"Not a damned thing," she said. "Nada. Othing nay."
The very idea that, out of nowhere, a member of my 1975 graduating class would call meand speak pig latin created a mixed sense of repulsion and endless possibilities.
Trudy spoke of her involvement in any number of organizations. She is, for example, volunteering to walk the dogs of recent stroke victims. "I usually walk with a woman named Marcie, and, Jesus, if you thinkI'm crazy, you should meet her! We call ourselves the Poop Troop, and next week we're getting our uniforms. You should join us sometime."
I pictured myself wearing an "I brake for hydrants" T-shirt and a baseball cap decorated with a synthetic stool.
On top of everything else Trudy also finds the time to play on her company volleyball team, iron for her crazy arthritic neighbor, and teach underprivileged children to make fudge. She didn't say it in a boastful way. She wasn't looking for a medal or trying to make me feel selfish. She invited me over to her apartment for a get-together, but I bowed out, claiming I had a business meeting to attend.
"Well if your meetings are half as crazy as mine you're going to need all the luck you can get," she said.
She asked if she could call me after my meeting and I told her to hold on a moment as I had another call coming in. She's been holding for fifteen minutes now and I still can't make up my mind. I look over at my mother's card on the refrigerator. BE GOOD. But she never specified: Be good to whom? If I'm good to Trudy Chase, I'll tell her never to call me again. If I'm good to myself, I'll wind up making fudge and walking the dogs of stroke victims. Which is worse?
Essays
Diary of a Smoker
I RODE my bike to the boat pond in Central Park, where I bought myself a cup of coffee and sat down on a bench to read. I lit a cigarette and was enjoying myself when the woman seated twelve feet away, on the other side of the bench, began waving her hands before her face. I thought she was fighting off a bee.
She fussed at the air and called out, "Excuse me, do you mind if we make this a no-smoking bench?"
I don't know where to begin with a statement like that. "Do you mind ifwe make this a no-smoking bench?" There is no "we." Our votes automatically cancel one another out. What she meant was, "Do you mind ifI make this a no-smoking bench?" I could understand it it we were in an elevator or locked together in the trunk of a car, but this was outdoors. Who did she think she was? This woman was wearing a pair of sandals, which are always a sure sign of trouble. They looked like the sort of shoes Moses might have worn while he chiseled regulations onto stone tablets. I looked at her sandals and at her rapidly moving arms and I crushed my cigarette. I acted like it was no problem and then I stared at the pages of my book, hating her and Moses the two of them.
The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.
My school insurance expires in a few weeks so I made an appointment for a checkup. It's the only thing they'll pay for as all of my other complaints have been dismissed as "Cosmetic."
If you want a kidney transplant it's covered but if you desperately need a hair transplant it's "Cosmetic." You tell me.
I stood around the examining room for twenty minutes, afraid to poke around as, every so often, a nurse or some confused patient would open the door and wander into the room. And it's bad enough to be caught in your underpants but even worse to be caught in your underpants scratching out a valium prescription on someone else's pad.
When the doctor finally came he looked over my chart and said, "Hey, we have almost the exact same birthday. I'm one day younger than you!"
That did wonders for my morale. It never occurred to me that my doctor could be younger than me. Never entered my mind.
He started in by asking a few preliminary questions and then said, "Do you smoke?"
"Only cigarettes and pot," I answered.
He gave me a look. "Onlycigarettes and pot? Only?"
"Not crack," I said. "Never touch the stuff. Cigars either. Terrible habit, nasty."
I was at work, defrosting someone's freezer, when I heard the EPA's report on secondhand smoke. It was on the radio and they reported it over and over again. It struck me the same way that previous EPA reports must have struck auto manufacturers and the owners of chemical plants: as reactionary and unfair. The re-port accuses smokers, especially smoking parents, of criminal recklessness, as if these were people who kept loaded pistols lying on the coffee table, crowded alongside straight razors and mugs of benzene.
Over Christmas we looked through boxes of family pictures and played a game we call "Find Mom, find Mom's cigarettes." There's one in every picture. We've got photos of her pregnant, leaning toward a lit match, and others of her posing with her newborn babies, the smoke forming a halo above our heads. These pictures gave us a warm feeling.
She smoked in the bathtub, where we'd find her drowned butts lined up in a neat row beside the shampoo bottle. She smoked through meals, and often used her half-empty plate as an ashtray. Mom's theory was that if you cooked the meal and did the dishes, you were allowed to use your plate however you liked. It made sense to us.
Even after she was diagnosed with lung cancer she continued to smoke, although less often. On her final trip to the hospital, sick with pneumonia, she told my father she'd left something at home and had him turn the car around. And there, standing at the kitchen counter, she entertained what she knew to be her last cigarette. I hope that she enjoyed it.
It never occurred to any of us that Mom might quit smoking. Picturing her without a cigarette was like trying to imagine her on water skis. Each of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it, with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, "Sooner or later, something's going to get you."
Something got me the moment I returned home from work and Hugh delivered his interpretation of the EPA report. He told me that I am no longer allowed to smoke in any room that he currently occupies. Our apartment is small four tiny rooms.
I told him that seeing as I pay half the rent, I should be al-lowed to smoke half the time we're in the same room. He agreed, on the condition that every time I light a cigarette, all the windows must be open.
It's cold outside.
Giantess
"WRITERS! Have fun while earning a few extra bucks writing erotica!Giantess magazine needs stories about gals who grow to gigantic proportions! Send sample of work to D.L. Publications."
I circled that ad in this morning's paper and left it lying on my desk while I went to work, staining the bookcases of an art director. This man had, among other artifacts, a pair of delicate porcelain plates, each picturing a single sperm making its reckless journey toward an egg. By mid-afternoon this man had only one such plate. It wasn't necessarily our fault; it just sort of happened. The woman I was working with thought we should leave a confessional note but I thought it might be a better idea to tell him that a squirrel had come in the window, jumped on the dresser, smashed the plate, and left as suddenly as it had arrived. I thought we should scratch the surface of the dresser to suggest destructive claw marks. Lili decided it might be better for her to blame it all on me, seeing as the client was a friend of her brother. That was how we left it.
I came home and wrote a letter toGiantess magazine, including a story I had written several years ago. I don't happen to have any giantess stories lying around the house so I sent them something about a short man, hoping they might recognize size as a theme.
I worked today for Marilyn Notkin, stripping the paint off her bedroom windows with a heat gun. I was at it for half an hour when I blew a fuse, at which point I set down my heat gun and headed downstairs to the basement fuse box. On my way back to Marilyn's I popped into the first-flo
or apartment and joined Kim in watching a few minutes of "Oprah." This morning Oprah's guests were people who had forgiven the unforgivable. One woman had testified on behalf of the man who had stabbed her twenty times. Another had embraced the drunk driver who killed her only son. She invites this fellow over to her house for holidays and Sunday dinners.
"He's like a second son to me now," she said, reaching over to take his hand. "I wouldn't trade Craig for anything." The felon stared at his feet and shrugged his shoulders. I was thinking that a lengthy prison sentence would probably be a lot more comfortable than having to take the place of the person you had killed. I thought it was funny and was laughing when I heard, in the distance, a high-pitched whine like a car alarm but no, not a car alarm. It was shrill and relentless and I was trying to identify it when I remembered the heat gun and ran upstairs to Marilyn's bedroom, where the flaming windowsill had just set fire to the sheer white curtains.
The smoke alarm was screaming and I froze for a moment, watching the curtains change color. And then I was hugging them to my chest and pawing the flames with my hands. I wasn't even thinking, I was so afraid. The fire died in my hands and afterwards, desperately trying to cover my tracks, I wondered what I might say to someone after burning down their house.
"No, I mean it, I'm really, really sorry and just to prove it I'm not going to charge you for today's work. My treat."
The editor of Giantess called to say he'd received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himself as Hank, saying, "I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you'll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I'm talking about here, Dave?" Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. "Do you know what I'm talking about, Dave? I need tohear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?"
It seemed to be something I might be capable of. Hank offered to send me a few back issues and I said it sounded good to me. Later in the afternoon I took a walk to the grocery store, wondering what might cause a woman to grow to such proportions. I think it must be terribly lonely to stand seventy-five feet tall. You'd have no privacy and every bowel movement would evacuate entire cities. What would you eat? A roast chicken would be the size of a peanut. You might put away five dozen but leave with the feeling you were only snacking.
I am working this week on the Upper East Side, assisting a decorative painter named Jeffrey Lee. The clients are renovating their fifteen-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, converting one of the bedrooms into a bathroom for their dogs. I had never in my life witnessed such wealth until this afternoon when Jeffrey and I had lunch in the apartment of the project's interior decorator. I was amazed by the splendor: a Sargent painting in the drawing room, a small Bosch propped up in the kitchen room after room filled with treasures. The decorator wasn't home so Jeffrey and I had lunch in the kitchen with an estimator and three burly men who had come to replace the dining room windows. I expected that we would sit together and marvel at the grandeur, but instead Jeffrey Lee made a phone call and the men talked shop window talk, the dullest shoptalk on earth.
"What do you think about those one-and-three-quarter seamless pane liners?" one of the men asked. "I worked with those up on East Eighty-Fourth and, let me tell you, they're a pain in the ass to hoist, but the bastards glaze like you wouldn't believe."
"Hell," another man said, tugging at his T-shirt. "I wouldn't give you two cents for a Champion Eight. I'd rather double-pane three-quarter Stets any day of the week they're worth two dozen Champions just on installation alone. Double-bind those Stets with a copper-bound Toby Steelhead and you've got yourself a window."
A window washer arrived at the door and the installation foreman pointed to one of his men, saying, 'Byron, why don't you take Mr. Clean into the dining room and give him a few pointers on those new Moldonatos?"
The window washer said that he'd been doing his job for thirty-two years and could probably handle it on his own. He wasn't quite ready to start working, so he lit a cigarette and began talking about the recent tragedy involving Eric Clapton's young son, who fell something like fifty floors from his living room window.
"That was over at Seven Fifty-Seven, wasn't it?" the foreman asked.
The window men nodded their heads.
"Seven Fifty-Seven's got those Magnum Double Hungs that start eighteen inches from the floor. Christ, that's low. That Clapton character should have had a goddamned child guard and that's all there is to it!"
The window men agreed.
Then the window washer told a story about a young guy, first day on the job, who fell six stories while washing windows that could have been cleaned from the inside. "This kid didn't know an Acorn Tilt and Turn from a hole in the ground. So he's out there putting his hooks into get this the awning rings! Goddamned awning rings couldn't support the weight of a house cat but he digs in and WHAM falls six floors."
The window men shared a moment of silence.
I asked if the young man died and they all moaned, exhausted by my stupidity.
"Of course he died," the window washer said. "You can't take more than a four-story fall, not in this town anyway."
Then Jeffrey Lee got off the phone and said that, given a choice, he'd rather fall from a higher floor as it would allow more time for his life to flash before his eyes.
The window men said that all depends on the life you led. And then they changed the topic and began discussing women.
In today's mail I received two copies ofGiantess along with a letter from Hank, who writes, "Please keep in mind that stories featuring continuous, spectacular growth are among the most popular with our readers." The magazines contain stories titled "A Growing Girl," "Blimper" and "The Big Date." There are illustrations and ads for videos, one of which is titledTrample and Crush. This is a publication for men who long to explore a vagina the way others might visit the Luray Caverns. Reading it over I noticed that, once they start growing, the women become very moody and aggressive and the knee-high men seem to love it.
My sister once gave me a magazine called Knocked Up and Gun Toting, which featured nude, pregnant women sporting firearms: pistols, hunting rifles, Uzis you name it. I don't imagine Knocked Up and Gun Toting has a very wide circulation but I'm certain its subscribers are devoted and happy in their own way. Still, though, like with Giantess, I have a hard time sharing their fetish. I shudder at the thought of nipples the size of manhole covers. Beneath the surface the Giantess reader seems to be a man who longs for his infancy. He looks back fondly at the time he was dwarfed by his mother and scolded for soiling himself. And that's just about the last experience I care to reflect upon. Sure I received a few spankings but I never considered them a high point. I moved ahead and got on with my life. Didn't I?
The Curly Kind
I WAS carrying out the Rosenblatt's garbage this afternoon when the maid from the next apartment closed the door behind her, straightened her white uniform, and pushed the button for the elevator. This is the twelfth floor, four apartments per level and only one elevator, so it usually takes a while. I watched as the maid was joined by two young children accompanied by an Irish nanny. As they waited, the nanny reached into her canvas bag and handed the boy a bag of Cheetos, which he opened and immediately emptied onto the floor, screaming, "I wanted the CURLY kind. Don't you know ANYTHING?"
The nanny lowered her head while the maid and I locked eyes and shrugged our shoulders as if to say, "What can you do?" The elevator arrived and they boarded, leaving behind an orange mat of uncurly Cheetos, which will be crushed by the twelfth-floor tenants until a janitor is dispatched to sweep them up.
I have seen this next-door maid three or four times before. She is a refrigerator-sized dark-skinned woman wearing loafers with the backs cut away to make them more comfortable. I see her and think of
Lena Payne.
My mother was never much of a housekeeper and it drove me to distraction, the chaos of our home. Five years after moving to Raleigh we still had Mayflower boxes in the living room. I would return home from school, place my coat and books neatly in my bedroom, activate the vacuum cleaner and set to work gathering my sisters' clothing, their half-empty glasses, and the bowls of potato chip crumbs left before the television set, wash-ing dishes, polishing furniture, and thinking thatit wasn't fair. I had been switched at birth and carried back to the wrong household. Somewhere my natural family spent their days observing strict laboratory conditions, wondering what had become of me. My own bedroom was immaculate, a shrine. I cleaned it every day. My sisters were not allowed to cross the threshold. They stood in the hallway, observing me as if I were an exotic zoo animal displayed in his natural habitat.
While my mother was pregnant with her sixth child, my father finally gave in and allowed her to hire a housekeeper one day a week. When Lena was introduced I thought that finally we were getting somewhere. I left for school as my mother turned on the portable TV and handed her a cup of coffee. I returned from school seven hours later to find an ironing board in the kitchen, Mom and Lena in roughly the same position watch-ing TV and drinking coffee.
It struck me as the perfect union: the two laziest people on the face of the earth coming together to watch "Mike Douglas" and "General Hospital." I ran to touch the vacuum cleaner and found it stone cold. It wasn't fair.
Normally Mom would drive Lena to the shopping center, where she caught a ride home with a friend, but one day there was something good on TV so Lena stayed late. My mother offered to take her home, and I went along for the ride. We drove past the Raleigh I knew, beyond the paved streets and onto narrow dirt roads lined with shacks actual shacks, the type I had seen inLife magazine. When our station wagon pulled up, Lena's shack emptied and seven children gathered on the porch, shielding their eyes with their hands. The yard was bald and dusty, populated with chickens. I had never before seen a live chicken and decided I would like to have one as a pet. Lena said that I could have one if I could catch it. Identifying the chicken of my choice I immediately pictured her living in my own grassy yard, prancing for grain. Her name would be Penny, and every day she would kneel down and thank God that she lived with me and not with Lena. I thought that this chicken might come to me if I spoke to her in a comforting voice. I thought you could convince a chicken with the promise of a better life. When that didn't work I decided I might tackle a chicken and I tried, again and again. I dove for her, soiling my school clothes in clouds of dirt and dust. Finally I gave up. Standing to wipe the clay off my face I turned to see everyone laughing at me: Lena, her seven children, even my own mother doubled over in the front seat of the car. I remember turning toward the shack yelling, "I don't need your filthy chickens. We buy our own from the store."
Barrel Fever and Other Stories Page 15