Serendipity Green

by Rob Levandoski

  Dick Mueller nods. Of course he will coordinate the parade and the memorial services. And, and always, Delores Poltruski will coordinate the craft show and the food tents. And Paula Varney, as president of the Chamber of Commerce, will coordinate merchant contributions and the big sidewalk sale. And former Mayor Grinspoon will continue to coordinate his three favorite events: the pie-eating contest, the tobacco-spitting competition, and the closing night fireworks. And present Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne will coordinate participation by the various village service departments: the police for traffic control, fire engines for the parade, paramedics standing by, clean-up by the village’s maintenance engineer when it’s all over for another year.

  “And Kevin, I know this is your first year on the committee, but could you coordinate the carnival rides?”

  The dread of responsibility races through Kevin Hassock like embalming fluid through a corpse. Runaway tilt-a-whirls. Blood on the parking lot. Unbathed carnies from New Jersey and Alabama drugging and buggering junior high school kids. Lawsuits up the wazoo. “I’d be happy to,” Kevin Hassock says.

  “Just make sure they bring the big Ferris wheel,” D. William Aitchbone says. “They always try to sneak the little one in.”

  “Gotcha,” says Kevin Hassock.

  Finally, Katherine Hardihood again will coordinate the historical display at the library, the band concert at the gazebo, and, most importantly, the Re-Enactment.

  “And I’ll coordinate the coordination,” D. William Aitchbone says. It is another old Donald Grinspoon line. Everyone laughs, just as they had always laughed when Donald Grinspoon said it. Another homage to the old man’s authority and respect.

  D. William Aitchbone now listens intently as each of them, for a few minutes permitted to feel important, go over their checklists:

  Dick Mueller says the parade units, as usual, will line up at the old snack cake plant, proceed up East Wooseman to the square, go once around, then proceed out South Mill to the cemetery for the memorial services. Both the high school and junior high bands have agreed to march again, he says, and the Chirpy Chipmunks unicycle troupe from Akron also has expressed interest in returning, though he hasn’t talked to them since October. “But I will real soon,” he pledges.

  Delores Poltruski says that the food tents again will be set up on the north side of the square, and the craft booths on the east side, “making a nice convenient L,” she says. She warns of one potential problem. “Howie Dornick still hasn’t cut that dead limb out of the box elder. The Knights of Columbus are afraid if there’s any wind at all, that limb could come down right through the sloppy joe tent.”

  “We’ll get the limb cut,” Donald Grinspoon assures her, forgetting he is no longer mayor.

  The new mayor handles this awkward moment graciously. “We might just take the whole tree down,” Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne says. “There really aren’t that many limbs left anyway.”

  “It’s the only box elder left on the square,” Katherine Hardihood reminds everyone.

  The unanticipated dead-limb-debate delights D. William Aitchbone. “If you’ve noticed, Howie Dornick still hasn’t removed the Christmas decorations from the gazebo either,” he says. “So whether it’s just the one limb or the entire tree, Woody, you need to get Howie popping.”

  “I’ll talk to him in the morning,” Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne promises.

  “You might mention his house again,” D. William Aitchbone says.

  “Oh yes, please,” Paula Varney says. “Mention his house.”

  “His house is a disgrace,” Dick Mueller says.

  “And right on the parade route,” Delores Poltruski says.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” says Dick Mueller, his head going up and down like a rocking chair. “People from all over the Ohio line up on South Mill for the parade. Television crews, too.”

  “I’ll talk to Howie about painting his house,” Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne assures everyone.

  D. William Aitchbone now makes sure there is just the right amount of bristle in his voice. “We need more than talk, Woody.”

  Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne does not appreciate the bristle. He weakly bristles back. “I’ll handle it, Bill.”

  D. William Aitchbone fakes a nod of contrition and moves on to the next subcommittee report. “So, Donald, what you got planned for the pie-eating contest this year? Blueberry? Cherry?”

  Former Mayor Donald Grinspoon brightens. “Nothing makes a mess like blueberry.”

  Paula Varney rests her plump palm on the old man’s knuckles. “That reminds me, Donald. Tom Winkler at Denny’s says he’ll give us the pies at cost again.”

  Now it’s Katherine Hardihood’s turn to bristle. “I’m not sure what sticking your face in a blueberry pie has to do with remembering what happened to Princess Pogawedka.”

  D. William Aitchbone lets Katherine Hardihood’s dig slide. The subcommittee reports go on. Donald Grinspoon has a second cup of coffee. Three or four times Dick Mueller slips and called Delores Poltruski “Dee Dee.” Before the meeting ends D. William Aitchbone gives Kevin Hassock the phone number for the Happy Landings Ride Company; he also gives him a folder containing the already-signed contacts, permits, and insurance documents. “Looks easy enough,” Kevin Hassock says, greatly relieved that most of his work is already done.

  “Pretty cut and dried, really,” says D. William Aitchbone. “Just remember: Big Ferris wheel.”

  The year’s first meeting of the Squaw Days Committee ends. Members disappear like movie ghosts into the horizontal February snow. D. William Aitchbone catches up with Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne half way across the square. “Woody! Wait a sec!”

  The mayor stiffens and stops and turns into the goose-shitting snow.

  “Sorry if I got a little gruff before,” D. William Aitchbone says.

  The mayor bats the flakes away from his eyes. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. He wants to go home and have a bowl of raisin bran. He wants to watch Letterman. “I’ll talk to Howie in the morning.”

  D. William Aitchbone puts his hand on the mayor’s shoulder and swivels him about. They walk. “We’ve been talking to him for years, Woody. Talking to Howie Dornick is like trying to fart a rainbow.”

  “I think I can get Howie to cut down one box elder limb by August.”

  “Who cares about the box elder limb? The house, Woody. I want his goddamn house painted.”

  “Everybody wants his house painted. But you can’t order someone to paint their house.”

  “Not in so many words you can’t.”

  Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne stops and turns his face back into the snow and lets the flakes land where they may. “You want me to threaten him with his job? He’s Civil Service. And don’t forget he’s also the son of Artie Brown.”

  “The illegitimate son of Artie Brown,” D. William Aitchbone points out.

  “Well, he’s legitimately protected by Civil Service.”

  They walk on, to the top of the square. D. William Aitchbone’s American-made Japanese luxury sedan is parked across the street, four or five spaces down from Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne’s red Ford Tempo. “I just want Squaw Days to go well, Woody. It’s my first year as chairman. Just like it’s your first year as mayor. We both want things to go well, right?”

  “That we do.”

  D. William Aitchbone grins and extends his hand. “See you at the council meeting. I’ve got some interesting new ideas about plugging that budget shortfall.” He crosses the street and brushes the snow off his windshield. As he brushes, he shakes his head at the expensive giraffes in the window of Paula Varney’s something-to-do shop. One giraffe is dressed in a top hat and tails. Another wears a scarf and Russian fur hat. Most of the other giraffes are naked except for the pastel silk ribbons around their endless necks. “Who in their right mind would pay that kind of money for a stuffed animal?” he asks himself.

  Paula Varney is not the only something-to-do shopkeeper on the
square. Something-to-do is the objective of most of the shops on the square these days. These days the real retail action is along the ever-expanding strip on West Wooseman, where Wal-mart and Kmart do battle 24 hours a day; where McDonald’s and Burger King and Denny’s and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell do battle; where the two quick-stop oil-change shops and the two fully automated car washes do battle; where four Chinese take-outs and three sub shops do battle; where two national supermarket chains, three national convenience-store chains and four national gas-mart chains do battle; where a national hardware chain battles with a national home improvement chain; where five national banks and their handy 24-hour ATMs do battle; where three car dealerships do battle; where a national drug store chain with “always-low” prices battles a national drugstore chain offering “everyday prices”; where local paychecks are surrendered to faraway corporate stockholders; where criminals all the way from Cleveland gather to steal CD players from cars, if not the cars themselves.

  The strip on West Wooseman leaves precious little important commerce for the old brick buildings surrounding the square. And so there is Paula Varney’s Just Giraffes stuffed animal shop where H. W. Colby’s Hardware used to be; an art gallery and framing shop where Borden Brother’s Shoes used to be; one antique shop where Porter’s Western Auto used to be, another where Morton’s IGA used to be; a travel agency where Klinger’s Paint used to be; the Pizza Tepee with its wooden Indian holding a large Italian pie, each pepperoni slice intricately carved, where Sylvia’s Family Restaurant used to be; the Daydream Beanery with its muffins and cappuccino and brain-numbing dulcimer music, where Grinspoon’s Department Store used to be.

  So all the real businesses and the real business people are gone from the square, either forced to close or forced to relocate to one of the asphalt-moated plazas on West Wooseman, on the flat fertile soil that used to be the Van Welter family farm and the Grabenstetter family farm and the Warner family farm and the McBiffy family farm.

  When Karen Aitchbone feels her husband slip into bed, she whispers what she whispers at least three nights a week. “How’d your meeting go, honey bun?”

  D. William Aitchbone kisses his wife’s cold ear. “That woman has got more brass than a marching band.”

  She knows who he’s talking about. He’s talking about Katherine Hardihood.

  3

  Katherine Hardihood is the last to leave the library community room. She is the last to leave because she has the key. She has the key because she is head librarian of the Tuttwyler branch. She has been head librarian for twenty-one years now. She also is one of the original members of the Squaw Days Committee, along with Donald Grinspoon, Delores Poltruski, and unfortunately, D. William Aitchbone.

  A year shy of fifty, Katherine Hardihood has not a single physical feature a man might find appetizing. She is a throwback—and she knows it—to the time when all unappetizing women—if their brains could carry it—served their communities as either schoolteachers or librarians. But no one in Tuttwyler feels particularly sorry for Katherine Hardihood. It is obvious to all that she loves her solitary librarian’s life.

  She pulls the plug on the Mr. Coffee and turns the thermostat down to sixty. Before clicking off the lights, she pulls a white knit hat over her straight, chopped-at-the-jaw librarian’s hair. She loops a matching scarf around her spindly librarian’s neck. She spider-walks her dry librarian’s fingers into a pair of white mittens, then pulls on a noisy caramel-brown polyester coat. It falls all the way to her blue Eskimo boots, which she had worn throughout the meeting to keep her flat librarian’s feet warm. She closes the door behind her, twice shaking the knob to make sure it’s locked. She ascends into the horizontal snow, her enormous librarian’s glasses protecting her square librarian’s head like the visor on a welder’s helmet.

  Despite I-491, Tuttwyler is still far enough from Cleveland for Katherine Hardihood to walk home alone in the dark, though she does hold the community room key ready in her be-mittened hand. She knows just what to do if she’s attacked: She’ll take that key and pop the rapist’s eye like a raw oyster, and scream at the top of her librarian’s lungs, fire, fire, fire. She’s read somewhere that yelling help chases good Samaritans away, while yelling fire brings them in droves. So she’ll yell fire, fire, fire.

  She walks down East Wooseman to North Grant. The old three-story Odd Fellows building, now an antique mall, keeps the wind and snow away from her for an entire block. The In & Out convenience store is still open and she considers going in for a pint of lime sherbet, but through the front window she sees Dick Mueller and Delores Poltruski browsing the snack aisle. She will give them their space. Who in their right mind eats sherbet on a night like this, anyway? She crosses the snow covered parking lot and heads up Oak Street.

  Oak is a modest street, lined not with oaks but with evergreens and sycamore. Most of the houses on Oak were built just after World War II, affordable starter homes for newly returned GIs and their high school sweetheart brides. They are tiny, two-bedroom ranches with one bathroom, no dining room, and a kitchen hardly wide enough for a table. Despite their modest profiles, these houses are painted the same soapy white as the impressive giants on South Mill. And all have dark green shutters.

  Katherine Hardihood’s tiny ranch is exactly half way down Oak Street. Still three houses away she can see her orange cat, Rhubarb, sitting on the window table, as straight and still as a bowling trophy. “There’s my little mister,” she sings out. She exchanges the community room key for her house key and goes in. The dark-yellow stench of ammonia fills her narrow librarian’s nose. “Jiminy Cricket, Rhubarb, not again!”

  What Rhubarb has done again is piss the curio cabinet. Backed up and pissed it like an African lion marking the baobab tree where he hangs his kill.

  Katherine Hardihood goes immediately for the rag and Pine Sol she keeps under the sink. Still in her noisy coat, knit hat and mittens, she wipes down the cabinet, then goes twice around her miniature living room with a spraycan of Glade. She picks up Rhubarb and cradles him on his back like a human baby. She buries her face in his soft belly, his full tomcat balls just a half-inch from her hollow librarian’s cheek. “You’re worse than Bill Aitchbone, do you know that?” she says in that high gooey voice people reserve for babies and pets. “Do you know that? Do you? Hmmm?”

  As she talks to Rhubarb she can see Dick Mueller pull into his driveway. A few seconds later Delores Poltruski pulls in. Snacks in hand they go inside. A bad night for sherbet, maybe, but a good night for love.

  Katherine Hardihood does not mind that Dick and Delores are copulating right across the street from her. She does not mind that people up and down Oak Street are copulating. She does not mind that people all over Old Tuttwyler and New Tuttwyler, and all over the world are copulating. She loves her uncomplicated, uncopulative life. She loves her little house and her big pissing tomcat. Most of all she loves the library.

  Katherine Hardihood never knew Rhubarb’s first human name, if indeed he ever had one. She found him three hot Junes ago, already full-grown, licking the melted chocolate off a Milky Way wrapper in the parking lot of the In & Out. It was obvious from his intense licking, and the enormous size of his head in relationship to the rest of his scrawny frame, that he was a starving street cat. So she took him home and fed him milk and tunafish and bowl after bowl of Meow Mix. And she cuddled him and snuggled him and talked and sang to him, and went for the Pine Sol whenever he pissed the curio cabinet she inherited from her Aunt Edith. She named the cat Melvil, after Melvil Dewey, originator of the Dewey Decimal system.

  One August morning, when Melvil was finally fat, and his head again in proper proportion to his body, she let him outside. He disappeared until November, reappearing at her back door during the year’s first real snow, as scrawny and big-headed as before. The following summer when she again let Melvil outside, she tied him to twenty feet of clothesline. Fastened to a stake in the middle of the yard, Melvil was free to explore as he wished now, th
ough his world was infinitely smaller, and no matter which direction he went, he always ended up back where he began.

  Melvil at first hated the clothesline and his bejeweled pink collar, and his Magellan-like existence. He strained so hard to pull free that he wore the fur off his neck. But after a few outings he surrendered to his mistress’ madness and accepted his shrunken world. When he was hungry or thirsty he’d circle to the backdoor where his Meow Mix and water bowls sat. When he wanted to warm up, he’d sit in full sun on the edge of the concrete patio. When he got too warm, he’d make a half-circle to the rhubarb patch, and shade himself under the broad green leaves.

  Katherine Hardihood had not planted the rhubarb. It had been planted years ago by the original owner of the house, Phil Davenport, high school buddy of Artie Brown—the same Artie Brown who came home from World War II with one foot and a Congressional Medal of Honor, and in the glow of his celebrity, impregnated Lois Dornick, an appetizing girl still in high school.

  Seeing Melvil encamped under the rhubarb leaves made Katherine Hardihood laugh, and made her love him more. Soon she was calling him Rhubarb more than Melvil. Soon Rhubarb was his name.

  Sometimes she would anger Rhubarb by clipping off the red stalks that supported his leafy canopy, and then bake them into a pie. Once she had given a piece of her rhubarb pie to Howie Dornick when he was working in front of her house, cleaning out the storm sewer. He ate it in four or five bites and told her it was very good. For a few days afterward she considered baking him an entire rhubarb pie, and taking it to his unpainted house on South Mill. But in the end she didn’t. Despite being born of a beautiful high school girl, and sired by a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Howie Dornick was as unappetizing as she.

  Katherine Hardihood loves the library because that’s where the facts are. She loves facts—any fact that pertains to something or someone other than herself. She loves finding out that tomatoes aren’t a vegetable but a fruit; that the button was invented in 1200 AD; that the words truth, tree and endure share the same Indo-European root, deru; that the gestation period for the opossum is just 13 days; that a black man from Cleveland, Garrett A. Morgan, invented those automatic traffic lights that go from red to yellow to green, like the new one at South Mill and Tocqueville.