by Barry Rachin
“Just one.”
The man sauntered halfway down the aisle and removed a small switch from a bin. “There you go.” Grace stood beside her daughter now, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. “Something wrong, miss?” He seemed genuinely concerned.
“Allergies.”, She cleared her throat and spoke a bit more forcefully. “How do you install the damn thing?”
He turned the switch over. “There’re only three wires. Two black and a bare copper ground. Just hook the blacks - that’s your hot wires - to the bronze screws and the bare ground wire to the smaller green nut here at the bottom.” He pointed to each place as he spoke.”
“It doesn’t sound that difficult,” Angie said.
The young man wagged his head up and down. “Easy as snapping a circuit breaker into a junction box.”
“This is all I need?”
“That’s it, lady.” He pushed the glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Three-way switches are just a tad more complicated, but if you ever need to change one, come back and see me.” He handed Grace one of his business cards and hurried off down the aisle.
Angie studied the layout of the switch. “Cripes, I could do this!”
In the parking lot Grace hesitated. Turning to her daughter she said, “There's one more thing I want to do before we head home. It will just take a moment.”
The museum was open late due to the fall art show. The Brandenburg Gazette devoted considerable advertising to the event and several dozen visitors were still milling about the foyer with only half an hour to closing.
They found the standard fare of water color paintings—still lifes, floral arrangements and nature scenes. A potter with an unusual glazing technique had three bowls set out on a lighted display. Not all the offerings were conventional or even attractive. One offbeat artist had worked facial features into an odd-shaped gourd along with a bulbous nose and formidable set of teeth. A vegetative rodent. The work reminded Grace of the satanic creatures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“A bit too avant-garde for my tastes,” a woman sporting an Etienne handbag directly in front of them murmured to a friend.
Close by the back wall was a bust of Abraham Lincoln cast in bronze. The emancipator of the slaves looked rather melancholy. Grace could picture such a piece in a government building, but couldn’t imagine a morosely depressed former president sharing her personal living space.
“Here’s Carl’s box.” In the far corner was a diminutive box no more than four inches square. Unlike the amboyna burl masterpiece, it offered no fancy curves or daring swirls. The surfaces had been planed perfectly flat, the edges gently eased.
The sides of the box were fashioned from a light, cream-colored wood, but this was clearly just a pleasant detail and nothing more. The viewer’s eye was immediately drawn to the lid which was done in three, exotic contrasting woods—a mottled, golden outside layer which exuded an irresistible glow as though it contained its own, inner light source. Nearer the middle was a band of quilted, reddish wood and, at the center, a coffee-colored burl with numerous swirls and intricate patterns.
A tall blonde woman, the museum director, came up behind them. She had a pleasant, sensible face. “You like the box?” Grace nodded. “The lemony gold wood is avodire and the red is sapelé. Both come from Africa. The medallion in the center is walnut taken near the root of the tree. The tremendous pressure the wood is under creates the unusual, paisley pattern.”
"I know the artist,” Grace said. “He works at our school.”
The director smiled. Though it was late, she didn’t seem in any great hurry to close the museum. “Perhaps you could tell me something about the man. I haven’t actually met Carl personally.”
“But I thought -”
“When he made his application,” the director continued, “he simply filled out the form and clipped it to a brown paper bag. The box was in the bag.”
“Wierrrrd!” Angie held out the ‘r’ for dramatic effect.
The director reached out and waved an index finger over the lid. “Everybody ogles this little box but never bothers to look inside.” The director winked at Angie - a conspiratorial gesture - then motioned with a flick of her head. “Go ahead, open it.” Angie placed her thumb in an indentation on the front and raised the lid to reveal a poem which had been recessed beneath the lid.
Paradise is there, behind that door,
In the next room;
But I have lost the key.
Perhaps I have only mislaid it.
Kahlil Gibran
Paradise is there, behind that door,… A poem hidden away, like a precious gem, in a box. A gift within a gift. What did it mean?
“The paper is archival, acid neutralized so it will never fade or yellow. Come back in a hundred years and it will look just as crisp and clean as it does today.” The director glanced at her watch. “We’ll be closing in five minutes.” She lowered the lid hiding the enigmatic verse and went off to tell the other patrons. Grace grabbed a pen from her purse and, reopening the lid, jotted the poem on the back of a slip of paper.
******
Monday night they got home too late from the museum to tackle the light switch. The following evening after supper, Grace assembled what few tools Stewart left behind when he drove off in the U-haul. “So this is it.” She began unscrewing the light plate.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Angie cautioned. Her mother stared at her with a blank expression. “The power. You have to shut the electricity off at the main box.”
“Silly me.” They went down into the basement and tripped the circuit breaker that controlled the hall lighting.
Back upstairs, all the lights in the entryway were dead. Grace used the Phillips screwdriver to remove the two screws securing the switch to the wall. Just as the pleasant salesman with the horn-rimmed glasses had assured her, the black wires were fastened to the brass nuts; the neutral ground tucked under beneath the switch. All she had to do was remove each wire, one at a time, from the broken switch and shift it over to the new one.
And to think the obnoxious salesman with the bowling ball gut had tried to break her spirit - make her feel like the only thing women were good for was cleaning house and fornicating, not necessarily in that order. Boorish swine! He probably sat home all day Sunday watching WWF wrestling matches on his flat screen TV and smashing empty beer cans on the side of his primordial skull.
All the wires were replaced and Grace tossed the broken switch into the trash. “Moment of truth.” Angie went downstairs and threw the circuit breaker. The other lights went on but the hallway was still dark. A fleeting image of the salesman with the walrus moustache floated back to her. He was wagging a finger in front of Grace’s nose, his lips curled in a dismissive sneer.
This wasn’t rocket science. For God’s sakes, how difficult could it be? Grace peered into the metal receptacle box. “Wait a minute. I see the problem.” The topmost wire had wiggled loose from the fastener, when she folded the wires repositioning them in the wall. She poked at the loose wire with the tip of her screwdriver. Big mistake! The second the metal blade made contact with the bare wire, there was a loud hissing sound and a bright arc of white light shot through the air.
“Mom!”
Grace tumbled backward, collapsing in a heap on the floor, and the room went totally dark again. Dead silence. “I think,” Grace gingerly lifted herself up on her elbows, “we were suppose to shut the power down.”
Angie held a flashlight over the box while her mother attached the errant wire. When they flipped the power back on, all the lights worked. “On. Off.” Grace flipped the switch and watched the light alternately glow then fade to darkness. “On. Off. On. Off. This is fun.”
“You’re a regular card-carrying electrician.” Angie stared up at the ceiling as her mother played with the new switch. Suddenly her daughter’s face clouded over. “Damn!”
“What’s wrong?”
Angie gestured towar
d the picture window. “We’ve got company.”
Grace peered out the window, but the street was empty. It was after nine o’clock. For the past hour, a light rain had been falling in a steady drizzle. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Over there by the shrubs.” Diagonally across the street and partially concealed behind an outgrowth of lilacs stood Dwight Goober, the Village Idiot.
Grace snuffed the lights, climbed the stairs and drifted noiselessly into the bedroom. She lifted the curtain and peered into the street.
“What’s he doing now?” Angie whispered anxiously. Dwight had shifted away from the lilacs and was standing in the middle of the street. All six feet of him. At nine o’clock on a school night in the pouring rain. Even when the boy stood rooted in one place, all his limbs were in perpetual motion, elbows stabbing the moist air, hips jerking about fitfully.
“He’s like a wild animal,” Grace mused. “A dangerous one at that.”
There had been a youth at Brandenburg Middle School several years back who reminded Grace of Dwight Goober. Same feral quality and lack of impulse control. Some of the teachers felt sorry for the troubled youth, even suggesting that he might benefit from one-on-one counseling. The well-intentioned teachers changed their tune after a kindergartener was found raped and beaten in the woods behind the elementary school.
“What are you going to do?” Angie pressed.
“I don’t know.” What could she do? Call the police and, as soon as Dwight saw the flashing patrol car lights turning onto Adeline Avenue, he would run off down a side street as far as the cul-de-sac and disappear into the woods. The police might take a report, but then he’d be back the next night, like a bad dream, to settle scores. Dwight Goober was vindictive. He smashed mail boxes, let the air out of neighbors’ tires, set an empty lot on fire and trashed the Wilson’s storage shed. Not that anything ever came of it. When something rotten happened, everybody knew Dwight was to blame but go try and prove it. He had the brainpower of a slug but always did his malicious dirty work late at night, when it was impossible to see much of anything and the neighbors already were sound asleep. Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer, The Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper, Dwight Goober—they were all cut from the same bolt of cloth. It wasn’t as simple as fixing a broken light switch.
“What am I going to do?” She repeated her daughter’s question. Grace boiled herself a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen making out the grocery list. When the clock struck eleven, she went back to the bedroom and pulled back the curtain a half inch.
“Is he still there?” Angie had taken a shower and changed into a pair of flannel pajamas.
“Yes, over by the lilacs again.” Dwight was lurking in the rain with no hat, swaying from side to side like a back ward schizophrenic. But he wasn’t psychotic, not in the traditional sense.
“Maybe he’ll catch pneumonia.”
“Not likely,” Grace replied. A herd of cows over at the Cumberland Dairy frequently stayed out in the rain for days. They seldom became sick. Sometimes their hooves got infected, what with the mud and muck, but, otherwise, inclement weather was just a minor inconvenience. Grace lay down on the bed but she couldn’t sleep. All the excitement and exhilaration over fixing the switch ebbed away. She felt depressed. Dwight Goober was a blight on society. A malignant growth. The damage he did to the community was exponential. He had the power to turn the whole neighborhood topsy-turvy, but what could anyone do?
Shortly before midnight, Grace got up to pee. She went and looked out the window. The rain was still coming down. The street was empty now, Dwight crawled off to his smelly lair. She went back to bed and pulled the comforter up around her throat. A vision of the poem box danced in her mind’s eye.
Paradise is there, behind that door,
In the next room;
But I have lost the key.
Perhaps I have only mislaid it.
A car swerved onto the street and the rain-soaked tires made a gurgling sound. Only fools would argue that an earthly paradise was easy to come by. Too many complications, missed opportunities, false starts. Tomorrow midterm grades would be printed and sent home. Brandenburg had scored poorly on the state MCAS test, and Ed Gray was on the warpath. He scheduled a faculty meeting to plan a strategy to remedy the problem. More aggravation. More grief. What year was it exactly when Grace lost her key to paradise? But then, as the Lebanese poet coyly implied, perhaps she had only mislaid it. Having almost electrocuted herself earlier in the evening, she still managed to fix the light switch. Hopefully, before she ended up toothless and senile in an old age home, she could figure how to set her private universe back on an even, harmonious course.
******
Every year the Brandenburg Knights of Columbus donated turkey dinners to needy families. Grace helped deliver meals. It was a family tradition. On Thanksgiving morning the phone rang. “We got three deliveries, all in the same area.”
Grace grabbed a pen and jotted down the addresses. Around ten she and her daughter stopped by the hall and collected the meals. The first stop was an elderly man who lived with his wife and a Siamese cat. The wife suffered from Parkinson’s disease and sat quietly in a recliner while her husband arranged the food in the refrigerator. Next was a Hispanic family in a three-decker tenement over by the Safeway Plaza. The father broke his leg and was out on disability. The wife thanked them profusely and offered Angie a small bundle of sugar cookies.
“Two down one to go.” Grace pulled the car back out in traffic. They drove cross town past the new fire station and cruised through an older residential area of modest split level ranches built in the mid-fifties. The single family home was similar to the others except for a fresh coat of slate blue paint. Grace rang the doorbell.
When the door opened, she blinked twice and felt her jaw go slack. Carl Solomon was standing in the doorway. He wore tan Dockers with a plaid flannel shirt; the heavy work boots had given way to a pair of suede Nikes. “We’re delivering Thanksgiving meals.” The remark was phrased more like a question than a statement of fact.
“The Knights of Columbus called earlier,” Carl replied. “Mrs. Shapiro was expecting you.”
An elderly woman, petite and neatly dressed, limped into the room favoring her right leg. “Whose there, Carl?” The accent was distinctly European but with another inflection that Grace could not readily identify.
“Your holiday meal,” he explained.
“Please come in. I’ll just be a minute.” The woman took the food and went off. The living room was quite small but neatly arranged. An old-fashioned mahogany table decorated with lace doilies stood in the center of the room. Reflecting the somber tastes of a previous age, a stuffed arm chair rested in the far corner next to a tiffany lamp and brocade ottoman. Scattered about the room were several small boxes with fancy inlays.
“I know you,” Carl said softly. “The English teacher.”
“We saw your box at the museum,” Grace blurted out, stumbling over the words. “The one with the Gibran verse.”
Angie kept looking back and forth between her mother and the man in the flannel shirt. “Wait a minute. You’re the janitor who makes boxes!” Carl shrugged then his face dissolved in a self-conscious grin. “Someone loses a key but then maybe he only misplaced it and can’t get into paradise or heaven or whatever ...”
“I think,” Grace interrupted, “the verse is intended as an allegory.”
“You understood the poem?” Carl’s eyes glowed with fixed intensity.
“Perhaps,... not completely.” Grace blushed and felt the words catch like a logjam in her throat.
Finally, Mrs. Shapiro returned carrying a tray of pastries. “I hope you don’t have to rush away.’
“No, you’re our last stop.” Graced eyed the pastry. “Is that German strudel?”
“Homemade, no less.”
Carl brought napkins and cups from the kitchen. Mrs. Shapiro eased gently onto a chair. “Had a stroke in April and I’m still not a
hundred per cent. Old age—it’s a real pain in the butt.” “So you know Carl?”
“Yes, from school. “I teach at the middle school.”
“When I was her age,” Mrs. Shapiro waved her good hand fitfully in Angie’s direction, “we were reading The Magic Mountain and Goethe’s Faust. Now you’re lucky if young people have enough patience to wade through the National Inquirer.”
Carl grinned. “Ruth can be a bit melodramatic.”
“For what it’s worth, I read The Magic Mountain my freshman year in college,” Grace replied. “Thomas Mann is one of my favorite writers.”
Mrs. Shapiro raised an eyebrow. “You just made a friend for life.” In the street a car with a blown muffler backfired as it raced past the house. The old woman muttered something angrily in a language that Grace could not readily identify. She picked up a word or two in German but then there were others in a more guttural tongue that eluded her. “That bum—he lives two blocks down,” Mrs. Shapiro groused. “Almost ran a kid over last week. You might think he was competing in the Daytona 500.”
Grace broke off a piece of strudel and nibbled at a powdered raisin. The papery thin layers of pastry dough were flaking in her fingers.“ What was that you said a moment ago?”
“Du solst wachsen wie ein tzibilah …” “It’s Yiddish. Old German mixed up with Hebrew and some Slavic offerings. The European Jews spoke it as a common tongue for centuries. A modern day Esperanto.”
“And the meaning??”
“Well, it’s not very nice,” Mrs. Shapiro didn’t seem terribly contrite. “I was referring to the hooligan who just used our street for a drag strip. I said that he should grow like an onion with his head in the ground and ass in the air.”
Grace flinched, not expecting such language from an elderly woman, while Angie burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.
Mrs. Shapiro talked at great length about a variety of subjects. Born in Germany, she immigrated to Israel only a few years later when her parents fled the Nazis. She worked as a chicken farmer—a very smelly affair—then a journalist with Yediot Aharanot, a popular Hebrew newspaper. In the early sixties she emigrated to the United States and taught German at Boston State College, where she met her third husband. What happened to the other two she conveniently omitted or forgot to mention.
