Lostart Street

by Vinnie Hansen

  One by one he cornered the mice and caught them with a gloved hand. Contrary to the cliché, mice were not always timid. He hoisted each into the coffee can with wary respect.

  More of Melancholy Monday

  Like the suddenly cold, overcast sky, The Monday Blues surrounded Punky Hayes, too. She had to face the Unemployment Office. She could no longer convince herself that she was busy settling into the apartment.

  Furthermore, she hadn’t had the money to leave Todd with anyone—she didn’t even know anyone—and Todd waddled, babbled and climbed like a monkey, with energy like his father’s. The lack of alone-time was driving her bonkers.

  Pain erupted in the nook of Punky’s heart reserved for the baby’s father. He had been a flash of lightning. He danced with abandon and fucked with abandon and they’d made this baby under a cypress tree, with crickets serenading, the scent of dewy grass against her face, moonlight slivered by the branches. She’d felt this tingle and had sensed her uterus transformed to a womb, and that was life, full of accidents and crazy things. She’d never deceived herself that this man would stay.

  She flopped across her bed and cried with Todd standing beside her, patting her with soft, quizzical hands. She hugged him to her. “Don’t worry, angel. I wouldn’t have it any other way. You’re the best mistake I ever made.”

  She thanked God for this wiry, healthy baby with curly, brownish-blonde hair and huge blue eyes. When she stripped him at the beach, he compared quite favorably with other two-year-olds. She had birthed him at home, and, with a maternity leave from the store, had nursed him for a while. She credited these things for his self-possessed personality. He wasn’t a whiny brat like some babies.

  Thinking of Todd’s birth and her old life caused dread to leaden her belly. Maybe she’d made a mistake, after all. She reassured herself that The City was no place for a child, that she’d been wanting to escape since before the birth, but still, the prospect of the Unemployment Office chilled her. She’d managed Todd without becoming a welfare mother, and she would continue to manage.

  She wondered whether she should dress up for the occasion or look as destitute as possible. She finally opted for natural and comfortable, a pink cotton tent dress she’d worn during her pregnancy.

  When she heard the knock, she composed herself. She wiped her eyes with a fingertip of pink dress bottom. The new neighbor towered before the door.

  “My name’s Lefty Hunt,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

  She crossed her arms impatiently, but she remembered the packet of Gummy Bears and softened. “Okay.”

  She couldn’t see any physical deformity, only a slightly purple cast to his skin and an overall weirdness that came from the way his arms dangled like long, weighty sausages from his yellow shirt, with hands cupped into loose fists along his hitched-up pants. His shirtsleeves were pressed into crisp tents, but the man’s hair was long and unkempt.

  “I do have to go pretty soon, though,” Punky added.

  “My name’s not really Lefty.”

  “Oh.” She felt uneasy. “What’s your name?”

  Todd hung on her leg and peeked around it.

  “It’s William. But nobody would ever call me that.”

  Punky didn’t like her anxiety. She prided herself on taking people however they came. She couldn’t see anything the matter with the man, and yet he seemed deformed to her. She focused on her Zen koan to calm herself: How does a rose blossom?

  “Nobody in our family was ever left-handed but me.”

  “Same here,” Punky said, “but that’s normal. Only about one out of ten people are left-handed.”

  Todd was popping his head to the side and then ducking behind her, over and over, trying to engage William in peek-a-boo.

  “We’re a special breed,” he said in a voice so conspiratorial it made her shiver.

  “This is Todd.” She caught the boy’s head to create a diversion.

  “Are you married?” the man asked.

  She had faced this assumption in various forms more times than she cared to think about. She pushed Todd back by the forehead, instinctively, not wanting him to hear, for the umpteenth time, the note of condemnation.

  “What did you want to talk about, Lefty?”

  “Divorced?” he asked, almost in pity.

  Punky mustered her iciness. “It’s not necessary to marry to make a baby.” She started to close the door. “I’ve got to go.”

  Lefty Hunt stuck the ball of his foot against the door. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he stammered. “You know people don’t just discriminate against the illegitimate.”

  “Get out!” She hated that word illegitimate. It suggested Todd was less than a real baby. Not legitimate. Somehow false. Bastard was preferable.

  “They’ll discriminate against anything. Take me, I’m left-handed.”

  “Get your foot out of my doorway!”

  “Once, when I was a kid, my mom bought me these colored ink pens—”

  She placed a hip to the door and added some pressure. “Don’t even think about telling me how to raise my kid!”

  He extracted his foot, but not like he had any comprehension of what she’d said. “You don’t know how hard it was,” he rambled on. “Every time I wrote with them, my hand dragged across the letters and ink smeared on my cuffs and Mama would swat me—”

  She slammed the door but could feel his presence looming outside the walls.

  In her bedroom, Punky tied back her thick hair with a pink ribbon and jammed Todd into a sweater, wiped his nose and checked the Velcro tabs of his shoes. Todd liked the crackling rip the tabs made when he pulled them apart. When Punky returned to the living room, Lefty was still mumbling through her door about how left-handers were more likely to be bed-wetters.

  Why me? She decided the third part of her bad luck had arrived.

  What Mrs. Bean Had Seen

  The other English teachers lavished praise on my baklava, especially Lily and Marge, two of the other full-time female teachers. Both were in their early forties; they both had short, blond curly hair and they went everywhere together, giving rise to their nickname, the Bobbsey Twins. I wondered if they were a couple, but I didn’t dare ask. If they were, they remained strictly in the closet.

  At the end of the day, only one piece of baklava remained, the last piece that no one dared to eat. The piece that made one an old maid. I decided to give it to Mrs. Bean since it couldn’t do her any harm. I’d already given Florence a plateful with the return of her butter brush. I wondered for a moment if Mrs. Bean would be able to crunch the nuts, but for all her other ailments, it turned out Mrs. Bean had a full set of her own teeth.

  I’d bought a cheap pine rocker so I had a second chair, and I served the treat to her at my apartment. The seventy-nine-year-old Mrs. Bean liked my coffee. I was standing by with hot water to dilute it, but Mrs. Bean took a big gulp.

  “Ahhh.” She sighed in satisfaction like a perfect commercial. “My, this is good coffee. I don’t think I ever tasted coffee this good.”

  Mrs. Bean then and there endeared herself to me.

  She told me the whole story of the apartments being old motel units moved from Santa Cruz after the l953 flood.

  On another occasion she had told me, as Bobbi had, that the flood was in 1955, but I didn’t want to question her and thereby prolong the visit. However, she didn’t continue with one of her taped stories, instead she said, “I don’t think that guy in apartment nine is quite right in the head. I don’t know what he’s doing here, anyway. Bobbi told me an older couple took that apartment.”

  “Maybe he’s their son.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “What makes you wonder?”

  “Well, I don’t see so good on account of my cataracts, but I hear fine, and you know I spend most of my day sitting right there by that big front window and I can see all the way down the driveway to the street even if it is a bit bleary. Well, this morning that guy from nine wa
s bothering that new girl with the baby.”

  “What do you mean bothering her?”

  Mrs. Bean told me what she’d heard and what she thought she’d seen.

  “He sounds a little strange,” I said, with reservations about Mrs. Bean’s reliability.

  “You know, that girl should come to me for help if she has any problem like that.”

  This is where I heard the major story of Mrs. Bean’s life. She’d been a counselor for twenty-five years until finally her “drunken lout” of a husband had done her the good favor of dying. She’d never been able to change his ways, failing at the case she’d wanted the most to help. She was convinced he’d resisted her efforts out of perversity.

  The bitterness in her voice told me she couldn’t forgive him, and I didn’t think it tactful to bring up the current theories of co-dependency.

  When her husband had died, Mrs. Bean had shifted to helping people with “real” problems. As a middle-aged woman, she’d added some psychiatry courses to her counseling degree and eventually worked in a psychiatric ward until a man attacked her with a knife that he’d managed to sneak from the cafeteria. He slashed her throat, just missing her jugular vein, before the other staff members pulled him off her.

  With shaky fingers she tugged at her collar to show me the scar. “Now don’t tell anyone,” she whispered, leaning forward confidentially, “but to this day I’m afraid of a nigger.”

  I bristled and sat stunned. I didn’t know anyone who would use that word, but now I had one as my next-door neighbor. Partly to avenge blacks, I told her, in a cold tone, that I thought the new girl didn’t come to her for help because she was afraid of her.

  “Afraid of me?” Mrs. Bean exclaimed.

  I nodded. Yes, you old shrew.

  “Well, that’s loony. I’ll go down there and meet her. She can’t be afraid of me.”

  Mice Are Nice

  Vince carried the can of mice under his arm to his apartment door. He resented the way the people at work treated him like a stupid, warehouse worker when he’d been promoted to planner a year ago. He had declined the promotion and kept the basement job (with lower pay) because lifting boxes kept him physically fit and because he got off early enough to go to the beach.

  His new chubby neighbor, with a bag of groceries wedged over her hipbone, kid beside her, was struggling to open her door. He trotted over to help her with his free hand.

  “Thanks,” she said tiredly. “God, what a day.”

  “You too?” She didn’t seem to bear him any ill will. He felt suddenly that he would like to talk to someone, so when she asked if he would like a cup of herbal tea, he said, “Sure,” although he never drank those concoctions of leaves and twigs.

  “Just make yourself at home on those futons.”

  Vince lowered himself awkwardly, betting she was the type who sat lotus. His nose wrinkled. Clearly she burned patchouli incense. He would like the odor if it could be cut in half. Her child stood squarely in front of him with his eyes riveted on the coffee can from which issued scratchy, scurrying sounds.

  “How would you like a pet for your kid?” he asked when Punky brought him the mug of tea. He noted that she handed it to him with her left hand, the skin smooth and the nails rounded and shiny.

  She sat half lotus a respectable distance away, clasping her own mug of stuff that smelled like the ocean during a red tide. She touched the coffee can with her toe. “What’ve you got in there?”

  “Mice.”

  She swallowed her tea and coughed. The kid, attracted by the mysterious noises, squatted by the can.

  “They make nice pets.”

  “I bet they do.” Her nostrils flared and her nose quivered, as though the energy behind her smile needed more places to come out.

  Vince pulled a glove from his pocket, put it on, peeled back the lid punctured with air holes and inserted his hand. The mice scrambled. He caught one by the tail and dangled the scudding prize.

  Todd squealed, reached forward with cupped hands and then pulled back, and then reached forward again with his index finger as if to touch the mouse where it now shivered in Vince’s hand.

  “Where did you get those?” she asked. “How many do you have in there?”

  “About a dozen,” he said. “I caught them at work.”

  She leaned toward him, forehead creased, and untied the pink ribbon in her hair. Thick waves slid around her shoulders and hid her face as she peeked into the can. “Aren’t they crowded?”

  A warm fragrance floated from her hair. “Not much more than we are in these buildings when you consider their size,” Vince said.

  He hated himself for sounding glib. His statement hadn’t been accurate, but he didn’t know any graceful way to retract it. “When they do get too crowded, they take care of the situation.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They kill each other.” He wondered if that were the kind of statement that earned him the recrimination of “unemotional,” but Punky took it in stride.

  “Why don’t the people at your work set traps?”

  “I won’t let them.” Keeping a firm hold on the little creature, he stroked the mouse with a bare finger. Todd stretched his fingers and tentatively touched it.

  “I wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it,” she murmured, breathing the steam of her tea. “Do they carry disease?”

  “I have an old terrarium I used for Marilyn, my tarantula.” He watched for a reaction and was disappointed. But it made him take another look at the woman resting on the flowered futon. The receptionist at work shriveled at the mere mention of a “bug,” but Punky looked completely absorbed in her tea and as exhausted as he felt.

  Todd tried to grasp the mouse, but Vince retracted his hand. “He’s not ready for that,” he told the child. When he returned the mouse to the can, the rugrat squealed with glee and pried at the lid so that Vince had to hold it in place with his palm.

  “Okay. I’ll try it,” Punky said, “but you’ll have to show me how to take care of it, and I want to be able to return him if it doesn’t work out.”

  “How about two? To keep each other company.”

  “What the hell,” she said, “as long as they’re the same sex.”

  “What’ll you name them?”

  “How about Love and Peace?”

  Vince had the diplomacy not to say anything. After all, they were going to be her pets. At least she’d had the sense not to give her kid a dippy name.

  He ported the terrarium from his apartment to hers. It still had a layer of sand and peat chips in the bottom and a screened lid on the top.

  As they decided on the table in front of the futons for the terrarium and outfitted it with a water dish, Punky told Vince about her trip to the Unemployment Office, hours of waiting just to get an appointment to return. Todd had gotten cranky with nothing to do and the people looked so weird, she was afraid to let him out of her sight. “I swear to God all the weirdos from San Francisco have migrated down here.”

  “There’s a Sixties time warp here.” Vince placed Love and Peace into the cage. Todd watched every move.

  “Well, I don’t have anything against the sixties,” Punky said, but she cringed at the memory of all the long hair, beards, and dirty clothes in the Unemployment Office.

  “I don’t have anything against the sixties, either, except they’ve been over for twelve years.”

  As Punky wondered what Vince would think of the marijuana plant in her bedroom, someone knocked at the door.

  “I hope it’s not that guy in nine. He’s nuts.” She spun a finger around her ear. Instead of going to the door, Punky slid into the bedroom where she could glimpse her step from the window.

  “Hey! Hey!” Lefty Hunt yelled at the door. “I know a guy’s in there, and I’ll give him ’til ten to come out.”

  “Oh my God.” Punky returned to the living room. “This guy is bonkers.”

  “You hear that?” Vince laughed. “Just like in the movies. He must
have a crush on you.”

  The thumps on the door grew louder and moved lower. “He’s the devil! You hear me, the devil!” Lefty’s voice climbed to a high, nervous squeak.

  “You go away or I’m calling the police,” Punky yelled back at him, astonishing herself with the words. She had never called the police in her life, and she certainly wouldn’t call them now with a four-foot plant in her bedroom.

  “He probably wants attention.” Vince was serious now, but annoyingly calm. “Ignore him and he’ll go away. He’s probably a little slow like Bucky.”

  “Mentally retarded and disturbed are not the same thing.”

  They listened to Lefty hammering on the door and yelling that he, Lefty, had met Punky first.

  “That’s not even a fact, Jack,” Vince muttered, but not loud enough for Lefty to hear.

  “This guy, this devil,” Lefty screamed, “thinks love is a four letter word.”

  “It is, you moron!” Vince shouted through the door.

  Punky tittered, but whispered to Vince, “Didn’t you just tell me to ignore him?”

  The yelling didn’t last long because it had aroused more people than Vince and Punky and Todd. The Fat Lady, who lived across from Punky, had apparently emerged from her apartment. “How long do you plan to do that?” she shouted at Lefty.

  Lefty seemed to ponder the question and stopped hammering.

  “I work six nights a week,” The Fat Lady continued hotly, “and I have to sleep in the afternoon. I can’t sleep with that racket.”

  Inside of unit two, Punky stared at Vince, and her gray eyes opened like a geode into a mysterious, sparkling interior.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  She leaned toward him and he froze, but she only touched his arm, said thanks, and flashed a big mouthful of teeth.