Foxy's Tale

by Karen Cantwell

  “God,” he exploded as the door shut behind him and the little bell tinkled. “What a nightmare getting back around DuPont Circle. That cab driver hardly spoke a word, I mean not a word of English. I told him to avoid the circle at this time of day. What is it with these people? They come here and expect us to speak whatever they speak? And then he wanted to drop me at the Marriott. I told him, no, I didn’t want to walk five blocks dragging these heavy bags. Uh.” He grunted and dropped the bags before collapsing into a wooden armchair with a tall carved back that looked like it belonged in a monster movie.

  “I’m totally done. Just done.”

  “Well, I have to run out for a while,” Foxy told him. “Can you keep an eye on things? With them here I don’t think we’ll be getting any serious buyers.” Foxy pointed to the workmen, who were in the process of adjusting a shelf. One of them held a gigantic level.

  “Where are you going?” He eyed her a bit suspiciously.

  “I just need to get out.”

  “It’s hell out there. Traffic’s a mess. And I think it’s going to rain. Look at these.” He pulled out two boxes and started to show off the new shoes he’d bought.

  “Honestly, Kuh-not, you have more shoes than a racehorse.”

  “Oh, look who’s talking. Besides it’s starting to rain.” Sometimes Knot’s sentences didn’t connect very well.

  “I’ll wear a raincoat, all right? And when Amanda gets home from school, could you order a pizza for her or whatever she wants?”

  “Some mother. That girl never eats a home-cooked meal. I’ll bet you didn’t even breastfeed.” He pulled off a shoe and carefully slid his foot into the new walking shoe. “Oh look. Aren’t they perfect?”

  “You can cook her dinner. I ruin Shake and Bake. I always wanted to be the kind of mother who baked fresh muffins for breakfast and had some delicious meal in the oven for dinner. But I could never do it. Here’s pizza money. Go on upstairs and introduce yourself. I’m sure you two will have a great time.” Foxy pulled her raincoat from behind the desk and slung her bag over one shoulder.

  “Maybe I will. Someone has to look after that girl.”

  “She’s fifteen,” Foxy said. “Not six. She has that whole dark thing going on right now. Her school counselor told me it’s her way of asserting her independence. So I’m trying hard to let her.”

  “Fifteen is hardly a grown up,” he said but Foxy had moved on.

  “Well if you do go up, don’t use the faucet in the powder room. It’s broken. I can’t find a replacement. Not an old one like that. I should call that contractor. His card is on the desk by the phone. Would you be a lamb and call him for me? Just ask him if he could find one and tell him I’d be so appreciative.”

  *****

  Friday – Amanda’s Life in Hell Continues (Amanda wrote)

  School sucked this week. Because Foxy decided to move after I started school, I have to travel over an hour each way just to get to my old school. And then it’s such a pain to stay after for anything and then get a bus (God, a bus!!!) and then the Metro and then walk seven blocks. It’s such a pain. And carrying all my books and stuff. There’s this guy, a senior. He has a car. He’s offered to drive me home sometimes, when he can. He runs cross country. Sometimes he has to stay even later than I do. He used to live near our old house. So far he hasn’t given me a ride home. It’s way out of his way. I don’t know. Anyway, when I got home this renter from downstairs rings the doorbell from outside. I wouldn’t have opened it but I thought maybe something was wrong with Foxy. What isn’t wrong with Foxy? But he said Foxy told him to order me a pizza. I told him if I have one more pizza I’m gonna choke. So he offered to make me dinner. Brought this big bag of groceries up here and lit the oven and everything. Foxy’s never even opened the oven. I don’t think she knows where it is. Anyway his name is funny – Knot. He’s says you pronounce the K, and he’s very proud of that. Typical. Foxy rents to someone with a weird name. He made a stuffed chicken. It was kind of like Thanksgiving. We had cranberry sauce with it. And mashed potatoes. And he made this funny thing for desert. A soufflé. It looked like a hat in a bowl. He said it was called a soufflé because it’s the French word for puff up. It was good, though. He talked the whole time. About growing up in Minnesota and coming to Washington ten years ago. He asked me what I was studying in school. I told him nothing interesting. So he asked to see my books. He was really interested in my chemistry book. I showed him the periodic table. My chem teacher says it was created by some Russian named Mendeleev. Knot said that’s a hard name, too. He’s kind of funny. And he likes shoes a lot. Said I should get some boots because girls look sexy in boots. I almost told him about this guy from school, but then I didn’t. Everything’s weird. Especially this house.

  Chapter Seven

  It was dark when Foxy returned, a large shopping bag clutched in each hand at her sides as if she were a milkmaid with buckets on a yoke. She couldn’t decide which one to put on the ground so she could feel around in her purse for the house key and then, as if he appeared from thin air, Myron Standlish was standing next to her.

  “Vell,” he said. “I can open the door for you maybe?”

  Foxy looked up, or rather down, and he was smiling that little crooked smile. In the dark she couldn’t see much more of his face.

  “Oh thank you, Mr. Standlish,” Foxy said in her most gracious, charming, Southern-girl voice. “I’ve been out all day.”

  Myron reached forward and stuck the key in the slot. He swung the door open and beckoned for her to precede him inside. They stood awkwardly in the small foyer for a few seconds and, in the light, Foxy noticed that Myron’s color had returned to his cheeks and he looked a bit boyish. He carried a small black satchel, like an old fashioned doctor’s bag. She also noticed a small red stain on his collar.

  “Oh, did you eat Italian tonight?” she asked, just for small talk, as she followed him up the stairs to her apartment.

  “Me?” He seemed stunned that she would ask such a thing. “I never.”

  “You never eat Italian?”

  “Never.” His head shook emphatically and he scowled as if eating Italian would kill him.

  Foxy tried to hide her smile. He was such a funny little man. They reached the second floor and Foxy veered off to her door and placed her bags on the floor.

  “I never heard of anyone not liking Italian,” she said, just conversational, her head down, searching for her keys again.

  Myron continued to the next landing and his room on the third floor. When he was almost to the top of the staircase he leaned over to look back down at Foxy who had finally located her keys. As she was sliding the key into its slot, she heard him say, softly, as if they were conspirators, “With me it’s simple. Italian, Greek, Chinese, eh, who needs?” He disappeared behind his own door and Foxy let herself into her apartment, where the faint aroma of roast chicken and chocolate soufflé welcomed her.

  She headed for her bedroom but on the way glanced into the kitchen. Dishes were piled by the large stainless sink, which was full of a roasting pan, mixing bowls, and the bowl Knot used for the soufflé, its inside coated with a thin, hard chocolate residue that looked rather like brown cement.

  “Amanda,” she called loudly and dropped the two shopping bags. “A-MAN-DAH.” This was not a greeting, but a command. She waited. She heard Amanda’s shoes clopping down the spiral staircase from her room on the third floor. She stood with hands on hips.

  Amanda appeared, dressed in her standard black pants and top, black hair with green streaks pulled to one side, a long silver teardrop earring swinging from the hole in her left lobe.

  “What,” she said blandly.

  “What is all this?” Foxy waved around the kitchen.

  “What.” Amanda repeated in the same dull tone. She took in the shopping bags.

  “You know very well what. This mess. Why didn’t you clean up?”

  Amanda shrugged. She slumped against the kitchen doorway and mumbled,
“Why don’t you ever make dinner?”

  Ever since Foxy found herself the mother of a teen, she’d felt completely out of control. She wanted to do the right thing, but God only knew what that might be. Her mothering skills had never been up there with Donna Reed but by then she seemed to have fallen into a kind of mothering pit from which there was no crawling out.

  “What did you say, young lady?”

  Amanda clamped her lips together. Neither of them was willing to break this silence, until the insides of one of the shopping bags made a crinkling sound.

  “What did you buy?” Amanda asked.

  “I was going to show you, but first you’ll have to clean up this kitchen. I thought you were going to have pizza.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to spend any more money until you got out of debt. So we were both wrong, I guess.” Amanda shifted her weight onto one foot and stood a little straighter.

  Mothering was hardly Foxy’s only failing. She had never been good with money. It was her looks that had been reliable. Her looks and the way she had of drawing a man in and making him feel powerful, important, desired. Since the fountain story broke and the tumbling waterfall of revelations about her personal life erupted in the media, then the realization that she was not only broke but deep in debt, and after that the divorce, she’d begun noticing little lines at the corners of her mouth, a slight loosening in the skin beneath her chin, infinitesimal crows feet at the outside of her eyes. She would not be young and desired by every man who saw her forever. But the stores would always love her.

  “I don’t have to answer to my daughter for how I spend my money.”

  “But how you spend your money affects your daughter.”

  Foxy slumped a little. She reached down to grab the shopping bags. The scent of chocolate was still palpable. She wanted to take her booty into her room and try on the dresses and shoes, the sweater and scarf, the round, gold earrings that the sales lady said made her face look fresh and young. She wondered if Knot sold anything this afternoon, if the workmen finished the shelves, if she should check the store. But the urge to unpack these bags and flaunt herself in front of her own mirror was strong. A wave of uncertainty enveloped her like the scent of that chocolate. She backed up to the barstool by the counter, plunked her butt on it, and sighed. The bags sat there on the floor like little soldiers, lined up at attention, waiting for orders.

  “I didn’t ask for any of this,” she said. “It’s not my fault your father gambled and fooled around with other women and pulled me into debt. I didn’t know any of that was going on. I swear I didn’t.”

  “He’s not my father.” Amanda was not going to let Foxy off the hook.

  From her perch on the bar stool Foxy looked at her daughter, still standing in the doorway but no longer leaning against the jamb. She’d come a tiny way into the room by then; she’d encroached on Foxy’s space just a hair.

  “That is not a nice thing to say, little lady,” Foxy frowned. “He’s the only father you’ve ever known. He almost adopted you. That makes him your father.”

  “No it doesn’t. He was never around. He never cared at all about me. It’s just another mess you made that I have to live with.”

  Having fired both guns, Amanda retreated up the stairs to her room.

  Chapter Eight

  Foxy was confused. She went downstairs to the store very early, even before Amanda left for school. She moved and then rearranged a ceramic urn that was turned into an oil lamp in the nineteenth century and then converted to electric in the mid-twentieth. Of course that lowered its antique value. But Foxy liked the original ceramic, and when she saw it she couldn’t resist. She was waiting for Knot to help her surround it with items that would enhance its perceived value. He was good at this. And so many other things. What would she do if he left? She knew he was smart in ways she’d never be, more foxy in fact. So there she stood wondering what would look good next to this urn turned lamp. She tried a wide glass bowl with clear hand-molded glass apples. She slid it into place and stood back to consider the juxtaposition of lamp and bowl. The tinkling of the bell caught Foxy’s attention. In glided Knot wearing a pair of brown suede shoes that had little antler ornaments on top of the arch, a small decoration that instead of being subtle drew the eye straight to his feet. The soles were such soft leather that he made not a sound as he entered the store.

  “What do you think of this?” she pointed to the arrangement.

  “Oh,” he breathed, “how can you?”

  “Can I what?” Foxy’s drawl was more pronounced when she was uncertain.

  “Put those two together? I mean, really, it’s like trying to fix Madonna up with Don Rickles.” He whisked the bowl off the table and careened over to the desk where he plunked it down.

  “Careful with that, mister. I plan to sell it for seven fifty. But not if it’s broken.”

  “Well, you’ll never get a penny for it if you don’t do it justice. It needs something.” He glanced around the store. “Oh, God, that is the thing. Look.”

  He glided to a side wall where an old family bible was stacked on a brass umbrella stand. The bible was huge, with ornate gold-plated corners and gold leaf covering the outside of the pages. It looked as if it weighed at least twenty pounds. When Knot picked it up he grunted a little under its heft. He carried it to the table and laid it next to the lamp, turned at an angle. Then he rummaged around in a glass case and found an old pair of wire rimmed glasses and a wooden pipe with a bowl carved from ivory. He placed these on the bible and stood back.

  “I’ve told you before – you have to tell a story with a display,” he explained. “It has to speak to the buyer.”

  She nodded. It did look right, this odd combination of elements. Like a Cubist painting.

  “Beautiful shoes,” Foxy pointed to his feet.

  “I know.” He was acting strangely elusive.

  When he didn’t add anything to the conversation, Foxy pressed. “So?”

  “So what?” he asked with exaggerated coyness.

  “Are you going to tell me where you got them?”

  The flood gates opened and he was all over it. “Well, if you’re going to beg for details . . . I bought them last weekend. At an Italian shoe store I found in New York.”

  “I didn’t know you were going up there. What did you do – besides shoe shopping?”

  Knot admired his shoes for a moment and then gave Foxy an intense look.

  “I met someone,” he said. “Someone special.” He tilted his head sideways flirtatiously.

  “Oh, Kuh-not. You just got out of something traumatic. You shouldn’t get into another relationship right away. You have to give it at least a year. Like me. I’m not looking right now.”

  It was true. Foxy had sworn off men. She’d decided until she got out of debt she was not going to let any man mess up her life any more than it already was.

  “You can’t wall yourself off from the world just because something didn’t work out. Besides, what kind of a message does that send to your daughter? At her vulnerable age?”

  “What do you mean?” Foxy may not have been the world’s best mother. But she was trying. Until all this happened, Amanda always had a nice house, nice clothes, nice vacations, and whatever she wanted. Foxy saw their situation as a bump in an otherwise gilded highway. And she was certain she’d find the smooth portion of the road up ahead.

  “Wellllll,” Knot strung the word out, then stopped.

  “Well what? And by the way, I thought you were going to order her pizza last night.”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying.”

  “What is?’ Foxy moved to the back of the store where she tried to slide a Victorian loveseat to a better position under a spotlight.

  “No, no, no,” said Knot. “That light makes it look dowdy. Move it to the left and place that swan neck floor lamp next to it. I have a gorgeous fern in my apartment we can place on the little table on the other side. We’ll have an ensemble
. And if you keep ordering pizza for your daughter’s dinner, you’re going to find your daughter eating out with some unsavory character one day.”

  “Are you calling me a bad mother?” Foxy shifted the couch and argued, “I’ve always given Amanda everything she could possibly want.”

  “She might just like a home-cooked meal and some conversation.”

  “Oh, so you’re the one who left that mess in the kitchen?”

  “I had to run. I assumed she would clean up after we finished. I can’t be expected to do both, after all. She’s not my daughter.” With that he was out the door to retrieve one oversized fern.

  Foxy puttered around the store. She stacked some first editions acquired from an estate auction on the new shelves the carpenters had installed. She moved a Ming-like vase to a more prominent spot in the window display. She arranged a small tapestry over the old steamer trunk that Knot had placed against the back wall. When there was nothing else to do but wait for Knot’s return, she perched on the edge of the loveseat and examined her nails. They were long, dark red, perfectly manicured. Foxy never skimped on herself. She needed to look good for the public – she had an image to maintain, she told herself. But what Knot said lurked in the back of her mind like a shadow. Amanda was her daughter. They should be able to talk.

  Upstairs Amanda had not yet closed her laptop, but she was ready to leave. She sat at her desk for a moment.

  Early Morning of Amanda’s Life in Hell (she wrote)

  She made me wash the dishes. Well, she can’t really MAKE me do anything, but I did it because otherwise they were likely to stay there for three more days while she was out spending her way into the ground on another shopping expedition. Some people have mothers with real maternal instincts. Me? I have an aging beauty queen with a Bloomingdales fetish. I may stay late at school so that boy can drive me home. Okay, so I’ll say it . . . his name is Nick. I wonder why he offered. I’m not exactly the girl-next-door type.

  Chapter Nine