Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  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 l
ives 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.

  But she didn’t just speak about herself. After Mr. Shapiro passed away, she rented space to make ends meet. Carl responded to an ad in the local classifieds. He had been staying by the week in a rooming house over on the east side. Not a nice place—a lot of riff raff and fershtunkener bums. Her last husband—may he rest in peace—had been a cabinetmaker. While cleaning the workbench, Carl found a book on joinery buried under a pile of pipe clamps and plywood jigs. He asked Mrs. Shapiro’s permission before using any of her late husband’s tools.

  ******

  What a character!” Angie said. Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that they take what was left of the strudel and Carl had wrapped it in a paper plate. “He treats her swell, don’t he?”

  “Doesn’t he,” her mother corrected. “And, yes, he treats Mrs. Shapiro very respectfully indeed.”

  As they were preparing to leave, Carl helped Mrs. Shapiro to her feet, supporting her under the left elbow, which was her weak side. Whether it was clearing the table or locating a three-pronged cane so she could see the visitors off, there was nothing forced or affected in his actions.

  “Carl’s nice,” Angie said. “A bit Neanderthal but nice.” There was no response. “So…”

  “So what?” Like an over-the-hill boxer telegraphing his punches, Grace could see where her daughter was heading with the conversation.

  “What do you think, I mean, about Carl?”

  “The world would be a splendid place if there were more people like him.” Grace realized that she was doing ‘the voice’. The voice was a stilted, high pitched tone she unconsciously slipped into whenever she felt uncomfortable, out of her element. She pulled up at an intersection and waited for the light to turn. Five more minutes and they would be safely home. A quick shower and off to bed. Tomorrow was another full day at school, the formal beginning of a new semester and grading period.

  “Why don’t you ask him out on a date?” There was no reply. “Women do it all the time. They see somebody they like. Maybe the guy’s shy, … doesn’t know how to approach woman … socially challenged.” Grace stared at her daughter in disbelief. “You been divorced a year and it’s not like any hot prospects are breaking down the door to ask you out on a date.”

  “You have such a succinct way of putting things.”

  “Which isn’t an answer,” Angie shot back petulantly.

  “Carl may be well read and a gifted woodworker, but he’s also a custodian at the school where I work.” She blew out her cheeks in despair. “I’d be the laughing stock of Brandenburg Middle School.”

  “This is America, not India. Carl’s not some grubby pariah.”

  A fleeting image of the yogi with the chalkboard flash in front of Grace’s eyes. “No, you’re right, but still …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” They were home. She set the shift in park and flicked off the ignition. “I’ll think about it,” Grace replied weakly.

  “No you won’t,” her daughter made no effort to conceal her disgust. “You always play it safe. You lost the key to paradise when dad cheated. You’d rather hide behind allegories and metaphors than risk something to get it back.”

  ******

  Later that night, Angie followed her mother into the bathroom and sat pensively on the toilet while she got ready for bed. “Those curvy boxes we saw over at Mrs. Shapiro’s house were designed by a woman.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Grace put the toothbrush away and reached for the dental floss. Before they left the house, Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that Carl show them a new piece he was working on. The box was similar to the one Grace had seen in the boiler room. “It’s not my design,” Carl admitted in an offhand manner. “There’s a woodworker, Lois Keener Ventura, from Pennsylvania. She came up with the original design. These are just reproductions.”

  Lois Keener Ventura had an artistic vision. A vision of sumptuous boxes that would mimic the shape of fish, plants, whales, even boa constrictors. Like the ingenious, brass wire sculptures in Hyannis, Ms Ventura sketched her improbable designs out on paper first, then transformed the whimsical doodles into exotic and voluptuous forms with names like boa, surf, minnow, whaleplay and leaf.

  Carl showed them a half dozen other boxes, all faithful, meticulous reproductions. One tall box Carl nicknamed the ‘Koa boa’. Fashioned from a slab of greenish gold, Hawaiian koa, it curled in a sinuous series of ‘S’ patterns. A lethal reptile frozen in wood. “A woman,” Angie spoke softly, “can do just about anything she sets her mind to.”

  Grace nodded in the affirmative. It didn’t matter that Carl borrowed the design. The workmanship was his as was the clever idea to decorate the drawers with amboyna burl. “A woman woodworker.” Grace ran the floss behind an upper molar then tossed it in the trash. “Now that’s something special!”

  ******

  Friday morning Grace met with Ed Gray at Adam's Diner. He wanted to discuss the school’s poor performance in the English portion of the MCAS test over breakfast. It wasn’t a formal meeting. That would come later, include everyone in the English department and tediously drag on through the remainder of the school year. Ed was mildly paranoid; he didn’t trust many of the ELA teachers. They harbored dangerous ideas. This meeting was more a pep rally, an effort to brain storm and set an early agenda.

  “Poached eggs with rye,” Ed handed the menu back to the waitress. “Lightly toasted, not too much butter.”

  “And to drink?” The cloying smell of maple syrup and hash brown potatoes sifted through the restaurant.

  “An Earl Grey tea with honey.”

  “We’re fresh out of honey,” the woman replied.

  Ed scowled and fidgeted in his seat. “Coffee… decaf with skim milk.”

  Grace glanced at the menu. All the breakfast entrees were named after popular dances. There was the Charleston - two eggs, with hash browns and a slab of Canadian bacon; the Viennese Waltz - similar but with smoked sausage as the meat; the Hokey Pokey - blueberry pancakes slathered with whipped cream; and the Last Tango in Paris. Grace had used this unusual offering as her basis for the ’crazy omelet’. She ordered the Charleston with a cup of coffee.

  “Now there’s a work in progress,” Ed interjected, gesturing with his eyes toward the entryway. A painfully thin, disheveled man had just wandered in and sat down on a stool at the counter. “That fellow comes here every day,” Ed said in a hushed voice, “A burnt out drunk. He’s off the sauce now - or at least that’s what he says. Lives over by the YMCA in subsidized housing and gets a disability check.”

  “And how do you know all this?” Grace asked with an amuse expressio
n.

  Ed Gray removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It was my great misfortune to be sitting at the counter one day when he arrived for breakfast.” Sure enough, the reformed drunk latched on to the ear of the fellow sitting next to him and began haranguing the customer with a long-winded story. At one point he laughed, a deep-down, straight-from-the-gut raucous belly laugh. Grace observed that four or five teeth on the top were missing - punched out, rotted away or sacrificed in a drunken fog. “What a blowhard!” Ed seethed.

  Grace smiled inwardly. She could picture Ed Gray, a captive audience, sitting next to the reformed drunk as he held court. A court of fools.

  “About the test scores,” Ed ran his fingers through a tuft of thinning hair, “Brandenburg is down fifteen points over last year. Nobody’s happy.”

  All the staff was in a similar bind. A math teacher could no longer just teach basic algebra any more than a history teacher could focus on the Civil War or Great Depression. Compelled to teach to the test, they had no control over what the pundits in Boston chose from one year to the next. The end result: the brightest students received endless praise; average kids were made to feel like dopes and dunces - a motley collection of ineffectual losers; and the marginal students cursed the day they ever set foot in a public school. It was an insidious blame game. Teachers blamed the students for not trying hard enough or, worse yet, downright laziness; parents pointed an accusing finger at the school; the superintendent, taking the bureaucratic high road, conveniently reprimanded all concerned. “I saw the social studies test.” Grace said.

  Ed Gray made a face and cracked his knuckles one at a time. “What do I care about social studies?” He spoke impatiently, as though the remark was totally irrelevant to the conversation.

  Grace leaned forward across the table. “The eighth grade textbook covers the history of western civilization from Roman times through the Middle Ages. Pope Innocent the Third, Thomas Becket, Henry the Second, Papal Indulgences and Justinian Codes ... It’s a college level curriculum scaled down to middle school. Eighth graders just barely handle puberty. They can’t digest that much information.”