Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Couldn’t read, huh?”

  “I didn’t ask but it was pretty obvious. The exit signs for Hartford were as big as the side of a barn. Can you imagine?”

  “You’d be surprised how many Americans can’t read,” Christy said. “I work with Literacy Volunteers. It’s an enormous scandal, a kind of national dirty secret.”

  “Fifty years ago everybody could read. Domestic servants. Hotel bellboys. Grease monkeys. My Grandma Elsie read Thackeray out loud to us on the front porch on summer nights—and she spent the first half of her life in Czechoslovakia.”

  “Some of the adults I tutor actually graduate from high school as functional illiterates. They can’t read their diplomas,” Christy said.

  “How is that possible?”

  “Nobody gets left back anymore. It’s called social promotion.”

  “What will become of us?”

  “We may forfeit our democratic institutions,” Christy said, addressing her scallop, arugula, and Peruvian blue potato napoleon. “We’ll become a crazy quilt of bickering regions inhabited by morons and governed by scoundrels. California will secede first, then the Pacific Northwest, the old South, eventually the Great Lakes states will go their own way, and so on.”

  “Good gracious. You mean the end of the United States?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “What about the … uh … the national defense?”

  “We’ll have more to worry about from the yahoos in North Carolina than the Islamofascist suicide bombers,” Christy said. “I just wrote a piece for Commentary about this. I can fax you a copy if you like.”

  “The end of America,” Maggie mumbled introspectively. She had lost her appetite. Would there still be a Fourth of July? she wondered. And what about Thanksgiving? “I’ll miss it horribly,” she declared.

  “Civilizations rise and fall,” Christy said, reaching for a square of Tontine’s signature shallot focaccia. “History is merciless.”

  “And I thought men were a problem.”

  “Well, they are. They just aren’t the only problem.”

  Maggie silently watched Christy eat for a while.

  “Now that you know what a hash I’ve made of my love life,” Maggie said, “would you mind my asking how you manage yours?”

  “I’m a virgin,” Christy replied at once, guilelessly.

  Maggie gagged on her Pellegrino water, and some of it worked up through her nostrils. The ensuing coughing spasm gave the other diners another excuse to stare at their table.

  “You’re putting me on,” she eventually croaked.

  “I’m quite serious,” Christy said.

  “Excuse me for appearing astonished, but how is that even possible in your line of work?”

  “Simple determination.”

  Maggie leaned over and whispered. “Are you telling me you’ve never had sex?”

  “I’ve … touched myself. Everybody does.”

  “I mean with another person. Weren’t you going with that Arlie Hodge, the movie star?”

  “We dated a few times.”

  “You didn’t sleep together?”

  “We did some smooching.”

  “And you were never tempted to go all the way?”

  “Of course I was. I was tortured by it.”

  “But you never gave in?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew he could never be my husband.”

  Maggie was having such a hard time processing this information that her eyebrows appeared to be at war with each other.

  “You are an even more remarkable person than I thought,” was all she could finally say.

  “I suppose I must seem like a freak.”

  “What did you tell Arlie?”

  “I told him he just wasn’t the one.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He cried.”

  “Oh, God, how mortifying.”

  “He’s a nice boy. That’s why I was attracted to him in the first place.”

  “Well, then, what was wrong with him?”

  “There were no books in his apartment. He promised to get some if I would sleep with him, and that’s when I knew it was hopeless.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Oh, Maggie. What I’ve told you is terribly personal. I hope I can depend on you to keep it confidential.”

  “I will. My word of honor.”

  “Word of honor,” Christy mused. “How strange to hear another woman say that.”

  “Maybe I’m a freak, too,” Maggie said. “I can tell this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  2

  A Close Encounter

  They were saying good-bye in the heat out on Columbus when a beige panel truck pulled up with a skreek of rubber and double-parked in front of Tontine’s crimson canopy. Six furtive figures wearing camouflage jumpsuits and ski masks hopped out of the van’s side door and hurried toward the restaurant. One of the figures collided with Maggie and spun her around as though they were performing a clumsy ballroom dance move from the 1940s. For a moment their eyes interlocked, and Maggie was sure she had seen the brown-flecked hazel irises somewhere before. It was as though they belonged to a former lover, someone with whom she had known the most powerful intimacy. The figure made a strange gerbil-like gleeping sound that was also vaguely familiar. Then he roughly disengaged himself and followed the others inside. Maggie was still caught up in the bewilderment of the encounter when she realized that the camo-clad figures had been carrying firearms.

  She grabbed Christy’s hand and ran uptown on Columbus. At Eighty-second Street, with Christy in tow, Maggie ducked inside a shop that specialized in expensive acrylic decor: clocks, pepper mills, photo frames, telephones, and the like.

  “Call the police,” Maggie shrieked to a clerk with an arresting pink hairdo, who looked like a piece of fluorescent plastic decor herself. “They’re robbing Tontine!”

  The clerk lunged for a phone, dialed 911, and, enunciating very clearly and calmly, reported the robbery in progress. Maggie was impressed. It was the kind of grace under pressure she prized in her own kitchen employees.

  “You’re not from here, are you?” Maggie observed.

  “Salisbury, Maryland,” said the girl, who couldn’t have been over twenty-five. “It’s real different down there.”

  “Do you cook, by any chance?”

  “I make the best smothered chicken on the Upper West Side, if I do say so myself,” the girl replied. “And a darn good chess pie.”

  Maggie was thrilled. “Let’s talk later,” she said, extracting a card from her handbag. “The pink hair has got to go, though.”

  “Whatever …” the girl said with a shrug.

  “Hey, they’re coming out,” Christy reported from the door.

  The three women peered down the avenue and saw the masked figures briskly exit the restaurant with their boxy machine guns and sacks of loot. Moments later their beige van swerved out into southbound traffic and vanished.

  Maggie and Christy hurried back down to the scene. The police cruisers skidded up a good seven minutes later. Half of Tontine’s patrons had spilled out onto the sidewalk. They percolated with that same odd mixture of giddy excitement and indignation Maggie had observed after the Four Seasons robbery months earlier.

  “I saw the getaway car,” she volunteered to a cadaverous-looking detective.

  “That’s nice,” the cop said.

  “It was a beige van.”

  “Super.”

  “You don’t even care.”

  “Lady, we know this bunch. They use a different vehicle on every job. All stolen right before and ditched right after. Next time, do me a favor and shoot out the tires.”

  3

  The Fence

  The Crumpled Coverlet was an overpriced antiques salon in New Canaan owned by a vicious old queen named Robert Twelvetrees who lived to spread vile, if often truthful, gossip about the sundry celebrities who pop
ulated Fairfield County, Connecticut. Maggie happened to stop in there because it was next door to a bakery that produced a particularly sinful large, hazelnut-studded, brownielike cookie called “the Brown Death” (which Maggie permitted herself to devour only when in a state of horrible anxiety). And, because she could hardly bear the prospect of returning to Kettle Hill Farm to the usual avalanche of messages, obligations, requests, responsibilities, and painful memories that awaited her there, she desperately sought any excuse to delay her arrival.

  Maggie was therefore dawdling in the center room of the Crumpled Coverlet, finishing the last morsel of her cookie—with Mr. Twelvetrees buzzing in her ear like a large horsefly, emitting hurtful tidbits about this person and that person, and about who was divorcing whom—when she spied a familiar ruby ewer amid a display of other cut-glass objects atop a perfectly dreadful ormolu buffet. She seized the ewer and examined it closely.

  Twelvetrees said, “… and I hear Eva Mosley is getting ready to dispatch the mister now—”

  “Where did you hear that?” Maggie spun around angrily. “Eva Mosley happens to be a friend of mine.”

  “Well, whu, whu,” Mr. Twelvetrees waffled in embarrassment, “she’s a friend of mine, too, at least a customer, a very good customer, I should say, and—”

  “And where did you acquire this object?” Maggie asked, thrusting the ewer into the proprietor’s face.

  “I, uh, came by it recently.”

  “This belongs to me,” Maggie declared.

  “Perhaps you have one like it—”

  “No, I used to have one like it, but it disappeared about a month ago, and this is the very same one.”

  “Whu … whu … whu …”

  “How did you get your mitts on this?”

  “Look hear, Mrs. Darling.”

  “Don’t you ‘look here’ me, buster. Receiving stolen goods is a crime in this state.”

  “What proof do you have that this ever belonged to you?”

  “If you look on the bottom you will see the initials M. D. inscribed in the glass. Look.”

  She tilted the base just beneath his half-glasses so he could see. The initials were boldly visible. Twelvetrees read them and flinched.

  “It could be a coincidence,” he said, wilting.

  “I put those initials there with my diamond wedding ring the very day I bought it at a rummage sale in Maine. Now, how did you get your hands on it?”

  “Someone brought it in,” Twelvetrees confessed. “I bought it fair and square.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s hard to remember. People come in here all day long.”

  “A man or woman?”

  “A … a … a woman. Yes, a woman.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Let me think …” he said. Little glistening beads of perspiration sprouted on his forehead. “… Uh, your age perhaps, medium height, short brown hair, rather scrawny—”

  “Lindy!” Maggie yelped.

  “Linty? No, I wouldn’t say she was linty …”

  “Oh, God …” Maggie cried, clutching the ewer to her stomach. “How much did you pay her for this?”

  “I dunno. Perhaps a hundred.”

  “You slimy bastard.”

  “She seemed a p-p-perfectly respectable person. There was nothing linty about—”

  “You know goddamn well what this object is worth, you chiseling creep.”

  “I’m in business, Mrs. Darling. The whole idea is to buy low and sell higher.”

  “What else have you bought from her?”

  “Oh, a few little things now and again,” Twelvetrees said. His hands trembled as his confidence ebbed away to nothing. “She was always as nice as pie.”

  Maggie now advanced until Twelvetrees’s back was up against a Queen Anne bonnet-top highboy. He attempted desperately to loosen his cravat, as though to improve the airway.

  “Did you buy a Lincoln and Foss coffee urn from her?”

  “No! Well, I’m not sure. Perhaps—”

  “How about a Canton Rose Medallion porcelain punch bowl?”

  “Maybe. I don’t recall—”

  “Twelve Newell Harding fiddle-pattern soup spoons?”

  “Soup spoons? We get scads of spoons—”

  “A silver Revere porringer?” Maggie was beginning to shriek. Twelvetrees slumped and cringed before her.

  “It’s all a blur—” he cried.

  “A Sunderland pink luster butter dish in the shape of a pig?”

  “Stop—”

  “A pair of Pennsylvania chalkware squirrel salters!”

  “No more! No more!”

  She had reduced him to little more than a damp quivering blob of cotton-covered protoplasm whimpering on the floor.

  “Why you’re nothing more than a common fence,” she said.

  “Mercy! Please!” he blubbered. “Don’t call the police. You can have them all back. At no charge.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you until noon to deliver my treasures, or you can contemplate spending your golden years in the state penitentiary at Deep River.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “Stop caterwauling. Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes, your things.”

  “And if any of them have been sold, you will pay the full appraisal price.”

  “Of course, full price.”

  “Don’t bother getting up. I’ll find my own way out.”

  4

  Heartbreak

  It was evening when she finally returned home. Walter Fayerwether evidently had left for the day. Shadows were long in the garden, endowing it with that buttery light that photographs so well. The beds and bowers had never looked so beautifully kept, even by the late and lamented Bob DiPietro. The garden was the one thing in her life these days that Maggie could recognize as maintaining its excellence and integrity. The house itself was empty … desolate. Maggie realized in a rush of emotion that the house had assumed the character of an adversary, an enemy, a thing to be feared and avoided. In the same instant she also saw what a personal tragedy this represented, for the house was the very polestar of her universe, and without it everything familiar would fly into a chaos. These personal griefs reverberated in her mind with Christy Chauvin’s prophecies about the fate of the United States like a particularly discordant symphony by Stockhausen, nearly overwhelming Maggie with anxiety and depression.

  As usual, she sought relief through activity, specifically in the painful matter of what to do about Lindy. For the first time in weeks, Maggie entered the guest room occupied by her erstwhile best friend. She was astonished to find that Lindy had transformed 264 square feet of perfect Shaker austerity into something that resembled a South Florida convenience store after a hurricane. Empty take-out food caskets, microwavable plastic casseroles, and pizza boxes lay strewn about everywhere along with candy bar wrappers, taco chip bags, cupcake packets, soda cans, chocolate milk cartons, and Styrofoam coffee cups—not to mention moldy fragments of the food itself deliquescing into the rug. Soiled clothes lay in heaps. There were strange dried splashes of various liquids on the walls The bed was not just unmade but wildly disheveled, dirty, and stained, as though gladiatorial contests had taken place upon it, and the sheets stank. Literally hundreds of strange, tiny empty glass tubes were scattered around the floor—they crunched underfoot—and it took Maggie several moments to understand that these articles might have something to do with drug use. A larger glass tube on the bureau top looked like an instrument for the smoking of such illegal substances. The bathroom was unspeakable, the toilet unflushed for God knew how long, the shower curtain torn from half its rings, and something that resembled dried vomit in the tub. She wanted to set fire to the whole repulsive mess, but inasmuch as it was connected to the rest of the house, that was out of the question. Instead, she dolefully fetched a roll of plastic garbage bags from the pantry downstairs and returned to begin the odious job of filling them with trash and Lindy’s belongings (not necessarily dis
tinguishable from the trash). This act of purification she performed with tears streaming down her cheeks and an ache in her chest that felt palpably like physical heartbreak.

  She had actually managed to clear a considerable amount of debris when she realized that the task of truly rehabilitating the room would have to be completed by professional carters, fumigators, and painting contractors. Then, of course, there was the horrible prospect of telling Lindy to her face that she could no longer live at Kettle Hill Farm. That confrontation suddenly presented itself as Maggie heard a vehicle out in the driveway and doors opening downstairs and a clattering from the vicinity of the kitchen. She took a deep breath and set forth to dismiss her old friend from the household.

  But it was Hooper, not Lindy who had turned up. He had a bag of groceries on the center island and stood downlit in a brilliant pool of halogen track lighting like a tragedian on a classical stage. They regarded each other warily for a moment from across the large, complicated room.

  “Your aunt Lindy’s been stealing from us,” Maggie said.

  Hooper heaved a sigh but said nothing.

  “I’ll have to kick her out now,” Maggie added gloomily.

  “What did she steal?”

  “Silver. Other stuff. Little treasures.”

  “I’m real sorry, Mom.”

  “It’s breaking my heart.”

  “Is she here?” Hooper asked.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then you don’t have to kick her out right now.”

  “Well, it’s as much as done. She’s a drug addict, you know.”

  “I know she’s … got problems,” Hooper said, and as though to dispel a deeper inquiry into his personal conduct in the matter, he remarked, “This whole country is screwed up.” He then began to unpack the grocery bag with strangely strenuous concentration. He had always been a physically deliberate boy, careful in his movements, but he performed this particular task as though he were a sapper disarming a bomb.