by Daniel Klein
Michael casts a quick glance up at her, then flashes a look of mock incredulity—Can you believe how gorgeous this girl is?—to his table mate. Up here in the country, Michael feels this kind of man-to-man exchange is not only permissible, but an expedient social leveler. But Terry Cyzinski does not respond; he suspects Dowd may be testing his political correctness.
After their orders are taken, Cyzinski says, “I’ll tell you the truth, Dowd. We never sent anybody to Harvard. Or Yale or Princeton for that matter. At least since I’ve been around.”
“Why’s that?”
Cyzinski shrugs. “Just hasn’t been on our radar.”
“Does it seem like too much of a reach for your kids?”
Cyzinski nods. “Plus, it’s not in most of their families’ budgets.”
“Harvard is need blind,” Michael says earnestly.
“What’s that?”
“They decide who gets in first. And only afterwards do they open the financial aid envelope.”
Cyzinski looks deeply impressed. Michael likes that the man does not even attempt to hide his awe.
“So what are they looking for?” Cyzinski asks.
“Good question,” Michael answers. The girl arrives with their drinks and he takes his—his first bloody Mary of the season—without looking at her this time. “Actually I have a pretty good answer to it. They aren’t looking for one kind of kid, they’re looking for a whole bunch of very different, but very particular kids.”
No one at Harvard or the Harvard Club ever explained this calculus to Michael; he figured it out on his own. The college is a community of eight thousand—a little larger than Grandville—and that community is loaded with almost one hundred student associations: drama groups; singing groups; two different orchestras; a fencing team; a cross-country skiing team; even a water polo team. The list goes on. Well, every one of those clubs and teams needs members to operate—very specific members. Say, the wrestling team’s 197-pounder just graduated and there is nobody to fill his spot. The wrestling coach takes a stroll over to University Hall and informs the dean of admissions he needs a 197-pounder in the incoming class.
The same was true in the academic departments. Harvard has five tenured professors who teach Latin and Greek. So what happens when there is a precipitous drop in classics majors? The head of the department strolls over to University Hall. On top of that, Harvard is committed to taking at least one kid from every state in the union.
“For us, that means niche marketing,” Michael says in conclusion. “I always say that the best way to get into Harvard is to move to Mississippi, take up the bassoon, and perfect your game of water polo.”
Cyzinski is smiling. “So how do you know what they need? What’s missing in their mix for the coming year?”
“Research. Straight from the source,” Michael replies, smiling back. “But why don’t we start with what you’ve got? What your top kids have to offer.”
“How top?”
“1350 SATs. That’s minimum. And class rank no lower than number five.”
Cyzinski leans back in his chair. He hasn’t touched his drink, a Heineken’s light. Several seconds pass before he says, “How about tennis? Girls’ tennis.”
“Good. I’ll check the job market for girl tennis players and let you know soon, Terry,” Michael says. He turns to the café window and gazes down Railroad Street. He feels a swell of well-being in his chest and shoulders. It is the feeling of having found his place here in Grandville.
It is just past nine o’clock on a weeknight after the summer people have gone, so there are few pedestrians on the sidewalks. Local restaurant patrons eat an hour or two earlier than the tourists do. The only noticeable movement is the shimmering shadows of poplar leaves cast by the streetlights on Railroad Street’s old brick buildings.
Unlike New York City where Dowd lived for most of his life, Grandville can almost be taken in at a glance. It has a comprehensibility that springs from limited variables. If one sees Mrs. Carpolino at the post office in the morning, it is not in the least surprising to see her again at the Grand Union supermarket in the late afternoon, and even again that evening as she makes her way with her new aluminum walker down Main Street, heading for the quilt sewing circle at the Congregational Church. A remarkable coincidence in Manhattan is a natural beat in the rhythm of daily life here. Although Michael Dowd has now lived full-time in Grandville for almost a year, he does not completely grasp this phenomenon; he may notice it now and then, but it is not yet part of his nervous system’s expectations. That is why Michael is startled when he sees his wife, Babs, round the corner of Main and Railroad at the center of a small group of men and women.
Without thinking, Michael waves at her through the café window but, of course, she does not see him. Again without forethought, Michael raps sharply on the windowpane, hoping to get her attention, but Babs is more than a hundred feet away on the other side of the glass and her companions are noisy. Several patrons at Santorini’s, however, turn from their drinks and each other to see what Dowd is up to. Terry Cyzinski is bewildered too. He follows Dowd’s gaze down Railroad Street where he sees an attractive, auburn-haired woman suddenly wrap her arms around Ned Shields, the drama teacher at Berkshire Community College. The woman looks enchanted.
* * *
Franny opted out of the regular, after-meeting drinks at the Railroad Car, saying that she had promised to help Lila with her homework. If some of the Grandville Players guessed her real reason for not joining them—and Franny was certain some did—they covered it well with solicitous comments about all the homework teachers gave kids these days. But Franny is pretty sure that Babs Dowd does not have an inkling of her state of mind, and for that she feels relieved.
Franny detests Babs’s play. It makes her angrier than she would have guessed any amateur play could. It is not its cartoonishness that gets to her; hell, Franny directed the Players’ production of Little Murders. Nor its obviousness or its catchy, TV commercial-like dialogue. She could even tolerate Babs Dowd’s grand larceny from Angels In America in the form of her Angel/Clown who descends into the White House bunker in a beribboned bassinet to enlighten the dim-witted evangelist preacher; certainly it posed no threat to Tony Kushner’s masterpiece.
But, oh, the smugness of that woman’s play! Its self-satisfied certitude that we are so smart and they—the Christian right-wingers—are so moronic. That we, the cognoscenti, have to dumb-down our arguments to reach their feeble minds and save them from themselves. God knows, Franny is every bit as upset by the ultraconservatives as Babs is. That is exactly why she wanted to put on The Crucible. But dammit, Mrs. Dowd, you need to get inside these people’s minds and hearts before you ridicule them!
Climbing the hill to Mahaiwe Street, Franny curses Babs Dowd out loud without intending to. She is startled by her own voice. The street is empty so no one has heard her, but nonetheless she decides she needs to get a grip on herself. Come on, girl, it’s only a play!
Franny has always thought of herself as easygoing like her father, but lately malicious moods have been sneaking up on her. One moment she is merrily singing along with ‘N Sync’ on the shop radio and the next she is fuming about some port in Florida that refuses to allow a Greenpeace ship to dock. Everything in the world suddenly feels personal—the refused ship, a batch of tasteless birthday cards Hallmark just sent to her shop, a suicide bombing in Kashmir, Babs’s inane play, the war in Iraq.
Damn it, that is the problem right there: there is no scale to her anger! All the indignities and stupidities of the world—small or large, local or global—enrage her equally. Ah, so the fault must lie in her self, for she has hormones. Franny’s mother went into a temperamental menopause when she was only thirty-eight, reason enough to suspect the same was happening to Franny—even if the idea of being similar to her mother in any way was abhorrent. Franny stands motionless under Mahaiwe Street’s lone streetlight, calming herself by letting her imagination parody Mrs. Dowd�
�s ridiculous parody of a play:
Enter Clown/Angel from above under single spotlight: Hormones, schmormones! The world is a mess, Franny-girl! And if your hormones have anything to do with it, they’ve only made you more sensitive to the ugliness you’ve been blind to until now. They’ve opened your eyes!
Franny: Just as I thought, you are as insipid as you look! Let me guess, Clowny, you’re crying on the inside, right?
Clown/Angel: Actually, I’m praying on the inside.
Franny: God save us!
Clown/Angel: You said it.
Franny: I suppose in your world of infinite treacle all tragedies are equal—a stubbed toe, genocide in Rwanda, bad hair.
Clown/Angel: That’s true, Missy deVries. It’s all relative. Human agony is human agony whatever the cause.
Franny: That’s amoral!
Clown/Angel : No, that’s amore!
Franny laughs out loud as she continues up the street, and she is still smiling when she lets herself in her front door. Wendell looks up from his book and says, “Hey, pal, you’re early tonight.”
“I was feeling anti-social, so I had a good talk with myself instead.”
“You meet a better class of people that way.”
“How’s Lila?”
“Good,” Wendell replies. He is not ready to talk about Lila’s newfound interest in deVries genealogy, so he does not. He and Franny are so effortlessly connected they can hold things back from one another in good faith.
“I see our neighbors moved out already,” Franny says. The other half of their house has had a rapid turnover of occupants in the past few years.
“Can’t be anything I said, because I never got a chance to speak to them,” Wendell says, smiling.
“I’m bushed. Think I’ll turn in,” Franny says.
“Goodnight, Franny.” Wendell watches his daughter disappear up the stairway, then turns back to the poetry book he selected for this evening, his Langston Hughes anthology.
CHAPTER THREE
Of all the discussion topics that come and go inside Franny’s shop—the new dentist who is taking over Dr. Schuster’s practice; the state highway crew that is taking forever to paint the Main Street Bridge; the whooping cough outbreak at the Rudolf Steiner School where they refuse to inoculate their kids—the topic with the most staying power is, The Day Grandville Changed Forever.
By this, the discussers mean that tipping point when Grandville no longer was a town unto itself but became a mere adjunct to something larger. As Write Now topics go, this one is fairly abstract, touching on the culture of place, on manners, even on what many call the “new feeling in the air,” as well as on more concrete conditions like the price of real estate and the flow of traffic. Franny, who finds these debates more interesting than most, especially likes the commonly-held assumption that a single event marked the change. What precise straw broke Grandville’s back? For Franny, there is a literary feel to this question; it reminds her of the defining moment—the rupture of the violin string—in ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ In fact, these discussions often rouse memories of debates in her college Russian drama class, although here—thank God—the word ‘symbolism’ is never uttered.
For a while, the final closing of the Grandville Fairgrounds was the winner of the tipping-point sweepstakes. The Grandville Fair had been the longest-running country fair in the entire country—one hundred and fifty-five nonstop years—until 1999 when it remained as dormant and desolate through the summer as it was throughout the rest of the year. It never reopened. Some blamed the end of the fair on the tornado that touched down on the fairgrounds in ’98, destroying most of its wooden stables, but others insisted that the fair had been doomed for years before that. To start with, there had not been a chapter of the 4-H Club in town for almost two decades, so gone were the sheep-shearing demonstrations, the giant zucchini contest, and everybody’s favorite, the hog obstacle course competition. All that remained of the Grandville Fair’s farmland past was the Lenox Garden Club’s cut flower exhibit and, most of Franny’s patrons agreed, that smacked more of suburbia than of agriculture.
For years before the tornado, the fair had become nothing more than an annual excuse for legalized gambling, a Mardi Gras-like furlough from sensible New England thrift. A caravan of second-rate racehorses and third-rate jockeys would amble onto the fairgrounds like the troops of faded, has-been actors that appeared at the Phoenix in the final years of live performances there. Grandvillians wagered up to fifty dollars per race although they all knew the races were fixed, that the winners at the Grandville Fair were chosen at the previous fair the caravan had worked somewhere in western Pennsylvania. No mind. Guessing which horse the fix was on was just as reliable as picking a winner by studying the horses’ rickety flanks as they paraded by in the fairground’s paddock.
Recently, however, the demise of the Grandville Fair has lost popularity as Grandville’s official swan song. For that honor, Franny’s rotating discussion group now focuses on the town’s new restaurants. Franny can remember when there were only three places to eat out in Grandville: the Phoenix Café and the Railroad Car in town, and Friendly’s out on Route 7. Now there were a total of thirty-three of them, including two Italian restaurants, two Chinese, an Indian, a Greek, and a Japanese, as well as a good dozen gourmet establishments with prices that few year-rounders can afford. As Archie Morris pointed out just the other day, one of these chichi joints recently dropped both potatoes and pasta from its menu in deference to that low-carb diet all the second-home people were on.
“That’s got to be it,” Archie said. “When you don’t serve potatoes in Grandville, it ain’t Grandville anymore.”
Franny is always charmed by the freshness of Archie Morris’s perceptions. In large part, Archie’s originality stems from his basic illiteracy; he has little idea what others have said or written before him, so most of his notions are original. Franny believes this constitutes the most undervalued quality of ignorance.
But today’s nod goes to Nakota out on the highway, and not simply because the pricey Japanese restaurant serves raw fish, but because it replaced Friendly’s. Two and three generations of Grandville families have gone out for an early Sunday dinner at Friendly’s, consuming Awful Awfuls, deep-fried cod, and burgers on toast with a side of creamy cole slaw, all the while joking with the waitresses, every one of them Grandville High girls. This treat was both predictable and affordable. Even if Friendly’s was part of a restaurant chain, it was a Massachusetts chain, and it felt homey.
From a strictly economic viewpoint, it was probably the McDonald’s out by Grand Union that did Friendly’s in. But it is the way some architect reconfigured Friendly’s basic, farmhouse-like structure into an ersatz pagoda—even transforming the restaurant’s signature crowning cupola into an oriental spire—that rankles Franny’s patrons. Now that marked the end of Grandville as a town of one’s own.
* * *
Lila deVries sees Nakota as an island of rescue. She works there six afternoons and nights a week in the summer, and Friday and Saturday nights during the school year. Among other things, it rescues her from dating. The boys of Grandville High know her work schedule and no longer bother to ask her out anymore, which is nothing but a relief to her. The idea of cruising in a car or going to the movies with any one of those boys feels like emotional suicide, one more deadening experience in a daily assault of deadening experiences. What other people in town find comforting in the ring of mountains that surrounds Grandville, Lila finds imprisoning.
She comes to life at Nakota. Actually, she enters an alternate life there. As one of only two Caucasians on the staff—the other is a fiftyish bartender who commutes from Westfield—Lila feels exotic, foreign, a stranger. She savors the otherness she feels, seeing faces and hearing words that exist so completely apart from her. Sometimes, it all feels like a hallucination.
Yet Lila also feels a pull to be one of them, both the Japanese women with whom she works in the dining room a
nd the Latino young men in the kitchen. With the help of Takaaki, a waitress of twenty who looks much younger, Lila has learned to properly pronounce every item on the menu, from the colliding ‘ch’s and ‘sh’s of chirashi-zushi to the sputtering consonants of teppanyaki. Sometimes, in a quiet, authoritative voice, she will even correct the pronunciation of her customers. And although there is nothing particularly Asian about the white blouses and black skirts required of the wait staff, Lila took a bus all the way to Pittsfield just to find a short-collared, Pima cotton blouse that matched those of the Japanese girls.
She is also picking up Mexican and Colombian slang from the boys in the kitchen. They adore her, of course. Her blonde hair alone would be sufficient for that adoration, but Lila’s grace with them, her interest in their lives, especially endears her to them. Most of them come from inner-city slums and shantytowns on the periphery of overcrowded South American cities. When Lila told her grandfather that some of these boys had already learned how to slice slabs of raw fish with a razor-sharp knife into delicate sushi portions, he burst out laughing. “Adaptability!” he had roared. “Man’s greatest gift!”
Between seven-thirty and eight, there is usually a lull at the restaurant, so that is when the staff takes staggered, ten-minute breaks. Early on, Lila realized that during these breaks the Japanese women like to chatter in their own language just outside the kitchen door, so she usually has a cigarette with one or two of the Latino boys out by the dumpster. The boys are afraid to flirt with her and that is not what she wants anyhow, so they just joke around the best they can in the limited vocabulary they have in common.