by Daniel Klein
“Tiffany. Tiffany Korand,” the woman says. She starts to extend her hand, but stops herself, apparently flustered.
“Do you know Lila?”
“Not really. But my son’s been in school with her since second grade. He’s a class ahead of her.”
Franny nods. She wonders if Lila is involved with this boy and that is why his mother has come to the shop—she wants to discuss their suitability for one another or some such. That sort of thing might still be done in hamlets like Frowell River.
“What’s his name?” Franny asks.
“Bret. Bret Stephenson.” A surname different from Tiffany’s own, Franny notes; certainly not unusual these days. “Listen, I drove past you last night,” Tiffany goes on. “You know, in front of the Town Hall.”
“The vigil,” Franny says. “For the war dead.”
“Yes. You were the only one I recognized.”
The woman looks deeply distressed, and Franny reflexively steps back from her. Could this woman be some kind of zealot who is about to harangue Franny about her politics? She did wait until the store had emptied, obviously so no one would see her. Franny remains a few feet away from her, eyeing her closely, saying nothing.
“How . . . how do you know those numbers are right?” Tiffany asks.
“The number of soldiers killed?”
Tiffany nods.
“We get them off the Web. GlobalSecurity dot org. It’s a non-partisan site,” Franny says.
“On a computer,” Tiffany says.
“Yes. It’s just like a newspaper, really.” Franny slowly backs toward the door, keeping her eyes on the woman.
“You never hear that on the radio,” Tiffany says.
“On GVS?”
“Uh-huh, not on the news.”
Franny considers explaining the reason for this to Tiffany: that the government does not want its citizens to become unduly preoccupied with the war dead, and the corporate media, like WGVS’s A.P. news, is more than willing to cooperate in this act of patriotism. But Franny does not want to provoke this woman any more than she already is.
“So it’s like a lie,” Tiffany says. Her face is still creased with anxiety, but now seems more troubled than threatening.
“Pretty close to one,” Franny answers.
“That doesn’t seem right, does it?”
“Not to me,” Franny says.
For a moment, Tiffany looks back at the Thanksgiving cards, then looks straight at Franny. “I never marched or protested or anything before,” she says.
It takes Franny several seconds to grasp Tiffany Korand’s meaning.
“Neither did I,” Franny says, smiling with wonder.
“Aren’t you afraid somebody will see you?”
Franny cannot help but laugh. “That’s kind of the idea, Tiffany.” She wants to hug this woman, and takes two long steps toward her, but now she is afraid of frightening her so she just touches Tiffany’s shoulder lightly. “I was just going to close up and go over there now.”
Tiffany shrugs. “I still can’t make up my mind which card to get.”
“I wouldn’t get any if I were you. They make cards for every damned thing these days. They sent me a bunch for Groundhog Day last year—can you believe it? It’s just another money-making business.”
Tiffany laughs and for a moment Franny can see traces of what once must have been a fairly attractive face. “I can only do it for a few minutes,” Tiffany says.
“Me too.”
This time, Tiffany follows through with her handshake as she is introduced to Marta and Herb. Franny can tell her colleagues are overjoyed to have a new member of the group—especially one who looks so, well, average; they know how much that can count in Grandville. But fortunately both Marta and Herb control their enthusiasm and greet Tiffany with a kind of warm formality: “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Tiffany.” Franny apologizes for not bringing her poster of Iraqi casualties this evening. They are waiting for Stephanie Cyzinski to arrive with the latest count of American soldiers killed.
The sun has dropped behind the mountains and the last refracted rays provide no warmth. An early evening breeze blows down Main Street and instinctively the vigil group huddles close together. For reasons she refuses to ponder, Franny feels content. Cars roll by, some honk and all four in the group wave back. Franny wants to ask Tiffany what brought her here tonight, but she does not want to break whatever spell the woman is under. No one talks; their silence is consoling.
“I guess I better go,” Tiffany says after ten or so minutes.
“Me too,” Franny says. “Got to get dinner going.”
When they turn to leave, Franny sees Stephanie coming toward them with her poster under her arm: “412 American Soldiers Killed.” Tiffany looks at the poster, then at Stephanie who is now walking directly up to her.
“Mrs. Korand!” Stephanie says. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“I didn’t know myself,” Mrs. Korand replies.
“But it . . . I mean, I can understand why,” Stephanie says quietly.
Tiffany and Stephanie simply gaze at one another for a long moment while Franny stands beside them looking from one face to the other. Franny cannot guess what exact feelings are flowing between Tiffany and Stephanie, but she can tell these feelings are founded in compassion.
Finally Tiffany says, “I thought . . . you know, I thought the tennis . . . that it might lead to something. A scholarship . . .”
“I thought so, too,” Stephanie says. “Bret’s really super. My dad says he’s a natural.”
Tiffany shakes her head back and forth very slowly. Her eyes are tearing up. “He . . . he didn’t even ask me. You know? Just came home and said he’d enlisted.”
Tiffany looks like she might start to cry, and Stephanie wraps her arms around her and pats her mouse-brown hair. “We tried to get Bret to change his mind. Everybody did.”
Tiffany whispers, “Thank you,” pulls away from Stephanie, and starts to walk quickly across Main Street. Franny realizes that the woman is going to wait for the Loop Bus at the corner of Railroad Street. She does not want to leave Tiffany this way. She could go over to the Phoenix, borrow Wendell’s truck, and drive Tiffany home, but at that moment Stephanie touches Franny’s arm. This young woman, a high school girl, is signaling Franny to let the distraught mother be.
Franny sprints up Melville Street, past the theater and up the hill towards home. She urgently needs to see her daughter.
* * *
As Franny passes the theater, her father is inside, reading in the projection booth. Tonight, Wendell sold only seven tickets for the film Radio, and he considers this a testament to the town’s good taste. He has only seen the film once and it pissed him off. Not because of its soppy life-affirming message, but because once again Hollywood had trotted out a retarded character to enlighten us with this message. The Forrest Gump factor. Wendell could not say who this contrivance insulted more, retarded people or the rest of us.
For a town its size, Grandville is home to a relatively high number of retarded people, the result of a Massachusetts law that gives full reimbursement to group residences for mentally-deficient people of all ages. Running these homes is a business, but it does seem to attract caring people, mostly semi-retired social workers from Springfield and Worcester who want to live out the rest of their lives in a rural area. The retarded, themselves, can be seen on Main Street just about any time during daylight. Their faces, stumbling gaits, and slow, loud voices are familiar to everyone who walks that street: the man with a large, round head and a hiccuppy laugh who calls himself ‘Chief’; the pretty teenage girl with a look of perpetual bafflement on her fine-featured face; the one obvious Mongoloid, a man in his thirties who, for reasons only he may know, carries a backpack stuffed with thick books. One or another of them is often sitting at the counter of the Soup and Sandwich when Wendell drops in for his late-afternoon coffee and pie. He greets them the way he does everyone else in town: “
How’s it going?” Sometimes they even have a short conversation of sorts, about the weather or perhaps something that is on the shop’s TV at that moment.
Wendell’s father told colorful ‘village idiot’ stories from his childhood about a guy they called Pinky who spent his days standing in front of the Shays’ Rebellion Monument next to Town Hall, playing with his yoyo and addressing every passerby by his full name. In the evenings, Pinky’s father would pick him up in his truck and take him home. Wendell does not find anyone in the current population of simpletons particularly colorful. Like most people he encounters in town, they are simply familiar faces with private lives he will never know. But also as with the other people he sees on Main Street, Wendell is pretty sure they do not have any eye-opening lessons to teach him about what really counts in life. In his experience, he has never met an idiot who was a savant, although he has come across a fair number of savants who were idiots.
The buzz sheet accompanying Radio was freighted with quotes calling Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of the retarded man “brave” and “daring.” “Demeaning” is more like it. The Gooding character is a retarded black man for God’s sake! To Wendell, the real message of the film is that only if a black man is retarded can you really love him for who he is.
Since meeting Professor Gnomes, Wendell decided to read up on African-American history. Over the years, it is in just this happenstance way that Wendell has pieced together his education, such as it is. He will, say, hear “Musetta’s Waltz” on Moonstruck’s soundtrack, and the next day he will stop by Digby’s Music Shop and pick up a CD of La Bohème that he will proceed to play three or four times while reading the libretto in the accompanying pamphlet. Afterwards, he will put the CD on a shelf where it will remain untouched forever after. By that time, he may have overheard a conversation in Franny’s shop about the old roller coaster in Coney Island, and off he goes to the community college library to take out a history or novel about Coney Island. He does not think of himself as an intrepid autodidact or even as a particularly curious man. Mostly, he thinks of himself as a man with a lot of time to spare in his projection booth. He is currently reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and perhaps that is why he was so quick to spot the indignity at the heart of Radio.
With his feet stretched from his upholstered chair onto a pillow-topped box of old Silver Screen magazines, Wendell is reading the part of the book called, ‘Gabriel’s Prayer.’ He knows some of the spirituals the characters sing in this section and hears their melodies in his head as he reads. Binx, as always, is lying on the projector stand next to the projector’s motor, savoring the warm current that blows off it. Like his master, Binx is a creature of comfort.
There is a knock on the projection booth door, usually a sign that the film image has gone blurry or even disappeared altogether. Wendell gets to his feet and peers out the window slot at the screen: Cuba Gooding’s demented smile is fully and vividly intact.
“Who’s there?”
“Esther.”
Wendell opens the door. “I didn’t see you come in,” he says.
“You caught me,” Esther answers. “I didn’t buy a ticket. But I promise not to look at the movie.”
“That’s a wise decision.” Wendell gestures for her to come inside and when she does, he closes the door. He now sees that she is carrying a small wicker basket covered with a napkin.
“I made some knafi, but the kids were less than enthusiastic. They prefer Twinkies. The whole Lebanese connection doesn’t mean much to them.”
“Well, I don’t think there are any in my bloodline,” Wendell says. “But I am a good eater.”
The projection booth is small to begin with, and Wendell’s reluctance to dispose of anything that commemorates the Phoenix’s past—including his beloved first projector, the stupendous Brenkert—has left so little space that Wendell and Esther stand just a foot away from one another. Esther removes the napkin cover, pulls out a pastry, and offers it to him. “It’s a mid-Eastern cannoli,” she says.
Wendell has to lean back at the waist in order to extend his hand without overshooting the proffered sweet. It would be an awkward maneuver for a smaller man; for Wendell it is a contortion. Esther laughs and positions the knafi in front of his mouth. He takes a good bite and chews slowly with a mock analytical expression on his face, as if he is a taste tester on one of those dueling chef TV shows.
“The hint of nutmeg is sumptuous,” he announces solemnly.
They are both laughing now, and when Esther offers Wendell another bite, he leans past the delicacy and kisses her lips.
If, at this moment, we were able to peep in rather than out the six-inch window that commutes the projection booth with the rest of the theater, it would be hard for us not to giggle at what we saw: a tall, overweight, white-thatched man leaning down to kiss a small, middle-aged redhead who is arcing her right arm over their heads, suspending a flaky pastry as if it were some kind of ersatz mistletoe. But lingering longer, our eyes adjusting to the flickering rainbow of light reflected off the walls of this miniature stage, we would see there is more to this tableau than a simple sight gag. It is in their faces: They both look deeply relieved, as if for this moment they are released from a burden they have borne so long it felt like the burden of simply being human.
The kiss concluded, Esther looks around for a place to set down the half-eaten pastry. Binx has roused himself on the projector stand and sniffs in her direction. Esther looks at Wendell questioningly.
“He’d rather have a bagel, but I’m trying to expand his palate,” Wendell says, grinning.
Binx hops down, takes the knafi from Esther’s hand, and hops back onto the stand to eat it. Wendell leans down and kisses Esther again. He feels foolish and extraordinarily happy.
They keep kissing this way, holding each other softly, then tightly, then softly again. Every once in a while, they lean back from one another and look into each other’s faces; they smile—sometimes laugh—but do not speak. Ten minutes pass. Down below, Radio is ratcheting up the mush for its three-hankie finale.
“I want to make love with you, Wendell, but I can’t,” Esther whispers.
“Okay,” Wendell says.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?”
“I figure you have your reasons.”
“I do.”
“Okay.”
Esther leans back from him again, but this time she is not smiling. “I . . . I only have one breast,” she says.
“Cancer?”
Esther nods. “Mastectomy.”
“I’m sorry,” Wendell says. This news does not much effect him. He feels neither shocked nor disappointed. He is so saturated with joy that it does not admit distraction. He touches the side of her face with his hand. “I may be behind the times, but I bet it’s possible to make love without both breasts,” he says, smiling.
Esther tries to smile back, but she cannot. “I guess I’m just not ready yet,” she says.
“That’s okay.” He looks down at her. “The truth is, whatever we’ve just been doing, that’s the sweetest lovemaking I know of.”
* * *
When Franny returned home from the vigil, Lila was upstairs in her bedroom, and when Franny called up to her that dinner would be ready in a few minutes, Lila called back that she had eaten already. So Franny walked up and knocked on her daughter’s door.
“I’m studying, Mom,” Lila said.
Franny has a self-imposed rule against invading her daughter’s room uninvited, so she said, “Can I to talk to you for just a minute?”
“Whatever,” Lila replied.
Franny took this as at least a partial invitation and opened the door, but stopped at the threshold. Lila was lying in bed on her back, staring at the ceiling. Any mother but Franny’s own would know that her child was busy dreaming she was somewhere else, anywhere else.
“I just had an amazing experience,” Franny began. “And I knew you’d be interested. It’s about peop
le you know.”
She then quickly told the story of Mrs. Korand, her son, Bret, who had enlisted, and Stephanie Cyzinski. But when she reached the part where Stephanie embraced Mrs. Korand, Lila interrupted her. “Stephanie probably does that shit so it will look good on her college transcript. Check off the box for ‘citizenship.’ She wants to go to Harvard, for crissake.”
Franny was so stunned by her daughter’s response that she immediately closed the door; she did not want Lila to see how wounded she felt. Reaching for the banister as she started down the stairs, Franny felt so weak and shaky she could not grasp the rail. She sat down on the topmost step and leaned against the wall. She took long deep breaths to counter her dizziness. Not for one second did she believe Stephanie Cyzinski had an ulterior motive for joining the vigil group. How could Lila think that? What had made her so cynical? Was Franny to blame for that too?
Franny waits until midnight for her father to come home. She wants to cry with him. She knows very well that she is beyond the normal age for a woman to still yearn for her father’s embrace when she feels tears coming, but she does not begrudge herself this weakness. It is what it is, and she is grateful that she can find solace in her own home.
But not tonight. Wendell must be out drinking with Maggie Bello tonight. So Franny goes to bed and weeps alone.
* * *
After cleaning up and locking the theater, Wendell walks Esther home. She is carrying her basket of mid-Eastern pastries and Wendell eats them one by one, relishing the sharp burnt surprise of toasted pine nuts inside the sweet cream filling. At the corner of Railroad Street, Wendell turns away his head lest Maggie Bello spot him through the window of the Railroad Car. He has only seen and bedded Maggie once since his trip to Amherst, and that was a dispiriting experience for him. Rather than introducing a thrust of life into his weary body, the act made him feel detached, a bored witness to a tired routine. He had hoped Maggie could tell they had come to the finale of their once-comforting alliance, but he realizes now that he will have to say something to her soon.
