Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “No more double-dating with those two,” said Bill.

  When Donna looked at him, her eyes were drawn to the bulge in his pants. She thought, Poor Bill, and resolved to have a talk with Beverly. She didn’t want her daughter making the same mistakes she had.

  “It’s got two tops,” said Richie, “a hard one and a soft one.”

  He had come up the walk behind Beverly and Bill, struggling under the poorly wrapped box.

  “I didn’t know you were having company, Mom,” said Beverly, “Bill and I will go upstairs.”

  “It’s not company; it’s Richie, from when I was growing up,” said Donna. “And no, you won’t go upstairs.”

  She put a hand up to fix her daughter’s hair, smiled at Bill, and made the introductions. “There’s cake, it’s my birthday, an old friend has popped in, and I’ve got this mysterious present. You really shouldn’t have, Richie.”

  “Should have, shouldn’t have … I’ve been thinking the same thing all week.”

  Bill helped Richie with the box, which was so poorly wrapped that it began to unwrap itself before they got it inside. Richie had another gift, too, smaller and flat. They brought the box into the living room and put it on the coffee table. Richie smoothed its paper and Beverly said she’d run up and change her clothes and come right back down.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Bill, but when Donna gave him a look, he sat on the couch.

  “I know it’s odd, my coming over like this,” said Richie.

  “Well, you can make up for it by helping me get the coffee and cake,” Donna said, drawing him into the kitchen with her.

  When he was alone, Bill dug the vibrator from his pants, looked around for a place to hide it, then shoved it in his pants again when Beverly came bounding down the stairs. She saw the bulge and said, “Wow.”

  “You guys stay put,” called Donna from the kitchen.

  “I really have to go to the bathroom,” said Bill.

  Donna and Richie brought the cake and coffee into the living room on an old tea tray. While Richie arranged the candles on the cake, Bill started up the stairs.

  “There’s a bathroom down here, Bill,” Beverly said, but he waved and kept on going. Beverly and Donna smiled at each other, and when Beverly turned off the overhead light, Richie lit the candles, which wavered in the room until a much relieved Bill came back down to join them.

  “Now make a wish, Mom,” said Beverly, “And blow out the candles.”

  “Gosh,” said Donna, but she closed her eyes and wished as hard as she could for Beverly’s eternal happiness.

  When the candles were smoking toward the ceiling and she finally turned her attention to Richie’s gift, it nearly unwrapped itself again.

  It wasn’t new, no newer than his car, but it delighted her like nothing else could have. It was an ancient record player with a one-inch shaft in its center, made especially for playing 45s, just like the one that had sat in her parents’ basement when she was a girl.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “All I need is my old beanbag chair.”

  “It works,” said Richie. “Here, now open this one.”

  He gave her the other gift from under his arm.

  “You truly shouldn’t have, Richie,” said Donna.

  “You might remember that I never knew how to be subtle,” he said.

  While Donna opened the second gift, Beverly dished up the cake and Bill helped Richie put the phonograph by an electrical outlet on the floor.

  “Oh, Richie!” said Donna, holding up the odd-looking record.

  “What is it, Mom?” asked Beverly, “Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’?”

  “It’s the best two-sided single from 1958,” said Richie, “by a guy named after me. I’m sure your mother knows it.”

  “Know it? Ha!” said Donna.

  “Well, what is it?” Beverly asked again. “Hurry up and put it on.”

  “Yeah,” said Bill.

  Donna slipped the record over the phonograph’s shaft and watched it fall down and start spinning, forty-five revolutions per minute. She laughed again. The tune was “La Bamba,” by Ritchie Valens, killed in a plane crash when he wasn’t much older than Beverly was now. Donna and Beverly both knew the words and leapt together, singing like crazy. “Bam-ba Bamba! Bam-ba Bamba!” Richie sang, too, while Bill took a bite of his cake and made a wish of his own—that Beverly’s mother would leave them alone tomorrow.

  Though they all loved it, Richie hadn’t bought the record for “La Bamba” but for its flip side, a dreamy slow-dance tune called “Donna,” and as that side started, he took Donna in his arms, and Beverly took Bill’s cake plate from him, and the four of them danced. When “Donna” ended they played it again, and then a third time, and then they returned to “La Bamba.”

  Though it hadn’t started out like it would be, this was a life-changing birthday for Donna. She and Richie were hardly ever apart after that, whether at her house, cooking and listening to music, or at his, working on the MG in his garage. And the next day, Bill got his second wish when Donna did leave them alone, going out early to poke around with Richie in an auto-wrecking yard. Beverly took him to her bedroom, the promise of the drive-in movie kept during the clear light of day.

  In the quiet afterward, and also later, when Donna and Richie came back, everyone thought they could hear a vague buzzing, as distant as a fly in a jar. But no one mentioned it, for each of them believed it singular to themselves, while each also began to believe that they had found their own true happinessss at home.

  The Women

  [1995]

  1

  THAT FALL, I TOOK MY DOG RUNNING at Wright Park daily, but while other dogs checked each other out by pressing noses to genitals, Bovary held his up high, like he might were he on the cover of The New Yorker. Maybe naming him Bovary did it, I don’t know, but he’d lately been distant when it came to other-dog encounters, preferring the company of humans, just as I, I suppose, had lately preferred the company of him. A boxer he met that day growled, in fact, when Bovary refused a friendly romp and bit the boxer on his snout for his trouble.

  We were in the park again a few days later, me in my jogging suit and Bov in his regular nudity. It was sunny, so we were sitting outside a nearby coffee shop after our run when a woman going into the shop gave me a look that said, I have a dog, too. Maybe I’d like this guy. She didn’t have her dog with her, mind you, nor did she speak, but I have found that dog owners often know one another through a certain invisible vibe. I smiled and nudged Bovary, hoping he’d do the same, but by then a storm had invaded the woman’s face.

  “Hold on a second, what’s your dog’s name?” she asked.

  I said his name was “Balzac,” without thinking twice.

  A half an hour later, we ran into her again, this time with Rocky, the boxer Bovary had bitten a few days before. Rocky’d been with a dog walker the first time we met him while she, the woman, was off teaching yoga at Stadium High School. The dog walker’d described the encounter, giving the woman Bovary’s name, plus a pretty good description of me, I imagined, judging from her coffee shop suspicion.

  “Hi again,” I said, while Bovary barked, “Bonjour.”

  I should have said already that he’s a large and reddish poodle and comes from a line of trufflers.

  “Look, his name’s not Balzac; it’s Bovary,” I said. “I had a dog named Balzac as a kid. I guess I must have flashed back to him.”

  My dog when I was a kid was Otis, the only dog I ever loved as much as Bovary. Women brought the liar out in me—or so say my ex-wives.

  “Well, whatever his name, Rocky’s been beside himself since their fight,” the woman said. “He’s had enough of fighting to last a doggy lifetime.”

  I glanced at Rocky, who didn’t look beside himself but crisp and squared away, like every other boxer I’d ever seen in my life. I liked dogs who didn’t face the world with so much blankness in their expressions.

  “Th
e dog walker’s my neighbor,” said the woman. “She tells me what goes on.”

  She was a dead ringer for Debra Winger, this woman, the best of the actresses I never seemed to see anymore.

  “Your neighbor’s a dog walker, but what does her neighbor do?” I asked, I thought, rather cleverly. It was then that she told me about the yoga teaching. I, in turn, said I was a lawyer who was running for judge, even pointing across the street at an ANDY FOLLETT FOR JUDGE sign on someone’s lawn. My only other bit of notoriety was that Ted Bundy had been in a class I’d taught at the Puget Sound law school back in 1973. I told her that, as well.

  Bovary and Rocky sauntered on ahead of us while the woman apologized for her coffee shop aggression, said a bad breakup had put her out of sorts, and agreed when I surprised myself by asking if I could call her. She gave me a pale pink card with only Mariah Spring and her phone number written on it, plus a sketch of a woman in a yoga pose. I determined to wait three days, which I’d heard was a rule of thumb, but when I broke down and called her that evening to ask if she’d like to take a drive with me up to Mount Rainier, she seemed happy to meet at our park the following Saturday. During the week, I gave Bovary three baths, twice washed my car, got a haircut, and bought a new pair of hiking shorts. It seemed an eternity, but when the day finally came and Mariah saw how clean my car was, she said right away, “It didn’t occur to me that you might not want Rocky along.”

  She made no mention of my haircut or shorts. “Not true!” I said. “I’m in this as much for Bovary as myself,” and when I showed her that I’d layered my car’s backseat with a mound of worn and comfy blankets, she smiled her Debra Winger smile.

  I had in mind a drive up to Paradise Inn, a hike among the wildflowers, and a slow trip back to my house for some cold sauvignon blanc and some very cool Miles. My second ex-wife used to tell me that I didn’t know how to connect with what she thought and felt, past the introductory seduction of wine and jazz, but wine and jazz was still a good start, was it not?

  Mariah looked great. Though I’d told her we’d be hiking, she wore a khaki dress that buttoned from top to bottom, engendering in her a certain wash-and-wear athleticism. Her body beneath the dress was toned, the muscles in her legs and forearms dancing around like little cloistered versions of Baryshnikov. During our drive, she told me the parts of her story that first dates allow: a happy childhood, popularity in school, and marriage to a football player whose career was ended by a wayward tackle, causing both a spiral fracture of a femur and the spiraling demolition of their relationship. She took up yoga before her marriage and started teaching it after.

  At Paradise Inn, we parked away from other cars, letting Rocky and Bovary off their leashes so they could romp where romping wasn’t allowed. Mariah took my hand, caressing its palm with her nails. She said, “It’s third and long in my life, Andy, and I’m afraid to call an imaginative play.”

  That would have been poignant, its intimacy thrilling, but I heard tired instead of third. “Yes, yes. Who’s life isn’t tired and long?” I almost said, but caught her actual words in time. So I asked instead, “Did you sue for the football metaphors in the divorce?”

  “I sued for Rocky and a few hundred bucks a month,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but the law isn’t the law when it comes to athletes. Cops and judges love them.”

  “I won’t love them when I’m a judge,” I said.

  Rocky and Bovary had gone into the woods by then, but Bovary soon came running back out with his tail up behind him at a forty-five-degree angle. His nose was up, too, making him a pointer at both ends.

  “Uh-oh,” said Mariah, “I hope they didn’t have another fight.”

  Rocky had stopped at the tree line, his head cocked off to one side.

  “Good boy!” I shouted, then said more quietly, “It’s not Rocky this time, Mariah, but morels! We have to follow his tail back into the woods.”

  Mariah seemed to think I’d said morals and squinted at me.

  “No, morels. Mushrooms! I can tell their variety from the angle of his tail.”

  If you know the ground cover of a Pacific Northwest forest, then you know that it can have a mossy carpet, built up over centuries primevally. Bovary led us back past the place of Rocky’s confusion to at least fifty morels standing behind a giant Douglas fir, an entire family of them out for a stroll.

  “It’s like a magical city with domed roofs!” said Mariah. “You can almost see Rapunzel staring down from the window of that one, Andy!”

  She pointed and laughed and swung my arm. Since I swung her arm, too, for a second we were like a couple of discus throwers warming up together at a track meet. She knelt beside Rapunzel. “Help me. I’m trapped in here!” she made Rapunzel say. It was the mushroom proxy of every human voice.

  When I said, “If we had a sack, we could take them back to my house, eat them with the sauvignon blanc,” Mariah unbuttoned the entire bottom of her dress, pulling its sides up into a makeshift basket. The morels were oblivious to the doomsday scenario until we plucked Rapunzel first, then ravaged their town.

  Though I’d parked away from others, a man was leaning against my car when we came out of the woods. Mariah’s dress, with the bottom looped up, made it look like she was naked from the waist down. “Who’s that, the leash police?” I asked while Mariah said, “Oh no, it’s Kahuna! Let’s go back in the woods for a while.”

  “What, the football player? You mean you were married to Kahuna Kamakuale?”

  Everyone knew Kahuna, who’d been a Seahawks star. But before Mariah could pull me back into the woods, Rocky ran to Kahuna, joy written all over his foolish boxer face. Bovary ran, too, and when he got there, Kahuna kicked him.

  “Hey!” I shouted, causing Mariah to throw an arm across my chest like a parent with a kid in a car. She also dropped her dress, spilling morels all over the ground. I picked up Rapunzel, and was about to throw her at Kahuna, when two other guys appeared from behind my car, both of them carrying clubs. Their faces were round and as huge as his, with horizontal lines climbing their foreheads. It wasn’t until Kahuna nodded to them, however, that I saw the things they carried weren’t clubs but ukuleles. And as soon as they started strumming them, Kahuna broke into this terrific falsetto version of “Over the Rainbow.” It was a straight-out theft from Iz Kamakawiwo’ole, but I had to admit it sounded great.

  “Enough, Kahuna, that’s not fair!” Mariah cried before going over to stand in front of him in a strange hypnotic sway.

  And not five minutes later she and Rocky were headed back down the mountain in Kahuna’s BMW, leaving me and Bovary alone.

  “I’VE LEARNED LIFE’S LESSONS SLOWLY, TOO,” I said, “and as judge I’ll try to remember that, aim toward leniency if the law allows. Does that answer your question?”

  I stood in front of a gathering of twenty at a campaign rally at the old Normanna Hall up on MLK. The question had come from a middle-aged black man with his arm around his sullen son. The election was a week away, and two weeks had passed since my humiliation up on Mount Rainier. I’d seen Mariah at the back of the hall when I started talking, but I made it a point of honor not to look her way.

  The man and his son lingered after my speech.

  “What do you think, Junior, should I vote for Judge Follett?” asked the man.

  “Not Judge yet,” I said, while Junior said he didn’t care who his father voted for.

  “You’ll care if you end up in court,” said the man. “Now tell him what you did.”

  “Stole some drumsticks from Ted Brown Music.”

  Mariah came up to us, but I kept my eyes on the kid.

  “I guess you got caught,” I said. “What’s your stand on shoplifting now?”

  “Answer the man, Junior,” said Mariah.

  Junior’s eyes left the floor, where they’d been glued. “What are you doing here, Ms. Spring?” he asked, while to me, he said, “I already promised about a million times that I won’t do it again.”
>
  “In that case, if you were in my courtroom, I’d send you home with a warning,” I said. “And make you pay for the drumsticks.”

  When Junior and his father left, I gave Mariah a suspicious look.

  “He’s in my ‘rescue yoga’ class,” she said. “He’s not as bad a kid as he wants to be.”

  I went to the podium to get my speech. I’d had three such events since I last saw her. My opponent said on television that candidates for judge shouldn’t campaign, but I wanted people to know where I stood.

  “What are you doing here, Ms. Spring?” I asked when I turned back toward her. “Tired of the Wizard of Iz?”

  “What’s a girl to do when you won’t answer her calls?” she said. “I guess I came to apologize.”

  “How’s Rocky? And seriously, tell Kahuna that if he kicks my dog again, I’ll be the one going on trial—for murdering him.”

  “If you have a message for Kahuna, you’ll have to deliver it yourself,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in a week and I won’t be seeing him again. And Wizard of Iz … ha! Good one, Andy.”

  When she smiled and took my arm, I felt a weight lift off my chest. We had stepped out onto the street.

  “‘Rescue yoga,’ huh?” I said. “What other kinds of yoga do you teach?”

  “Oh, lots of different kinds,” she said. “‘Cheerleading yoga,’ so the little idiots won’t start breaking bones; ‘stress-reduction yoga’ for teachers after a difficult day; and ‘don’t be such an asshole yoga’ for the football players.”

  A bunch of football players came into my mind, standing around semaphorically. Would that I could read what they spelled out.

  “Browne’s Star Grill ain’t what it used to be, but it’s right up here,” Mariah said. “We could stop for a drink if you like, maybe get things back on track?”

  I thought about how certain people say “ain’t” when they want to sound spontaneous or carefree. Mariah and I had found great spontaneity before Kahuna’s arrival on Mount Rainier, but neither of us had been carefree. My cares were tied up in two bundles: one containing my failure in two fraught marriages, the other my desire to help set things right in the world at large by becoming a judge.