American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “She doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Maybe I’m not so easy to live with, Scoots. I drink. I smoke. I swear. I buy Nazi cars. Maybe I’m not so good for you and your sister to be around. Your dad moved out, and what does your mom do? She takes in the first fleabitten old mongrel that shows up on her porch. Like that Mrs. Payson who owns the Mets—she doesn’t go for a young husband like your father, she gets one with maybe a little too much mileage.”

  “Gil Hodges just hit a home run.”

  “And Don Zimmer’s playing third with a metal plate in his head. I’m not saying I’m worthless, kid. Hell, I’m designing conducting coils for the strongest magnet mankind’s ever put together. I’m just saying your mom and I—we had some laughs, and now it’s time for me to chug off in my little insect car and quit corrupting the kids, you know?”

  “You aren’t corrupting me. I’m eleven. I can take care of myself.”

  Harvey didn’t say much after that. He turned up the volume and together we listened as the Cardinals piled up the runs. The final score that day would be 11–4. It was to be the first of nine straight losses for the Mets. They wouldn’t catch a break until they faced off against the Pirates twelve days later, on April 23.

  During a commercial for Rheingold Beer sung by Vic Damone, I turned down the volume and asked my stepfather when he was moving out.

  “Couple of days.”

  “Will Connie and I get to see you again?”

  “I won’t be a stranger. In fact, your mom says once I get my own place, you can come over and listen to the games whenever you like. And your sister can come too. I have a feeling I’m going to start missing her linguine real fast.”

  I rested my head against the glass of the passenger window. Even with the pervasive smell of the cigar smoke and the beer, I could detect the distinct rubber and vinyl scent of a virgin car. I liked the smell. New cars reminded me that change isn’t always bad. I tried to see my stepfather Harvey’s departure this way. Harvey knew how much I had grown to love him and look up to him, even though he was a good fifteen years or so older than my mother and obstinately set in his ways (as he would be the first to admit). He had taught me everything I knew about baseball and cars and technology and science, and had been, in truth, over these last two years, much more of a father to me than my own.

  I think Harvey knew this and I think it made having to tell me about the decision he and my mom had reached a hard thing to do. Harvey had been married only once before, many years ago for a few months after he got out of the Navy. He never talked about his first wife and I didn’t ask. He never had kids. Connie and I were the closest he was ever going to come to having kids.

  Harvey turned up the radio. But a moment later there was a knock at my window. It was my older sister Connie. I rolled down the window. “Is the game over?” she asked.

  “Bottom of the sixth,” said Harvey.

  “I’m making linguine.”

  “Did your mom talk to you?”

  Connie nodded. I could tell from the puffiness of her eyes that she’d been crying.

  “You two want to come in and listen to the game while we eat? Mom says it’ll be okay.”

  I gave my stepfather the same hopeful look as my sister. “I got my new transistor radio,” I said, holding it up, as if he hadn’t been with me four days earlier when I picked it out.

  “Sure,” he said. He turned off the radio and picked up his nearly empty third bottle of beer. Connie looked at the bottle and then looked at me. “Have you been drinking too?” she asked.

  I nodded. “But don’t tell Mom.”

  “I won’t tell Mom if Harvey gives me a pull.”

  Harvey held the bottle up for Connie to reach in and take through the window. “You see why your mother’s kicking me out, don’t you?”

  We had Connie’s linguine, which was seasoned with an ungodly amount of oregano (just the way we all liked it). My mother and stepfather were civil, almost friendly to one another at the table, and when the game was over and the injury of defeat was patched up with positive thoughts from the broadcasting trio on the future of the franchise, Harvey took me aside. Quoting the famous Yankee and future Mets player and manager Yogi Berra, he said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

  Then he handed me a fork he’d lifted from the table, and turning his face so I wouldn’t see it, went out onto the back porch to smoke another Tiparillo. I didn’t follow him. He had a lot of thinking to do about his next inning.

  1963

  ESTIVATING IN NEW JERSEY

  Adrian Martini took out his handkerchief and wiped the beading sweat from his forehead. It was late September but it felt like late July.

  “Are you allowed to call it Indian summer when summer never really left?” asked Benny Baum, the other salesman working the floor that afternoon at Landis Avenue Appliances. Benny took a swig of his Coca-Cola, the third bottle he’d plucked from the frosty commercial cooler that afternoon. The cooler was put there by the store’s owner for the refreshment of his customers, especially those who had stepped into the un-airconditioned south Jersey appliance store and then seemed immediately desirous of stepping right back out again. The reason was this: in spite of meteorological evidence that argued against it, the owner had a seasonal habit of turning off his store’s central air conditioning unit the day after Labor Day. Nobody—not Adrian or Benny or Sophia, who worked in Accounts (and had come to work this day wearing more bath powder than Blanche DuBois)—could talk him out of it.

  “Was that a real question or are you being rhetorical?” replied Adrian, sticking his now soggy handkerchief back into his trousers pocket.

  “Doesn’t matter. Just making conversation,” said Benny through a half-yawn.

  Adrian was only barely listening to his sales colleague. He was watching the two kids presently situating themselves on the linoleum floor in front of the store’s new Magnavox 330-square-inch console. Anticipating their arrival, Adrian had turned on the set and made sure it was tuned to Channel 6. Adrian did this every afternoon he was in the store, and every afternoon he was in the store the girl and boy could be counted on with almost clocklike punctuality to show up between 3:50 and 4:00. This meant that every weekday afternoon of every week, Landis Avenue Appliances got a ten-minute helping of American Bandstand rock and roll, leading into the main attraction: Popeye Theatre, hosted by Sally Starr. Thursday was Adrian’s day off. But he knew that the girl and boy came to watch Popeye and the Three Stooges and cowgirl Sally Starr on Thursday, too (along with the Dick Clark appetizer), because Benny told him so.

  The girl, who looked to be about nine, and the boy, who looked to be about seven, had started making their afternoon visits about two months ago. Adrian and Benny figured that the kids didn’t have a TV at home. Mr. Poitras, the store’s owner, didn’t mind. In fact, he liked to think of the kids as props in a sort of real-life diorama about home and hearth and family togetherness—the hearth, the pot-bellied stove, if you will, of twentieth-century America being a sparkling new 330-square-inch Magnavox American Traditional, Normandy Provincial, or Danish Modern console television. (And nobody beats our competitive prices!)

  Benny took another gulp of Coca-Cola. He pushed the cool bottle against his hot cheek. The store was bereft of customers. Both men were feeling lethargic in the heat. “Who sends their kids to an appliance store every day?”

  “What’s that?” asked Adrian. The show the girl and boy had come to see had just gotten started. The volume was turned up and Adrian was listening for Sally Starr’s daily salutation: “Hope you feel as good as you look, ’cuz you sure look good to your gal Sal!”

  “I mean, we’re not talking adolescents here,” Benny went on. “My Rebecca just turned eight. I wouldn’t let her cross the street by herself, let alone come all the way down to Landis Avenue without some kind of chaperone.”

  Adrian shook his head slowly. “Beats me. Maybe someday I’ll si
t down with them and get the story. They always seem so engrossed in their show, though; I don’t have the heart to interrupt.”

  Fortuitously, his opportunity came ten minutes later, when the power went out. It wasn’t a long outage and Benny attributed it to all the people cranking up their air conditioning at a time of year when the grid wasn’t prepared for the extra demand. Not that Landis Avenue Appliances was making much of a contribution to the temporary electricity crisis; except for the lights and a couple of TVs and the refrigerated Coca-Cola cooler, Mr. Poitras’s store was hardly pulling any watts at all.

  “The TV’s broken,” said Kirk, the seven-year-old, looking up at Adrian.

  “It ain’t the TV, pardner. Power’s out all over the store. See? No lights.” Adrian called Kirk “pardner” in deference to the boy’s cowboy hat. Kirk’s older sister Angela was wearing a Western hat too, hers very close to the design of that of the “Philadelphia Annie Oakley,” Sally Starr.

  “When do you think it’ll come back on?” asked Kirk, his fretful expression betraying the degree to which both Kirk and Angela depended on Sally Starr for their afternoon fix.

  “Soon, I’m sure,” said Adrian. “Somebody at the power station probably just has to flip a switch. Would you like a soda?”

  Both Kirk and Angela nodded. Kirk’s tongue licked one corner of his mouth in eager anticipation.

  Adrian signalled for Benny to come bring the kids a couple of Coca-Colas. “And get me one too,” he added.

  A couple of minutes later, Adrian and Kirk and Angela were sitting on the floor of the half-darkened store, drinking sodas and talking about Sally Starr and her favorite horse and Popeye and Olive Oyl and Larry, Curly, and Moe, and the incongruity of a rootin’ tootin’ Old West cowgirl being friends with an animated sailor and three violently bellicose slapstick comedians from urban America. Kirk pointed out that Popeye—at least the full-sized cutout of Popeye that adorned the set of Sally’s show—was dressed like a cowboy. Case closed.

  While the three were sitting and chatting and enjoying the “Pause that Refreshes,” a middle-aged couple came into the store to look at the new television models, finding no problem at all with the fact that they would have to do so in the minimal lighting offered by the store’s sunlit front display windows, and Benny Baum, the consummate appliance salesman, finding no problem at all in their finding no problem.

  Eventually Benny and his customers wended their way over to the dormant Magnavox American Traditional. “Wish you could see the picture on this new 2-MV357 model,” said Benny. “I’m thinking of trading in my very own RCA for this technological marvel.”

  “What kind of wood is this?” asked the woman, reaching over Angela, who politely scooted out of her way. The woman ran her hand over the grain of the cabinet top.

  “Hold on to your hat, madam—it’s mahogany! And even though we don’t have one in stock yet, Magnavox also puts out a Far Eastern Contemporary model similar to this one in ebony.”

  “I like ebony,” said the woman, who was holding an all-black clutch. Addressing Adrian, who was still sitting Indian-style on the floor, she said, “Are these your children? They’re quite well behaved. My grandchildren would be running all over the store, sword-fighting with the rabbit ears.”

  “No, these aren’t mine,” said Adrian, smiling politely.

  After Benny and his customers had sauntered off, Adrian looked at both Kirk and Angela and said, “Whose little ones are you?”

  “We live with our mother,” answered Angela.

  “No father?”

  Angela shook her head.

  “We don’t have a daddy, but we’ve got a bunch of uncles,” offered Kirk.

  “Not really uncles,” corrected Angela. “Mama has a lot of boyfriends.” This last statement came out as simple fact—neither brag nor censure.

  Adrian wasn’t sure if he should ask the question that next begged to be asked. But the kids had been forthcoming up to this point, and it was about time, he thought, to get a better sense as to why Kirk and Angela spent ten hours a week being babysat at Landis Avenue Appliances by Adrian and Benny, Sally, and Popeye the Sailor Man. “Is this when your mother’s boyfriends come to see her?”

  Angela nodded. It wasn’t an eager admission, and yet something in her look told Adrian that she might be willing to elaborate. Unfortunately, the conversation was cut short by the return of an electrical current to Landis Avenue Appliances. Kirk jumped up and turned the television back on.

  “You’re in good shape, kids. Probably just missed some cartoon you’d already seen.” Adrian pulled himself up from the floor. He was still a youthful thirty-four, but his legs protested. Restored to his feet, he tousled Kirk’s short-cropped brown hair. “Say hello to Sally for me,” he said, walking away. Kirk and Angela both nodded, their eyes fixed on the screen, waiting for the cathode ray tube of the Magnavox American Traditional console to charge back up and Sally to miraculously appear out of the ether.

  The next day, Adrian’s day off, was devoted to errands: the bank, the post office, a visit with an old high school buddy turned insurance agent who had been after Adrian for months to buy a term life insurance policy, even though Adrian wasn’t married and had no other beneficiary to speak of, except for a mother in Red Bank whom he would no doubt outlive.

  The highlight of the day was to be lunch with a woman he’d met at a party thrown by a friend of a friend in Bridgeton. Adrian recalled the woman as having been funny and smolderingly beautiful—a hot fudge sundae cross between the cool of Jackie Kennedy and the heat of Mamie Van Dorn. Adrian and his impromptu date for the evening had spent very little time talking about themselves, the preferred topic of their increasingly intoxicated, flirtation-larded colloquy being the differences between the primetime intern Dr. Kildare and the primetime surgeon Ben Casey, though Adrian never once mentioned that he might know a little something about television programming since he sold TVs for a living. Like Adrian, the woman lived in Vineland—only a couple of blocks from the appliance store, actually—and after Adrian offered to drive her home that night, she had been all over him with her Yellow Page–walking, bright-red-polished talons while he labored heroically to keep the car on the road. (“Why,” he wondered to himself in the midst of her hungry advances, “couldn’t women be just as deliciously horny sober as they are when they get tight?”)

  She didn’t invite him in. “Complications,” was her explanation.

  Now Adrian was curious to know if the woman, whose name was Claire, would be in an equally libidinous mood over club sandwiches and glasses of alcohol-free lemonade.

  She was. Which was not exactly what Adrian had been expecting, though he couldn’t say he was disappointed. He knew she wasn’t married—at least that is what she had told him. And he wasn’t married. And this was his day off. And after all, he hadn’t—he would be ashamed to admit—been with a woman in almost four months: a record dry spell that he was eager to break without having to resort to paid companionship.

  “There’s a nice motel over by the Delsea Drive-in,” said Adrian, “if you don’t find that kind of thing, you know—”

  Adrian fumbled for the word, but Claire found it: “Tawdry. But you see, I like tawdry. I like to be bad. And I like to be with men who want me to be bad.”

  “But we hardly know a thing about each other,” he teased.

  “Like that matters,” she said with a wink, and then pinched Adrian’s nose. “And that’s the way I like it. Two ships, you know, fucking in the night. Except in our case, it’s the afternoon. Buy me a drink, Adrian. After that—well, forget the motel. Let’s us drive right on over to my place.”

  “How’s about we drive on over to your place right now?” asked Adrian, who suddenly could think of nothing he’d rather do than hop into the sack with this sultry woman of mystery.

  Claire shook her head. Her whole torso seemed to wriggle, her faux pearl necklace whipping against her heaving, taunting chest. “No can do, Adrian. The kid
dies come home from school at three-thirty and they’re not out of the house until close to four. From four to six you can have me all to yourself.”

  Adrian sat forward in his seat. “Where do they go?”

  “Who, sweetie?”

  “The kids. Where do they go at four?”

  “I really don’t know. Our neighborhood is lousy with kids for them to play with. Some days I think they walk over to the appliance store and watch Captain Kangaroo.”

  Adrian didn’t respond. Not right away. Then he said in a voice modulated by the sudden deflation of his libido, “Captain Kangaroo comes on in the morning. More than likely they’d be watching Sally Starr.”

  “Sally who?”

  “Sally Starr. She wears six-shooters and is on a first-name basis with each of the Three Stooges.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  Adrian shrugged. He shook his head. He dreaded asking the question that logically came next, but he had to know the answer for sure. “Your kids—how old are they?”

  Claire exhaled. Angrily. “What’s with the third degree? Hey, wait a minute—I get it; you don’t get yourself involved with women with kids, is that it? Look, buster, I’m not asking you to take me down the aisle. I’m only talking about a fucking four o’clock roll in the hay. Look. Forget it.” She stood.

  “I didn’t ask about them because—”

  Adrian was stopped short by Claire’s suddenly piercing glower. She gave her dress an upward yank, covering up a few inches of her munificent décolletage. The show was over—or, rather, the coming attraction for a show that just got cancelled. “My kids are my own business. And none of yours. And if you have a problem with that, which it looks like you do, then let’s just nip this thing in the bud. I’ve got somebody else I was hoping to see this afternoon anyway.”

  There was nothing else to be said, but Claire said something all the same: “I got a girl, Angela—she’s nine and a half. I got a boy, Kirk—he just turned seven. They’re good kids, but I got no desire to play June Cleaver every fucking minute of every fucking day. I thought you were bright enough to see that.”