Collected Short Stories: Volume III

by Barry Rachin

  Neither woman acknowledged the existence of the other visitors waiting in line; when the security guard finally stepped forward with the key, they stampeded through the door and hurried to the service desk. Mr. Weiner took a number and sat in the waiting area. The security guard approached. “Any weapons, firearms or knives?” He gestured indicating Fanny’s purse.

  “No, nothing.”

  “I still have to look.” She handed him the bag which he unzipped and examined with a bored expression before returning. “Thank you.”

  A rather disheveled, middle-aged woman with gray-streaked hair and a jumbo cup of coffee entered. A teenage boy dressed like a skinhead was bringing up the rear. “No food or drinks.” The guard pointed at a sign strategically placed over the facing wall.

  The woman went out, disposed of the coffee and returned to where the guard was standing. “Where do I sign in?”

  The man gestured toward the help desk. “Just give them the last four digits of your social security number and wait with the others until they call your name.”

  “It’s for him not me.” She indicated the boy.

  “Then give his social security number.”

  “Don’t know it.” She exploded in a hacking, smoker’s cough.

  The guard gave her a dirty look. “You don’t know his number?”

  The woman just shrugged and screwed up her face in a dull-witted frown. He turned to the boy. “What’s your social security number?”

  The boy bit his lip and cocked his head to one side. “I dunno.”

  “Last name?”

  “Corrigan.” The guard disappeared down the corridor.

  At the service desk a worker was getting the Orientals squared away. “Who’s applying?”

  “My muddah.” The woman in the floral dress yanked the equally dour-faced, older woman closer to the window.

  “Does she speak English?”

  “No English! No English!”

  “Has your mother ever worked or collected taxable income since arriving in the United States of –

  “No work. No taxes,” the angry mama-san sputtered.

  Fanny leaned closer and was about to say something when Mr. Weiner’s name was called. “This won’t be long,” he assured her and disappeared down the hallway.

  Fanny glanced around the reception room, which was filling slowly. With the exception of Mr. Weiner and the Orientals, most of the people were quite young. The security guard reappeared and approached the young boy and scruffy woman. “You’re all set. Take a seat and they’ll call your name.”

  The twosome sat down next to Fanny. The dull-witted woman, who wasn't the boy's mother, reminded Fanny of the welfare recipients who flooded the market after the first of the month with their food stamps, AFDC and welfare vouchers. They loaded up on TV dinners, ice cream, over-priced junk food, peanut butter, bologna and pastas. When the manager, out of a sense of misplaced altruism, put one of them to work at the market, she seldom lasted much beyond the first paycheck. Viewing work as an avocation - something you did for amusement or under protest for short duration; they used the system to beat the system. In many respects they reminded Fanny of her brother, Norman, who smoked dope, frittered and farted his self-indulgent life away.

  “I ain’t got no goddamn clothes,” the skinhead said, turning to the woman. Fanny noted a metal ring in the youth's left nostril and matching silver hoop dangling from his top lip. “Maybe I should shoot by the house… get my stuff.”

  “Okay,” the woman replied hoarsely.

  “What if my old man called the cops?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Trespassing.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that.” The woman seemed stymied. “Tough call.”

  “Hell, it’s not like I did anything wrong,” he sputtered weakly. “Not really.” The mystery woman, who taxied him to the social security office, shrugged noncommittally.

  Fanny rose and went to wait outside until Mr. Weiner finished his meeting. Ten minutes later they were back on the highway heading home. “How’d it go?”

  “The administrator was very helpful.” He seemed genuinely pleased. “I’ll know more in a day or two.”

  “Those two Orientals …Why should a foreigner who never worked a stinking day in her life here and can’t speak English collect benefits?” Fanny made a hard right onto Commerce Ave.

  “Beats me,” he replied.

  “And that teenage boy with the black leather jacket and body piercings – the one who didn’t know his own social security number … He isn’t even in high school yet. Why the hell’s he getting benefits?”

  The older man chuckled softly and shook his bald head. “Ask me something easy – say, quantum physics or Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

  “Is it like this all the time?”

  “No,” Mr. Weiner replied. “Sometimes it’s worse.”

  * * * * *

  Saturday morning Fanny was sipping tepid coffee with Sally Bicknell in the employee lounge. Sally was a floater, who filled in for cashiers who called out sick or couldn’t finish their shift. The willowy, bean pole of a girl might have been passably pretty but for a pulpy lower lip that hovered a good half inch below its mate. A year younger than Fanny, Sally was a jittery, train wreck of a bleached blonde with a twitchy left eye. “I got this wicked paper cut.” Sally held an index finger in front of Fanny’s face and squeezed the fleshy tip with her free hand. A microscopic cut no more than a thirty-second of an inch wide puckered faintly. “It was bleeding profusely an hour earlier.”

  Fanny had her own rather elaborate theory about Sally. Sixty years from now, when three-quarters of her contemporaries were moldering in the grave, Sally Bicknell would still be pissing and moaning about paper cuts and free-floating anxiety. Despite all her bellyaching, the woman would be remarkably unfazed by the passage of years. And Why? Because obscure and extravagant maladies, inoperable brain tumors, terminal parasites and pathogens were her raison d’être. On her deathbed at the age of a hundred and ten, as the priest was reading Sally Bicknell her last rites and anointing her with holy water, the woman would be showing the soon-to-be-bereaved the scar from her bogus paper cut.

  “That Bert Weiner is a swell guy,” Sally gushed “I was telling him about my problems… you know, with my nerves.” Though there was no intrinsic merit whatsoever to her endless kvetching, Sally panicked imagining all the morbid, ill-defined things that might go wrong with her otherwise uneventful existence.

  “You were telling Mr. Weiner about your problems,” Fanny tugged Sally gently back to the topic at hand, repeating the ditsy girl’s words back to her. Up until this week apparently Bert Weiner was the only member of the ShopRite staff unaware of Sally’s emotional excess baggage.

  “Yeah, I’m telling him all about my nervous condition, and Bert stares off into space with this demented smile. Then out of the clear blue, he starts jibber jabbering about Helen Keller, the deaf and dumb woman who couldn’t - ”

  “I know who Helen Keller was,” Fanny interrupted peevishly.

  “He starts telling me how Helen Keller said that security was really just superstition and that it didn’t exist in nature.”

  “Bert Weiner said that?”

  Sally’s head bobbed up and down and her left eye likewise fluttered like a trap door a half dozen times in rapid succession. “Oh, he went on and on talking a blue streak how avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than confronting things head on and that life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

  “Bert told you all that?” Fanny couldn’t believe that the same elderly man, who never said diddly-squat to her, would open up to an emotional goofball like Sally Bicknell.

  “Well, he was just parroting back what Helen Keller said after she grew up and got famous. But still, it sure was nice of him to share that stuff.”

  Fanny was still trying to digest what she had heard when Sally leaned across the table giggling like an idiot
and thumping her on the wrist. “Miss Goldberg in the pastry department’s got the hots for Bert.”

  “What else is new?” Fanny had spotted the squat, older woman an hour earlier in the cosmetics aisle purchasing a box of L’Oreal hair coloring and wrinkle cream. Everyone was aware that Edith Goldberg had more than a passing interest in the frail elderly man who bagged Fanny’s groceries. A rumor was making the rounds that she invited him over for supper on at least a half dozen occasions, but each time Bert declined with vague excuses.

  “I don’t think the feeling’s mutual.” Fanny noted.

  “No, Mr. Weiner doesn’t have any romantic interest in that frump – not even for a casual role in the hay.” Sally leaned still closer across the table. “Edith met Bert’s wife, though. They volunteered together at the library. You know, stamping books out and filing returns back on the shelves.” “Mr. Weiner quit his job and took early retirement so he could care for the woman after her stroke.”

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  “Miss Goldberg. Once that woman gets going, she don’t hardly come up for air.” Sally seemed to take great pleasure divulging information that only she had been privy to up until now. “Anyway, the hospital wanted to ship Mrs. Weiner off to a rehab center, but Bert closed down his accounting firm so he could take her home.”

  “Geez!”

  “I know, ain’t it swell?” Sally sighed, a drawn-out, if somewhat theatrical gesture. “Can’t imagine anyone doing that for me.”

  “What else?” Fanny pressed.

  “Edith went over to visit in late May a month after the woman left the hospital. Mrs. Weiner was all scrunched up in a wheelchair. Bert brought her out on the back deck so she could enjoy the fresh air.” Sally reached up and brushed an errant tear from the corner of her eye. “He had his wife all bundled up in a flannel blanket and was feeding her Motts applesauce right from the jar with a plastic spoon. The poor invalid… She couldn’t talk or nothing. Just sit there like damaged goods.”

  Suddenly and without warning, Sally let her mouth go slack, scrunching up her nostrils and jutting her lower jaw to the right at an oblique angle. She held the grotesque mask for a solid five seconds before allowing her features to relax. “The stroke – it paralyzed all the muscles on the right side of her face; if Bert wasn’t there every minute with a Kleenex, the poor creature would slobber and drool all over herself like a freakin' mongoloid.”

  “I didn’t know any of this,” Fanny said.

  Sally sucked air sharply into her lungs and sighed. “Three years.”

  “Three years what?”

  “That’s how long he nursed his wife and then one day she up and died in her sleep in the hospital bed right next to him - the poor son of a bitch!”

  “Sally Bicknell says you’re a goddamn saint.” Fanny threw this out in an offhand, acerbic manner as soon as she returned from break

  “Really?” Mr. Weiner chuckled lightly. Five minutes – that’s how long I spent commiserating with her and now I’m sprouting wings and a halo.”

  “How come you never told me about Helen Keller?” Fanny demanded, sidestepping his previous remark.

  “I only told Sally because she was all lathered up.” Mr. Weiner replied. “And, anyway, you make high honors and score in the two thousands on your college boards. You don’t need any dopey advice from some two-bit amateur psychologist.”

  * * * * *

  On Wednesday they carpooled. Fanny called Mr. Weiner on her cell phone. “Be ready fifteen minutes early. I need your advice on a personal matter.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” He hung up the phone.

  When they drove passed the golf course and were turning onto South Main Street, Fanny said, “Two colleges accepted me for the fall semester.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “I’m not attending either.”

  “Okay.” The older man stared out the passenger side window.

  Fanny smiled grimly. “Thought I’d take a year off,… maybe join the French Foreign Legion.”

  “North Africa’s can be muggy this time of year.” He scratched a silver tuft of hair that peeked out from behind an earlobe. “I graduated high school in nineteen fifty-eight. The class valedictorian was a brilliant Swedish kid - Lars Something-or-other. I can’t recall his last name. He went bonkers… had a nervous breakdown and spent the next few years on the locked ward at Bridgewater State Hospital.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Weiner replied. “Life’s a crap shoot. Go to college. Don’t go to college. Join the goddamn French Foreign Legion. What difference does it make? At some point, hopefully before you’re wearing geriatric diapers and slipping away into second childhood, you figure out what you want to be when you grow up.”

  The market loomed directly ahead. Choosing a parking space a healthy distance away from the front door, Fanny scanned the lot to make sure nobody else was close by. Reaching into the rear of the Subaru, she grabbed a navy blue backpack off the floor and placed on the seat between them. “Open the top flap.”

  Mr. Weiner eyed her uncertainly. “What’s this all about?”

  Without waiting, she tugged on the zipper and held the bag under his nose. A sweet, aromatic odor not unlike fresh-mown hay immediately suffused the car. Mr. Weiner poked about among the transparent, cellophane bags. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Fanny told him about her brother, Norman. “I’ve considered everything from dropping a dime on the idiot to handing the knapsack over to my parents.” She pulled the zipper shut and flung the pack into the rear of the car. Fanny gestured with a hand toward a metal container near the loading dock at the side of the building. “Of course, I could just as easily throw the drugs in the dumpster and that would be the end of it. What do you think I should do?”

  The elderly man sat with his hands folded in his lap and head slumped forward on his chest. “Hard to say. Don’t know what to tell you.”

  Fanny reached out and flicked the master lock securing all four doors. Folding her arms across her chest, the girl stared sullenly at the steering wheel. “Not good enough.”

  A minute passed and then another. Five minutes later Mr. Weiner cleared his throat. “Okay, if I was in your situation, kiddo, this is what I would do.” When he finished speaking his mind, Fanny unlocked the doors and they went to work.

  * * * * *

  An hour into her shift, the store manager approached with Sally Bicknell in tow. “Your brother’s on the phone. Says it’s a family emergency. Sally can manage your drawer until you get back.” He shut the light down over the register to discourage any additional shoppers from queuing up in the aisle.

  In the office, Fanny picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “I’m missing something,” the voice was frantic, borderline hysterical. “I was wondering if you - ”

  “I got your stupid backpack.”

  “Got it where?”

  “Not to worry. We’ll talk when I get home later tonight.” She hung up the phone.

  At nine-thirty, Fanny returned home and went directly to her brother’s bedroom. She tossed the Adidas backpack on Norman’s bed. “I saw you in Veteran’s Park buying this crap the other day so I know what you’re doing.” Her brother ripped the pack open and examined the content. Satisfied that nothing was missing, he stared at her warily. “After considering options, I’ve decided in favor of a hands-off policy.”

  “What the hell's that mean?”

  “Sooner or later, the cops will catch up with you again. As a repeat offender, you’ll get prison time and that will be the end of it.” She turned and left the room.

  Later that night before going to bed, Fanny replaced the worn string on the gyroscope with a fresh length of cord. Setting the rotor in motion, she balanced the toy on the tip of a pencil then, flipping it end over end, stood the gyroscope upright on a taut piece of twine which she anchored between the bedposts. Where human nature proved both err
atic and unpredictable, the laws of physics produced consistently replicable results

  A decision was reached.

  Fanny would become a supermarket Sadhu, traveling about the country, visiting religious shrines and holy places. Well, not really. She could work in stores where the grocery chain had outlets, while sharing an apartment with roommates. She would ask the admissions department at Boston College to hold her spot in the freshman class for one year, alluding to some vague family crisis. Perhaps Norman would be safely tucked away in a federal penitentiary fabricating Massachusetts license plates - his first real job. The money she squirreled away over the past few years for college – Fanny would leave that in the bank gathering interest.

  Of course, most Sadhus made the break much later in life, but this was a finite yearlong sabbatical. In this the year twenty-ten, the universe was in deep flux. Retired Rhode Island firefighters grabbed generous clothing allowances so that when their forty-inch waists mushroomed to fifty, they wouldn’t look totally foolish; US soldiers were being blown to smithereens in the lush poppy fields of Afghanistan; Chinese women, who looked like they just floated into Boston Harbor on a sampan, applied for social security, demanding benefits with such galling tenacity that an army of native-born bureaucrats were stood back on their heels.

  But none of this mattered. Maybe the new frontier, the untamed wilderness, was situated between her ears. It was a pristine state of mind, not some topographical, x-marks-the-spot smudge on a roadmap of North America. It had more to do with some foolish claptrap purchased second hand from a deaf, dumb and blind woman about life being a wondrous adventure or nothing at all.