by Barry Rachin
But she didn’t just speak about herself. After Mr. Shapiro passed away, she rented space to make ends meet. Carl responded to an ad in the local classifieds. He had been staying by the week in a rooming house over on the east side. Not a nice place—a lot of riff raff and fershtunkener bums. Her last husband—may he rest in peace—had been a cabinetmaker. While cleaning the workbench, Carl found a book on joinery buried under a pile of pipe clamps and plywood jigs. He asked Mrs. Shapiro’s permission before using any of her late husband’s tools.
******
What a character!” Angie said. Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that they take what was left of the strudel and Carl had wrapped it in a paper plate. “He treats her swell, don’t he?”
“Doesn’t he,” her mother corrected. “And, yes, he treats Mrs. Shapiro very respectfully indeed.”
As they were preparing to leave, Carl helped Mrs. Shapiro to her feet, supporting her under the left elbow, which was her weak side. Whether it was clearing the table or locating a three-pronged cane so she could see the visitors off, there was nothing forced or affected in his actions.
“Carl’s nice,” Angie said. “A bit Neanderthal but nice.” There was no response. “So…”
“So what?” Like an over-the-hill boxer telegraphing his punches, Grace could see where her daughter was heading with the conversation.
“What do you think, I mean, about Carl?”
“The world would be a splendid place if there were more people like him.” Grace realized that she was doing ‘the voice’. The voice was a stilted, high pitched tone she unconsciously slipped into whenever she felt uncomfortable, out of her element. She pulled up at an intersection and waited for the light to turn. Five more minutes and they would be safely home. A quick shower and off to bed. Tomorrow was another full day at school, the formal beginning of a new semester and grading period.
“Why don’t you ask him out on a date?” There was no reply. “Women do it all the time. They see somebody they like. Maybe the guy’s shy, … doesn’t know how to approach woman … socially challenged.” Grace stared at her daughter in disbelief. “You been divorced a year and it’s not like any hot prospects are breaking down the door to ask you out on a date.”
“You have such a succinct way of putting things.”
“Which isn’t an answer,” Angie shot back petulantly.
“Carl may be well read and a gifted woodworker, but he’s also a custodian at the school where I work.” She blew out her cheeks in despair. “I’d be the laughing stock of Brandenburg Middle School.”
“This is America, not India. Carl’s not some grubby pariah.”
A fleeting image of the yogi with the chalkboard flash in front of Grace’s eyes. “No, you’re right, but still …”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” They were home. She set the shift in park and flicked off the ignition. “I’ll think about it,” Grace replied weakly.
“No you won’t,” her daughter made no effort to conceal her disgust. “You always play it safe. You lost the key to paradise when dad cheated. You’d rather hide behind allegories and metaphors than risk something to get it back.”
******
Later that night, Angie followed her mother into the bathroom and sat pensively on the toilet while she got ready for bed. “Those curvy boxes we saw over at Mrs. Shapiro’s house were designed by a woman.”
“Yes, that’s true.” Grace put the toothbrush away and reached for the dental floss. Before they left the house, Mrs. Shapiro had insisted that Carl show them a new piece he was working on. The box was similar to the one Grace had seen in the boiler room. “It’s not my design,” Carl admitted in an offhand manner. “There’s a woodworker, Lois Keener Ventura, from Pennsylvania. She came up with the original design. These are just reproductions.”
Lois Keener Ventura had an artistic vision. A vision of sumptuous boxes that would mimic the shape of fish, plants, whales, even boa constrictors. Like the ingenious, brass wire sculptures in Hyannis, Ms Ventura sketched her improbable designs out on paper first, then transformed the whimsical doodles into exotic and voluptuous forms with names like boa, surf, minnow, whaleplay and leaf.
Carl showed them a half dozen other boxes, all faithful, meticulous reproductions. One tall box Carl nicknamed the ‘Koa boa’. Fashioned from a slab of greenish gold, Hawaiian koa, it curled in a sinuous series of ‘S’ patterns. A lethal reptile frozen in wood. “A woman,” Angie spoke softly, “can do just about anything she sets her mind to.”
Grace nodded in the affirmative. It didn’t matter that Carl borrowed the design. The workmanship was his as was the clever idea to decorate the drawers with amboyna burl. “A woman woodworker.” Grace ran the floss behind an upper molar then tossed it in the trash. “Now that’s something special!”
******
Friday morning Grace met with Ed Gray at Adam's Diner. He wanted to discuss the school’s poor performance in the English portion of the MCAS test over breakfast. It wasn’t a formal meeting. That would come later, include everyone in the English department and tediously drag on through the remainder of the school year. Ed was mildly paranoid; he didn’t trust many of the ELA teachers. They harbored dangerous ideas. This meeting was more a pep rally, an effort to brain storm and set an early agenda.
“Poached eggs with rye,” Ed handed the menu back to the waitress. “Lightly toasted, not too much butter.”
“And to drink?” The cloying smell of maple syrup and hash brown potatoes sifted through the restaurant.
“An Earl Grey tea with honey.”
“We’re fresh out of honey,” the woman replied.
Ed scowled and fidgeted in his seat. “Coffee… decaf with skim milk.”
Grace glanced at the menu. All the breakfast entrees were named after popular dances. There was the Charleston - two eggs, with hash browns and a slab of Canadian bacon; the Viennese Waltz - similar but with smoked sausage as the meat; the Hokey Pokey - blueberry pancakes slathered with whipped cream; and the Last Tango in Paris. Grace had used this unusual offering as her basis for the ’crazy omelet’. She ordered the Charleston with a cup of coffee.
“Now there’s a work in progress,” Ed interjected, gesturing with his eyes toward the entryway. A painfully thin, disheveled man had just wandered in and sat down on a stool at the counter. “That fellow comes here every day,” Ed said in a hushed voice, “A burnt out drunk. He’s off the sauce now - or at least that’s what he says. Lives over by the YMCA in subsidized housing and gets a disability check.”
“And how do you know all this?” Grace asked with an amuse expression.
Ed Gray removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It was my great misfortune to be sitting at the counter one day when he arrived for breakfast.” Sure enough, the reformed drunk latched on to the ear of the fellow sitting next to him and began haranguing the customer with a long-winded story. At one point he laughed, a deep-down, straight-from-the-gut raucous belly laugh. Grace observed that four or five teeth on the top were missing - punched out, rotted away or sacrificed in a drunken fog. “What a blowhard!” Ed seethed.
Grace smiled inwardly. She could picture Ed Gray, a captive audience, sitting next to the reformed drunk as he held court. A court of fools.
“About the test scores,” Ed ran his fingers through a tuft of thinning hair, “Brandenburg is down fifteen points over last year. Nobody’s happy.”
All the staff was in a similar bind. A math teacher could no longer just teach basic algebra any more than a history teacher could focus on the Civil War or Great Depression. Compelled to teach to the test, they had no control over what the pundits in Boston chose from one year to the next. The end result: the brightest students received endless praise; average kids were made to feel like dopes and dunces - a motley collection of ineffectual losers; and the marginal students cursed the day they ever set foot in a public school. It was an insidious blame game. Teachers blamed the students for not trying hard enough o
r, worse yet, downright laziness; parents pointed an accusing finger at the school; the superintendent, taking the bureaucratic high road, conveniently reprimanded all concerned. “I saw the social studies test.” Grace said.
Ed Gray made a face and cracked his knuckles one at a time. “What do I care about social studies?” He spoke impatiently, as though the remark was totally irrelevant to the conversation.
Grace leaned forward across the table. “The eighth grade textbook covers the history of western civilization from Roman times through the Middle Ages. Pope Innocent the Third, Thomas Becket, Henry the Second, Papal Indulgences and Justinian Codes ... It’s a college level curriculum scaled down to middle school. Eighth graders just barely handle puberty. They can’t digest that much information.”
“I don’t see where …”
“Does anyone really give a hoot,” Grace pressed her point, “that the Visigoths invaded Spain toward the end of the Roman Empire?”
“Let’s talk about English,” Ed said peevishly, “and let the barbaric Huns and Visigoths sort themselves out. Or perhaps you’d rather travel back in an Orwellian time machine ten years or so when the ultra-liberal anarchists were trampling public education into the ground.”
“That was a cheap shot,” Grace said.
Ed Grayson was referring to a regrettable period in American education when the progressive establishment tossed traditional teaching out the window in favor of an enlightened approach. Since rote memory skills were considered old fashioned, the Dick and Jane primer was abandoned. No one needed to learn vowels or consonants, at least not in the conventional sense. First graders could sound out and spell words with an improvisational flair. It didn’t matter if a sentence was technically correct. The children would grapple with proper spelling, phonetics and grammar as they progressed through the higher grades.
Rules of language. Roolz uf Langwage. Ruels off Lainkwuch. Over time, the first graders’ Tower of Babel would eventually sort itself out. Young learners would blossom into educational free thinkers.
At least that was the grand design.
In reality, kindergarteners taught the ‘enlightened’ educational model frequently emerged in later years functionally illiterate and desperately needing remedial help to repair the damage done by ‘progressive’ education. The utopian dream proved more a pipe dream - make that pieyup drrreeeem - than the real deal.
Grace felt her enthusiasm draining away She had come to the meeting with an open mind, but Ed Gray lived in a world of tattered novels and bureaucratic niceties. Given the option, he’d probably prefer working with the bureaucrats in Boston than teaching the children. The waitress brought their food. Grace spread strawberry jam on a slice of toast. “Last year the English test focused mostly on vocabulary and punctuation.”
“Don’t forget the composition portion,” Ed added. “That counted for thirty per cent of the overall score.”
The reformed drunk suddenly rose from the counter and, moving unsteadily, careened off in the direction of the rest rooms. As he passed their booth the man leaned over and stared at Ed Gray “Hell, I know you,” he crowed. “You got some fancy pants, high fallutin’ job over at the elementary school.”
Middle school,” Ed corrected stiffly. “I work at the middle school.”
“Ooooowee! You’re girl friend’s one hot tamale!” The man dropped down on his haunches beside Grace. “I never would have taken you for a lady’s man, but what the hell do I know.” Giggling like a recalcitrant schoolboy, he staggered to his feet again and disappeared into the men’s room.
“What an asshole!” Ed lowered his voice to a faint whisper. “A totally useless waste of humanity!” He suddenly reached across the table and tapped Grace lightly on the forearm. “About that unfortunate business with the janitor‘s helper... “
The remark caught her off guard. Ed was smiling at her but the expression was pinched. “The man was ill informed. Writers in Pushkin's time were very mannered. There was a conventional romantic formula. They all used it.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Grace didn’t know what to say.
“Alexander Pushkin was a brilliant writer but no different than the rest.” He pushed his glasses up on the brim of his nose. It wasn’t just a casual statement. A reply was expected.
“Yes, I suppose.” Grace cringed inwardly. What Ed was telling her simply wasn’t true. Pushkin was different from all the rest - a literary heretic! Ed Gray was probably telling everyone at Brandenburg Middle School that Carl was a fraud, but that was just damage control. A clever PR job.
The burnt out drunk had returned to the counter and was acting real crazy now, flailing his arms and talking gibberish. One of the cooks, a burly man wearing a soiled apron tied around his thick waste and a Red Sox baseball cap emerged from the kitchen. He bent over the counter and whispered a handful of words in the man’s ear and, without waiting for a reply, retreated back to the grill. The ex-drunk who lived in subsidized housing and got by on his disability check never opened his mouth through the remainder of his meal.
An epiphany! Grace suddenly realized who the unkempt loudmouth reminded her of. Sure, there was Dwight Goober ten years down the bumpy, dysfunctional road of life. He would be living off the dole at taxpayer’s expense and wrecking havoc in a slightly more sedate, middle-aged fashion.
“I’ll get the check,” Ed waved a hand at the waitress.
******
A week after Thanksgiving temperatures plummeted. There was no more talk of Indian summer or winter reprieves with sunny days in the high fifties. A thick film of frost on the windshield greeted Grace went she went out to warm up the Volvo. The finches, chickadees and hummingbirds had long since departed for more temperate regions. Only a handful of diehard cardinals, pine siskin and blue jays presented themselves at the feeder.
At Brandenburg Middle School, vocabulary lists had been inflated to twenty-five words per week amid grumbling and groans from the students. Information overload—too much homework, too many facts to digest, not enough hours in the day. Schoolwork as drudgery! Sisyphus, king of Corinth, doomed to roll his rock up the steep mountainside on a daily basis. Worse yet, Ed’s new strategy, which was no different than the old strategy, produced the opposite effect. Test scores continued to plummet. Now parents were in open revolt, and the chairman of the English department’s only response was to hold firm.
Shortly before lunch, Grace found a handwritten note in her mail slot.
Mrs. Shapiro called. Please
stop by later today after work
regarding an urgent matter,
an emergency. P.R.
Pam Riley, the office secretary, took the message. If she made the connection between the old woman with the funny accent and Ruth Shapiro, Grace was in serious trouble. The administrative secretary was an insufferable news bag, a one-woman rumor mill, who would let everyone in the school know the latest dirt. Actually, Grace wasn’t quite sure what exactly Pam Riley might do with the information, but it wouldn’t be anything flattering.
Later that afternoon, Grace baked breaded scrod with mash potatoes. When the meal was done, she left Angie to clean up and drove out to Mrs. Shapiro’s house. Carl’s car was not in the driveway.
“You mentioned an urgent matter,… an emergency?”
“Emergency?” Mrs. Shapiro shrugged. “What a strange choice of words!” The woman was dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt. Grace followed her into the living room. Again she favored her left side, dragging the injured leg in a sweeping arc, an accommodation to the illness. “PTO meeting at the school tonight,” Mrs. Shapiro noted absentmindedly. “Carl has to close up so he won’t be home until late. Too bad. He would have enjoyed your company.” The room was growing dark and she flicked on the Tiffany light. The bulb was weak and only dimly lit the area around the recliner. “Poor man! He doesn’t enjoy much of a social life.”
Grace let the remark die a natural death.
“Weather has been
so cold lately.” She settled into the recliner, wiggling her rear end until she was quite comfortable. Her withered left hand curled inward toward her chest in a limp ball. “We were spoiled by the warm weather. Now winter is here with a vengeance.”
Grace took a seat by the mahogany table. Why had Mrs. Shapiro invited her here? Certainly not to discuss the weather. “You lived in Israel,” Grace deflected the conversation in a new direction.
“Seventeen years. We were Zionists, nation builders back then.” The old woman tucked her crippled hand in the crook of her arm and smiled wistfully. “I was twenty-five and living on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in the upper Galilee. The Golan Heights rose snow-covered to the east, the biblical cedars of Lebanon due north.” A nostalgic, bittersweet reminiscence tugged the corners of her lips gently upward. “I worked in the poultry barn, but mostly we harvested apples, oranges and grapefruit for export.”
Grace tried to picture Ruth Shapiro as a young girl, petite with dark hair and eyes—a fastidious little bird of a woman. A Jewish settler, brimming over with pioneer fervor in the land of milk and honey. “But you left.”
“Too many hate mongers,” the old woman replied, “on both sides of the ethnic fence.” She fell silent. In a distant room, a grandfather clock struck eight o’clock. Only when the last chime had rung did she pick up the thread of conversation. “There was a handful among us who still remembered the tradition of haskalah.”
“Which was?”
“An outmoded, 19th century notion that all people could live together in peace and brotherhood. The father of modern day Zionism, Theodore Hertzl, was a proponent of haskalah, but few people remember that utopian gibberish today.” Her final words trailed away in a self–mocking tone.
Grace didn’t know what to say. Snowing was falling outside, the ground peppered with a lacework pattern of fragile whiteness. The small room where they were sitting exuded an austere, monastic economy as though in her final years this well-traveled woman was slowly shedding the unwieldy trappings of the material world.