“Anbesol.”
Sometimes Martha felt like Dody thought she was some kind of handy-dandy medicine woman. But at other times she wondered why she set herself up to play that part. Like now. She figured it must be they both enjoyed this kind of exchange or it wouldn’t keep occurring. Surely it could not be that she was really offering that much new information to Dody. And maybe he knew that but just liked the sense of consulting cooperatively on something other than carpentry.
“Anbesol.”
“Bet you are one of those people who is always worrying and…”
“No. I’m not a worrier. I just like researching for answers. I like to know as much common sense stuff as I can. Anbesol. Ask the druggist. Or ask him what he recommends.”
“Anbesol. Yeah. I guess I have some Anbesol. Now what was it you wanted done?”
“Well, the dining room and living room. I feel like I’m living on the open desert. No curtains. No shades. No furniture.”
“Yeah. Well, Mike said he ran out of paint.”
“Mike didn’t run out of paint. He ran out of ambition. He didn’t want to do the windows. He took down all the curtains and shades and then just stopped.”
“Well, he’s been needing some advice. Going back to college now. Senior, ya know. Has to buy a suit for his interviews. Asked me what he should get. Wanted to know how to buy a suit. What do I know about suits? Don’t even own one. Used to but who wears suits nowadays? I told him to go to Brooks Brothers. Says even if he goes, wouldn’t know how to pick one. Whada ya think?”
“Tell him I’ll take him to buy the suit. Probably doesn’t need a suit anyway. Sport jacket and some slacks would probably do just as well. And if he knew what he was doing he could go to Marshall’s and pick up a nice one at half the price.”
“Yeah. But he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Tell him I’ll take him.”
“Gonna miss that boy when he goes. Worked for me for four summers now. Neat. Quiet. You just tell him what you want painted and he says okay and then after a while he comes back and says, ‘Now, what do you want me to do?’ Nothing else. Hard worker. And neat. Really neat. Couldn’t find a nicer young man. Gonna miss that boy.” At that time Martha had been only vaguely aware that there was some discord between Dody and his son, Thaw, so Dody’s note of care for the young Mike passed her without notice.
“Well, listen. I’m gonna call up Mike and see if he couldn’t come over here now and do whatever you want him to do first today and then have him come back and finish up tomorrow.”
After Dody left, Martha shook her head and began to muse on the likelihood of Dody ever getting to the point in his work on the house where they might reasonably begin to talk about installing a woodstove in Martha’s fireplace and some solar heating panels on the roof, both in the hope of lessening the cost of heating and hot water. She laughed to herself: some environmentalist I’ve turned out to be! In Aesopolis I would have been one of the few arguing for the development of wind power and the need to bring water-power-generated electricity down from Canada. Here, who cares? Here in the states of New Carlton and Mariana we generate our electricity by water power anyway! We use solar power as a money-saver to lessen our reliance on non-renewable resources. Meantime we happily use wood and gas stoves, burn our leaves, fill the air with sulfur dioxide from the mills and make a big thing of recycling glass, metal and paper. Also we make sure that every outside event is accompanied by the biggest bonfire that can be built! Oh, well. When in Rome…
When next Martha was in discussion with Dody, in order to keep the work flowing for him and his men, he was was using his ad hoc approach to keeping all his irons hot. At this point he was doing his best to placate Martha. “Well, listen. I’m gonna call up Mike and see if he can’t come over here now and do whatever you want him to do first today and then have him come back and finish up tomorrow.”
Just a bit after Dody promised to call Mike to paint the living room, Mike arrived. He entered smiling. Marlena, Martha’s airedale, greeted him as if the tail wagged the dog. But she kept her paws to the floor and licked his hands as he petted her. As he talked (as if to Marlena), he related the antics of his dogs at home, each of whom by comparison made Marlena look like a cupcake. His lab didn’t jump on people. No, she came from behind them to get between their legs, giving each the opportunity for a ride as she greeted them. And since her pups as she had turned into a butterball, this didn’t add much to her greetings grace. He noted the other one was a “jumper.”
“I had to go shopping for college,” Mike explained.
“Yeah. Whadya get?” Martha was curious.
“I was supposed to get a suit for my interviews, but I didn’t.”
“Oh.” Martha’s curiosity was not peaked.
“Yeah, I got a sport coat instead.”
“Sounds good. You can wear it with some nice slacks. What color?”
“Navy blue with a small gray pinstripe.”
“Nice. Sounds nice.” Martha puzzled over what a sport coat with a pinstripe in it might be like. Then she looked in Mike’s clear blue eyes and considered his artless, easy smile and somehow she is sure it would be fine…whatever it was. Next time he might pick a subtle herring bone or tweed…or maybe even a cashmere solid, but this time…the first time…it was blue with a small gray pinstripe.
Mike began to paint. He refused a soda or water and Martha went in to read a book in a chair with an ottoman and woke an hour later. The painting was progressing. She wondered if she had snored at all.
On day two Mike ceased painting before he was actually finished. He had to go get his hair cut as he returned to school “maybe tomorrow.” He’d stop down to return the brushes to Dody.
There seemed no option so Martha paid him, throwing in an extra twenty as she mumbled something about his being so neat. He left with her best wishes for the year.
There was nothing unusual about the transient quality of this contact as before the Event, the people who peopled Martha’s life in Locklee came and went like so many postage stamps in the wind. Recollecting them now was like calling up flat images of smiling faces of mostly near-strangers.
An hour later Dody arrived. He was smiling. His cold sore has almost disappeared. Without greeting Martha the Dody-report began. “Dang telemarketers. Stayed home all day yesterday and might as well of gone to work.”
“Yeah?”
“Ya know how many calls I got? Thirty. Ya believe that?! Thirty!”
Eight a.m. the day after Mike went off for his haircut for college and Dody had come with the promise to send Neville, the doorbell rang. Martha opened it to find Neville smiling shyly with brush in hand. She introduced herself and welcomed him in. He entered. She drew him toward the kitchen. He moved easily, walking with a slight stoop to his posture, as if to avoid a too low ceiling or possibly to lessen the discrepancy between his and Martha’s heights. He smiled and talked easily as he went.
“So you’re the one who tiled the mud room! Great job! I love it!”
Neville smiled at the compliment. “Yeah. House had a lot of work in it. Never know how much ‘til you start doin’ it.”
“And if I had, I probably never would have bought it!”
Neville glanced shyly at Martha. “Ah, you’d a bought it anyway. Where else would you find a view of the lake like that?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, Neville.”
Although Neville loved to talk, money was scarce so he preferred to do it as he worked. “So what do you want done? I only have today so best we do first what you want done most.”
“Living room and stairs I guess, so I can bring in some furniture there.”
He preferred wiring to painting, but rarely had much chance to do it, working for Dody as he did. “What about installing the ceiling fans?”
“Well, you can do them if you finish painting the living room, but I have Marc Ava who can do them…if he ever finds the time.” Marc was a pleasant, big handsome Italian who dabbled i
n politics and whose given name was really Marco. The origins of his family name had been reduced a few generations back to only the -ava. It was a name that had been at least three syllables shorter than the original, but it maintained both the echoes of his Southern Italian ancestry and his family’s readiness to acclimate to the new culture. Marc’s style included an evident regional accent, rather slow speech, a dry sense of humor, and an easy smile. He had prematurely-white, curly hair and a rather large-earred appearance that reminded Martha of a somewhat non-slick but charmingly newer version of Clark Gable.
Soon Neville was joined by one of the Joes in Dody’s cadre of workers. This one, unlike the other one, had a spellable, sayable last name. The two men divvied up the room and stairs and set silently to work. Martha decided silence was not the best answer so she sidled in and seated herself on the chair next to the roll top desk and watched for a while.
“How do you like my new chair?” she asks. “Nine ninety-nine.” She referred to the only other object of furniture in the room beside the desk and its chair. “Place for your drink and everything. Saw it. Didn’t need it. But when I saw its price I got two. I’d seen some people with ‘em at the concert-on-the-lawn and thought they were really luxurious for folding chairs. Can’t believe they were only $9.99 each.”
“Yeah,” acknowledged Joe-with-the-sayable-last-name. “We got some in Bain. Just like it. Cost us $30.00 each.”
Silence.
Neville was painting around the corner on the stairs out of sight of Martha. She knew he was there but she addressed only Joe.
“You have any children, Joe?”
“Yeah. One son. Big one. Sixteen. Really big. Heavy. Really heavy.”
Martha did not know where to go with this information.
So Joe continued. “Yeah, he’s really big. Overweight. Got to take him shopping for clothes this afternoon. He’s really big.”
Martha took a breath and dove in. “How much does he weigh?”
“Two-ten. Big.”
“How tall is he?”
“Almost six feet tall. Gonna’ play football this fall.”
“That ought to help. Firm him up. Two-ten sounds like a lot but if he’s near six feet tall…?”
“Yeah. But he’s soft. Really big.”
Martha decided to let this one sit.
“Been painting long?”
“Yeah. Painted all over the place. Arizona. Nevada. You name it, I’ve painted there.”
“How’d you get into painting?’
Joe had that slowness of speech that marked the local accent. “Worked for a man. Perfectionist. Took all the fun out of it. But I learned a lot from him.”
It was Martha’s impression that exchanges with Joe would never last very long. Still they held the essential information and were lacking in neither clarity of thought nor opinions.
Martha rose and silently left the two men to their painting. From two rooms away she could hear the hum of their voices chatting persistently over time. Martha felt good that the men were painting in a manner less isolated from each other. She suspected that her conversation had been a cue that talk was permitted as people worked in her house. She suspected they were now working as they might have worked had she not been there, a steady flow of conversation between them.
As there didn’t seem much Martha felt like doing and the book she was reading failed to hold her, Martha wandered back into the living room and seated herself again at a distance in the chair by the desk.
“It’s looking good!” said Martha, noting mentally that while Joe was painting with an ease and neatness similar to Mike’s, he was painting the windows shut. Martha determined she would open them as soon as he was done to prevent them from sticking.
“Thanks. But I am going to have to stop soon. It’s almost 2:30 and I have to take my son shopping for school clothes.”
Neville remained silent, out of sight in the corner.
Marlena nosed around near the paint pan. White water-based paint highlighted one ear and a spot on the side of her wiry cinnamon coat. Every so often Joe would give her a pat and a push to keep her where she belonged. Usually the push was accompanied by a smile.
“My dog bothering you?”
“No. No problem. Used to dogs. Had a black lab. Nice dog. But wouldn’t stay on my property. Put up a fence and she went under it. I got three acres and it wasn’t enough. My wife and me both work so even with three acres we couldn’t take care of our dog. So I found her a new home. But I like dogs. She’s very sweet.”
Marlena had resorted to beating one of her rope toys to death on the floor, intermittently tossing it high in the air and then retrieving it only to beat it harder by holding it in her mouth and rotating her head back and forth, slapping the knot on the end against the floor, first on one side and then on the other. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud.
“Yeah. Very delicate, as you can see,” responded Martha.
Joe stopped briefly to watch Marlena as she swung her head back and forth. Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. He returned to his painting. “Yeah. Sure.”
From around the corner the sound of quiet laughter. “Yeah. She’s a real lady.”
Joe began to gather together his paint can, brush and pan. “Well. Two-thirty. Gotta go.”
“When do you think you’ll be back.”
“No idea. Busy now. Real busy. Just came down today because Dody sent me to help you out.”
Martha knew then that she would be hanging the curtains and furnishing the room with the painting half done, something she had not wanted, but for which she would now be left little choice if she wanted to finish furnishing the house before the snow flew.
“Well, thanks Joe. Thanks a lot. Hope your shopping trip goes well.”
“Yeah. Not easy finding something affordable that he likes and that fits. But we’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.”
Joe ambled out the door, closing it as he went.
After Joe had stopped painting and left to go clothes shopping with his oversized son, Martha repositioned herself to a folding chair from which Neville would be in sight. Neville’s approach to painting was similar to Joe’s but he was slower, and although they both used the same paint, Neville’s work was marked by brush marks. As he had been requested, he was painting the hall and stairs.
“Do you want the risers painted all the way to the top?”
Martha nodded in assent.
Neville asked if she was going to use the stairs that day.
As the treads had already been finished in their natural wood and were dry, Martha confirmed her understanding of the intent of Neville’s question. “I’ll be careful.”
“Do you have any children, Neville?” she asked, and to her surprise, what precipitated next was an unhurried monologue which Neville interrupted only for pauses of convenience.
“One. A little girl. Nine months old. And my wife has two daughters from her previous marriage. After that she had her tubes tied. So I said to her, ‘Look, if we’re going to get married you are going to have to have that operation reversed because I want to have children.’ So she did and it cost us three thousand dollars, but it worked, and now we have a daughter. It was worth it. So last Christmas was our first Christmas as a family, and we talked to the whole family…her family and my family…to see what they wanted for Christmas and then we went out and bought a present for every single one of them and then when Christmas came we were supposed to have Christmas at our house except my wife’s sister called and said she wanted it at her house so we didn’t want to make trouble and so we said okay and then just before Christmas she called and asked if my wife could bring the turkey. Imagine that! Christmas at her house and we bring the turkey! But my wife said okay and we went down there. Going there I call going to shanty town ‘cause that’s what it’s like, and everyone was there and we gave everyone their presents and you know what? We didn’t get one. Not one present! And after we had talked about what they wanted and they
had talked about what we wanted and then we have Christmas at their house and we bring the turkey and then not one present! That’s the last time we’ll ever bring them gifts!”
Martha felt the poignancy he must have experienced. “Must have really hurt!”
“Yeah. Well my wife’s family is crazy anyway. All they do is fight. And they never come to see us and then they complain because we don’t go to see them. And her mother is always wanting her to come down. Then they all just disagree and my wife wants me to stand up to them. She wants me to tell her sister where to get off and I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want to make things worse and I don’t know how to make things better and my wife keeps telling me I should tell them what I think and I don’t know what to think…whether I should tell them what I think or not. What do you think? Does it help to tell people what you think?”
“Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m always telling people what I think, but as time goes by, I do it less and less because I’m less and less sure that it helps. I guess if I think it’s really important and what I want to say can offer some really new and important information that might be helpful, then I risk it. But mostly I try to be careful because most often telling them things they haven’t asked to hear causes more problems than it solves, even when your intentions are good and you try to be really careful how you say it. So I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well we’re not giving them anything for Christmas this year!”
“Maybe you have more than they do. Maybe they can’t find the means to buy everybody presents. Maybe you could just bring a house gift to each…fruit or a cake or pie or something.”
“Boy, the year before last my wife and I had a real Christmas! We had gone down to Las Vegas and over the summer between the two of us we had saved fourteen thousand dollars just painting. Both of us. Now that was a Christmas! But then after Christmas there we were. Starting all over again. Just seems I can’t get ahead. I work and work and work and never get ahead…Now my wife’s got a cousin and he figured it out. There he is working for this company down in New Jersey selling cars and doing real well, but he’s the only one. He always could figure how to get ahead. But I work and work and never get ahead.”
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