Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  Mrs. Shapiro was lying in bed with a pensive expression. “Are there many stupid teachers at the school?”

  Grace was momentarily, flustered by the odd remark, but the sick woman rushed ahead without waiting for a reply. “Oh, such a rude thing to say! Forgive my impertinence.” Despite her protests, she didn’t seem the least bit contrite. In fact, she was smiling wickedly now, staring off into space through squinty eyes. “There’s an old spinster who lives three doors down from here, a retired teacher. She was planning a trip to visit the Grand Canyon over the summer. The woman took the MBTA red line train into Boston so she could apply for a visa. Someone had to explain to Elsie that Colorado was halfway across the country but still located within the continental United States.”

  Elsie Davenport. Grace had worked with her at another school several years back. Even then, the woman’s foolishness was legendary. Worse than legendary, common knowledge. The superintendent tried to fire her for gross incompetence, but the teacher’s union dug in solidly behind Elsie. In the end it would have cost five times her annual pay to litigate the case in court so the school committee allowed dopey Elsie to muddle through to retirement.

  “Imagine,” Mrs. Shapiro suddenly reached out and, grabbing Grace by the wrist, pulled her close, “that you are working at a menial job and no one values what you do. You are smarter and more sensitive than three-quarters of the dummkopfs who pass you in the hall without so much as a backward glance.”

  “Carl is in love with you,” Mrs. Shapiro said abruptly. “What are your intentions?” For the second time that afternoon, Grace was caught off guard.

  “He told you?”

  “No, not in so many words. But then words aren’t a terribly trustworthy commodity.”

  “My intentions,” Grace picked up the thread of Ruth’s previous remark, “are no different than anyone else’s.” She placed her free hand on top of Mrs. Shapiro’s gnarled knuckles gently massaging the mottled skin. “To find a key to paradise.”

  “I ask a straight question and you answer in riddles,” Mrs. Shapiro replied. “So you want a key to unlock the gates to paradise? Right now I’d settle for another cup of tea.” Grace got up and reached for the bowl. “Leave the soup. I still haven’t decided yet if I want to live or die.”

  In the kitchen Grace found the Earl Grey black tea, the selection with natural oil of bergamot that the old woman favored. She waited for the water to boil, added a spoonful of honey and glanced out the window. In the yard, the jays and a handful of crows were laying waste to the sunflower seeds, scattering the torn shells all over the ground.

  So, I heard this improbable rumor. At school, Grace and Carl avoided each other. He stopped eating in the faculty lounge altogether. They passed in the corridors without so much as a nod or casually greeting. That would come later. Once word got out that a mentally unbalanced school teacher was dating the janitor, vitriolic tongues would wag. Ruth Shapiro was no fool. She was simply playing the devil’s advocate, baiting Grace with what was sure to come. She’d been through three husbands on several continents. She understood Grace’s dilemma. A public middle school was a hothouse, a steamy incubator for outrageous gossip and innuendo.

  Back in the bedroom, the soup bowl was empty and all that remained of a piece of sourdough bread was the unbuttered crust. “Carl never speaks about his past.”

  The old woman stirred the tea and placed the spoon on the saucer. “Carl’s mother died when he was still a baby. The father couldn’t cope. He ran off somewhere so the state placed the child in foster homes.”

  “I figured something of the sort.”

  In the basement, the electrical motor that powered the jointer turned over with a smooth hum. Mrs. Shapiro began to sneeze fitfully. Grace handed her a Kleenex. She dabbed at her swollen nose and her eyelids drooped. The old woman grew quiet. Grace could smell the honey and oil of bergamot in the few remaining drops of sweetened tea. Mrs. Shapiro’s breath turned smooth and regular as she slept and, for a fleeting instant, Grace caught a glimpse of a young girl barely out of her teens, a beautiful wisp of a Semite with black hair and a book of poems jutting out of a back pocket. She was raking piles of rancid chicken shit into smelly piles, there on the kibbutz in the rugged hill country of the Upper Galilee.

  ******

  The Mansfield Craft fair was in its tenth season. A hundred and twenty exhibitors were assigned spaces in the main ballroom of the Mansfield Sheraton Hotel. With dozens of minor details to sort out, Carl had packed everything up the previous night after working all day at the school.

  Grace and Angie arrived around eight-thirty. “There he is,” Angie ran ahead to greet Carl, who was spreading an emerald green cloth over a long table. He hadn’t put any jewelry boxes out on display yet.

  Grace scanned the room. In a finely choreographed bedlam, crafters were bustling about arranging tables and positioning displays full of jewelry, ceramics, paintings and blown glass. “Somebody’s not happy,” she whispered and pointed several tables down in the large function hall, where a blond woman in her late thirties was going toe to toe with an older man.

  “The masking tape on the floor,… that what you paid for.” The man struggled to keep his emotions under control, but every time he objected to something, the feisty blond fought back, raising her voice by a half dozen decibels.

  “I paid good money for this spot and you can’t tell me -”

  “Lady, look at the tape,” the man fumed. “You’re grabbing twice the space of anyone else.” He jabbed his finger at a clipboard. “We got you down for a ten-by-ten. That’s all you paid for. You can’t make up the rules to suit your convenience.”

  The blond woman got up in his face and hissed. “Any of these fine people complaining, huh? Is my setup taking business away from them? I’m perfectly within my rights to set up my displays as I see fit!” The older man stared at her with a constipated expression and was about to launch another frontal assault, but a woman wearing an ID badge grabbed him by the arm and hauled him away on some other business.

  “So what was that all about?” Grace asked.

  “I’ve seen Blondie at other shows. She’s a fraud.” Carl began spreading merchandise out on the table, large boxes on pedestals, smaller pieces positioned to the front. “She doesn’t make any of her own jewelry. It’s all BS.”

  “Bull shit!” Angie grabbed a necklace box and placed it strategically on a riser near the center of the table.

  “That too,” Carl chuckled without any malice toward the blonde woman. “But in the crafting trade, BS stands for buy/sell.”

  Grace’s face clouded over. “I don’t follow you.”

  “The rings and pendants are manufactured in third world countries - China, the Philippines and Taiwan. It’s all cheap imports... junk. Nothing handmade. But she passes it off as the real deal and gullible customers don’t know the difference.” “Once they open the doors,” he added, “pay close attention to Blondie. She might be a con artist but she’s got a smooth delivery.” Carl flashed a sly grin but didn’t bother to elaborate.

  At quarter to ten, Grace wandered down the length of the hall to size up the competition. No other woodworkers were booked. A woman near the far wall was hawking twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa. She had laid out free samples in Styrofoam bowls along with several trays of tortilla chips. Scooping a healthy portion of dip from each bowl, a heavyset man was enjoying an early lunch at the salsa lady’s expense.

  “So what’s the connection between munchies and fine art?” Grace turned to see a pallid, willowy thin woman sitting on a folding chair next to a collection of water colors.

  “Funny, I was asking myself the same question,” Grace replied.

  “This stinks,” the woman said in a humorless tone. “Customers will stuff their faces with freebies and ignore our crafts.”

  “Your paintings are very nice,” Grace said. She didn’t think the woman’s artwork was particularly remarkable, but didn’t want to hurt her f
eelings, especially since the artist was already upset about the salsa lady’s unfair advantage. Truth be told, her water colors were rather commonplace and the scenes pleasant enough though not terribly original.

  “It’s my first show,” the woman confided. “I quit my day job to pursue a career in the arts.” She smiled a slightly wilted, ambivalent expression. Drifting the entire length of the table, the heavyset man finished sampling the last container of salsa and promptly bought three jars of dip. The salsa lady stuffed the money in a granny pack strapped to her waist. The fair hadn’t even technically opened and she’d already rung up her first sale!

  The water color artist blew out her cheeks. “Salsa belongs in a whole food store,” she hissed, “not an art fair.”

  “Well, good luck.” Grace wandered off.

  So what was the lady with twenty varieties of homemade salsa doing at a craft fair? It made no coherent sense to Grace. But then further down, sandwiched between a potter and vendor with blown glass flowers was a woman hawking Mary Kay cosmetics. As soon as the droopy-faced painter sight of the perfumes, emollients and ultra gloss lipsticks, Grace mused, the woman probably would have something scandalous to say about commercial cosmetics.

  Grace went back to where her daughter and Carl were waiting patiently. Five minutes later, the doors burst opened and a hoard of customers flooded into the hotel ballroom. The first wave of shoppers drifted past, some eyeing the boxes and stopping to chat with Carl. A middle-aged woman who was looking for a present for a nephew promised to return after she toured the hall. “Blondie’s killing the competition,” Carl said tongue in cheek. “That despicable BS artist is putting us all to shame.”

  Sure enough a crowd three-deep had gathered around the jewelry booth where silver bracelets, pendants and rings were flying off the table. “Yah, that’s a one-of-a-kind... No I don’t personally make a thing. My Uncle Sid from New Jersey is the creative genius. He designs every piece. A regular Picasso with precious metal! … Yes, everything’s on sale. I can let those go two for $25. A steal at that price!”

  “What did I tell you,” Carl chuckled. Smaller clusters of shoppers were gathered around various booths. The salsa lady was alternately refilling empty tortilla chip bowls and ringing up sales. Everybody was grabbing the free samples. A handful of customers floated past Carl’s boxes but didn’t stop or show much interest.

  Finally an older married couple strolled by. “Hey, Ralphy, look at these splendiferous boxes.” The pudgy woman wore thick, glasses and a slap-happy grin. She stood with her hands on her generous hips studying the merchandise. “Ralphy, get a load of this neat stuff!” Her husband, scowled and moved away to examine a collection of handmade soaps and body lotions. “You make these boxes?”

  The woman clearly had no intention of buying anything but that didn’t seem to bother Carl. “Me and my mother.” He smiled and cocked his head to one side. “You know my mother,… Mother Nature. She does the hard part. I just throw it all together.”

  The woman reached out and stroked the surface of a ring box. “Gorgeous stuff you make. I can’t hardly believe my freakin’ eyes!” She turned impatiently and shout at her husband. “Ralphy, for crying out loud! Come over here and get a load of this guy’s fancy shmancy jewelry boxes.” The husband, who was stout and balding in the rear, rushed off even further down the hall. The woman bent far over the table, “My husband makes boxes, too, but he only uses cheap pine and a quickie coat of varnish. Nothing like yours.” She wandered off in search of the man who had disappeared in the crowd.

  At ten-thirty, Carl made his first sale, a poem box done in cherry and quarter sawn oak. A half hour later another woman bought a large band sawn box and a man’s valet with a sliding tray. He put the money in a small cash box and turned to Grace. “I’m going to bathroom. You’re in charge.”

  “What about customers?”

  “Take their money and give them a box.” He walked off in the direction of the lobby. Grace looked at her daughter. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “No, not really. But how difficult could it be?”

  Five minutes later a gaunt man in his early thirties ambled up to the table and stared at one particular box with a queer intensity. He bent over at the waist so that his ferret like eyes were no more than an inch from the wood and continued to gawk at the keepsake box. Then, without straightening up or even bothering to look at either one of them he growled, “Take it off the table.”

  “Excuse me?” Grace stammered.

  “Take ...the box...off the table,” he repeated in a furtive, clipped tone, “and put it out of sight.” Only now did he straighten up and look directly at Grace. “It’s a present for my daughter. She’s over there with her mother.” He indicated a teenage girl with dark hair a few tables away.

  Angie eased the small box off the table and secreted it into a gift bag. The thin man all but threw the money down on the green cloth and rushed off spastically as though fleeing the scene of a crime.

  “So what was that all about?” Angie looked at the crumpled bills in her fist. Three twenties. The fellow never even waited for his change.

  “I haven’t a clue,” Grace said. Her first sale! She tried to gauge her feelings but nothing registered. She felt mildly disoriented, like when she got lost one time in Boston driving back and forth over the Charles River, unable to find her way home. Carl returned and they showed him the money.

  “Every sale’s different, I guess,” he replied philosophically and handed the money back to Angie. You keep it. Gives you a hankering for corporate greed.”

  Angie stuffed the money in her jeans then pasted Carl with a wet, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “Hey,” he cautioned, “don’t mix pleasure with business!”

  In the late afternoon, Grace went off to check on the competition. The flow of customers had dropped off considerably, but the blond whose fictitious Uncle Sid from New Jersey supposedly hand-crafted every bracelet, pendant and ring was still doing a brisk business. The spunky street fighter gibber jabbered with every customer, cracking an endless stream of corny jokes and frolicking her way through the final few hours. The homemade soaps were still selling well; the twenty varieties of homemade, organic salsa display looked like it had taken a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. Empty Styrofoam bowls and broken tortilla chips littered the floor. But the salsa lady was still chatting it up with a few stragglers. Diagonally across from the salsa lady the water color artist was sitting on the folding chair with her hands folded limply in her lap. All of her artwork was neatly arranged against the wall. All of it.

  “I didn’t sell a damn thing.” She looked like one of her flowers after a prolonged drought. “If I earned a tenth of what that woman did with her crappy salsa, the show would have been a modest success.”

  Crappy salsa. Grace wasn’t sure if the painter’s assessment was based on an actual taste test or an indictment of the process. Self loathing and despair oozed from every pore in her body. “Well, for what it’s worth, I like your paintings.”

  The woman glanced at her suspiciously. “Yah, but that’s what everyone says, and I’m going home broke.”

  Grace edged away. Maybe she should have told the woman that her droopy, tortured artist demeanor was a liability. While the tortured, water color artist sat morosely waiting to be discovered, Blondie was whooping it up, engaging everyone from frumpy housewives to an elderly woman with nasal oxygen and a portable tank strapped to her waist. Grace remembered the Chickasaw Indian woman with her woven baskets. Humility, talent plus a smattering of self-deprecating humor - not necessarily in that order - was what the flower lady lacked.

  At a booth on the far side of the hall, Grace bought some tea from an effeminate man who ordered leaves through an Asian wholesaler and mixed his own unique blends. “Bags? God forbid!” the man, who spoke with a pronounced lisp, seemed mildly horrified. Teabags were bleached. Bags were blasphemy! They adulterated—that was the word he used—the true taste of the delicate leaf. The am
brosia was perverted, desecrated, defiled. Would you take a bath in lye? All his selections had to be steeped in metal strainers. Before she left, the fellow loaded Grace up with free catalogues and samples. She would bring the teas to Mrs. Shapiro and, while they indulged their taste buds, recount the story of the overly sensitive tea salesman.

  “What a surprise!” Pam Sullivan, the office manager, was fingering a selection of alpaca wool sox imported from Mexico. “What brings you here?”

  “A good bargain,” Grace shot back, momentarily regaining her composure.

  “I just bought these crazy socks,” Pam boasted. “The dye is all natural. Natives soak the wool in a vat of crushed beetles and boiling water. Isn‘t that a hoot!”

  “Yes, I know.” Grace had spent some time talking with the vender earlier in the day. The red die was extracted from the pulverized bodies of the female cochineal beetle. The insects were soaked in hot water to remove a waxy residue then dried in the Southwest desert sun. Seventy thousand female beetles were sacrificed to produce a single pound of cochineal powder. Because the organic dye was absolutely non-toxic, it was widely used in cosmetics, food coloring and soft drinks.

  Grace studied Pam’s selection. The socks were ugly. The young couple manning the alpaca sock booth had fair skin and hair. They didn’t look like they’d jetted in overnight on a red­eye flight from New Mexico. More buy/sell.

  “Did you see who’s here?” Pam said leaning closer. “Carl Solomon’s got a table over by the main entrance.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How utterly absurd!” Pam tittered. “He’s hawking a bunch of tacky boxes that you couldn’t unload at a flea market.”

  Grace cringed. “That bad?”

  “The guy should stick to taking out the trash and general maintenance.” Pam rolled her eyes and made a motion to leave.

  “I don’t suppose you actually got a look at any of Carl’s boxes?”

  Pam’s features clouded over but she left the question hanging. “A woman’s holding scented candles for me three tables down. I gotta run.” Pam wandered off.