“Lorraine, it’s your mother,” the next voice declared. “I realize that nine thirty is much too early for you to be up, but when you do turn out, call me. Joyce is quite upset that you forgot her birthday yesterday. She says strangers with mental problems are more important to you than your own sister.” There was a sharp click, and then the blessed tone again. Chandra was going to hit the proverbial roof. Frederick smiled appreciatively. He had allies in the strangest of places. He considered taking his mother-in-law on as a client, for free, to repay her for all those years of unknowingly airing his grievances, but her widow’s mite would barely warrant his expertise. Too bad. She deserved his finding her a deduction here and there in the IRS haystack. The old battle-ax was good: Lorraine, I realize nine thirty is too early…
Nine thirty? Frederick looked at his watch. Updating Portland Concrete had taken longer than he had anticipated. Then he remembered Chandra’s declaration on the refrigerator. It is of earth-shattering importance. They had been married for over twenty years; everything in Chandra’s life was of earth-shattering importance.
In the kitchen he filled a cup with hour-old coffee and headed upstairs to their bedroom. When all those blended beans went stale, they were still better than the coffee at Cain’s Corner Grocery that Chandra was addicted to, although she now carried her own ceramic mug in a personal effort to speed up the demise of Styrofoam.
“Honey,” Frederick said, and poked at the lump in their bed. “You’d better get up. Here’s some coffee.” Chandra stretched out her arms, a crucifixion figure, as she did every morning. Frederick had seen the symbolism in it. Not yet ten o’clock and already nailed to the cross for her sacrifices to humanity.
“What time is it?” she asked. She yawned as she reached a hand out in search of the cup.
“A little later than you wanted to get up,” Frederick admitted.
“God, this tastes good,” Chandra said, and he knew she meant it. He had given up on her taste buds years ago. Just as he had given up on the stray cats. “So what time is it, really?” she asked. With a quick flash of her wrist, one slender hand rose up and, with fingers acting like a comb, she swept them through her hair.
“About nine thirty,” he said, though by now it was almost nine forty. He tried to sound frivolous, as though time were a thing to be courted, perhaps, but never obeyed.
“Nine thirty!” Chandra said. “Jesus Christ, I’ll be late for the boycott!” She was suddenly sitting up in bed. With over twenty years of practice, he had still not grown used to how quickly she could switch like that, from being stretched out to sitting up suddenly with a new idea, from being pacifist to wishing anticonservationists would get ambushed in back alleys.
“Damn it, Freddy, I asked you,” Chandra said. She flashed past him to the bathroom, and he followed. “I suppose you had your nose in that computer’s face again.” She was adjusting the knobs for her shower. “You can be pretty thoughtless sometimes,” she said. He leaned against the wall.
“What boycott?” he asked.
“The National Veal Boycott, is all,” Chandra said. “True, there’s no software offered on the subject, but out there, in the hard wear of the world, some important things are taking place.”
“It’s not even ten o’clock,” Frederick said, “and already you’ve come up with a computer pun.”
“I don’t ask you to join me,” Chandra said, and flopped a thick bath towel onto the floor beside the shower stall. “But I do ask you to wake me up.”
“I’ve never understood your aversion to clocks,” said Frederick, bringing up a point he’d mentioned more than once. “Almost everyone, including me, has to wake up to an alarm. That’s what you call a rude awakening. But you get a gentle nudge in the side and a cup of coffee.” He watched as she unbuttoned the top of her pajamas and tossed it past him. It landed with a soft swish in the hallway. Her small breasts bounced as she bent to remove the bottoms.
“Put my pajamas in the hamper, would you please?” The bottoms flew past his head.
“Excellent coffee, I might add,” he said. He watched as she pulled her hair up into a quick ponytail, most of it still brownish-blond with youth, but some strands now gray. It was, Frederick realized, as if an old abacus, that first computer, was busy at work, counting one hair at a time, numbering the days, marking the years. It was all a means of keeping track, wasn’t it? Updating humans. Jesus, but the years were swift bastards.
“One of these days your little country with the secretive coffee beans may need our help,” Chandra was saying. “And it’ll be people like Sukie and me who fight to keep it going so that people like you can keep making excellent coffee.”
“That little country happens to be a thriving democracy,” Frederick said, and was thankful that the Ivory Coast was the only African country to offer beans to the Western world. Otherwise, Chandra might be right. Frederick could tune in to CNN some heartless morning to learn that half the beans of his prized blend was now in the hands of some upstart military regime. “They have a president now and can get along quite nicely without any help from you and Spooky. Incidentally,” he added, “there’s an orange cat on our windowsill.”
“Just until I get it a good home,” Chandra said. “Ignore it.”
“It has no tail,” Frederick said.
“That I can’t do anything about.” The shower door slammed in his face.
• • •
Back at his computer, Frederick paged down his menu of clients to James Bennett, DDS. As the files appeared on the screen, he heard the back door to the kitchen open with a gentle creak.
Who in hell? he thought, wondering if perhaps Joyce, maddened beyond logic, had come after Chandra with a kitchen knife, a birthday gift no doubt from someone who cared. But it was not Joyce. Before him he saw two women who looked as though they were editors of one of those feminist magazines, The Lesbos Biannual, The Menses Monthly, or maybe Sister Sappho, circulation twenty-eight and growing. They peered at Frederick as if to ask what he was doing there.
“We did as the paper told us,” said the shorter woman. She was dwarfish, with a long, thick braid trailing down her back. Frederick accepted the paper she handed him. Sukie. Go around to the back and let yourself in, the note said. The door’s unlocked. How many times had he told Chandra to lock the goddamn doors! And what good did it do for him to lock the things when she left such notes upon them? Chandra seemed to think murders couldn’t occur in Maine. Maybe she and Sukie had boycotted them there or something. And why hadn’t he seen the proclamation when he went out for the morning paper? Walter Muller’s upstairs light, Frederick supposed, had garnered all his attention.
“Sukie, I presume?” Frederick asked, and balled the second note that day into a perfect salvo. He looked at the windowsill for the cat, but it was gone.
“I’m Halona,” the woman said. “This is Sukie.” A pale, thin creature, looking every bit as tall and anemic as Sukie suggested, peered at Frederick over the other woman’s head.
“Chandra’s just getting out of the shower,” he said, and moved in front of the computer monitor to shield Dr. Bennett’s records, as though they were the dentist’s exposed private parts. “Make yourselves at home,” he added sarcastically.
“What’s that?” asked Sukie, and pointed at the computer.
“It’s a computer,” Frederick replied. Good Christ. Had they stepped completely out of the crumply pages of the sixties?
“I mean, what’s all the numbers for?”
“It’s an accounting package,” said Frederick.
“A computer,” said Halona, pushing past Sukie and staring wide-eyed. She pointed at the screen. “Is that the game where somebody steals something and you try to catch them?”
“Game?” asked Frederick. “This isn’t a game. This is information on one of my clients.” It would be futile, he realized, to explain his work to these wo
men. It was then that Chandra breezed into the room, still buttoning her plaid shirt.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Faulty alarm clock.” She threw the sarcasm in Frederick’s direction and then disappeared into the kitchen.
“By the way,” Frederick said as Chandra appeared again, a yogurt in one hand, spoon in the other. He’d been savoring the moment. “There’s a message from your mother.” He watched the frown appear on her forehead. Sukie and Halona, trained picketers that they were, followed her obediently into the den. Frederick heard the button click, and then the curt message. Lorraine, it’s your mother.
“Lorraine?” he heard Sukie’s shrill voice ask. He smiled, delighted.
“My name before I changed it,” he heard Chandra explain. A minute later the trio was on its way, like a tiny mob, back to the computer room and on out to the kitchen. Frederick followed them out of good-natured curiosity. “I even had a notary public involved so the name would be, you know, official. It’s on my license. I mean, it’s legally been my name for over twenty goddamn years, and she still leaves messages like that.” Frederick shrugged his shoulders helplessly when Chandra’s eyes met his.
“An emergency?” he asked, and pushed the tailless orange cat away. The visitors must have let it in, as they did themselves, and now it was twisting snakelike about his calves, marking him well with its scent. He put a foot beneath its stomach and scooted it aside. He could sense a sneeze coming on.
“Emergency my ass,” Chandra said. “Joyce is another year along into what she calls the frightful forties. She likes for people to turn up on her birthday and pity her. Well, I’m afraid I have too many important things to do.” She helped herself to an orange in the fridge and then offered the basket to Sukie and Halona. They shook their heads in harmony.
“Do you need to call her back before we leave?” Sukie asked. “We still got time.”
“I never answer her messages when she calls me Lorraine,” said Chandra. “She says Chandra, she gets called back.”
Frederick remembered the first time he’d ever heard her speak the name Chandra, as though it were a little song, a breeze from along some river running through the night. Chandra. And he remembered her as she had been, her hair thick, wet with rain, smelling slightly of marijuana. “It’s Sanskrit,” she had told him, and he was caught up instantly in how her lips moved when she uttered syllables, as though they were coins she was offering him. “It means moonlike.” And so it did. And so did she, lovely, pale, changeable thing that she was. My God, but he had fallen in love with her faster than you could format a floppy disk.
“It took her about ten years,” Chandra was now saying, “but she finally caught on. If it’s something important she wants, however, you’d be surprised how quickly she can remember names. By the way, my seminar this month, ‘The Psychology of Names,’ is in two weeks. Why don’t you come?” Frederick suppressed a grimace. He imagined the house full to the rafters with Berthas and Lucilles hoping to become Sukies and Halonas.
“My name means fortunate,” Halona said then. “It’s Native American Indian.” Frederick stared at her. With her flaxen hair, blue eyes, and buxom chest, he could imagine her as a kind of woman warrior at the vanguard of some Anglo-Saxon assault upon a castle. Mildred, maybe, but not Pocahontas.
“What does your name mean?” Chandra was asking Sukie.
“I don’t know,” Sukie said. Her hair was thin and fine as a spider’s web, her eyes those of the walking wounded. She would have made an excellent Moonie, Frederick decided.
“Where’d you get it?” asked Chandra.
“My mother gave it to me,” said Sukie, backing up a bit, as though Chandra might heave the orange at her in disgust.
“But what does it mean?” asked Halona.
“I don’t know,” Sukie admitted. She seemed ready to run. Perhaps she sensed what Frederick already knew: it’s a dangerous thing when picketers turned on one another. “It just means Sukie, I guess.”
“You need to come to my seminar for sure,” said Chandra. She gave Frederick a quick kiss. “Bye, sweetie. See you after the boycott.” Fine words from the woman he married. See you after the boycott. “Oh, and don’t forget to pick up a dozen or so marigolds at Home Depot. I’ll set them out tomorrow.”
Chandra gathered up some posters from a corner of the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed them before, but there they were, sad calf faces peering out of tiny crates. He felt that pang again, the swift kick of guilt. Frederick the Abandoner. He shuffled the orange cat, batting it along on the end of his foot, out onto the porch behind the three picketers. The membranes in his nose were vibrating wildly.
“Have you found a home yet for the cat?” Sukie was asking.
“Not yet.” Chandra sighed.
“You should keep him,” Halona said as the cat tried to sneak back in past Frederick’s legs. He shut the door in its orange face.
“We can’t keep a cat,” he heard Chandra say. “Frederick thinks he’s allergic to them.”
“Psychosomatic?” Halona asked. Frederick felt the membranes tickling frantically, demanding his attention. He let fly a worthy sneeze, and hoped it was loud enough to alert the cynics on the porch.
“How long have you been married?” It was Sukie, since the voice was shrill.
“In October it’ll be twenty-one years,” Chandra said, her own voice soft and lilting, hanging on to the rim of excitement. After all, she was on her way to the National Veal Boycott, no less. “We met at Woodstock,” she added.
“He went to Woodstock?” Halona asked, just as Frederick gave in to another robust sneeze.
Two
Back from delivering the payroll checks to Portland Concrete, Frederick took a pad and pencil and began a systematic inventory of the house. Early in their marriage he had designated Tuesday as shopping day and had managed to maintain that schedule over the years, except for several Tuesdays that had been swallowed up by important matters. His father’s funeral, for instance, had fallen on Tiu’s Day, as it was originally called, after the god of war and the sky. It had been wonderfully fitting, considering Frederick’s stormy relationship with the elder Stone. He had sat stiffly throughout the services, thinking not of the wasted years that had washed between father and son, but whether or not the produce department had received the first corn of the season.
At first they had shopped together, Chandra girding her independence by wheeling her very own cart. But as the years passed, she had fallen by the wayside as a credible shopper. Frederick took the job over exclusively when he discovered that his wife bought a certain brand only if it “had nice lettering” or if she “loved the picture on the box.” They had compromised. She would be sole executor of the dirty laundry, a task Frederick loathed, and he would shop.
In the upstairs bathroom he carefully checked each shelf. Bathroom tissue, bath soap, and Q-tips went onto the list. Downstairs he inspected the canned goods, perused the fridge, the laundry room, and the closet that contained cleaning supplies and various other sundries. His inventory finished, he went to the computer and entered each item. He then instructed the machine to sort the items alphabetically. This way, it was a snap to check each one off as he deposited it into the shopping cart.
With a quick printout in one hand and his umbrella in the other, Frederick ignored the orange cat on the front porch. But he did pause to pencil cat food at the bottom of his sheet. He knew Chandra would only send him down to Cain’s Corner Grocery for it when she returned, and Mr. Cain charged a kingly sum for a mere two-pound bag. Yet he felt a twinge of annoyance to have cat food glaring up at him from below zucchini, spoiling the poetry of his list.
At the IGA, Portland’s largest grocery store, Frederick browsed up and down the familiar aisles. He had done the weekly shopping there since the giant facility opened a year earlier. He had met the manager once, just long enough for him to refuse Frederick’
s pitch for Stone Accounting & Consultation services. What had his name been? Johnson? Jacobson? He had pointed out to Frederick that the store, as a part of a major chain, already had its own computer system. Frederick considered doing his shopping at a smaller, individually owned market, one that might be more prone to becoming one of his clients. In the end, he had given in to the larger store’s variety, convenience, and, most of all, prices.
In the fresh produce department, he spent a long time picking through the nectarines and plums, searching for the occasional dark bruise, the decaying soft spot.
“How are the cherries, Frederick?” He looked up to see Mrs. Freeman peering at him with her tiny, poodle eyes. He tried not to sigh too loudly. They always found him first in the fresh produce department.
“Still some nice ones left,” Frederick said, “but you’ll have to pick through them one at a time.”
“Are the oranges good this week, Frederick?” It was Janet Walsh, who wrote articles for some woman’s magazine. What had she bored him to death with last week? Oh yes, some hormonal pack which women could clamp on—Frederick imagined it would look like an unopened parachute—that would enable them to jump confidently into menopause.
“I was here first,” said Mrs. Freeman. “Frederick was telling me about the cherries.” He was not telling her about the damned cherries. He had merely suggested that she pick through them for the best ones, as any sane shopper would do.
“You just need to pick through them, Mrs. Freeman,” he said again. If she had her way, Mrs. Freeman would stand there and let him sort every cherry for her, maybe even destem them with his teeth. And she had a magic number for cherries: thirty, never more, never less. He turned his attention to Janet Walsh.
“Yes, well, let’s see,” Frederick said. “I’d stay away from the prepackaged. You’re better off choosing from the loose ones over there. And I think Florida has the best oranges right now.”
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 2
