by Cathy Day
If instead he'd hired young ones, high school girls, they might have thought it was a love affair, but Lois and Polly and Constance and Jane and Myrtle and Georgia were old enough, smart enough, to know better. "You and me, we're just lonely people with needs." That's what Ollie said, handing over a tuna-noodle casserole. After a polite peck good-night, Ollie went home where he knew Mildred would already be asleep.
In Between Polly and Constance
OLLIE TRIED "Stars Fell" again, hoping to awaken the other Mildred. She did not emerge, but the old Mildred obliged him without much of a fuss. Nine months later, their daughter, Laura, was born.
In Between Constance and Jane
IN HER JOB interview, Constance told Ollie that her estranged husband was in the army, fighting Japs in the South Pacific. He'd left without a good-bye. "I hope he gets shot," Constance said. A year later, he did—lost a foot and wrote her a long letter from the hospital, begging her to come to California. Ollie spent five months looking for a suitable replacement. "Women willing to work in a hot laundry aren't so easy to come by anymore," Ollie told his wife, "what with the war and all." Mildred offered to help out, but Ollie wouldn't hear of it.
During the prolonged job search, Ollie got desperate. He tried "Stars Fell," and again, Mildred obliged. Confusing her easy acquiescence for ardor, he approached Mildred from the rear. As they rocked together, he thought he heard her saying" oooohh. "Finally, he'd found the other Mildred. Afterward, she stayed quiet for a long time, then rose from the bed on shaky legs. "The baby," she said more to herself than to him. Ollie fell into a happy sleep.
Two months later, Mildred miscarried in the bathtub. The doctor said, "Give her time, Ollie. Let her be." So he took Laura with him to Clown Alley, kept her in a laundry basket on the counter while he worked. He told his customers that his wife was ill, "so I'm helping out until she gets on her feet again." Jane, his newest employee, wouldn't join him in the office, not as long as the baby was there. Going to Mildred for release was out of the question—she spent all her time in bed, carrying her baby's ghost to term. At first, Ollie resorted to long bathroom breaks, but eventually during his seven months of full-time fathering and laundering, his well of desire went dry. Maybe this is what Mildred feels all the time, he thought, this nothing. Ollie had to admit, however, that he appreciated the efficiency, the focus of that nothing.
On the day that her baby would have been born, Mildred rose, went to church, and resumed her life as if nothing had happened. She never spoke of those months.
With time and rain, Ollie's well filled again, and he tried "Stars Fell." Mildred said, "You can go to hell, Ollie Hofstadter."
He never bothered touching her that way again.
The Family Library
IN OLLIE AND Mildred's living room, there was a set of shelves filled with Reader's Digest Condensed Books, the complete works of Louis L'Amour, dime-store paperbacks, and subscriptions to popular magazines. Pressed within the pages of these books and magazines were seventy years' worth of letters Mildred and Ollie wrote to each other. They left each other notes stuck in something they thought the other was reading or might read soon. They guessed wrong sometimes, and on more than one occasion, ten years passed between delivery and receipt.
On [>] of Riders of the Purple Sage: "Ollie, you have made my life a misery. If it wasn't for the fact that I believe God punishes those who divorce, I would leave you and take our daughter with me."
On [>] of Gone with the Wind: Advertisement for Dr. Drago's Female Passion Potion. "Guaranteed to increase a woman's libido or your money back!"
On [>] of National Geographic: "You are a perverted man, looking at these pictures of jungle women. Your seed is animal tainted. Our baby was conceived in sin, in the posture of dogs, and that's why we lost the child."
On [>] of Good Housekeeping: "Dear Abby, I love my wife, but I believe she is frigid. We no longer even sleep in the same bed. What can I do to save my marriage? Signed, Frustrated in Fresno."
On [>] of The Hound of the Baskervilles: "Dear Ann Landers, I think my husband is having an affair with his secretary. I don't want to follow him around because it's so unseemly, and I'm not even sure if I want to know. I'm so degraded. What do I do? Signed, A Devoted Wife."
On [>] of Love's Wicked Ways: "Dear Mildred, if I have made your life a misery, you have done the same to mine. You are a cold, cold fish."
The Third Time Ollie Got His Name in the Paper
WHEN THEIR DAUGHTER, Laura, announced she was going to marry Ethan Perdido, heir to the Perdido Funeral Home, Mildred rejoiced. The Perdidos lived in one of the nicest houses in town. Ollie, on the other hand, wasn't too sure about the match. Laura seemed more bored than in love, as if she were marrying to have something to do. The boy loved her to death—that was clear. When Ethan came to dinner, he followed Laura with his eyes wherever she went, but Laura was aloof and distant, like her mother.
One night in bed, Ollie heard Laura creaking up the steps. He checked the clock—it was after two. Since the engagement, they'd moved her curfew from eleven to midnight, but she broke it regularly. That night, she'd gone to one of Ethan's baseball games, but that was hours ago. Mildred stirred next to him. "Was that Laura?"
"It was nothing," he lied. "She's already in bed."
"She'd better not have been at the Perdido's house on Yellow Lake." Mildred yawned. "Her hair smelled like fish the other morning."
"Well, I hope they are going up there. To see if they're suited for each other. Good for them."
"Oh, you would say that." Mildred rolled over. "Well, I'm sure she's a good girl. We raised her right."
Ollie wasn't sure if he'd raised his daughter right or not. He couldn't remember anything specific he'd ever taught her. Truly, Laura mystified him. He looked at her one morning standing at the sink and thought, Who is this? He wondered what a father was supposed to do, to feel, but he had no idea. For a while, he made a conscious effort to touch her once a day—her shoulder, her hand—but she always flinched. Ollie stopped that the day she called him a creep and Mildred gave him one of her withering looks.
Now, Laura was grown-up and getting married, and he'd never gotten to know her at all. For this, Ollie was ashamed, so he spent too much on her wedding.
Six months later, Laura gave birth to his grandchild, Jennifer. Mildred tried telling folks the baby was premature, but the Lima Journal published birth announcements complete with all the details, including the fact that Jennifer Perdido, daughter of Ethan and Laura Perdido, granddaughter of Ollie and Mildred Hofstadter, weighed in at almost eight pounds. Mildred was mortified—everyone in town would know!—but it amused the hell out of Ollie.
Birthday: 1969
FOR A WHILE, every birthday after Ollie's thirty-fifth had felt like a gift, but now he was tired of presents he hadn't asked for, didn't deserve, and couldn't return. Already, his friends were dying—at least once a month, he recognized someone on the obituary page of the Lima Journal. Ollie figured he'd live to see seventy, exactly twice as long as his father had lived, and that would be that. Surely, he'd almost used up his father's unspent heartbeats. Against Mildred's wishes ("You're in perfectly good health," she said), he sold Clown Alley and retired. He would spend his remaining time in peace.
On his birthday, Ollie celebrated by visiting Mount Pleasant Cemetery. He bought a plot and had his headstone engraved, including a quote he remembered from when he trouped with the circus, the last thing the ringmaster said at the end of the show.
OLLIE F. HOFSTADTER
1900–
MAY ALL YOUR DAYS BE CIRCUS DAYS
Then he went home and rummaged around the hall closet for a while until he found it. Despite Mildred's objections, the bullhook stood sentry beside his easy chair while he waited for death to walk in the door to claim him.
Retirement
HE ROSE AT FIVE or six and drank coffee alone in the dim kitchen, waiting for the sun to rise. As soon as he heard Mildred stirring upstairs, h
e left the house; in the winter, he went to the garage to smoke a pipe, and in the summer, he walked. By the time he returned, Mildred would be gone. She'd told him she couldn't stand to share the house with him all day long, so she volunteered down at the Lima County Historical Museum four days a week, collecting admission fees and giving tours. "Why don't you donate that old stick to the museum?" she asked, pointing behind his chair. "Round out the collection. We've got a nice display set up with that old elephant's head." Ollie thought that was just about the meanest thing she'd ever said to him, and that was saying a lot.
In the afternoons, he watched soap operas while Mildred went to her meetings: Flower Club and Women's Circle and Circle K and Book Circle and the Ladies' Prayer Auxiliary. At four, Ollie napped and Mildred came home and started dinner. At five, she woke him by letting the oven door slam shut or rattling the pots on the stove. They ate in silence on TV trays in the living room, watching whatever was on.
At nine, Mildred would yawn, run her bath, and go to bed. Ollie would stay up another hour or so, smoking his pipe in the dark room, listening to his house. Finally, he'd slide into bed beside Mildred. Long ago, Mildred had insisted they not get separate beds because she didn't want her friends to come over, see the brother-and-sisterish twin set, and start talking about her.
There's not much else to tell, really. Whole days went by just like this. Days. Weeks. Years.
Days of Our Lives
WHEN JENNY WAS in second grade, she came down with a bad ear infection that kept her out of school for a month. Because her parents both worked, she went to her grandpa Ollie's house. They started watching Days of Our Lives together. After she went back to school, Jenny came over in the summers to get caught up on all she'd missed in the previous eight months. She said, "I can't believe you can skip so many episodes and still know what's going on. Nothing hardly changes."
"I wouldn't know," Ollie told her. "I watch it every single day."
By the Time You Read This, I Will be Gone
ONE DAY, Laura went missing. She'd gone out for a drive in Ethan's hearse and never came back. They found the hearse in a Chicago parking garage. The police said she had either been abducted or she'd run off, but they couldn't prove one way or the other. Mildred was certain her daughter was dead, and she prayed for a body for Ethan to bury, but none ever turned up.
A few months after her disappearance, Ollie found a letter from Laura in an old Life magazine:" Dear Mom and Dad, by the time you read this, I will be gone. "He took it to the police, certain it was proof she'd run away and was alive somewhere if they'd just get off their butts and look. The detective asked him, "How's your eyesight, Mr. Hofstadter?" Ollie told him it wasn't too good. "Well, I'm afraid this letter can't help us much, sir." It was dated 1967.
In Sickness and In Health
IN 1995, Ollie fell down and broke his hip. After the surgery, Mildred told the doctors she couldn't care for him at home, and they suggested she find him a bed at Sunset Village, a local nursing home that smelled of urine, mothballs, and talcum. He agreed on two conditions: that Mildred wouldn't sell the house to pay for it, and that he be allowed to take his bullhook with him. Mildred honored one of his wishes.
Once he was settled, Mildred sold their house and most of their furniture and moved into an apartment complex for senior citizens. She didn't tell Ollie this. On her Sunday visits, Mildred sometimes took him for a drive, and he often asked her to go past their house. One day, they went by and there was a little boy digging a hole in the front yard. Mildred told him it was the son of their new next-door neighbors. Ollie said, "Don't let him dig up the hostas. We paid a fortune for those."
The Lord Hears All Prayers
THE NEW PASTOR from Mildred's church came by. Reverend McCanliss or McCormick or something. He'd been pastor for over a year and was finally getting around to visiting the shut-ins. "Your wife tells me you've never been a churchgoing man, but that you might have some things you want to get off your chest," he said, smiling. Ollie laughed and sent the man away. Then he started thinking about all the things he wasn't too proud of. The lineups and the Cowboy and Indian act and the girls in his office. And Laura. Yes, Laura most of all.
Ollie picked up the bullhook next to his bed and held it in the air. A radio transmitter sending his regrets straight to God and to Laura, wherever she was. The bullhook quivered above him, and Ollie let himself believe this meant something. He kept his eyes upward—not seeing, ignoring, his shaking hands.
Apples and Bras and Greasepaint
OLLIE ASKED the nurses at Sunset Village when he was going home. At first, they were nice and said, "Oh, Mr. Ollie. You can't go home now. We like you too much." But he kept asking, every day his voice getting louder, so they lost their patience and told him the truth. "Your wife sold your house, Mr. Hofstadter. You've just forgotten." Maybe he had forgotten. He was forgetting a lot of things, sure, but never a whole house. He told Mildred what the nurses said, and she promised to send a complaint to their supervisor.
Every day was new because every night he forgot the day before. Instead, Ollie started remembering things he hadn't thought about for a long time: the swish of Mildred's taffeta skirt, his mother paring apples for her famous apple strudel, the way his friend Joe snored, his girl Lois hooking her bra in his office at the cleaners on Tuesday nights. Then Ollie began to remember things that he didn't even know he knew: the perfume his wife wore on their wedding day (Chantilly), his mother's strudel recipe (in German, unfortunately), the tune Joe was whistling as he applied his greasepaint the night he died ("Yankee Doodle Dandy"), the size of Lois's bra (36DD). Then the memories went farther back. He saw his father's wake—not from the photograph in the drawer next to his bed, but a real memory with a minister delivering the eulogy, people moving around the casket, and his mother crying. Then he saw his father's face peering down into his crib. Ollie was certain this was a real memory. In a fantasy, surely he would use the likeness he'd seen in photographs. But instead, this was the dark oval from his dreams, the sound of deep coughing, the smell of cigar on the breath.
The wheelchair-bound residents of Sunset Village formed a metal gauntlet down the hallway, and he made his way among them in his own chair, paddling along like a duck. Ollie tried to tell them about these visions, about the apples and the bra and the greasepaint, but nobody listened. They were too busy talking about socks and radios and Hawaii. Nobody cared that every night the nurses tried to take him to the post office and leave him there. He woke up scared, surrounded by letters and packages addressed to people he didn't know. When he yelled, "Take me home right now," the postman would come in and give him a shot, and by the time he woke up from its effects, they'd have taken him back to Sunset Village. Ollie tried to stay awake, to catch them in the act, but they put drugs in his food to make him sleepy. He tried not to eat, but they found his mother's recipe for apple strudel, and gee, he didn't know when he'd have the chance to eat it again.
The nurses taped gauze around the tip of his bullhook, but he still kept it next to his bed. The bullhook scared the angels away. At night, the light in the walls started out the size of a firefly, but then the light got bigger and brighter so the angels could get through. If he picked up his bullhook, the light always disappeared. The angels wanted to take him away, but he didn't want to wake up at the post office ever again.
The Fourth Time Ollie Got His Name in the Paper
The Lima Journal, January 1, 2000
ELDERLY MAN ATTACKS EMT
Local EMT Scott Powers, 25, was treated for bruises and contusions today. His patient, Mr. Ollie Hofstadter of Sunset Village, was being transferred to King's Memorial Hospital when the attack occurred.
According to hospital spokesperson Peggy Richards, Hofstadter has been experiencing stroke symptoms, including slurred speech and dementia.
Hofstadter attacked Powers with a metal rod hidden under his blanket. "When I tried to wheel his stretcher into the hospital, he started beating me with this thing
," Powers said. "He was obviously confused. He thought I was taking him to the post office."
Hofstadter was unharmed in the incident, but was admitted to King's Memorial Hospital for observation.
Hofstadter's wife, Mildred, said that the rod is an elephant hook, probably used by her husband's father, who worked for the circus. "My husband hasn't been himself," Mrs. Hofstadter said, adding that January 2 will be Hofstadter's one-hundredth birthday. "Plus, he was up late at Sunset Village, ringing in Y2K."
Mr. Hofstadter is a lifelong resident of Lima. He owned and operated Clown Alley Cleaners for thirty years, and for a short time was a clown in the Great Porter Circus.
Birthday: 2000
A FIREFLY FLICKERED on the wall opposite Ollie's hospital bed. He reached for his bullhook, but it was gone. "Where is it?" he moaned.
Mildred rose from her chair. "Where's what, Ollie?" He tried to roll over, but he was tangled in tubes. "Oh that. I've got it somewhere so you can't hurt anyone else with it." She held the Lima Journal in front of his face. "We're the laughingstock of town. Thank you very much."
The light on the wall glowed brighter. Ollie pointed—he wanted Mildred to see the angels coming for him. "Look," he said.
Mildred crossed the room to a bouquet of Mylar balloons. "Aren't they pretty? I got them for your birthday. Was just bringing them to you when I got the call that the ambulance had come." Her voice wavered, and she looked away.