by Arthur Day
Bessie’s B&B was a large white gingerbread style Victorian house complete with gables and fancy cornices painted a light green and a widow’s walk on top. It was built at the top of a small hill and was by far the largest house on the block; the original owner had probably owned all the land the other houses now occupied. It had an air of calm superiority and a complexity of line and land that impressed me as I turned into the driveway to the left of the house and parked my little blue rented Corona in the area marked. I sat for a moment as the engine ticked over and looked straight ahead at a small herb garden replete with thyme, rosemary, mint and parsley. Sage grew in a small ceramic pot as did marjoram and basil. It was a pretty little garden and I wondered whether I should simply admire it for a while and then turn around and drive back to the city. I felt suffocated by the thought of what I had agreed to do that now filled me with a sickening nervousness, an awareness of the risk I would be taking should I move up to May’s Corners leaving behind all the bustle and dirt of the city in which I had spent the past ten years.
Someone knocked on the driver-side window and I turned to find an attractive woman in her late forties or early fifties looking in at me so I powered down the window and smiled at her.
“There’s a place inside. I call it a room and it has a bed in it. It’s probably more comfortable than this car.” She smiled showing two deep dimples on either side of her mouth.
With another person this might have come off as sarcasm, but Bessie had such broad friendly features and a mile-wide smile that I couldn’t help but laugh. “What a great invention,” I rejoined. “I must see this new space. Did Dickens sleep here perchance?” I got out of the car, picked my small blue suitcase from the back seat and Bessie led the way towards the house while I trailed behind still occupied by the thought that this was a bad idea and that moving here would turn out to be an expensive waste of time and might not help my writers block at all. Had I been able to see the future all doubt would have vanished, and I would have turned around and driven back to the city immediately.
The following morning, though, I was in a much more reasonable state of mind as I stood on the front porch of the house full of English muffin and Bessie’s strong coffee. She had given me directions to the little real estate office where I was to meet the agent. Maybe it would all come to nothing, but the sky was blue, and the little village lay below me, a perfect postcard for a New England town, and, if nothing else, I would have had a nice trip, a small getaway that could only do me good. I started down the hill full of joie de vivre and boundless good will towards my fellow man.
Mays Corner is just that. Bessie had handed me a small tourist folder on my way out the door. It was originally a shack where people riding up through the great forests in Connecticut and Massachusetts could stop, get a drink and eat flapjacks, or stew containing vegetables from a garden out in the back with occasional meat should someone be able to trap or shoot rabbit or deer or the occasional chicken, and water themselves and their horses. Old Jeremiah cooked the meat over a fire behind the shack and basted it with a sauce he had made for himself. Even today Mays’ Northern BBQ attracts connoisseurs from other states. I had to admit that the pictures in the brochure looked tempting.
It boasted a corral, a water trough, a rough bar inside made of planks with a couple of chairs to fill up the remaining space. If a person needed to spend the night there was space in the stables behind the shack for about five cents a night or you could park your wagon if that is what you were using and sleep in that. It wasn’t really a corner although there was a horse track that wandered off into the woods from the main drag just past the Mays’ shack. It probably led absolutely nowhere except perhaps to somebody’s farm. Mays Corners was an entrepreneurial idea of one Jeremiah Mays and he would have been astounded to see what his shack had become.
It was now a small town of some five thousand people most of who worked in Rockmarsh, New Hartford or Windham or farmed corn and some cattle on the rough slopes that would turn into the Berkshires a little way north. I came down to the end of the street and there I was in downtown Mays and on the main street that was also Route 219 out of Rockmarsh. There was a stop sign and that was the extent of traffic control. Cars would take turns edging cautiously through the intersection turning left or right onto the main drag or going straight ahead onto the only other commercial strip in town. This secondary commercial road boasted a small eatery, a garage, a clothing store and the real estate agency for which I was looking. Choosing a quiet moment, I crossed Main and went down Welldon Street to the Pickering Brokerage.
Inside the front door was a row of desks along each wall with a wide aisle down the middle leading to the back where there was at least one office with its own window overlooking the sales floor. Several of the desks were occupied with women assiduously working their phone or typing into their computers or deep into conversations with people sitting alongside. Pictures of various properties crowded the front bay window and I spent a moment looking through them but they all seemed pretty much alike: capes and ranches, split-levels and colonials with well-tended lawns and plantings. Some were white and some were yellow or beige. There was even a red one with part of a child’s swing set showing from the back yard. Though the prices were reasonable this far away from Hartford, I found the houses boring. I had no kids and was no longer married so I didn’t feel the need for a ticky-tack look alike. I felt my high spirits crash and burn and I stood there wondering what I should do next. Perhaps I should just drive around and see if I saw anything interesting. That thought dampened my spirits even further. I turned away from the rows of desks and stared out the window as I tried to decide what to do.
“May I help you?”
She was big woman, broad hipped and almost mannish in aspect. She had a square face with big blue eyes and long blonde hair with purple streaks in it. It framed her face making it look narrower and fell onto her shoulders. She was dressed in khaki slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt. Late thirties or early forties, I thought. Definitely not your average matronly agent. She was standing right behind me smiling up into my face and, for the first time in years, I found myself liking a complete stranger. She had a look about her that suggested that she too had been down a few roads but the experience had made her stronger. She stopped smiling and looked at me and waited to see if I would respond. “I’m looking for a house, but not any of these so I don’t want to waste your time,” I told her.
“My name’s Dianne Vargas,” the woman told me and gave me another thousand watt smile and held out her hand. “Why don’t we blow this joint and go somewhere that doesn’t look like the inside of a minimum security prison.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed a real belly laugh that I had not had in quite a while. “Are you really an agent?” I asked as we shook hands.
“Yup. Got my license and a Mickey Mouse watch so I’m good to go.” She held up an arm that had a big plastic-looking watch strapped to it. “Here’ssss Mickey,” she parroted in a pretty fair Donald Duck voice.
I was feeling better by the minute. “Got a place in mind?”
“There’s a Dunkin a few blocks out on Main Street. Coffee’s decent.” She walked past me to the front door. “C’mon. I’ll drive.”
The coffee wasn’t bad and we sat in silence for a minute or so just sipping coffee and waiting for the other person to say something. It was as if she had expended all her ammunition in that one whiz-bang greeting. Dianne had almost a contemplative look on her face. She put her cup down and looked at me. “So. Looking for something a bit different?”
“Yes.”
“Big different? Little different? What kind of budget?”
“No budget really. I made some really good decisions on Wall Street a while back and they paid off, but they took their pound of flesh as well. I guess you could say I burned out.” Shrugged and smiled at her. “A common story probably.”
“No
t so much in this area. Okay so you’re retired sort of?”
“Yes.”
“What plans if any?” She took a sip of coffee and raised an eyebrow in question. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry but sometimes what a person does determines what kind of shelter he or she might want. A big-shot banker is probably not interested in an eight room ranch. That kind of thing.”
“Mmm. I see your point. Well, I am writing a book or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is writing me. I couldn’t get it done in the city and decided that a permanent change of place was what I needed.
“Ahh. The creative sort.”
“Maybe.. I’m looking to get away from people for a while, maybe a long while.” In reality, I had already begun to write, not on paper of course, but on my laptop. I had tried a pad of paper and a pencil but at the end of the day I could not even understand what I had written and most of it was crossed out. I had at first become interested and then obsessed by the family that I had married into for a period of years and then bowed out of. The fact that I was no longer married to Pam did not lessen my desire to investigate her roots and the people who had made her what she was both good and bad. Not a biography really but a novel based on fact. That, at least was my plan.
Dianne tapped her forefinger against her lips and stared past me at the counter of the coffee shop where a small line had formed in front of the cash register. “I wonder,” she said softly.
“Got an idea?”
“Maybe. I can get you to the edge of the world but it would cost you some large coin to live there year ‘round.”
I grinned. “Sounds interesting.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Bessies.”
“Okay. Go there. Change into rough clothes and hiking shoes if you have them but at least sneakers. We will be walking in from the nearest road. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
She was right. We walked for about twenty minutes through some thick woods along what might have been a path or rough road at some time in the past. I could feel the ruts beneath my feet but there was so much overgrowth that it was hard to make out the actual path. Dianne walked ahead of me much faster than I thought she could but then she must have been down this way a few times and was used to it. I matched her pace while admiring her back and legs. She had changed into jeans and filled them very well indeed. “You weren’t kidding,” I told her.
Dianne stopped and turned back towards me. “Nope. You wanted different. You’re getting different.” She grinned and turned back to the path. “Not far now.”
I followed behind thinking I should be careful what I wished for.
We came to a clearing and about twenty yards across it was the remains of an old cabin. In truth, it was really just a shack. “Wow,” I murmured more to myself than to Dianne but she heard me anyway.
“Wow is right,” she said. “This was originally a hunting shack where the owner and his friends could come and hunt and drink. For some reason he even had a cellar dug. Maybe to keep his kill and his beer cool. Who knows? When he died another man bought it and tried to fix it up a little, but he didn’t do much to the outside as you can see. “He died,” she stopped as if considering her words “in unusual circumstances No realtor wanted it so it came to me. She gave me a gamin grin. “I said what the Hell. You never know, right?” Then she pulled her face into a pretend frown and raised her arms with fingers in a claw position. “I am the agent of last resort,” she growled.
I stared at a large hole at one end of the roof. I could see part of a ceiling joist through it. “Right.” I said.
MJ 2005
I had not started out to be a writer. In fact, I, like almost everyone else, had not started out to be anything in particular. When I was a boy I had wanted to be a fireman, then a policeman, then a marine then President. Such are childhood fantasies played out on a thousand playgrounds, a million back yards, maybe a billion bed rooms with posters and books and later computers and DVDs. I think I turned to writing as a reaction to the strange beautiful woman I married and then found that inside her coiled like a sleeping snake was a piece of her that I could not reach, could not understand and with which I could not live. Was this all a process of genetics or environment or a combination? What was it within me that brought it to the surface? I did not know and did not consider myself smart enough to make an educated guess, but it did make me curious as to her past and once I had started on that I had to first consider her family.
Our first date if that is what you want to call it when we sat in Salvadore’s Bar and Grill drinking (sour mash for me and gin and tonic for Pam) did not start well. “Well here we are,” she told me quite primly while looking pointedly at her watch.
I sipped my drink and listened to the loud hum and occasional laughter from the crowd at the bar behind us.
“Well Michael J McCaal are we finished here?” She started to rise.
I remember that my patience was wearing a little thin about then. “Will you just relax and sit down. What is the matter with you? Can’t you sit and have a drink without bouncing up and down and being just plain rude?”
Pam stared at me across the little table and slowly lifted her glass and took a dainty sip. “I’m sorry,” she told me in a tone that suggested that she was embarrassed by her lack of manners and thus irritated at me since I was the obvious target. “It’s been a long day and I am tired and not up for chit-chat with strangers no matter how nice they appear.”
“Well everyone has had a long day if they were alive to get out of bed this morning. The stress level on Wall Street is always high.” I took a pull from my glass. “What type of work do you do?”
“Publishing. I am a copy editor with Farrow & Hawkins.” She took a longer sip of her gin. “I had an author in my face today because he thought I was wrong to suggest changes to his masterpiece. I really am tired and just want a little dinner by myself, a hot bath and a soft bed.”
“I can’t blame you for that. Maybe we could reset and start again when we’re not working. How ‘bout this coming Saturday?” I fished my wallet out, laid a twenty on the table for the drinks and handed her a business card after writing my number on the back.
Pam took the card, arched a large gray eye at me and stuck it in her purse. “I’ll think about it,” she told me.
We were married a year later. It was not a union of the young, lusty and stupid. We had our own work and neither of us wanted children. We had a service come in and clean the apartment once a week and we ate out at local restaurants enough that the wait staff knew our names. I can make eggs and bacon but that is my limit. Pam early on declared that she had not been born to be chained to a stove and had never learned to cook. Lisette, a friend of hers, did like to cook and would sometimes come over and share a dish or two with us but that was the extent of our domesticity. During the week we sometimes did not see the other person at all if one was working late and only for two or three hours if we made it home from our respective jobs on time. It was more a partnership than a marriage, more a roommate than a spouse other than the fact that we shared the marital bed. Most of time, I was happy with how things had worked out. I loved Pam and was happy to be in her life and have her in mine. If we didn’t see much of each other at times I blamed the exigencies of our jobs, our New York lifestyle, one that is known to millions. We did have some time together and I tried to make the most of it by taking her out to dinner and a movie or a stage show on or off Broadway. We went to the Bronx Zoo. We ate hot dogs with kraut in Central Park. We laughed at re-runs of the Odd Couple. Pam seemed happy, secure in her surroundings. We both made a good salary and I was in line for large bonuses. She, in turn, apparently came from a wealthy New England family and had money in a trust fund.
When I asked her about her family, about whom they were or what they did, she evaded a succinct answer but talked around the subject. I was okay with that. M
y own family was nothing to brag about. My father was a soldier and left when I was a small child. My mother raised me, and I loved her more than life itself, a feeling that was returned. The memory of her death still haunts my dreams throughout those nights when my brain refuses to relax. One night early in our relationship we were sitting watching Fox News on the television and it was a slow news night with the biggest event involving a tractor-trailer tie-up on an interstate.
“So how was your day?” Pam asked turning in her chair to look at me.
“Okay. Made changes to several client’s funds to reflect market conditions. It was a pretty stock answer. If I had gone into detail Pam would not have understood and there were confidentiality protocols in play as well. She had asked the question before as a means of breaking the silence, the sound from the television notwithstanding and I had given the same answer but this time she clicked off the set, got up, freshened her gin and tonic and moved her chair so that we were facing each other.
“I have a question for you.”
`”Okay. Ask away.”
“We’ve been married for weeks and I suddenly realize that I know basically nothing about you, your family, your childhood. Maybe it’s just human curiosity but what was your childhood like? What did your parents do? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to of course.”