“Go on!” Pet exclaims, exaggerating her interest. “That must have been a picture!”
“Oh, darlin’, it was somethin’ to see,” marvels this woman in the window seat.
“Me?” Pet starts in, affecting something like the same drawl as her neighbor, curling her every thought into a kind of question. “I called to order me a few a those Patsy Clines? And the fella, he says to me, you know, how would I like that delivered? And, I says to him, well, special delivery would be fine? And he reads off all the different special delivery options? You know, overnight express? two-day air? three-day ground?” Her accent is a caricature, she’s swallowing her words to keep up with it. “Turns out, they can get these packages to you every which way? But I says back, no, no, no, that’s not at all what I have in mind? And he wants to know what it was I did have in mind, and so I just said, suspended air freight? I don’t know why I was funnin’ with him so, or what put me in this kinda mind, but it just come to me. Suspended air freight, that’s what I said, just like that. Naturally, this poor fella had never heard of suspended air freight, so I explained that I wanted my Patsy Clines flown to the Tennessee hills and then dropped from the plane and slapped against the side of one of those cliffs they’ve got there, until my desired items were reduced to recyclables? This is what I told him. Recyclables. They’re plastic, right?” She laughs as if she might choke on her own good cheer, and embroiders this with a string of unnecessary breath-catching gestures. “Oh, my Lord!” she says, patting at her chest with an open palm, pretending to ease herself into a lower gear. “And then, oh, oh, oh”—she pats at the air in front of her unnerved neighbor, to make sure she still has what’s left of her attention—“I’m leaving out the best part. I tell the guy, you know, if he could somehow fix it so that the pilot could be playing ‘I Fall to Pieces’ on the cassette when he dropped my package, I would consider that extra special delivery, and would be willin’ to pay a few dollars more?” She builds to her best mock-cackle. “Extra special delivery?” she says, slapping at her own knee. She makes to catch her breath again. “Good lord!” she says, “that fella was off the phone quicker than if I were tryin’ to sell somethin’ to him!”
Petra Wood looks up from her performance and is nearly able to count the fillings in the mouth of the woman sitting next to her. This is what it means when they say someone’s mouth is agape, she thinks. This is as agape as it gets. The woman, flabbergasted, manages to clutch her Air Mall catalog to her breast with one hand and reach for the orange “call” button at her armrest with the other, going to harumphing lengths to avoid eye contact with the devilish woman at her side, and when the stewardess arrives to see what the trouble is, the woman very demurely asks if there might be an empty seat toward the back. Something about the rumble of the engines makes it easier for her to fall off asleep, she says, although from the urgent, hushed tone of her voice she might be discussing matters of national security.
“That will be fine, ma’am,” the stewardess says, and she helps the flustered lady collect her few things and inch her way past Petra Wood to safety.
There, Pet thinks, sliding over to the still-warm seat by the window, stretching out. Wasn’t so hard.
There is a coffee shop in downtown Bar Harbor, Maine, serves perhaps the greasiest mess of home fries ever to have fled a skillet. Place is landmarked for its home fries, which are larded and charred and coated with this heavythick glaze of some secret something that lets them slide past peristalsis for the nearest artery. They taste famously like burnt candied yams, and even the late-to-lunch locals can’t inhale enough of them. Folks have been known to drive two hours out of their way for a plateful, and, in these parts, a two-hour side trip is pretty much a four-star review. This part of New England, everything is so spread out and remote that a one-hour trip is nothing, but two? Well, that’s a high compliment.
The restaurant has got no name Terence Wood can easily determine, unless of course the Good Food and Coffee Shop signs out front are meant as more than exposition. Even the menus offer no clue: Menu. About the best a first-timer like Wood can gather is a sanctioned nickname—Two Stools—which appears to have something to do with the overweight waitress working the room like a matron and with the limited seating at the lunch counter. The spinning seat discs are a memory on the half-dozen metal posts lining the counter’s length, save for two at the end by the cash register, and Wood guesses there might be a story behind their absence. He won’t have to wait long to find out.
Wood, dressed down in a straw fishing hat and plaid flannel shirt, has stumbled in to refuel and evacuate. He’s got his long gray hair tied with a red rubber band he found lying on the street. He hasn’t eaten since the sample pack of cheese-filled Combos he collected first thing this morning when he stopped by a roadside convenience store to see if his exit had made the early papers. Fuck did he know about newspapers and deadlines? Closest he ever came to the world of print journalism was a cut bit as a paper boy in Citizen Kane— his first Hollywood payday, a favor to his connected uncle. While this insignificant contribution to movie history may have been left to shrivel on strips of acetate in some forgotten vault, it also left Wood with the idea that if his car should somehow sail off a cliff during the night, there might be some mention of it on the front pages by morning. This was news. Surely there might be some paper boy, somewhere, urging early morning commuters to plunk down their coins for the latest on the sudden death of a Hollywood legend: Read all about it! Terence Wood, dead at sixty-five! Entertainment world rocked by the news!
But, alas, there was no mention of the actor’s sudden presumed death. Wood idly thumbed the newspapers and magazines on display, strolled the few aisles with enough interest to forestall any suspicions of loitering, and, in this way, consumed some additional minutes on this first day of his new freedom. This last had quickly become one of his primary concerns. He hadn’t figured on all the time he would now have to fill, hadn’t decided yet if this was a good thing. Some other things he hadn’t figured on were eating, shitting, showering, going through the rest of his life unnoticed, and now that these had taken turns occurring to him, he figured he’d deal with them on an as needed basis.
First, food. As he continued with his aisle strolling, he realized he was famished, and the brightly packaged snack foods leapt off the shelves to assault his hunger in a way he found strangely satisfying. Oh, he didn’t do anything more than consider each package, maybe handle a few of them, hold one or two to his nose, but this was enough for Terence Wood. There is something filling, he considered, in staring down a box of Freihoffer’s cookies, assorted, or a neatly stacked tower of Pringle’s ranch-flavored potato chips, or individually wrapped Ring Dings, Ding Dongs, or Ho Hos, or the exalted fake-creaminess of a package of double-stuff Oreos, when your wallet is trapped in the glove box of your jettisoned four-by-four vehicle and you can’t know how far the fifty-three dollars and change in your pants pocket will take you.
Wood was drawn to the Combos not for the promised bursts of zesty processed cheese or the ten-cent introductory price tag, but because he once had a thing going with a woman who sang back-up on the Combos jingle: “Combos really cheeses your hunger away.” The line, between them, became a source of endless bedroom by-play. One of the singer’s favorite gags was to grip Wood’s cock like a microphone and croon to him like she was on Carson, like he was her first true break, and it was only underneath her sometime teasing that Wood could recognize the real omnipotence of his situation, that he felt he could actually stand before this girl and cheese away her hunger simply by being who he was, by letting her perform for him this unadorned act of raw tenderness, by accepting her supplication. He would fill her with the seeds of power and fame, he used to think, his celebrated greatness would become hers, and she would thank him for it, ask for more.
Cindy. Her name was Cindy, and this was how Wood remembered her. As he popped one of the Combos nuggets into his mouth this morning, he tasted again the stale sweetness
of this singing Cindy. It came right back to him. The girl had kept what seemed like a lifetime supply of Combos in a corner of her studio apartment (one of the perks of her jingling), and in the few weeks they spent together, her lips could hardly brush up against Wood without leaving behind specks of pretzel and puttied cheese. Sometimes, Wood’s tongue in her mouth would discover a coarse paste, and he would return to his own mouth and pretend not to mind. He recalled drinking a lot of water.
The Combos held him through mid-afternoon, when his stomach began to feel as if someone had inflated a balloon inside of it. Also, like he was about to give birth to an avocado pit. He had to shit, and he couldn’t tell if the two developments were somehow related. Probably. Anyway, this Two Stools joint surfaced in time to cover both needs, and Wood slipped in and made for the back. Earlier in the day, he had found the apparently abandoned straw fishing hat on a park bench, and he pulled the brim down low, seeking obscurity. He caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass window on the way in, and it didn’t seem to him he looked like Terence Wood. He was dirty, and unkempt, and underdressed, and not at all himself. This was good. His plan was to slink to some back table, order the cheapest item on the menu, and nurse an accompanying cup of coffee until he could motivate his bowels. He asked the huge waitress for an egg sandwich, heavy pepper, and settled back to soak up what he could of the local color.
This is what he now makes out: Two Stools, the waitress, is the daughter of the restaurant’s owner. It’s his place, but she runs it. She’s got two short-order cooks, each named Lenny, and herself, and that’s it. Her father lives on a golf course in Florida. Eleventh hole. Dogleg left. She sends him a check every month. Summers, it’s actually a good-size check. The deal with the stools at the counter is that, one by one, as the place fell into disrepair, they kind of spun loose from their mountings, the fitting grooves worn from more than fifty years of fidgety swiveling. This happened over a period of ten, twelve years, Wood surmises, and Two Stools was forever meaning to take care of the problem, fix the place back up, nice, but she never seemed to have the time or the money to make the repairs. ’Course, most of the folks seemed to prefer the mismatched tables and chairs she’d collected and loosely scattered about the restaurant, and it was a lot cheaper to scavenge some tables and chairs than it was to adequately replace a row of lunch counter stools. Before anybody knew it, they were down to just these last two stools. One of the regulars, guy named Joe Scapsi, finally looked up from his home fries one late afternoon and affectionately remarked on how fortunate the waitress was to have her chair still standing. “If there weren’t two stools left together, honey, you’d have no place to sit down,” he reportedly said, or words to this effect, and from that moment forward, the waitress and her father’s restaurant went by their new name.
All of this comes to Wood in fifteen minutes, like a side dish to his small meal. Sure enough, this waitress is so big-butted he can’t imagine she ever was able to balance herself on a single stool, even as a small child. Yet, when she sits every few minutes or so to tally up her checks or credit the tabs of her regulars, she manages to slither elegantly between the two remaining stools and hoist herself onto both seats. Really, she moves like a fat ballerina, but a ballerina just the same. Most of her excess fleshiness drops into the space between the two stools, which do an otherwise serviceable job of supporting her considerable weight.
Wood looks on and connects the woman to his old points of reference. She reminds him first of one of those dancing hippos from an old Disney cartoon and then of a story he read in Variety, couple days back, about a similarly overweight woman who had brought suit against her local multiplex for failing to provide what her lawyer called “wide-body seating.” He wonders what it must be to go through life with such an added burden. Wondering, he upbraids himself for managing to translate even so innocuous a human condition as obesity into movie terms. Here he is, freshly disappeared into the middle of nowhere—or, more precisely, the edge of nowhere, this being a coastal town—and, first chance he gets, he comes right back to the trades, to the industry, to cartoons. This poor fat girl works two shifts to stay solvent, keep her father on the links and off welfare, sustain the out-of-work locals with her extremely reasonable prices, and shoulder the (mostly) good-natured taunts of her regulars, and she smiles underneath the indignity of having to use two counter stools to support her girth. It is all Wood can do to keep from optioning her life story.
“Refill?”
The voice startles Wood from his wonderings, principally because his mind was on something other than his coffee, but also because it sounds far too delicate to have come from such a big woman. Also, he is surprised that so large a woman could have sidled up alongside his table without warning. Here is her voice, again: “Most people, they order themselves a bottomless coffee, they drink maybe two, three cups.” The waitress’s tone is pleasant, playful. “They want their money’s worth.”
“Hit me,” Wood says back, matching her tone, inching his cup forward, and as she pours for him, he fixes on the still-moving flesh of her arms, their doughy warmth, the way she seems to occupy this incredible space without encroaching on his own. “This place have a name?” he says, looking up from his filled cup, making conversation.
“Not really,” she says, softly. “Folks know where to find us.”
“How ’bout yourself?”
“Know where to find me, too.” She laughs, knowing this is not quite what her new customer means to discern. “I’m always here.”
“No, I mean a name,” he clarifies. “What is your name?”
“Everyone calls me Two Stools,” she says, with practiced pride. “You can do the same.”
“I’d prefer to know your given name,” Wood persists, “if you don’t mind.”
“Two Stools is fine,” the waitress answers, stepping shyly away from the table in a way that perhaps suggests she does. “I don’t mind it at all. Even my father calls me Two Stools.”
“That’s fine,” Wood says, “but I’d prefer to know your real name.”
“Grace,” she announces, extending her hand. “Name’s Grace. Pleased to meet you.”
“Grace,” he says back, in appraisal. “Grace. I believe it suits you.” From any of Grace’s regulars, this line would have sounded counterfeit, but Terence Wood has a way about him when it comes to women. All women. Fat. Skinny. Pound ugly. They are all made to feel beautiful around him. This is sometimes an effort, sometimes not, but here, now, it is no trouble at all. Up close, this Grace has an astonishingly pretty face, and she smells (wonderfully) like fresh bread. There is something about her Wood cannot yet identify, but, nevertheless, has got him bent to distraction.
He collects her hand and is startled by the meat of it. He’s got big hands himself, but this woman can just about swallow him up with her paws. Her fingers are like sausages. Then, quickly, he’s off her hand and back on to these pleasantries. Right. He needs a name. Hadn’t thought of that. Okay, okay, think. Name. Something he can slip into, some new space he can occupy. A character, perhaps, from one of his pictures. Yes, that’s it. Someone he’s played before. Someone he knows. This way he gives himself not just a name, but a history, a personality. A plot.
His mind races over his credits, trying to place himself. There was that architect he played, lost his wife in an elevator accident, one of his own buildings. No, no, no. Too recent. And what would an architect be doing here, flannel-shirted, in a remote corner of Maine? What about that public defender, took up the rights of all those ’60s radicals? Joe Justice? What the hell kind of name was Joe Justice? (Jesus, he’s made a lot of shit pictures.) No, no, he needs something a little less assuming, something more generic. Whatwhatwhatwhat? Small-time circus owner. Neurosurgeon. Corrupt congressman. That gay guy he played, coming out to his family, his own kids. Nothing fits, until he hits on Front to Back, this all-but-forgotten draft-dodging picture he made opposite an undiscovered Goldie Hawn between campaign appearances for
Humphrey. Played a guy, fled to Canada, built a new life for himself. Could work. Picture sank like a cinder block, but it wasn’t half bad. The timing was just wrong, the director for shit, but this actually works okay for him now, this works it so that he can slip into this borrowed persona undetected. Far as he knows, the picture’s never been released on video. He can’t imagine anyone around here has seen it recently enough to remember it. Now he just needs to remember the fucking guy’s name.
He considers all of this in a moment, the same moment this Grace has been using to make Wood’s acquaintance. He’s still got hold of her meaty sausages; it has not yet become an awkward exchange.
“Trask,” he says, remembering the character’s name. “Harlan Trask. Just passing through.”
Alone
Pimletz shuffles into the Record-Transcript offices a half hour early and a couple hours shy of a night’s rest. Sleep didn’t come easy, and when it finally did, it didn’t matter.
He’s energized, still, by his swollen effort on the Wood obit, eager to soak up what there might be of collegial praise. He’ll even take grudging acknowledgment. Anything. Been forever since someone’s noticed something he’s written. Last time he made the front page was during Reagan’s first term—yes?—when the paper played the shooting death of a twelve-year-old Roxbury drug dealer way beyond deserving. Back then, the paper had a managing editor named Charlie (“King”) Tuthill, and the man was legendarily hot for any story to accent the desperation of Boston’s inner city youth. This was his thing. Janet Cooke’s faux Pulitzer had come and not yet gone, and King Tut was on the prowl for anything that might put his own rag on the same map. Guy would rub two stones together and call it an avalanche. This Roxbury youth had been gunned down in an otherwise innocuous dispute over an ounce of pedestrian dope, and Pimletz was called in to dress up the kid’s adolescent life and hard times with the kind of sorry prose for which he was not yet known.
Mourning Wood Page 7
