A Marriage Made at Woodstock

by Cathie Pelletier

  “What do you mean, I wasn’t sympathetic?” Frederick asked. “I took you to dinner, didn’t I?”

  “What I remember most about that dinner,” Herbert said, “was you trying to talk me into buying a computer.”

  “That’s because you should have a computer,” said Frederick. “I’m sorry, but how can anyone—let alone a veterinarian with the number of clients you have—compete in business without being computerized?” He was about to list a few statistics when he remembered his situation. He felt the muscles of his stomach cramping. He stared at the first photo ever taken of Chandra and him as a couple, August 1969, at Woodstock. He flopped the photo facedown on his desk. He looked like a televangelist in that picture, what with the greasy hair and sideburns. Chandra looked like, well, a flower person.

  “There I was, crying on my sleeve,” Herbert went on, “and there you were, criticizing my business tactics. That’s what I remember about that dinner. I just hope I’m a better brother to you, now in your own moment of need, which, by the way, you told me would never come.”

  “What is this?” Frederick asked. “Some kind of contest?” He was amazed at how cold the outer world was sometimes. No wonder he had preferred to avoid it. Herbert Stone was becoming their father as he grew older.

  “All right, listen,” said Herbert. “Let’s go to the China Boat one evening this week for dinner and a couple of drinks.”

  “I’ve got a feeling Chandra will be back in a day or two,” Frederick said and realized he believed it. “This is just another one of her little protests.”

  “Well, just between you and me,” said Herbert, “methinks the lady doth protest too goddamn much. But let’s just assume that she’s not back by Friday. Dinner at the China Boat?”

  Frederick thought about this. “Promise you won’t do the duck metaphor?” he asked. How many times had he been forced to sit across the table from Herbert Stone and hear him tell the waitress, “One bird with two Stones.”

  “I’ll let you cry on my shoulder,” Herbert said. He sounded very big-brotherly.

  “Thanks,” said Frederick.

  “Which is something you wouldn’t let me do, by the way.”

  “Herbert!”

  “Okay, okay,” Herbert said. “Hey, you gonna start eating meat again, now that Chandra’s out of the picture? I always thought that was her idea, you know.”

  Frederick sighed. Even the Cancer Society was denouncing red meat, and now this from a medical man.

  “No,” said Frederick. “I’m not going to eat meat again. What do you think I am? A kid waiting for my mom to leave so I can devour the candy?”

  “Sort of,” said Herbert. He was incorrigible. Frederick had always understood why the former Maggie Stone had one day packed up and left him.

  “Do you want her new number?” Frederick asked. He had no idea why he was giving it out against Chandra’s wishes. Perhaps it was his own method of battle.

  “Chandra’s new number?” said Herbert. “Why should I?”

  “I thought you might call her or something,” Frederick said. “Maybe have a talk. She always liked you, you know.”

  “You never called Maggie,” said Herbert. “Of course, Maggie never liked you.”

  “Jesus,” said Frederick.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Freddy, but the truth is the truth. Did you ever call Maggie?”

  “Jesus,” Frederick said again, and hung up.

  • • •

  He had watched the news, had nibbled at a sandwich, and was in the process of clipping his toenails when he heard footsteps on the front porch. He smiled. He must remember not to tease her or condescend in any manner. A little civil disobedience now and then, as Thoreau knew, was good for the soul. He would encourage her instead to express herself in a more conventional manner in the future. Maybe they could have breakfast talks, sort of like FDR’s fireside chats, in which she could air her grievances. What was it she had said, earlier that morning, as she was packing? “I have to introduce you to people over and over again.” Funny, but he had always considered his bad memory an asset when it came to Chandra’s acquaintances. Fair enough. He would make a halfhearted effort to remember the Sukies, Halonas, and the assorted simpletons who filtered in and out of his wife’s seminars. He paused at the kitchen door until he was certain that his smile was safely hidden beneath a mask of concern. Darn it, but he wished he had never mentioned this to Herbert, Joyce, or Lillian! He had let a spontaneous panic attack get the better of his good judgment. Well, lessons had been learned all around. So be it. He opened the door and found his brother, Herbert Stone, standing on the porch, one raised hand about to knock.

  “You!” was all Frederick could say. He felt a physical change occur on his face and was aware of facial muscles arranging themselves into a frown.

  “For Chrissakes, Freddy,” Herbert said, “don’t puke or anything.”

  “It’s just that, well,” said Frederick. He held his ground in the doorway. If Herbert got inside, he’d never leave. “Why didn’t you call first? You know I don’t like for you to drop by without calling.”

  “I thought maybe you could use some cheering up,” said Herbert. “But now I’m the one who needs it.” He shrugged his shoulders, dejected, but Frederick maintained his stance. Herbert peered around him and into the kitchen. “She’s not back, is she? I didn’t see her car outside.”

  “She’s not back,” said Frederick. “Yet,” he added.

  “Come on, Freddy.” Herbert waved an arm. “I’ll buy you dinner. Quit standing there in the door like you’re about to bite someone. You look like that dog with the three heads that guards Hades.”

  “Cerberus,” said Frederick. He felt a cool breeze wafting in. Early June evenings could be chilly. An involuntary shiver ran down his back.

  “Besides, do you think I’m going to move in or something?” Herbert lit up a cigarette. “I’m having a pretty bad time myself, you know. Maggie hired Jaws as her lawyer. You remember that big movie shark? Raw meat isn’t enough for this guy. He wants to see blood. They seem to think I’m making more money down at the clinic than I am.”

  “We don’t allow smoking in the house,” Frederick said. He fanned the air.

  “I’m on your porch,” said Herbert. Frederick noticed that Herbert’s hair was thinner than ever, his hairline inching slowly backward. Herbert was part forerunner to him, always had been as the older brother. He hoped his own hair hadn’t been shocked into retreating more quickly than nature had planned by this nasty little turn of marital events. Certain types of shock or stress can most certainly lead to baldness, or alopecia areata, he heard Mr. Bator say. A wave of regret swept over Frederick. He wondered what had ever happened to his old biology teacher. Mr. Bator had been very kind to him during the difficult years of high school adolescence. Especially throughout that period when Frederick had desperately wanted to play football for Portland High. His sophomore year was a time when all the cheerleaders were particularly pretty, especially Leslie Ann Doody, who had soft, doelike eyes and a quick little bounce that shot her into the air an inch above the other girls. “Son, you just don’t have the balls for this kind of sport,” the coach had pulled him off the field to say. “You don’t have the killer instinct. Why don’t you write for the school paper? Join the glee club?”

  “Am I gonna hickory smoke your front door or something?” Herbert was asking.

  “The smoke can go right through this screen,” Frederick said. He was now overwhelmed with memory. Those had been painful days, when Richard Hamel had become captain of the football team and had then gone on to pin Leslie Ann Doody. After he pinned her, he obviously nailed her because Leslie Ann had become pregnant. At least, if gossip held, that’s what happened. And pretty little Leslie Ann Doody, with her doelike eyes, had simply disappeared from the halls of Portland High, as though she’d been nothing more than a floati
ng wisp of vapor. Frederick had turned to Mr. Bator for solace, dropping by the science lab on those afternoons when he knew the teacher would be alone. He had never mentioned a word to Dr. Philip Stone because Mr. Bator had said all the right things. “There will be plenty of other girls, Freddy. And the only goals in football are the posts on each end of a rectangular field. Your goals are far greater than that.” Were they? Had his goals been righteous, far-reaching, beneficial to mankind? Would Stone Accounting rank one day with UNICEF and CARE?

  “You’d better hope Chandra doesn’t hire Maggie’s divorce lawyer,” Herbert said, and then exhaled. “Remember what happened to Robert Shaw in Jaws? I came out of my divorce trial with stubs for limbs, and they’re still not happy.” Frederick could almost feel the first symptoms of alopecia areata settling in. Before long, and with associates like Herbert Stone to cheer him on into loneliness and old age, he would feel nothing but wind blowing across the top of his bald pate. The human hair grows at the rate of 0.35 millimeters every single day, Mr. Bator added. Frederick wondered how long his hair would be when Chandra finally returned to him. He was already due for a haircut. Perhaps he would let his hair grow, an exercise to entertain himself until she tired of this latest gauntlet.

  “I’m buying,” Herbert added, “so shake a leg.”

  “Okay,” said Frederick. After all, it was almost nine o’clock. Chances were that Chandra was holed up with Amy Lentz again. Or designing more posters with Cindy Huggins. “But from now on, you phone first.”

  “You want it all, don’t you, Freddy?” Herbert asked.

  • • •

  When Frederick returned from dinner at the China Boat, his wife was still not home. As Herbert swung into the drive, the lights from his car lit up the catty-corner house, the sidewalk, the marigolds, the shrubs. More flowers sat in plastic containers along the front porch, waiting for Chandra to plant them near the mailbox. She had been the one with the gardening love and knowledge. Frederick, on the other hand, kept in touch with nature by mowing the grass each Saturday during the summer, and shoveling snow from the walk as needed during the winter. His prowess at the supermarket was all the contact that a descendant of hunters and gatherers needed these days.

  He said good night to Herbert as quickly as possible, and then stood on the porch looking up at those stars still large enough to be seen in the light pollution over Ellsboro Street. In more than twenty years they had never had a major fight. He wondered now if that had been wise. And, as if to add to his emotional distress, his head was thumping at the temples, the aftermath of having had an extra scotch and water at the China Boat. But Frederick had needed that extra scotch. It was the only way he could put up with a constant stream of brotherly annoyance. And Herbert had developed a perturbing new habit since his divorce: while standing at the bar for a predinner cocktail, he spun like a top on his heel and aimed himself at every young woman who sauntered past. Early in the evening, Frederick had made a silent promise to alert NASA the next day. It was apparent that, at the age of forty-six, Herbert’s penis had evolved into some kind of heat-seeking missile. This torment aside, Herbert had gone ahead and done the duck joke, a prelude to an evening of gloating about the female pet owners he’d been examining lately.

  “One thing you’ll discover, Freddy,” Herbert had lit his perpetual cigarette to announce, “is that young women are going to go for you like flies to shit.”

  “I’m not sure I care for the metaphor,” Frederick had said.

  “Ah, sweet, sweet youth,” Herbert had continued. “That’s the best quality of young women. Their brain cells have budded, but not yet flowered. It’s that flowering part that’s dangerous.”

  “Regardless of what Chandra’s future plans might be,” Frederick had replied, “she’s only forty-two years old.”

  To this, Herbert Stone had raised his brandy snifter and said, “Yes, but half of forty-two is twenty-one, Freddy. Don’t forget that.” That’s when Frederick had had the fifth scotch and, thinking about it now, it was probably all that had prevented him from grabbing Herbert Stone by his Cave Art necktie—a thing with bisons galloping about—and dragging him into the men’s room for a swift round of fisticuffs.

  Frederick let himself in to a quiet house and noticed that he’d left the light on in his office. Aside from that, and the small light over the kitchen sink, the house was in darkness. There were no notes on the fridge announcing a wake-up call for the next morning, and there would be no need to usher a cup of coffee up the stairs. From next door Mrs. Prather’s porch light streamed into the den and silhouetted the sofa, the reclining chair, outlined the floor lamp. Frederick stood at the entrance to the den, home of past seminars, and listened to the sounds of the empty house unfolding around him, more little squeaks than earlier, more scratches of cherry branch against the window. Added now were snaps along the baseboard as hot water rushed through the pipes. The heating system had obviously kicked on at sixty-eight degrees. He wished that his wife was home with him. But the only answer to his wish, coming from that cosmic energy of the universe in which Chandra believed so firmly, arrived when Mrs. Prather flicked off her porch light and cast the den in total darkness.

  Back in the lighted office, Frederick slumped into his own specially ordered computer chair. For a few minutes he stared at the face of his monitor, now his only true friend. Then he turned on the switch of his surge protector and smiled as the beast burst to life. He went quickly to his menu and selected Correspondence. My dearest Chandra, he typed out in white letters on the blue screen. He sat waiting for the appropriate words to hit him. He had written her many letters in college. He had plagiarized Pound, O’Neil, Eliot, Fitzgerald, other men who’d had the lion’s share of crazy women. But now, after two decades of marriage, he sensed he would have to say something by Frederick Stone if he was to get Chandra’s attention. He stared at the blank screen before him, blue as a swath of sky, and waited. After a few minutes he went back to the keyboard. He deleted the My and est. Chandra would declare them sexist. He then inserted a capital D. Dear Chandra. He examined the salutation. Should he delete the dear? That was the wonderful thing about being computerized, something he might mention to his brother, in case Herbert felt the need to send a monosyllabic note to any of the kindergartners he’d been dating. Frederick had slaved long and hard on those college love letters, churning them out at his old IBM Selectric, retyping due to numerous mistakes. Now, with a myriad of downloadable fonts, his laser printer could spit out any type style from Baskerville Italic to Swiss Condensed. He could plead for Chandra to return to him in letters three-fourths of an inch tall, or with words small enough to look like gnats scuttling across the screen. And mistakes? What were mistakes with spell-check right there to come in like some good, motherly soul and clean up after him? Who even needed the blasted dictionary when the thesaurus key stood at the ready? Mistakes were nothing—as he’d tried so valiantly to tell his opinionated big brother—when one was computerized. Frederick only wished this was something he could apply to his marriage. Maybe the Backspace key should have been used more often, the Control key less. Or perhaps he could have paid more attention to Home, Style, and particularly Save. Maybe there had even been a subtle directive in Merge Codes, had he known how to see it. It sounded very Woodstockian, after all. He sat there wordless, unable to summon up a single thought. The blinking cursor seemed to be asking, What now? What now? What now? His eyes filled with warm tears because all Frederick Stone could see, on the face of his beloved keyboard, were the words Escape, Exit, and End.

  Five

  Why am I losing sleep over you?

  Reliving precious moments we knew?

  So many days have gone by

  Still I’m so lonely and I

  Guess there’s just no getting over you.

  —Gary Puckett & the Union Gap

  For the first few days—four of them, to be exact—Frederick Stone kept busy
at his computer, reconciling the latest bank statements of his largest clients and doing the weekly payrolls. Several times, on each of those days, he found himself staring into the green leaves of the cherry tree outside his window, forgetting what he was doing, forgetting where he was, forgetting even who he was. Then, as if a breeze had blown through his mind, as well as through the black cherry, he’d remember the nasty details. His wife of twenty-plus years—a sound investment in marriage these days—had left him. And he didn’t know where she was. He had called her two days earlier, dialing the sickly digits of the number she’d left behind—it belonged to Amy Lentz—and had received a sound dressing-down rather than a plea to take her back. He’d had a little speech memorized for the latter possible event, some platitudes about forgiving and forgetting. He had nothing at all to say in response to the dressing-down.

  “You gave this number to Joyce!” she had scolded him. “And then you went ahead and told my mother, my mother, when I’d asked you to let me tell her. Isn’t anything sacred to you, Freddy?”

  “It just sort of slipped out,” Frederick had lied. He’d wanted to mention that lots of things were sacred to him, plenty of things, a goddamn cornucopia of stuff, but he couldn’t think of anything specific. Other than her. Other than his work. Those were pretty sacred things, weren’t they?

  “Try to understand what I’m going to tell you,” she’d said then. “I just can’t live with you anymore. Capisce?”

  Frederick watched the branches of the cherry tree dip and bob. It was a windy time of year in more ways than one. He had intended all along to summon up a good defensive front, and that’s why he had said to Chandra, “You had no right to leave this house.” Now even the cherry tree seemed to realize his folly. One didn’t tell Chandra Kimball-Stone what her rights were or weren’t. Rights were things Chandra counted at night when she couldn’t sleep, instead of sheep.