by Barry Rachin
When Mrs. Abercrombie, who lived three streets over, lost her husband to prostate cancer, Denise arrived at the woman’s front door in the late afternoon following the funeral with a condolence card, bouquet of roses and offer to buy the property. Her figures topped out at eighty per cent of the appraised, fair market value of similar residential property in the area, but the distraught widow was only too happy to get rid of the home and move to an assisted living facility in Brookline that boasted gourmet dining and regular trips to hear the Boston Pops Orchestra perform at Symphony Hall.
Denise unloaded the property within a month of the widow vacating the premises and pocketed close to thirty thousand dollars in clear profit. Then she drove to the newsstand at the corner of Murphy Boulevard and bought a newspaper to check obituaries and new listings of distressed properties being sold for liens and back taxes.
By the time their daughter entered college, Jason refusal to buy into the Denise’s version of the American Dream had them sleeping in separate bedroom. The previous June, he returned home from work and found the answering machine flashing with a new message. “Angelina Fuentes… from 32 Scenic Vista Drive,” the woman with the thick Hispanic accent sobbed into the phone. “Please call me.”
Denise got home late that night. She checked messages, fixed herself a Caesar’s salad and cup of tea. “What did Mrs. Fuentes want?”
His wife teased a crouton onto the tangs of her fork and raised it to her lips. “The poor woman’s three months behind on her mortgage payments, and now the bank has started eviction proceedings.”
“But why is she calling here?”
Denise shrugged. Reaching for a knife she slathered butter on a slice of fresh sourdough bread. “No idea.”
It was a cat-and-mouse game. Denise wouldn’t volunteer information about the tearful Mrs. Fuentes. A reporter, Jason was used to puzzling stories together from tidbits of random information. Three years earlier, his wife hooked up with Willow Tree Lending, a financing firm that specialized in the subprime real estate market. The firm wrote mortgages for people with bad credit, no credit and questionable employment. Since then, there had been at least eight similar calls from homeowners being evicted and thrown out in the street.
“What you’re doing is criminal.” Jason made no effort to hide his feelings.
“Coming from someone who considers ‘work’ a four-letter word, I’ll let that slide.” Finishing with the light meal, she leaned back leisurely in the chair and sipped her tea.
“Want to know the difference between you and a vulture?” Jason didn’t bother waiting for his wife’s response. “By scavenging nature’s waste, the bird serves a useful purpose.”
In early May, just before Mother’s Day, Jason spotted Denise sitting at the counter in Ryan’s Diner. They had been divorced two years. She was hunched over a copy of The Brandenburg Gazette clutching a yellow magic marker. Jason imagined his ex-wife circling prime pickings among the obituaries and recently foreclosed properties. Her hair was going gray at the temples and the crow’s feet dappling her eyes left the middle-aged face haggard. Denise had always been modestly pretty in an ebullient, if somewhat harsh, sort of way. Now the effusive enthusiasm that blunted the sharp edges of her temperament had dissipated. All that wheeling and dealing came with a price tag. Cosmetic surgery or a few Botox injections could repair the external damage - only the external damage.
Things had been spiraling out of control in the marriage long before Denise walked out. His ex-wife complained that Jason wasn’t enterprising. He lacked motivation, direction, and initiative. All of which was true or at least it was accurate from her stilted perspective.
Jason once considered cataloguing Denise’s verbal abuse in an informal compendium. He would pilfer a roll of toilet paper from the hall closet and, with an indelible marker, inscribe each new level of insult on the perforated sheets. ‘I wipe my ass with a chronicle of your complaints’ was the not-so-subtle message. The fantasy was infantile and only lent further credibility to his wife's argument that Jason was a lost soul.—half baked, childish, atrophied, a ne’er-do-well, inadequate personality (Denise borrowed that twenty-five cent gem from a friend with a PhD in abnormal psychology), and all-around ineffectual loser.
His wife earned conservatively three times what he did. She labeled him low energy – worse yet, an inveterate underachiever. So Jason was secretly ecstatic when Denise rented a U-haul and cleared out her belongings to set up housekeeping with a senior partner at the firm. Experiencing a queer sense of moral vindication, he never felt cuckold, betrayed.
*****
One rainy afternoon in late October, Jason was in the upstairs study writing out a check for the quarterly real estate tax. Eight hundred thirty-one dollars and seventy-five cents made payable to the City of Brandenburg. All that money for the privilege of living on the goddamn street three more months! A sudden impulse to rip the check in a hundred pieces seized him along with a similar inclination do the same with the rubbish and water bill that would be arriving in a week’s time. But the town would quickly put a lien on his split-level house or, worse yet, after a few years, confiscate the property. Then he’d be penniless. Homeless. You couldn’t win. All the precocious, bright-eyed Indigo Children had grown up and put their prodigious intellects to work as city planners, public officials, lawyers, speculators, financiers and politicians.
Frank Zappa’s Hungry Freaks, Daddy – the ghoulish nightmare had become commonplace. For fear of ending up in a straight jacket, Jason scrupulously avoided telling anyone about his growing disenchantment with the American dream. Now, for the first time, haltingly and with a growing sense of personal conviction, he told the luftmensch, Maribel Munson. But he only did so late at night when he had trouble dropping off to sleep and, whenever she complained about his morose moods, Jason quickly changed the subject.
“First few years of our marriage, my wife and I used to go camping in the White Mountains. Sleeping bags, Coleman stoves, birding binoculars, hiking gear—the whole shebang.” Jason was lying in bed at three forty-five in the morning, a late night thunderstorm whipping sheets of rain against the storm windows with unrelenting force.
Maribel Munson’s wraithlike doppelganger was perched on a Windsor chair strategically placed near the foot of the bed. “If this degenerates into another rant against your ex-wife,” she warned, “I’m history.”
“You already are history,” Jason corrected.
“Your ex-wife,” Maribel was clearly unimpressed, “is less a physical presence in your life than I am, but you’re still agonizing over her.”
Sliding off the bed, Jason scooped up a backpack mounted on an aluminum frame resting in the corner of the room and slipped the harness over his shoulders. The price tag was still dangling from a chrome post. “I’m taking a sabbatical from the rat race. Bought a Eurrail Pass…ten countries over three weeks
Maribel’s face cycled through a series of unflattering contortions. “What about the newspaper?”
He waved a hand in a placating gesture. “I’ve accrued a month’s vacation so it’s no big deal.” Locating a map, he splayed it on the surface of the bed. The itinerary took Jason in a sweeping arc from Luxembourg up through the Scandinavian countries before backtracking through southern Germany, Switzerland and Italy. “From Florence,” he thumped the map weaving a finger along the Mediterranean, “I’ll skirt the coast and spend a few days in Paris. From there, head south, cross the Pyrenees and tour Spain.”
“When do you leave?”
“A week from Friday.” Jason removed the backpack and leaned the metal frame up against the bedrail. “Regarding accommodations, there are dozens of dirt-cheap pensions and youth hostels along the way.” He waved a copy of Fodor’s Essential Europe under Maribel’s nose. “Already drew up a list, country by country.”
“Aren’t you a little old for the youth hostel circuit?” Maribel quipped.
“I’m considering a side trip,” he ignored the rema
rk, turning his attention back to the crumpled map, “through southern Spain to the port city of Algeciras, where I could cross the Bay of Gibraltar by ferry to North Africa and from there...”
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Fatally Flawed Women
Every woman Ernie Summers ever dated was fatal flaw.
A case in point: the previous winter the thirty-five year-old mechanic spent time with a woman of Chinese background. Maureen Kwong held a masters degree in education. She had been teaching fifth grade math for eight years, when the vice-principal at Brandenburg High School left on maternity leave and she assumed the administrative position.
"School committee meets tomorrow night," Maureen explained, "so we can’t get together." They were sitting at Starbucks down from the Emerald Square Mall sipping mocha latte cappuccinos. "The PTO is considering a car wash to raise money for the harvest festival dance. I suggested selling magazine subscriptions or a bake sale."
"What's wrong with a car wash?"
She scrunched up her bronze nose. "High school girls dress too provocative. The skimpy clothes and all that fleshy exuberance send the wrong message."
Ernie gawked at the woman but held his tongue. The statement made no sense. It was late October with temperatures dipping into the low fifties by early morning. Nobody would be prancing around in halter tops and cutoff jeans! And even if they were, it was a carwash.
"You see," Maureen pressed her point with brittle obstinacy, "parents lack common sense, and I constantly need to redirect their misguided energies."
The skimpy clothes and all that fleshy exuberance send the wrong message. This from a woman who wore a flimsy, low-cut blouse and stiletto heels when Ernie met her three months earlier at the Foxy Lady lounge!
Maureen Kwong had no compunction about cleavage, risqué small talk or casual sex on a first date but was worried half to death about middle-aged men getting erotically aroused at a car wash. Despite a master’s in administration, the vice-principal seemed like the stupidest cow on the planet.
Sipping his tepid drink, Ernie glanced about the coffee shop. A pimply-faced youth several booths down was ogling Maureen Kwong with a fawning expression. "What about the graffiti prank?"
"I'm still working on it,” Maureen replied tersely. “These things take time."
The week following New Years, somebody decorated a stall in the second floor, boy's bathroom with an obscenity-laced poem. The first stanza read:
Roses are red
Lemons are sour
Open your legs
and give me an hour.
The janitor scrubbed the lengthy verse away but not before Ms. Kwong took a dozen digital photos of the raunchy musings. A week passed and a second somewhat longer and more intellectually challenging poem appeared on the same spot. Both were scribbled using indelible markers.
Sex is like math
You subtract all the clothes
Add in the bed
Divide the legs
And Pray to god
You don't multiply.
The pithy verse was far too clever to be the work of adolescent minds. Ms Kwong hypothesized that the writer plagiarized the smut from a collection of internet erotica, passing it off as an original creation. Needless-to-say, no one claimed literary credit. The vice-principal, who was in charge of disciplinary matters, grilled a handful of prime suspects, who pleaded ignorance; long after the metal stalls were scoured clean, the woman was still hard at work trying to solve the adolescent caper.
"A few dirty words scribbled on a bathroom stall," Ernie assumed a breezy tone, "it's a victimless crime - hardly worth getting your panties twisted in a knot."
"Maybe for you," Maureen's voice soured. "I’m having several photos enlarged."
"For what purpose?"
"To check handwriting against samples from some of our more troublesome students."
"That almost seems like an invasion of privacy." He no longer made an effort to mask his irritation. As a prelude to more extensive interrogations, Ernie imagined Maureen Kwan brandishing a high-powered magnifying glass over the script, examining each verse for distinctive flourishes, embellishments, misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies.
"Are the poems in bad taste?’ “Yes, of course.” Ernie answered his own question. “Are they mean-spirited, vulgar and crass? Yes, again, but teenage boys… and I speak from personal experience, are like that."
"And you're not embarrassed to admit as much?"
Ernie leaned halfway across the table. "It's a quasi-degenerate stage most healthy males go through… a pubescent rite of passage."
Roses are red
Lemons are sour…
In the Starbucks Coffee Shop on a Saturday night in the middle of October, Ernie decided to pull the plug on Maureen Kwong, the newly-minted vice-principal of Brandenburg High School. Not that the autocratic, Asian woman was an anomaly. There were a million females out there just like her - well-educated, bright, sexy, professionally competent and dangerous as hell. You couldn't marry a woman like Maureen Kwong. Even as a casual date, Ernie could tolerate her eccentricities for no more than a handful of hours back to back.
* * * * *
Three months later while easing a corroded water pump out from under the hood of a Ford pickup, Ernie gingerly placed the damaged part on the concrete floor and wiped his grimy hands with a rag that wasn’t any cleaner than his fingers. Only when he stood fully erect did he notice the olive-skinned woman waiting patiently near the hydraulic lift. "Can I help you?"
She gestured with her eyes at a maroon colored sedan parked near the furthest bay. "My Toyota Celica... the air conditioner’s busted."
"Leave a number where you can be reached. We’ll take a look and call you in a few hours."
She pursed her lips and stared at a mound of gashed, punctured, crushed and otherwise ravaged tires heaped in the far corner of the repair bay. “I work over at the library in reference and am on a rather tight budget."
"I'll see what I can do."
After replacing the defective water pump, Ernie finished a brake job, junking the scarred rotors on a late model Subaru. Around eleven he pulled the Toyota into the bay and raised the hood. Twenty minutes later he called the library. "Your compressor’s shot… completely dead."
"Oh dear!"
"New units cost a small fortune, but I can scare one up at salvage for a fraction of the cost. Even though it's used, we’ll warrant the part for a year just in case anything goes wrong." He wasn’t quite sure why he said that as the garage never offered warranties on used parts.
There was a short pause. "That sounds fair enough."
When he hung up, Buddy Evers, who pumped gas and did odd jobs, stuck his head in the garage bay. "Are my eyes playing tricks on me or was that Jillian Crowley stopped by earlier?"
"Where do you know her from?" Ernie asked.
"Attended high school together. The guys called her the 'Virgin Mother' ‘cause Jillian was such a prude. She always treated me swell, even though I never moved in her circle."
"Which circle?"
"The straight 'A', goody two-shoes set.” A rusty van pulled up at the self-service pumps. “You still dating that Chinese girl?"
Ernie grimaced and shook his head violently. "That blockhead?"
"Thought she had a half dozen sheepskins hanging on the wall."
"Just one - a PhD in foolishness," Ernie muttered. "What else can you tell me about Ms Crowley?"
“Her parents brought their Chevy Cavalier for oil changes but moved to Florida a few years back. Jillian shares an apartment over behind the fire station with a younger sister."
"What's the sister like?"
"Abigail?" Buddy flashed him a queer look. "Nothing like the Virgin Mother!"
"Which tells me nothing."
*****
Three days later, Ernie visited the library on his lunch break. "How's the air conditioner?"
"Wonderful! I can't thank you enough."
/>
"Anything goes wrong," Ernie added magnanimously, "you bring it back to the garage and I’ll set things right." He shifted back and forth on the heels of his feet. "I was wondering if you could recommend something." His original intent was to ask the librarian out but his mind got hamstrung.
Jillian folded her hands together on the desk. "What type of fiction do you prefer?"
"I don't know… nothing too demanding. Since high school, I mostly favor hot rod magazines."
She led the way across the room to the stacks and in the first row pulled a slim volume down from the top shelf. "Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson... it's an American classic."
"Anything else?"
"No, I think that about does it," Ernie replied meekly. Jillian stood quietly with her delicate fingers laced together, the nails polished with plum colored lacquer. "He sold paint for a living," Jillian muttered as an afterthought.
"What’s that?"
"Sherwood Anderson... when he wrote Winesburg, Ohio, which is generally considered his greatest work, he was writing advertising copy and working days for a paint factory." Uncoupling her fingers, the supple hand drifted down to her hips. "It's just a bit of literary trivia that I thought you might appreciate."
Ernie promptly went home and read the novel. He liked it well enough but wasn't terribly sure that he understood the half of what he had read. Each short vignette contained a subtle, evocative message. Winesburg, Ohio - it was sort of like Jillian Crowley. The woman was an enigma. She confounded his sensibilities. But if Buddy Evers said she was a decent sort, that's all Ernie cared about. Buddy had been married to the same woman since high school. He coached Little League, never drank to excess or fooled around. Buddy mentioned that it was no great surprise Jillian, who was always shy and reclusive, became a librarian.
