by Evan Dara
—Here you go.
—Ah, thanks, Leo. Thanks. Looks good.
—So Bill, you’re making my argument. Rick’s idea – even if it is Rick’s idea – it sounds kinda worthwhile to me.
—Mm. We just got to get the word out.
—Zackly.
—There’re a million ways these days—
—And all of ’em seem like terriers—
—So—
—So let’s do something about it. Let’s do something with The Free Press. Let’s propose it to them.
—Right. Get ’em to stir things up—
—Put it on page uno—
—Cut them in if need be—
—Right. Exactly.
—I know Hayes Solender in there. Big high up like Vice President—
—Exactly. It’s a good idea—
—Yeah—
—Yeah. Let’s—
—Yes, it is a good idea. Too bad they’re going under.
—
—Huh …?
—Wha—?
—Jimmy …?
—Yeah. Last issue’s next Friday. They just announced it. The paper is folding.
35,717
Br. Breee—
—Still so damn shit oh freeze—
—This winter never gonna—?
—BreeeCome on pick up! Pick …! Where—?
—Motherplucker … Look at – already! Stitch on the index finger ripped, all the stuffing springing out … I gotta, next year—
—I, this – it’s three times I call her. Wherebreee—?
—Next year – some new gloves next year—
—So how do – I need paper towels, the roll is, Don likes one put like a diamond on his plate in the morning, usually they advertise in—
—So like should I just go over to …? Because like what are the specials today at Shaw’s—
—Mandy, I mean – just take a look outside! You really need to check the weather?
—So look – OK?, right here, there’s every possible fact about football right here on the USA Today webs—!
—ReeeThrang!
—And so OK, you know, I’m here – I’m here. I am sitting here on my damn couch in the living room waiting for Justin, and what should I, I can’t leave, Lucia is already asleep, it drives me crazy the Allure, picking it up and trying to read, kidding myself that I can read then just flickering the pages and putting the magazine down in ten seconds, then picking it up again and ruffling a few I’ve got to be at the meeting by eight fifteen, it’s important to be there on time, Weight Watchers they’re big on punctuality responsibility – You draw the strength you give – eyes find you when you come late, no matter how quiet and sidewise and frowning sorry and where is Justin? So OK once I came home and he was smoking, but in general he’s reliable, he’s good, a gift of a babysitter, he can walk over, lives just up on Elmwood, I bought the Doritos and the Orange Crush he likes yesterday he confirmed with me! And he doesn’t answer his cell, so I, I—
—And on Henry Street, after I had parked and was walking, up at the deli: Twenty percent off.
Mm hm.
That’s right. Twenty.
Off everything—
—Yeah, you know. Yow. Long day. First all the returns, then Kirk ragging on me about keeping the tracking numbers aligned to the right, then his comment about … Yeah. You know. Enough. More than e—
So, you know, after I knocked off, I headed from Staples over to Muddy Waters to grab a wind-down coffee – theirs from their old roundbelly glass pot is no-comparison better than Starby’s programbrew – and I was standing at the counter rasping at the splash, you know, putting all things out for the night, when I saw Rick Pasternak sitting in a booth by the window. Or something that once was Rick Pasternak. His head was all buzzard-slunked down between his shoulders, and his hair all ragged, and he was all like jittery, his leg pumping under the table so that the left half of his shirt was tremoring – and the shirt, of course, was this totally cheapo, blue-scrap, plaid-y thing, of course. And then he turned to look out the window, and then he pulled his eyes back down in front of him, and then he—
And with him, Carol, not moving much, sitting with her elbows down in sub-table dark and her forearms beaching up into the visible, hands wrapped around a white mug of tea. She’s warming her hands. The mug’s handle arches above the uncolored tips of her weather-scruffed fingers.
Here, now, Rick and Carol are together.
They aren’t sitting side by side, but across from one another, separated by the table. Talking quietly, but with agitation, but also working to bridle the agitation, and—
Don’t – don’t you worry, Carol says, sipping her tea. l’ll get back. I will …
Got to, she says. Don’t have a choice—
They had met in Vickie Moorley’s intro-level salsa class, Basic Partnering, less than two years previously. Or, rather, they met just after that, when Rick had stopped taking the class – after two sessions – and needed to make a Xerox. He went into the UPS on South Winooski and, on the other side of the cardboard-boxy room, recognized someone whose instinctively fluid turns and breaks he had, from across the salsa studio, admired. Likewise the knowingness in her up-glance when she handed him his photocopy. Dating and "seriousness" had come, for Rick, nicely quickly.
I mean, have you heard the latest numbers?, Carol says. It’s like, fhew … The official rate for Chittenden County is nearly four percent – and that means the real rate of unemployment’s gotta be what, six, eight percent? And here, in Anderburg, with the U— Left my name a couple of places, she says. Stopped by Dale, over at the copy center?, and on Thursday I officially started putting the word out with my friends. And they were really good, everyone I spoke with was really supportive. And Judy, you know, she knows everyone—
But still, you know, no way, no matter what, I’m not stopping at the hospital. They need me there, I love the volunteering—
Shit, man, I got to get back to—
Because Rick, you know, Carol says. I mean—
I mean, for how long – I don’t know how long we can continue like this, she says. I mean, my bank account, everything in it – that’s yours, that’s for us to use. No problem there. But what’s that – months? Three or four months? And the way things are, there are no guarantees – no guarantees – your research grant is going to be renewed. And you know you can’t wait for the solar thing—
Sure it’s too good. Sure it’s ahead of its time. Of course it’s politically unfeasible. But babe, we can mobilize all the defeatist cliches in the handbook – we can be triumphal in our defeat – but while you wait for the world to get it en masse, you gotta pay for your own energy use—
So it’s time, darlin’, it’s time to start thinking about something else, Carol says.
You probably can’t even count on going back to Morway’s, she says. By now there’ll be fifteen, fifteen hundred guys who’ll be real real glad to load the trucks for half the abuse they were paying you.
Rick, love, you got to make some changes, Carol says. The way things are has got to end—
We, you, cannot continue how we’ve been doing, OK? I mean, Rick, I just can’t – I don’t want to continue on like—
So why not teaching?, Carol says. Like two years ago – you remember?, real early on?, we were sitting on my old couch having popcorn, with Beck on – and you said you were going to call the guy you know at Bard.
He still even there?, Carol says.
Rick, honey, there’s gotta be a place for your skills in what, like an architect’s firm, or a machine-design place, I don’t know – you just gotta go out and look. It is not beneath you, it is not like you can’t continue with your research after hours, I’Il have the cup of Speeder & Earl’s ready for you when you want to step over to your desk—
I mean, I hate capitulating, too, Carol says. But don’t you think, like, that’s exactly what they want? For folks like you – like us – to neutralize, to destroy our�
��?
To direct our acid at – and not at—
OK …? Do you hear me …? This has got to change. I am radically unsure if I can continue like—
Shit, man, I am going out for a jog—
—And you know it saddens me. That’s the only word. I’m just so sad that after eleven years the game isn’t going to happen any more. We had all gotten so good – and bridge is like that, you build up skills and you build up sensitivities, you start to pick up on how the others’ll play and really develop a feel for declaring or finessing, or even just finding a fit. O my word you gain an intuition for what the other players are going to do – and I don’t only mean your partner, but everyone behind his fan. It would be like shifts in climate: a breeze of daring lifting not-obvious cards from hands, a rise in humidity – emotional – slowing tricks down and making play-choices sticky. I mean, we’d all sit around whoever’s table we happened to be at, talking and joking and Mindy complaining about her latest adventure in dating – there was the shoulder-toucher, there was that saliva-launcher, and, o yes, one guy who didn’t ask one single question about me during the whole meal … So nice.
We met on Tuesday nights, eight fifteen, even including most holiday weeks, rotating houses until the fall of 2004 when Tila announced she just couldn’t do it at her place. And Phil would bring the cupcakes that his wife makes in crinkled paper, and Mindy would show off the swatches of wallpaper she was working on – she designs them – and … And now I can’t believe it. I can’t.
Of course I’ll put a sign up in North Country Books. Maybe we can find someone else. Phil says he thinks we can regroup – but Phil wasn’t particularly close with Tila. So, OK, you know, maybe. I’ll give it a try. I will.
—Rick sits, solo, in the diner booth, bills and coins splashed on the table before him. He looks out from between his forearms, elbow-perched on the blotched white-and-dun Formica and become leaning trees, holding up his gravitied head. His reach to detach the last of the corn muffin from its wave-paper case ends with some of it crumbled on the table, some on his lap. He pinches up the yellow dust, licks it from his sphinctered fingertips.
He stands, brushes crumbs from his pants, pulls a fist of things from his pocket. From this jumble he pulls four dollars and forty cents – quarter, dime, nickel – and places same on the table. He turns to leave. But then he hitches, turns back, looks down, takes the forty cents up again – levering each coin one by one – before pivoting, again, to go. He starts to walk away, slopes his head, stops, turns back to the table, puts the dime and nickel once again down.
The quarter remains within his fist, pinched between second and third fingers. Outside, he puts the coin back into his left front pocket, walks away.
—And I couldn’t even hardly hold my head up, you know what I’m, all the tension wedging down the right side my neck and all through the shoulder there it had been a long day getting the laundry from the baskets into the dryers, and I picked up another half-hour at five-fifteen. Jolanda was away and sure, I could do it, and them were some full baskets but sure, I got ’em done. And in the bus shelter I’m sitting there waiting to get on home, and it cold and wet leaves like mud on the metal seat and I am surely looking forward to get out my shoes but I got a Kleenex and the cars swishing past in the slush under the streetlamps and it just feels good to be sitting down. And I’m waiting, you know, just waiting there and almost sleeping and waiting, must be forty minutes – forty minutes?: shoot, fifty – and then I get up and there’s a sign by the schedule that bus 86 is discontinued. That all it says: that starting February 18 the bus wont run no more. Well shoot, you know, why couldn’t – it wasn’t up there in the morning, the sign, when I, or someone to tell us, there should have been, just today at 7 a.m., shoot—
—So we stood and started singing, and that’s when – that’s when I let myself know what I already knew. That’s when I let myself listen to what I had been whispering to myself all morning long. A few measures into I Am Weak But Thou Art Strong and – and in my eyes I’m cringing, there are so few people here. I sit up front, you know, second row, I like pretty close to center, and I tell you I had forced myself not to turn around, to look. And I still couldn’t do it, but the song was so flimsy and timid that I knew what I had felt: that the number – that the pews – the whole place – it must have been half-empty—
—So OK. It happened. Move on. I still have to—
—The flasks on shelves in windowed cabinets, congregations of glass shaped round and beakerlike and strawlike and bulged. The checkerboard floor foot-ground to burnt-wood black at center, all down the store’s two aisles. And on both sides of the aisles: rainforest hangings of tubes and bottles and small hygienic devices – tweezers, nail clippers, interdental brushes – pressed by plastic against high color-temperature cardboard backings, all imparting language. All the old-century dark wood. All the times I went in there for my Prevacid or Twizzlers or shampoo – whatever headwash was on sale at the moment – or Tums.
Of course it’s only a pharmacy, and of course that law doesn’t apply to Renzo Drugs. My mother running in and out for Neosporin and bandages when I was working – evidently not too well – on building a treehouse, then her going back to pay, the next day. My mother getting short, short tortoiseshell haircombs for her mom’s Biedermeier waves. The folding-door telephone booth and the dusty-brush rouge tester and the appetite suppressors in freestanding cardboard-dollhouse displays; the cigar humidor. The emery boards and gum.
All of them there. Not, I trust, all of them sold.
—Yeah, Sandy got a job with Alcoa, heading up their shipping department, its a nice step for her—
—Better schools, you know, for Dustin and Chelsea, everyone says they’re real good over in—
—Well, I kinda did OK, you know, shorting Continental – I mean anyone coulda seen that coming – I mean: airlines – that one worked out kinda OK – so I’m figuring, you know, why not? – I always wanted to check out San Fran—
—Yeah, you know, I was sitting at my desk in the living room, its maybe two thirty in the afternoon and we got some sun, the snow on the front lawn’s still clean, its still got like the diamond-effect happening and I sense something and look up from the invoices I’m finally entering into the computer and, well, there’s Mr. Wanamaker walking up the flagstones, then making a little scratching noise at my door, then going off. I mean I don’t recognize the fur hat he has on with the ears turned up and the big brown coat, but there’s no mistaking that gray-goat beard, and like what’s he doing here from down the block? So I wait the necessary then jump up, and there in one of the metal curls in the screen door is a small envelope, card-like size. And it’s an invitation – and like what is Mr. Wanamaker doing inviting us to a – get this – to a potluck dinner? A potluck dinner? Next Friday 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. it says, bring something you like. And, like, hunh…?
Well OK, you know, sure, why not, I suppose. I can try to … But I’ve got to get his number to call him – he should have put it in the invitation – and like what, what’s his wife’s name? I should, before I—
—Thus in the matter of Schwedock versus Magnusson, Chittenden County Register number R447B in the docket, the court rules in favor of the plaintiff, including full damages as claimed in Statement C, plus all court, legal, and associated fees, imposed upon the defendant in absentia and in violation of the rights, authority, and demands of this court. The defendant has thirty days to—
34,918
Everywhere. The flyers, the circulars, the cheapie two-tone lavender-and-orange leaflets – they’re just everywhere. On the tables at the Post Office, on the narrow shelf in the pay-hut over at the Cherry Street parking lot, on strings hanging from South Winooski Avenue lamp poles, folded into the little walletlike thing they give you your check and your change in at Windjammers … Man, you can’t get away from them … And look here, take a look at this just here: I’ve been gone from my car what, twenty minutes?, I go to return a shower
curtain and already here’s one run under the windshield wiper … !
Fifteen percent off. Twenty-five percent off, fifty …
My God.
They could say ninety percent and I still wouldn’t—
—The little purple plastic guitar that Charlie played with when he was four: out. The x-ray film from Tom’s femur surgery: out. Our files for the condo in Vale – its been more than seven years: get them out. I don’t want this shit any more, we don’t need it. Lighten our load, streamline, strip it down, get minimal, go Barnett Newman, go Diogenes, maybe I can breathe again—
—So maybe, now – finally – its a level playing field. Maybe now I can have half a half a chance. It was always who you know around here. Here …? – everywhere. All of education is a refinement of one lesson: it’s not what you know but who. And I’m trying not to split, I’m really trying, and now maybe I can find some kind of position somewhere, a position where I can stand thinking about it when I think about it – in construction, maybe doing truck repair, anything but office maintenance. Maybe now that our little, slimy, pathetic world doesn’t run on the all-important law, now that there’s no one to know, maybe I can—
—And I’m like talking with Randolph, you know, we’re hanging at Akes’ downing truly adequate doses of J&B (me) and Kahlúa (him), and its a quiet kinda night, with maybe four other plaid-and-denims in the house and five others keeping their parkas on, and AC/DC’s on the good ballsy bass-y CD System they got there, ballsy enough so you can hear it over all the damn sports screens, and Randolph was off from the service center, just hanging and relaxed, with the rubber band pulled from the back of his head. And like I’m talking with him about the fishing were gonna do – largemouth bass, they’re still king over in Lake Iroquois – and about when we should go and whether we should try out keeper hooks and then he wasn’t there. I mean, Randolph was still talking, he was still answering questions and pointing with his pinkie like he does, but the man just was not there. And don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s – it’s like he – it’s like his eyes were tracking some, like, invisible ghosts, like he was gone into offstage business, the angle of his head, the gap before his replies, he—