
“Did it help?”
She shook her head from side to side. “The medication made me feel like a zombie. After the first week, I stopped taking it.” She made a sharp snorting sound that only vaguely resembled a laugh and, without warning, reached out and poked me on the upper arm. “My parents have marital problems so they send me for counseling. Does that make any sense?” She didn’t wait for a response. Rather, Cheryl’s voice dropped several decibels, assuming a droll, self-mocking tone. “Last Tuesday I overheard them quarrelling and, for the first time, they used the ‘D’ word.”
Now I was in it up to my eyeballs! This petite brunette with a South American boa constrictor for a best friend was spilling the beans about her dysfunctional family. I knew the girl less than two days and she was having emotional dysentery!  “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she parried my remark. 
Mr. Oliphant was having a love affair with a woman half his age, a secretary at the insurance firm he managed, and wanted out of the marriage. Cheryl broke off her commentary, running her slender fingers through her dark hair in a repetitive gesture.
“So what happened?”
“My father got a lawyer. He’s drawing up the paperwork. A bittersweet, convoluted smile enveloped her features. “My dad’s moving into an efficiency apartment over the weekend.”
I stood quietly now, mulling over what I had just heard. “How much time before class starts?” 
“About eight minutes.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a prolonged sigh. “We should probably head over to the main hall.”  
“No, not yet.” I went and sat on a gray bench close by the monkey house. A plaque on the side of the structure explained that it had been fabricated from recyclable waste – plastic milk cartons, TV dinner plates and such. “Here, eat this.” I handed her the inch-thick slab of sour cream apricot loaf that my mother, with much fanfare and ceremony, had cut an hour earlier.
Cheryl closed her eyes and bit into the golden bread shot through with orange flecks. Then she smiled - the most beautiful, rapturous, enigmatic and mystifying display of transcendent emotion I had ever witnessed. “God, this is delicious!” A pungent, fruity sweetness wafted through the muggy, early morning air.
“My mother baked the bread last night. It has sour cream and orange juice and apricots and some crazy spice that can only be found in the remote mountain regions of Sicily but don’t quote me on the Sicily thing.”
She broke the uneaten piece in half and handed a portion to me. When the magic bread – the bread that made the singularly saddest girl in the universe smile as though it was the second coming of Christ – was gone, Cheryl reached out and placed the splayed fingers of her right hand on my chest. “You are the sweetest boy in the world.” Like a benediction, her hand floated down my body falling away at the stomach. “And now we should go to class.”

    

Each Saturday throughout the summer vacation straight through until Labor Day I went out with my father, a furnace repairman, on emergency calls. My mother said that, since I was clever with my hands, “mechanically inclined just like your old man” – those were her exact words – it would be as good as a first job. 
“How much do I get paid?”
My mother flashed a dirty look. “Room and board plus the usual amenities.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the 'usual amenities' entailed but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my life, which seemed to be in a perpetual holding pattern over a destination not of my own choosing.
My father was a lanky, outdoorsy type with an unruly mop of dirty brown hair that fell down over his ears. My mom suspected him of trimming the shabby mess with a pointy scissors squirreled away with the razors and dental floss on his side of the medicine cabinet, but my father always pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to incriminate himself regarding the butchery and self-mutilation that passed for personal grooming. When it came to shaving, the man was equally lax, running a Schick twin-blade disposable over his stubbly chin no more than twice a week at best so that he never grew a full beard or appeared clean shaven for more than a few, random days per month. However, my dad’s personal grooming habits had no appreciable impact on business. The man, who was honest to a fault, never charged a penny more than the job demanded and guaranteed all his work. 
The first house call was in an upscale neighborhood on the historic East Side of Providence. The oil burner shut down in the middle of the night and there was no hot water. My father slid the metal face plate on the front of the burner to one side and stuck his nose up against the belly of the furnace, sniffing the acrid air.
“How many times did you try the reset button?” he asked.
The owner, a thin, rather effeminate looking man with a sallow complexion and horn-rimmed glasses, scratched his earlobe. “I don’t remember. I kept hitting it but nothing happened.”
I didn’t like the sissified guy right off. He sounded snooty – like he had a bad case of book brains. Book brains was a term my father coined to describe a person with a PhD in nuclear physics, who could design an nuclear bomb but had trouble tying his shoe laces or balancing a checkbook. It was people with book brains who were running the country into the ground. President Obama, according to my dad, had a terminal case of book brains. So did all the fat-cat politicians in Washington D.C.. They talked a good line and, at face value, seemed harmless enough but were a menace to society. And they never worked with their hands.
“You don’t recall how many times you pressed the red button?” My father repeated the question.
“I forget exactly. What difference does it make?” Acting as though his fragile feelings had been injured by the ‘indelicate’ question, the gaunt man hurried from the basement without waiting for an answer.
“The walls of the furnace are flooded,” My father spoke in a sober drawl. “If the motor fired up with that much fuel in the system, it could have caused an explosion and burnt the house down.” He grinned sheepishly and punched me lightly on the upper arm. “But we won’t share that minor detail with the owner.” 
He knelt down on the cold cement and waved a half-inch wrench at the furnace. “Draft regulator, stack control, master switch, blower, oil pump.” The man proceeded from top to bottom identifying each mechanical part. “Transformer, motor, oil shutoff button, burner assembly and, on the inside, is the combustion chamber.”
Pulling the metal cap off the transformer, he placed the blade of a flat head screwdriver vertically on the further pole of the electrical unit and then lowered the blade until it rested a fraction of an inch away from the opposite pole. A dim flash of electricity arced, jumped from the transformer to the screwdriver but just as quickly died away to nothing. He repeated the process a second and third time. “Transformer’s burnt out.” He reached into the toolbox and located an adjustable wrench. “Go out to the truck and get a replacement. There’s a pile of spare parts over to the right alongside the wheel well.”


“Did you notice how it killed him to write out the stupid check?” My father chuckled. We were a good three miles away from the home. 
“Yeah, he did seem rather aggravated.” The homeowner, who mentioned that he taught comparative literature at Brown University, made a half-hearted attempt to smile when the burner fired up and my father began packing his tools. The supercilious grim quickly petered away when he was handed the bill. You could tell that the chump was in the habit of bossing other people around, having his own way ninety-nine per cent of the time.
“You weren’t here even an hour.” The emaciated man waved the bill fitfully in the air. “Isn’t this a bit steep?”
“Parts and labor – that’s all I charged you.”
“Well, I dunno …” It was a nasty, vindictive jab as though to suggest that my father was somehow taking unfair advantage. I hated the guy. I wanted to kick him in the shins or tell him outright what a pompous ass he was. But my father didn’t seem the least bit ruffled by the customer’s snide superiority. He waited patiently while the fellow wrote out the check with a gold-nibbed fountain pen that looked like it might have cost more than the new transformer.
“What a jerk!” We were back on the highway, a light drizzle misting the windshield. I still couldn’t get the image of the spiteful professor out of my mind.
“I’m paid,” my father replied, “to fix the burner, not refashion his personality.”
“What if he refused to pay?”
“The guy might be a money-grubbing skinflint, but he’s too shrewd for that.” 
“But what if he went ballistic and tore up the bill,” I insisted.
“Simple enough.” My father flipped the knob for the intermittent setting on the windshield wipers. “I’d remove the new transformer and put back the broken one and that would be the end of it.”
 

The second call was a little old lady with a dowager’s hump and crippling arthritis. She hobbled to the front door with a three-prong cane and a well-fed, Siamese cat following at her heels. From the way my father stopped to pet the cat and commiserate with the old lady before going downstairs into the basement, I could tell that he felt sorry for the craggy-faced woman all crippled up like that and hardly even able to move from the living room to the kitchen without the cat skittering under her wobbly legs.
Nothing was wrong with her furnace. A fifteen-amp fuse had blown. My father reset the circuit breaker and the burner fired up of its own accord. The woman sat at the kitchen table with a checkbook and ballpoint pen. “How much do I owe you?”
My father waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no charge unless we find something wrong.”
That wasn’t true. The company charged a flat-rate service charge just for showing up regardless of what was done to remedy the problem. The woman with the dowager’s hump placed the checkbook on an end table. “Perhaps you’d like some sugar cookies to take with?”



A Tim Horton’s coffee shop loomed up ahead. My old man has always been partial to their coffee, swearing up and down that it’s ten times better than the dishwater they served up at Dunkin’ Donuts. He pulled into the parking lot.
“That old lady back there looked to be in her eighties,” my father observed. 
We were sitting in a booth nursing our hot drinks. I was nibbling a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich on a croissant. “Except for the kamikaze cat that’s always running under her rickety legs, she must live alone,” I noted.
“Someday, it’s just a matter of time, we’re all gonna be like her - a little absent-minded, forgetful … getting our pills paid for by Medicare and living on social security.”
“Don’t seem like a barrel of fun,” I noted.
“Well, at least she got the whacked-out cat for company.” 
A boy that I recognized from zoo camp came into the coffee shop with his parents and a younger sister. He nodded affably and went off to sit in the far corner. I was thinking about Cheryl Oliphant – my favorite pastime lately – and how her fractured, disjointed commentary got under my skin. “Call of the Wild - did you ever read the book?”
My father, who had been lost in his own, private thoughts, looked up distractedly. “Yeah, we studied that in high school - the adventure story about the sled dog up in the Canadian wilderness during the gold rush.” He scratched his grizzled chin and took a tentative sip of coffee. “Buck was the dog’s name, if I remember correctly.”
“London wrote a short story about a man struggling to light a fire to keep warm after falling through the ice and getting his feet wet. Years later the author went back and rewrote the story but with a completely different ending.” I finished off the croissant sandwich, washing the flaky crust down with what was left of my milk. “Everyone wants things to turn out a certain way.”
“Like the Brown Professor, who was hoping I’d give him a break on his repair bill.”
“You charged him the going rate.”
“I didn’t charge him a cent more than what the job required, but he would never see it that way. Stingy bastards like him will always nickel and dime you to death.” He spoke in a perfunctory tone devoid of animosity. “How come the guy in the story was traveling alone?”
“I don’t know.”
My father shrugged. “Thing is, you gotta try and do the right thing by people – never take an unfair advantage but, at the same time, don’t let the troublesome types walk all over you. We live in a community and everybody’s got too …” His voice broke off as his thoughts hit a cerebral cul-de-sac. “Aw, cripes! I don’t know what I’m babbling about anymore.” Mercifully, my father home-grown philosophy was cut short when his cell phone began twittering feverishly. He spoke briefly to the party on the other end of the line then flipped the phone shut and stowed it in the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. “Looks like it’s going to be a busy morning.”

The third repair call was gas not oil. A middle-aged woman with great legs and sandy blond hair that cascaded down over her ears in curly ringlets met us at the door. “There’s no heat, no hot water.”
My father placed the metal toolbox on a wooden bench and removed a thin metal plate covering the bottom of the gas heater. Dropping down on his haunches he peered into the guts on the burner. “Pilot light’s dead.” He pressed down on a button and held the flame from a butane lighter up against the nozzle. Half a minute later he released his grip on the pilot button and the light went out. He relit the gas and repeated the process a second time. “Thermocouple’s burnt out. Totally fried.”
“Is that bad?” the blond asked. She was quite a looker with pale blue eyes and massive breasts - soft and inviting like something out of a Playboy centerfold. Not that the woman’s clothing was terribly revealing, but I could see by the curvy contour of her cotton pullover that the woman had a wickedly fine torso. And there was no ring on the third finger of her left hand. I might be just a goofy, dumb-ass kid, but I’m savvy enough to check for these things.
I’m sure my father, who doesn’t miss a beat, picked up on that too, but, after an appraising peek at the prodigious family assets, he immediately settled in with the heating element and was all business. “Replacement part costs a whopping eight dollars and ninety-five cents and takes less than five minutes to replace but, I’m not suppose to tell you all that.” With a small wrench he loosened a brass fitting and pulled a copper wire away from the burner. “There’s your culprit.” He placed the coiled tubing on the cement floor.
The woman knelt down and retrieved the damaged device. “How does it work?”
My father had already ripped the cardboard packaging from the replacement part and was positioning the silver nozzle under the burner. “What you’re holding is a thirty millivolt thermocouple.”
“Which means nothing to me.”
“It’s really quite basic stuff. A thermocouple is made from two dissimilar metals. If the gas flow is interrupted or the flame accidentally goes out, the sensor immediately closes, shutting the fuel supply.”
“Any idea why it broke?” the woman asked.
My father shrugged. “Just normal wear and tear, that’s all.” He depressed the red button a second time and relit the pilot. Fifteen seconds later he released the pressure, lifting his finger away altogether, and the pilot burned continuously. “That’s it! You’re back in business.”


“I got a question.” I said.
“Fire away.” We were a mile and a half from home and, courtesy of the hump-backed lady with the three-pronged cane, nibbling on sugar cookies dusted with multi-colored sprinkles.
“From when you first met Mom, how long did it take to figure out that she was the one?”
“Strange question.” Up ahead a lady with a baby carriage was standing at a crosswalk. He braked to a halt and waited while the woman reached to the opposite curb.
“That’s not an answer.”
We passed the Brandenberg Fire Station and the post office. “A guy I knew from high school, Victor Palumbo, had this girl, Lois, who he wanted to go out with. Lois was best friends with your mother but didn’t really know Victor all that well and thought he might be a big gavone.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a disparaging Italian term describing a jerk, phony, embarrassment, whatever.”
 So what happened?”
“Lois arranged a double date. As I remember, Victor and Lois had absolutely nothing in common so the budding romance proved a big flop.”
“The double date – that was the first time you ever laid eyes on Mom.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“From when you met her, how long - ”
“Five minutes,” My father cut me short. “That’s all. I knew inside five minutes.” We pulled into the driveway. My old man had to reorganize his truck for a commercial installation. I went into the house where my mother was folding laundry in the den. There were three separate piles – bath towels, hand towels and washcloths. A mound of unmatched socks were resting in a straw clothesbasket. 
Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes. The words reverberated through my brain like a Buddhist mantra. 


Later that night as I was lying in bed waiting to drop off to sleep, I got to thinking about Cheryl Oliphant. The inscrutable enigma-of-a-girl had been shadowing me day and night. I would be taking out the stinky garbage and a fleeting image of her with Nicolena, the South American python, would mysteriously flit through my brain - a randomly bizarre misfiring of the neural synapses. Or I would be nursing a glass of milk before taking my shower and sense her presence like some invisible sprite. 
I tried to imagine what it might be like to be married and come home to her, a dozen years older, of course. Cheryl would have supper waiting every night when I returned from work. A bucolic existence, we would jibber-jabber about nothing in particular just like my own, thoroughly dopey folks. Mrs. Oliphant, who I had seen dropping her daughter off most mornings during the first week of zoo camp, would be a regular guest, but the philandering father would be persona non grata, barred from ever setting foot in the inviolate sanctuary of our home. Of course, my mother would teach Cheryl how to bake breads, not just the exotic dessert loafs with fruit, eggs, cream and honey but the hearty traditional recipes with fresh herbs, whole wheat, molasses and sour dough starter. At fourteen, I possessed a wide-ranging and engrossing imagination. Funny though, how things always worked out so much better in my fourteen year-old fantasy than mundane reality.

    

“Got any more sour cream apricot bread?”
My mother was packing my lunchbox Monday morning. “Your brother and father went a little overboard with the loaf last night, but I think there may still be a little left.” She raised the lid on the breadbox. One last slab of the orange-flecked loaf remained. My mother placed the bread in a separate sandwich bag, nestling it between an overripe banana and bottle of Gatorade. 
“When were you planning to make more?”
“Not for a while yet.”
I fumbled with a knot in the shoelace of my left sneaker. “Could you bake another loaf so I could have it for the middle of the week?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Teasing the tangled string apart, I eased my foot into the shoe. “Would you and dad ever get divorced?”
“Such a crazy question!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s this girl at the zoo – her parents fight and everybody’s miserable.”
“Well, that’s not good.” Her eyes wandered from my face to the bulky slice of sour cream apricot loaf perched in the lunch box. “Your father and I get along just fine so I don’t think divorce is a viable option.” 
I wasn’t quite sure what the word ‘viable’ meant, but the woman’s intent was perfectly clear. Suddenly, my mother reached out and pulled me against her plump body. “Now you have an utterly stupendous day at zoo camp and don’t worry about such nonsense.” Her voice assumed a no-nonsense authoritative edge. “And be kind to that poor girl whose parents don’t know how to behave.”

My folks, like the river otters, were creatures of habit. My father got up every day and went to service heating and air conditioning units. He came home promptly at six. He gave his wife a box of candy each Valentine’s Day and a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card the first Sunday in May. We went on vacation every summer to Booth Bay Harbor where the family didn’t really do much of anything spectacular but always managed to have a great time. I dragged along behind my parents and younger sister as they flitted about the touristy shopping area, buying T-shirts that said stupid things like ‘I’m a Bona Fide Mainiac!’, purchasing coffee mugs that were ridiculously overpriced and homemade blueberry jellies for relatives and friends. My folks had a walloping donnybrook-of-a-fight once or twice a year. My mother usually won, and my father sulked for a day or two but never held a grudge. And that was about it.

What did Cheryl Oliphant say about river otters? 
They were environmental indicators. Once a stream became polluted with noxious waste, the animals, who were a part of the ferret and weasel family, quickly abandoned the area in search of clean habitat. Cheryl’s father was a philanderer, an inveterate liar and heartbreaker - a toxic waste dump of emotional pollution. He soiled his nest.

    

The hand on the chest – that was a big deal. 
Not quite as big as a kiss or hug but right up there. When I gave her the second slice of apricot bread, Cheryl rewarded me with another unearthly beatific smile. I unzipped the front flap on my lunch bag and transferred the treat to the girl’s backpack. “I’ll save it for later.” Something had definitely changed. She seemed more relaxed. “My father moved out over the weekend.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be,” Cheryl protested. “It’s so much nicer with him gone.”

Monday the Zoofari class was introduced to the South African meerkats, relatives of the mongoose family. They reminded me of miniature squirrels strung out on amphetamines. The meerkats lived underground in burrows, housing about twenty animals with each member having a specific job that benefited the community as a whole. There were babysitters, sentries, hunters and teachers. Sentries stood on a log or bush and watched for predators and other threats. When one was seen, the sentry let loose with a warning call that allowed the others to reach the safety of the burrow in plenty of time. The animal spent much of the day above ground playing. When not engaged in play, they were usually busy digging or turning over stones in search of food.
Next, we got to meet the lions, white ruffed lemurs, a fennec fox and silver-cheeked hornbill before progressing on to the diadem snake, binturong, snow leopard and Madagascar fody. By Wednesday of the second week, we were learning about speckled mousebirds, Japanese macaques, a Visyan warty pig and red-crowned crane. Thursday there was a summing up of the camp experience, and Friday the parents were treated to a formal presentation before collecting their children for the last time. 

“Jack London was an autodidact.” Cheryl waved the dog-eared paperback in front of my nose. On this our last day together, she was still obsessing over the author who wrote multiple endings to the same story. 
“What’s that?” As an endless stream of visitors, parents and rowdy siblings paraded past, I wanted to kiss her something awful – right there in front of the mesh wire cage housing the gold-crested mynah birds. 
“An autodidact is a self-taught person, someone who never got a proper education.”
Everything was falling apart and all she could manage was more inane banter. “To hell with Jack London!” I sputtered and, leaning forward, kissed her full on the lips.
Somewhere in the distance the sloth bears let out a cacophony of bizarre polytonal grunts and squeals. “Do it again,” she demanded, and I kissed her impetuously a second time but had to make it brief because a couple of bratty preschoolers came skipping around the bend singing the idiotic theme song from SpongeBob SquarePants.
“I’ll call you later tonight after supper.” I could hardly catch my breath. “Let’s meet somewhere tomorrow.”
“There’s a playground with toddler swings and a jungle gym off Reese Avenue.” Cheryl’s eyes were glazed over. 
“It’s not that far from where we live. I’ll hop on my ten-speed and see you there around one. We can spend Saturday afternoon together.” 
That’s when I sort of went bonkers—snuffling, gagging and bawling my eyes out like some emotionally labile lunatic. My brain shut down—went on sabbatical. The kiss, the sloth bears howling freakishly in the distance and a certain self-taught adventurer who never benefited from formal education—they all congealed together, converting my cerebellum into a slurry of vapid mush.
“What’s the matter?” Cheryl pressed.
“A person traveling alone in the wilderness falls through the ice and his legs go numb, freeze solid …” I couldn’t continue. I just didn’t know what else to say, because the main thrust of the argument was running so far ahead of my putrid brain cells that I couldn’t keep pace much less catch up to the scattering of evanescent thoughts. Now I understood how my father felt at the Tim Horton’s coffee shop when he got all balled up in his grandiose palaver.
Cheryl Oliphant sidled up to me. Her compact hand slid into mine, a perfect fit, and held the fingers tight. Lifting up on her toes, she nuzzled my wet cheek. “Make it twelve-thirty, and, before we visit the playground, come by the house to meet my mother.” 

Return to Table of Contents


Still Virgin


“I'm not a virgin anymore," Clarissa announced as soon as we were seated in the restaurant. The chubby girl with the unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses spoke primly, in a plainspoken manner. "At least not in the technical sense," she added as though the initial statement demanded further elaboration. The word 'least' sounded like 'leathhhed' because of a pronounced lisp. Normally none of Clarissa's friends ever made fun of the speech impediment, but, in the context of what she had just told us, it did sound rather absurd. The three of us agreed to meet at the Italian Garden for lunch to celebrate finishing our freshman year of college. And then, out of nowhere, ditsy Clarissa makes this crazy pronouncement, bursts into tears and runs off barricading herself in the lady's room.
"Well, this is fun," Ted quipped and sipped at his raspberry cream Italian soda. Ted, who is flagrantly gay, a real femme fatale, brushed a wavy strand of blond hair out of his eyes. His hair being rather straight, he uses a curling iron to create the effect of natural curls. 
After a minute, Clarissa returned. Her emotions back under control, she sat down, grabbed a breadstick from the basket and waved it in the air like a dagger. "Don't you just love the way they do salads here?"
"It's nothing special," I interjected slightly disoriented by the emotional outburst and subsequent non sequitur. "Just oil and vinegar."
"Yes, but I can never get it to taste quite like this" Clarissa began heaping her plate with lettuce, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and red onions from the salad bowl. "Perhaps it's a special brand of olive oil." 
Ted just sat there staring at us like we both were nuts. "If we're finished discussing gourmet salad dressings, perhaps we could get back to virgins in the technical sense."
Clarissa stopped eating. She lowered her eyes and, for a brief moment, I thought she was going to go postal on us again with another crying jag. She raised her hands over the table, palms facing down, as though she was participating in a séance, took a deep breath and let the air out ever so slowly. "I got intimate with this guy from college. We're in love. He wants to get married, and I don't know what to do."
The waiter returned, refilled our water glasses before running off with the empty salad bowl. "You had sex with this guy." I posited the question as an immutable, a priori statement of fact.
"Well, yes and no."
Ted rolled his eyes. Then he reached across the table and grabbed Clarissa by the wrist. It was the sort of impulsive move only a swishy gay guy could pull off with panache. Of course, the fact that he was so damn sweet and kind-hearted didn't hurt. "Intercourse, fornicating, doing the no-pants dance, wango tango - it's when two consenting adults come together for the purpose of - "
Clarissa scowled. "It's not as simple as that."
Ted stared at her with that insouciant, lovable smile that he reserved for miscellaneous lost souls. The waiter returned. "I'm watching my weight so I'm going to order the zuppa Toscana… that rather earthy soup with the escarole, sweet sausage and red potatoes. What about you?"
"The veal parmesan looks good, although they always give you twice as much as a personal can realistically eat." Clarissa closed her menu and laid it on the table. "Of course, I can always take what I don't finish home for later."
I felt like a person on a locked ward at a mental asylum. "Ditto on the veal."
After we placed our orders, Ted told a funny story about his 'friend', Roger. They were devoted to one another and flagrantly monogamous. But, for reasons that only the dysfunctional couple were privy to, Roger and Ted were forever squabbling and making up. Roger was flaky and a full-blown swish, but at a much deeper level, something clicked between the two of them, and I had the distinct feeling that a dozen years from now they would be having their silly tiffs, patching things up and making a perfectly wonderful life together. 
"Technically still a virgin…" I just can't let such a weird statement pass without some coherent explanation," Ted blurted. "That's like saying a girl with a swollen stomach is only slightly pregnant."
"Yes, I guess I owe you both an explanation." Clarissa twirled a forkful of spaghetti but put the food aside without eating. "Jeff and I met at a dorm party." The food was growing cold but nobody seemed to care. "Almost from the outset, it was like that exquisite Neruda poem… the one about blurred boundaries." 
"I simply love Neruda!" Ted sipped at his frothy drink. 
Clarissa ran her tongue over her lips and began to recite from memory in a whispery, lilting voice:

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

"Dear God!" Ted impetuously raked the cloth napkin across his eyes, blotting away a fistful of tears. Several diners looked curiously but quickly turned back to their meals. "That's the most beautiful sentiment I ever heard." He reached across and placed a hand on Clarissa's shoulder. "You must write that out for me. I'll use it on Rodger the next time he goes bitchy on me."
Clarissa momentarily turned away and began rummaging in her handbag. Pulling a three-by-five glossy from her wallet she handed it to me. The picture showed Clarissa decked out in a fur-trimmed winter coat and mittens standing in the snow outside a campus dormitory. Behind her was a young man, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist. He had pudgy, rather non-descript features, a fleshy, bulbous nose that seemed set down on the face as an unfortunate afterthought and wire-rimmed glasses. The couple looked sublimely happy - ridiculously and immodestly in love.
"Through all four years of high school I never had a boyfriend, not a lousy date or kiss." Clarissa's homely face dissolved in a sheepish grin. "Would you like to know where I spent my senior prom?"
"No, not really," I blurted. Wherever Clarissa ended up, it certainly had nothing to do with the Marriott Hotel, tuxedos, lavish evening dresses, cut glass floral centerpieces and an eight piece rock band.
"I went bowling… ten-pin with the big balls. Almost got a freakin' hernia."
"If it's any consolation," Ted noted, "I went to the movies with Roger, who was acting hormonal and very unpleasant."
What was I doing? Oh yes, I made a brief appearance at the prom before rushing off to the lake in Ricky Fleischman's Camaro coupe where we… Well, it doesn't really matter what we did at the lake, but I could certainly empathize with someone who couldn't even scare up a nerdy reject for the senior prom. Clarissa swiveled in her chair. "What do you know about tantric sex?"
I'd squirmed uncomfortably. A lowlife sophomore I regrettably dated only a few months earlier showed up at my dorm room one night with a pack of playing cards denoting certain sexual positions more suited for a double-jointed contortionist than first year college students. The raunchy drawings were originally taken from a Hindu manuscript. "The Kama Sutra - it's supposed to show you how to increase carnal pleasure and - "
"No, not that smutty crap," Clarissa brought me up short. "I meant the spiritual practice where you don't climax but channel the sexual energy for spiritual purposes." "Phil had his own apartment off campus so, by the end of second semester, we had done pretty much everything but you-know-what." She sipped at her water. "A week ago Tuesday, a day before I was driving home for the summer, we were in bed together. I said, 'Oh, for God's sake, just put it in.' He didn't have any condoms and I wasn't on birth control. But we were both aroused, and it was the last time we were going to be together until the fall semester." 
The couple dining opposite our table suddenly broke off their conversation. They were sitting rather stiffly with their heads tilted at an angle, and I had the distinct impression - not that I could blame them - they were eavesdropping."Anyway, I says, 'Put it in. We won't do anything,.. just see what it feels like.' So he climbed on top of me and I spread my legs and it sort of went in real easy and then…" Her voice fell away just as the waiter arrived with the check and three mint chocolates wrapped in green foil. "And then we just lay there together holding each other."
The couple sitting opposite were pawing at their food but still not eating. The woman, a heavy brunette was breathing heavily through parted lips with her eyes half shut. Her partner was leaning so far back that the front legs of his chair rose a good three inches off the carpeting. 
"And that's when it happened.” 
"What happened?" Ted pressed.
 "This tingly sensation in my pelvis, curling up like dense smoke through my stomach. It kept climbing higher and higher until it went straight up to the roof of my brain. Then  I drifted into a blissful state, bordering on pure rapture. About thirty seconds passed and Phil says, 'Did you feel that?'"
"Geez!" Ted blew out his cheeks. "Would you mind if I brought Roger along to lunch next time?"
"It didn't break!" For the first time since we arrived at the Olive Garden, I finally understood Clarissa's original intent. "It didn't break, did it?" I repeated more forcefully now, rephrasing the original statement as a question.
Clarissa was preoccupied, adding up the money we had thrown in a heap, separating out the tip. "No, it didn't."
"So, technically, you're still…"
"Oh, dear!" Ted fluttered both slender hands in front of his chest in a frenzied gesture. "The hymen… Oh, dear!"


Out in the parking lot we kissed and hugged. Clarissa drove off with a promise to get together over the weekend for either a movie or shopping date at the mall.
 "So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep," Ted repeated the final verse of the Neruda poem. "Do you remember the rest of that lovely poem? I'll just shrivel up and die, if I can't get my hands on it."
"She was always the ugly duckling," I blurted peevishly, ignoring Ted's histrionics. "All through high school, Clarissa was the fat frump with the goofy lisp and heart of gold. I was the hottie, the babe, the cutesy, the dreamboat, the perfect ten knockout glamour-puss."
"Not anymore, sweetie!" Ted pressed his thin lips so tightly together they seemed to merged with his chin. "Clarissa's the new gold standard!"

Return to Table of Contents


The Prize


Unable to find what she wanted at the Brandenberg Book Nook, Alexis drifted to the front of the store. “Edith Wharton...” Alexis shifted her gaze to the far side of the store, where she had been sifting through the offerings. “I just checked the stacks but couldn’t find a thing by the author.” 
“That’s genre fiction. Ms Wharton's situated in literary classics.” The clerk, who looked to be in his late twenties, stepped out from behind the counter. A mop of dirty brown hair and wispy, anemic beard did nothing to dispel Alexis’ initial impression of a bleary-eyed adolescent trapped in a man’s body. Or maybe it was simply his relaxed, pokey manner as he led the way to a collection of free-standing displays.
“The House of Mirth was one of the author's earliest works.” He deftly pulled two paperbacks off the shelf, handing them to her. “Ms Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, but I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know.” He offered up this last bit of incidental trivia while staring absently at a dust bunny the size of a silver, half dollar drifting aimlessly about the baseboard trim before meandering quietly away.
Ten minutes later Alexis wandered back to the front of the store where a middle-aged woman with a dowager’s hump and bifocals was counting out change. “I spoke with a young bearded fellow earlier.”
The woman gestured diagonally across the room. “That would be Tom. You’ll find him stocking shelves in young-adult fiction.”
 Alexis located the clerk hunched over a cardboard box of shiny paperbacks. “Which did you choose?”
“Age of Innocence. I’ll read it first and work backwards.” Alexis took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Are you seeing anyone?”
Only now did the clerk straighten up. “I'm not dating at the moment.”
“Would you like to go out?”
He glanced at her but only briefly allowing his eyes to droop until they finally settled on the bright neon cover of the book he was holding. “You don’t seem the type who would be sitting at home twiddling her thumbs on a Friday night.”
“No, that’s true.” 
“A date,... that would be nice.” His right hand came up as though he meant to shake her hand but thought better of it. “I’m Tom.”
“Alexis. Alexis Hamilton.” She retreated several steps and began talking once again in normal, conversational tones. “Here, let me give you my cell number.” She jotted the digits on a scrap of paper and handed it to him. “Since I put you on the spot, choose whatever you like.”
He stuffed the slip in his shirt pocket. “Dramatic irony.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ms Wharton... she was most famous for her humor and dramatic irony when describing the New York upper class.” He reached for the pricing gun. “Keeping up with the Jones - are you familiar with the expression,?”
“Yes, sort of.” The bookstore clerk had a queer penchant for drifting off topic. 
“The Jones were Ms. Wharton’s wealthy father’s family.”
“You’re joking?”
Easing a pile of books onto a shelf, Tom smiled affably. “I’ll call closer to the weekend.”
You don’t seem the type who would be sitting home twiddling her thumbs on a Friday night.   Alexis entered the Book Nook with no ulterior motive, no hidden agenda other than to find an Edith Wharton novel. The dark-haired girl with the willowy figure wasn't horny; she wasn't lonely. She wasn't feeling particularly desperate, depraved, emotionally labile, or psychologically unhinged. And at twenty-five, her biological clock certainly hadn't run down. Still, something went awry when, with no great sense of urgency, Tom lead her on a rather circuitous route away from mainstream fiction – detective novels, Harlequin romances, steamy erotica and chick lit -  back to the classics. Or was it a metaphor, like the Frost poem reminiscing about diverging paths? You come to satisfy one unmet need but forfeit that in lieu of something more exigent.

******

Thursday evening the phone rang. “Any thoughts about succotash?” Tom was on the other end of the line.
Succotash – wasn’t that lima or shell beans cooked together with corn in a sweet broth? “I’m rather neutral on the subject.”
“The Seakonke-Wampanoag Tribe is holding its annual Powwow in Rehoboth this weekend. Indians from all over New England will be converging - ”
“What time,” she cut him short, “will you be picking me up?”
“Saturday, around noon. We can eat there.” Not a man of many words, he hung up the phone. Alexis drifted into the bedroom. On the comforter, a black strapless bustier outfit with metallic beading at the waist lay next to an Andrew Marc drape chemise with cap sleeves, an asymmetrical neckline and ruching at both the sides and shoulders. Chuckling under her breath, she hung both dresses back in the closet and reached for her jeans plus a plaid denim shirt.

******

Alexis’ previous blind date, which occurred six months earlier, soured her on men.. A Harvard economics major, the swarthy fellow brought her to the Newbury Steakhouse off Massachusetts Ave in downtown Boston. Jason Tarkington - that was the graduate student's name. His father was an investment banker with a brokerage firm on State Street, three blocks down from historic Faneuil Hall Market Marketplace. Gaunt with an avalanche of black hair that buried his ears, he was actually quite handsome despite a stubbly, five o'clock shadow that materialized most days shortly before noon. 
Jason Tarkington was infatuated - not with his svelte date, who he had only just met for the first time a half hour earlier, but with someone infinitely more intriguing. "I truly believe Greenspan got it all wrong with his … From my point of view, and I can only speak for myself when it comes to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations… I can’t agree with any of the Keynesian crowd who claim that trickledown economics…" During the ride north on Route 3 into Boston, he carved the air with absurd gestures and screwed his face up in the most ridiculous expressions. Whether discussing microeconomics, laissez-faire capitalism, commodities markets or the Red Sox's chances for winning the World Series, he never let up on the histrionics.
Following the meal, he tried to grope her in the parking lot of the restaurant, but Alexis had seen it coming and was neither caught off guard nor the least bit flustered. She slapped his face - just once, but so brutally hard it left a permanent red welt that was still evident as they pulled up in front of her apartment complex. “I don’t know what came over me... I'm not really the sort of guy who... I swear to God, Alexis, I seldom if ever…"

******

Saturday, Tom arrived a little after noon. They drove through Brandenberg center, passing out of the city into a rural stretch of New England country. Out the passenger side window, a blur of oaks and maples descended to a wide lake stocked with largemouth bass, sweet perch, pickerel and catfish. “Where'd you go to school?” he asked.
“Wellesley College.”
He flipped the directional and took a sharp left onto Arcade Avenue heading towards Seekonk. “Didn’t Hillary Rodham Clinton attend Wellesley?”
“Yes, the president’s wife, along with Diane Sawyer, Secretary of State, Madeline Albright,... Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.”
Tom pursed his lips and a fleeting smile drifted across his lips. “Anyone among those illustrious alumnae you care to emulate?”
They passed the Grist Mill Restaurant with its huge turn-of-the century paddle wheel originally powered by a relentless deluge of water cascading over a granite dam. In recent times, the immobile wheel was more decorative than functional. “No, thank God!” 
Up ahead and to the right stretched a huge open field. They could already hear the pulsating rhythms of a huge tribal drum being struck by multiple sticks. Tom pulled into the grassy parking area at the front of the field alongside a stand of birch trees. A profusion of tents and EZ-Up canopies ringed a hundred-foot enclosure where both men and woman in Indian garb were furiously dancing. Two sets of drummers and singers were alternately accompanying the dancers as they twirled, trotted, skipped, shuffled and hopped about the perimeter of the circle. Dead center, a hardwood fire, which had burnt down to coals, sent up a plume of aromatic smoke. “What I do at the bookstore," Tom noted soberly, "pays the bills but it’s basically a dead-end job.” 
Alexis sensed that the man wasn’t apologizing so much as simply setting the record straight. An elderly Indian wearing a loincloth and buckskin britches hobbled by with the aid of a much younger man and an aluminum walker. The couple entered the circle and joined the dancers. “Why are you telling me this?”
“It’s been suggested that I suffer from a Peter Pan complex,” he noted tongue in cheek. “As a Wellesley girl, who may on occasion rub shoulders with America’s elite, I thought you ought to know.”
They meandered halfway around the perimeter of the circle and pulled up in front of the music' tent, where a dozen men were pounding away on a communal drum. Behind them, the woman, decked out in feathers and native costume, were singing wordless accompaniment, a rambunctious call and response. More people were arriving every minute with giddy tribal members rushing off to greet long lost friends and relatives. “Considering some of the men I've dated,” she muttered with a self-deprecating half-smile, “Peter Pan might represent a refreshing change.”

Alexis found a pair of turquoise earrings and a matching bracelet at one stalls, while Tom bought a flute fashioned from fire-killed, old-growth cedar. The wood was not grown locally but originally harvested in British Columbia. Alexis was three tents down looking at a collection of handmade moccasins while Tom spoke with the Mashpee Indian who hand-carved the wind instruments. The artisan had driven up in a camper from the tribal reservation on Cape Cod. “Can you find the seam?” Tom handed her the amber colored flute he just purchased.
Alexis flipped the flute over in her hand. The satiny smooth wood shimmered in the early afternoon light. “There’s no break in the grain. It looks all of one piece.”  
“The wood is split down the middle, then each half carefully hollowed out and planed smooth before being glued back together.” “That Indian,” he pointed to the craggy-faced elder with a single eagle feather wedged in his gray ponytail, “claims the assembly is so exact that most people can’t find the join line even if he shows them where it's located.” Tom’s enthusiasm over the ingenious workmanship was infectious, and Alexis grinned foolishly even though she wasn’t quite sure why the method was such a big deal. A young toddler dressed in moccasins and beaded leather shirt wandered by nibbling on an ear of corn. Near a display of handmade Indian artifacts, a huge pile of unshucked corn was roasting on a blackened grill. “Hungry?” Tom queried.
They ignored the hot dogs and hamburgers in favor of a watery succotash, which was actually quite good, and traditional corn tortillas with vegetables, a roasted meat of unknown origin, generous dollop of sour cream and pungent, herbal sauce. 
A new group of drummers and singers replaced the original musicians as a stream of children and teenagers, some brandishing war clubs and elaborate, handmade jewelry, entered the dance circle. Out of breath, the elderly man with the breechcloth and geriatric walker shuffled unsteadily off to the side and collapsed onto a folding chair. His companion ran off momentarily and returned with a large bowl of succotash. Many of the participants didn’t especially look like Indians. A tall black man with dreadlocks and a broad, fleshy nose was talking to a blond woman with pigtails. Both wore feathers and traditional Indian regalia. With an impromptu change of clothing, the WASP’y  blonde could have passed for a cheerleader or collegiate homecoming queen. 
Alexis was feeling slightly woozy from the food and excitement. Somewhere between the changing of the guard with the drummers and the young people joining the older dancers, Tom had slipped an arm around her waist. He felt her hips lean up against him. “So, what are you doing next weekend?”


The following Saturday night, Tom took her to an older, Russian foreign film, Dersu Usala. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, the joint-venture movie had won the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival in 1975 and was loosely based on the memoirs of a Russian explorer, Vladimir Arsenyey, describing his exploration of the Sikhote-Alin region of Siberia in the early twentieth century.  By the end of the film, when the aged hunter was losing both his eyesight and ancestral ways, Alexis found herself dabbing away the tears. "I'm not usually like this," she sputtered averting her soggy eyes.
The third date, they went out to eat at a Korean restaurant where the diners heaped meats and vegetables in metal bowls and watched as the chef cooked and seasoned the meals on a communal grille. Later they went to hear a jazz quintet at a lounge in downtown Providence. Tom said that the tenor saxophonist reminded him of Dexter Gordon with his wide vibrato and angular, melodic improvisation. Afterwards, they went back to Alexis' apartment and, rather quietly and without fanfare, made love. 
"At some point, you ought to meet my parents?" It was two in the morning. They were snuggling together naked.
"People with the financial resources to send their daughter to Wellesley College generally aren’t terribly fond of near-do-wells."
"Tolerant or accepting of near-do-wells," Alexis appended his previous remark. "And, yes, in all likelihood, they’ll be extremely critical, but if we are going to continue seeing each other…" She left the remark dangling.


A month later, dressed in slacks and a neatly-ironed flannel shirt, Tom visited the Hamiltons for dinner. Things went reasonably well. Alexis’ mother flitted about the kitchen overseeing the meal – a spicy pot-roast with candied carrots, potatoes au gratin and asparagus in a lemony butter sauce. She basted the pot roast in a Kikkoman teriyaki marinade before slow-cooking the meat in its own juices with garlic and black pepper. For dessert, she picked up a selection of creamy pastries from Konditor Meister. Alexis didn't see her mother until the middle of the following week. "Where did you meet that silly boy?" The tone was blithely dismissive.
"At a book store."
Mrs. Hamilton was a tall, fair-skinned blonde with broad shoulders and a stony expression. "He seems rather limited."
Alexis, who hadn't expected either of her parents to like Tom, would have been shock to learn otherwise. "That's the appeal. He is rather limited but in all the right ways."
"Your father was even more disappointed." 
"Your collective disgust has been duly noted, and I won't bring him home ever again." Mrs. Hamilton opened her mouth to deliver a rebuttal but reconsidered. "I'm the prize," Alexis said intuiting her mother's unspoken thoughts, "the perfect daughter-in-law... the future mother of some Boston Brahmin's precocious grandchildren." There was no reply, just a sullen frigidity the temperature of dry ice.
Later, as Alexis was slipping on a North Face jacket and getting ready to leave, her mother petulantly asked, "Whatever happened to that lovely economics major Aunt Edna introduced you to?"
Alexis felt something snapped in her brain, a subtle misfiring of neurons somewhere in the frontal lobe. "He stuck his hand up my crotch in the parking lot of the Newbury Steakhouse."
"Oh, dear!" A fluttery palm drifted to her mother's wrinkled throat. "And he seemed so refined and self-assured."
Alexis laughed sarcastically. "Those are the ones you have to watch out for." Alexis went home and poured herself a Heineken. Three beers later when she was reasonably drunk, she reached for the phone. "What're you doing?"
"Nothing, why?"
"Come over and make sure to bring a toothbrush plus a change of underwear." 

******

“Is there a literary precedent for what we’re doing?” Alexis asked. Lying in bed, Tom was kissing the satiny skin between her shoulder blades. 
A minute passed before he spoke. “E.M. Forster... A Room with a View?"
"I read the book in high school but can't remember a thing."
 Tom flipped over and lay supine, fingers laced behind his neck. “The novel ends in Florence, where George and Lucy have eloped without her mother’s consent.” 
“Star-crossed lovers.”
“No, not at all,” he objected. “Although Lucy alienates all their friends and relatives, the story ends with the promise of lifelong happiness.” 
"Funny… you chose a term like happiness, not love."
"Countess Olenska in the Wharton novel you purchased was madly in love, but, from the outset, her passion offered no hope whatsoever of future happiness."
Alexis flipped over on her stomach, rising up on her elbows. “A Room with a View,... the plot is coming back to me in bits and pieces.” She draped a leg over his thigh. “There was George’s father, a very doting, warm-hearted fellow and an overbearing older cousin chaperone, who accompanies Lucy on her ill-fated Italian trip.”
“That would be Charlotte,” Tom offered.
A Room with a View -- rediscovering the plot was like fitting the frayed pieces of a favorite puzzle together. Every time she located a matching piece, another possibility suggested itself. “Back home in England, Lucy agrees to marry some pretentious boy she really doesn’t love.” Alexis' voice cracked, the words catching in her throat. “How utterly hideous!”
“What’s wrong?”
“There was this boorish ass I went out with briefly last year who reminds me of the fictional character.” Alexis proceeded to tell Tom about Jason Tarkington.
"On any given day of the week," Tom observed drolly, "several dozen dolts like that Harvard graduate student wander through the Book Nook." He jabbed a forefinger playfully into her side. "Just as many fusty females, too."
Alexis smiled sheepishly. "The boy who surfaces at the end of the Forster novel and almost spoils everything reminded me of the egomaniac." 
"It’s just a book and and you're over identifying."
What Tom had just said was true but, everything struck too close to home. Like the stodgy, brittle-minded adults in the Forster novel, Alexis’ mother had a perverse sense of propriety, bordering on the fanatical. Politeness, decorum, respectability, correctness, aptness – whatever the term Mrs. Hamilton chose, people were compelled to be proper and respectable. By sheer force of will – water dripping through endless millenniums on bare granite – Alexis' mother would ultimately wear her down. Alexis would come away from each family visit with a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach, and then a migraine and then diarrhea followed by ulcerative colitis, a hemiplegic stroke and myocardial infarction death resulting - all because Tom, the kind-hearted bookworm, didn’t measure up.
"Well," she pouted, leaning her head on his arm, "I'm still upset."
"If it's any consolation," Tom added, "in the final chapter of the Forster novel, the love birds eloped to Italy,… impetuously rushed off in the middle of the night and married without telling the parents."
"Where do we stand in comparison to George and Lucy?" 
"Actually, we're light years ahead of them."
"That makes no sense,” she protested. “The couple was already married and away on their honeymoon."
"Yes, but because the older cousin, Charlotte and intriguing relatives conspired to keep the lovebirds apart, they never dated or had a chance to get to know each other."
Alexis considered what Tom told her. "Then I don't see why we couldn't be every bit as happy."
"More so!" 


Around five o’clock in the morning, Tom slid off his side of the bed, and a moment later she heard pee splattering against the toilet bowl. “My mother’s a blockhead,” Alexis observed as Tom slipped back under the covers. “She’s got the preternatural instincts of a feral animal to sense that I’m falling hard for you and will do everything in her power to destroy our happiness.”
“Could we backtrack to the ‘falling hard for you’ part?” 
“It’s been a month and we get along reasonably well, wouldn’t you agree?”
“That’s fairly obvious.”
“And it doesn’t really feel like we’re dating anymore.”
“No,” the breezy humor fell away, replaced by a sober resoluteness. “The relationship’s grown too comfortable,... cozy.”
Alexis nudged him with an elbow. “I thought a latter-day Peter Pan would never fall into that trap.”
“You didn’t hear me right the first time.” Tom’s voice was shot through with an undercurrent of genuine irritation. “What I implied at the Powwow was that other people mistakenly viewed me as a Peter Pan-type, perennial adolescent. I’ve never personally felt that way." He leaned closer and kissed her on the throat. "And just for the record, by the final scene in Dersu Uzala, I was already fantasizing about the two of us growing old together.”
A car door slammed. An engine fired up and the vehicle crawled out of the parking lot in the direction of the highway. When it was gone, the bedroom was engulfed in soothing silence. Alexis rolled over and straddled him. Resting lightly on his stomach, the girl sat up straight, draping her forearms provocatively over her head. He was staring intently through the chalky, early morning light at her naked torso with an expression of abject reverence. "Like what you see?" 
Lips parted, he lay transfixed, breathing through his mouth in shallow puffs of air. An unintelligible, guttural sound welled up in his throat. Alexis inched back down on top of Tom and placed her lips up against his ear. "Consider yourself a risk taker?"

For the most part, no," he spoke haltingly, "but on rare occasion, I'll go for broke."
"Listen closely." Alexis let out a deep sigh, almost like a moan and whispered, "Conventional wisdom be damned, this is what I think we ought to do…"

Return to Table of Contents



The Reticent Storyteller



Parker Salisbury met Lilly where she worked mucking stalls and caring for the horses over at the Cloverleaf Stables. The riding academy ran equestrian programs for beginners through advanced and boarded a handful of privately-owned horses for local families. Parker and his construction crew were renovating a barn adjacent to the stable. One day in early December he wandered over to the paddocks to look in on the animals before heading home for the night. A young girl he had never seen before was mucking stalls. 
The privately boarded horses were generally cleaned up and set right for the night early on, but when Parker entered the barn he could smell the stench of horseshit and rotting, pea-soaked hay. Most stalls were cleaned three times daily and yet this one clearly hadn't been tidied at all. The girl, who paid him absolutely no attention, quickly mucked out the stall. Disposing of the soiled bedding, she swept and washed the floor with a stable disinfectant. Once the surface was dry, she returned the clean bedding to its proper place, adding fresh material to make up for the straw she had removed.
"What happened?"
"No idea," she mumbled without making eye contact.
With all those freckles, the pale-skinned dirty blond reminded him of some adolescent character out of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. "I'm Parker." The lanky girl did not readily volunteer any additional information. "I didn't catch your name."
"Lilly." She nuzzled a brown quarter horse. With her short back and heavily muscled body, the beast was noticeably smaller in stature than the others, standing only sixteen hands high. 
The adjacent horse stall proved even dirtier. Worse yet, the water bucket was upended. Before addressing the filthy bedding, Lilly hauled a compact, rubber tire from a neighboring, empty stall and threw it on the floor. Filling the dry bucket with fresh, cool water, she wedged it firmly in the center of the tire. Burying its muzzle in the metal pail, the spotted mare didn't raise her head for a good thirty seconds. Still ignoring the carpenter, Lilly scrounged up some fresh carrots and divided them equally between both horses. While the beasts were still munching their vegetables Arnold, the boss's son, stuck his head in the barn. "Simon quit. No notice. That's why the place is such a shithouse."
"And you didn't think to pitch in and help straighten things out?" When there was no reply, she added, "It is one thing to neglect your own horses, but the private-pay boarders will take their business elsewhere if they think we're understaffed."
"You think I don't know that?" Arnold shot back.
"Got anyone in mind for a replacement?"
"I'm working on it." 
Squatting down on her haunches, Lilly began scraping a sticky tangle of yellow bot fly eggs off the mare's lower legs with a folding pocket knife. "I'm holding back on grain until they finish eating their hay so the animals don't bulked up on the high-protein feed." 
Arnold grunted something unintelligible. Parker doubted he had even been listening. The boss' son wasn't working on anything productive. He never did. Even among the carpenters, he  pranced around like Little Lord Fauntleroy giving orders in a supercilious, autocratic tone. 
Arnold glanced at his watch, a purely theatrical gesture, before hurrying off. After he was gone, Lilly checked a Shetland pony that seemed to be favoring his left hind leg. "What's wrong with the horse?"
"Can't say just yet." She picked up the hoof and felt for defects but there were none, then she did the same with the coronary band. There were no dark spots indicating bruising or puncture wounds. She pressed down lightly on each frog with a hoof pick. The tissue was slightly spongy. Then she placed her freckled nose up close to the hoof.
"Is it infected?"
"Probably not. There's no foul odor," Lilly confirmed. She cleaned all four hoofs with the curved metal pick and found no cracks, rings, dishes or flares. The horse was moving about normally now. "Probably just a pebble."
"Yeah probably." 


At first Parker thought the fair-haired girl with the wan features was morbidly shy, but after the third visit to the stable the following week he revisited his initial impression. To be sure, Lilly was aloof, disconnected from humanity, but there was nothing overtly pathological about her detachment. She was efficient and professional; she doted on the horses, loving them to distraction. "Would you like to go out some time?" Parker's heart was racing out of control as he blurted the words in a jumbled heap.
"A date?" She glanced at him with a stony expression. "Yeah sure. Why not?"
Parker's eyes brushed over the bony, angular physique. "Give me your telephone number. I'll call later in the week."
She jotted her number on a slip of paper then did something outlandish; even though he was standing there no more than three feet away, she turned her attention elsewhere, effectively blotting him out of existence. Her queer response creeped him out so bad that, reaching home, Parker flung the slip of paper with her phone number in the trash. But in the morning he lugged the plastic rubbish bag outside, dumping the smelly refuse on the lawn. It took him the better part of half an hour to find the raggedy slip of paper stained with coffee grounds.


On their first date, Parker brought Lilly to the company Christmas party at the Marriott Hotel. Pulling up in front of the moss green ranch house, the front door opened, and the young girl came down the brick stairs. Mrs. Truman was peering out the bow window with a muddled, wide-eyed expression as though she were watching her daughter heading off on a first date. "Pretty jacket," Parker noted.
The girl who mucked stalls for a living wore a camel-colored, wool blend coat with slight pleats under an empire waist. "It's very warm." Lilly glanced at him with a flat affect, rested her hands palms down on her lap and stared straight ahead. 
When they reached the third intersection, Parker said, "Did you get the job at the stables after high school?"
"No, I went to college first."
"Which one?"
"Brandeis."
"How many years did you attend?"
"Six."
"So you've got a master's degree." Lilly nodded distractedly but didn't bother to elaborate. "What did you study?"
"Victorian literature."
This tight-lipped girl attended one of the most expensive, Ivy League colleges on the east coast but worked an entry-level job for chump change! Parker felt slightly nauseous. He pictured the slip of paper blackened with coffee grounds and wondered if he might have been better off abandoning the crumpled, sheet where he had tossed it several days earlier.

At the function hall, Lilly stripped off her stylish coat to reveal a black strapless dress with a sweetheart neckline and tiered satin band at the waist. She wore no jewelry. Her hair, though neatly brushed, hung limply about the bare shoulders. With her alabaster complexion and dusting of freckles the effect was stunning.
"Now who's this gorgeous creature?" Thelma Kowalski cornered them in the hotel vestibule. A frumpy blond whose amorphous body was forever expanding in myriad directions, Thelma was married to Rick, a journeyman carpenter. Parker genuinely liked the woman despite a fatal flaw: like a busted spigot, her garrulous mouth ran from morning until night. He introduced the ladies. "God, you're such a skinny Minnie! It would take two of you to make one of me and just barely." Thelma laughed raucously at her own joke. For her part, Lilly seemed modestly pleased. She smiled, only responding in monosyllables. But then, nobody, not even Rick, could hold his own once the chatty wife had a couple of drinks to lubricate the perpetual motion machine that was her tongue. Lilly, who didn't care for liquor, was nursing a Shirley Temple, sipping the bubbly liquid with the cherry, as though it had to last until New Years.  
"Lilly, works over at Cloverleaf Stables," Parker noted, "caring for the horses."
"Aw shit! I just love horses beyond all human comprehension," Thelma gushed. "When I was fourteen, my family vacationed at a dude ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and we spent every day from sunup to dusk riding through…"

A half hour later, the cocktail hour was winding down and guests began moving through the buffet line. "Having a good time?" 
Lilly spooned a helping of Swedish meatballs onto her plate. "Yes, why shouldn't I?"
Parker reached for a dinner roll. "I don't know. You seem a bit quiet, that's all."
Lifting a chrome cover off a tray, she placed a dollop of butternut squash laced with brown sugar and cinnamon alongside the spicy meat. "It's just my nature. Some people like Rick's wife are more outgoing. I'm reserved, that's all."
Lilly Truman, Parker mused, was one step removed from catatonic - a zombie out of Night of the Living Dead - and the best she could do was lame excuses. They ate in silence, the other people at their table picking up the slack with light conversation. Nobody seemed to care that the wisp of a woman in the strapless evening gown next to Parker contributed nothing - not a feeble word - and showed no interest making friends. "How's your meal?"
"Good. How's yours?" she replied.
A staggering four words, counting the contraction as two! 
"Fine, although I think the chef was a bit heavy-handed with the black pepper in the meatball gravy. You haven't touched your salad."
Lilly cut her scalloped potatoes into manageable chunks and speared a portion on the tangs of her fork. "I'm saving it for last."
Six words under the previous rule.
"Did you notice the desert selection?" A separate table decked out with cheesecakes, éclairs, brownies, cherry Danish and assorted chocolates had been set up next to the coffee urn.
She paused, but only momentarily before negotiating the seasoned potatoes between her thin lips. Parker noticed that she wore no makeup - no lipstick, eye shadow or blush. "Everything looks scrumptious!"
A loss of three!
After the meal, Thelma Kowalski took Lilly aside and began bending her ear. The woman was sloshed - sloppy drunk - confiding some teary-eyed story that neither her husband nor Parker were privy to. The men were camped out at the bar.
"Pretty girl," Rick sipped at a Heineken. "She don't talk much, though."
"She doesn't talk at all," Parker replied morosely. It was a relief to have the mute creature temporarily off his hands. Normally Parker might have indulged in a few more drinks, but he wanted to deliver Miss Truman to the family homestead without incident. 
"You ain't gonna see her no more?"
"She's not my type," Parker confirmed. "Not a bad girl, just…" Truth be told, he hadn't a clue what she was and didn't much care.


Around eleven, the Christmas party wound down without a glitch. On the ride home, as they reached the outskirts of Brandenberg, Parker said, "You got a master's degree from one of the finest colleges in the country and shovel shit for a living… that makes sense?"
"It's a matter of perspective," Lilly replied obtusely. She didn't seem to find his intrusiveness objectionable, which only riled Parker all the more.
"Why not put your education to practical use?"
"Such as?"
"I don't know - teach college, take a job in publishing… write the great American novel." The silence that ensued suggested none of the choices represented viable options. "Okay then," he continued, shifting gears, "tell me something about yourself."
”I'm not much of a talker."
"We've just spent the evening together, and I feel like I don't know you much better than before I pulled up in front of your house."
She was sitting like a mannequin, her hands folded in her lap. "I read an interesting short story the other night. I'll tell you that instead."
"I don't want creative fiction," he fumed. "I want to learn about your family, friends,  hobbies, interests away from the stables..." Now he was really getting upset. "Do you have any vices? Maybe you're a compulsive germ freak or bulimic who goes on eating binges then sticks a finger down your throat to vomit." He shouldn't have said that, but they were only a few blocks away from the Truman residence. "That's what I want to hear."
"No," she replied evenly, not the least bit ruffled by his burgeoning hysteria, "we will do it my way." Sitting there in the car with the motor running in the driveway, Lilly told a silly story about an elderly Russian couple, who hired a local official to write a letter to their married daughter, who had moved to a distant province the previous year. The educated bureaucrat included nothing that the illiterate peasants told him to put in the letter that ultimately degenerated into a jumble of unintelligible drivel. But in the end, the daughter was so overjoyed to receive news of her parents that her heart comprehended every heartfelt sentiment and bit of newsworthy gossip intentionally omitted.  
Lilly sat with her hands folded in her lap, the heater purring a soothing accompaniment to her passionate monologue. "You see, in Chekhov's tale the local official had written utter foolishness, but the daughter only took in what her heart could grasp and, in the end she was overcome with feelings of gratitude and devotion for parents too poor and sickly to make the trip." The story having wound to an end, Lilly breathed out heavily and her hazel-flecked eyes went dead.  
The pale cloth curtain covering the bow window fluttered several times as Mrs. Truman surreptitiously glanced out. Only the mother's eyes were visible. Once finished, Lilly let herself out of the car and remarked, "I had a swell time, Parker." Hurrying up the slushy walkway, she disappeared into the house.
"Good riddance!" he muttered as he threw the shift in reverse.


New Years came and went. Thelma Kowalski asked, "Where's that kind-hearted Lilly? I so enjoyed our little chat at the Christmas party."
"What exactly did the two of you talk about?"
Thelma tapped the side of her cheek with a stubby index finger. "Funny thing is, I don't remember. She's a great listener, though."
"Yeah, that seems to be her strong point," Parker noted sourly.
Once rid of her, Parker had no intention of ever laying eyes on the dirty blond with the freckle-dappled skin. But a week passed, then another. They finished up the Cloverleaf Stable job and moved on to a condo project, part of the mayor's inner-city, gentrification program. At the time, Parker was too embittered to give the Russian tale much thought, but he wasn't so cocksure anymore. Rick and Thelma were separated. They suffered a horrendous blowout the second week in January and the husband moved into a studio apartment. "I can't live with that loudmouth bitch!" he confided. "She sucks all the oxygen out of the air."
Five weeks passed. Parker returned to the Cloverleaf Stables. "How have you been, Lilly?"
"Good. And you?"
"Just fine."
"How is it that you can spend the better part of half an hour telling me an elaborate, make believe story about Russians who live a hundred years ago but can't string two sentences back-to-back about current events?"
Lilly shrugged. "I don't know."
"Do you ever feel an urge to unburden yourself… to spill your guts?"
She stared at him wistfully before running her tongue over her lips "Hardly ever."
"Well, that's an honest answer." The barn smelled sweetly of fresh hay. The horses were fed and settled in for the night. "That's a pretty horse," Parker gestured in the direction of a dappled animal with a cream-colored hind quarter.
"It's an Appaloosa. They were originally bred by the Nez Perce Indians near the Palouse River. The breed has four, distinct patterns: the spotted blanket, leopard, snowflakes and frost."
"I gather this one would be named Snowflake." 
"You’re a quick study."Lilly grinned. "They make excellent trail horses."
Okay so Lilly could talk expansively about two topics: Russian literature and horses. A weird anomaly! Parker pointed at a lone horse off by itself in a separate paddock. "Why is that one separated from the others?"
"Parasites… bloodworms." They crossed the crushed stone path to get a better look. "The gelding was losing weight, its coat turning dull and rough. He was also rubbing his tale with hair loss. Arnold didn't want to call the vet,… claimed it was an unnecessary expense, but when I explained that a single parasite could lay two hundred thousand eggs a day and infest the whole stable, the jerk reluctantly placed the call." 
As they were heading back through the field toward the parking lot, Lilly pulled up, knelt down and began tugging at a patch of star thistle. "This stuff is poisonous,...brings on colic. Any horse foraging might accidentally eat the weed along with clean feed and get sick." Parker also began tugging at the noxious plants. Ten minutes later all the weeds had been ripped up and hauled away.
They were back in the parking lot. The sun was fading, bleaching the landscape into various shades of gray and murky greens.  Lilly was following a hawk circling the pines on the far side of the highway.  "How do horses breathe?" 
"How do horses breathe?" he repeated the question word-for-word in a deadpan voice. "I don't know... like humans I suppose."
"Horses can't breathe through their mouth," Lilly clarified. "That's why God gave them such huge nostrils. Also, their pricked ears can rotate a full hundred and eighty degrees, allowing the animals to listen to sounds all around them." 
Parker's features relaxed in a tepid smile. "And why exactly are you telling me this?"
The hawk resurfaced, hovering lower now over a grassy meadow rimmed with maples and pine that bordered the Cloverleaf Stables. Maybe it had spotted a field mouse or plump rabbit. At any rate, the predator was minding its own business, fulfilling its intrinsic destiny. "I don't know. You don't like it when I'm quiet. I'm trying to be sociable the only way I know how."
Parker was engulfed by a wave of self-loathing. "There's no need to change things. I prefer you just fine the way you are, and wouldn't have it any other way." He stepped closer and grabbed her forearm. "Would you like to go out again?"
"Yes."
"How's this Friday. We could grab something to eat and catch a movie afterwards."
"What time can I expect you?"
"Around seven." 


On the fourth date Parker brought her by his apartment and they made love. In her phlegmatic way, Lilly took as good as she gave. "I read a wonderful story by Frank O'Connor, the Irish author."
"Really." He was lying naked on his back calculating how many pounds of anodized nails he had to buy over the weekend for a roofing job on Monday.
"This middle-aged man discovers that, years earlier, his wife gave birth to a child by another man …" 
Yes, there it was again! Lilly was slipping into that throaty storyteller's mode. The gabled roof under construction runs sixty by forty feet so, figuring five pounds of nails per square foot…
"Are you listening?" Lilly tapped him gently on the shoulder.
"Yes, of course."
"But you were snoring."
"No, I'm awake now."
"Anyway," Lilly had shifted on her side, a forearm draped across his chest. "The husband decides to travel back to County Cork, to find his wife's missing child and…"


On Wednesday when the crew broke for lunch after installing the fascia trim on the new construction, Rick, asked, "How come you never say shit about Lilly?" 
"What exactly did you want to hear?" 
"I don't know… does she make you happy?"
"Yeah, she's good," Parker offered guardedly.
"Sometimes she acts like a deaf mute."
"Yes, that's true."
Rick gave him a tortured look. "Thelma's a freakin' talkaholic. She never shuts up. That's why I left… cause of her god-awful motor mouth. She don't never hardly give it a rest. Twenty-four-seven….blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like Chinese water torture." He inched closer. "I told Thelma she gotta put a rag in it or I'm gonna file papers… put an end to this farce-of-a-marriage once and for all."
Parker took a swig of ice tea and bit into a roast beef sandwich. He didn't hold out much hope that Rick's wife would 'put a sock in it' or much of anything else. Their marriage was doomed. But then, more people than Parker cared to admit confabulated, spewing their noxious, verbal diarrhea in a dozen different directions. They bullshitted you half to death - offered you up a potpourri of half-truths, verisimilitude and misinformation - wasting time and grey matter.
 "In the bedroom my wife's a goddamn prude." the carpenter was thinking out loud. "Thelma don't like to experiment - take liberties, if you know what I mean." Parker nodded and took another bite from the sandwich. "Nothing kinky… won't watch skin flicks. No nothing."
"That's too bad." Parker rose to his feet rather abruptly even though a slightly overripe banana was nestled under a paper towel in his lunch box. "Gotta get back."
"One more question." Rick sounded like a frantic tourist, who had fallen overboard on a cruise ship and was watching the vessel laze off into the sunset. "Do you love Lilly?"
Parker grunted something unintelligible and shook his head up and down.
"Can you picture yourself living apart?"
"No, not hardly."He grabbed his steel-shank Estwing framing hammer off the ground. 
Rick flashed him a tortured look. "Lucky you!" 


A year passed. Parker Salisbury slid a felt ring box from his pants pocket, held the silver cube chest high, but didn't bother to show his future mother-in-law the modest stone. "I want to marry your daughter."
Edith Truman didn’t rush forward to embrace him; neither did the fair-skinned woman with the curly brown hair streaked with gray suggest it would be an honor welcoming him into the family. Rather, she cleared her throat and observed, "Lilly isn't like other girls. You'll have to accept your new wife on her own peculiar terms… just as her father and I have over the past twenty-six years." Mr. Truman had passed away a year earlier.
“I’ve dated my share of women since high school," Parker replied, "and Lilly doesn't resemble much of anyone in the universe."
Most parents might have taken such a crude remark as a rebuff - a back-handed compliment if not flagrant affront - but Mrs. Truman only stared at him with genuine sympathy. Only now did her normally stoic features ease into a pleased expression. "And when were you planning to ask her?"
"Tonight, at dinner." They had been dating a year now. Parker was taking Lilly into Boston to celebrate. The girl would probably sleep over his apartment. She texted him a half hour earlier - something about being stuck in traffic and delayed getting home. "I'm at a distinct disadvantage," Parker confided. 
"How so?"
"What I feel for your daughter far exceeds anything Lilly could ever experience for me." He scrupulously avoided the 'L' word. The first time he told Lilly how he felt she observed, "I'm sure Thelma and Rick loved each other once and now look at them."
"That's pretty damn cynical," he grumbled. 
"Words come cheap," she replied harshly. "Treat me nice. That's all that matters."

A moment later the front door burst open and Lilly rushed in. "Traffic was awful," she explained, slipping off her jacket and scarf. "I'll just be a moment." She hurried upstairs to change out of her work clothes.
Mrs. Truman led him into the den that doubled as a family library. "Good luck tonight and, for what it's worth, I'd be delighted to welcome you into our family." Hugging him briefly, she left the room.
An avid reader, Lilly's father installed floor-to-ceiling, mahogany shelves along three walls. Once when Parker asked Mrs. Truman, which of the hundreds of books in the library her daughter had read, the woman replied cryptically, "It might be easier to say which Lilly hasn't read." 
Parker's future bride didn't so much read books as she devoured them, cannibalized the hardcover classics. As he perused the titles, several authors jumped out him. There was a clever tale about a simple-minded servant with a parrot by Flaubert. Lilly served up the bittersweet story like an hors d’oeuvre  before their last debauched lovemaking. And Guy de Maupassant - Parker vaguely recalled a tale about a prostitute who outfoxed a sadistic Nazi officer during the French occupation. On a shelf slightly above eye level he spied Candide. Voltaire, according to Lilly, wrote like a zonked-out hippy from the psychedelic sixties. Or at least that’s how it seemed when she described the main character's hallucinogenic romp across sixteenth-century Europe. 
On the far wall was a collection by Willa Cather. Did it contain Neighbor Rosiky? Lilly recounted that brief character sketch between strings in a duckpin bowling alley off route one in North Attleboro. A few rows down Edith Wharton had been misfiled. Parker moved the nineteenth-century socialite to the opposite end of the collection, where she rightfully belonged. George Elliot - her novels ran a thousand pages or more. Lilly Parker ignored Silas Marner in favor of vignettes - some comical, others painfully sad - from each of Elliot's major works. And Turgenev, the Russian…
"I'm ready now." Decked out in the same stunning dress she wore their first date, Lilly floated into the room.
Reaching into his pocket, Parker rubbed a thumb reassuringly over the fuzzy surface of the ring box. "Come in and close the door. There's something I want to show you, darling." 

Return to Table of Contents


The Unfinished Face


Harry Jankowski stood under a flowering dogwood tree in the Brandenberg Arboretum. Directly above his head, a raucous collection of jays was feasting on clumps of wine-colored berries scattered among the porcelain petals, while thirty feet away in the trellised rose garden, a middle-aged woman sat on the same bench he had recently abandoned, a familiar, moss green volume with a cracked spine resting on her lap. Bent over slightly at the waist, her lips fluttered in silent accompaniment to the printed text. From his vantage point, the slim, dark-haired woman looked reasonably attractive, but as he drew closer, Harry realized his favorable impression had been premature. She wasn't ugly per se. Rather, it was as though, early on, God had become distracted and wandered away from the wet canvas before completing a meager handful of details. The woman's features were drab, colorless. The unassuming face, an aesthetic work in progress, exuded an unfinished blankness.
"Is this yours?" she asked.
Harry had driven almost halfway home before realizing the tattered anthology of Persian verse, was missing. He stepped closer. "Yes, it's a library book," he noted apologetically. "I must have gotten distracted and - “ 
"Would you mind terribly if I read through to the poem’s end."
"No, of course not." He sat down beside her. "Which verse were you reading?" 
"The Rumi." She lowered her head again. Leaning closer, Harry could just barely make out the final stanza.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; 
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want;
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
Across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
				
The woman finally handed him the book. "What do you think it means?"
Harry ran an index finger thoughtfully over the faded, buckram cloth. "Sleep would seem a metaphor for most people's natural state of mind. Even wide awake, we often miss the ‘secrets’ Rumi hints at." The intoxicating scent of the roses coupled with the woman's perplexing face had catapulted the normally reticent man in an uncharacteristically chatty mood.
"Or the natural beauty we take for granted."
"Yes, I suppose. So few people take an active interest in poetry these days."
"And how would you know such a thing?"
"Here, see for yourself." He opened the slim volume and pointed with a taut index finger at the yellowed slip of paper pasted on the inside of the front cover where, at cockeyed angles, a smattering of dates was stamped in black ink. Prior to Harry checking the book out, the anthology hadn't seen the light of day in six years! Prior to that, it languished in the musty stacks another four. "The book was published in nineteen sixty-seven," Harry noted with morbid humor. "Over the last forty years, only twelve people showed an interest."
The woman looked at her hands, which were slender with pale pink, lacquered nails. "Do you come here often?
"Mostly weekends, when the weather’s decent."
"I'm Dora." She extended a hand. He pressed her fingers gently.
"Harry Jankowski." 
The woman rose and, began moving at a leisurely gait down the flagstone walkway past a profusion of pink blossoms that reeked sweetly like incense. Before she proceeded very far, Dora abruptly returned. "Just for the record, I'm partial to the traditional poets - writers such as Frost, Ferlinghetti, e e cummings, Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton and John Berryman."
"Berryman's Dream Songs are rather obscure,… challenging," Harry noted. 
"Yes, I know," Dora agreed. "Much of his later writing is beyond my limited abilities."  
Harry missed Dora’s final observation. Rather, he was concerned by the disconcerting fact that the last three writers on Dora's list of personal favorites had met with tragic ends. "Sylvia Plath, the author of the Bell Jar, wrote some interesting free verse."
“I was never a great fan." Dora shook her head vigorously from side to side. “The poet glorified mental illness and was a snake pit of nuttiness.” 
The vigorous response set his mind at ease. “Yes, I totally agree!”


On the ride home, Harry glanced at the frayed anthology resting on the passenger seat and grinned foolishly. A senior moment - that's how he understood the miscue when he realized the book was missing. A dumb, addled-brained bit of mental torpor guaranteed to waste gas and time - not that Harry had any special place to go most Saturday afternoons. Since his wife left, his social calendar had atrophied, shriveled away to nothing. Monday through Friday he managed a temporary employment agency; weekends mostly found him treading water, waiting for the workweek to resume.
It was almost two in the afternoon when Harry pulled into the driveway. He tossed a load of laundry in the washer - mostly dress clothes he needed later in the week. Then he swept the kitchen floor, filled the bathtub and even threw some of his ex-wife's lavender-chamomile bubble bath in the steamy water. He didn't usually indulge in such questionable extravagance, but the chance meeting with the woman with the unremarkable, slapdash face had put him in a weird frame of mind.
Twenty minutes later when the buzzer in the basement sounded, he switched the damp clothes over to the dryer, went back up stairs and gingerly climbed into the tub. Only now did Harry grasp why he left the arboretum without the book. Since early spring, when the weather finally became warm enough to visit the park with any regularity, he had begun studying the deciduous trees. There were numerous maples - the Norway, silver, sugar, mountain and diminutive box elder, as well as the striped or moosewood varieties. Maples shared certain unique characteristics - sweetish watery sap and long leafstalks. Almost all had palmately veined, fan-lobed leaves. Harry learned all this from the informative plaques that dotted the landscape.
Even with trees as common as the birch, things got dicey. Harry could easily identify the ever-present American or paper birch. But then there were the black, gray and yellow birches and, of course, the American hornbean, also known as musclewood, ironwood or blue beech. They all fell under the same generic species, betulaceae, sharing simple, alternate, stipulate leaves, which were generally thin and often doubly serrate with fruity catkins and a one seeded nutlet. He had gone off on a walking tour to take one last look at the trees before heading home and forgotten the book.
With his big toe, Harry flicked the hot water on and waited as the soothing warmth crawled from the front of the tub to the rear. He slid down in the sudsy water, the perfumed bubbles tickling his ears. What were the odds of meeting a fellow poetry enthusiast in the Brandenberg Arboretum on a late summer afternoon? During their marriage, on the rare occasion when his ex-wife, Ruthy, reach for reading material, she favored the National Inquirer or Reader’s Digest. The busty blonde Harry had fallen hard for some twenty-five years earlier was a dolt, the woman's fleshy loveliness little more than a paper-thin mask. Three years earlier in the throes of a hormonally-induced midlife crisis, Ruthy ran off and left him. Now she was somebody else's well-endowed dolt.

The summer his wife flew the coop, the couple had signed up for a tour of the Holy Land through a local church group. Rather than forfeit the deposit and air fare, Harry went alone. He visited Jerusalem then toured the Upper Galilee before heading down through the Negev Desert into the southern Sinai to visit the Monastery of Saint Catherine. Saint Catherine, the tour guide explained, lived in Alexandria during the persecution of the Christians under the reign of Maximus. When she converted to Christianity, the Romans tortured and finally killed her in 307 A.D., cutting off her head as a gruesome admonition to her Christian zealots. 
The Sinai was barren, a dried-up, godforsaken wilderness infested with poisonous snakes and wild camels. A short distance from the monastery stood a huge outcropping of reddish rocks, what was thought to be the original site where Moses witnessed the burning bush. The reddish-brown hills strewn with huge boulders, the thousand year-old, stucco Monastery was thrown together from brick, mortar and whatever raw materials lay readily at hand. 
Initially, Harry found the landscape otherworldly, apocalyptic; it was hideous, an affront to everything civilized. But then his eye was drawn back for a second look, and an intrinsic harmony emerged from the desolation. He noticed a small cluster of fir trees off to the right of the main gate and how the stunted mountains directly behind the monastery heaved up toward an unbounded sky.  
Harry returned home chastened. The barren, blistering wilderness of the southern Sinai mirrored his inner spiritual wretchedness. Some nights he sat in his condo contemplating the desert’s message. At the Monastery of Saint Catherine Harry grasped that he was not just growing older. Men in their late twenties grow older, more mature and settled. In their thirties and forties their hair falls out or goes gray; they develop a glut of yuppie ailments - tennis elbow, carpal tunnel syndrome, trick knees, spinal subluxations, acid reflux and hemorrhoids. No, that wasn't it either. Harry wasn't easing into middle age, because he already plateaued a decade earlier. Now he was just plain growing old. It's why he made weekly pilgrimages to the secular shrine that was the Brandenberg Arboretum, where he meandered among the greenery like some fetishistic obsessive-compulsive, reading the plaques, memorizing the genus, species and identifying characteristics. While other men in similar quandaries prowled the VIP room at the Foxy Lady lounge or downloaded soft porn from the internet, Harry Jankowski staked his purse on botany. 
This middle-aged poetry lover - would she return or was Dora’s appearance in the park a fleeting aberration? Five minutes after meeting her, Harry no longer noticed the drab exterior. No, that wasn't terribly accurate. It was more like viewing sepia tones in an old-fashioned print. The murky, monochromatic reddish brown shadings exuded a distinctive warmth seldom attained from modern, digital photography. But once you got past the initial shock, Dora wasn't terribly unattractive. Unlike Ruthy’s flamboyant charms, in its ragged simplicity, Dora’s rudimentary features hid nothing. 


The following week it rained both Saturday and Sunday. Harry went to the movies. Afterwards, he visited his mother in the nursing home, where he told her a funny story about his job at the temp agency. A sixty-five year old woman came in looking for work. Anything would do. She was hard up, desperate for cash, which was a bad sign. Harry ran a BCI criminal check. A week later, the report came back. The applicant was a child molester with multiple criminal offenses over the past twenty years. 
"Boys or girls?"
"Boys, exclusively."
"Geez, that's pretty creepy!" His mother was sitting in a wheelchair in the solarium nursing a container of jiggly, greenish Jell-O.
"Needless to say," Harry returned, tongue in cheek, "the pervert didn't get the job."
"What'd she look like?"
Harry thought a moment. "Barbara Bush."
"That's even weirder!"
An irritatingly shrill alarm sounded several doors down. A patient, who was supposed to stay put, was trying to get out of his chair or bed. A nurse's aide hurried past the open doorway to settle the troublesome individual and quiet the monitoring device. "How come Ruthy don't come?"
"We're divorced. Three years now. I told you last time."
Mrs. Jankowski digested the newly acquire information. After a while she pushed her wrinkled lips out in an exaggerated pout like a goldfish sucking water. "I wonder if she still makes that revolting fish face when she gets overwrought and don’t know what to say."
Harry began to chuckle lightly. "Yeah, that used to drive me nuts, too?" He wondered if the new spouse found the mannerism unsettling. The fifty-year-old woman was silly on multiple levels. And yet, Harry had thought ‘fish-face’ Ruthy stunning, a perfect ten when they had met thirty years ago. Now, even his demented mother in the nursing home made fun of her goofy mannerisms. No, nothing was ever what it appeared to be at face value. As if on cue, Mrs. Jankowski made the puckering fish face again and began sucking oxygen. Not to be outdone, Harry pushed his mouth forward and wiggled his lips from side to side.


The following Saturday, Harry returned to the arboretum. The weather was humid but not oppressively so for mid-July. Twenty minutes after settling in Dora arrived. She wore a blue chintz dress with a matching scarf tied up in her hair. The woman was clutching a small paperback. "Are you familiar with the poet, Robert Hayden?" Harry shook his head. She sat down on the bench next to him, opened the book to a page that had been flagged with a slip of paper.

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,…

The poem was a dazzling tour de force describing a blue collar laborer who rose early every Sunday throughout the frigid winter to light a cast-iron stove and shine his son's shoes before traipsing off to church. It was a brief piece– three stanzas, a total of fourteen meager lines – resembling an epic novel in that the reader could visualize the man's devotion, his humble dignity. When Harry finally laid the book aside, Dora asked, "Who is Robert Hayden?"
"I told you I'm not familiar with his poetry."
"Yes, but take a guess," the woman pressed, "based on this short poem."
"That's tough," Harry hedged. The language was simple enough but too precise not to be the work of a highly disciplined academic type - perhaps, an imagists or confessional poet from the early sixties. "No, I haven't a clue."
Her limpid eyes were transfixed on the opaque maze of summer foliage just beyond the rose garden. "Hayden was a black man, an Afro-American born into poverty. He grew up in a Detroit foster home where he was sickly,... physically and emotionally abused." A wistful yearning washed over her face. "From such ugliness and heartache, pure beauty - how do you explain such things?"
"I don't really know," Harry replied. 


From such ugliness and heartache, pure beauty… Harry was eight years old. The family lived on Providence's East Side. His mother gave him a quarter to buy a balsa wood airplane at the local 7-Eleven. The boy gently nudged the delicate, papery wings through the fuselage then inserted the tail section. With care, the toy might last a hundred throws, and even if the fragile wings cracked along the grain, which they inevitably always did, Harry could bind them back together with masking tape or a few drops of Elmer's glue and manage the better part of a week before begging his cash-strapped mother for another quarter.
But on only the third throw, the plane got caught on a gusty updraft of air, depositing his prize possession on the second-story porch of a three-decker tenement. What to do? Little Harry was despondent. A perfectly good balsa wood glider without a single blemish, crack or nick irretrievably gone astray. Forever lost! Ascending the front stoop, the boy found the door ajar. He plodded up the smelly stairs to the second floor landing and knocked. A fat black woman about the same age as his mother cracked opened the door but only as far as the metal security chain would allow. The careworn face was puffy with sagging jowls. She wore a tattered bathrobe and a jumble of pink rollers ranged across her frowzy, graying hair. "Yeah, what you want?"
"My balsa airplane flew up to your deck, and I was wondering - "
"Who… what?" Now the tone was belligerent. 
"My toy airplane - it landed on your deck."
Releasing the chain, the woman threw the door wide open. Harry could hear a baby fretting in another room. The congested child coughed - once, twice then let out a mournful, sputtering wail. The apartment smelled of exotic vegetables - spices and seasonings that were both comforting and disconcerting all at the same time. From another room a man's voice barked in a gravelly voice, "Who the hell's that? What they want?"
"Wait here." The woman disappeared and returned a moment later with Harry's airplane perched between a nubby thumb and forefinger. Then she smiled the most beautiful fat-black-woman-with-an-awful-life smile that the boy had ever seen. "Here, kid. Have a swell day." She slammed the door shut. Harry stood there foolishly holding the glider cupped in his palms. He wanted to thank the morbidly obese woman, give her a kiss and a hug, nurse her tubercular child back to health and make her psychotic husband speak to her in soothing tones. Instead he went three blocks down to an open field where he could fly his plane without fear of a similar mishap.


Dora was sitting on the bench with her long-fingered hands splayed across her lap. Except for pearl earrings, she wore no jewelry or makeup. The Hayden poem had surely triggered the bizarre flashback. Harry thought he might like to tell Dora about the kind-hearted black lady but certainly not today. "You're not married."
"My husband suffered a stroke and passed away a year ago this October," she replied in a flat tone.
"Was it a good marriage?"
"No, not particularly. And you?"
Harry told Dora about his ex-wife. "I don't think she's terribly pleased with the new arrangement, but she walked out on the marriage so I feel no obligation to help her sort out her latest fiasco." "About a year ago," he added almost as an afterthought, "on a whim, I started learning about the various plants and trees here in the park." Pivoting a half turn, he pointed at a flaming mass of foliage closer to the entrance. "That black tupelo is one of the more flamboyant offerings. In the fall you can find shadings of yellow, orange, bright red and purple all on the same branch." Rising to his feet, he led her over to take a closer look. Reaching out, Harry placed his hand against the trunk. "The distinctive bark resembles alligator hide."
“How interesting!” Extending her hand, Dora stroked the textured wood. "And you learned all this from the plaques."
He took several steps back and pointed into the upper branches of the slender, fifty-foot tree. "Notice anything?"
"Lots of noisy birds."
"Those fruity clumps scattered among the leaves are berries. The tree is an important food source for both local and migratory birds." Harry rubbed his chin and, lowering his eyes, stared absently at his fuddy-duddy, wing-tipped shoes. "Would you like to get together some time?"
"A date?" Her features brightened. "That would be nice."
"Are you doing anything later tonight?"


When Dora was gone, Harry followed his weekly ritual, making a walking tour of the grounds, while carrying on an interior monologue with his leafy acquaintances. Yes, over there by the trash barrel was a scattering of quaking aspens with their twenty-five foot spread of noisy greenery. Sometimes he confused them with American beech. The late-blooming Magnolia directly behind with its greenish-yellow flowers was a bit easier to spot. 
Dora lingered another half hour after Harry screwed up the courage to ask her out. The woman confided that she played second-chair flute in the Wheaton College wind ensemble. A Fourth of July concert was scheduled. They were doing Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain as well as excerpts from a Tchaikovsky symphony. Harry, for his part, told her several funny stories about a senior-league, slow-pitch softball team he recently joined, where the ballplayers were forty and up. Most of his teammates had non-life-threatening disabilities of one sort or another – a torn rotator cuff, inguinal hernia, pulled hamstring, asthma, emphysema, knee replacement - which made for some interesting athletic buffoonery.
The Eastern Redbud off to the right was a no-brainer. The riot of plum-colored leaves was a dead giveaway. And the mountain ash to the left of an outcropping of granite ledge had already lost its showy, spring flowers in favor of a thick crop of orangey-red fruit clusters. Harry remembered how the previous November the leaves looked like they had been dipped in yellow ink. Further down the twisty path, a tulip poplar was nestled between an eastern hemlock and diminutive chokeberry.
Harry wasn't so deluded as to imagine that he was in love with a woman he had only recently met. What were the prospects of sex on the first date? Probably not. Harry didn't doubt for one second that Dora would prove a passionate lover; the woman was too clever and kind-hearted not to be. But physical intimacy was a minor concern. Deeper emotions eventually set down roots, like old-growth timber, over a broad expanse of time. In the end, God or whatever animist power governed the universe ultimately got it right. Now Harry had to go home and decide on a nice restaurant and what to wear.
Over by the linden tree… 

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Thyroids, a Love Story


"Nok. Nok. Nok. Aram noks but nobody seams to be home.” Reading from a wrinkled manuscript, Beatrice Monahan, the writing instructor, waved the half dozen pages over her head at a young man in his early thirties sitting three rows back near the water cooler. "The verb, knock, begins with the letter 'k' and seams are stitches used to bind fabric." She directed her eyes elsewhere as she spoke. 
Dressed in steel-toed work boots and a blue shirt with the Firestone Tire emblem stitched above the left pocket, Abi ran a thumb and index finger over a bearded chin in a repetitive, soothing gesture. A wild outcropping of curly black hair cascaded down over his ears. “Story is goot... yes, no?” 
“I appreciate the fact that that English is a second language," The barrel-chested woman observed, "but still, you should consult a dictionary.” 
“Computer have spell check,” he offered. 
The writing instructor stood five foot three and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Like some displaced time traveler from the psychedelic sixties, she favored flowery, moo moos and wire-framed granny glasses. Under the best of circumstances, the woman with the orangey hair would never be terribly attractive, but Austin, who sat several rows back from the bearded immigrant, had the distinct impression that the writing instructor went out of her way to foster the image of a physical grotesque. He wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to discover that Ms. Monahan never shaved her armpits or bothered with feminine deodorants. 
Eight students signed up for the creative writing workshop. Among others, there was Carl, a sixteen year-old high school junior with a twitchy eye. Phyllis, the menopausal housewife, admittedly hadn’t written anything more challenging than a grocery list in years. A chubby girl, Sage Ostrowski, waitressed at Ryan’s Diner, and Abi, the Armenian, emigrated from Azerbaijan in central Asia.  
  “I liked Abi’s story just fine,” Austin blurted. 
Beatrice lowered her head and stared at him over the top of her glasses. “How so?”
“Faulty grammar taken aside, he did well describing the tension between local Christian villagers and their Moslems neighbors.” 
"Unfortunately, editors wading through a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts at the Yale Review are looking for something a bit more polished." The rebuttal was accompanied by a glacial smile. Abi, who was unfamiliar with the Yale Review, grinned proudly and continued to stroke his lush beard. Nothing fazed him. His people had been massacred, routed from their ancestral homeland and dispersed to an unsympathetic Diaspora - what more could a mean-spirited Beatrice Monahan do to deepen the hurt? Retreating to the safe haven of the oak desk at the front of the room, Beatrice set the class to work on an impromptu, flash fiction assignment. 


The previous session, Austin inquired about the mechanic's name. “Is short for Abimelki,” he explained. Abi meant father and melik king. The Assyrian variant was Abimelki, a name which was common in biblical times but not so anymore. The Armenian's stories contained a veritable junk heap of dangling participles, split infinitives, ill-chosen adjectives and other syntactical abominations. But everyone in the writing group, Austin included, was grammatically challenged. Phyllis, the grocery list lady, favored run-on sentences that gobbled up entire paragraphs before a period ever materialized to bring the verbal chaos to a thudding halt. Wearing his adolescent angst like a badge of honor, Carl, the child prodigy, suffered emotional diarrhea, and Sage wrote exclusively in short, choppy sentences. Abi, whose name meant 'father-king' in a defunct, thoroughly moribund language, was still grappling with the proper spelling of simple words. 


“Wanna grab a coffee?” Sage was waiting outside the community college center when Austin emerged. 
“That would be nice,” he watched as the other members filtered out into the parking lot. A Honey Dew just up the street stayed open until eleven. At the donut shop they ordered hot drinks. "Would you like something to eat with that?" 
Sage shook her head self-consciously. "I'm watching my weight."  
Austin sipped at his coffee and glanced out the front window. The last of the dusky, late summer light had bled out of the sky wrapping the town in wooly darkness. “Has Beatrice said a nice word about anyone’s writing?” The previous week Beatrice trashed one of Austin's stories, insisting the main characters were ‘not sympathetically drawn - little more than one-dimensional stick figures and talking heads’. Those were her exact words. 
 “For what it’s worth,” Sage noted, “I thought Abi’s story was rather touching.”
“What she said earlier was a cheap shot,” Austin observed glumly, “but if Abi can’t spell any better than a second grader and doesn’t understand - ”
“The guy's lonely... homesick." Sage interjected, "so he writes about his mountain village and, in the process, comes to terms with the loss.” Sage made a thoroughly disagreeable face. “For Abi, Getting published in the Yale Review isn't the point,… never was.”  
A mother with two freckle-faced children entered the doughnut shop. They bought an assortment of donuts and disappeared back out into the street. “How’s your thyroid condition?” The question caught Austin totally off guard. In response to his baffled expression, she added, “When I got to class, you were shaking one of those distinctive, butterfly-shaped pills from a plastic prescription container into your palm.” She blew on the coffee before raising the Styrofoam cup to her lips. “I took Synthroid for six month. Gave me the goddamn heebie-jeebies... almost had a nervous breakdown.”
“You don’t take the medicine anymore?”
Sage shook her head in the negative. "It's an exclusive club... more like a carnival freak show," the fleshy girl added almost as an afterthought.
"What is?"
"You know,… people with thyroid conditions. We're always looking for something better… comparing notes."
"You certainly have a colorful way of putting things."
"You get brain fog?"
"Some days worse than other," Austin confided. He took a bite of his jelly donut. 
Brain fog - you couldn't think straight, remember simple things. It was like being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease sixty years prematurely. How did you explain such nuttiness to 'normal' people? Brain fog - what a stupid expression! You got to be kidding me! "Some days," he noted, "I can hardly think straight, I'm so screwed up."  
"What about the heebie-jeebies?" 
"The jitters, the creeps… all the time. Some days worse than others." The Levoxyl stabilized Austin’s illness but created a whole new set of vague symptoms that Dr. Balcewicz, his endocrinologist, dismissed of with blasé humor. He finished his donut and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. "What are you on now?"
"An all-natural, desiccated supplement made from pig thyroids. Most traditional MD's won't prescribe it so I switched to a naturopath."
"My doctor says its voodoo medicine."
"Yeah, well it works just fine for me." Reaching into her purse Sage located a pen, scribbled some numbers on a clean napkin and handed it to him. "There's my telephone. Like I said, it’s an exclusive club and us thyroid freaks got to stick together.” 


The endocrinologist initially started Austin on a regimen of seventy-five micrograms levothyroxine. The first week he was bushwhacked by a panic attack in the lobby of the Brandenberg Public Library; a few days later while climbing a short flight of stairs, Austin felt an erratic flurry of palpitations mimicking angina. Then he broke out in hives. Dr. Balcewicz’ response to Austin's concerns was to increase dosage.
"Why are you giving me more, if I don’t feel good?"  
Dr. Balcewicz, a pear-shaped man with a florid complexion and bristly, salt-and-pepper moustache, grinned affably. "Your TSH levels are still much too high. The temporary unpleasantness will subside over time. Trust me."
What good was trust when a person found himself in worse shape than before he sought medical intervention? At their next meeting Austin said, "If you don't take me off this dog shit, I’m gonna go nuts."
“You aren’t giving the pills enough time to work properly.”
“What about the desiccated hormone?” Austin learned about the controversial therapy on the internet.
"Wrong percentage of T3 versus T4," the older man in the clinical white jacket replied authoritatively. "What works for pigs and bovines is ineffective for humans. The chemistry is all wrong."
"But I read where a lot of people swear by the stuff."
"Mostly older people," the doctor said, "who were took the stuff a century ago, before there was any sensible alternative." Leaning forward, he patted Austin lightly on the shoulder. "Look, you're a reasonable kid. You want the best that modern medicine has to offer, not some outmoded, nineteenth century snake oil." Actually, Austin did want outmoded, nineteenth century snake oil. Outdated, outmoded, poppycock, bunkum, quackery - what the hell did he care as long as it made him feel half-human again? 
Dr. Balcewicz stared at the morose young man sitting on the opposite side of the desk. His pokerfaced expression never wavered. The impasse was broken only when the doctor reluctantly reached for his prescription pad and began scratching out a new order. "Levoxyl is a safe alternative to the generics." He pushed the script across the desk. "Let's see how you make out on this new medication." Before Austin could collect his thoughts, the endocrinologist was already racing out the door toward an adjacent examining room.


Austin and Sage strolled back to the community college parking lot. Everyone having left for the night, all lights were extinguished. Directly across the street, the Brandenberg Bowlarama was still doing brisk business with the tacky, neon sign flashing in pulsating rhythm. The lanes closed at ten o'clock on weeknights. A couple of grungy teens dressed in black and sporting chains and body piercings were sitting under the electric bowling pin sign. The boy, whose dark hair fell down in his eyes grabbed playfully at the girl. She let out a squeal, punched him viciously and ran off to the darkened far end of the lot with the boy in pursuit. A minute later they were back sitting under the sign again puffing on a shared cigarette. 
How old could they be - sixteen,… seventeen tops? Austin felt ancient, positively prehistoric by comparison. It was the damn disease. When his thyroid shut down, went AWOL a year and a half ago, his whole life turned upside-down.   
“Beatrice trashed my short story.”
“Yes, I know.” They were standing next to Sage’s blue Toyota. “She didn’t like the main characters.” An eighteen wheeler lumbered down the street, pulling up at a set of traffic lights with a screech of hydraulic brakes. Sage had her car keys in hand and was reaching for the door but leaned away. The waitress was dark complected, certainly not a beauty but modestly attractive. Unlike Beatrice Monahan, she exerted rigorous effort to make herself prettier. “In your story there's a scene where the girl’s boyfriend kisses her. They're in a public place, but he doesn’t care. The guy’s testosterone is flowing so he just acts on impulse. That’s the sort of thing Beatrice Monahan can’t wrap her spastic brain around. It’s too spur of the moment."
"Irreverent and honest," Austin blurted.
"Yes, that too." Sage turned fully around and stepped closer. She was smirking, a cheeky expression. “Would you like to kiss me?” There was no immediate reply. “I see the way you look at me sometimes in class, and don’t you dare deny it.” “I guess it's just fictional characters,” she inserted the key into the driver's side door, “who wear their emotions on their sleeves.” 
Austin had never met anyone quite like Sage, and, in part, that was her appeal. She was self-assured but without any of the cocky, false bravado of the preppy types he knew from college, whose fathers underwrote their personal finances soup to nuts. These pampered yuppies were shipped off the best schools with their Louis Vuitton handbags, iPods, kindles and American Express Platinum Cards, where it was assumed that they would find suitable partners and marry well.
Before Sage could crack the door, Austin slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her close. Leaning up against her, he pinned her against the car with his body and kissed the girl deeply on the mouth. The scruffy teens across the street began hooting and jeering at the top of their lungs. 
"Would you like to go out some time?" Austin pressed.
"Yeah, that would be swell, but what do hypochondriacs do on a romantic soiree?"
"We're not hypochondriacs." He kissed her on the neck softly and felt her curl to the side as his lips tickled the smooth skin. "We're hypothryroidiacs."
"There's no such thing. You just made that up." Sage broke free and got into her car. She lingered a while longer before firing up the engine and driving away.


One, two, three, four, five… Later that night before going to bed, Austin sat in a straight-backed chair and counted his breaths. He sat with his feet planted firmly on the floor and, breathing through his nose, followed the thin column of air as it came and went. At a certain fixed point - usually about twenty minutes into the exercise - he would stop counting and just sit in meditative silence feeling his body, trying to gauge where he stood visa vie his loused-up thyroid. 
The kiss in the parking lot notwithstanding, today totally sucked. His brain fog had worsened and energy level plummeted so low the boy felt absolutely geriatric. Lately, Austin found himself nodding off in the middle of the afternoon like some addle-brained, nursing home patient. And he was constantly cold. The issue with cold was fairly commonplace. People with thyroid conditions heaped their beds with extra blankets and dressed in layers even when it wasn't particularly chilly. They weren't neurotic or attention seekers. Being hypersensitive to the slightest change in temperature, they were always cold - cold and physically exhausted. Austin could sleep twelve hours straight and wake up feeling like he chugalugged a quart of scotch the night before! If anything, he was losing ground. And the new medicine, the silver bullet that was supposed to rectify everything, was a total bust! 


At the previous meeting of the writers' group, Abi told a funny story. He traveled back to his homeland to visit relatives. As the Beechcraft King Air twin-prop landed in Baku, the plane badly overshot the runway by several hundred feet, running off the asphalt into an open field of barley. The Caspian Sea was visible out the grimy passenger window a short distance to the east. "Was not so good the brakes," the Armenian immigrant noted with a goofy smile that belied his anxiety over the ordeal. As Abi explained it, the region was desperately poverty stricken, the government feudal and corrupt. When a domestic plane had mechanical problems or needed routine maintenance, spare parts were often purchased on the black market. They were third rate, the substandard metal either too soft or brittle. It's just the way things were. The provincial country was one of six independent Turkish states with Russia to the north and Iran due south. 
Abi desperately wanted to get it all down on paper, to chronicle his bizarre experiences. "I go home for Christmas, not for to swim in Caspian Sea," he chuckled and rubbed good-naturedly at his hairy chin. Abi was just Abi - a grease monkey heartbroken over the immutable loss of his spiritual homeland. So he joked in fractured English and, as best he could, jotted down his life story. Nok. Nok.Nok.


Prickly ash bark, sarsaparilla, oat seed, shizandra berry, ashwaganda and maca root.... Before leaving the community college parking lot, Sage fished about in the glove compartment of her Toyota. “Here try this.” She handed him a smallish, opaque bottle.
“What is it?”
“An adrenal support herbal formula. I got a spare bottle at home. Just follow the directions.”
Later that night, Austin dribbled ten drops of the rust-colored herbal solution into a tumbler of water and tossed down the bitter solution. Sage was seeing a naturopath. Maybe he would make an appointment with the holistic practitioner to discuss a non-pharmaceutical alternative. An hour after taking the herbal remedy, he already felt a hundred percent better, although he realized, full well, that the euphoric sense of well being was probably just wishful thinking. Still later that night as he lay under the covers, Austin felt warm, too warm. He removed one of the blankets - just one as a precautionary measure. The heebie-jeebies weren't completely gone, but manageable. And his brain fog had lifted ever-so-slightly.


What if? What if? What if? Beatrice Monahan, the ungracious troll who managed the community college writing program, had a favorite exercise. Students chose a theme and then asked a series of recurring questions, each of which sent the work-in-progress spiraling off in an, unanticipated direction. 
What if Austin fell in love with the chubby, dark-skinned girl with the satchel jaw and thyroid condition who waitressed over at Ryan's Diner? And what if she returned his slavish devotion? Sage Ostrowski was no fashion plate - not the sort of girl most red-blooded guys gave a second look. But still the girl possessed nice breasts - not overly large but 'substantial' - and that was definitely an asset when you climbed into bed slightly horny and wanting to snuggle in the middle of February with a foot of snow carpeting the New England landscape. 
Sage was surly and kind, sullen, churlish, defiant, loyal and a dirty street fighter. Austin was passive-aggressive, hard-working, low-keyed and dull. He had no sense of adventure, no wanderlust, no desire to set the world ablaze. In his third year at Bryant College he was leaning toward a degree in accounting. In a few short years, he would be earning decent money and searching about for a significant other. What if? What if? What if? 
What if he stopped by the diner this weekend and brought Sage a small gift - nothing ostentatious - by way of appreciation. Perhaps a bouquet of cut flowers or dozen roses. No, that was out of the question, since it would certainly set gossipy tongues to wagging and give the employees at Ryan's the false impressions. 
But, on second thought,...
      
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Tulipwood


"Hey, Kid!" The woman's menacing tone voice brought Frankie Dexter up short before he even made it halfway across the darkened lawn. Frozen in place, the fifteen year old peered about but couldn't see a thing, not even the scraggily weeds beneath his feet. No street lamps existed this far down the road, and the thin sliver of a moon was wreathed in clouds. "Why are you on my property?"
What if the owner of the disembodied voice had dialed 911 from when she saw him prowling the street and already notified the police? Maybe the cops were on their way and she was just stalling for time until the authorities arrived. 
 "I'm going to the 7-Eleven," Frankie mumbled.
A skinny blonde in her late thirties stepped down from the front stoop of the Lomax place. The owner, Edgar Lomax, had suffered a stroke and passed a while back. The blonde, his common law wife, settled in five years earlier. The reclusive woman lived alone, having nothing to do with any of the neighbors. 
"Convenient store’s that way." Though he couldn't see the outstretched arm, he knew that she was pointing down the street in the opposite direction from where Frankie was headed.
The sound of wolfish laughter shot through with vulgarities filtered through the wooly darkness along with the clatter of an empty beer can skittering across the asphalt. "Can't get to the 7-Eleven that way."
"Why's that?" The gravelly tone was downright inhospitable.
"The McElroys are out on their front stoop drinking." 
A Friday night ritual, the McElroy clan would be sitting out on their front stoop, drunk and looking for trouble. The front lawn was probably littered with crushed beer cans and cigarette stubs. The old man was out of prison a year now. The oldest son worked at the gas station three blocks down from the Kentucky Fried Chicken. The younger boy dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. He didn't work and had been in and out of trouble with the police since eighth grade. 
Frankie had considered running the gauntlet - casually meandering to the end of the street and continuing down Oak Hill Ave to the center of town. The ex-con father would give him a dirty look or flip him the bird. The demonic sons would hurl insults and challenge his sexual orientation along with a few choice obscenities. Or, for the sheer fun of it, they might beat the crap out of the fifteen year old boy. There was another burst of foul-mouthed laughter followed by a loud guffaw. The McElroy's took great pleasure letting the community know they held everyone in utter contempt. "It's almost eleven o'clock," The nastiness in the woman's tone ebbed. "What the hell are you doing out this late at night?"
It was a perfectly reasonable question. Frankie took a deep breath air and considered his options - the truth, a flagrant lie or a hodgepodge of supercilious nonsense. “My mother is home drunk. My father's got a girlfriend, and I just didn't want to hear it anymore."
The crickets were chortling away, a rhythmic, high-spirited cadence. Down toward the end of the street one of the McElroy degenerates howled like a lunatic at the wispy moon. The outburst triggered another wave of sniggering and crude laughter. Frankie was stuck in a nether world. The boy certainly didn't want to home while his parents were sniping at each other. He couldn't make it past the McElroy's place without considerable risk. And now the deceased Edgar Lomax's live-in girl friend had just caught him trespassing. 
"What's wrong now?"
"Nothing," Frankie blubbered. He had begun crying rather noisily, making embarrassing snuffling sounds through his soggy nose. "Everything's just peachy keen!"
The skinny woman quickly closed the distance between them. Wrapping her arms around Frankie's waist, she pulled him up against her. "Poor baby!"
No one other than his mother had ever held him like that. The crickets continued their nocturnal symphony shot through with a slurry of four-letter word as discordant counterpoint from the far end of the street. But nothing mattered anymore. There in the pitch black on Edgar Lomax's front lawn, a woman was cradling Frankie up against her chest and crooning unintelligible, infinitely reassuring sounds in his left ear. 
"Hey kid, you're squeezing the life out of me!"
Without realizing it, Frankie's arms had snaked up behind the woman in a fierce bear hug. She broke away and held the boy at arm's length. "The McElroy party doesn't seem to be winding down any time soon," she noted with a flick of her head in the direction of the late night revelers. "Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?"
Frankie wiped the tears away with the heel of a hand. "Yeah, that would be nice."
"I'm Kendra Ryder."
"Frankie… Frankie Dexter." She led the way into the kitchen, which was rather neat and tidy. A Tiffany lamp with a multi-colored glass shade threw a dim warmth across the room. She put a pot of coffee on to perk. "I'll be just a minute." 
Retreating into the bedroom, the woman emerged five minutes later. Something was different about the way she looked. She hadn't changed her clothes or makeup. Her ratty hair was still unbrushed. "Coffee looks about ready." 
Kendra Ryder, who wore a pair of jeans and cotton blouse, was rather harsh looking. A smattering of laugh lines and crow's feet dimpling the corners of the watery blue eyes; a certain feminine delicacy in the thin lips and squat nose was offset, neutralized by a brittle obstinacy in the pokerfaced expression. The skin was pale, translucent. Frankie noted a fleeting prettiness but only when she smiled, which she didn't seem to do that often. 
Kendra set a plate of Oreos on the table between them and then began picking at her fingernails. "Glue… epoxy," she said by way of explanation. "It's a bitch trying to get this stuff off your nails. Mineral spirits doesn't really help and the more volatile stuff like lacquer thinner just burns."
Frankie was trying to figure what the woman had been doing that her hands were so frightfully calloused, but she didn't readily volunteer additional information, and the boy didn't feel comfortable asking. A short while earlier he was standing in the yard next to a forty-foot, white mulberry tree bawling his fool head off, and now he was sipping coffee and nibbling cookies. He felt strangely safe, no longer vulnerable. All the anxiety and confusion had sloughed off like so much dead skin. 
A timer on the microwave suddenly beeped. Kendra rose. "This won't take long," she said, disappearing down a narrow stairwell just off the kitchen. When she was gone ten minutes, curiosity got the better of the boy. Unlike the kitchen, the unfinished basement was flooded with a bank of fluorescent lights. An array of woodworking tools - table saws, belt sanders, jointers, planers, drill presses and a six-inch Ryobi band saw - were arranged about the concrete floor. Kendra was releasing the pressure on a steel clamp. Lifting a square block of solid maple, she turned the surface over to reveal a parchment-thin web of blue masking tape rimmed with glue.
She looked up and smiled when he approached. "Here's the fun part." She began gingerly peeling the tape away to reveal a decorative mosaic of exotic woods arranged in an intricate pattern not unlike a patchwork quilt. "That's bubinga," she pointed to a dark wine colored wood shot through with black, "a form of African rosewood. The golden veneer with the pale flecks is Brazilian satinwood." She eased another strip of tape free of the surface and tapped a greenish, scaly wood that ran around the perimeter of the design creating an inlaid, quarter-inch frame. "This here's a domestic species… sassafras." When the last piece of masking tape had been removed, she wiped away some excess glue with nail polish remove and laid the rectangular object aside."
"But what is it?"
"A keepsake box," the woman replied.
"Where's the lid?"
Kendra pointed at a band saw in the far corner of the room. "Tomorrow morning, I'll saw the lid free of the carcass, round over all the sharp edges on the router table and insert the brass hinges.
On a separate work table a grouping of ornate jewelry boxes were arranged in various stages of completion. "Did you paint the woods?"
Kendra flashed a closed-lipped smile. "No, they're exotics. That's exactly how the lumber looks in its natural state. After sanding, I wipe them down with light Danish oil to bring out the lustrous warmth of the grain but nothing more."
"But where did you - "
"Edgar," Kendra interjected, anticipating his train of thought, "was a master woodworker. We met at a craft fair. I was selling crappy jewelry at the time. After we started dating, I took over finishing and placing the merchandise in art galleries. By the time Eddy took sick, I had already picked up enough of basic woodworking skills to actually design and build boxes Reaching up she yanked on a chain and the overhead lights went dark. "We met at a rainy craft fair," Kendra repeated. They were sitting back in the kitchen. "Not terribly romantic by most people's standards." She glanced at a clock over the stove. "Your parents are probably wondering where you are." The implication was fairly obvious.
"What do you do with the jewelry boxes?"
"I already told you… sell them through art galleries, flea markets, craft fairs, whatever." She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with her glue-stained fingers. "You gotta go home now."
"Can I come see you again?"
"I dunno," she hedged. "Maybe, if your folks don't mind."
"Yeah, they won't care."
"And you can't go anywhere near the tools. They're dangerous as hell." Kendra held her hands up in front of his face. "How many fingers?" Frankie counted ten, all intact. "Touch any of my power tools, and that will be the last day you ever set foot in this house." 
Frankie lingered in the doorway. "I wonder if the McElroys are still partying." 
Sensing his reluctance to leave, Kendra disappeared back down the stairwell. When she returned, the woman was holding a small strip of cream colored wood delicately veined with orange. "Smell this." She stuck the milky wood up under his nose.
"I don't smell nothin’."
Kendra scuffed the wood with a piece of 120-grit sandpaper she was holding in her free hand and extended the wood a second time.
"Cripes!" An intoxicating sweetness wafted through the room life an expensive, designer perfume. "It's tulipwood and, like bubinga, also from the rosewood family." She handed him both the sliver of wood and the sandpaper. "Next time your parents have a tiff or the McElroy clan is stirring the pot, take a whiff of tulipwood and it will calm your nerves." She gently pushed him out the door into the warm night. "Goodnight, Frankie Baxter and I hope your parents can work things out." Kendra stood out on the landing and watched the young boy reluctantly shuffle off down the empty street.
  

* * * * *

"You got in late last night," Mrs. Dexter was in the kitchen cooking waffles. She added a tablespoon of vegetable oil to the mix, an egg and a splash of milk. With his brown hair and fair complexion, friends claimed said Frankie was the spitting image of his mother. They both had dimples that surfaced when they smiled and a malleable softness about the mouth.
"I met the lady who lives in the slate blue cape."
"The Lomax place?" His parents still referred to it as the Lomax place even though the owner was long dead. 
"She does fancy woodworking… said I could come back and visit as long as I got your permission." Before his mother could respond, Frankie jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. He returned a moment later holding the slender length of tulipwood and the sandpaper. "Here, smell this." He rubbed the sandpaper over the surface briefly and held it up to his mother.
"What a delicious scent!" Mrs. Dexter grabbed a whisk and stirred the batter to a frothy consistency. 
Frankie told his mother how Kendra took over the woodworking business after Edgar took sick. "She said I had to get you permission," Frankie repeated.
"Well, I don't know," his mother wavered. "A woman living by herself and…"
"For God's sakes, she's older than Aunt Helen!" Aunt Helen was Mrs. Dexter's younger sister.
"I'll think about it," his mother replied evasively, "and let you know later tonight." Spraying the waffle iron, she poured the batter onto the griddle and lowered the lid. 
Frankie was about to argue the issue but held his tongue. His mother wasn't being contentious and seemed genuinely pleased with the fragrant tulipwood and the notion of a woman building ornate boxes. "Well, that lays one mystery to rest."
"Which is?"
"Many times when I passed the Lomax place coming home from market," his mother remarked, "I heard the sound of heavy machinery and wondered what they were doing. Now we know."
Frankie went upstairs and lay down on his bed. An older woman had held him tight up against her wiry body. This was unfamiliar territory. He had to think it through. Not that there was anything much to think about. Kendra had pulled him close in the darkness out of pity not lust. The 'poor baby' was clearly meant as an expression of sympathy and maternal affection. The way she held him, Frankie could feel every crevice, fleshy bulge and contour of her body. 
"Aw, shit!" It suddenly dawned on him what changed when Kendra ran off to the bedroom, slamming the door shut. She had slipped on a bra. Even alone in his own bedroom, the stolid, middle-aged woman's sense of modesty and decorum caused the boy to blush self-consciously.
The Lomax place resembled a safe haven, a protective womb. The several hours spent there was like a dream - unfortunately, a dream that, like most pleasant fictions, didn't last. Before leaving the basement, Kendra had shown him a crate full of finished boxes. The artwork was meticulous. Marquetry - the handicraft dated back to the Middle Ages - was the name of the technique she used to puzzle the tiny slivers of wood into intricate design patterns. 
After the glue dried, Kendra sanded through eight, increasingly finer grades of sandpaper ranging from two-twenty to fifteen hundred before applying Danish oil. "Chatoyance," she spoke softly rubbing a thumb lovingly over a glassy wooden surface. "From the French œil de chat, meaning cat's eye." "You sand the wood until it's so smooth that, when the finish is applied, the surface flings the light back at you in shimmery brilliance." She held the box up to the light and the decorative surface exuded a luminous glow that caused Frankie's breath to catch in his throat.


In the early afternoon, Mrs. Dexter went off somewhere and didn't return until late in the afternoon. "Did you know the police were called over to the McElroys' place last night?"
"How do you know?"
"The Hispanic lady who lives diagonally across from them works behind the deli counter in the market. She says the two brothers got plastered and started beating on each other. They're out on bail now."
"What about Kendra, the lady who makes the fancy boxes?"
"Oh, yes," Mrs. Baxter replied almost as an afterthought. "You can spend time over there but don't go near the machinery. Now I've got to make supper." Frankie's mother shifted the several bags she was balancing in her arms and headed in the direction of the kitchen. 
Later that night while he was lying in bed, Mrs. Baxter came into the room. "Kendra goes to church Sunday mornings over at Saint Stevens, and she also volunteers stocking shelves at the library Wednesday afternoons." After a brief pause, she added, "Ryder… her last name is Ryder. Kendra Ryder."
"How do you know this?"
"If you go to visit and hear machines running down in the basement," she sidestepped his question, "don't set foot in the house until the electricity is turned off and the noise dies away."
"Okay." 
"I'm doing laundry in the morning. Do you need any clothes washed?" Frankie had a bad habit of burying dirty laundry under the bed.
"No, I'm fine," the boy replied. Mrs. Baxter went away. 

* * * * *

"Your mother came to visit," Kendra said the next time Frankie stopped by. It was a Thursday afternoon. The black sky had been spitting warm rain off and on all day. Rain was the kiss of death to crafters. The previous Saturday, Kendra had set up her ten-by-ten foot canopy at the Stonington Craft Fair only to see her business literally washed away by a torrential downpour. Eighty-seven soggy exhibitors spent the day staring bleakly at one another in an otherwise empty field. Only a small handful of diehard customers, sporting rain gear and umbrellas, visited the fair. They didn't linger and nobody was in a buying mood. Luckily, the fair extended straight through the weekend, and Sunday Kendra was able to recoup the loss and turn a small profit.
"I gotta cut slots for the brass hinges," Kendra said. "Sit over there," she pointed at a folding chair a good thirty feet away from the drill press and don't belch, fart or pick your nose." 
As she explained it, the razor-sharp slot cutter, which measured a meager three inches in diameter, was, far and away, the most dangerous tool in her arsenal. The Delta, ten-inch table saw made a god-awful racket and ripped through rock maple with lethal indifference. But the stock could be guided safely along a metal fence or navigated across the carbide tipped blade with a miter gauge. The tiny slot cutter afforded no such luxury. Kendra fashioned a right-angle brace from scrap lumber and clamped the lids onto the brace before cutting slots. Reducing the speed on the drill press to a sloth-like six hundred rpm's, she inched the wood across the table until the horizontal blade barely kissed the grain. Then she locked her elbows rigidly against her sides and eased the wood forward in tiny increments. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. When the blade cut to a depth of half an inch, she pulled back, freeing the stock from the whirring blade.
"What's that for?" Frankie gestured at a can of silicone spray that Kendra waved over the slot saw.
"The slippery silicone lubricates the metal teeth so there's less chance of the wood seizing up in the middle of a cut."
"What if the blade grabs the wood?"
Kendra cracked a gritty smile. Rummaging around on the floor under the workbench, she located a badly shattered box with an amboyna burl lid. "If the slot cutter blade seizes up, you concede defeat and let go." 
She handed him the ruined box. The orangey wood was speckled with reddish-brown, black and gold highlights. "Amboyna burl is imported from the jungles of Cambodia. The sheet of veneer that came from set me back a pretty penny."
Later that night at home Frankie could still picture the willowy woman hunched over the drill press, her elbows straight-jacketed against her slender waist. Just before she pressed the wood up against the slot cutter, Kendra filled her lungs with air. Listening to the mute language of the slot cutter blade as it blindly wormed its way through the black walnut casing, she didn't breathe again until the cut was complete. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. 

* * * * *

In September, Frankie returned to school. He dropped by the Lomax place a couple days after school. One afternoon as the boy was approaching the slate blue house, the front door opened and a middle-aged man bustled past him. Climbing into a Buick convertible, he slammed the door and drove off in a rage.
Kendra was in the kitchen. A rather imposing tea box fashioned from red birch was resting on the counter alongside several sheets of flamboyant handmade paper. "I found these beauties," she said as soon as Frankie entered the room. "at the Rode Island School of Design."
"Nice stuff!" Frankie gazed at a velvety, cream-colored sheets.
"A slurry of twigs, leaves and flower petals are added to the moist pulp so that, when it dries, the paper has an organic, three-dimensional quality." She transferred a piece she had already cut to the top of the unfinished tea box. "I'm thinking of using the paper as the medallion to showcase the wood."
Kendra had told Frankie on more than one occasion that 'presentation' was everything. The artisan needed some central theme or unique feature to draw the consumer in. "Yeah, I get it. The mint green and dark purple…that’s swell!" 
She lay the paper aside. "Of course, we can't use wood glue... too brittle" She was thinking out loud. "Maybe an acid-neutralized PVA."
"What's that?"
"Water-based white glue with a vinyl additive." She turned and smiled at the boy, a conspiratorial gesture. "Did you get a chance to meet Edgar's brother as he was leaving?"
"He almost knocked me over."
"Yes, well, the man was a bit upset." Kendra rolled the exotic, handmade papers in a bundle and fastened them with a pair of elastic bands. "He wants to put the house on the market… gave me thirty days to pack up my belongings and clear off the property." She sipped from a cup of coffee. "After he took sick, Edgar warned me that his family was a bunch of greedy bastards, and they might try some funny stuff. That's why he went to an attorney and redid his will; signed the property over to me, free and clear."
"So the family can't kick you out?"
Kendra raised her hands, palms up, and smirked impudently. "Not in thirty days, not in thirty years."
For the second time since he met the hardscrabble woman with the unlovely features, the boy burst into tears. Kendra reached out and pulled him close. "I ain't going anywhere, so don't you worry." 
Only when he had gotten his emotions back under control, did she gently pull away. "The Boxboro juried art festival is coming up next month."
"Yeah, you already told me." Frankie blew his nose and dabbed his cheek with the back of a hand.
"Well, I sure could use an extra pair of hands and I'm willing to pay."
"Okay."
"I'll need someone to sand and finish, while I get the rest of the inventory together. Can't afford to pay you much better than minimum wage, but - "
"Yeah, I'll do it. When can I start?"
"Unless you're planning another emotional meltdown," Kendra tucked the red birch tea box under her arm and headed for the basement, "you can get to work now."

* * * * *

Later that night, Frankie told his mother about his new, working relationship with Kendra Ryder. "So everything's going good over there."
"Yeah, real good."
"You staying away from the power tools?"
"She lets me use the stationery belt sander but that's pretty safe."
"Good." His mother wet her lips. "Your father called from the office. He won't be coming home tonight."
"Okay." 
Frankie turned to go, but his mother brought him up short. "I suppose he's spending the night at his girl friend's place." Her voice was devoid of anger, no hint of bitterness. "So it will be just the two of us for supper." 
He eyed her uneasily. "You're not going to drink, are you?"
"No, not tonight." The woman pursed her lips and gazed pensively out the bay window. "I still care about your father but he's all mixed up."
"What if he wants a divorce?"
"That will be his choice to make," his mother replied evenly. "At some point he'll have to choose. I don't want to look back twenty years from now and discover that our happiness was held hostage by a man who put his own needs before those of his family. Either way, we can make a life."
They ate supper alone. Somehow it didn't feel so bad. Frankie sat in the kitchen while his mother did the dishes. "Don't you have homework?"
"Already did it."
Frankie's mother squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink. "Be nice to the Ryder lady." She was facing away when she made the odd remark, and Mrs. Dexter blurted the handful of words with an abrupt severity that caught the boy off guard. He stared open-mouthed at his mother's backside. "I want you to be nice to the lady who lives at the Lomax place," she repeated.
"Why wouldn't I be," he stuttered. His mother reached for the sponge and began scrubbing a Pyrex baking dish. He waited. After Mrs. Dexter finished the dish, she washed the rest of the plates and rinsed the sink. Approaching the kitchen table, she cupped her son's face in her moist hands, planted a kiss on either cheek and said, "I gotta throw a load of laundry in the dryer."
Frankie went upstairs and took a shower. Then he got in bed with his tulipwood. He had already used up the old piece and Kendra sliced him a new one off a three-foot slab. He scuffed the surface and raised the pungent wood to his nose. Yes, that was better.
Be nice to the Ryder lady. What the hell did his mother mean by that moronic remark? Kendra was the nicest goddamn person he had ever met! No one had to tell him to be kind, or generous, or decent or anything! Frankie felt a lump growing in his throat. He scratched the sassafras a half dozen times for good measure, rolled off the side of the bed, went and found his mother in the laundry room. "The Ryder lady,… why did you say what you did?"
Mrs. Dexter had finished with the dryer and had moved over to the ironing table. She added a cup of distilled water to the steam iron and raised the temperature to the cotton setting. "I forgot that Kendra volunteers over at the library and ran into her when I returned some books earlier today." She pressed down on the steam button and a puff of watery vapor burst from the sole plate. "Anyway, we got to shooting the breeze the way women do and one thing led to another."
Frankie's mother spread a plaid, perma-press blouse over the nose of the ironing board and made a tentative pass. "Well, the conversation turned to a certain fifteen year-old boy and she kept going on and on about what a swell kid you were." Finishing with the blouse, she grabbed a pair of black slacks. "Then the woman goes all mushy on me and confides how she and Edgar Lomax were planning to start a family of their own right before he took sick and how she looks at you almost like the son she never had." Only now did the woman set the iron aside and look her son full in the face. "I'm only sharing this because you forced the issue. What I'm telling you goes no further than this room."
"Kendra… she really said all that?"
His mother turned back to the ironing. "No further than this room, mind you!"   
Still later that night while teetering on the cusp of sleep, Frankie tried to reconcile the notion of the utterly fearless, taciturn female hunched over a slot cutter chucked into a drill press lumbering at six-hundred rpm's and the mushy volunteer at the Brandenberg Public Library. 

* * * * *

Kendra had signed on for a couple of local craft fairs. The third Sunday in October, Frankie helped load the rust-pocked Dodge Caravan and spent the day watching her greet customers and sell merchandise. As Kendra explained it nobody bought the big stuff. The elaborate, mixed-media tea boxes and multi-drawer jewelry cases sold reasonably well through the chic galleries on Cape Cod and Newport but were outside the price range of the average craft fair shopper. "They usually stop to ogle the really fancy stuff and admire the workmanship, then settle on a smaller keepsake."
She also set out items each show as a 'lost leader', cheaper items she sold for cost and never really brought in any profit. The sign over a hexagon-shaped ring box fashioned from bird's-eye maple read: 

Clearance Sale!!!
Ten dollars while they last!!!

A dozen or so ring boxes were spread out on the table. "Customers view the ring boxes as a solid bargain so they grab them up. Meanwhile, more people crowd under the canopy to see what all the fuss is about, and medium-priced items start flying off the table. Even if I lose a few bucks on the ring boxes, I recoup the loss twice over on pricier stuff that gets tacked onto the initial sale."
Kendra gestured with a flick of her eyes at a lanky older man sitting on a director's chair next to a tent full of watercolors. "That jerk isn't going to sell crap!" 
"How can you be so sure?"
Kendra smiled at a woman pushing a baby stroller past her booth. The woman nodded amiably but didn't slow down. "You see how the sourpuss sits with his nose buried in the newspaper?" Sure enough, the fellow was leaning back in his chair, ignoring the customers streaming down the walkway. The artist's expression was sullen, disinterested. "Customers aren't stupid. They can tell when a vendor is giving them the holier-than-thou cold shoulder." Kendra waved a hand emphatically in the air. "By five o'clock, you will be able to count the number of sales that fool has made on the fingers of one hand."
A young woman approached and was staring at an unusual box with green, gold and black highlights. "That's paldao," Kendra explained. "The wood is harvested from the jungles of Indochina. It's a dangerous wood to harvest, and most natives won't go anywhere near a paldao tree."
"Why is that?"
"Boa constrictors."
The woman flipped the lid up then ran her fingertips over the crushed velour interior. "You're joking." Kendra grinned and shook her head slowly from side to side. 
The woman left but returned an hour and a half later. "About that tree and the snakes… you were pulling my leg, right?"
"The boas hang from the trees searching for prey; the natives, who are animists and believe in voodoo, are terrified of the snakes. The logging companies had an awful time finding loggers willing to go into the jungles and cut down the trees." The woman promptly pulled out her wallet and paid cash for the paldao box. By closing time Sunday night, Kendra had pocketed fifteen hundred dollars. Peeling five twenty dollar bills off the roll, she handed the money to Frankie. "What's this for?"
"Your take. Now help me break down the tent and pack up all this crap so we can get home."

* * * * *

Saturday morning the phone rang. "Hello, son, is your mother there?"
Frankie went upstairs. "Dad's on the phone."
Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Dexter fixed herself a cup of tea, went out to the retrieve the newspaper that the paperboy flung in the bushes and sat down at the kitchen table. "Apparently it's not going so hot with your father and Phyllis."
Frankie cringed. This was the first time his mother had ever mentioned the 'other woman' by name. His father moved in with her six months ago. They hadn't been getting along for the past three. Over the weekend the girlfriend threw him out, and Mr. Baxter had taken a one-room efficiency apartment at the Motel 6. Now he wanted to come home. 
"What now?"
"I told your father that, in his absence, things had changed… we had moved on with our lives." She ran a poised finger around the rim of the cup. "I explained that, if he came back, there would be no more nastiness, no more hurtful bickering." Opening the newspaper to the editorial page, she scanned the offerings. "I also explained that I wouldn't tolerate any more deceitful hanky-panky. The next time he screws up will be his last."

Later that afternoon, Frankie's father returned dragging an overstuffed Pullman suitcase. He looked tired, bedraggled like a beaten dog. Mrs. Baxter was civil and courteous. She even fixed him a roast beef sandwich on sourdough bread with a slice of pickle and can of diet Coke. She didn't make a big deal about his arrival. He wasn't the prodigal son or some long lost relative. She didn't berate him or rub salt in his middle-aged wounds. What his mother said earlier in morning as she leisurely thumbed through the Brandenberg Gazette was true; in his absence, things had changed.

* * * * *

The first week in December, Frankie stopped by the Lomax place. The door was open but the basement was empty. He glanced in the bedroom. Kendra was lying under the comforter with a box of Kleenex balancing precariously on her chest. "What's the matter?"
"I gotta bad cold. Bronchitis."
The boy placed a hand on her forehead. "You feel hot."
"I was up to a hundred and three last night, but the temperature came down since then."
"What about the Litchfield Christmas Fair?"
"I dunno," she said listlessly. 
Frankie went and sat on a chair in the far corner of the room. "You got food?"
"Yeah, I went to the market just before I got sick. There's plenty to eat… just can't keep anything down, that's all." The woman coughed spastically, blew her nose and lay silent. Five minutes later, Kendra Ryder began snoring softly. On the night table was a framed photo of Edgar Lomax. Heavyset with a dark beard and plaid flannel shirt, the unsmiling hulk of a man resembled a backwoodsman from the hills of Appalachia. This was the man who taught Kendra Ryder to cut finger joints, miters, dovetails and mortises. This was the man who died before he could give the woman what she wanted most in the world.
 Frankie went home and told his mother what had happened. "When is the Litchfield Fair?"
"This coming weekend. It's an indoor event at the art center. The booth fee was two hundred dollars."
Mrs. Dexter groaned. "Maybe she could tell them what happened and get a refund."
"It's a fancy-schmancy, juried art show," Frankie explained. "By invitation only… no refunds."
Mrs. Dexter blew out her cheeks. "Tough luck!"


Thursday Frankie's mother came into the bedroom as he was climbing under the covers. "How's the Ryder woman doing?"
"Much better, but she's still too weak to work the fair." He breathed out heavily making a disagreeable sound. "She spent the whole month making inventory for the show, and now she'll have to eat the loss. What a waste!"
His mother picked up a pair of Dockers slacks, folding them on the crease. "You know how to manage the booth, right?"
"Yeah, but each crafter has to set up, greet customers, track sales … "
Mrs. Dexter hung the slacks in the closet and turned to face her son. "I told your father about the Ryder woman taking sick, and he suggested that, if she got permission from the sponsors, maybe we could manage the booth in her absence."
Frankie's brain flickered, momentarily dimmed then grew white hot again. "I can sell. That's no problem as long as somebody helps bagging, collecting the money and sales tax."
"What's Kendra's telephone number?” Mrs. Baxter shuffled to the door. “I'll call over there now and let her know."
When his mother was gone, Frankie reached under his pillow and fingered the milky white shaft of Brazilian tulipwood. He ran his over the surface of the redolent, ornamental wood - the talisman of a kinder, gentler universe – but left it where it lay.  

Return to Table of Contents


Fun with Dick and Jane

“Let’s make it an early night," my wife, Irene, suggested as we turned onto the Cunningham’s street. Tuesday afternoon, she ran into Jane Cunningham in the supermarket. The software firm where her husband, Dick, worked had just put him in charge of a lucrative, overseas contract and the couple wanted to share the exciting news with friends. We didn't consider either one of them friends in the conventional sense, but I could hardly get angry with my wife. Jane comes on like a jackbooted Nazi storm trooper, and, after a while, you would jump off the Mystic-Tobin Bridge into Boston Harbor in the dead of winter just to be rid of the boorish beast. "With that squat body and turned-up, snout of a nose, it's painful sitting in the same room with her."
"People can't help how they look," Irene replied.  
"It would kill the woman to brush her teeth once a week?" The last time we visited, Jane reeked of halitosis and a grimy ridge of greenish-yellow gunk rimmed the gum line. And how she belittled her husband! She sniped at Dick, making snide comments about his nerdy appearance, the fact that he didn't know how to wash a load of laundry and similar such nonsense. One time in mixed company Jane sniggered, “'Dickey wouldn't remember to wipe his pimply ass, if I didn't keep an extra roll of Charmin extra soft on the vanity.” Granted the woman had already downed three martinis, but if my wife ever talked to me like that, I would whack her upside the head with a pressure-treated two-by-four then debarked to a warmer climate. 

"Hi, guys!" Dick ushered us into the living room. Thin with a sunken chest and pencil moustache, his brown hair flopped down over watery blue eyes. 
"So what's all this exciting news?" Irene asked.
"It's not that big a deal.” He smiled self-consciously. "Our corporation is opening a European division."
"What he conveniently omitted," Jane joined us from the kitchen, "is that management handpicked Dickey to oversee the new contract."
"I'll be flying to Munich for a couple of weeks around the end of the month," he confirmed. Irene gave him a brief hug and when she pulled away the guy was blushing, literally turning red in the face. 
It was still light out and we went out on the deck. The weather was a balmy seventy degrees. A black swallowtail butterfly flitted among a messy overgrowth of wildflowers in the rock garden. On the far side of the fence, a neighbor was grilling T-bone steaks while his young sons kicked a soccer ball about the manicured lawn. Jane brought a cheese ball with an assortment of crackers from the kitchen. The cheese, which was dusted with crushed walnuts, tasted like sawdust. Guests seldom got anything decent to eat when they visited the Cunninghams. In addition to her other faults, the woman was stingy as hell.
"When Dickey caught wind of the position, he immediately signed up for a crash course in conversational German." Jane smeared an orangey wad of cheese on a whole wheat cracker and stuffed it in her mouth. "As long as we been together, he never showed an aptitude for much anything, neither hobbies nor vices." She erupted in a  malicious, cackling laugh. "But none of the other programmers could speak a stitch of German," Jane glanced at her husband dismissively, "so it wasn't like he had much competition." 
Jane stuck her pudgy face up under her husband's nose. "How you going to survive in Deutschland without a nanny to read you a bedtime story and tuck you in at night?" Jane whacked him playfully on the side of the head, and Dick had to grab his horn rimmed glasses before they went flying off his ears. 
"You'll want to visit the red light district," I quipped, more to rattle his obnoxious wife. Irene shot me a dirty look. 
She could see where this was going, but before I could get up a head of steam, Jane interjected. "Tell them about the Topic-a-Day teaching method, while I get some more ice tea."
The sun, which had been hiding behind a cottony wad of late-afternoon clouds, reemerged, spraying the deck with a soft, luster. "Mrs. Steiner, the language instructor, picked a new topic each day - clothing, weather, sports, colors, food, politics, and so on - along with half a hundred essential words,… just enough to get us by in social situations."
"And grammar?" I asked.
"We had basic text books for that plus a newspaper… a page or two, written on the level of what second or third graders might understand."
"How ingenious!" Irene noted. "Such a clever way to learn."
"Let me give you an example." Dick cleared his throat. " One day we were covering the four seasons along with the types of weather that - "
"Did he tell you about the German comic strips?" Jane suddenly returned, dragging the conversation off in a totally different direction. Dick slumped forward, his eyes growing dull and sipped at his drink. Somewhere in the house, a telephone rang and he went off to answer it.


"That milquetoast is gonna be the death of me!" Jane confided once her husband was out of earshot. "I've been worried half to death that, when he gets to Munich, those damn foreigners, are gonna eat him up alive."
"They're not foreigners," Irene noted.
"How's that?"
"Technically, Dick is travelling to their country."
"You know what I mean," Jane shot back in her gruff, take-no-prisoners tone. "In social situations, Dickey's clueless … doesn't know how to hold his own." "If I'm not there to run interference, he stands around like a cigar store Indian." 
Did Jane really think that, left to his own devices, her husband might show up his first day in Munich dressed in leather lederhosen with red suspenders, knee-length socks and an Alpine-style feather cap?  Granted, the guy was unassertive, but in a quirky sort of way he got things done. Jane was all mouth - all fluster and bluster with nothing tangible to ever show for all her whacky pronouncements. Strangest of all was the woman's delusion that somehow she was the driving force, the brains in the relationship. "He learned a difficult foreign language in a short period of time and won the promotion on his own merits." I couldn't resist the impulse. "I think you're selling your husband short." 
"Yeah, well I live with the nebbish and know his limitations." A disagreeable sound welled up in Jane's throat, never quite reaching her lips. "And, of course, Dickey's gonna need a decent wardrobe so I'm taking him to the mall later today."
"J.C. Penny and Filene's have a nice men's selection," Irene offered.
Jane rolled her eyes. "You can get the same crap at the bargain outlets for half the price." 
"Sorry for the interruption." Dick returned. "So what did I miss?"


A half hour later, Jane brought Irene into the back yard to inspect the vegetable garden. "Want a beer?"
The question caught me by surprise. I always thought Dick a teetotaler. Or at least that's what we had been led to believe never having seen him sipping anything stronger than a cup of Columbian coffee. "Beer would be nice."
He went and got a couple of Heineken longnecks, and we sat watching the women eighty feet away mucking about the pole beans and cherry tomatoes. "One day toward the end of the fifth month, it hit me that I was no longer fumbling for words but actually thinking in a foreign language. Someone would ask a question and I answered in German... spontaneously, without hesitation or uncertainty." As he spoke, Dick was absorbed in the process of peeling the green label from the front of the amber bottle. He really wasn't that goofy once you got him away from his castrating bitch of a wife. I could imagine some sensible-minded woman might even find the man attractive in an phlegmatic sort of way. "The final week of class, the instructor handed out a short story written by a famous German writer." 
Something in his demeanor had abruptly changed. The man sitting next to me wasn't Dick Cunningham. I don't mean to suggest that he had gone weird on me. Even to this day, I still don't comprehend what really happened. We were just sitting there sipping beers in late June with the goldfinches flitting about the shaggy hemlocks bordering the property, a lawnmower sputtering in the distance. 
"A mild mannered apothecary marries a shrewish woman, a regular fishwife, who constantly berates her husband. The fellow goes off one Sunday morning on the pretext of purchasing the newspaper but never returns. Instead he travels to the port in Marseille and takes the ferry across to North Africa where he promptly joins the French Foreign Legion."
"All this in a short story?"
"Would you like another Heineken?" We had only been by ourselves a few minutes but his beer was gone and he ran off to retrieve another. "Ten years later, the apothecary-turned-soldier-of-fortune returns home dressed in camouflage fatigues with a gun strapped to his hip. He's sunburned, twenty pound heavier, muscular and covered with dust."
"And how did the reunion work out?" 
"Just as you might expect. At first the German hausfrau was so overjoyed to have her husband back, she showered him with kisses and platitudes.” Jane waved at us from a row of bell peppers. Dick stared at the woman with mild indifference. “She even baked this huge strawberry shortcake to celebrate the homecoming."
"And then?"
"And then she started in again with the nagging. 'Where the hell were you all this time?  The picket fence needs painting. Get rid of that moronic uniform!'" Two-thirds of Dick's second beer was already gone as he positioned the rim up against his lips, upending the bottle. Glub. Glub. Glub. Glub. "The estranged husband jumps to his feet. Wrenching the revolver from its holster, he aims the muzzle at his wife's forehead and pulls the trigger."
"He kills her?"
"No, at the last second, he lowers the barrel and releases a round into the strawberry shortcake splattering his wife with whipped cream. The woman screams and faints dead away."
"And then?"
"He goes away never to be seen again."
"Nice story."
The waning sun ran up against another velvety cloud and was swallowed whole. "It's an allegory." A fleeting sliver of a smile creased his mouth. "More like an epiphany." 
"Yes, I can see that."  The women returned to the deck.


Later that night when we were lying in bed, I confided, "Dick is going to Germany on the pretext of setting up the new division; he isn't coming home." I told her about our conversation.
The room grew very still. "Dick Cunningham will do just fine." Irene finally broke the silence. "It's Jane that's gonna end up in a straight jacket on a locked ward at the Institute of Mental Health." Reaching beneath the covers, she patted me on the thigh. "Are you horny?"
"Too tired. Maybe tomorrow night."
"Goodnight." She rolled over on her side, and less than a minute later, my wife was snoring softly. 


Back in the late nineteen-sixties, my parents were among the last batch of American children to sound out words using the Fun with Dick and Jane reader. Blonde haired Jane, resplendent in her pink frock and Dick with his brown shorts and pale blue, wrinkle-free polyester shirt racing giddily down the street - they epitomized youthful innocence. And of course there was their darling puppy, Spot and playful, fluff-ball-of-a-kitty, Puff. Fun with Dick and Jane - I found a tattered copy of the reader in a drawer of my mother's personal effects after she passed away. 
Fun with Dick and Jane. Jane Cunningham couldn't deliver the goods. She threw a sobering pail of ice water on any attempt at rambunctious fun. 
Dick wanted fun. 
He had no dog. 
He had no cat. 
No Spot. No Puff. 
But he had a plan. 
See Dick board the plane. 
See Dick fly away. 
Far, far away.
Bye Jane.

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