by Barry Rachin
Later in the day when the children were gone, Grace sat for the longest time staring at the new floor and wondering at the hidden allegory: the dirt and dust swept clean; the blemishes and discolorations undone; the multi-textured grain of each, thin board stripped, restored, made whole again.
A new floor. A new life.
******
The clock on the bedside table registered two a.m.. Grace’s brain was shutting down. Like a ship coming untethered from a dockside mooring, her body was drifting off to sleep. Her last conscious recollection was an image of Carl's deadpan face and cryptic, oddly visceral body language which kept floating back to her with obsessive force. Then with equal insistence, another image presented itself: that of Ed Gray, the neurasthenic Chairman of the English Department. Grace imagined him dressed in blue coveralls and steel-toed work boots laboriously swinging a mop back and forth across the classroom floor. With his wire-rimmed bifocals perched on the tip of his nose and the tattered copy of Pushkin's short stories protruding from his back pocket, the middle-aged academic flailed away with the string mop, splattering water in every direction.
Where this bizarre imagery came from or what it meant, she hadn't a clue. For sure, Ed Gray was an odd duck, but he wasn't a bad person. He certainly wasn't malicious like some people.
Like Stewart.
Stewart could be hateful and cruel. When they married, he seemed so full of enthusiasm and spunk. Misdirected enthusiasm. Self-serving, opportunistic spunk. A thousand-and-two questions in search of a thousand-and-three answers.
******
In the morning they watched the harbormaster cruise up the channel from the breakwater. During the summer he would be checking permits for anyone digging clams, but this late in the season it was just a routine patrol. Locals waded out waist deep with a wire clam rake, which they scraped along the sandy bottom. When they hit a hard object, they scooped it up. Mussels, smallish clams, succulent quahogs, even spiny starfish were all fair game.
They drove back across the narrow slip of land that connected the island to the mainland. Wild lilies, yellow with speckled mouths and lavender-fringed blossoms fading toward porcelain centers, rimmed the inland grasses. High up in the telephone pole, the osprey was feeding her young. Grace pulled off the road onto the stiff marsh grass so they could get a better view. “Osprey eggs seldom hatch at the same time," Grace said. "There could be a lapse of five days between the first born and the last chicks.
The women craned their heads far back but all they could see was the huge basket-shaped nest fashioned from twigs and branches. “The older chick dominates the younger ones. If hunting is good, there’s no problem among the chicks. But if food is scarce, the older ones won’t share even to the point of starvation.”
They ate breakfast at a bagel shop near the rotary then drove out to South Cape Beach. The beach was empty except for an older couple searching for sea glass and an occasional surf caster. The bluefish had been running since late September and sea bass were also plentiful.
The twosome headed off down the wintry beach. A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. Near a hillock in the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed close by a marshy wetland where phragmites grass rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. Angie meandered near the shallow surf, dodging stranded horseshoe crabs and rubbery stalks of seaweed. A pale jellyfish floated by, sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill.
"Those are synchronized flying kites," Grace said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. “Very expensive.”
Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns “Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I use to go every year.” The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.
"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." Angie had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.
"See how they adjust the height and direction,” Grace said, “by moving their hands."
Her daughter had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.
"Kites are easy,” Grace thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. “Something goes wrong with the routine,... you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple.”
Grace glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled all her malleable features at cross-purposes. “There was a letter from the court,” Angie said.
Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. “I asked the judge for a few extra dollars, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. “Why didn’t you just ask dad directly?” Grace had asked him on several occasions. More like begged. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Angie said, anticipating her mother’s thoughts.
“No, I guess not.”
Monkey syndrome. That’s what Grace called Stewart’s affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Stewart might have been an ace at the Toyota dealership, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and outstripped her father in subtle, undemonstrative ways that Stewart would never comprehend.
They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofilament line out over the water. “Any luck?” Grace asked.
“Not today.” He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. “Fish aren’t cooperating.” He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.
“Dad’s got this new girl friend,” Angie said.
“What happened to Gloria?” Angie shrugged. “What’s the new one like?”
Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn’t answer right away. “She’s nice enough.”
Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Grace imagined Stewart carrying his romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in a similar fashion, but kept the thought to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead, another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth.
“I’m going to take a vow of silence,” Grace spoke in a confidential tone. “Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string.”
“And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
A chalkboard and a string. Grace was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that’s faker, not ‘fakir’, as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton? Besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teacher eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Make an amboyna burl box? Grace was tired of all the phony baloney. The verisimilitude. The appearance of truth. The sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery beard.
******
On Sunday morning an icy chill gripped the air, but the sun quickly rose over the bay nudging the temperature up to a reasonable forty degrees. Crossing the inlet, the Osprey were feasting on the remains of a large fish. The mother held the mangled body in her beak while the fledglings ripped the flesh to pieces.
They cruised south on Route 28 into the center of Hyannis where the harbor was filled with private yachts and sailboats. On the main square that meandered along the wharf, they found a few boutiques still open this late in the season but came away empty handed. But for the cool weather, they could just as easily been on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive. They bought cappuccinos and croissants at a gourmet pastry shop and lounged outside on metal folding chairs with their food. From her handbag, Grace pulled a small brochure she picked up at the visitor’s bureau. “In 1602,” she read, “Captain Bartholomew Gosnold was the first of the Old World explorers to view the area now known as Hyannis. Settlers from England incorporated the Town of Barnstable in 1639."
“Scintillating.” Angie smeared butter on the flaky crust and sipped at her coffee.
“In 1666 Nicholas Davis, first settler and businessman, built his warehouse for pickling oysters in brine on Lewis Bay at the foot of what is now Pleasant Street.” “It says here,” she scanned further down on the pamphlet, “that, from the days of the earliest settlements, the Indian Sachem Yanno, for whom Hyannis is named, sold the area presently known as Hyannis as far as Craigville for 20 English pounds and two small pairs of pants.”
“Now you know why the Mashpee hate us,” her daughter added.
An elderly woman with a wrinkled face and platinum colored hair emerged from a jewelry store with several bags. She was carrying a funny looking dog that resembled a cross between a Shiatsu and a poodle. The dog had a face like an exploded cigar with dark, spiky hairs sprouting in a dozen different directions. The pooch was decked out in an almond-colored sweater and a collar studded with garish stones. The woman hurried past with a preoccupied expression, on her way to some hoity-toity tea party or socialite function. “Such a slave to fashion,” Grace muttered under her breath. A Boston Brahman with a pampered pooch. Not the sort of woman who would ever have to beg the courts for chump change. But still, the weather is delightful and it’s a blessing to get away.
Two doors down was a store with a blue awning. The sign over the door read Cape Cod Collectibles. Grace stepped over the threshold. Metal sculpture and small statuettes in various medium rested on tiered displays; pottery and ceramic vases were washed in a soft sheen from overhead track lighting. From a speaker in the rear, Clifford Brown's limpid jazz trumpet was navigating through the melodic chords to Joy Spring. The smoky horn leaped into the upper register, hammering out a barrage of staccato triplets before settling back into the final chorus of the tune.
A man came out from behind the counter. He was casually dressed in a V-necked sweater and hush puppies. “That sculpture you were admiring is by a local artist.” The fellow had a boyish appearance despite a barren patch on the back of his skull where the hair had thinned away to a mere wisp. “It sold yesterday.”
The piece, which stood four feet high, had been executed entirely in thin-gauged, brass. Using multiple strands of wire to recreate the instrument and performer, the artist had literally drawn the figure of a jazz saxophonist in silhouette. Off to the side was a trumpeter, a skier and a ballerina up on her toes. A five hundred dollar prima ballerina.
Grace budgeted everything. Without that extra twenty-five bucks from Stewart there was no margin for error. And yet, some people could blow five hundred dollars on a brass ballerina and never give the extravagance a second thought. The Kennedy compound was less than a mile down the road. The senator from Massachusetts could, on a whim, buy the jazz saxophonist or an entire sixteen-piece big band without breaking a sweat.
“Clever concept, don’t you think?” The proprietor explained how the artist drew a rough sketch in charcoal in order to visualize each figure. Then, using the drawing as a template, he shaped, rolled and twisted dozens of metal strands to bring the figure to life. “They’re three-dimensional,” he added. “The images have depth despite the thinness of the metal.”
The talkative owner knew Grace and her daughter had no intention of buying anything but didn’t seem to care and Grace appreciated that. To meet someone without an agenda or ulterior motive was refreshing. “My name’s Donald. Donald Carrington.” He handed Grace a business card. “Feel free to stop in any time.”
******
On Monday after classes, Grace went to the Brandenburg town library and searched for books by Pushkin. She found nothing. A volume by the author was available at a neighboring branch. Grace had the librarian order the book. When it arrived, she read the introduction and a half dozen short stories written in a simple but straightforward style. The prose was lean and muscular with a sharp, realistic edge. In one of the stories, a Mongol chieftain from an eastern province staged an uprising against the local ruler and was put to death. Was the tale meant to be taken literally or was there something more - a childish parable masking a deeper, hidden truth? In the biographical postscript that followed the stories, the editor wrote:
‘Alexander Pushkin’s highly unique style
laid the foundation for modern Russian literature.’
******
When she arrived home later in the afternoon, the light in the living room was burnt out. Grace replaced the bulb but that didn’t fix the problem. “It’s gotta be the switch,” Angie said.
Grace removed the plastic plate and stared at a jumble of wires. “Maybe you ought to shut of the electricity at the main box,” Angie cautioned, “before pulling things apart.”
“Stupid me,” Grace thought, easing her hands away from the bare wires. There were different voltages in different parts of the house. Two-twenty and one-ten. She wasn’t sure what she was dealing with. But replacing a wall switch wasn’t brain surgery. How difficult could it be to change a stupid switch? “Let’s go for a ride.”
At Home Depot the electrical aisle was thirty feet long with offerings on both sides. Fourteen-gauge wire in fifty-foot coils, junction boxes, wall outlets in a huge metal bin, black electrical tape, shiny metal conduit, wire strippers, needle-nose pliers and plastic splicing nuts in various color-coded sizes. With Angie bringing up the rear, Grace cornered a salesman.
“New or old installation?” The man had a walrus moustache and grumpy disposition.
“I just need a light switch.”
Everyone else seemed to know perfectly well what they were doing. There were contractors loading up shopping carts with every conceivable electrical offering. An older black man was rummaging in a bin of 20-amp circuit breakers. None of the other customers needed any help. The salesman hooked a thumb on either side of the buckle of his leather belt and scowled. His gut hung precariously out over the inverted buckle. “Two-way or three-way switch?”
Grace felt her brain grow numbed. “I don’t understand the question.”
The salesman made a sound that was a cross between a belch and a death r
attle. “You don’t know the first thing about electricity, do you?” He ran a crooked forefinger over the salt and pepper moustache. “Lot of people come in here. Do-it-yourselfers. They can manage a regular switch without too much trouble, but when there’s an extra hot wire thrown into the mix, that always sends them to the nuthouse.”
A fellow snaked passed them pushing a steel flatbed loaded with framing lumber and sheets of particle board. The metal wheels on the bottom of the cart made an unholy ruckus. “All I asked …”
“We’re not in business to teach novices complicated installations.” The salesman’s cell phone rang and he answered it. “Be back in a minute.” He strode off down the aisle as though escaping from the plague.
“Idiot!” Angie fumed.
Grace put her hands over both eyes and bent over as though someone had sucker punched her in the gut. She wept quietly and with infinite self-loathing. She had come to Home Depot tabula rasa, intent on facing down her demons, and what did she get? The electrical salesman from hell, a misogynistic son of a bitch!
“Gees,” Angie hissed, “get a grip!” Twenty feet away, the older black man sorting through circuit breakers was staring at Grace with a blank expression. The hardware department was no place for strong emotions. A young man with thick glasses was restocking a bin with yellow extension cords. Angie slithered in front of him. The man dodged to one side, but she blocked his path. “My mother needs help with a switch. Really really bad!”
“Two way or three way?” the geeky fellow asked. Angie’s mouth fell open. “How many switches,” he rephrased the question, “control the light that won’t work?”
