by James Tate
“Yes, Mr. Smith,” he would reply, “I will see to it that all employees are kept busy every minute they are on payroll. You have my word there will be no more nonsense.”
Smith would glare at the diminutive manager of his store. He would stare specifically at Arthur’s button of the day and his violent earring.
“What the hell is that?” he’d asked, “You’re a manager now, Tomten. You’re representing my interests to the public.” He couldn’t bring himself to even mention the earring it infuriated him so. “Act like a man, can’t you? I entrusted you with this responsibility and I expect you to make me proud of that trust I put in you. Do you get my message?” Now it was Smith who was red, and Arthur swallowed deeply to suppress the horrible laugh that was welling up in his bosom.
When Earl Smith left there was a collective sigh of relief and the workers went back to work pretty much as before. Their injokes were all that got them through the day. The work was, in fact, dreadfully boring. The customers were a peculiar lot of lonely, battered people. The garbage man from Belchertown who checked out “Seka’s Fantasies” three times every week, the boat people with their obsession with Chuck Norris films, the college professors with their nervous fingering of risqué foreign imports. There weren’t that many surprises or even pleasantries. Something about a VCR that says nowhere-to-go, no-one-to-speak-to, nothing-to-do, little-on-my-mind. And to stand behind a counter eight hours a day, five or six days a week, was a window on the world that needed constant cleaning.
Arthur’s own obsession was with “splatter” films and biographies of serial killers. No one knew exactly why. He was sweet and polite and was refreshingly funny to his co-workers.
“That woman makes me want to throw up razor blades,” he would say after a particularly unsavory customer had left the store. He didn’t talk much about himself, but it was known that he lived with a girl, Angie, and that they were both from Shamokin, Pennsylvania. He loved both Angie and Shamokin. Shamokin had at least three major distinctions to its credit. One: Walter Winchell had said that the women of Shamokin were among the most beautiful in the world. Two: Groucho Marx had been given the key to Shamokin and had mentioned it on his TV program, “You Bet Your Life.” And three: the noggin. The “noggin in a jar” is how Arthur always referred to it. It seems that sometime near the end of the last century a severed head had been found in the town park. No one knew what to do with it. An ad was placed in the newspaper so that anyone wanting to claim the head would know where to go. Days passed and no one claimed it. A week passed. It was beginning to decay and smell, so the temporary holders of the head had the good sense to embalm it. It was placed in a large jar of formaldehyde and years passed, decades, nearly a century. Arthur, as a young child and even later as a teenager, loved to visit the “noggin,” as he had dubbed it. It sat on a shelf in the backroom of the town library. He took pride in his town for keeping it all these years. But then, one Christmas after Arthur had left home, the library burned to the ground and the noggin was no more. A sad loss.
As for the beautiful women of Shamokin, Arthur was particularly fond of recalling the lovely albino twins, Eunice and Eugenia Smitherman. They were considerably older, in fact, they were even older than Arthur’s father, but thought of themselves as eternally sixteen. And, of course, they dressed as twins always, and would only consent to double-dates with brothers, which in the long run hurt their chances in a town as small as Shamokin. They, however, did not burn down and can still be seen occasionally in the malt shop or at their favorite dressmaker’s.
Arthur’s eyes actually twinkled when he told his tales of Shamokin. And Dave and Chris and the others laughed in appreciation and egged him on with questions. Arthur, essentially a private man, even in his youth, gradually revealed more of himself through these stories. His father was a prison guard who raised pigeons. His mother worked in an old age home. Arthur’s girlfriend had been his high school sweetheart. They had lived together for almost five years, which meant, in effect, that Arthur had never had any other girlfriend. Angie was something of a mystery to the employees of Advanced Video. All they knew about her was that she too loved “splatter” films and that she had total power over Arthur. She made him move into another room in their apartment. Then she’d let him move back a little later. She even dated other men occasionally, and Arthur would be depressed for days.
Earl Smith was making a killing in his new business. He opened three more outlets and bought thousands of films. He’d make trips to distant warehouses and come back with a truckload of random trash. Growth, growth, and more growth. He had been rich eight or nine times before, he had lost count, but he always knew the way back out of bankruptcy. He could find the pulse, was how he liked to put it. Of course, everybody was always stealing from him, he knew this, but he figured it took more time to watch over them every second than it was worth in the long run. About Arthur Tomten he had mixed thoughts. The little guy certainly knew something about films, and he wasn’t sure if this was an asset or a bother. Arthur was always trying to advise him on what the store needed, what kinds of films, and this partly annoyed Earl, though it was just possible that he needed someone like that, some film nut.
He didn’t even remember the names of the others, just the managers. He’d blame all failures on them, that’s why they got paid more than the others, the little shits.
“I want to know which films are not being checked out. I want you to go through all the records and give me a complete list of all films that aren’t moving. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Arthur replied, filled with dread, knowing that this meant working nights for the next two weeks, knowing too that Angie would be fed up with him, that she would have ample opportunities to step out on him with her new interest, the Ph.D. political scientist creep she met the week before last.
He, Arthur, could not imagine a future without Angie. There had always been Angie. He and Angie, Shamokin, the noggin, the Smitherman twins. The Torque-Master, as he liked to call the owner of Advanced Video, was putting an end to all that, completely oblivious to the gravity of his situation.
“Listen up, Tomten. I’ve given you a chance here. I’ve trusted you. I could have promoted one of the others, but I didn’t. You get this store moving in a big way, and there’s something in it for you. You let me down and there won’t be a second chance. Understand? Two of the other stores are already doing greater volume. You’re slipping. Now you run a tight ship here or else. Do you follow me?”
“I follow you. I’ll have the list for you next week at the managers’ meeting.”
“That’s more like it,” Smith snarled. He was like some kind of despicable football coach, never satisfied, always insulting, with no notion of human dignity. And Arthur despised himself for not telling him to his face. What kind of sniveling chattel was he becoming? In Shamokin he and Angie had always thought they didn’t need anyone else, they had this unspoken contract with one another that nothing could tarnish their private world as long as they remained strong and true to one another. They knew when the world was false, they knew what it was they would do and what was beneath them. Now, he had to earn a living somehow, but the harder he worked, the closer he was to losing all that he was working for. Angie was changing. She was not amused by their old habits, watching horror films, listening to bizarre music, putting down most everyone around them. She wanted to go back to school and finish her degree. She even talked of moving to New York.
“Look at you,” she said to him one night, “in your little Salvation Army pin-striped suit and bow tie.” (Her emphasis on the word “little” was “a hat pin in his eye” he told Leslie and Don at the store.) “If you’re going to be a capitalist, then do yourself a favor and don’t be such a wimpy, pitiful one. Your little protest earrings are really a big statement. You’re going to change the world with amusing buttons, I suppose?”
Arthur worked late every night now, he had to, he had no choice. The shelves of the store w
ere crammed with films nobody cared about, How to Make Your Head Explode films, films about insect life in Asia, How to Raise a Baby Underwater, Travelogues of Cemeteries, How to Sculpt Used Tires, How I Married a Dead Junkie and Found Happiness. There was even a homemade video of a seventeen year old boy’s suicide made by his older brother.
Arthur hadn’t even known about this one. He read the jacket-copy on the box and smiled. He shoved the paperwork to one side of the office desk, then pushed the cassette into the VCR and leaned back. Surely he deserved a break after so many pages of figures. But it was Angie he was thinking of the whole time, how they had first gotten together. It always had been a kind of suicide pact, he realized now, and now that he was really dying, she was breaking the pact. It wasn’t funny one bit. What had they been laughing at all this time. It wasn’t one bit funny.
THE EXAMINATION
Dr. Shroeder, at the age of thirty-four, had every reason to be pleased with himself. The spacious new house with its solar heating system came complete with a little apartment in back for his mother. And his new black BMW made him feel sportier than he actually was, and he liked this, and told no one that he had to sit on a pillow to be able to see over the steering wheel. With his practice growing day by day, the six-figure income helped compensate for his premature baldness and the curse of his diminutive height. He was tall of mind, he liked to say. His mother had taught him to say that when he was teased in high school.
At the clinic he demanded complete respect from his nurses. They brought him coffee between patients and they removed the Styrofoam cups from his desk each morning before he arrived. They, Susan and Patty, often asked one another why it was not possible for the great doctor to simply dispose of the cups in his wastebasket himself. But it was a small matter, and they knew he was a stickler for detail. Everything had to be just the way he wanted it or he would have one of his little tantrums. He would not walk across the room for a tongue depressor. It had to be right by his left hand as he was examining the patient.
When a female patient required a vaginal examination, one of the nurses was always present, and Dr. Shroeder’s behavior was as cool and thoroughly professional as could be, betraying nothing but medical satisfaction that he could remedy the problem. And when the patients were young and beautiful and shapely, Patty or Susan watched the doctor’s every expression in hope of detecting some interest or stimulation, but, alas, his little round stone face was a perfect blank.
One spring morning, on his way to the clinic, listening to classical music on his tape-deck, Dr. Shroeder accidentally drove over a pair of birds copulating in the middle of the road. His heart jumped and he looked quickly in the rear-view mirror. Sure enough, they were thrashing wretchedly, and he couldn’t help but wish another car would come along in a moment and finish them off. While making love! Perpetuating their species! And he, a doctor! He quickly put them out of his mind and looked at his clipboard on the seat beside him. Ah, Mrs. Ramstetter.
Mrs. Ramstetter was truly statuesque, she towered above him like a Scandinavian goddess. She was seated in the waiting room reading an old issue of Natural History. She had called the day before and Dr. Shroeder was able to fit her in this morning.
“The doctor will see you now,” Patty told Mrs. Ramstetter.
Mrs. Ramstetter sat in the examination room for several minutes before the doctor entered. She had been coming to Dr. Shroeder for almost two years now and they had struck up some small rapport. She was a healthy, vigorous woman, occasionally plagued by small complaints. This time it was the little finger on her right hand. It had been stiff and sore and slightly swollen for more than a month and she wondered if she might not have some rheumatoid arthritis in it.
The doctor held her hand and bent the joints of her little finger back and forth with great concentration. She felt just a little silly taking up his time for a complaint so small, but his rapt attention dissuaded her embarrassment. Indeed, she began to wonder if that stiff little finger might not bode something more serious, or why else would the doctor have then asked her to disrobe and put on one of his robes.
Dr. Shroeder left the room while she stepped out of her skirt and blouse. Mrs. Ramstetter then sat on the edge of the examination table and thought to herself how the little finger might express some larger malady. Normally, she had confidence in medical science.
When Dr. Shroeder returned, he asked Mrs. Ramstetter to open her robe so that he could examine her breasts. She complied automatically. There was something vaguely comical about his tiny hands exploring her large, full breasts. He had to reach up to them and had an underside view of them. Nonetheless, he seemed to savor the work, taking his time, doing the most thorough examination possible, if that is what it should properly be called, Mrs. Ramstetter thought to herself. Then she began to feel the sweat on his little palms, and she looked down at his bald pate and saw glistening beads of sweat there also.
Mrs. Ramstetter felt completely violated by this little runt of a man, and still she could not bring herself to speak. Dr. Shroeder told her she could get dressed now and again he left the room.
When he returned, he seemed shaken and stared down at his clipboard as he attempted to talk with her. “It appears you have the beginnings of a little rheumatoid arthritis. It’s nothing serious and will most likely go into remission. It might come back in five or ten years, but I don’t believe, in your case, it will ever become serious.”
Mrs. Ramstetter considered her options: if she told him just what she thought of his little fun with her, what did she have to gain? She finally decided that she had more to lose and said nothing but “Thank you, doctor, for seeing me on such short notice.”
That night, and for the next several nights, Stanley Shroeder dreamed of those breasts, his hands stretching to encompass as much of their girth as possible, and then in circling motion he massaged them. But then, each time he woke with a start when they became those two unsuspecting birds, black and screeching in their death dance.
“Stanley,” his mother called through the wall that separated them, “Are you all right, darling?”
OUR COUNTRY COUSINS
Once a year Nikki and I pile in the car for the cross-country journey to visit our families. We usually go in the summer, hot as blazes, and, once there, there are a series of picnics held by lakes. The nephews and nieces shoot up six inches a year until they land in jail or go away to college. In our families, they never go far. Nikki and I are the only ones to have settled out of state; and we are therefore treated differently. Our presence seems to excite most of the family, as though our stories were of another civilization. We try not to disappoint them, and we are delighted with their accents. Ours come back to us almost immediately. But no one in either family has visited us where we live. We accepted this without much thought, until we got the call from Nikki’s aunt and uncle, Lloyd and Joan. They wanted to come for a week in June. We had no choice in the matter, and instantly started to panic.
They wouldn’t know what to make of any of our friends, and we probably didn’t have any interests in common, once you stripped away the family thing.
“Let’s not worry about it until they get here,” Nikki advised. “I’ve known them all my life. And they love us both, you know that, Charles. They’d do anything for you.”
“But it’s different. When we’re there, we’re different people.
We both try to blend in. Here, I don’t know, it makes me nervous. What will we do to kill time? Lloyd doesn’t have any interests, I mean, ones that travel well.”
“We’ll take long drives.”
I had forgotten just how loud Lloyd could be until he stepped out of his car in our driveway. “Not bad, Charlie, old boy! Not bad at all! Glad to see somebody in the clan is making it.”
It was good to see them, but already I was aware of our neighbors staring our way, probably amused, possibly annoyed at Lloyd’s decibel crashing of the property-line.
“By George, so this is where you’ve
hidden our little Nikki all these years.”
We spirited them inside as quickly as we could. Joan glanced around at the paintings on the walls. Nikki and I looked at one another and realized our mistake. Most of the paintings should have been stored for the duration of this visit. The big nude study by our friend Noel Clemmins identified us as Communist subversives right away. Joan tried not to look at it, but it kept sneaking its way back into her peripheral vision. Obviously I have turned her little niece Nikki into a swinger and pervert of the worst sort.
Joan was very nearly speechless at the sight of our furniture, as well. We were touted by Nikki’s mother as grand successes of some kind. Nikki’s mother had this competition with her sisters, and we were obviously displayed in our absence as the ones who traveled regularly in Europe, who mixed with a few famous politicians. There wasn’t a great deal of truth to the picture she painted, but we gave her ammunition over the phone occasionally that could be used to intimidate her sisters. Now Joan was quietly gloating at the disheveled appearance of our home, the paintings in poor taste, the tear in the fake oriental carpet. She could hardly wait to report back the seamy truth.
