A Community of Writers

by A Community of Writers (retail) (epub)

  “Busybody—that’s what your aunt is. I told her I didn’t want you to wear nylons, and she had the nerve to argue with me. Thinks she knows everything because she raised six girls. Your dear father took her side.

  “Go on then, wear the nylons, but if you tear them, I’m not buying you another pair. Guess I’ll have to make you garters.”

  Pleased as I was with the hose, I bemoaned how, paired with my dumpy lace-up oxfords, the effect was less than elegant.

  “Mama, these nylons look stupid with my shoes. Please, won’t you change your mind about the heels? Please?”

  Elegance was not on Mama’s priority list. The hose and garters had been her last concession. “No heels.”

  I prayed and waited for another heavenly intercession. Nothing happened. I supposed God doled out a finite number of miracles, and I had met my quota. If I wanted the shoes, I was on my own. I hatched a scheme to get them, and thus, passed the point where it would still have been possible to avoid the slippery slope into sin.

  My plan was simple, but a major obstacle stood in the way: money. My sister was the answer. I nonchalantly proposed my idea to her on our walk to church.

  “I want to buy a pair of shoes. I have eight dollars. If you lend me two dollars and fifty cents, I’ll have enough to buy the shoes. I’ll pay you back”

  “Are these the shoes you and Mama have been arguing about?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “You can’t buy those shoes—she won’t let you wear them.”

  “Thought of that.”

  Our Catechism class met in the elementary school across the street from the church. Since Teddy and I walked to Sunday services, we always allowed extra time so we didn’t need to hurry. That extra time would by my ally.

  “I’ll hide the shoes in the garage where Mama won’t find them, and I’ll take them with me on Sundays. When we get to the school, I’ll go to the girls’ room and change into my new shoes. After Mass, I’ll go back to the bathroom and put on my old shoes. Not a bad plan, if I say so myself.”

  “Well? What about the money?”

  “I don’t know…you’ll get caught,” Teddy warned.

  “No I won’t. Not if you don’t tell.”

  “I won’t tell, but think about other times. You always get caught.”

  “Yeah, but those were other times,” I countered. “Just don’t tell.”

  “I won’t, but sooner or later…”

  “Decision time. Are you going to lend me the money, or not?”

  “I might…it depends.” Teddy arched her eyebrows.

  “Oohh! What do you want?” I asked, amazed at how fast she’d found a way to blackmail me.

  “I want to ride your bike—whenever I want it—for the rest of the summer, and let’s see…I also want to read the new Nancy Drew before you do.” Teddy flashed a smug gotcha-grin. “Promise, or no deal.”

  “Deal. But remember, if you snitch, I’ll tell Mama you broke her necklace.”

  Cavalier in her advantage, Teddy shrugged. “I won’t tell, but you’ll get caught.”

  Later that week, under the guise of going to the playground, I snuck downtown and bought the shoes.

  My plan went without a hitch for nearly two months. I wore the shoes, puffed with pride, finally an equal with the other girls.

  But the God who dispenses miracles, is also the God who will, after all, not be mocked.

  After Mass I dash out of church, intent on crossing the street to the school.

  Light rain falls, spattering my shoes. Oh, no! I think. They’ll get water spots. I run.

  The drizzle acts like wax on the worn church steps. I slide. My right heel catches the edge of a step. Yikes! Unbalanced! I can’t control my feet! I flail my arms.

  Suddenly my hand brushes against something, and I grab it like a drowning person catching a thrown lifeline. But this lifeline doesn’t save me. I fall.

  Thud! Ouch! Crack! Crunch! Rippppp! A piercing scream. People shouting. People running.

  When I catch my breath, I open my eyes. Prone on the cement, I’m relieved I’m not mortally wounded and that all my limbs feel intact. I have an intimate view of people’s legs. Wadded in my white-knuckled fist is a flowered pale blue and white cloth.

  The trail of fabric leads to a woman sitting splayed-legged on a church step, the lower half of her dress torn from the bodice; the material is stretched between her legs and my hand, taut as a tightrope. Her pillbox hat rests on the rim of her glasses. She pushes it back, looks around, and is greeted by the susurrus of surprised mutterings from the crowd gawking at her exposed legs, garter belt and underwear.

  “Oh, my God!” she utters as she tries to cover herself with one hand while tugging at the fabric I still clutch with her other hand.

  I rest my head on a step and envision God shaking His finger at me, shouting,

  “I will not be mocked!” He sounds like Sister Avila. Perhaps it was Sister.

  She hurries down the steps, and blesses herself. After she pries the dress from my hands, she shouts for someone to help me up.

  Teddy arrives. “Oh boy! Are you ever going to get it!”

  She picks up my missal, then points. “Look!”

  The right heel, rent from my shoe, has landed at the base of the step, eerily upright and apropos of nothing. My heart sinks. My beautiful shoes, ruined. Tears trickle down my face.

  Sister Avila peers over her spectacles. “Stop crying. You’re fine. We’ll drive you and your sister home, and you can tell your parents what happened.” She motions for the woman and her husband to follow her.

  The grim delegation that greets my mother causes her universe to wobble. Shocked first by the disheveled woman wearing a torn dress, fastened with a dozen safety pins from the waist to bodice, she shrieks upon seeing me dirty and barefoot. “Holy Mother of God! What’s happened?”

  She takes a step toward me, but I step back and hide myself behind Sister Avila’s ample form.

  Mama hollers for my father. “Ray!”

  Sister moves aside, and my mother yanks me forward. Her hands hold my shoulders in a death grip.

  “Rayy-mond!”

  My father comes running, sees everyone and asks, “What is it? Has there been an accident?”

  “Nothing serious, praise the Lord,” says Sister Avila. “Carmen fell on the church steps and broke a heel on her shoe.”

  Sister points to the shoes I hold. “She can tell you the rest.”

  My parents lean closer, look at the shoes, then at me.

  “Where did you get those shoes?” Daddy asks.

  Enumerating my transgressions to an audience in broad daylight makes kneeling before a priest in a darkened confessional seem like a cake walk. I wish I could turn back the clock; I want to run away, but I can’t do either. I tell the entire story, omitting nothing, while Sister mumbles under her breath and fingers her rosary beads.

  She taps my head with her divining rod crucifix. “Disobeying your parents, sneaking around. Lying. What you did is a sin. Go to confession.”

  My father pays the woman for her torn dress and hose, and they leave.

  I stand shame-faced before my parents. As Sister had avowed in her Sunday school lesson, most sinners forget about consequences, and indeed, until now, I’d given consequences little regard. I desire the refuge of the confessional and the priest’s predictable penance. My parents’ punishment will neither be predictable nor easy.

  “Go to your room and write apology notes—including one to your mother and me,” Daddy orders. “Stay there until we decide what to do with you.”

  My parents’ favorite punishment was house arrest. During the thirty-one days of my confinement, I was forbidden to talk to my friends on the phone, watch TV, or listen to the radio. All the dishes, ironing and scrubbing the floors were mine to do without help. Sister Avila also benefited. Once a week, for the following year, I had to help her assemble care packages for the needy.

  My sister got off easy despite ai
ding and abetting me. My parents concluded that, although she had acted wrongly, she was younger, meaning I had coerced her. Although I didn’t have to repay her, I still had to compensate my parents.

  In the immediate hubbub of that Sunday’s events, I’d forgotten to return to the girls’ room for my oxfords; when I went to retrieve them, they were gone. I had to wear sneakers to church. Another year passed before I could afford to purchase new hose.

  Teddy showed no mercy. She called in her chit, seizing my bicycle whenever she wanted it, and claiming first reading rights to the latest Nancy Drew mystery. Unable to resist gloating, she often reminded me of her warnings. “Told you so. Told you so. Told you so!”

  “Shut up.”

  To Dad’s credit, he tried several times to glue the severed heel, but it resisted adhesion, and he gave up. Mama tossed the shoes into the garbage.

  Shoe losses, the woman’s dress and hose reimbursement, plus what I owed my parents for Teddy’s loan, put me forty dollars in debt. In those days, when a loaf of bread cost a mere fifteen cents, forty dollars seemed like untold wealth. My piggy bank remained empty for the year it took me to repay every cent.

  Fifty years have passed, but even the haze of time hasn’t erased the image of Mama throwing my beloved kitten heels into the trash.

  She’d shaken her finger at me. “Let this be a lesson.”

  I had learned a lesson, but not the one either my mother or Sister Avila would have anticipated.

  I confessed as ordered, and as I recited the list of my offenses, tried to evoke sincere contrition. Yet, in the deepest recesses of my heart, lurked the truth: I wasn’t genuinely remorseful, only sorry I’d gotten caught.

  I had sinned. Most definitely. While I’d worn those lovely slip-on Pandora’s boxes, I hadn’t cared. I felt wonderful!

  “And that, Sister Avila,” I would tell her if I could, “is the nature of sin.”

  Maria McKee is a reclusive Virgo. Occasionally she ventures out to the grocery store or to a shoe store. If you happen to see Maria, speak to her at your own peril. Everything you say or do is fodder for her fiction.

  Dead Letters

  By

  Susan Girolami Kramer

  Mary refused to throw away the yellowed newspapers, chipped coffee cups, vintage fabric, disheveled books, and piles of photographs of unknown people in every corner of her apartment. She'll be furious when she realizes what I have done.

  I bit my nails as I waited for her over an hour at the back door to my Laundromat, anxious about the confrontation about to happen. My parents took Mary in when, as an infant, she was left at their doorstep. They never really labeled her mental disability, only saying Mary needed our family to be hers. It took time, but I got used to her eccentricities.

  I only moved back into the area to help her and give her a job at the Laundromat. She refused at first, saying she couldn't leave the post office, but Mary became so good at filling the laundry orders for local hotels, my business started to boom.

  I went outside to smoke, finishing about three cigarettes when I heard my name being called.

  "I wondered where you were." The young college student smiled at me. I had hired her to make lattes and cappuccinos at the Café I opened next door to the Laundromat.

  "The sign is up and looks fab," she said.

  "So it's official now, I have my own business:'Love's Cafe & Laundromat.'"

  "Unusual Mary’s not back from her weekend with Betty. Have you seen her?"

  "No, I haven't."

  I snuffed my last cigarette butt into the ground and tensed at feeling a hard stare. I looked up at the back window of Mary's apartment above the Laundromat. She opened the window and threw out the old books I had given her last Christmas.

  The books landed right at my feet.

  "Mary, we need to talk, meet me in my office, now," I yelled.

  I picked up the books, their spines now completely broken. I went to my office and heard squeaking coming towards me.

  Mary wheeled a rusty, upright cart in front of me. The cart overflowed with shoeboxes of junk. I sighed.

  "Try and understand why I had your clutter cleaned out, only the stuff that could be a hazard," I said like a parent scolding her daughter for not taking better care of her belongings.

  "I'm hurt you'd do that without asking," Mary sniffled, tears forming.

  "Glad I took the most important things with me over the weekend. You won't get my cart and my letters," she said with confidence.

  "Letters? What letters?" I frowned. Mary opened a box marked Dead Letters scrawled on the front and held them at arms length.

  "Let me hold them."

  "No, no one holds them but me. I'm not sharing with you,” she said.

  I peeked into the box and glanced at the thick lines blotting out the name of the person to whom the letters were addressed. No return address and hardly enough information for whom the letter was intended.

  "Where'd you get these?"

  "Betty found them, ready for the shredder, and read them, said they belonged to me." Mary placed the box carefully on top of some frayed burlap fabric.

  "She took these before her last day at the post office?"

  "Supposed to shred them, but couldn't when she read them. She always read them before disposing. I read them, and they're mine now." Mary started to leave.

  "Mary you have to get rid of the cart, it's too obnoxious and gaudy," I called to her.

  She stopped only to grumble, "No way, helps me watch over my treasures."

  Every time I stared at her cart too long, she’d frown and move it far away from me. I watched her show a select few the worn handwriting, and to others, reveal bits and pieces of their lost words.

  After a few days, I couldn't wait any longer. So I eavesdropped while Mary confided in the young barista at the cafe, that she thought the letter writer could be her mother.

  “I often picture our life together if you had chosen me. Sometimes I wish I knew exactly where you were, so I could claim you for my own. I wouldn't be afraid.

  Do you remember telling me that you never felt so in love? I know in my heart you think about me every day as I do you. You deserve a woman who can only love you like I do and bear you children. I hope these letters find you. I will keep writing until they do. Forever, A.”

  Mary held the letter to her chest. “This has to be my mother, she tried to find my father to make us a family. He must have known Richie and Barbra Love to leave me with them.”

  I slid behind the counter and brought the pot out to offer Mary a refill. She jerked at seeing me and knocked over her cup, sending splatters of coffee on her letter.

  "Dottie, look what you've done," Mary said getting up and wiping the stains off her letter with her sleeve.

  "Mary, I'm sorry, please allow me to read the letters or read them to me." My eyes pleaded.

  "Maybe," is all she said and wheeled out of the cafe building.

  I bowed my head in defeat for now.

  The sounds of the Laundromat—machines buzzing, dinging, and clinking— followed me around as I walked through it to go outside and view the signs.

  Mary followed me out with her cart. "Beautiful, aren't they?" I said.

  "Colorful," she said wheeling her cart back and forth like she needed to calm a crying baby in its carriage.

  Mary wore her usual denim skirt, braided hair, and red polo. Her new glasses magnified her eyes like a microscope making the minute viewable.

  The vanilla latte I had in place of breakfast gurgled going down my empty stomach. "How's the letter reading going?"

  "It's coming along. I won't hold a grudge too much longer," Mary smiled.

  "Good, I want to know what you find out about your birth parents. I've always wondered where you came from."

  "Maybe you can help?" Mary said and headed toward the former Laundry Mill building, now the cafe, with several old washers and dryers in the back for the laundry we did for hotels in the area.

 
Just as the door opened to go back in the Laundromat, I heard some commotion.

  A few customers looked frazzled. Sparks started to fly like fireworks. A dryer made a rumbling sound like a car before it dies, and left off steam from its door. I helped a young woman untangle her myriad of thongs, lace bras, and silky pillowcases, out and into another dryer.

  That dryer started to shake and putter. I smelled something burning. Then a man pointed at one of the massive front-loader washers, heaving, then shaking so hard, its glass door popped open.

  Someone screamed watching flames consume her jeans and T-shirts. I called the fire department immediately as people started to run from the building.

  Mary and the barista rushed in to help get people out. Smoke started to puff out of the dryers, setting the smoke alarms screeching over the sound of the fire truck sirens.

  I stood outside with a handful of people curious how new machines could break down so quickly. A fireman approached and asked to speak with me privately. He estimated the cause was faulty wiring in the whole building and that all machines would need replaced. My heart sank. I had flyers made for my official grand opening next week.

  It could take a month or more until we’re up and running again. Mary placed her hand on my shoulder after I told her the news.

  "You'll have to stay with me for a while," I said. Mary squinted her eyes and pursed her lips. I remembered that look growing up, when my parents didn't give her the answer she wanted.

  "I'll finish doing the hotel laundry, here's my key, take the rest of the day off," I said.

  I watched Mary cross the street to walk the few blocks to my house, not realizing at first that she didn't have her cart.

  When I went to the back of the cafe that housed the leftover washers and dryers, I spotted her cart with white lights intertwined within the metal grates and illuminating it as though it were a Christmas decoration.

  I wasted no time and opened up the box of letters. Finally, I could hear the lost words of a stranger. I shuffled them around like playing cards and closed my eyes as I chose one to read first.