by Ruth Rouff
“Nashville went for Obama,” Melanie told me.
“People have been very welcoming,” Ken had said earlier.
On the couch, Bob sat looking at his Hermitage postcards. Meanwhile, Sarah played with her white doll. She liked to lug the doll around the house with her. The doll had a stilted grin on her face. I didn’t think she was a particularly attractive doll. She reminded me of a cheerleader.
“Sarah’s alter ego,” I said to Melanie while we were standing in the kitchen.
“Sarah likes white dolls better than she likes black dolls,” Melanie admitted. “I wasn’t counting on that.”
I told her I knew several women, one white, one black, whose biracial children were now fairly well-adjusted adults.
“It’s a process,” I said.
Replacing Phil
It was difficult, when considering Phil, to know whether to ascribe his general incompetence to old age or what. It was said that he had, until quite recently, been a foreman in construction, drywall, to be exact. And now here he was, just a few months later, in retail. In the sporting goods department of a large chain store. Kmart, to be exact.
Well, he was in his seventies, that much was known. And he was a pleasant enough guy, who liked to whistle while he worked, as well as a dapper dresser, with his button down shirts and snazzy suspenders. But he was old, of that there could be no doubt. His head had that shrunken, skeletal look to it, with the remaining fine white hair clinging to it like wistful tendrils of vine.
He couldn’t hear too well. If you repeated his name loudly while he was engaged in some activity, he would look up in alarm, his mouth working fitfully, and he would cry, “Well?” Not “what” but “well .” I always wondered why he would say “well” when he meant “what .” But I never asked him, for it would have been rude to. He was at least thirty years older than me. He was at least twenty-five years older than his wife, Joan, for that matter, who was a part-time checkout supervisor. Everyone wondered why she had married an old geezer like Phil, but no one asked her, of course. It would have been rude to.
We all realized that the transition from construction to retail would be hard for Phil, but we couldn’t have imagined just how hard. It took him forever just to learn how to use the phone! He couldn’t seem to get the hang of answering price checks. When there’d be a price check for sporting goods at the front registers, it took him forever to respond to it. At first he just didn’t pay any attention to the page, and then when we had impressed upon him that he had to, it took him a long time before he could master the system of picking up the phone and pressing the intercom button and then number 17 for checkouts. Sometimes he’d press “page” by mistake and you’d hear his nervous, tentative voice over the store loudspeaker saying something inane like “Uh, Dave, how do you work this darn thing?” all over the store.
Well, I had to admit it was kind of funny when he did this. It broke up the monotony. But when he messed up on the sporting goods register, the customers tended to get irked. He was completely thrown by the registers. He would totally forget what had just been shown him about ringing up credit card purchases or checks. Even when he went back to the front registers for remedial training, it still didn’t make too much of a difference. He’d still mess up big time.
Mark, a short Filipino guy who had worked in the store about three months and already knew everything, quoted a wise old Filipino proverb when referring to Phil.
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Mark said.
Phil became an object of wonder and amazement. One day, after he had been working in the store nearly two months, he asked the store manager where the pet department was. She was aghast, as pets was directly across from sporting goods. It was kind of amazing that anybody could be that dense not to notice it.
“I’d never have drywall done by that guy,” Ted, another of my sporting goods associates, a mere kid of fifty-eight, muttered, shaking his head. We thought that maybe it wasn’t just because Phil was old that he didn’t pick up on things. Maybe, we suspected, it was because he was old and dumb. In fact, maybe he had been dumb all his life. Or a fourth possibility—maybe he just didn’t care.
But he seemed conscientious enough. When you asked him to fill the motor oil aisle, he’d fill it. He’d put all the different grades of oil in the wrong places, but he’d fill it. And the bowling shoes. He’d fill that section up, too. Sure he’d put the $39.97 shoes in the spot labeled for $25.97 shoes, but at least he’d fill it.
“You’ll go to heaven, Ruth,” the store manager, Ms. Taylor, said to me one day. She meant because I had patience with boobs.
“Thanks,” I said.
A decision was made to move Phil to footwear, part-time. In footwear he was assigned the task of removing tissue paper from the incoming shipments of shoes.
“A tissue paper technician,” somebody quipped. But Phil was extremely slow at this task. It took him overtime hours to complete the job.
“Speedo Phil,” Robbie, another Kmart associate, who was eighteen years old, called him.
“Is he really that slow or is he just milking the job?” somebody else wanted to know.
One day they had Phil filling in back in my department. Evidently a customer asked him where light bulbs were in the store and he didn’t know. So he asked the assistant manager, Paul, who told me. “I’m not making this up!” Paul said. Light bulbs were right over in the home center department, adjacent to sporting goods on the left hand side.
“Something’s got to be done, something’s got to be done,” muttered Paul. “It’s a shame.”
But who wants to be the one to fire someone who’s old enough to be your grandfather? I mean, how humiliating for Phil, not to be able to make it at Kmart. It’s not like working for a hot-shot company like Microsoft or Lockheed Martin, for god’s sake, where you actually need to know something.
So right now, as I write this, Phil is still working for Kmart. Still screwing up big time.
“He’s awful!” I told the store manager a little while ago.
I had never referred to any employee in that way before. We sort of laughed together in agreement. We sure hoped we didn’t get as dense as Phil when we got old. We kind of thought we wouldn’t.
At the Circus
I can’t say my parents fought a lot, but one fight they had was memorable. It happened like this: late one Saturday morning my father stuck his head in my bedroom and noticed that my dresser top was an absolute mess. Loose change, baseball cards, crayons, and dust covered the surface like algae covers a stagnant pond. I was lying on my bed reading a Spiderman comic book, oblivious to everything but the adventures of Peter Parker. I was a tomboy. My father must have barked at me to clean up the mess, but I really don’t remember. What I do remember is that a few minutes later, he informed my mother that she was a bad housekeeper. I guess that, looking around the house, he realized that my dresser top was simply a microcosm of the general disarray. At any rate, my mother went ballistic. She started screaming and crying hysterically. I guess you could say the old man had touched a nerve. My mother was very intelligent, had even skipped a grade in Catholic school, but had never done anything with her intelligence. Being a housewife and the mother of seven must have been very unfulfilling for her, but she could never find it within herself to do anything else. So telling her she was a bad housekeeper was like treating a wound with boric acid.
I hated to hear her scream and cry. My father decided the best thing to do was to hightail it out of there. So he took me to a circus that just happened to be performing in the nearby town of Pitman. It was called the Hoxie Brothers Circus. It was a Diane Arbus-type event. I thought the whole setup was kind of bizarre, especially the clowns, but for some reason my old man liked circuses. I guess they harkened back to his boyhood. This was when there were still a lot of circuses traveling around the country, putting on shows in canvas tents. This was before Ringling Brothers pretty much became the only game in town—and circuses got
corporate, just like everything else.
At any rate, there were clowns and sawdust and trapeze artists at this circus, and little dogs jumping through colored hoops. There must have been some lions and elephants because Hoxie Brothers was famous for them, but I honestly can’t remember. Most memorable to me: there was some circus lady there wearing fishnet stockings and high heels and a tight black jacket over little black shorts that barely covered her ass. She wore lots of makeup and had curly blond hair of a brassy sort. I don’t know what her official “job” was, but I remember her standing just outside the circus ring, talking and joking with people. I couldn’t get over her. She was sexy and cracked wise in a brazen, pulp fiction sort of way. She fascinated me. She was so different from my mother, who wasn’t sexy at all.
By the time the circus was over and we got home, my mother had calmed down considerably. I don’t know if my father apologized to her or what. If they kissed and made up, I never saw them do it. Things just somehow went back to normal.
Going to bed that night, I thought of the circus woman in the skimpy outfit. I couldn’t get over her. I compared her existence to that of my mother. I imagined that she spent her life smiling, making wisecracks, and traveling from town to town. How in the world, I wondered, did she get away with it?
The Elusive Mr. Clay
Unlike most modern doctors, Dr. Waslik, our family practitioner for over forty years, doesn’t have a receptionist. That is mostly because he doesn’t schedule appointments. Like the lunchmeat counter at Acme, it is strictly first come, first served at Dr. Waslik’s. Walking the few yards from his tidy examining room to his waiting room, he gruffly ushers patients in and out. Both examining room and waiting room are located in the south section of his house, a large colonial on Delaware Avenue in Woodbury, New Jersey. Dr. Waslik, it seems, is not a believer in high overhead. He did, however, until very recently have a male secretary who did his paperwork and answered the phone. That was the mysterious Mr. Clay, whom no patient had seen for the past forty years. Small wonder that Mr. Clay incited speculation about his very existence. He was a disembodied voice, an enigma, yet a gatekeeper and therefore to be respected.
I was sitting in Dr. Waslik’s waiting room one evening with a chronic cough when I learned I wasn’t the only one to find the thought of Mr. Clay intriguing. A man a few years younger than myself was sitting on Dr. Waslik’s old green vinyl couch with his young son. His son was fidgeting on the couch, rolling about in a frisky way, when the man fondly announced that as a child he had played on the same couch. People nodded. We agreed that, all told, the waiting room hadn’t change much in forty years. The same green walls, the same cracked and yellowed linoleum tile, the same green and liver-colored armchairs (one mended now with green vinyl tape), the same magazines on the table—Sports Illustrated, National Review, Reader’s Digest, Highlights for Children—a greenish-hued beach scene, and a framed replica of the letter Lincoln wrote to a young girl after she advised him to grow whiskers (Dr. Waslik was a big Lincoln fan). I forget who brought up the subject of Mr. Clay, but the man confessed that he had never seen Mr. Clay. Nor had I. Nor had, it turned out, any of the other patients in the waiting room. We all kind of chuckled at this. We only knew he existed because it was he who answered the phone when we called Dr. Waslik’s office to get prescriptions refilled or to see what time Dr. Waslik had hours that day. We all wondered where, exactly, Dr. Waslik kept Mr. Clay. I mean, we had never seen a suitable alcove which could have kept a secretary’s desk. Of course, what went on in the house outside of the waiting room and the examining room was none of our business. Nonetheless, I had images of Mr. Clay tucked away in a closet somewhere, a musty, narrow-shouldered man surrounded by medical records, forced to labor under trying circumstances, like Scrooge’s Bob Cratchit.
Actually, Mr. Clay had a voice that sounded a lot like Dr. Waslik’s. Sometimes when I’d call the office, I would think it was Dr. Waslik answering the phone when it was Mr. Clay. Which led me to further speculation. Perhaps there was no Mr. Clay. Perhaps Dr. Waslik merely pretended that there was a Mr. Clay in order to impress his patients. Perhaps, Dr. Waslik and Mr. Clay were one and the same man, like a less malign version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or Norman Bates and his mother. On the other hand, Mr. Clay had a kindly voice. Dry and elderly, but definitely kindly.
I remember when I called Dr. Waslik’s office one Saturday morning and Mr. Clay answered.
“My mother got bit by her cat,” I said. “How long will Dr. Waslik be in the office?”
“Just a minute,” Mr. Clay said. Then I heard him throw over his shoulder, “Mrs. Rouff got bit by a cat!” I could imagine Dr. Waslik halting on his way out the door, golf bag slung over his shoulder. Curses! Foiled by a nasty feline.
Mr. Clay returned. “Can you get here by ten-thirty?” he asked.
“Okay.”
Well, I got my mother to Dr. Waslik that morning by ten-thirty and the cat bite was duly attended to. Fortunately, it didn’t get infected. But I never saw Mr. Clay in the office on that day, or on any other day, for that matter. The last time I went to Dr. Waslik, he told me that Mr. Clay had fallen and broken his hip. Not too long after that, I learned from another patient that Mr. Clay, being elderly, had passed away.
I imagine some people must have actually been close to Mr. Clay, like Dr. Waslik, for instance, and perhaps his wife. It was strange, though. I can’t pretend to know what it means. But in a subtle way I miss Mr. Clay. It’s not every day you fail to meet a man like him.
Spook Show
“Tommy!” Mrs. Del Vecchio shouted at her son from the side door of their house.
“Whaty?” Tommy shouted back. He and I were playing catch with a rubber ball in the street in front of my house, which was two doors up from the Del Vecchio residence.
The “whaty” was one of the things I liked about Tommy: his cheeky sense of word play. It was a simple thing, and hardly the height of wit. Yet none of the other kids on the street—the Joeys and Bobbys and Johnnys and Debbies—said “whaty” when their mom or dad called them.
I was “Ruthie” some of the time. But my mother called me Ruth Anne, so I couldn’t very well say whaty when she called me.
“Dinner’s ready!” Tommy’s mother shouted.
“Okay!” Tommy tossed the ball to me. “Gotta go.”
“See you tomorrow.”
I watched as Tommy trotted off toward his house. He was a nice kid, but lately I felt bad for him because of his dad. Sometimes we kids—my younger brother Sam and Joanne Muhlbacher from across the street and others—would play board games like Sorry! and Parcheesi and The Game of Life on the round patio table to the side of Tommy’s house. As we rolled the dice or spun the wheel under the patio umbrella that shielded us from the sun, we concentrated on the rewards and pitfalls of the games. But sometimes we’d notice Mr. Del Vecchio entering or leaving his house—a gloomy figure even in the brightest sunlight.
Although Tommy’s mom was always cheerful, and would sometimes serve us root beer or Coke in real glasses, I don’t recall Mr. Del Vecchio ever speaking to us kids. Even though he couldn’t have been much more than forty, he was rail thin, and his head was completely bald—like a cue ball. What’s more, there were marks along one side of his head that I much later realized were suture marks. He never looked happy.
When I asked my mother why Mr. Del Vecchio’s head was completely bald, she told me that he had a cancerous brain tumor.
“When you get radiation treatments, your hair falls out,” she explained.
I guessed that was why Mr. Del Vecchio looked grouchy all the time. He had something awful growing in his head—like mold, only worse. I wondered how he acted toward Tommy. I suspected that Tommy had to be on his “best behavior” at all times, but somehow I couldn’t imagine Tommy managing that. Around us, he was a lively boy.
“Ah, poop!” Tommy would raise his hands to his head and wince if his token landed on a bad square during one of our board game a
fternoons. Sometimes he would win and sometimes he would lose, but he was never a sore loser.
That August Tommy and I decided to create a spook show in my family’s garage. Our immediate impetus was that the Kaminski kids over on Lansing Drive had had one in their garage, which we had both checked out. All they had were some threadbare sheets hanging from the rafters and some kid running around in a sheet.
“That wasn’t scary,” Tommy concluded. I agreed.
“Why don’t we put up our own? We can use my garage,” I said.
“Neat!” Tommy replied. “Let’s do it!”
Another thing I liked about Tommy was that he was willing to hang out with me, a girl. It helped that I was a bona-fide tomboy and not a girly-girl who was content to play with dolls. (Actually, I did play Barbie dolls with my friend Kathy, but that’s another story.)
Before we began, I asked my mother for permission. I knew she would give it. She had had seven children. I was the sixth. Micromanaging us was beyond her energy level at this point.
“Well, all right,” she said. “But don’t get into anything.”
The next morning we opened the door of my family’s garage and began setting up the show. Sam joined us. We had to keep the garage door nearly closed because we didn’t want anyone seeing our preparations. Our “centerpiece” was a dark blue, battered trunk I had taken to camp a few summers earlier. Now it was doing double duty as a tomb. At its head we placed a cardboard grave marker with “Ichabod Crane” and 1776-1805 inscribed on it in magic marker (I had recently read a Classics Illustrated version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). The way we had planned it, I would lead guests around and point out the tomb. When I exclaimed, “He died of fright,” Sam, clad in a Halloween skeleton costume and mask, would rise out of the trunk and wave his arms around menacingly before sinking back again into the trunk. (The whole show lasted only a minute or two, so he was in no danger of suffocating.)