That was the whole problem with horoscopes. What if you hadn’t been to college and thus had no pals from your college days? William J., his son, had not been to college. Horoscopes were one size fits all, but human beings were not.
William T. came back out to see Burl bent over his coffee and reading the front page of his personal Observer-Dispatch. Burl bought a fresh paper every day from Jewell’s Grocery. Burl disliked sharing the common diner paper. He liked to read the paper in his own way, in his own time. William T. watched him fold and quarter his paper in accordance with time-honored personal tradition.
“Burl,” William T. said. “True or false: Perennial flowers, such as tiger lilies, that are not thinned regularly will eventually crowd themselves out of existence and die.”
Burl ignored him.
“Well? True or false?”
Silence.
“I’m making a point here, Burl. You are being overcome by your lilies. Something needs to be done about them. You need an old pal from your college days to reappear and give you guidance about your lily problem.”
“I didn’t go to college.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“My lilies are big,” Burl said after some consideration.
“Big is an understatement. They’re mutant lilies. They’re preternaturally big.”
Burl took a box of Band-Aids from his blue mailbag and peeled one out of its wrapper: paper cut, curse of the mailman.
“A man with your fear of heights? Jesus Christ, Burl, cut down the damn lilies. They’re taller than you are.”
Burl smoothed the Band-Aid over his pinky and then bent over the wastebasket and plucked out the string of wind chimes and examined them.
“William J. made these,” he said. “Why would you throw them away?”
William T. nodded. It was a good question, answerable by the fact that the world was choked with wind chimes. Everywhere he went, more wind chimes.
“Why would I throw them away?” William T. began.
But his voice failed him. He projected the words telepathically instead: Because there are enough goddamn wind chimes in the world already, and all of them remind me of William J. He cleared his throat, trying for words. Burl looked away and began to work the buckle to his mailbag as if there were a problem with it.
“Speaking of college, Sophie’s thinking of it,” Burl said.
Sophie? College?
“Sophie J.?” William T. said. “Sophie’s thinking of college?”
“So I hear.”
“Why?”
Burl smoothed his smooth Band-Aid. “She’s got to do something with her life, is what she told me. She’s thinking of nursing.”
“Nursing?”
Sophie J., his daughter-in-law, a nurse. William T.’s head filled with the image of Sophie, her hair up in a bun, a tri-wing cap on her head, a white nurse’s uniform, white stockings, white shoes. But wait. Nurses didn’t look like that anymore, did they? That was an image from Cherry Ames: Student Nurse, a book of Eliza’s that had sat on the bookshelf as long as he could remember. No. Nurses were ordinary people these days, wearing ordinary white pants and ordinary white sneakers. Keds even.
Sophie? College? She had never mentioned it before.
William J. had never wanted to go to college. Sophie had never talked about it either. They had been happy, the two of them, with their truck and their apartment in Remsen and Sophie working at Queen of the Frosties and William J. remodeling half the houses in North Sterns. A bathroom here, a sun-room there. A hot tub at the back of the Buchholzes’ garage even. Jesus Christ. The word college had never come up.
“But they were happy just the way they were,” William T. said to Burl.
Burl looked at him. Smiled his Burl smile, a smile that always made William T. sad. Crystal came down with the coffeepot and upended it in her deft way. A flickering stream of amber appeared, connecting the pot with Burl’s cup. William T. watched, fascinated. She never spilled a drop.
“Thank you for organizing the jams, William T.,” Crystal said. “How’s Genghis these days?”
William T. cleared his throat.
“Genghis is the king of cats, Crystal.”
“I have some broccoli stems for him if he still likes them.”
“Genghis loves a good stem.”
“What other cat would even take a bite of a broccoli stem?” Tamar Winter said from her stool next to Burl.
“That merely proves my point.”
“What it proves is that you are the owner of an abnormal cat,” Tamar said. “A reject from the feline nation.”
“Genghis is a prince among cats,” William T. said.
“I’d put Puddy up against him any day,” Dena Jacobs said.
“Puddy versus Genghis,” Tamar said. “Does Puddy eat human food, too?”
“Puddy has to have low-ash. He eats Royal Canin exclusively,” Dena said. “I have to drive to Syracuse to get it.”
“Cats should be fed table food,” William T. said.
He plucked a broccoli stem from Crystal’s discarded-vegetable-peeling pile.
“That’s just weird,” Tamar Winter said.
“I’ll tell you what’s weird,” William T. said. “Dessicated pellets of former food in the shape of stars and fish. That’s what’s weird. What about mice? What about birds? What about a blade of grass every now and then?”
“When cats eat grass that’s an indication of a hairball,” Dena Jacobs said. “Or a deficiency of vitamin C. Something like that. I think, anyway. I don’t let Puddy outside. Besides, he’s declawed.”
“My point is that if Genghis wishes to eat a blade of grass, he should have that right,” William T. said. “Genghis lives in the same world I do. Why should he not partake of it in all its richness and glory?”
Crystal’s boy, Johnny, looked up abruptly. William T.’s voice must have grown loud. Johnny was twenty-eight and as grown up as he would ever be, sat in the same booth he always sat in, coloring a brown paper grocery bag with a red crayon.
A string of wind chimes hung on the coat hook next to Johnny. William J. had made it for him, for Johnny who loved shiny things. William T. eyed it and turned away.
William T. did not allow himself to picture all the strings his son had labored on and given away: brass rods on a rope hanging off the thruway tollbooth, sleighbells hung around the neck of the bouncing enameled horse at the Sterns Elementary School playground, hollowed wooden tubes hanging from the Buchholzes’ mailbox on Fuller Road, slender silvery rods dancing from a circular wooden ring on the worn signpost of Nine Mile Trailer Park down in Sterns, all the misshapen music his son had set loose in the world.
Jesus Christ.
They were everywhere, and wherever William T. went from now on he would have to face people who had known his son, whose eyes slid away from him when he walked into a room, who had known him back when he was a man with a wife, a man with a son, a son he used to drive up to Remsen to greet the dawn with and then go to the diner and eat breakfast with, a man with an ordinary life, the only life he had ever wanted.
William T. looked away from Johnny’s booth to see Crystal bending over an old woman in a booth. The patient curve of her back caused a lump to form in his throat, and William T. had to look away. His stomach clenched again.
William T. watched as she bent farther over the booth, reaching for the sugar shaker that the old woman, her head knotted on her neck from arthritis, could not.
Crystal had always seemed a woman without time, but William T. saw that time was upon her, too. Forty-five? Five years younger than him. She had thinned over the years if that was possible, her bones attenuating, growing into the lightness that had always been hers as a child. She was graceful in an unfussy way.
Suddenly she looked up and saw him watching her.
Too late to turn his eyes away. She returned his gaze with her own, her level Crystal look that he had seen all her life, and he wondered what the look in his own eyes had
been.
Teaspoons clinking against thick white china.
Early-morning voices not yet ready to be loud.
A creak as someone slid in or out of a wooden booth.
Bacon sizzled and Crystal stood, spatula in hand. She didn’t blink. She gazed at him. William T. cleared his throat. Johnny lifted his head from the stack of old Observer-Dispatches he had been laboring over. Circling every capital J with a red marker.
“J,” Johnny said.
And Crystal turned. She bent over Johnny. Good work, J, he heard her say. The spatula was still in her hand, and the sputter of bacon behind her on the grill grew immediately louder.
William T. had been coming to Crystal’s for twenty years. For twenty years he’d seen Crystal stroke the hair back behind Johnny’s ear, trying to keep it out of his eyes. He’d seen her make shadow puppets with her fingers to keep babies quiet while their tired parents tried to order. He’d seen her lift the biggest piece of strawberry rhubarb pie onto a plate and without asking slide it over to Clara Winter, who loved strawberry rhubarb pie.
Burl had unfolded his paper to its full height, turned the page, and refolded it into quarters. Burl skipped nothing but the funnies and the horoscopes. William T. slipped the funnies out of Burl’s paper, something Burl hated him to do—disturbed his sense of orderliness—and read his horoscope aloud to him.
“A friend or family member may need your advice today, Burl.”
“I don’t believe in the horoscope.” “Does anyone?”
“William J.,” Burl said. “He did.”
Burl turned his paper over, revealing the next half-page. When his breakfast came, William T. picked up his fork and inserted the tines into the silent yellow face of one of his eggs. Yellow oozed over the white and onto a corner of his toast. Burl’s friend or family member might need advice, but Burl had no family members. His parents had been gone twenty and more years now, his wife for thirty. He had been an only child.
As a child, Burl had sung solos in the school and church choirs. He was famous for his beautiful Welsh tenor. He was known for having perfect pitch.
“Burl, what the hell is perfect pitch?” William T. said.
Burl unfolded the paper, turned the page, refolded. He did not look at William T.
“Some say there’s no such thing,” he said, keeping his finger on the headline of the article he was reading. “That there’s only very good relative pitch, which is an ability to know what note is being played. C. G. A. Whatever.”
William T. looked at Burl, at his eyes, which would not look at William T., at his finger patiently holding his place in the Observer-Dispatch. Would it kill him not to read the paper at Crystal’s every day? Would it kill him to vary from his routine even one iota? What the hell was an iota, anyway?
William T. had never known Burl to take a vacation outside of Sterns. When they were children at Sterns Elementary they had talked about what they would do when they were eighteen and traveling to California together in their own car. Burl’s eyes had grown dark and shining every time they made their plans. They would dip their toes in the Pacific while watching carefully for sharks. They would eat oranges off the tree. The oranges might be green but would still taste delicious because William T. had read that in California not all ripe oranges were orange. They would pick bay leaves, whatever bay leaves were, for Burl’s mother, because she liked to use them in her stew and bay leaves grew on bay leaf trees right in people’s backyards, in California.
In California.
William T. opened his mouth and started to sing.
“‘The-ere is a balm in Gil-e-ad/To make the wound-ed who-ole.’”
Johnny Zielinski looked up from the tinfoil star he was gazing at. Burl’s whole body drew into itself, so that he looked smaller than he usually did. William T. watched Burl’s hands. They were taut with the desire to cover his ears, as William T. knew they would be.
“Why does that hurt?” William T. said.
“Because you can’t sing,” Tamar Winter said. “That’s why.”
Tamar’s dark-haired daughter Clara looked up from her ever-present book and made a face, apologizing for her mother.
When they were children, the music teacher had taken William T. aside one day and suggested that if he felt like it, he was welcome to mouth the words while the other children were singing. It could be a special game for him alone. How fun it would be for William T. to see if he could match the right mouth movements in time to the actual singing.
She chose Burl for the solos, the only part of school he was not shy about.
Burl’s finger had not moved from the headline it was frozen on: Lineman Electrocuted at Boonville Construction Site.
Burl’s finger moved, but William T. could tell he was not reading. His ears lay flat on the sides of his heads, exposed by his short hair with its above-the-ear cut. Burl had had the same haircut since he was a child. At Sterns High his nickname had been Dad.
Tamar Winter and Clara were leaving, Tamar suspending the last bit of milk shake from her straw above her mouth and letting it drip in.
Burl’s hands were still tense on his newspaper. Sound could be painful to him. Car brakes squealing, static crackling on the radio, a child singing the national anthem off-key at the Sterns High Purple Knights’ opening fall football game. William T. had no understanding of that sort of hearing. How might Burl have fared, seated directly next to the noisy engine on an airplane, the way William T. had been on his one flight? William T. used his fork to spread cold, oozing yolks over his cold toast. Back and forth he spread, trying to equalize the thickness of yellow.
“True or false,” William T. said. “Genghis loves the yolk of a fried egg.”
“True or false was William J. ’s game,” Burl said.
“You can play, too. It’s a nondenominational game.”
Burl looked at him. “Nondenominational?”
“You heard me.”
“False then.”
“Sorry. True. Genghis loves the yolk of an egg, over easy, cut up with two knives and placed in the middle of a clean china plate. He’s a fan of that particular shade of yellow.”
“I thought cats were color-blind.”
“An ordinary cat might be color-blind,” William T. said. “But Genghis is not an ordinary cat.”
Crystal was busy down at the other end of the counter, shaping hamburger into patties for lunch. She separated each with a square of waxed paper. She made three stacks of five each on a plate and covered it with plastic wrap and set the plate in the cooler. She washed her hands and dried them with one of her red dish towels. Burl turned the page and folded and quartered. He licked his finger and set it at the top of the first left-hand column: Local Woman Leads Bird Sanctuary Crusade.
Burl plucked at another Band-Aid that was coming loose, one end dangling in a limp, used-Band-Aid way, then gave up and intertwined his fingers: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people. Crystal passed by Johnny’s booth and ran her hand over his sleeping head. Burl rolled the limp Band-Aid into a ball and closed his fist over it. He would not look at William T.
“Sing one of your hymns, would you, Burl? Sing ‘Amazing Grace.’”
“No.”
“‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ. Consider it a nondenominational request, with me being the nondenominator.”
Burl just shook his head.
The pricking behind William T.’s eyes came again, that familiar ache. His vision began to swim with the weight of his tears. He had not been a crier his whole life long, and now look at him. Burl got up. He sorted through his customary fistful of coins for a tip, plucking out nickels and dimes. He stacked the coins in small piles, each according to its denomination, and then gathered up his paper and nodded to Crystal. His coat brushed against Johnny’s string of wind chimes and they whispered tinnily among themselves.
William T. watched through
his blurry eyes as Burl crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of his station wagon, started the engine and crept off down Route 365 in the direction of Barneveld. Once there, he would find a place along Mappa Avenue to parallel park. Many was the time William T. had watched Burl parallel park when there were plenty of pull-in spots available.
Johnny Zielinski shuddered in his sleep. Moaned. His twisted hand twitched on the table as if to bat something away.
“Johnny. Johnny.”
Crystal called softly from behind the grill, her eyes squinted in concern. She went over to Johnny’s booth and bent over him, putting her cheek on top of his.
“Johnny,” she murmured.
At the sound of her voice Johnny’s sleeping frown smoothed out, and his hand stopped its restless movement on the table. Crystal stood there a minute, making sure, then returned to the grill. William T. had seen Johnny all the years of his life, a child the same age as William J. Cerebral palsy, not enough oxygen at birth. Crystal had taken care of him all those years. She had been at the school conferences. She had been there to meet Johnny when he got off the bus at the diner. She drove him back and forth to Utica, to his special program there.
She was scrubbing the other end of the counter. Johnny woke quietly, sat up, and started to color. Crystal wrung out the rag in the sink and washed her hands under water that steamed, rubbing each finger over and over with soap.
“You wash with surgical precision,” William T. said.
Her back was to him, but he sensed a smile in the curving lines of her back. Crystal held her hands under the steaming water until they were bright red.
“Can I confess something to you, Crystal?”
“If you want to, William T.”
“I’m tone-deaf.”
“There are worse things,” she said.
William T. looked over at Johnny in his booth, his grocery-bag coloring paper spread around him, shades of red scrawled across it.
“Johnny’s a man of red, isn’t he?” he said. Johnny was coloring on a brown paper bag from Jewell’s Grocery. They used to be handleless, the Jewell’s bags, but in recent years Harold had started ordering handle bags. They were easier.
Was It Beautiful? Page 6