by Barry Rachin
Grace had little trouble picturing Ed Gray sneering at Carl Solomon. Five minutes into the burnt-out drunk’s tirade at the diner, Ed’s nose had begun to twitch, an uncontrollable nervous tic, while his upper lip curled half way to his eyebrows. Grace didn’t bother to tell Carl about the PR campaign to reclaim his damaged credibility. “Ed Gray lives in a world of musty books he can’t even begin to appreciate.”
“But he could make your life miserable.” Carl released his grip and stepped back, putting his dry jacket back on.
Grace was trying to remember the Helen Keller quote, but her brain fogged over - something about living with uncertainty, danger being the natural state of animals in the wild. “Yes, the neurotic turd can make my life a living hell,” Grace smiled, a defiant challenge, “but I’m counting on you setting everything right again.” Before he could respond, she lifted up on her toes, planting a kiss on a bristly cheek. “And I’m coming to the Mansfield show whether you like it or not.”
******
Tuesday before class Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist, stopped by the classroom. The psychologist wore a dozen different hats at Brandenburg. He tested special needs kids to determine grade levels and where their educational weakness lay. He also counseled kids with emotional problems and ran a play therapy group at the elementary school. “Lester Boswell’s mother says you’re a saint,” Dr. Rosen threw the remark out in an off-hand manner. “She told me about what you did in the poetry class,… getting Lester actively involved.”
“The class got a kick out of it.”
Lester Boswell hadn’t started the year in Grace’s class. He transferred from Charlotte Anderson’s home room in early October. Charlotte was menopausal and taking it out on the class. When her hormones were crashing, teachers could hear the hysterical outbursts from three doors down. Lester, the quiet little gnome with wire-rimmed glasses and a speech impediment, frequently bore the brunt of her feminine angst. After an angry call from the Boswells, Principal Skinner pulled the curtains shut and hunkered down in his office with Dr. Rosen. A week later, Lester was quietly transferred to Grace’s eighth grade class. Charlotte Anderson promptly chose another child, Roberta Tolbert, to replace Lester as black sheep and worthless runt-of-the-litter. Fortunately, Roberta was more resilient than Lester; the teacher’s snide tirades rolled off her thick shoulders like so much briny water off a seagull’s back.
“Whatever you did,” Dr. Rosen continued, “made Lester feel special.”
“He is special,” she murmured as an afterthought. “That was the underlying theme of the two poems we read.”
“When she comes to grips with her midlife crisis,” the psychologist said dryly, “be sure to share that bit of wisdom with Charlotte.” Glancing at his watch, Dr. Rosen rose to leave.
“That was me a year and a half ago,” Grace blurted out just before the psychologist reached the door.
“Excuse me?”
“Charlotte Anderson. It’s her season to crash and burn. A year ago last December I wasn’t much better, what with my marriage in shambles.”
“But you’re doing better now,” the psychologist remarked.
“Yes, Lester Boswell and I are having a reasonably decent year.”
******
The week before Christmas Mrs. Shapiro caught the flu. Carl drove her over to the emergency room at Bayberry Hospital. A nurse took her blood pressure and pulse then clipped a device that looked like a high tech clothespin onto the tip of her index finger “Blood oxygen’s a bit low.”
The doctor wanted to admit her but the cantankerous woman wouldn’t cooperate so they negotiated a compromise. The hospital pumped two bags of electrolytes into a knobby vein in her arm and sent her home with a prescription for cough syrup with codeine and a week’s worth of antibiotics to manage the sinus infection. Grace cooked up a pot of homemade chicken soup with escarole, celery, carrots and basmati rice and, while Carl and Angie were downstairs building jewelry chests, she kept the invalid company.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about.” Mrs. Shapiro’s frail body was racked with a broadside of uncontrollable coughing. Propped up in bed with a pillow under her head, her dark hair was matted against her forehead in pasty ringlets.” Why are you looking at me like that?”
Grace placed the bowl of soup on the bedside table and waited for the convulsive fit to subside.” Like what?”
“Like if you turned your back for five minutes, you’d find me keeled over stiff as a board.”
“That’s not likely.”
“Why not?”
Grace fluffed an extra pillow and positioned it behind the woman’s scrawny shoulder blades. “Rigor mortis doesn’t set in for at least two hours after a person passes away. And that‘s a medical fact.”
“I’ll remember that the next time I’m planning to drop dead.” She wiped her mouth and the tissue was smeared with putrid looking greenish phlegm.
“You look a mess,” Grace replied calmly. “And you probably belong in the hospital.”
“So now I’m inconveniencing you?” She groused pugnaciously. “A poor old woman wants nothing more than to die with dignity in the comfort of her own home, but you can’t be bothered.”
“Eat the soup,” Grace counseled, handing her a spoon, “and cheat death.”
“Cheat the devil’s more like it.” She sipped listlessly at the broth and pushed the bowl away. “So, I heard this improbable rumor. Utterly ridiculous nonsense.”
“Which was?”
“No, no! Nothing even worth mentioning.” Grace raised a skeptical eye and the old lady continued, “That some mentally unbalanced English teacher was dating the school janitor.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Anyone else know?”
“Not yet. We’re dating and it’s no secret. Sooner or later someone from the school will see us out in public. Then we’ll deal with it.”
“A month after he came to board with me,” the old woman abruptly shifted gears, “Carl asked for something to read. I said, 'Why don’t we take a look in the den. ’”
In the rear of the house, Mrs. Shapiro’s third husband, Oscar, had converted the den into a private library. Putting his carpentry skills to good use, the man designed custom, floor-to-ceiling, mahogany bookcases. The shelves were stocked with literature in various languages, philosophy and poetry. “Something to read,” Mrs. Shapiro sighed. “What would you offer Rousseau's noble savage or one of the captives in Plato’s hypothetical cave?” There was nothing condescending or sardonic in her tone. “I suggested Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Carl plowed through Steinbeck in a week. I offered him Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illyich. He devoured the novella the same day. A collection of Chekhov’s short stories went down like an hors d’oeuvre.”
“Last month Carl discovered Wittgenstein, the linguistic philosopher. An English translation of the Tractatus was squirreled away on an upper shelf in the den. He insisted that I explain the epistemological limitations of spoken language.” The old woman had to breathe through her mouth now, her sinuses swollen shut. “A person kisses the picture of an absent loved one. How do we understand the gesture? Is the kiss symbolic or can it be understood at a deeper level? Such actions may simply be the spontaneous expression of an inner need - or no need at all.”
Grace felt her usually nimble her brain balk at the odd concept. “Where kissing is concerned, lately I prefer Neruda over the linguistic philosophers.”
Mrs. Shapiro either missed the oblique humor or chose to ignored it. She shook her head and blew out her cheeks in exasperation. “Even for a seasoned academic, Wittgenstein’s theories are daunting.” The room grew silent. The old woman seemed momentarily lost in thought staring at the flowered pattern on her bed sheet. Finally she glanced up with a blank expression and said, “Perhaps you would like to check on your daughter.”
“Yes, I think I’ll go downstairs.”
In the basement Carl was cutting a thick slab of wood on the
band saw. The block seemed to be moving through the quarter-inch, vertical blade in slow motion following the markings on a paper outline masking-taped to the top. Grace waited until he shut the machine down and stepped away from the tool before entering the work area. Angie was off in a corner spreading glue on small sections of wood.
“What are you making?”
“Ring boxes,” her daughter replied, smearing yellow glue with the tip of a finger over a mitered joint. The box contained six sides. She stood them up on edge, nudging the joints together in a lopsided hexagon. “Hand me that rubber band,” Angie said. The young girl stretched a band around the perimeter of the box. The sides bowed and twisted, but when the band was firmly in place, the wood settled into a perfectly symmetrical hexagon.
Grace handed her daughter another band which she secured over the bottom of the box. “Very clever.” Carl flipped the band saw back on again, which was Grace’s cue to head back upstairs.
Mrs. Shapiro was lying in bed with a pensive expression. “Are there many stupid teachers at the school?”
Grace was momentarily, flustered by the odd remark, but the sick woman rushed ahead without waiting for a reply. “Oh, such a rude thing to say! Forgive my impertinence.” Despite her protests, she didn’t seem the least bit contrite. In fact, she was smiling wickedly now, staring off into space through squinty eyes. “There’s an old spinster who lives three doors down from here, a retired teacher. She was planning a trip to visit the Grand Canyon over the summer. The woman took the MBTA red line train into Boston so she could apply for a visa. Someone had to explain to Elsie that Colorado was halfway across the country but still located within the continental United States.”
Elsie Davenport. Grace had worked with her at another school several years back. Even then, the woman’s foolishness was legendary. Worse than legendary, common knowledge. The superintendent tried to fire her for gross incompetence, but the teacher’s union dug in solidly behind Elsie. In the end it would have cost five times her annual pay to litigate the case in court so the school committee allowed dopey Elsie to muddle through to retirement.
“Imagine,” Mrs. Shapiro suddenly reached out and, grabbing Grace by the wrist, pulled her close, “that you are working at a menial job and no one values what you do. You are smarter and more sensitive than three-quarters of the dummkopfs who pass you in the hall without so much as a backward glance.”
“Carl is in love with you,” Mrs. Shapiro said abruptly. “What are your intentions?” For the second time that afternoon, Grace was caught off guard.
“He told you?”
“No, not in so many words. But then words aren’t a terribly trustworthy commodity.”
“My intentions,” Grace picked up the thread of Ruth’s previous remark, “are no different than anyone else’s.” She placed her free hand on top of Mrs. Shapiro’s gnarled knuckles gently massaging the mottled skin. “To find a key to paradise.”
“I ask a straight question and you answer in riddles,” Mrs. Shapiro replied. “So you want a key to unlock the gates to paradise? Right now I’d settle for another cup of tea.” Grace got up and reached for the bowl. “Leave the soup. I still haven’t decided yet if I want to live or die.”
In the kitchen Grace found the Earl Grey black tea, the selection with natural oil of bergamot that the old woman favored. She waited for the water to boil, added a spoonful of honey and glanced out the window. In the yard, the jays and a handful of crows were laying waste to the sunflower seeds, scattering the torn shells all over the ground.
So, I heard this improbable rumor. At school, Grace and Carl avoided each other. He stopped eating in the faculty lounge altogether. They passed in the corridors without so much as a nod or casually greeting. That would come later. Once word got out that a mentally unbalanced school teacher was dating the janitor, vitriolic tongues would wag. Ruth Shapiro was no fool. She was simply playing the devil’s advocate, baiting Grace with what was sure to come. She’d been through three husbands on several continents. She understood Grace’s dilemma. A public middle school was a hothouse, a steamy incubator for outrageous gossip and innuendo.
Back in the bedroom, the soup bowl was empty and all that remained of a piece of sourdough bread was the unbuttered crust. “Carl never speaks about his past.”
The old woman stirred the tea and placed the spoon on the saucer. “Carl’s mother died when he was still a baby. The father couldn’t cope. He ran off somewhere so the state placed the child in foster homes.”
“I figured something of the sort.”
In the basement, the electrical motor that powered the jointer turned over with a smooth hum. Mrs. Shapiro began to sneeze fitfully. Grace handed her a Kleenex. She dabbed at her swollen nose and her eyelids drooped. The old woman grew quiet. Grace could smell the honey and oil of bergamot in the few remaining drops of sweetened tea. Mrs. Shapiro’s breath turned smooth and regular as she slept and, for a fleeting instant, Grace caught a glimpse of a young girl barely out of her teens, a beautiful wisp of a Semite with black hair and a book of poems jutting out of a back pocket. She was raking piles of rancid chicken shit into smelly piles, there on the kibbutz in the rugged hill country of the Upper Galilee.
******
The Mansfield Craft fair was in its tenth season. A hundred and twenty exhibitors were assigned spaces in the main ballroom of the Mansfield Sheraton Hotel. With dozens of minor details to sort out, Carl had packed everything up the previous night after working all day at the school.
Grace and Angie arrived around eight-thirty. “There he is,” Angie ran ahead to greet Carl, who was spreading an emerald green cloth over a long table. He hadn’t put any jewelry boxes out on display yet.
Grace scanned the room. In a finely choreographed bedlam, crafters were bustling about arranging tables and positioning displays full of jewelry, ceramics, paintings and blown glass. “Somebody’s not happy,” she whispered and pointed several tables down in the large function hall, where a blond woman in her late thirties was going toe to toe with an older man.
“The masking tape on the floor,… that what you paid for.” The man struggled to keep his emotions under control, but every time he objected to something, the feisty blond fought back, raising her voice by a half dozen decibels.
“I paid good money for this spot and you can’t tell me -”
“Lady, look at the tape,” the man fumed. “You’re grabbing twice the space of anyone else.” He jabbed his finger at a clipboard. “We got you down for a ten-by-ten. That’s all you paid for. You can’t make up the rules to suit your convenience.”
The blond woman got up in his face and hissed. “Any of these fine people complaining, huh? Is my setup taking business away from them? I’m perfectly within my rights to set up my displays as I see fit!” The older man stared at her with a constipated expression and was about to launch another frontal assault, but a woman wearing an ID badge grabbed him by the arm and hauled him away on some other business.
“So what was that all about?” Grace asked.
“I’ve seen Blondie at other shows. She’s a fraud.” Carl began spreading merchandise out on the table, large boxes on pedestals, smaller pieces positioned to the front. “She doesn’t make any of her own jewelry. It’s all BS.”
“Bull shit!” Angie grabbed a necklace box and placed it strategically on a riser near the center of the table.
“That too,” Carl chuckled without any malice toward the blonde woman. “But in the crafting trade, BS stands for buy/sell.”
Grace’s face clouded over. “I don’t follow you.”
“The rings and pendants are manufactured in third world countries - China, the Philippines and Taiwan. It’s all cheap imports... junk. Nothing handmade. But she passes it off as the real deal and gullible customers don’t know the difference.” “Once they open the doors,” he added, “pay close attention to Blondie. She might be a con artist but she’s got a smooth delivery.” Carl flashed a sly grin but didn’t bothe
r to elaborate.
At quarter to ten, Grace wandered down the length of the hall to size up the competition. No other woodworkers were booked. A woman near the far wall was hawking twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa. She had laid out free samples in Styrofoam bowls along with several trays of tortilla chips. Scooping a healthy portion of dip from each bowl, a heavyset man was enjoying an early lunch at the salsa lady’s expense.
“So what’s the connection between munchies and fine art?” Grace turned to see a pallid, willowy thin woman sitting on a folding chair next to a collection of water colors.
“Funny, I was asking myself the same question,” Grace replied.
“This stinks,” the woman said in a humorless tone. “Customers will stuff their faces with freebies and ignore our crafts.”
“Your paintings are very nice,” Grace said. She didn’t think the woman’s artwork was particularly remarkable, but didn’t want to hurt her feelings, especially since the artist was already upset about the salsa lady’s unfair advantage. Truth be told, her water colors were rather commonplace and the scenes pleasant enough though not terribly original.
“It’s my first show,” the woman confided. “I quit my day job to pursue a career in the arts.” She smiled a slightly wilted, ambivalent expression. Drifting the entire length of the table, the heavyset man finished sampling the last container of salsa and promptly bought three jars of dip. The salsa lady stuffed the money in a granny pack strapped to her waist. The fair hadn’t even technically opened and she’d already rung up her first sale!
The water color artist blew out her cheeks. “Salsa belongs in a whole food store,” she hissed, “not an art fair.”
“Well, good luck.” Grace wandered off.
So what was the lady with twenty varieties of homemade salsa doing at a craft fair? It made no coherent sense to Grace. But then further down, sandwiched between a potter and vendor with blown glass flowers was a woman hawking Mary Kay cosmetics. As soon as the droopy-faced painter sight of the perfumes, emollients and ultra gloss lipsticks, Grace mused, the woman probably would have something scandalous to say about commercial cosmetics.