Collected Short Stories: Volume III

by Barry Rachin

  On the landing Robert waited for the elevator.

  Ding! A bell sounded softly and the lift arrived just as the door to Mrs. Goldfarb’s apartment creaked open. “Mr. Chen will be accompanying me to Joel's bar mitzvah,” the older woman stated in a terse, no-nonsense tone.

  “Yes, I heard you the first time.”

  “If Naomi continues to make a hullabaloo, I simply won’t attend.”

  Robert stepped into the elevator but leaned back out just as the door began to close. “Neither will I, Mother.”

  Back to Table of Contents

  The Moribund Moose

  At 8 p.m., Ruth Ostrowski cracked the bathroom faucet and began filling the tub at a lazy dribble. Except for a slight limp, the aftermath of hip surgery, the pear-shaped, soft-bellied woman moved about the cramped bathroom with the somnolent ease of a tai chi master. Before the bath was half full, a rust-pocked Subaru with a blown muffler rumbled into the driveway. Her five-year-old grandson, Clyde, trudged up the brick walkway, a bulging pillowcase slung over his shoulder. The dark-haired boy wore a tattered, flannel jacket, too short at the wrists and flimsy for the frigid, late December weather. Noticeably underweight with knobby knees and ankles, the child exuded a feral wariness as he sidled, like an under-aged convict assigned a new cell block, toward the house. The boy’s mother watched from the car. A minute passed before the noisy engine fired up and she was gone.

  Hustling Clyde into the bathroom, Ruth methodically stripped him naked. Straight black hair framed an economical mouth and walnut-colored eyes. The skin glowed pallid, almost ivory, below an unruly mop of dusky hair. “I’ll be just a moment.” She carried the soiled clothes and underwear to the front door and flung them outside on the frosty stoop. In the bathroom, she fished a container of Kwell from the medicine cabinet and began pulling a fine comb through the child’s black hair.

  “Ain’t got no nits this time, Nanna.”

  Putting the comb aside, she kissed the boy’s neck. “A precautionary gesture.” Ruth felt the words congeal in her throat along with a decade of unanswered prayers.

  Clyde poked distractedly a scab on his leg. “Mommy’s sending me a postcard from Muscle Beach.”

  Ruth’s husband, Fred, wandered into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet seat. An easygoing Taurus by temperament, he was a big-boned, slope-shouldered man. “Melba flying to L A?”

  Ruth adjusted the chrome lever and increased the flow of warm water. “Smitten by wanderlust and an ex-con named Ralphy.” She ran the soap between Clyde’s toes and the clear water clotted over with a dingy film. Bending over the tub, she dowsed his fine hair with avocado shampoo. “Do me a favor,” she said without looking up. “There’s a pile of dirty clothes outside the front door. Put them in the washer along with the contents of the pillow case and run everything through the light-load cycle.”

  “Detergent?”

  “Arm and Hammer… on the counter by the light switch. Half a cup should suffice.”

  Fred went off to see to the laundry but returned a minute later. “Found this at the bottom of the pillow case.” He held a tattered library book. Six months overdue, the slim volume chronicled a boy’s trip to an island off the coast of Indonesia to visit the Komodo dragons.

  When he returned, Fred intercepted his wife just outside the bathroom door. He rubbed his stubbly chin. “You had that appointment yesterday. What’d the doctor say?”

  Ruth Ostrowski’s midlife crisis - if that’s what it truly was - hadn’t come in the normally prescribed manner. Rather, it snuck up on her incrementally, one negligible tribulation after another; it bushwhacked her with night sweats and terrors, sent her caterwauling toward menopause and the outer rim of her twilight years. And now, compounding her inner blight, the first frost, like a silver-haired, uninvited guest, blanketed the New England landscape. “Psychiatrist,” Ruth corrected. “It’s okay to use the ‘P’ word.”

  She waved a pair of slightly dingy underwear in the air. “Clyde’s waiting.”

  “He can wait a minute longer,” Fred said gently. “What’d the shrink say?”

  “Dr. Shulman says I’m suffering an involutional depression, a sadness that simply wells up from inside. I fall to pieces for no apparent reason. Which is to say, I am a fraud, phony, dissembler, emotional charlatan, impostor - a woman who hasn’t even earned the right to her foolish misery.”

  “What else?”

  “The depression’s just a symptom, not the root cause. He gave me some pills and billed my insurance for a hundred-fifty bucks.”

  Fred shrugged. “Take the medication; we’ll worry about ‘root causes’ later.”

  “I flushed the pills down the toilet before breakfast. The entire bottle.”

  Fred groaned. “Cripes!” Even when upset, an evenhanded sympathy undercut his sarcasm. He eyed his watch. “We’re low on milk. I’m going to the market. Might as well pick up some extra fruit and cereal.”

  Ruth nodded, her lips stretched thin with impatience. “We'll be just fine.” He bussed his wife on the cheek and disappeared out the back door.

  *****

  Clyde cupped his hands together, a familiar ritual. From under the sink, Ruth produced a can of Palmolive shaving cream and squeezed a spiral mound onto his outstretched hands, and the boy smeared the foam on the sliding shower door - impromptu finger paint. Twenty years earlier, she had done the same for Clyde’s mother. The ritual could last upwards of half an hour, depending on the child’s ingenuity; the cleansing of body parts was only a small - in some ways, insignificant - aspect of the whole.

  “Momma don’t bathe but once a month,” Clyde said. Ruth had let the water down and the boy was slithering back and forth on his belly in the last, few inches of tepid water. “Says it robs a person of their natural, body oils.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Ruth replied, gathering her grandson in the plush folds of a terry cloth towel.

  *****

  On the living room mantel was a picture of Clyde’s mother in her early teens - sunburned, lithe, svelte, and drug-free. Now a dozen years later when Melba came to visit, her cellulite-encrusted buttocks spilled over the sides of the rattan, kitchen chair, causing the woven seat to sag like a hammock. The woman never bothered bras.

  Melba, the maternal moron, the frumpy, wild-eyed woman with the IQ of Brussels sprouts and none of the redeeming virtues - twenty-four years ago she was baptized into the Christian community. Not that month-old infants consciously participated in the sacrament. The year following her confirmation, she stopped attending Holy Communion and confession. At fourteen, she was collared for shoplifting - a pocketful of candy bars, eye shadow, lipsticks and lubricated condoms - at the CVS two doors down from Ro-Jack’s Supermarket.

  Later that same night, Ruth hovered just outside her daughter’s room. Melba was lying fully-dressed on top of the disheveled bed reading The National Enquirer. “About what happened earlier today ...”

  “I stole a few shitty things.” Melba picked at an inflamed mosquito bite on her elbow. “Five dollars-worth of crummy merchandise. Nail me to the goddamn cross, why don’t you!”

  “It’s the principle.” Ruth felt her conviction faltering.

  “Yeah, the sacred principle.” Melba was clearly bored with the conversation.

  “Unfortunately it is the principle.” Ruth rose to her feet. Her hip was beginning to throb. She had an appointment scheduled with an orthopedic surgeon for the middle of the week. Without another word, she limped from her daughter’s room.

  God had played a cruel trick on Ruth Ostrowski, placing Melba under a spell. Or perhaps it was the Devil - with God’s tacit forbearance - who beguiled her daughter. Even Ruth’s Biblical namesake, the Moabite widow and daughter-in-law of Naomi, eventually remarried and lived happily. With no wealthy landowners waiting to make an honest woman of her, Melba’s prospects weren’t nearly as promising.

  Recently, Ruth had begun to dichotomize, to think of Melba as two separate
entities: the good child (leading up to but not including adolescence) and the demonic beast possessed of evil urges and equally sordid intentions. Melba, who at twenty was having sex for money in the back seat of cars on Potters Avenue in South Providence, who passed bad checks and pawned stolen jewelry.

  Melba didn’t need psychotherapy so much as an exorcist.

  *****

  Ruth watered the living room plants then took the can upstairs to the bedroom to freshen the ferns and coleus. When she returned to the living room, Clyde was sitting on the sofa, his legs dangling a foot above the carpeted floor. “Your house is weird.”

  “We must do something,” Ruth replied humorlessly, “to expand your vocabulary.” She rubbed at a patch of eczema on her elbow. “And what, exactly, is the matter with my house?”

  Clyde scrunched up his face. “It’s too clean.”

  “Thank you, Amy Vanderbilt.”

  It was after eleven before Clyde settled in for the night. Crawling out from under the covers he curled up in his grandmother’s lap. “What’s wrong with your nose, nana?” Clyde asked when Ruth bent down to adjust the waistband on his pajamas.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “It’s just shaped a bit differently.”

  As a landscape artist, Ruth understood the vagaries of form and line, how an otherwise pleasing sketch could be structurally undone by one unseemly flaw. In her particular case, a clear, milky complexion did little to enhance an otherwise unremarkable face. The wide, pulpy nose proved a disconcerting focal point, drawing attention away from a strong chin and full mouth. Age had only deepened the chasm between modestly pretty and disconcertingly plain.

  “Did you know, Nana, Komodo dragons can grow ten feet long and 300 pounds?”

  Only a fifty pounds heavier than her flabby daughter. “Imagine that!” Ruth eyed her grandson uncertainly.

  “The lizards, which inhabit several tiny islands off Indonesia,” she read from the illustrated book, “run swiftly, swim, dive, dig, walk on their hind legs and climb trees. Unlike other reptiles, their body temperature remains constant day and night and they can survive up to six weeks without water.”

  “Like camels,” Clyde interjected.

  “The tongue is forked like a snake’s,” Ruth continued to read, editing as she went, “and, used for both taste and smell, can locate rotting carrion over five miles away.”

  Clyde nuzzled his cheek against her forearm. “You left out the part where the dragon kills a water buffalo.” Ruth had purposely avoided reference to the water buffalo, fifteen times the dragon’s body weight. The dragon slaughtered the dumb animal by literally thrashing it to death with its muscular tail. Thump! Thump! Thump! In addition to water buffalo, the dragons supplemented their diet with domestic goats and an occasional villager or two.

  What sort of nitwit gives a five year-old such books?

  When Melba was the same age as Clyde, Ruth stocked the bookcase with Winnie-the-Poo, Beatrice Potter Classics (The Tales of Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Jeremy Fisher and, of course, Peter Rabbit), Curious George, Ticki Ticki Tembo, and the Madeline series:

  “In an old house in Paris covered with vines,

  Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines....”

  *****

  In the morning, Ruth sorted through the summer-weight clothing and quickly discovered nothing suitable. When she returned to the bedroom, Clyde had kicked his sneakers off and flung the socks into the far corner.

  “Stupid socks!” He stuck his tongue out and made a razzing sound.

  “What’s wrong with your socks?”

  “They’re stooopid! Stoop, stoop, stoooopid. The most ridiculous socks in the world. Even stupider than ...”

  Ruth stared at the boy trying to decode the convoluted message implicit in his theatrical tirade. “That will get you far in life.” The woman located another pair of faded socks and bent forward but the child pulled his foot away. Grabbing the ankle, she fitted the sock over the toes, but Clyde stabbed the air violently, slingshotting the clean sock into the far corner of the room, bursting into hysterical laughter.

  “This is getting tiresome,” Ruth muttered peevishly.

  “Too small! All my socks are too small,” Clyde blubbered through a fog bank of tears then slumped against his grandmother’s chest and began sucking his thumb.

  Only now, did Ruth actually look at the orphaned sock barely half as big as the child’s foot resting in her lap. The heel petered out around the instep, the remaining material, including trim, just barely covered his ankle. “How foolish of me,” she whispered. “How very, very foolish!” She kissed Clyde on each of his toes. “We’ll go to the mall and get you new clothes,” she spoke in a conciliatory tone. “What do you say?”

  “I want my mommy.”

  Ruth heated the car for ten minutes before bustling the boy off to the Emerald Square Mall. Four-toddler - all of the bedraggled clothes Clyde brought over were a full size or more too small. In the children’s section of Sears Roebuck, Ruth located everything she needed. An hour later on the way back to the car, Clyde pulled up short and said, “The old socks were stupid. Stoop, stoop, stoop, stooopid!” He mouthed the words like a talisman, a verbal charm which, if invoked with sufficient sincerity, could ward off an army of evil spirits.

  Back in the kitchen, Clyde wriggled his toes luxuriously in plush, new socks which rode halfway up his slender calves. “Let’s color..”

  “Haven’t any crayons,” Ruth replied, “but I know something that’s even more fun.” She brought the boy into the den. On an easel near the window was the crude draft of a painting she had begun months earlier, shortly before her mother’s death from liver cancer.

  For twenty years, Ruth Ostrowski worked at her oil paintings - mostly folk art motifs in the American primitive tradition - colorful and carefree New England land and seascapes done in a simple, unadorned style. Despite modest success, she always considered herself a pretender - more dilettante than serious painter. Not that she wasn’t accomplished in the technical sense, but her mother’s funeral and recent emotional upset had sapped her strength, paralyzed her will.

  Clyde selected a china bristle brush, a hard-to-find, wedge-shaped beauty which Ruth had special ordered from an art supply house in New Jersey. Stabbing at a mound of vermilion paint, he smeared it on the canvass. A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. In the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed safely beyond the reach of the child’s outstretched arm. “Nice choice!” Ruth clapped her hands, a robust pitter-patter.

  Anticipating Clyde’s artistic excesses, the grandmother began mixing some of the more extravagant colors - neon purples, aquamarines, blood oranges and lemony yellows - leaving them scattered in glistening globs on the pallet.

  “Does your mother ever color with you?”

  “Mmmm.” Clyde was too absorbed in his brushwork to give the question any weighty consideration. The child swirled thick, gooey paint over the top right corner of the painting and watched it drip to the bottom of the canvass eradicating a marshy wetland where phragmites grass rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. The prickly grasses quickly disappeared, buried beneath the onslaught of dripping sludge. Clyde leaped in the air and pirouetted. “So beauuuutiful!”

  Ruth took the paintbrush, cleaned it with a rag dipped in mineral spirits before handed it back to the child. Clyde sniffed the bristles before settling on a lime green which he mixed with ochre, producing an uneven blend of gray-green and sickly orange. He scraped the wet brush across the sky, and the weather grew abruptly overcast, menacing.

  “Every night I play Candy Land.”

  “How nice! Your mother -”

  “No, I play alone,” he interrupted, anticipating his grandmother’s thoughts. “Sometimes I get Queen Frostine and that makes me happy. But last night I drew the plum card and had to go back to the beginning.”

  Queen Frostine. From her own experience as a
young mother, Ruth knew that the card with the sweet-faced, blue fairy transported the lucky player to the far edge of the Ice Cream Sea, within spitting distance of a winning card. “That always made me happy, too.”

  The phone rang. Ruth went into the bedroom and picked up the receiver. “Would have called earlier, but there was a slight problem.” Fred was on the other end of the line. “One of our commercial accounts, a restaurant, is without heat. Ignition transformer blew… had to get a supplier in Westerly to messenger the part up to us. What a nightmare!”

  Though Ruth had no interest in such matters, her husband always described mechanical problems in graphic detail. An aquastat was circulating cold water; sediment build up was clogging a Watts Regulator—as if mentioning the brand made an appreciable difference in her understanding. “It creates a hotter spark, like the coil in a car.”

  Ruth gazed out the window. In the yard a black poplar stood naked to the rough wind; the spade-shaped leaves and feathery gold catkins tinged with raspberry had long since blown away. The wind had picked up, hurling a fistful of maple leaves soundlessly against the window. Another week or so and the maples, too, would be stripped bare. “What does?” Ruth asked.

  “The transformer,” Fred said. “How’s Clyde?”

  “He’s painting in the other room.”

  “I’ll check back in a few hours,” he said and hung up.

  “Great-grammy went to live with the angels,” Clyde said without looking up when Ruth returned.

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “In heaven.” Clyde shook his head with the brashness, the false bravado unique to egomaniacs and very young children. A half hour later, the beach south of Chappaquiddick was gone, washed away in smeary tsunami of psychedelic hues; all the foliage and birds had been annihilated, caught up in a cyclone of fantastic color, buried beneath the soggy rubble of paint several layers thick.