Florence lived cattycorner from Mrs. Bean and me. In the laundry room, Florence drank Gallo Chablis as she washed, dried, folded and ironed massive quantities of laundry.
“Well, this place sure ain’t dull,” she said, slapping shut her Psychology Today and bringing the laundry-room lounger into a more conversational position. “People think this is some old fogey place. Looks like nothing happens here. If they only knew.” She chuckled. Wrinkles etched her desiccated face. She pushed back her hair, dyed a brassy blonde.
I blushed. Florence had just delivered my original assessment of the place.
“You mean you don’t know the news, love?” Florence asked, reading my face.
The gossip, you mean. I set my wicker basket of laundry on the table.
Florence leaned forward, eagerly rubbing her hands together.
The idea she purposely dirtied clothing to arrange this kind of encounter crossed my mind. Her load in the washer was almost done, which was good. I didn’t want to stay up too late, waiting for my turn, just for a fill of gossip.
“Alice in nine was busted,” she said.
“Busted?”
“Um hummm.” Florence sipped wine from her jelly jar and relished the moment.
I was a perfect fish, despising gossip because I was so easily taken in by the living fiction, the impromptu drama. I was a captive audience, a sucker reborn every minute.
“Well, actually, they didn’t get her, just the drugs.”
“Holy shit.”
Florence smiled smugly, pleased to have elicited this response, and lifted herself from the ratty brown armchair, sloshing wine on her hand. She licked the Gallo from her fingers without abandoning the glass as she checked another load of clothes in the dryer. One-handed, she spilled garments into a plastic basket and scraped it across the floor to her throne.
“Not the quiet place you thought, is it, love?” Florence folded rainbows of lingerie, frilly bikini underwear, skimpy bras, and transparent nighties. With one dry, strong hand she deftly smoothed and crimped. “Interesting she left that dog with Bucky this morning, like she knew. I’d say she’s long gone.”
Behind me the washer thumped through its spin cycle until the whole machine rocked toward a tortuous climax.
“The stuff in her apartment would convict a saint. Granny Smith in two died this morning, too. It’s been quite a day.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“That’s because you didn’t know them, love.”
Gossip wasn’t fiction, after all. Fiction made actions credible; gossip made them incredible. Fiction revealed, gossip concealed.
“Could Alice have been the one who stole Mrs. Bean’s jewelry?”
Florence shook her head sadly, the way I wanted to do when I heard some of my students’ responses. “Not Alice.”
As much as Florence liked to gossip, she didn’t elaborate.
The washer wound to a stop. Florence pulled flattened, mangled clothes from the machine and pitched them into the dryer. She packed the unlikely undergarments into her basket and tucked it under her free arm. “You ought to stop by some time, love.”
The sad and sagging and slightly snookered woman sashayed from the laundry room. Alice busted for possession. I recalled the tough characters I’d seen coming and going from her apartment. Dealing? I never would have guessed by looking at her. However, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was overwhelmed with work.
The next morning, I arrived at school an hour and a half early as usual, barely enough time to write my agendas on three different blackboards and to sort through the stuff in my school mailbox. Among other things, the mound included: the bulletin, notes from the board’s meeting, a memo notifying teachers of a change in the attendance-taking procedure we’d spent an hour reviewing during the first faculty meeting, a note from a counselor alerting me that one of my students was in foster care, a notice to post in one’s room regarding a start-up meeting for Students Against Drunk Driving. And a reminder that I had volleyball supervision.
Once the police were done with Alice’s unit, number nine, a man rented it, and a woman with a baby moved into unit two, Granny Smith’s vacated place, across from nine. These “younger people” caused quite a commotion, especially the guy in nine. The common belief had been that an older couple was moving into nine since the manager Bobbi Headland had been seen twice on the premises with them. Apparently the manager did come around, just never when I was home.
Mrs. Bean positively declared that Bobbi had told her an older couple was taking the unit.
“Perhaps the guy is their son,” The Fat Lady in eight replied. She was five-foot-nine and two hundred and eighty pounds of love medicine, in her opinion. Her license plate frames said: TRY FAT AND YOU’LL NEVER GO BACK. She filled every cell of her body and then some and delivered her opinions with force.
She planted dimply arms akimbo over her purple, hibiscus-covered dress. “I really don’t give a flying fig who the guy is, as long as he doesn’t play loud music. I have to sleep during the day.”
Whoever he was, he passed for normal long enough for the curiosity to die.
Vince
I’ve always been a perverse person. Mrs. Bean, Florence of the laundry room, and The Fat Lady’s suggestions that I should get to know Vince in unit one, that I might like him, primed me not to like him.
I resented the implication that I was lonely, even though I didn’t have a friend within eighty miles and was the youngest person in the English Department by many years. Annette, who’d been forced to share her room with me, dubbed me Kiddo. That was the friendliest overture I’d received.
For the most part, the twenty-two teachers in the department remained courteously aloof, probably waiting to see if the new girl hired-from-out-of-town fell on her face. Two younger female English teachers with children worked part-time and disappeared at lunch. The five full-time women in the department were all single. My career choice did not seem like a match for having a relationship.
That hardly mattered. After wasting years with Angelo, I didn’t feel kindly disposed toward guys. I’d fled my hometown to pursue my dream, and Angelo’s immigrant story captivated me as much as his Mediterranean handsomeness. He co-owned a Greek restaurant, impressive for someone our age. If he could come to America as a teenager and reach his dream, I could reach mine.
During graduate school I’d worked at his restaurant, getting paid under the table, supporting my desire to become a writer. I didn’t mind being poor. I’d been poor all my life. I was one of those idealistic sorts who didn’t believe in materialism.
Then the little slip of the diaphragm.
Angelo suggested abortion. Politically I supported abortion, but it was not a thing I’d ever considered for myself. I realized then that no woman wants an abortion. Just like nobody wants heart surgery.
In between morning sickness and trying to hold my life together, I cried. Then I went to the hospital.
Afterward, my heart felt as heavy and toxic as lead. I considered myself a coward. At the same time a bitter resolve grew. Like Scarlett at the end of Gone with the Wind, I declared I’d never again let finances contribute to my moral choices. I would have money, a career. I would be independent, self-sufficient, a real adult, able to support a child. I wouldn’t need a man.
I went back to college for another year and emerged clutching a California Single Subject Teaching Credential for English.
To a determined, “Never again,” I slammed my manuscripts into the tomb of a file cabinet.
So the day I met Vince was a predictable disaster.
On a gloriously warm and sunny weekend, I decided to explore my new neighborhood. I knew only the locations of a gas station near the freeway entrance and of a shopping center with a grocery store just beyond the freeway entrance.
As I walked down the asphalt drive, a lean, athletic man emerged from unit one. I had the weird feeling that he’d been watching me and had planned this encounter. I lowered my
eyes and blushed because standing on the steps above me, he was undeniably handsome and obviously checking me out.
Under his gaze, all my imperfections bubbled to the surface. After the prolonged months of bleeding and then the stress of student teaching, I was thin to the point of bony, and my cowlick-prone brown hair fell to my shoulders in a boring page cut. My confidence was about as strong as peanut shells on a barroom floor. Anger percolated up from feeling vulnerable.
“Hello.” He wore only long surfer shorts and running shoes without socks. Dirt covered well-muscled legs and a light film of perspiration glowed on his golden chest.
“Hi,” I said crisply.
“My name’s Vince.”
“Cecile,” I murmured.
“See sill,” he practiced. “Pretty name.”
I stared at his yard. The front units had overgrown grass sloping down to Lostart Street with tangles of wild flowers near the houses. Vince had dug up the flowers and the shovel leaned against the rail of his steps.
“What are you going to plant?” I asked.
“Cacti.”
“Cacti?” I repeated, stunned. What kind of person would plant cacti? What kind of person, besides an English teacher, would think of the correct plural?
“Yeah, cacti.” He reevaluated me from head to toe. “I’m making an outdoor paradise for my lizards.”
“Lizards.” At a better time in my life I would have politely asked what type of lizards he owned, and where he kept them, but now I just wanted to flee.
He came down the two steps, but passed by me and picked up his shovel. As he stomped his blade into the earth, I lamely flapped my hand in farewell. “Bye.”
I didn’t hear an answer.
Point of View
Vince Meets Punky or Punky Meets Vince
It was not love at first sight. Vince thought his new neighbor would be interesting if less flesh pudged above the waistband of her cutoffs—if one could squeeze that fat up to where it belonged, although she had ample there already. He leaned lethargically against the prickly stucco exterior of his apartment and further rated his new neighbor.
She’d introduced herself as Punky Hayes and the conversation had gone down hill from there. He guessed her to be twenty-five, a really short five-one or so, and chubby, about one-hundred-twenty pounds. Plus, she had a kid. In the October sunshine, he ogled her anyway.
He inspected her exposed navel and the cleavage revealed by a bright pink and yellow polka-dotted suntop because he knew women’s lib was for shit. Experience had taught him that women did not like wimpy men. They liked boldness. Forthrightness. They liked manly men.
Some of them were even attracted to jerks. The bigger the jerk, the better. Furthermore, women could say all they wanted about how it wasn’t the size of the ship, but the motion of the ocean, they were more willing to sail on a yacht than a yawl. Not that he was Johnny Holmes, nor would he want to be, but he knew women noticed his goods, even uptight ones like that teacher Cecile. And, to extend his metaphor, Vince had a constant interest in sailing.
This Punky Hayes was a leftover hippie, he concluded.
His nonchalance needled Punky. She tossed back her lavish dark ringlets and squinted at him. His sun-bleached hair glinted as though strewn with mica, but he was skinny and didn’t have much chest, so where did he get off looking at her like that? In twenty years he’d be picking the scabs off his skin-cancer lesions.
An insensitive jock, she summarized.
Still, he lived next door, and Punky needed to meet some people in her new home and the choices didn’t seem so great. She thought of the old shrew in the back who’d make a great Halloween witch.
“Where do you work?” she asked Vince, her eyes making a full evaluation and snagging for a moment at his crotch. It looked like he had an erection.
Glancing toward the cacti he’d planted in his front yard, Vince kept an eye on Mendacity, his alligator lizard, and Hardcore, his blue-tailed skink. They twitched and slithered through the fake desert.
“Airesearch,” he said, aware of her eyes and her thoughts, just as she sensed every move of her child, playing behind her on the other side of the drive. It irritated him that all women assumed they could have aroused him.
Punky savored the word “airesearch.” It seemed mystical, as if related to a search of the cosmos.
“Aerospace.” He spit the word like a blow dart, aimed perfectly at her imagination.
“Oh, God,” she groaned, “you commute to San Jose?” She made the trip over the Santa Cruz Mountains sound like a descent into hell.
Her black hair spilled to her waist and she flashed a cavernous mouthful of slightly crooked teeth. Everything about her seemed as if it were a little too much for someone five-foot-one.
Locking up at her tease, he rifled his brain for an excuse to leave, but heat and inertia conspired against him.
“Where do you work?” he asked.
“Nowhere, at the moment.” She sighed, but he seemed totally unreceptive. He was inspecting the ground and tweaking his shorts. Punky’s insides settled to her feet. What if the whole fucking town proved this sterile?
“I got fired,” she volunteered.
Hardcore skittered over Vince’s bare toes, across the strap of his Tatamis and around his ankle. He kept his eyes on the ground to keep track of his lizards, but also because a lost job embarrassed him. He would have been less embarrassed if she’d shared she lost her virginity. “That’s a strange time to move, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” she shrugged. “They’re kind of connected. I wanted to get out of the San Francisco and I’d just begged a transfer. Then my supervisor caught me eating Oreos in the back room and fired me. He was pissed that I’d gotten the transfer and was laying in wait.”
“You were fired for eating cookies?”
“Store cookies. I didn’t pay for them.”
The lilt in her voice suggested a trace of Gaelic that seemed out of sync with her smoky appearance. Irish mixed with something?
“I didn’t even think of paying for them. I mean, God, they were open. Nobody ever pays for them. That’s only the surface reason, of course. My supervisor liked pushing up against women in the back room, and I guess since I was leaving, he thought he could get away with it, and since I was leaving, I thought I could tell him to go fuck himself.” She shrugged, again.
“You have a union, don’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. Retail Clerks. It’s pretty strong.”
“You can fight for your job.”
As much as Vince hated passivity, he would have accepted a lame excuse like But I’ve already moved. Instead she said: “I don’t know. Bad luck runs in threes.”
Prickles ran up his spine. He jerked up from the wall as if caught on the fishhook of her illogic. “Christ, the reason things happen that way is because people like you think they do. You make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“What do you mean, people like me?”
“Boy, you’re really sensitive, aren’t you?”
His voice sounded both appreciative and deprecating, as though sensitivity were a fantastic trick, but one for which he had no use.
“Yeah, a real character flaw,” she said sarcastically. “I better check on Todd.”
Vince reached down and scooped up his alligator lizard. “Women are strange,” he said. “No offense, Mendacity.” He stroked her belly until the alligator lizard went still, its legs stiffly extended as though rigor mortis had set in.
Across from Punky’s place, in front of unit nine, a circle of geraniums broke the tedium of the asphalt. Todd squatted there, once captivated by pill bugs, but now looking up at the man who was offering him Gummy Bears.
Todd was old enough to know he liked candy, but too young to comprehend warnings about taking it from strangers. Yet he wavered with an intuitive uncertainty.
Punky turned from her conversation with Vince and frowned to see the man bent toward Todd. The man’s blond hair hung to hi
s shoulders and framed the strange, purplish cast of his face.
“Hello,” she said curtly, crossing to her child.
The man’s lips melted into a stupid smile, and she suddenly regretted her suspicion, guessing he must be dimwitted like Bucky. Punky didn’t want to be hard-hearted like the old lady in the back. She’d heard someone refer to her as Old String Bean. It fit.
“Gummy Bears for your baby,” the man said, looking down at his brown, scuffed shoes.
As the man handed the plastic packet to Punky, Todd’s caution disappeared.
“Gummy Bears, Gummy Bears!” Todd performed a two-year-old’s squat-and-hop dance.
The man slipped up the steps to unit nine and disappeared before Punky could thank him.
The Budding Romance in the Barracks
I don’t know what I expected of Vince, a virile, single man on the prowl, but I felt disappointed when gossip started about a “budding romance” between him and Punky, the woman with the toddler who’d moved into unit two.
I heard the “news” when Florence stopped by the open window of The Invisible Lady’s apartment. During these Indian summer months, I read essays from school on the oversized landing outside my door.
Given my spot, I was destined to overhear one side of this conversation.
People called through The Invisible Lady’s window as though she were deaf, although she apparently answered in a normal or even soft voice because I could never hear her. Anyway, I learned that unit one and unit two were “involved” because Florence shouted the information through my neighbor’s window.
I comforted myself in a classical fashion. Vince had turned his yard into a desert habitat, tearing out the wild mint and unruly nasturtiums and replacing them with cacti. Anyone who’d landscape his yard this way, covering with sand the soil that could nurture iris, anemone and ranunculi bulbs, anyone who’d do this was not the man for me.
Lostart Street Page 2