Devoted
By Brett Eastonfield
Copyright 2010 Brett Eastonfield
Published by
Apport Press 10/13/2011
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
eBook ISBN 978-1-4658-8669-9
Cover by Cheryse Triano
Devoted
She bade me follow to her garden, where
The mellow sunlight stood as in a cup
Between the old grey walls; I did not dare
To raise my face, I did not look up,
Lest her bright eyes like sparrows should fly in
My windows of discovery, and shrill ‘Sin.’
D. H. Lawrence
Chapter 1
The small, dark man with dirt-covered jeans has placed himself a discreet distance away, and he waits awkwardly, unsure of what to do with his hands. I stand alone, also unsure of what to do with my hands, or my face. I try to look contemplative because grief eludes me, and I don’t want to seem inappropriate, even to a stranger who doesn’t speak English.
How does one signal when to proceed? There must be a secret sign ministers and priests use that he understands. The only one that comes to me is from war movies. I give a jaunty thumbs up, and he stares. I signal again, and his understanding erupts into clumsy movements to remove the remote control from his shirt pocket and point it in my direction. The motors controlling the two wide, yellow straps slung underneath begin a slow whine and the coffin recedes into the rusty brown of the grave. One motor grunts and stops, and the other continues until the coffin slants precariously in the hole, as if it were trying to stand up.
“Ay, Madre de Dios,” whispers the man, and he scrambles to the motors, kneeling and pushing buttons on the remote and making apologetic nods to me. He continues swearing or praying, I cannot tell which.
Jenny planned this. I successfully evaded her attempts to command my attention all these years, and now she has stood her coffin on end to make me listen. She will push open the lid, tuck one hand under her arm, swirl the ice in her Margarita with the other and scold me.
You never visited me, Nicky, and when you did, you didn’t stay long. No, she never scolds me, although I deserve it. She will find something positive.
I’m proud of you, Nicky. You always did so well in school. There is nothing else to be proud of. She will move on to worry about me.
You look sad, Nicky. Are you lonely? I will mumble a denial, and she will sense my discomfort and change the subject by telling a tall joke. Which newspaper do giraffes read? Unable to wait for a response she will cackle, The Tall Street Journal.
I will laugh, and then she will look longingly at me before saying goodbye and closing the lid. Then I will cry. Yes, if she opens the lid and tells me a joke I will cry, but only then.
I turn when a woman with pale pink pants and a nurse’s white jacket steps up next to me. She looks at the coffin poking out of the ground and then up at me. My face feels naked without tears.
“Is this part of the service?” she asks, her Philippine accent as distinct as the day I met her eleven years ago.
“There is no service,” I say. Her simple question has shamed me again, just as they did every time I visited the nursing home. I do not believe she is mean. She simply can’t comprehend me.
Guided by the kneeling attendant, the motors whine again and the coffin levels and comes to rest on the bottom. I wonder if her death means an end to our bedroom conversations?
Mina stares quietly into the hole and whispers something.
Turning from the grave I say, “I wasn’t expecting anyone, or I would have had a service.”
She turns to my side again, “I don’t need someone to help me say good-bye.”
Mina is only five feet tall and I cannot see her face, but I suspect tears.
Finally, she wipes her face and looks up. “She liked to talk about you, very proud, I think,” she says as she reaches up to rest a hand on my arm. She intends comfort with her words and gesture, but the weight of them staggers me and I fear I will fall backward into the grave.
I begin walking toward the cemetery office. She follows, convinced I want to talk. I walk briskly hoping she will come to the correct realization.
“She gave me this brooch,” she says holding the pink oval hanging from a chain as she tries to keep up with my long strides. “She said it was a wedding gift. Is it all right if I keep it?”
“Yes, of course,” I say as I step into the office and close the door behind me. After writing a check to cover the remainder of the expenses I exit the office to find Mina waiting to resume our conversation.
“I’ll miss her very much,” she says. “Jenny made me feel good, like I was part of her family.”
Mina was the best part of her family.
I walk silently with her, along the narrow paved road that carves through Madronia Cemetery toward the brick and wrought iron entrance gate. Named by the pioneer settlers of Saratoga to sound like the Spanish pronunciation of the madroña trees thick on the hill, the cemetery is lush green grass crowded with neat rows of headstones marking three centuries. The thicket of madroña has been replaced by homes nestled in among the oak trees and scrub typical of California foothills. A few of the dull red trunks and waxy green leaves of the native trees still show through, and several are planted in the cemetery along with maple, redwood and magnolia, which provide abundant shade.
“Jenny loved this place, and this town,” she continues. “She loved everything. A lot of them give up when the family doesn’t visit, but she never gave up. She was happy until the very end.”
I stumble on the pavement because my feet feel leaden.
“She loved to cook. Sometimes she would help the kitchen staff and she was the only one they would let do that. She cooked for you, didn’t she, Mr. Staylor?”
“No. Yes, for awhile.”
“I tried some of her recipes and my husband loved them. She knew them without writing them down.”
There is no response inside I can articulate. We reach the gate and I turn to Mina to signal an end to our conversation and our relationship.
“Thank you… for taking care of her all these years,” I say.
“I love my work, Mr. Staylor. And I loved your grandmother.”
We exchange good-byes, and I start down Sixth Street, a steep hill leading into town. Shortly, I turn to see Mina’s plump figure still standing in the cemetery gate. She waves and yells, “Walk tall, Mr. Staylor. Walk tall.”
Her words sting, but my body still reacts to the old command.
I puff my way down the hill until I reach Big Basin Way. Turning right, I face another downhill slope through most of the town. Saratoga is all hills, not big ones but always annoying ones. The original settlement was built to receive and process logs cut from the foothills behind me. Beyond the cemetery the hills build to a narrow range of low mountains with Big Basin Redwoods State Park at the top. They continue down the other side to the coast. Ahead of me, and past the town lie suburban homes, most built in the 1950’s, and the remainder of the Santa Clara Valley. My home is out there, in Sunnyvale.
The locals refer to Saratoga as ‘The Village,’ denoting an old world quaintness that doesn’t exist, making it pretentious in the extreme. I hate the town and have avoided spending any time here since I was a child. My chief dissatisfaction is the lack of familiar restaurants. The Village doesn’t allow franchise restaurants, meaning I will not find the comfort of eating burgers for lunch.
As I head down the slope I locate the outdoor cafe Karen specified, called Blue Rock Shoot. It is distinctive because of the furniture, which looks as if it has been hewn from small, thin trees and assembled by children not yet introduced to the concept of perpendicular. I buy a coffee and settle into one of the cartoon-like chairs near the front and watch the people strolling by. I pull the can of Jolt Cola from my coat pocket and open it discreetly.
The air is warm, too warm for early summer, but there is a mild breeze from the northwest, which rustles the napkins on the outdoor tables and reminds me of the sweat on my forehead. My lukewarm cola soothes and relaxes me. People fill the sidewalks this Saturday morning, doing errands, or shopping.
Most of the people I have met like watching other people in crowds. The men like looking at the women, and the women, I presume, like looking at the men; I don’t know. I have never understood the fascination with crowds, but Karen is late, and I have only my drink for consolation, so I watch.
They are an attractive group, The Village people, more so than most crowds I have observed, more so than in Sunnyvale, especially. I attribute this to the extraordinary wealth in Saratoga because I believe that attractive people accumulate wealth easily, and attractive people are attracted to other attractive people, and they marry, accumulate more wealth and have attractive children. So it makes sense to me that a village of wealthy people would be attractive. All this attractiveness makes me nauseous with envy and reminds me why I prefer Sunnyvale, where the unattractive don’t feel so out of place.
It is mildly interesting to me how a person’s gait changes when they are negotiating a hill, as opposed to a flat surface. For some it is a challenge to maintain their pace as they move upward, and I watch the leg muscles strain on a trim blond across the street as she defies the up slope. For others, it is a challenge to get up the hill at all and I see a few of those who are nearly defeated. Those going down the hill jut their legs straight out in front of them to prevent rolling down like a ball. Tall people are conspicuous in this manner of descent.
The absence of these difficulties makes one stand out to me, a young woman in a summer skirt with dark hair and a gait that begs for the description, lighter than air. She walks so effortlessly up the hill that it appears her leg muscles do not flex, as if she were an apparition unfettered by the downward pull of gravity. She places each sandaled foot in front of the other with purpose and grace, athleticism and symmetry. It may be the way her head never looks down that contributes to the unreality of her movement, for her head appears to be searching for something in the crowd, something important, so important that she cannot pay attention to her feet. It is a serious look, a determined look. I give her a name, She Who Floats Uphill. When she floats into a shop I return my gaze to the crowd, but nothing interests me as much so I close my eyes.
Hi, Nicky. I’m so glad to see you, give me a big hug.
I stand rigid with my hands at my side while she squeals and squeezes her arms around me. I think I am going to suffocate when she pushes me back and says, I’m going to fix your favorite, spaghetti and meatballs, and I expect you to eat it all and grow another foot. She throws her arm around my shoulder and drags me toward the house, laughing with such joy it washes away my sadness.
“Nick, are you okay?”
I open my eyes to find Karen standing over me with a puzzled look. “Oh, hi. Yes, I’m fine.”
“How was the funeral?”
“There was no funeral,” I remind her.
“Well what am I supposed to ask, how was the planting?” she says, pulling out a chair and sitting across from me. “I never got to meet her. I wish you would have let me go to her… her interment.” Karen carefully folds her long legs under the table.
“What would you have said, nice to meet you, I’m so sorry you’re dying? And there was no funeral, just a burial.”
“How could you not have a funeral service for your grandmother?”
“What’s the point of a service if there is no one to listen? I was the only one there.” I don’t want to mention Mina. That would only dilute my point.
“All right, all right.” She takes a deep breath, “Let’s drop it.”
Karen is upset, which I find disconcerting, because Karen is usually upbeat, positive, perky, or brisk as a bee, as Jenny would have said. I dislike Karen upset because I am always the cause of this deterioration of her natural self, and I know I will pay for it. Karen always snaps back from upset though, and rediscovers her perky self, a quality I greatly appreciate.
Karen is a tall woman, six feet even, which is two inches above minimum height for membership in the Terrifically Tall Club of Silicon Valley, where we met, and four inches shorter than me. I used to tease her by calling her a midget, but stopped when she said I was cruel.
“You carry it too far,” she said.
She has a simple face with a light complexion, a sharp nose and brown eyes. Her blond hair is cut to shoulder length, and she wears long, dangling earrings, jangling bracelets and has a fondness for green, which sometimes makes her look like a moving Christmas tree. This is an old tall joke, but it fits.
Karen is not unattractive, however. In fact, she is the most attractive woman I have ever slept with. This is a decidedly small pool of women. Karen says all my compliments are left-handed.
“Are you going to eat?” she asks, looking at my cola and untouched coffee.
“No, I’m not hungry.”
Her eyes roll. “Really, Nick. Your eating habits are atrocious.”
“Haven’t you heard? Fast food makes you look young.”
“No, it makes you die young. Besides, we never have nice dinners together, it always has to be fast food.”
I shrug.
She orders a salad and coffee, and I sip from my can when she isn’t looking.
Karen knows about dying young. She was married once before, to another tall man, named David, with the additional distinction of being a MENSA member, who died of Marfan’s disease at the age of thirty-six. They had a child, Jeff, who is now eight years old and only in the fiftieth percentile for height, which accounts for her extraordinarily overprotective stance in raising him, which, in turn, accounts for my lack of tolerance for him.
“How is Jeff?” I ask.
Her look is full of mistrust but she forces, “He’s fine. Thank you for asking.”
I suddenly feel a need to explain myself. “I just don’t do well with kids.”
“You called him stupid because he didn’t understand his math homework.”
“He doesn’t understand how the commutative, associative, and distributive properties of math are used to solve problems.”
“When you put it like that, I don’t either.”
“The commutative property dictates that factors can be added or multiplied—”
She interrupts with a wave of her hand indicating this isn’t a good time for a math concepts review. “He is not stupid.”
“I’m just not good with kids.”
“Nick, we’re moving in together. When are you going to try?”
“I’ll try. Let’s all go to a movie together; he likes movies. Doesn’t he?”
“Yes, maybe next weekend.” She is trying to snap back as she eats.
After Karen finishes her salad, she pushes her plate aside. I read the movement as a preface to changing the subject and I am wary.
“Have you given any thought to my suggestion?” she asks.
“I don’t want to live in Jenny’s house.”
“But Nick, it is so perfect here. The schools are great and I want Jeff to be in a good school district. Good primary schools are crucial to success in college.”
“He’s only eight.”
“It takes a whole life to prepare for college. He needs the advantage of good schools to get into a really good university.”
It had better be a good Liberal Arts college. “Your place is fine. It’s in a good school district and your house is bigger and newer than Jenny’s.”
“Nick, you know what the realtor said. Saratoga schools are unmatched for class size and teachers and awards. Everybody says so. Please, Nick. Saratoga is such a great town we’ll have lots of fun here. Think of all the places there are to eat.”
I will have to leave town to eat. “My condominium is sold. We’ve redecorated your house. The moving arrangements are made and now you want to move to a house you’ve never seen, just because it’s in Saratoga? It makes no sense.”
“I want what’s best for Jeff. Take me to see it. Maybe I’ll hate it and we can live in my place.” She is precisely folding and unfolding her napkin.
“You’ve already seen it, haven’t you?”
“I’m sorry.” Her face is absent of guilt. “After your grandmother died I had to at least see what it looked like. The property manager showed it to me.”
“How did you find out Leah’s name?”
“I asked the renters. I figured if I didn’t like it, it wouldn’t matter.”
I have a new respect for Karen’s persistence. “I don’t like her house, and I don’t like this town.”
“It’s a great house. We could ask the renters to leave, fix it up this summer and be in by the time school starts. The redecorating we did on my place will improve the value when we sell it.”
The prospect of moving into Jenny’s house, of even being in Jenny’s house again, muddles me into silence.
“Come on Nick. It’s like Keith said. If you’re going to live together you have to make changes for each other.”
Keith is big on change. Keith regards change as an “opportunity for growth.” I regard change in the same way I regard a dentist with a probe in his hand. Someone is going to get hurt, and I am not the one holding the sharp piece of metal.
Whether we live in Karen’s home in San Jose or Jenny’s house in Saratoga I have to leave my home in Sunnyvale. I have lived in my condominium for seven years, and it is precisely to my tastes; two bedrooms, one bath, with a large connected kitchen, dining and living area, where I can see most everything I own and enjoy, especially my collection of miniatures. What I enjoy and can’t see from there is in the second bedroom, my computers and related paraphernalia. It has a nice tan carpet and cream-colored walls throughout, which Karen says is so passé. She says it as though I should know better.
I bought it after saving my money for the previous ten years, a grueling period of self-deprivation, required because I didn’t have an inheritance or a second income to contribute to a mortgage. It was the most significant accomplishment of my life. It has always been outrageously expensive to live in Silicon Valley and to buy a home here means something. I am giving up the most meaningful thing I own.
All the decisions in my life will become joint decisions between Karen and me. I have already experienced this when we were selecting the new carpeting and paint for her home. I wanted neutral, beige colors to make the house look like my condominium while Karen wanted sharper, contrasting colors, a salmon colored carpet and light yellow walls. We discussed it extensively, and we sought opinions from decorators, who always sided with Karen. I offered arguments of future resale value when neutral colors are used. I said we would get tired of the salmon at our feet and the sun in our eyes and, I thought, the arguments were quite persuasive.
Karen was adamant about her desires, and it became a contest of wills between us. I could not imagine not having my comfy, softly colored surfaces to come home to, to recede into when I am tired. I argued; Karen says I badgered. I persuaded; Karen says I manipulated. I insisted; Karen gave up. I am delighted with myself for not abandoning my principals. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, though, and required so much energy I thought I would have a stroke. I don’t know how many similar battles my physiology can tolerate, but I am firm on this point, I will not be beaten down; I will continue to fight the good fight until I collapse.
For the first time in my adult life I will be living with another human being, sharing the same house, the same bed, the same bathroom, and I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stiffen as I think about it.
I imagine women’s things cluttering up the bathroom and eight-year old things cluttering up everywhere else. Previously neat closets will become glutted with shoes, handbags and articles of clothing I don’t understand. I will step on skateboards in the hall and end up in traction after a terrifically comic flight into the living room. Every one of the clean, cream walls will come to resemble the caves at Lascaux with wildly primitive drawings and handprints at the height of Jeff’s outstretched arm.
Food items will bulge from kitchen cabinets, displacing my books and cases of Jolt Cola. I will be forced to watch healthy meals consumed and will have fast food only when I am alone, which, I fear, will be seldom.
I will smell things I don’t want to smell, woman smells, little boy smells, bad smells.
I will have nothing of my own. Each item I now own alone will gradually become a ‘we’ item, an ‘our’ item or an ‘us’ item. ‘We’ will have a computer. The television will gradually become ‘ours,’ as shows I don’t like are watched repeatedly. “Yes,” I will hear Karen telling her mother, “He used to have a penis, but now it belongs to us.”
I am frightfully ignorant of women and children, and my ignorance will be exposed when Karen and I move in together. I will be asked to shop for menstruation supplies; there must be a label for this category of items but I can’t imagine what it would be. I don’t even know the names of the items. I anticipate profound embarrassment when I ask a young drugstore clerk where the pontoons are located.
There must be little boy supplies also, but I don’t know what they would consist of. Jeff doesn’t require diapers, but he does wet the bed frequently, so perhaps there are large, bed size diaper pads, or special tubes to attach to his penis at night. I fear more embarrassment when I ask the pharmacist for a penis hose. I wonder what size he is?
It is little consolation that Karen will have to change, too. She will have to give up fancy dinners, sex and conversation, like my previous girlfriends. She doesn’t realize this yet because, like Mina, she can’t comprehend someone like me.
So far she has been willing to settle for a less attractive partner because I look so good on paper. I am educated, have a good job, a home and no baggage, or at least the kind of baggage that would prevent me from marrying, like an ex-wife who collects alimony, or children who need money for college. Karen is also a bigot. She can’t stand men who are shorter than she. Karen is fond of saying I swept her off her feet, but I think, she clung to the first tall broom she found to get off the floor. Apparently, tall, clean brooms are scarce.
Not that I should complain. Karen is the only woman who has wanted to marry me. The other three were too fond of eating out, sex or talking. Talking is how I swept Karen off her feet, and I wasn’t even trying. For the first three months we went out Karen talked continuously about short men with emotional, legal and parental baggage. She talked with such enthusiasm that she didn’t notice that I didn’t eat and that the sex was infrequent. Those were the happiest times in our relationship because her regard for me was overwhelmingly positive, and I enjoyed the feeling. Living together and eventual marriage seemed a reasonable course because I wanted to believe that feeling would continue.
When she stopped talking, she started paying attention and my appeal diminished along with her positive regard, and the warm feeling I had learned to enjoy. Counseling with Keith was her suggestion. I reluctantly agreed to three sessions to discuss the virtues of change.
“I’ll think about it,” I say. “But I don’t want to live in Saratoga.”
Karen’s face shows the optimism that defines her. We part, with her saying she will call to get together. Her manner makes it plausible, but I don’t believe it. Women have never liked me for long and I don’t believe counseling will make Karen like me enough to stick around now that she has stopped talking. Each time we are apart I assume she has left me and forgotten to mention it. When she calls to get together I am always pleasantly surprised, and then I wonder why she wants to be with the cause of her unhappiness.
I walk down the hill to the end of town where I parked my car, sweating profusely at the effort. A county Sheriff’s Officer is standing in the lot near my car, talking to a group of kids on skateboards. Stepping into a shop, I watch through the window as he warns them, his finger pointing and spraying them with promised consequences. The skateboarders slink off and he drives away.
Exiting the shop, I merge with villagers negotiating the hill around me and I feel conspicuous. I try to imagine what it would be like living here, coming here to the drug store, coming here to do my banking, picking up my laundry. I don’t fit in a village where attractive people of means float up hill. I would be exposed as a pretender. They would shout at me and call me the Village Ugly, the giant Village Ugly, and they would punish me.
Chapter 2
Karen has made a strategic retreat. We talked a few times on the phone during the week and she has reluctantly accepted that I cannot move into Jenny’s house. My physiology would have been strained to the limit if she had chosen to fight, so I am relieved. The incredible upheaval facing me is slightly more palatable in comparison.
I must leave my condominium by next weekend so the new owners can move in. I have arranged for movers to come on Saturday and transport my belongings to Karen’s house. She assures me there will be enough room for everything and that I will still have my ‘space.’ I am more worried about ‘my’ space.
We agreed to go to dinner and a movie tonight and Jeff will accompany us. Since I am at home packing, they will pick me up when she has prepared herself and Jeff. I spent the day putting books in boxes, magazines in boxes, clothes in boxes and boxes in boxes. I am ready to pack my miniatures, which will require the most care. All of my miniatures are in a display case, itself a work of art, hand-made by a talented hobbyist in Sunnyvale, whose wife sold it to me at a garage sale after he died. The case is a tall wooden cabinet, about six feet wide, with lockable glass doors and adjustable mini size spot lighting. The cherry wood frame is finely detailed and the shelves are highly polished to a dark red luster and can be slanted forward for better display of the pieces in back. The cabinet sits against the wall across from the couch and coffee table, a place of prominence other people might have given to their home theater.
My entire collection consists of lead cast soldiers and related historical pieces purchased over the years at shows and, more recently, over the Internet. Such pieces were created in the last half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries as toys for children, much as green army men are today. As lead was replaced by tin and plastic materials, the pieces have become collector’s items. Mine are all vintage pieces, meaning they were produced before 1935, not recently cast replicas, at least as near as I can determine.
Many collectors like to reconstruct historical scenes, battles mostly, with a number of pieces assembled in a collection as they might have been at the actual event. I prefer a single piece to a collection although a collection is considered more valuable. I have 18 single miniatures from different periods, which are set in various places in my display case. Each shelf contains several single soldiers with additional scenery pieces I purchased to highlight the miniature, and to indicate the time period and typical environment.
When they are appropriately lit, the reflection off the gray metal and brightly colored paint of the solitary soldier standing in battle dress at his station is captivating to me. I often sit with the room darkened and observe each highlighted piece in turn, enjoying the sparkle of light and shadow, the way a child watches a Christmas tree.
While the separates are my favorites I have two other items as well. One is a collection of pieces constituting the entire scenario of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace when their majesties are in residence. I stumbled upon it at a garage sale also, and the price was so reasonable, less than a thousand dollars, I added it to my collection. There are 168 lead pieces of standing, marching, or horse mounted guardsmen, and 104 plastic pieces of various supporting guardsmen including members of each regimental band.
Most of them wear the bright red jackets, while some wear the long blue coats and they all wear shiny black hats. Many of the pieces are delicate, with long rifles resting on shoulders, or finely articulated horse legs protruding from the body. Each has great detail visible in relief on the lead. On the few occasions when other collectors have seen the display or I have described it to them, they have been duly impressed and I have two standing offers.
The second piece is a rarity and, unlike the others, it was not intended as a toy, but as a bank. A small World War I era lead cast soldier standing in a ready pose with a helmet and rifle, fixed with bayonet, is mounted in a small wooden enclosure. The enclosure is a guardhouse made from a soft wood painted brown about seven inches tall, four inches wide and three inches deep with a slot in the top for coins and a piece of glass behind the soldier so the coins may be seen as the bank fills. On the face of the guardhouse are the words, “Get Behind The Man With The Gun” in red. It is in excellent condition and I had a pedestal and clear plastic box made for it, where it sits by itself with two mini spotlights. It is my favorite piece.
The movers will pack the rest of my belongings, but I will pack and transport the miniatures myself. I wrap each piece in bubble pack and place related pieces in plastic bags before placing them into boxes containing generous amounts of packing foam. I’ve completed all of the individual pieces and the guardhouse bank and I am about half way through Buckingham Palace when the doorbell rings, announcing the arrival of Karen and Jeff. I close the cabinet and packed boxes, and before opening the door, place my remote control car into a box and close the lid. Jeff drools every time he sees the car, and I don’t want to stir up any issues with Karen.
Karen stands on the porch with Jeff leaning his head against her hip and punching an electronic game furiously with his fingers. Karen steps in, and to my relief, smiles her snapped back smile and kisses me on the cheek. She says she has stopped trying to kiss me on the lips because I wiggle too much. Jeff doesn’t look at me, but says hello after a nudge from his mother.
“Oh, I see you’re packing your little toys.”
“They are not toys,” I emphasize for the nth time. “They are very valuable collectables, the most precious things I own.”
“Sorry.”
I think that is a smile.
“How is the rest of the packing coming?” she asks.
“I’ve done most of the difficult stuff so I should be ready by next Saturday.”
“What time do you want Jeff and me here to help?”
“The movers will pack everything in the morning and unpack it in the afternoon at your place. So I won’t need your help until I have to start putting things away.
“Okay, we’ll be ready Saturday afternoon.”
Jeff has sunk into the only uncluttered chair, engrossed in his game.
“Will anyone else be helping you?”
“Like who?”
“Oh, I thought maybe a friend from work, a fellow programmer or something.”
“I don’t feel comfortable asking anyone from work to help me move.”
“You don’t have any friends, do you?”
Karen’s observational skills are beginning to blossom. “No, I guess not.”
I know the absence of friends is a deficit in Karen’s eyes. She has a large group of friends, several she considers close, and spends a good deal of her time doing things with them. I would like to have more men friends because I don’t like being the kind of man who doesn’t have men friends. I sense there is something terribly wrong in not having them, but I am not sure why. I am told you can have females as friends, the younger guys at work believe this, but any friend of mine would have to be a male, since females seem to expect things from me I don’t know how to give.
Friends are an inordinate amount of work to maintain, I have found. They get upset if you don’t call occasionally, or ask them to do things. They get particularly annoyed when they ask you to do things and you decline, as if it were personal. Sometimes I had to force myself to do things with a friend when I wanted to be alone because I knew they would take offense if I didn’t. It rather took the fun out of having friends. I don’t have anyone whom I could currently call a friend, my lack of effort is to blame.
Karen introduced me to some of her friends early in the relationship, and we visited on several occasions. I would say they were dramatically unimpressed by me, as I would be, so now we don’t do things with her friends.
On another night Karen would want to explore this topic in more detail, to my detriment I fear, so I am relieved she decides to move on.
“Where should we eat dinner?”
“What are you in the mood for?” I pause and then quickly append, “What does Jeff like?” I am happy I remembered this bit of social grace, asking about Jeff, and am rewarded with a smile from Karen for my thoughtfulness.
“Jeff likes fondue. Why don’t we try the place in The Village, La Fondue?”
“You mean Saratoga?” I can’t believe she is already calling it The Village.
“I’d like to become more familiar with the area anyway, just in case.” Her look is devious delight.
“All right,” I say. I can hardly wait to push unfamiliar food items around at a restaurant called melted. Fortunately, the two burgers I ate in the late afternoon were an adequate inoculation against hunger.
“What movie shall we see?” asks Karen, very pleased with her restaurant victory.
I don’t ask what Jeff wants to see, my social graces are limited. We move to the only room not yet cluttered with boxes and sit on the couch to view the movie listings in the newspaper. Karen is dressed neatly in yellow pants and a matching short sleeve top, which enhances her small breasts, and a light denim jacket. The long earrings dangle and her bracelets jangle and tonight she wears a small pendant around her neck. I never get the impression Karen comes home from work and puts on something casual, rather, Karen changes her ensemble, like a model before another walk on the runway. I assume it is very stylish, Karen deems herself stylish, but this is not an area of my expertise.
As we discuss several movie options I gradually become aware of noises in the distant background, unfamiliar noises, noises which make no sense. We can’t agree on a movie to see. I want to see a SciFi, she wants to see something that won’t give Jeff nightmares. I didn’t know Jeff had nightmares but she mentions two occasions in which she told me as much. I don’t have nightmares so I think I would have remembered her telling me, but my line of argument is interrupted by the unidentifiable noises. They are not mechanical noises, I know mechanical noises when I hear them.
“He has nightmares,” she says. “He has since his father died. Can’t we see something without killing?”
“What’s that noise?” I ask.
“What noise?”
“That funny noise.” I try to make the staccato sounds, but reproduce them badly.
“It sounds like Jeff,” she says.
“What’s he doing?”
“Playing,” she says, her exasperation implying I have never heard a boy playing before.
“What is he playing?”
“What all boys play when they have seen too much violence on television and the movies, kill’em.”
“Kill’em?”
“Kill’em,” she says, “Bang, bang, skew, skew, kill’em,” she points her finger at me like a gun and reproduces the gurgling skew noise I couldn’t identify before.
“Why would he be playing that?” I try to imagine Jeff playing killing games on his electronic toy. He wasn’t making killing noises on it when he came in, why would he be doing it now?
“Why don’t we see the Disney one, Jeff will enjoy that and it won’t give him nightmares.”
I am about to bring up her over protectiveness with Jeff when it occurs to me that Jeff may have found my remote control car and is playing kill’em with it. “Karen,” I say, “I will be very upset if Jeff is playing with my remote control car. I told him not to and I put it away in a box.”
“I am sure he is not playing with the car, I told him how you feel about it and he promised he wouldn’t touch it.”
“Well then what is he playing with?” I suddenly have a vision of a small boy holding a soldier with a rifle and pointing it at another soldier and saying, ‘skew, skew.’ I bolt from the couch dropping the paper to the floor and begin yelling, “Jeff, Jeff,” as I run from the room. Karen leaps up, too, no doubt detecting the slight anxiousness in my voice.
When I arrive in the living room I see Jeff, stretched out on the floor arranging the guardsmen pieces around him in a mock battle with plenty of ‘skew, skew’ noises as they are moved about. He has not noticed my earlier shouts but when I yell loud enough that the glass in the cabinet vibrates, “What are you doing with my miniatures?” Jeff notices. So acutely does he notice, in fact, that he rockets to his feet, startled, terrified, and plants his right foot firmly on a mounted guardsman.
I hear another unfamiliar noise. I can’t detect where it is coming from, but it sounds very much like the Incredible Hulk in that television show when he got mad, sort of a low, growling noise that slowly gets louder and higher in pitch. I pinpoint the source; it is I. I fall to my knees, shrieking so hard I am sure my physiology will not be able to tolerate it.
Jeff detects the lump under his foot, associates it with my shortened position, and lifts his foot away to reveal a mounted guardsman, whose previously long horse legs now look as if they belong to a Dachshund, only not as straight. I begin to crawl toward the assembled regiment, a movement that must frighten Jeff even further because I next detect a little boy smell and a growing wet spot on the front of Jeff’s pants. Jeff cowers in the corner between the cabinet and the wall while I reach for my mangled guardsman. “How could you, you little shit?” I say. It is not a question.
Karen quietly walks around to the cabinet where Jeff is crying and picks him up so that he straddles her hip, soaking her fashionable ensemble in his urine, and says, “Come on Jeff, let’s go home.” She swings her long arm at the chair to gather her purse before gliding across the room and closing the door behind her.
I sit quietly on the floor for a while and ruminate on my loss, another fallen soldier in the army of my life.
“Don’t feel bad, Nicky. When you’re older the girls will be happy to have a tall boy to date. They’ll feel so proud, just like I do when you walk with me.” She hugs me and I bend to rest my head on her shoulder.
Chapter 3
Well-kept suburban homes line quiet, Squirrel Valley Road as I drive toward the house. A triangular center median marks the street leading left to Saratoga Avenue, but I continue, passing the gray, corner house on my left and the yellow house on my right, and straight into the driveway, before the street turns sharply right and then dead-ends at Saratoga Creek.
I know the way, although it has been eleven years since my last trip. Then it was to oversee the storage or disposal of Jenny’s things when she moved into Our Lady Of Fatima. It was eighteen years before when I had spent any time here. I ease into the shaded area in front of the garage to avoid jostling my miniatures, coming quietly to a stop.
Built in the late nineteen-fifties, in the tradition of a New England Colonial, there is a main house covered by a barn shaped roof, and an extension, probably added in the seventies, with a traditional roof. The garage is detached and sits in the back, accessible by an asphalt driveway near the extension. There is a front lawn with a maple and a Coastal Live Oak, hibiscus blooming near the house, and ivy along the curb. The terrain near the creek is hilly, and four steps are required up from the street to get to the main walkway facing the front door. The front of the house is faced with brick, and simulated shutters neatly frame pane glass windows. The door is painted red, the shutters black, and the part not covered by brick is white. Karen said the house oozed charm. It oozes something, but it isn’t charm.
The moving van is only a few minutes behind me or I don’t think I would have come. I am gripped by the sense this is a mistake and that I should have done something, anything, to avoid living here. Easing myself out of the seat I retrieve a Jolt Cola from the trunk. The familiar snap, fizz, and tearing metal sound signals relief is on the way and I walk around the front, sipping.
The house has been completely redecorated: new landscaping, new paint, new carpets, new cabinets and anything else needed to erase the old. Now I see Leah did too little. The place is strangely familiar, like someone with a bad facelift. I am more comfortable with strangers, so I keep my attention on the neighborhood.
Unfavorable comparisons with my condominium rush into my head. It is too verdant here. Lining the street on both sides are well-established maple trees, with broad trunks and large, leafy boughs. They cast shade over much of the street, allowing blotches of light through only when a breeze shifts the branches. Walnut and fruit trees dot a few lawns and large oaks grow in several places. The oaks were saved from when this area was a flood zone incorporating the nearby creek.
The terrain slopes sharply down from Saratoga Avenue, directly behind my backyard, toward the creek located behind the backyards of the houses across from me. Some of the houses are barely visible and must peek out from immense bushes, colorful flowerbeds and neatly sculpted hedges.
Squirrels scrabble through the trees and across the roofs with full mouths and huge black crows perch on gutters like sleek gargoyles. They both harvest walnut trees, one shredding the green skin with their teeth, and the other dropping the shell onto the pavement to pick at the broken pieces. Their detritus is visible under trees and telephone wires.
It is not like my condominium, with its mini-sized, manicured lawns, small plants that never get out of hand, and trees too short to drop unpleasant surprises on your head. My new environment is too natural, almost rural. The creek runs from the mountains down past The Village to the north, and on through the residential area a few hundred feet to the right of me, roughly parallel to Saratoga Avenue. Tall trees line the banks of the creek, creating a seldom broken canopy through most of town. If I were Henry David Thoreau I would feel right at home, but I am not.
Not wanting the miniatures to get so hot they discolor, I grab the first box from the car, locate the key Leah left by the faucet, and step up to the front porch. The door whooshes as it opens and odors fly past my nose to escape. New smells predominate; paint, synthetic carpet and varnish, but there are others, underneath the new. I open the windows to the warm August air and turn on the ceiling fan in the living room. Let them all escape. There is no air conditioning as there was in my condominium, and neither the whirling fan nor the open windows offer relief.
I hear men quarreling in Spanish on the street outside the house. Through my front window, I recognize the two movers walking away from the van parked down the block by the median, and toward my driveway. At the front door, the older of the two tells me the street is too narrow and I will need to move the cars parked nearby so he can back the van in. He tells me to ask the neighbors to move the cars, and they will begin unloading after lunch. While there are only two vehicles, a truck and a small compact, I think I might have avoided meeting my neighbors for several months if I had been left to my own inclinations.
While the movers return to the van, I walk across the street to what I assume to be the owner of the miniature car parked on the corner across from my driveway. The yellow house is of an indeterminate style, from too many poorly conceived remodels, and overly large for the lot. The entrance is overgrown with Carolina Cherry shrubs and contains a single, wide door, which I knock on when I can’t find a doorbell. I am interrupted in the middle of my second knock by a fit, middle aged woman, older than me, who swings the door open wide. She is five feet, with blond curly hair and a pleasant face. She looks up at me, recognition, reaches her hand out to shake mine and with an embracing smile says, “Come on in, you’re just what I need.” She pulls me into the house with the hand she is shaking before I can utter a word and leads me into the kitchen.
“You see that cabinet right above the stove?” she asks, pointing and half hanging onto my arm. “I keep my good silver in there and I want to use it for a dinner tonight; you can put it on the counter for me.”
“Why do you keep your good silver up so high?”
“So burglars won’t find it.”
Apparently, Saratoga only has short burglars. I open the cabinet and reach to the top shelf for a reddish, flat wooden box about eighteen inches wide, which I set on the counter.
“Why don’t you use a chair?” I ask.
“Why would I do that when I have a guy like you standing at my front door?” She laughs and jabs me with her elbow. “I am Sandy Barnett, by the way. Terry, my husband, is in the computer biz, too, and we have two grown daughters who live out of the area. We’re Berkeley, class of ’73. Go Bears!”
I am about to introduce myself when Sandy says, “Where’s your family? When can I meet them?”
I am flustered by this whirlwind of a woman and I try to start from the beginning.
“I’m Nick Staylor—” but before I can complete my resume she interrupts.
“Oh, I know who you are, Nick,” she says as if we had been friends all our lives. “Leah Gould told me everything. Leah and I go way back. I was so sorry to hear about your grandmother. I looked for a service in the paper but I didn’t see one.”
“Uh, no. There was no service. Look, it’s about your car—”
“You went to U.C. San Diego, right? Your wife’s name is Karen and you have a son named John, Jim. What is it?”
“I think you mean Jeff. Listen, can I get you to move your car? The movers need to back in the van and they’re afraid it’ll get in the way.” I remind myself to yell at Leah for misleading Sandy.
“Oh, that’s my daughter’s old car.” She hands me a set of keys from the counter, smiles slyly, and says, “Here. You can park it in the driveway.”
I shake the keys at her and say, “Thanks,” delighted to leave, even if it means I have to move her car.
She shouts at me as I reach the curb. “I’ll come by later to get to know your wife.”
Make that yell at and hit Leah.
I open the door to her car and must exhale sharply to squeeze between the back of the seat and steering wheel. As I wedge myself in, the horn honks until I can reach the seat lever to release the pressure and slide back. I then fold one leg into the car and under the steering wheel, bend my head to the side, and start it up. When the engine turns over, loose fan belts begin screeching and I bend the other foot in to work the clutch. I release the emergency brake and lurch the car into a turn past my house and into Sandy’s driveway with my knee sticking out the open door, stop near the garage door, and reapply the brake.
Sandy is standing near the driveway, doubled over in laughter as she watches me, and keeps spitting out, “That car is too small for you. You look like the clowns in the circus, just like the clowns in their little cars at the circus.”
With difficulty I extricate myself from under the steering wheel, and slam the door. The keys in my hand and two steps away from the car, I detect movement in my peripheral vision. The car is sliding inexorably down the driveway in a path toward the truck across the street. I reach for the door only to discover I have inadvertently locked it, then, rush to the back of the car, trying to slow the tiny car’s increasingly rapid descent. The keys jab into my palm as I position myself squarely behind and push back on the trunk lid. My wobbly knees and pounding chest are no match for the rolling crusher as it gains speed and forces me to back step ever more quickly down the driveway. I imagine myself slapped to the ground and squished by all four wheels before the car slams into the truck. The street is peaked for drainage, however, and when the car clears the driveway and begins to ascend up the slight incline, it slows of its own accord, stops and rolls slowly back to the foot of the driveway.
Sandy is now nearly foaming with laughter, “Are you all right?” and shrieking at each breath. I return the car to her driveway, making sure it is in first gear, place a rock under the front wheel, hand her the keys, and limp across the street.
The house with the nearly missed truck is next to mine and across from Sandy’s, but since the street makes a right angle turn where our lots join, it is within the line of sight of my front porch. The house is a dark gray, also with brick facing, but a single story more in the style of a California ranch home. It sits on the top of a rise and the driveway is short and steep, and the front porch is several steps above that. A street intersects on the other side of the house linking to Saratoga Avenue and creating a corner lot. Where the streets join sits a large triangular median, directly in the middle, and covered with ivy. Three small leafed maples inhabit each rounded corner to make a miniature park. The movers are lounging there, next to their van, eating their lunch and looking amused.
The new white truck appears to belong to someone in the construction business, as there are locked steel cabinets behind the window, a black metal frame protruding up from the sides, and an assortment of construction materials cluttering the bottom of the bed. The truck is parked in front of the street entrance, forcing me to go up the driveway to the front steps. Five steps up to the front porch I ring the doorbell. At first there is silence, and I wonder if the truck will have to remain, then I hear a woman’s voice yelling, but muffled behind the door, “You’ll have to get that. I’m in the bathroom.”
Shortly, I hear shuffling toward the door and it opens to a thin man about my age, with deeply tanned and wrinkled skin, thick brown hair with thin streaks of gray, wearing Levi’s with suspenders and a plaid shirt.
“Hello. Sorry to bother you but I am moving in next door and your truck is in the way of the van. Could you please move it?”
He yawns as if awakened from a nap and smoothes the hair over his head with his hand, and then scratches the back of his neck under his collar. Slowly, he looks up at me, and asks, “Who are you?”
“Oh, sorry, Nick Staylor. I own the house next door. I am trying to move in today and the van can’t get past your truck.”
He leans out the door and looks at my house.
“The van is over there,” I say, pointing in the opposite direction he is looking.
“You want me to move my truck?”
“Yes. Please.”
He commences to look around for something, pats his pockets, and then reaches for a set of keys from a small table in the hall. After yawning, “Okay,” he tumbles onto the front porch in his stocking feet and follows me gingerly down the steps. He winces and hops several times as he steps on small pebbles in the driveway and, when he reaches the truck, drags his hand along the side before getting in and starting it up. Relieved my task is complete and I no longer have to talk to neighbors, I turn toward my house.
I hear metal shuddering thunderously, the unmistakable noise of a vehicle going over a large bump and rattling the frame. I turn to see the truck bounce over the median strip directly between the trees, scrape the branches, scatter the movers, then turn sharply and come to rest on the other side, parked next to the curb. A precisely executed maneuver, except for the new set of tire tracks on the median and a broken tree branch now dangling from the frame of the truck. I run down the street, across the median and open the driver’s side door.
“Are you all right?”
Without answering he slides off the seat and onto the ground, yelling, “Ouch,” as he lands on a rock kicked up from the drive. He drags his hand along the side of the truck until he nears the newly acquired branch.
“Basketball?” he says, only like a question.
“What?”
He swats above his head at the branch without success. “Basketball.” It’s not a question this time.
I now know where he is going, having been asked this question several million times in my life and I answer, “No.”