Lostart Street

by Vinnie Hansen

  Curled in the corner, Lefty chewed on the wet knee of his rumpled pants and touched himself in memory of that time. He thought of Punky with her thick hair and big smile. Punky who was left-handed like he was and had a sweet-breathing child like Anabelle. He wished he could be with Punky.

  It All Comes Out in the Wash

  Light danced in the windows of Florence’s apartment as I worked up the courage to knock. I had no reason I could state for my presence. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d visited someone just to visit. It was before my job, before the credentialing program, before the pregnancy … . The scratchy voice of a radio announcer covered the sound of Florence’s footsteps so I jumped when the door opened.

  “Hello, love,” she said. “Come in, come in. Let me get your plate before I forget. The baklava was delicious.”

  “I didn’t come for that, Florence. I came to visit.”

  A kerosene lantern burned on the coffee table and candles wiggled their flaming bellies on top the refrigerator, the windowsills, and the television. Shadows leaped on the walls. This was not right. You didn’t spring a visit on a person.

  Florence crossed the room and clicked off the radio.

  “Good. Good. Have a seat. I’ll get some wine. I hope it’s still cold.”

  I sat on the faded pillow that served as a cushion for one of the two rattan chairs. A tomcat meowed at me from across the room in the open window.

  “It’s okay, Tommy,” Florence clucked. “She won’t catnap you.”

  Handing me a glass of wine, Florence curled into the other rattan chair and told me the story of the previous night, how Punky and Vince had captured Tom. “I probably would have killed that asshole Vince if he didn’t remind me of my son,” she concluded halfway through our second glass of wine. “Tom has been a nervous wreck all day; he hasn’t even gone outside.”

  “You have a son?” I could feel my eyes brighten. A tentative stir. I’d been without a man, without interest in a man, for pushing two years.

  “Had.”

  “Oh.” I’d blundered again. Never one to press, I waited, and patiently waited, having been taught that good things come to those who wait.

  “He committed suicide.”

  “Oh.”

  The cat emitted a long, tortuous cry, the kind that can come only from a big, throaty tom not used to crying. In that strange room full of wavering and shifting light, my imagination, overexposed to early American authors like Melville and Poe, conjured that cry into a desperate call from her son’s unresting soul.

  “It’s okay, Tommy,” Florence said.

  But the cat yowled again, in protest. The world was not okay, and he would have himself understood.

  “You see, love,” Florence said, finishing her drink. “He’s a nervous wreck. Of course, the earthquake didn’t help any.” When Florence stood to pour herself another glass of wine, her shadow lurched on the wall as if it were drunk. “But you know, that Vince is so much like my son, with that tan and that sun-bleached hair, beautiful like that, love. I couldn’t give him the crap he deserved.”

  I stayed glued to my seat like an ineffectual blob with no idea how to comfort her, stunned that she might be as needy as I was. I couldn’t even murmur something nice about Vince as a way to say something nice about the son I’d never met. I could have at least agreed Vince was handsome, but Vince forced his body into an athletic fitness that seemed as stiff and uncomfortable as my hollowed-out shell.

  “Don’t worry, love. I’ve been working on this for a while.” Florence propped herself against the counter in her kitchenette, holding the neck of the wine bottle as though she might pour a drink into the glass she’d already refilled. “August fifteenth … mmm … four years and a little over two months ago.”

  I kept my eyes on Ernest and Julio Gallo’s Chablis Blanc, the l.5 liter green bottle with its thick neck strangled by tense fingers.

  “He dressed up in my clothes and slit his wrists. He didn’t even leave a fucking note. He simply wore my clothes to do it, and he wasn’t into that, either; he wasn’t kinky.”

  No wonder Florence was a washerwoman, a professional at removing stains and cleaning up messes on clothes. I thought of Lady Macbeth, washing and washing her hands.

  She raised the bottle to pour herself another drink. She didn’t see that she was about to overflow her glass, but rather seemed to notice the alarm in my eyes, and that caused her to set down the bottle with a thump. She bent to sip her drink without lifting the glass from the counter.

  “Did you get any counseling, Florence?”

  She straightened, glass in hand. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly. “My husband’s paying for that. He insisted upon it. It’s the only thing I accepted from the son-of-a-bitch. I think he was half glad, love. It gave him such a convenient excuse to leave me.”

  To my relief, someone knocked at the door.

  “Come in, love,” Florence called.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” Punky yelled through the door, talking fast.

  Florence went to the door. Punky bounced on the step.

  “I left Todd in the apartment, and I don’t feel like I can be away from him for even two minutes, you know? I was wondering if you have Bobbi’s phone number?”

  “I don’t know, love. I’ll have to dig in all that crappola there.” She pointed to the overflowing end table by her couch/bed.

  “Well, if you can find it, would you please bring it down to me? I hate to ask that, but Todd’s konked out, and that stuff last night has made me paranoid.”

  “Sure, love, but warn me if Bobbi is coming out, okay?”

  Florence shut the door softly. “Poor thing.” She took the candle from the refrigerator over to the end table and kneeled before the heap of papers and envelopes by the telephone. “I doubt if I have that number since I’d as soon none of those people ever came around. They never fix anything, anyway. Damn! I don’t believe this!”

  “What is it?”

  “My son’s gold cross is gone.”

  I eyed the junk heap skeptically, but said, “This is getting outrageous.”

  “It probably disappeared the same time as the money and I just never noticed ’til now.”

  “What kind of person would steal a cross?”

  “Someone sick.” Tears drizzled down her cheeks.

  I had come to Florence’s door seeking comfort, but I was slowly realizing all she had to offer was sorrow.

  Dribbling Juice

  By candlelight I dug in the drawer of my garage-sale desk, which the previous owner had been kind enough to deliver to my door. I had the manager’s number. But, then, Punky hadn’t asked me; Punky didn’t know me. I paced the floor with the scrap of paper in my hand. My mechanical clock had stopped, but my biological clock said it was past my bedtime. I pulled back my new curtains and looked down the driveway at the other apartments. They looked as deserted and quiet as seashells. Prufrock came unbidden to me:

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  Why did I make everything so complicated? Why did I bang my head against the simplest decision, when in this age, one ill-advised second could undo everything anyway?

  That is exactly the reason one should contemplate every action, I thought, but I had already pulled on my hooded sweatshirt and headed down the driveway.

  Fully dressed and wary, Punky appeared at her door as though she had no plans to sleep. She held a candle in one hand and the darkness behind her poured forth marijuana fumes. She stood trembling in the autumn chill and didn’t invite me in. After all, I was a teacher, and God knows how righteous teachers can be, and she was standing in that heavy, incriminating odor.

  “I brought you the manager’s phone number.”

  The instant I handed her the slip of paper, the world sprang to life. Light dazzled the room behind her, various apartments along the drive blinked on, a television, turned up too loud, broadcast into the night, an
d dogs barked at the sudden change. Power had been restored, but that didn’t stop the sensation that it’d happened at our connection, like the anticipated explosion of light and energy when God’s finger finally touched Adam’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Punky thanked me for the number and blew out the now unnecessary candle, a pleasant vanilla fragrance curling up with the smoke.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “In a couple of days I have to go somewhere, though.” She shifted her weight and scratched at her cheek. “Do you think it would be okay to leave my boy with Mrs. Bean? She offered to watch him.”

  If I hadn’t been so ignorant of children, if I’d thought more carefully about the question, I might not have said yes, and I might not have blamed myself for what happened. But that night, I was eager to give her something, and Mrs. Bean, with her sharp ears and vigilance, seemed like a safe bet.

  The Soaps

  The socs (popular, social students) in my junior classes were a group of white kids. Boys and girls alike dressed in a preppy style, polo shirts with the collars turned up. If it was cold, they threw on trim sweaters over the shirts. The boys sported short hair and Raybans and the girls tied back their hair in ribbons. They came from the more affluent families in the community, and although they had not been friendly to me, they were too well mannered to be vicious.

  They had returned from the summer addicted to Days of Our Lives. As a snob who considered soaps a pastime for bored housewives with few alternatives, I needed months to catch on. I was used to kids in The City who wore tight clothes, smoked dope, and spent their weekends trying to sneak into clubs. It took me a while to grasp the buzz among these students consisted of daily fixes of this soap passed around from a student with a videocassette recorder.

  Finally, after I’d asked Elene Petroutsas for the umpteenth time to be quiet, she blurted, “But, Ms. Knutsen, I gotta find out what happened to Jessica Fallon.”

  “Who’s Jessica Fallon?” I asked.

  The class, even the non-socs, stared at me in astonishment.

  While one student informed me Jessica Fallon was the illegitimate daughter of Alex Marshall, a hospital administrator, and his nurse Marie Curtis, and she had left town with Joshua Fallon, I had the good sense to listen and not to pronounce judgment at the confusing list of soap characters. It was a turning point in my career. It may have been a turning point in my life.

  On this foggy, chilly Friday, my brain teased me with questions worthy of a soap. Why wasn’t Vince comforting Punky? Would Punky call the manager? Who was Lefty Hunt? Was he our thief?

  How could I deny the appeal of such questions? Weren’t they as stimulating as, “What effect does Poe create with his use of onomatopoeia in The Bells?”

  I nervously glanced at the classroom clock, thinking about education classes and the prevailing omniscient god of educational theory: Time on Task.

  We had ten minutes left. It was only October and I was exhausted. I could not go a whole year, pushing and pulling at these students, demanding attention they didn’t want to give. Thirty-seven bodies sprawled before me—grown bodies, bodies that drove cars, made love, held jobs, consumed alcohol—bodies big enough to take some responsibility for whether they’d learn or not.

  The desks hadn’t changed much since I was in their place, plodding through Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. One of my classmates had observed that if a guy spit, the dust rolled for three pages. As serious as I was about literature, even then, I had laughed. Because it was true. Not in a factual way. But in the way Faulkner meant when he said facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

  I sighed audibly and perched on the side shelf of my lectern; it was the first time I’d sat in class. I rested my hands on the podium and noted with calm alarm the thinness of my fingers. They looked anorexic, starving.

  I’d been quiet a full minute when I realized all thirty-seven bodies were deadly silent and staring at me with a certain amount of trepidation. I don’t know what they feared, perhaps that I would faint, but behind the fear lay an element of guilt. They knew that if I did, they’d be partially responsible. This class had once thrown little bits of paper at me. It deserved to sweat. I took a second to be grateful Annette didn’t sit at the back of this room. Of course, if she did, that fiasco probably never would have happened.

  “Let me tell you about this guy who moved into the apartments where I live.” I settled my butt a little more firmly onto the lectern shelf. “He’s supposedly the son of an older couple who rented the place.”

  They were listening, all thirty-seven of them. After two months of constant struggle, suddenly, effortlessly, I had undivided attention from students who dismissed Jonathon Edwards as a fanatic, complained of Franklin’s tediousness, and showed only a begrudging interest in Poe.

  The class I’d thought of alternately as belligerent and apathetic was hanging raptly on each word. The moment was magic.

  Same Time, Same Station

  Florence knew the answers to most of my questions. Glad to put aside her Psychology Today, she held forth as I leaned against the warm, vibrating washer. The only chair in the laundry room was Florence’s throne.

  According to Florence, Punky would love to sleep with Vince, but she feared Lefty might report her again, claiming moral turpitude disqualified her as a parent.

  “Seems like she’d be more afraid he’d call the police about the pot.”

  “Well, she’s worried about that, too, but she also needs something to calm her down, love. She hasn’t been sleeping at all. She’s afraid Lefty will sneak into her apartment. Besides, Lefty isn’t jealous of her marijuana.”

  “She thinks the motive is jealousy?”

  “It’s the only thing we could come up with.”

  I kept the idea of no motive to myself. “Did she call the manager about him?”

  “That’s the weird part, love. Bobbi says she did rent the place to an older couple, and they didn’t say anything about a son. She’s going to check on it.”

  I was surprised anyone had been able to reach Bobbi Headland. Then I reminded myself that life continued on Lostart Street after I left for work at six and before I returned at five. Clearly there were Bobbi sightings, I just wasn’t home for them.

  “I wouldn’t want to be in Punky’s shoes,” I said.

  “Well, love, that’s only half of it. She’s stuck there with that baby all day and doesn’t know a soul down here except us. She has to go to the Unemployment Office on Monday.”

  If I’d kept my baby, would I be in the same position? Alone, facing the Unemployment Office, frightened? I doubted it. Angelo had always been generous, would have helped to provide for the baby, might even have married me if I’d kept it.

  “She asked me if I thought it would be okay to leave Todd with Mrs. Bean,” Florence continued, “since I guess old String offered to babysit.”

  “She asked me about Mrs. Bean, too. What did you say?”

  “Well, you know, love, Mrs. Bean is awfully beat up.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But I figured for a couple hours, what the hell. And you know, love, I think it’d do Old String Bean a world of good.”

  I smiled. That was a nice twist I hadn’t thought of.

  “Now, as if that girl didn’t have enough troubles, one of those mice that Vince conned her into taking disappeared, and the other mouse is sick. It lies in the corner of the terrarium as if it will never move again.”

  “Maybe she should put it out of its misery.”

  “It’s her kid’s pet. Boy, I tell you, love, the only way she’d abuse that child is by loving him too hard.”

  The tone sounded confessional. Perhaps she’d smashed her own son with a ton of love.

  The Language of Connection

  The weekend dawned so lovely I slipped back to my original conception of the place as peaceful, even dull. The morning dampness burned off early, and, coffee in
hand, I sat on my step to correct papers. The landing was big enough for a chair, but I only had two, my rocking chair and an upright that I shuffled between my typing table and my eating table.

  Beside my step, a redwood bucket spilled pansies. When I was growing up, my mom nurtured pansies in a window box, a bright spot in our house. I would stare for long periods at their velvet colors—the sun yellow with navy centers blurring into sad symbols of the beauty my mother wanted, but never had.

  Across the asphalt drive was The Invisible Lady’s house. Although no one in the apartment complex went inside, The Invisible Lady had visitors. Most of them were in their thirties or forties. Some of them entered without knocking, so I assumed they were relatives or close friends. Maybe her children. They greeted me with pleasant “hellos” or “good mornings.” Today, though, the place seemed deserted.

  On Mrs. Bean’s step, the door stood slightly ajar and Buddha Belly lolled in his position. He seemed like the world’s laziest cat. I wondered if he’d ever even explored the opening in Mrs. Bean’s floor. Probably, though, he couldn’t fit his fat body through it.

  I couldn’t have asked for quieter neighbors, and, apparently, Mrs. Bean, at least, felt lucky to have me, too. She’d slipped into the conversation several times how glad she was to have a sweet girl like me for her next-door neighbor and not somebody odd like that new boy in nine.

  I glanced at the stack of papers in my lap and sighed. My freshmen were studying metaphors. So they’d written on what they’d be if they had to be inanimate objects. I read Rosaura’s first. “I would be a mountain. Not just any old mountain. I’d be a powerful, majestic mountain like Everest so I could be there for people to admire. I’d stay there, in one place, with my head stuck up in the clouds feeling how good it is not to move. People would come from all over the world to see me.”

  I smiled. She’d even spelled majestic right.

  Ruben’s paper began, “I wood be a big old rock. Sometimes people think I’m a rock, anywhay, so I would like to realy be a rock. Go in the WWF and crush my oponants.”