“Since you’re a member of the world’s most important profession,” she said without the slightest trace of irony, “I thought you might appreciate this.”
One had merely to suggest I might like something to guarantee I’d dislike it. I started to unfold the paper.
“No,” she said, “read it at home over your afternoon coffee where you don’t feel pressure to respond.”
“Well, thanks,” I said uncertainly. That she knew I was a teacher didn’t bother me. That seemed obvious enough, but I found it a trifle disconcerting that she knew my habit of contemplating matters over afternoon coffee. As a matter of fact, it piqued me because I knew nothing about her. I didn’t even know if she was The Invisible Lady for certain. I didn’t like people to be one up on me, although I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, the way I holed up with my schoolwork.
I saved the mysterious paper until I’d situated myself at my desk with a cup of serious brew. I opened the flaps. After the small, scrawling cursive of my students, the enlarged print was inviting:
PURPOSE OF EDUCATION
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students human.
Yes, I thought, this touched my first principles of education, but the paragraph also puzzled me. Who’d written it? The woman I’d seen looked too young to be a concentration camp survivor. I wondered why she had given it to me. Was she trying to tell me something? Did she think I was producing Eichmanns?
At the bottom, she’d written a short note in dark, bold pencil: “Have you been robbed, yet? The thief went through my medicine cabinet, but didn’t find anything worth using or very marketable.
P.S. Mrs. Bean had a heart attack. Florence took her to the hospital.”
I rubbed my temples. If I hadn’t put Mrs. Bean through the ordeal with Todd, if I’d offered comfort when Buddha Belly died, maybe this would not have happened.
To fortify myself, I sipped the coffee. I reread the other part of her note. The Invisible Lady had been robbed, too. I had thought she was always home. Either I was wrong about that, or our thief was really bold. This theft, like the others, looked like an inside job—someone who, unlike me, would know when The Invisible Lady left her apartment. The note stated “the thief,” one thief, and I wondered whom, among us, that could be. Certainly not The Fat Lady, Mrs. Bean, or Bucky. Well, why not The Fat Lady? What did I really know about her? Why not Bucky? Just because he was slow?
My missing sweater wouldn’t fit either of them, but whoever took it could hardly wear it around the complex anyway. The thief had ransacked The Invisible Lady’s medicine cabinet. Looking for drugs? I hated to think it, but Florence was a definite substance abuser. She had been robbed, too, but really, I had only her word on that. And Florence had gone out of her way not to involve anyone in investigating the burglaries.
Lefty Hunt seemed like the best suspect, but Mrs. Bean’s diamonds had disappeared before he and Punky arrived.
It was important to nail this person. Not because of the thefts, but because suspicion could destroy our community.
Speculations on The Invisible Lady
I never asked anyone about The Invisible Lady. All the questions I formed seemed impertinent. I did not have the social grace of small talk, and to attack the matter without preliminary patter would offend people. So, I fantasized.
The Invisible Lady took on shades of Emily Dickinson, not the romantic spurned lover dressed in white or the kooky eccentric, but the intense personality who wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Emily’s intensity drained people, and maybe The Invisible Lady was the same, retreating from the world, watching us from a distance to shield us from her penetrating eyes and demanding depth.
In my mind, The Invisible Lady became a writer who had composed the note she slipped to me. She knew such thoughts were not for ordinary conversation. Behind her window, she observed our triteness and chuckled at our banality while celebrating the vitality and ecstasy she chose not to inflict upon us.
She Doesn’t Smell Like a Beach Bunny
As Vince drove home that Thursday, his lust dissipated into an occasional throb of the groin. The faint scent of urine scrambled his brain, as only scents can do. This woman has a baby, the smell told him, but, at the very same moment, it evoked her bed and the softness of her breasts against his back.
He had considered a vasectomy more than once, but that seemed so permanent. Maybe, some day, he’d want a kid, but for now, he loved his freedom to drive home from work, throw on his beach shorts, and go to Rio Del Mar for a long run, or to Santa Cruz Main Beach for a game of volleyball, or maybe to Manresa to surf even though he wasn’t a good surfer. He didn’t have to think about dinner if he didn’t want to, much less a babysitter, or an infant sick with all those things they get—measles and mumps and chicken pox and colic.
How could he have been so stupid? To be in bed with a woman with a baby.
Then he’d get a whiff of his shirt and everything would go haywire again until logic beat a stubborn path through the chaos.
He wasn’t attached, yet. He hadn’t made her any promises, given her any ring, or claimed he loved her. Just the little love on the note. Of course, it would be awkward with her living next door, but he’d break it off now, before any real damage. They could be friends.
Shit, he thought, maybe she wasn’t even looking for a serious relationship. She probably had other lovers. He worried too much. He was too fucking responsible. Relax, he told himself. Enjoy it.
Punky tried to read Todd The Three Little Pigs, but the Big Bad Wolf kept becoming Lefty Hunt, and she was the first little pig with the house of straw. If she’d kept her act together, they’d be living in a better place, but here she was disgracefully unemployed, suspected of child abuse because of a nut, and with no options but to run to someone. She’d never read the fable with so much sympathy for the first little pig. The Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed right into her heart so it exploded along with the straw house and she understood emotionally the socio-economic implications that whirled across the pages with all those bits of the cheaply, poorly made house of piglet numero uno.
When Punky answered the door, her crooked smile and her gray eyes so glad to see him, and the thick, fragrant hair floating around her like an aura, Vince’s resolve to end “it” dissolved. When she kissed him, his knees weakened, and his cock swelled.
They spent the evening kissing, hugging, talking, groping, shedding clothes, and wishing Todd would go to sleep. Punky was wearing lacy black panties, and Vince was thrilled. Whether she wore sexy underwear all the time or had put them on for him, both were good. Lust triumphantly conquered fear of commitment and fear of the Big Bad Wolf.
The covers finally tucked about the boy, Vince and Punky retired to the living room floor. She lit a candle. Although he was hard, she caressed his face, stroked his body, pinched his nipples, and kissed her way to his erection, which she circled with the tip of her tongue. Her rhythm was one of leisure and he thought he’d erupt.
Vince scooped her into his arms and flipped her under him. As he entered her, the olfactory system pumped its information directly to the limbic regions of the brain, and the primitive sense of smell, the only sense that bypassed his overactive thalamus, told him Punky was his first woman who didn’t smell like suntan lotion.
A Chapter for Lefty
Lefty Hunt took a butcher knife from his kitchen drawer because he’d been commanded to do so. He had been hearing a voice ever since he’d gotten confused about his meds. At first he thought a spirit lived in
the apartment and he searched for it, but gradually he had realized that God was talking to him again. It had to be God. Who else could it be?
Lefty Hunt had been an autumn child. His brother and sister were almost old enough to be his parents. His mother, Louise, channeled all her intellect toward creative ways to support her rigorous, fundamentalist upbringing, and his father, William, Sr., was the stereotype of the henpecked husband.
Lefty had passed for normal all through high school, although people, in retrospect, could pick out oddities. He excelled in science and was a lanky, average-looking kid, but he had few friends and no girlfriends. He told inane stories with no points and laughed at them even when others were annoyed or impatient. Still, this only earned him a reputation as weird, not crazy. His classmates and teachers who bothered to think about Lefty’s emotional immaturity blamed it on his mom, who emphatically professed everyone should be a virgin until married. It didn’t bother her a whit that Lefty had no apparent interest in popularity or the opposite sex.
When Lefty decided to attend a fundamentalist bible college, she was ecstatic, and when he began to hear the voice of God, she held him in awe. Yet, a tiny part of her not dominated by religious fervor noted that her son was becoming more and more slovenly. He let his hair grow into a straggly mop and no matter how she urged him to bring home his laundry, he went about in an increasingly disreputable state.
Even when Lefty’s personal neglect led to his dismissal from a fast-food restaurant and prompted William, Sr. to say mildly at the dinner table, “Something’s wrong with that boy,” Louise became livid, comparing her son’s long hair to that of Christ, and defending his poor personal hygiene as a sign of his lack of ego, his humility.
Lefty’s condition deteriorated for several years until the day he stood on a speaker’s dais at the center of the college’s green claiming he was a messiah come to liberate left-handers and to expose devils. In a community predisposed to believe in the wonders and strange ways of God, Lefty probably could have gotten away with the sermon if he hadn’t decided on that day to forget about his clothes altogether.
To his mother’s way of thinking, Lefty was like St. Francis of Assisi. People had called Francis crazy when he had shed his clothes and given them to beggars, and that is what they called Lefty.
After he was 5150ed, the more concerned people at the college noted that “Lefty didn’t use to be that way.” Lefty entered a psychiatric ward for evaluation. The doctor there, quite aware of his colleagues’ over-diagnosis of schizophrenia, cautiously considered the DSM III criteria for the illness and then called Lefty’s problem a Schizoaffective Disorder. Louise referred to Lefty’s illness as her “cross to carry” although she agreed quite readily to institutionalization. She was, after all, sixty-two years old. She had neither the energy nor knowledge the doctors possessed. She would, and did, pray for her son.
William, Sr. simply didn’t mention the subject except to tell his wife he’d prefer not to have the bumper sticker, but she still stuck it right next to “Jesus Saves”: “Mental Illness—The Loneliest Disease.”
Lefty responded well to Thorazine, but the political climate was such that Governor Reagan’s cost cutting and the liberals’ cry to deinstitutionalize conspired to put the mentally ill back on the streets. Lefty moved from a state hospital to a community care facility supported mostly by government funds.
An immigrant family owned the house. The wife had completed the short program to become a licensee of the state, but other than that, they had no formal training. Mrs. Galera had heard from her cousin that this was a good, easy way to make a living in the United States.
The inspector who made periodic visits to Tranquility House had once been passed a note by a crazy named Carl who’d written all in capital letters on plain white paper:
SINCE I HAVE STAYED HERE EVERY LAW FOR THE PROTECTION OF CLIENTS OF BOARD AND CARE HOMES HAS BEEN BROKEN. CHILDREN ARE LIVING ON THE PREMISES. THE MAN AND WIFE THAT OPERATE THE BOARD AND CARE HOME ARE OVERWEIGHT. THE STAFF HAS SERVED KANGAROO MEAT AND BUZZARD MEAT FOR DINNER. THEY HOARD CIGARETTES AND DOLE THEM OUT MANY TIMES A DAY. WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE POSSESSION OF OUR MEDS. PEOPLE KEEP STEALING MY CLOTHES. THIS WEEK SOMEBODY TOOK ALL OF MY RINGS AND JEWELRY AWAY FROM ME. THEY SERVED POISONOUS DOG MEAT LAST SUNDAY FOR DINNER.
Tranquility House eventually closed, but not because of any buzzard or dog meat. The Galeras had been cited more than once for many offenses: mouse droppings in the cupboards, understaffing, and failure to meet nutritional standards. But the worst offense was that they let their children sleep in the same rooms as the clients. So perhaps one could say there was an element of truth in the note passed to the inspector.
The Galeras wouldn’t give up any of their clients to open space for their children, and room additions would have eaten up their profits, so in stubborn, greedy ignorance, they lost their license, a not uncommon occurrence.
Lefty was released to the custody of his parents. Louise liked only the idea of suffering. She liked the drama of the stories about Lefty, and she liked the attention his illness reaped. She loved to make him care packages, to write him letters, to visit him and to pray for him, but, she wasn’t, at heart, a martyr, and that’s why she and William, Sr. rented the apartment on Lostart Street for Lefty.
No one could have predicted the voice of God would return to command him to take the knife, to walk calmly down to Lostart Street and to sneak behind the apartments. There the smoke of hell greeted him with its stench of burning rubber as he began his descent to kill the devil snuggling against Punky Hayes and to liberate the soul of his fellow lefty.
The Copper Penny Behind the Fuse
Florence remained at the hospital with Mrs. Bean as long as she could. Mrs. Bean’s heart attack had been mild, and she would be released soon, unless her insurance coverage was particularly good.
When Florence returned to the apartments, she went immediately to work in the laundry room, drinking past her normal, tipsy state and dwelling on who would take her to the hospital if she had a heart attack. She hoped she was building good karma, that people would feel indebted, that someone would help her, but she doubted it.
At moments like this, her body clenched tight against her son for abandoning her and tighter still against her husband for deserting her. He’d used the suicide as a reason to dump her during his mid-life crisis. She chased her thoughts around and around and around until they made her dizzy, and there was no answer, just an increasing blur. How could a person live a certain life for twenty-odd years—with all the ups and downs of that life—and then have it vanish, as if she were Cinderella and the clock had struck twelve?
She blamed her body for sagging. She blamed her skin for drying and her hair for graying. She accused her husband of wanting a younger, more vibrant woman. She blamed her son for his incurable depression. She blamed him for wearing her clothes to do it. She blamed the world for being too hard for her son to bear. But most of all she blamed herself for a zillion reasons.
In the physical world, perpetual motion may have been impossible, but in her mind, it was not. Drinking was a circuit breaker for the whirring, painful cycle of thoughts, the Catherine’s wheel of thoughts.
In truth, the drinking operated much like the copper penny behind one of Mrs. Bean’s fuses.
Cowlickcoo—The Calico Cat
If someone had told Cecile she shared a literary interest with Florence, she would have scoffed. Yet, T.S. Eliot, who’d written The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, had also written Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Florence gave a copy of this book to anyone with the slightest fondness for cats at the first special occasion that presented itself. If there weren’t any special occasions, she’d create one in order to share this joy. Seeing Cats, the Broadway musical based on the book, topped her bucket list.
Florence felt contempt for people who pointed out how many cats she had, as if the cats were all the same. She loved the way T.S. understood the fine distinction
s of cat personalities, ranging from that of Jennyanydots to that of Macavity. Even cats as sly and mysterious as Macavity didn’t desert you, which made cats a cut above humans.
And here she had abandoned Cowlickcoo, the Calico Cat, to save Mrs. Bean. Cowlickcoo was a neurotic cat with tufts of black, honey-colored and white hair sticking in various directions. She was a veteran chair stealer, but if she couldn’t find a properly warm seat, a newly shed pair of socks would do. When traumatized, she peed in the house, and there was no way to predict and avoid the mess, because the oddest things stressed Cowlickcoo. Like a needy person, Cowlickcoo stalked warmth and comfort.
In her stupor, Florence remembered that the poor cat was stuck—alone—in Mrs. Bean’s apartment. In the panic of the heart attack and the frantic flagging down of the sheriff, Florence had forgotten Cowlickcoo. Florence started to cry at her own cruelty and planned to jump up and rescue poor Cowlickcoo, but instead, she passed out in the lounger, oblivious to Vince sleeping with Punky and unaware of Lefty Hunt with the butcher knife.
But the sense of smell, the gut level, immediate, underrated sense, sneaked through Florence’s alcoholic haze. Black smoke, stinking like tar, alerted her.
Cowlickcoo didn’t like the smell of Mrs. Bean’s chair and instead had curled half on the windowsill with her rump on the toaster, warm from Mrs. Bean’s preparation of an English muffin. She kneaded the sill as if it were a scratching post and yowled at the kitchen window glass. Upset to find herself locked in a strange, crazy place, she had relieved herself, and the pee ran into the old, rusty toaster.
The urine seeped and corroded its way into the electrical system, but the poor, calico cat was not to blame for what happened. Several lights had been left on, drawing electricity, and the penny behind the fuse, to “fix” a short in the electrical system, allowed for a continual current, bypassing the fuse so that it wouldn’t constantly blow. This “solution” to the problem guaranteed a fire eventually.
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