My “sour grapes” over Angelo had dried into bitter raisins, hard little pellets that stuck in my throat. No man had touched me since I’d terminated my pregnancy, since before my credentialing and student teaching, a whirlwind of activity that left me too exhausted to care. During my training, one supervising teacher had handed me the course curriculum and said, “I’ve never taught this class before either. Good luck.” Fortunately, my other supervising teacher had been a consummate instructor, not only of her classroom students, but also of me. Unfortunately, I’d done my student teaching with her class of advanced sophomores. At Watsonville High School, I’d been assigned classes only in the low English track.
However, two weeks into the school year, a disgruntled music teacher who’d been assigned to teach English suddenly quit, and my schedule changed to three courses in two classrooms—much better, but nonetheless, an abrupt about-face. I now had a schedule of three American Literature classes for college-prep juniors, one section of World Literature for college-prep seniors, and to round things out, I retained the one section of General English that I taught in Annette’s room. Work engulfed me. My isolation didn’t even register.
I didn’t feel rancor toward Punky, the new tenant in unit two. I barely knew her. After she moved in, she had been toting empty boxes to the dumpster, her child in tow, when Mrs. Bean came out on her steps to yell at Bucky.
Bucky had charge of Dudu, who insisted on the regularity of his walks, urinating every day at the same places: at the bottom of the rail on Mrs. Bean’s steps, under The Invisible Lady’s window on the water-meter pipes, and on the front leg of the garbage bin. Bucky had even continued the tradition of clipping ribbons on Dudu’s forehead.
As far as I knew, Mrs. Bean had not minded Dudu when accompanied by Alice. But now that Bucky had custody of the leash, Mrs. Bean had developed a paranoia that Dudu would run amok and harm Buttons (Buddha Belly). This was an inexplicable theory as Buddha Belly didn’t even raise his head when Dudu came to pee, and the little white dog didn’t take much interest in Buddha Belly, whose placid body hulked as large as the dog’s.
On the day that Punky lugged boxes to the garbage, her boy toddling behind her, Bucky stopped with Dudu under The Invisible Lady’s window.
“Hi, there,” Bucky called in the window. “Juth me and Dudu taking a leak.”
“This is private property!” Mrs. Bean shrieked at Bucky and Dudu. However, Punky and the child clearly thought the yell was aimed at them. They circled wide from Mrs. Bean’s steps, the toddler whimpering.
“I pay to live here,” Mrs. Bean continued. “I don’t want that kind of garbage around here.”
Punky glanced guiltily at her boxes. The child let go of the one he’d been given to drag along. Tiny and pathetic, with a child now clutching her leg, the woman stirred my empathy and my jealousy. Unmarried women with children reproached me. They’d taken the risk; they had overcome the fear of poverty, pain, and problems. Of course, she could be divorced, with alimony and child support.
As Punky collected the box the boy had abandoned and hurried by our apartments, I bit my lip and let her believe Mrs. Bean spit venom at her.
“He ithn’t hurting anything,” Bucky protested.
Mrs. Bean clutched the rail to keep from tipping over and falling on top of her cat, but she shook a finger of her free hand at Bucky. “That dog should’ve been arrested with its owner.”
Oblivious to Mrs. Bean, Dudu hauled on his leash to continue his jaunt about the neighborhood. In the meantime, Punky and her child had gone down the other asphalt drive and circled on Lostart Street to return to their apartment.
Life on Lostart
Slowly I realized I might not see the manager Bobbi Headland again. If I called in the evening, she never seemed to be home. Mrs. Bean didn’t like Bobbi because she came on the first to collect rent with no sympathy for those like Mrs. Bean who sometimes didn’t receive their social security checks until later. Mrs. Bean called her a “heated-up divorcee.”
Because I worked, I paid my rent by mail and Bobbi didn’t stop at my place. Maybe she even avoided it, knowing that I needed something. She seemed the type who would evade responsibility. The judgment tasted like a penny in my mouth. I was no one to talk about shirking responsibility.
I wanted to contact Bobbi because my apartment came with roaches. And, the stove leaked gas so I kept my windows open even though most of them had no screens. Drowsy, late summer flies and desperate mosquitoes, sensing the end of their lifespans, buzzed about my home.
Worse than that, Mrs. Bean’s story about being robbed had planted the idea someone might crawl through my window. And I did seem to be missing one item—a purple cashmere sweater Angelo had given me. That was the only thing, but then, after all my years in poverty, I didn’t have many nice things to steal. I thought back, trying to remember when I’d last seen the sweater, whether I was sure I’d packed it.
I couldn’t quite believe someone had sneaked into my house to steal a sweater, especially during a heat wave. But I wouldn’t have left it to get musty in the basement of the Victorian where my friend Imogene still rented the flat.
I wanted locking screens for my windows.
In spite of these problems, I liked living on Lostart Street. It comforted me to think that probably no one could find the one-block street without directions. Students wishing to egg my apartment would have to locate my address somehow, arrange transportation to this small town twelve miles from the high school, and search for the barely paved road. Even if they found the address, they’d have to figure out that I lived in the back. I felt oddly insulated and protected by the old people around me, especially Mrs. Bean with her eye on the neighborhood and her caustic tongue.
Although my colleague Annette assured me I was doing well “for a first-year teacher,” my third-period American Literature and Composition class, with thirty-seven students jammed into a small room, bristled with a barely restrained urge to baptize me in blood. I had nothing to do with the music-cum-English teacher quitting, but Annette said, “Kiddo, they resent you. They signed up for a kickback teacher and instead got you. It’s a shock to their system.”
Whatever the reason for their hostility, I was glad that when I left work, I also left town.
Lostart Street ran parallel to and one block from a quaint main street. After four years in San Francisco, I loved Lostart Street with its lack of sidewalks, and its many trees: wispy eucalyptus on the hill behind the apartments, a persimmon in the parking lot across the street, lemon and peach trees in yards along our side of the block, and maples thinking about fall. Mockingbirds warbled and tweeted through their enormous repertoires and finches flitted and twittered.
A small river flowed through the downtown. Fresh air wafted from the ocean, a couple miles away. A nearby freeway entrance made my ride to work easy. As the mornings grew darker, I’d crest the hill before Watsonville as the sun was rising over blue-black mountain silhouettes. The Pajaro Valley spread and opened before me.
On the steering wheel, my fingers tapped, searching for the keys to type crown of mauve sunrise, hoping the words would survive the day before me.
Florence
As my new job settled down, I discovered my lonesomeness. Annette would have welcomed me at her table if I’d chosen to eat with my colleagues in the English Department lounge, but the dim room roiled with cigarette smoke.
The department chair was an ancient man who puffed cigars. And once, after spending the night at a home where the owner smoked cigars, I’d awakened unable to open my eyes. So here at the high school I chose to sit alone on a campus bench to eat my cup of yogurt and apple.
Leave it to Rosaura to ask me, in the middle of class, “Ms. Knutsen, are you a loner?”
To a freshman, loner ranked with dweeb. Weirdo. A loner was a leper with no friends. I didn’t point out that I often spotted her walking alone across campus. Instead, with a crisp snick-snack, I straightened papers against my twelve-inch spac
e on the lectern. “I’m just allergic to cigar smoke.”
Since all the students knew more smoke rolled from the English Department Lounge than from the students’ bathrooms, they accepted my response at face value.
“But you’re not married, are you?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Let’s get back on task.” As difficult as this class was, I enjoyed them more than my college-prep classes. Since they’d been with me from the first day of school, they didn’t bear teacher-swap hostility. Or maybe their own challenges just made them more compassionate with mine.
At home, my students’ papers sometimes lasted through the weekend, but my sanity and eyes required breaks. During these intervals, I washed the dishes, laundered the clothes, and scrubbed the porcelain. I changed the sheets on the single bed I’d purchased at a garage sale down the street. Time remained.
Once I bought a phone and had service installed, I called my best friend Imogene. She was buoyant about a new guy. From then on, I couldn’t reach her. She fell into love and disappeared.
I first went to Florence’s apartment when the days were still warm, but cooled fast. During a restless break, I’d decided to make baklava to warm my apartment in the evening (I still had to keep the windows open) and provide a treat for my colleagues on Monday.
Angelo’s mother had taught me to make the dessert. That was back when I believed I could transform myself into something Greek enough, when I was busy accumulating phrases like kalimera, good day. She’d been friendly to me, confident (I saw with brilliant twenty-twenty hindsight) that I would never be more than a girlfriend.
After I had purchased the phyllo dough, ground the nuts and taken out the butter to make the baklava, I realized a butter brush was not included in my collection of eight or so kitchen utensils. Once I unwrapped the phyllo, it would dry and break in seconds. I’d need a brush to spread the butter.
This state of affairs propelled me to Florence’s door.
She answered with a cigarette in her hand. “Hello, love. Come in, come in.” She motioned for me to enter as she padded across her apartment to turn down the radio. “I just have this on to keep me company. The T.V.‘s broken.”
Florence had an ex-husband somewhere, a rich ex-husband I’d heard, but she didn’t seem to have any alimony. Maybe she had some social security. She made extra money as a washerwoman. She took in people’s clothes and washed, pressed, mended and altered, mostly in the laundry room. In return for her domination of the laundry room, she kept the machines running and clean. She wiped the counters and table to a shine and, in spite of the constant leak from the washer, the room smelled pleasantly of detergent and starch.
So, I was not prepared for Florence’s apartment. Cat hair billowed from the carpet that looked like the indoor-outdoor kind, thin, ugly, and selected by a person interested in durability, not aesthetics. Probably a good thing, since the roof leaked and an occasional whiff suggested some cat was not house broken. Brown water stains liberally marked the ceiling and peeling paint hung in great curls. The apartment had no bedroom. On the couch rumpled covers suggested the shape of the body they embraced at night. Across the room squatted the large, broken console television. A big gray tomcat rested in the back window with one eye open, as though he’d pounce out at the slightest provocation.
Florence served me wine from an uncorked jug and brushed a calico cat from one of the two rattan chairs near the door. “This baby likes any place that’s toasty. She’ll snatch your seat as soon as you’re up.”
I believed in the wisdom of neither a borrower nor a lender be and felt embarrassed to come a-borrowing, especially now that I had seen the state of Florence’s apartment. I didn’t want wine, but out of awkwardness, I accepted the water glass as I asked about a butter brush.
“It’s nice of you to come by, love.”
“What’s the matter with your T.V.?” I asked to make conversation.
“Something electrical.”
“Expensive?”
“Well, about eighty dollars. I was going to fix it this month, but someone stole my cigar box of money.”
I told her about my sweater.
“It’s someone from the neighborhood,” she said.
“Who?”
She shrugged. “I thought maybe the kid who plays with Bucky. Or maybe one of the new folks I don’t know yet.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Oh no. What could they do? I didn’t exactly record the serial numbers. They’d blame me for keeping money in the house and having my window open.”
I chewed my lip. My own windows were open, but I might be asphyxiated if I closed them. She must be right about a kid. Who else would work a neighborhood with such slim pickings?
One of the watermarks ran down toward the television. “Maybe the electrical problem is in the wall.”
“A man looked at the T.V. and said it was the set,” Florence stated, staring at the maple cabinetry.
These older televisions reminded me of Cadillacs—big and plush, but who would want anything so weighty?
As the wine dissolved my bashfulness, my eyes wandered up to the ceiling. “Your roof really leaks, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Does Bobbi know?”
“Yeah, but I don’t make a big deal of it. I don’t want her poking around. I didn’t even tell her about the stolen money.”
“Why?”
“Well, love,” she said a bit sharply, looking me right in the eye, “so far, all the neighbors have been nice about my use of the laundry room, but if somebody complained, or if Bobbi got a bug up her butt, I’d be ousted from the laundry room and I couldn’t live if I had to pay to wash all those clothes.”
“Oh,” I said dumbly.
“Besides, you know damn well that if something is fixed, the rent is raised to pay for it, and, love, I can’t afford that either.”
I wondered if the hole in Mrs. Bean’s floor went unfixed for similar reasons.
Florence rose abruptly to get the butter brush. I’d blundered, committed some faux pas on my first foray into my new social life.
She jabbed the brush at me. “Besides, Bobbi Headland is a twit.”
The Great Mouse Catcher
Vince was late. He stalked through the lobby of the airesearch building to the tiled corridor that led to the steps to the basement. This morning he’d been unable to find his new digital watch. He didn’t wear it weekends when he played volleyball, but he was positive he’d left it on the stand by his bed. In the dim downstairs warehouse, Jose Martinez clapped him on the back.
“Aey, the great mouse catcher ez here,” Jose announced, his “ch” pronounced like an “sh.” “Aey, aey, aey.”
“Again,” Vince grumbled.
The other workers wouldn’t bother to trap mice. If it weren’t for him, they would simply sprinkle poison all over the place or would use those glue pads where the mice stuck until they died of fright or starvation or perhaps lived, in terror, waiting to be bashed. He could empathize with the mice because of his recurring nightmare. It had plagued him again last night. He had been in a race, running, running, running, but unable to move, stuck in place as if on a treadmill.
“Aey, you’re the best mouse catcher,” Jose said through the haze of Vince’s thoughts.
“You guys need the practice,” Vince yelled over his shoulder as he strode along the rows of shelves and pallets full of airplane parts. The warehouse smelled of grease-marked pine. As he approached a small office at the end of the basement, bluish florescence and the odor of burned coffee invaded the cool dimness. From the office Vince snatched an empty gallon coffee can and its yellow plastic lid from the top of an army-green filing cabinet. The place reeked of stale cigarettes.
“The great safari hunter has arrived,” someone shouted as Vince entered the dim aisle.
“Vince the Invincible,” another jeered from a passage.
“It’s too bad you guys don’t have the balls to do it,” Vince said at
large to the warehouse.
A tall man named Jamal appeared like a shadow from behind him. “Damn, man. Is that what you use? I wanna see that.”
The supervisor—a short, bald man—trooped down the dingy steps toward Vince. It was a rarity to see him out of his office, and Vince was surprised all over again at how spindly he was. The supervisor dressed impeccably in three-piece suits and sat in the back office from seven until three writing orders and apparently living on coffee and cigarettes. The color and texture of his face reminded Vince of potato sprouts, something that thrived and grew in a cellar.
“Glad to see you’re doing your job, Vince,” the Mr. Pasty Face supervisor said. Half his mouth twitched. Even fresh in the morning, he stank of cigarettes with an overlay of after-shave.
Fuck you very much stuck in Vince’s throat like a fish bone. “Where are they nesting?”
Behind him Jamal guffawed at Vince’s seriousness.
“The boys can show you.” Mr. Pasty Face peered through Vince as though the office beyond and his scribbled stack of ash-burnt orders beckoned him. But, for a moment, he clutched Vince’s shoulder. “What, exactly, do you plan to do with all these mice, Vince?”
“I’ll give them to people for pets.”
Jamal howled.
“Prejudice against mice is like prejudice against blacks,” Vince said. “It’s cultural brainwashing.”
Mr. Pasty Face slid around Vince and the big man.
Jamal squinted at him. “You comparin’ me to a mouse?” He sauntered off, tossing a “shee-it” over his shoulder.
If Vince had his druthers, he would leave the mice as they were, in the nests of dust balls, paper shreds and weeds in the bottom of a huge crate. The box was a perfect house for them with an open knothole and tunnels through loosely packed airplane parts.
As Vince lifted the heavy parts from the crate, the mice squeaked and scuttled toward the now taped-over knothole. He must be like an angry God to them. They had no way to know he was different than other people. Not that he was the type who opposed hunting or killing. He regarded vegetarians as mostly a bunch of hypocrites who’d squish a bug or chop a snake without a thought. Killing belonged in the natural scheme of things. Killing didn’t bother Vince; senseless, wasteful acts did.
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