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2008
$100 Editors' Choice - What Could Be Said about Pedris Road by Ru S. Freeman
Freeman is a Sri Lankan-American writer and activist. Her political commentary is published in Sri Lanka and on commondreams.org. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Kaduwa, the University of Peradeniya's Anthology of Literature and elsewhere. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review. She has received four consecutive writerships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 2005-2008. Her first novel is forthcoming from Atria/Simon & Schuster.
What Could Be Said About Pedris Road
Ru S. Freeman
Everything that happened could be traced back to brick and cement walls broken up by doors and windows. Long ago, when she was much smaller, when the word small was the only one she knew to describe herself, diminutive, petite, these acculturations still beyond the horizon accessed by British Airways, she remembers there was a first window. It was one of four that belonged to the flat, one of two that looked out from the single bedroom in which they all slept: father, mother, brothers, uncle and she. This window opened into a square of loamy dirt the size of two saris cut in half and laid side by side. The two saris were her mother’s. One was red and black, the other blue. Later, as she described the space with more sophisticated language, with terms that analyzed it for what it meant and not, as she had experienced it, for what it held, she explained that in concrete terms. Terms without the color and texture of saris: five feet by twelve feet. She corrected herself, no, six feet by ten feet, and then clarified it, small, like she had been.
“My mother had punished us,” she told the woman who, when she stood up, was always shorter than she was in her high heels and therefore could not, she had known from the first moment, help her.
“What had you done?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Why don’t you remember?”
“I remember what we did there.”
“Who?”
“My brother and I.”
“What did you do with your brother?” the woman asked. Her name was large and older than she was: Margaret. Margaret Spelde. She wanted to suggest that the last name be extended somehow; to Spendewind perhaps. Something to balance it on a page. The way it was spoken now, it tilted to the left. Margaret had told her that her problems with left and right could be traced back to her inability to receive help.
“The left side is the receiving side, the right is the giving side. They say that people who are uncomfortable with the right being outweighed by the left are people who cannot accept help. They always want to do the giving. They want other people to owe them. They don’t want to owe anybody anything.”
Owe. A curious word. A word that had meant yes in the language that was hers when she used to speak it, unlike now when she only referred to it as the language of my country. She had turned it about on her tongue wondering in which language it was being uttered there, inside her mouth, silently. Owe. Owe.
“What did you do with your brother?”
“We played.”
“What did you play?”
There was a large flat stone there on the ground. She couldn’t remember why that stone was there, clean and grey like it had a purpose. And then she did, because she remembered Mary. Mary was Tamil and Catholic and wore a bright orange sari like a Buddhist priest. She was fair skinned and she must have had curves because men whistled at her. She remembered that now, how the men had whistled at Mary and men only whistled at women with curves, not flat-chested ones like she had become. But she had circumnavigated that obstacle too. She felt proud of herself saying that word, circumnavigated. And then she remembered that if a person circumnavigates, that person would return to the place of origin. She felt crestfallen. A better word then, something like leap but grander. Leap was a small word and she was no longer small. But no word would come to her. All the ones she could think of were small too, words like jump.
“Circumvent!” she yelled, startling herself.
“Was that the name of the game?” Margaret asked; pale, untroubled.
“No.”
“What did you circumvent?”
“I circumvented the men.”
“Which men?”
“The men who whistled at Mary.”
“Mary,” she said. She said it slowly and wrote in her notebook. “Why do you think the men whistled at Mary?”
“Mary is real. Mary was real.”
“Is there anybody who was not real?”
“No. Everybody was real.”
“Why do you say Mary was real?”
“Mary was real. She worked in our flat. She lived with us.”
“In the flat?”
“Yes.”
“In the flat with one room?”
“Mary slept in the kitchen, on the floor. She had a mat. She worked for us. She was a servant.”
“Your family lived in a flat with one bedroom where everybody slept. And you had a servant?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about Mary.”
“She was fair.”
“Did she participate in your game?”
“What game?”
“The one with your brother.”
“No.”
“So how was she fair?”
“She was fair. In her skin. She was fair skinned. Light skinned.”
“Oh,” Margaret smiled faintly the way she always did. She wanted to fault her for this somehow, to assess a lack against her, but she couldn’t. She was fair, heart-fair, not skin-fair: Margaret had not been enlisted to beam at her, she had been enlisted to Find Out with questions like her next. “Did you like Mary?”
“I loved Mary. She bought us Cracker Jack chocolates when she got paid, and naarang bik when she wasn’t paid. She chewed betel with hunu so her voice always had a bubbling sound to it, from the spit in her mouth. She could spit in a hard stream and sometimes it looked like she was bleeding from her mouth except that she was controlling the bleeding, putting it out and pulling it in whenever she pleased.” She stood up to demonstrate. “She tilted over like this when she spat into the drains, gazing into the places where the red spit was landing as though she was painting a picture and wanted to make sure.” She sat down again, feeling lonely without something to say about Mary in her mouth. The room she was in was very foreign. Everything was foreign and unusual. The lamps and the shades and the carpets, not a single bulb, curtains and cement floors. No open drains.
“What made you think about Mary?”
“She never went home.”
“Why didn’t she go home?”
“She didn’t go. She wanted to stay with us. My mother teased her. When Raheema’s became a big store,…it used to be a small one, a kadé, with a few things to sell, kadju, seeni kooru…sorry, peanut brittle, sugar…sugar sticks, sweets like that in big glass bottles, and Bristol cigarettes and beedis for the poorer men. They sold hairnets on round cardboard circles and tiny packets of Sunsilk shampoo for fifty cents. But then they became big. They grew. Mr. Raheem, we didn’t call him that of course, he was just a shop owner, not a gentleman, he sold some land and wanted to expand his store. He invited my parents to the grand opening. My father was away then so my mother didn’t want to go. She sent Mary, but she put her hairpiece…my mother had a long hairpiece that she tucked under her own hair before she rolled it into a bun. It made her bun enormous. I don’t know why she used it. Her own hair was enough. And the hairpiece sometimes stuck out so her bun had different colors in it. It would have been much better if she didn’t have that hairpiece.”
Why did her mother use a hairpiece? It interfered with the shape of her face. If she hadn’t had a hairpiece, if she hadn’t tied her hair into a bun and covered it with a hairnet, everything taut and tucked except for the strands that she scraped loose with the edge of her comb across the two sides of her middle parting, would she have had a happier marriage? Her father had called those pieces ang once.
“Why do you keep doing that? They look like ang.”
Ang. The horns on cattle. She had stared at her mother’s head. Her mother had been taller than her then, and still powerful. They had always seemed important to her, those loose strands of hair. And suddenly they had seemed stupid. When had she lost her own eyes and taken on those of her father? She was always replacing her eyes with other eyes. Her mother’s. Her father’s. Her mother’s. Her father’s. Back and forth, back and forth until night fall. Until she shut her lids and put back her own eyes and could not sleep. Until she got on a plane and slowly worked those eyes out of her own, scraping and peeling and worrying until she was here, in this room, looking with her own eyes.
“You were talking about Mary,” Margaret said. “You’re frowning. What happened with Mary and the store?”
“That was funny. My mother’s hairpiece had two strands of short ribbon at the top of it; that is how she tied it onto her own hair. She called Mary and told her she had to go to the grand opening and when she was ready, she pretended to arrange her sari. Mary wore it like a lungi during the day and only put the fall over her shoulder if she was going out. My mother slipped that hairpiece into the waistband behind. It looked like a tail. Then she sent her to the store.”
“What did you think of that?”
“I laughed. Mary came back and scolded my mother and told her how all the men in the store had teased her. She said my mother was like a child. My mother laughed till the tears came. Mary laughed too. It was a happy day. We still talk about it sometimes. The time that Mary went to the store with a tail.”
“What happened to Mary?”
“She went home. She was sent home. My mother said she had a fruit in her stomach. A growth is what she meant. But we were small and we imagined a large round fruit. She said Mary had to go home to have it removed and then she would come back.”
“Did she come back?”
“She came back and we had moved from Pedris Road where we didn’t have a number on the door of our new place. A real house. But she didn’t want to stay.”
“Why do you think she didn’t want to stay in the new house?”
“She was pregnant. That was her fruit. I think she went home but she didn’t have an operation. She couldn’t stay. I don’t remember her much in the new house.”
“Did you miss her?”
“Yes, but other servants came and I had to get to know them. I liked all of them. They didn’t ask me to do anything.”
“What did your mother say about Mary?”
“My mother read Everybody’s Book of Fate and Fortune to ask if Mary would ever return. She said Napoleon consulted that book before every decision. She borrowed it from a friend who belonged to the British Council. It was very large. I had to stand to look in it. She made dashes and dots on a piece of paper and then found the answers.”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t remember. My mother always wanted Mary to come back.”
Would things have been different if Mary had come back? Would Mary have stopped all the other doors and windows from opening or closing or having to be locked or gazed at or frightening her?
“Why do you think you talked about Mary?”
“Mary washed our clothes.” Margaret was silent, nodding, waiting. “Mary washed our clothes on the big flat grey rock in the space behind the bedroom. That’s why it was there. She carried it into the bathroom when she washed clothes. She put it next to the basin and then she beat the clothes on it. The basin was white enamel.”
She remembered that basin. When they were very small, her mother bathed all the children by holding them across her lap with their heads hanging over the basin. When her brother was old enough to panic at being held that way, out of control, naked, his head lower than his body, she stopped. They all stopped together even though she and her other brother had been squirming over this ritual for a long time before. It couldn’t stop until her oldest brother had had enough of it. The first born. The second born. The last.
“He wasn’t punished.”
“Who wasn’t?”
“My oldest brother.”
“Why wasn’t he punished?”
“I don’t remember. I remember that he wasn’t punished. I don’t remember what we had done to be punished. My mother shoved us into that square of space and she shut the bathroom door. That was the only way to get there. The square was surrounded by walls. On one wall was the entrance to our bathroom. On the second was a window from the kitchen to the flat next door. On the third a window from our kitchen where Mary stood and watched us. On the last, the window to our bedroom.”
After the door shut, her brother had taken her by the hand and they had explored the brown earth, a place they never played in, preferring by far the long narrow parapet approach to their flat, the flat bars of steel that had been brought in to build a bigger house and abandoned in the overgrowing grass beyond it, the white farm gate beyond that; things to swing on. That gate had shut once, leaving them inside alone, and what their mother had said as she left had come true: the steel bar they had been standing on, she, her brothers and the neighbor’s boys and girl, had fallen on this brother’s foot and fractured it for a hard cast. A few years later he had gotten hepatitis A and lain there for months, yellow eyed and weak, eating only seer fish cooked white and rice, drinking powdered milk in a yellow plastic mug with Marie biscuits; food bought just for him. The neighbor had once screamed her way into their bathroom with a gagging daughter and her mother had placed her mouth over the child’s nose and mouth and sucked out wads of phlegm that she spat on the floor, large gelatinous yellow pods of mucous, and brought her back to life. She had a birthday party when she was five and won a blue watering can in a school race when she came second and she had to yell the correct pronunciation of her name into the microphone next to the nuns. She had watered her mother’s potted plants that cluttered up the front of their house bordered by more walls and a wall for their feet too, where her father pulled out their four chairs, so close for lack of room, and drank with his friends who were all homosexuals and slept in their beds too if they were drunk. Once she had walked into the kitchen and seen Mary on her back with her orange sari above her waist. Her father had discovered it, the fruit that sent her home. Another time, her mother had made warm tapioca and the table was pushed against the wall to make room for one pink desk and one blue desk for her brothers and for her to share, had seemed like it had expanded, the heat from the pudding wafting up, the teaspoons her mother had taken out of the blue chest that had come from Rome - along with her father, returning after six months service there, carrying household goods, dinner sets and cutlery - and set beside each small bowl. She had felt like a dormouse. Small and safe and cozy at a table beside their last window, some sun coming through, themselves clean, and one-time tapioca pudding on the table. Cozy. Once.
But that day, she and her brother had examined the dirt in the small square and this is what he had said: “Let’s play a game so that when they come to the window we won’t look sad. We will look like we’re having fun.”
He had thought up the game: they collected ants from the dark earth and placed them on the clean, smooth rock and watched them crawl about looking for something. They had only picked the black ants, the harmless kind who traveled fast, not the red ones who went about in single file and bit brown skin into welts.
Their mother and oldest brother had finally come to the bedroom window. Their mother had pointed to them, herself and her other brother, as though to show him where they were, reassuring him that they had not disappeared. Her mother had stood there toweling his head dry, powdering him and putting Johnson’s Baby Eau De Cologne behind his ears, under his armpits, and bending down, out of sight, to rub it between each toe. And he had looked sad behind those bars; his head tilted like he did not understand, his wise eyes solemn, his mouth soft, his hair wet, his arms hanging from his shoulders. That is what she remembered.
“What happened?” Margaret asked, her whole body waiting.
“Nothing,” she said, her hands folded quiet in her lap. Her lap of blue jeans and white cotton.
“Nothing?”
Yes, nothing.
Margaret gave up after a year of stories about windows and walls and parents and siblings she would not name, and the silence in between the thoughts she shared. She wrote citalopram on a sheet after six months, aripiprazole after nine. Their last meeting was conducted in silence. Margaret asked no questions; and she kept her voices inside, repeating two words to herself, Marge Spelde, Marge Spelde, to correct the imbalance.
She was not forgiven, not punished. Nothing was exacted, not that she could put into words. They placed her in a small room; a room within a building, a single window looking into a courtyard where other people walked. They sent her home.
$100 Editors' Choice - 2008 - On the Case by Jeff Kass
Kass is a teacher of English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor MI and also works as the Poet-in-Residence for Ann Arbor Public Schools. He has performed his work all over the U. S. His poems, stories and essays have been published in several literary reviews, newspapers, magazines and anthologies, and he has taught poetry workshops to thousands of young people. Kass is the Poetry Director in the acclaimed theatrical production Lay Your Comfort Down and recently co-edited the anthology Unsquared: Ann Arbor Writers Unleash Their Edgiest Stories and Poems. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Ann Arbor Book Festival.
On the Case
Jeff Kass
“I think somebody stole a box of Pop Tarts from my backseat,” you tell Daniel, because, well, who else are you gonna tell? Not your wife. You don’t even want her to know you bought Pop Tarts from the Safeway, or that you ever buy them, with your stomach starting to push these days like a soccer ball against the skin of your shirt. You can’t tell your kids either because you don’t want them thinking buying Pop Tarts is a legitimate way to spend money after you refused them the Pokemon treasure chest and the Gamecube. So who else can you tell? The cops? You’re gonna report a Grand Theft Pop Tart?
You tell Daniel at work because you know he’ll think it’s funny, he’ll laugh with you, but he’ll take it seriously too.
“Are you telling me someone jacked Pop Tarts from your car?” he says.
“Yeah, man, it was a double-box too. Sixteen pastries.”
“What flavor?”
“Strawberry.”
“Frosted?”
“Yeah, I was looking forward to eating them too.”
“That’s messed up, man,” he says. “People are messed up.”
The thing is, you’re pretty sure you know who stole them. When you parked, there was a woman next to you pulling garbage bags filled with cans and bottles out of what looked like a thirty-year-old Lincoln. It was rusted around the tire-wells and inside her trunk a large spool of yellow nylon rope lay on its side, surrounded by a half-dozen bruised and misshapen gallon-jugs that looked like they once held bleach, but had since been used to pummel someone’s skull. She was maybe five-foot-four with brittle grey hair, blue jeans with oil stains and a lumpy lime-green sweatshirt with an ironed-on portrait of Dora the Explorer. Her face looked red and pissed-off as if she’d just lost a fight. Shit, you thought, maybe I should lock the car.
You didn’t lock the car though because you hate locking your car and it was your second trip to Safeway that morning anyway. You bought the Pop Tarts on the first trip and you forgot to pick up the toothpaste and tofu you were supposed to get, so now you had to stop back there, and you were irritated because who wants to go to the supermarket twice in one day, and why does your wife apparently believe tofu is the answer to every damn thing wrong with the world, and so, screw it, you didn’t lock the car, but you did grab your laptop bag as if maybe if there were a long enough check-out line, you’d be able to locate a wireless network and check your e-mail.
But the woman saw you re-open the rear passenger door and reach in to shoulder your computer bag, and a moment passed between you, and she knew damn well you only took your laptop because you thought she might steal it and she looked at you like she would like to batter you with one of those bleach bottles, so when you returned to your car and the Pop Tarts had vanished from the back seat, you figured she just stole them out of spite.
“Yeah, man,” you say to Daniel, because you think he’s right about people being messed up, but you can’t decide if the person who’s more messed up is that woman, or you.
“What are you gonna do?” Daniel says.
“I’m not gonna do anything. It’s Pop Tarts, dude. Should I, like, red alert the FBI?”
“You could call Safeway and complain. Say they need more security in the parking lot. Demand they replace the box for you.”
This is what you love about Daniel. He always finds a weasel third way for dealing with problems. That’s why the two of you are the best sales team at the network, why you’ve won a free cruise every year for hitting your quotas. You just closed a huge deal last week with Cypress Mineral Water when the stuck-up budget skank in their conference room was tapping her pen on her copy of the leather-bound proposal and whining about how there weren’t enough primetime spots, and the Q-factor of the Thursday night sitcom was too low to generate the viewership of twenty-something females they want buying their bullshit over-priced fake water, and you were ready to reach over and smack her designer granny glasses straight through her eyeballs, when Daniel said, hold on, what if we talk to the writers? What if we have them write in a new love interest for our tragi-comic hero and she’s this totally buffed rock climber with arms like lithe muscular snakes and we’ll do product placement and every time our hero talks to her, she’ll zing hip witty comments and show off her guns and beautiful flowing hair and she’ll be holding a cold dewy bottle of Cypress Mineral Water? How’s that sound?
And now you’re making reservations for the boat going from San Juan to Port-of-Prince, (expensive berths) and it’ll be just like it’s been for the past three years. The kids will eat their heads off and attend day-camps starring Midwestern undergrads as warm and welcoming counselors, and Emily will play suntan and volleyball, and you and Daniel will do what you always do – beer, beer, and beer except there will be more of it, and better potato skins with grease that’s creamier and more luxurious and the best part, the chugging forward through ocean as if you’re riding a grand carving knife splitting the watery seam of the world because if even the waves will re-fold and heal themselves, you will have made a cut in something so much bigger than you, something that could swallow you and not even taste you in its spit.
“Listen,” you say to Daniel, “I think I know who did it.”
And you tell him the story of the woman with the beat-up Lincoln, leaving out the part about how she saw you shoulder your laptop and knew you were afraid of her, but emphasizing the menacing bleach bottles in her trunk.
“Dude,” he says, “I think we can catch her.”
You think that’s basically absurd – and what would you do if you caught her anyway, beat her ass? Demand restitution? – but you let Daniel spill out his idea because he seems excited about it, rotating back and forth on his spinning desk-chair as if he’s a kid at an ice cream parlor, and when he’s finished and flips you his smirk which says damn right I closed the deal, you realize his plan actually makes sense.
Later, after the staff meeting and a bout of unsuccessful cold-calling, and lunch with the people from the discount furniture chain which looks like it might lead to something promising – even though you hate their revolting cheerleader-like jingle – couches, coffee-tables, touch-lamps more/ let us decorate your living-room floor – you give Daniel the thumbs-up and you can see him chuckling as he jots down notes from the city’s web site that will tell you which neighborhoods will be flaunting their recyclable materials curbside tonight.
The two of you lean over your desk like a couple of hardcore analysts from the slaughter-all-the-terrorists weekly drama that’s the network’s highest rated Sunday night hour, and you glance to the corner of your office and try to channel the steely gaze of the life-sized plastic model of John Benson, the show’s twice-divorced, sometimes coke-addicted ass-kicker. The thing is essentially a six-foot-tall bobblehead doll, except that his large square head doesn’t bobble, and he stands before you, arms crossed beneath his train-car pectorals, with a silver pistol poking from his waistband like a mammoth gleaming erection. Generally, you get a laugh looking at him, but today you are searching for another kind of motivation. You stare down Benson’s empty eyes and his hyper-masculine carriage reenergizes something vital in your blood and you and Daniel huddle over the map he printed from the city’s web site, and you participate in several minutes of squinting and nodding, and you plot makeshift parabolas and hypotenuses, and you decide, yes, it’s got to be the area known as Lower Edgar Park. That’s the closest neighborhood to the Safeway, the neighborhood with the most houses with the most children who drink the most soda and bottled water – and the most dads like you with beer-fridges in their garages – and that’s where she’ll be tonight.
“I’ll come by your house at midnight,” Daniel says. “She won’t be out before that. Recycling pirates wait until everybody’s asleep, then they’re out lurking, you know, stealthily plundering the bins.”
You like that Daniel called them pirates instead of scavengers, as if they’re committing a despicable unlawful act and not just trying to survive by sifting through other people’s garbage. The pirate appellation makes you feel better about trying to apprehend one of them, as if, well, if you don’t draw the line here, what will she do next? Cans and bottles to Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts to wallets and jewelry and guns. What you intend to enact is justice, crude though it may be. This is a nation of laws and nobody’s above them. Daniel’s getting way too excited though, speaking in a near-whisper about how he’s going to ride up on his bike and how you should have your bike ready too, how the night will be a slow cruise, kind of a mobile stake-out from block to block, and how it would never work with a car because you’d make too much noise and spook her.
“Dude, hold on,” you say, thinking how Daniel’s got no wife or children and is probably gay so he shouldn’t just make assumptions about your availability for this kind of adventure, even though Emily and the kids will already be asleep so it won’t be a problem for you to sneak out either. “Listen,” you tell him, “I’m up for this, but if you show up in a black turtleneck and a watch-cap, I’m gonna beat you with a bucket.”
He doesn’t. Just a navy windbreaker and a backward Dodgers hat, and some eye-black under his eyes as if the streetlights might blind him, but you don’t say anything because you’re also surprisingly excited for the mission. You even spent twenty minutes in the garage spraying WD-40 on your gears and chain to minimize squeaking, and you set your phone to vibrate on the off-chance your father with the emphysemic wheeze will die and somebody will call to tell you at two in the morning. You’re amped. When you swing your legs up over your bike like the Caped Crusader hopping into the Batmobile, Daniel has to reach out and grab your arm. “It’s a slow cruise, remember?” he says. “We need to sneak up on her while she’s in the midst of her thievery. We need to swoop like silent owls. She looks up and, wow, where’d those guys come from? Get it?”
You’re not much of a swooper. You’re line-backer beefy, more like a bulldozer. But you nod at Daniel in all seriousness because, yes, you will lance the dark with silent grace, yes, you will. You will do that.
For the first hour, you see nothing. Not the lady. Not any other recycling pirates. Just two teenagers having a 45-minute break-up fight that should take thirty seconds, one inside the car brooding, the other outside on her driveway with numerous violent-looking gestures and a loud fuck you that resonates like a church bell off the high roofs of the surrounding cul-de-sac.
And what you’re doing feels spiritual. You’re riding bikes like two tactical assassins, cruising slow and quiet through the dark, all senses on high alert. The night is warm and calm, there’s the faint echo of hip hop beats from the basement of a house with a glowing platinum ball like a miniature moon shining amidst a leafy driveway hedge. Large screen TV’s push purple and blue spectral clouds through picture windows and you glide right through them. You feel the air streaming around you as you pedal. You are swooping, it’s true. You have been designed aerodynamically – not for sales, not for beer, not for husbandry or parenting, but for this specific moment astride your bicycle. You bless that woman for stealing your Pop Tarts. She has given you this night, this liquid panther-stalk through your city, and people are not messed up. People just need to get out more. Need to lube their chains and glide.
Both you and Daniel are surprised when you see her. You have long trusted Daniel’s genius, but this is something different. Predicting human behavior when you’re sitting across the table from someone in a conference room is one thing, but knowing not only what a woman he’s never seen will be doing at 1:30 in the morning, but also approximately where she’ll be doing it, that approaches the level of mythical prophet. “Holy shit,” Daniel says, as if he’s scared too, “there she is.”
She’s half-a-block away, across the street, shuffling beneath a streetlight. You and Daniel stop pedaling and roll a little closer, angling like two felines behind a large SUV where you stow your bikes. You crouch down near the front bumper so you can watch her, and as long as you’re quiet, she won’t spot you. Daniel moves into position behind you and you could be two brothers-in-laws at a Bar Mitzvah in a conga line, except his hands aren’t on your hips and you’d elbow him in the eye if they were.
The woman has replaced her Dora sweatshirt with a maroon raincoat, but it looks like she’s wearing the same grease-stained jeans. There’s a rhythm to her pushing, a right-left shove forward, a pause, a hover of dead space, a right-left shove forward, a pause. She’s got three shopping carts strung together with her nylon chord and the bottles of bleach are knotted along the rope too, situated as buffers between the carts to muffle the jangle when she shoves forward and they smack against each other. The cart she’s pushing is full and the one in front of it almost full, the lead cart empty. She’s close to two-thirds of the way through her mission.
What do you want to call what she’s pushing? A makeshift junk-jalopy vacuum? A recycling freight-train? Performance art? She’s pilfering trash bins, but she’s also a kind of social engineer. The cardiovascular architect of Lower Edgar Park. She’s a sieve, thinning the neighborhood’s refuse, siphoning glass, aluminum and plastic nickel-nuggets, and re-injecting the discarded wealth into the blood of the city. She’s guiding a mobile laboratory, a shopping cart IV drip, and she halts it expertly with the nearly filled middle cart parallel to the next bin she investigates. Most bottles and cans she shuttles quickly from bin to cart, but when she encounters a product she’s unfamiliar with, she raises it to the streetlight and examines it like a jeweler, searching for the hieroglyph that will reveal its value. It is when she lifts to the light a bottle that you recognize as being from Cypress’ newest line of flavored water – which tastes mostly like sugared sewage – that something else nags at her attention. She glances back at the house she just passed, where she didn’t stop her junk-lab because whoever ferries the trash out – probably an overworked new father who’ll wake up at 4am to schlep it to the curb – hasn’t done the job yet.
For a moment she rolls the revolting Cypress bottle in her hands as if she’s considering something new that just occurred to her, then she dumps it into her cart and finishes sifting through the rest of the bin. But before she shuffles on, she leaves her plunder at the curb and creeps across the front lawn toward the porch of the house she glanced at moments earlier.
Daniel grabs your sleeve. “Dude,” he whispers, “We gotta stop her. She’s trespassing.”
“So?’
“So, it’s not about garbage anymore. She’s crossed the threshold from curb to yard. Anything can happen now. What if she breaks into the house and stabs someone?”
You consider this, but don’t move. The woman steps quietly onto the porch.
“Stop her,” Daniel hisses, but he doesn’t yell out, and neither do you. She appears to move a few things around the porch, then grabs the handle of a jogging stroller, wheels it around, and pushes it down the stairs.
“Yo, she’s stealing that,” Daniel says.
“You don’t know that,” you say.
“I’m sorry – what? She just crept up to that porch and snatched it. Are you blind? That’s her, right there, pushing it down the walkway.”
“Maybe she has a kid at home and she’s thinking of buying a new stroller, did you ever think of that? Maybe she just wants to test this one on the street, see if she likes the feel of it. A woman like her who pushes stuff around all the time, she’s probably a discerning consumer.”
“A discerning consumer? Are you fucking kidding me? She stole your Pop Tarts. Now she’s stealing the stroller. Dude, she’s a thief.”
Daniel’s right. There’s no third way here. The woman’s affixing the stroller to the front cart, weaving the yellow twine around the handle to secure it. It’s an expensive model, a status-stroller, sleek and triangular with a lightweight aluminum frame that’s collapsible for easy stowage when traveling. No way you could have afforded it when your kids were of stroller age. The family with the front porch will wake tomorrow morning and want to take their kid to the park, probably a wailing infant who needs to get outside, needs some time away from the house and Mommy who’s been nursing him for five hours straight, and Daddy will volunteer for the job in order to keep his marriage afloat and he’ll pack the diaper bag, fill the sippy cup, get ready to earn some serious sensitive-male points with his wife and when he goes to garner the stroller – uh oh, oh shit.
The recriminations will be loud and enduring because Mommy has told Daddy repeatedly not to leave the stroller on the porch, to store it in the garage because hasn’t he noticed stuff disappearing from their yard every once in a while? Little stuff like the rake that one time, and whatever happened to the Frisbee? Yeah, he said, but who’s cruel enough to steal a stroller? And who’s bold enough to venture all the way onto our porch?
Once again, you minimized my concerns, she’ll say, you never take me seriously, and he’ll shout don’t make this a bigger deal than it is, you always blow everything out of proportion and the baby will be wailing and the whole weekend will be ruined, and maybe their marriage too.
“Do something,” Daniel says, because even though he’s the genius, you’re the muscle. That’s what makes your team work. He does his let-me-appeal-to-your-inner-weasel thing, and then you step forward with the papers, holding them with your meat-hook hand, your lead-pipe arm and GQ smile, and the subtle undertone of we just spent our whole afternoon talking to you and if you end up wasting our time maybe you shouldn’t be too confident about your legs or your jawbone or your windshield, and the deal closes and it’s time to start making reservations for the cruise.
Daniel’s right, of course, you should stop her because even though you don’t give a shit about that couple’s marriage – they’ll be fine with their too big house with the fake Victorian eaves and the satellite dish, and they’ll have a new stroller, a more chic model with an even lighter alloy by this afternoon – still, there’s the broken window theory to consider. If you don’t stop the woman from jacking the stroller, what will she steal next? Maybe, you’ll wake one morning and there will be empty space on the street where your car was the night before.
“Do something,” Daniel says again, almost whining now because at heart Daniel’s a wuss and if you don’t do something, there’s no way he will, but you don’t do anything, because the woman’s moving again with her rhythmic right-left shuffle push, and the night is warm and calm, and the stroller affixed to the front cart looks like the sharp prow of a ship, and there she goes cutting her way through the dark.
$100 Editors' Choice - 2008 - The Transparent House by Edith Pearlman
Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short nonfiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on-line publications. Her work has been selected by Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Collection, Best Short Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Preservation, and Yankee. Her travel writing has been published in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and salon.com. She is the author of three collections of stories: Vaquita (1997), Love Among The Greats (2002), and How To Fall (2005).
THE TRANSPARENT HOUSE
Edith Pearlman
Stringbean,
What a visit that was! Shall I remind you in my beautiful script – catch that serif! – of how we adored it, adore you, abandon ourselves to you, spread like spilled oatmeal before you our idol. My little boys – and my big one too, don’t let anybody tell you different – admire every one of your distinctive attributes. Your five feet and ten inches. Your unchanging wardrobe of black stovepipe pants and black sweaters and black tees. Your black-rimmed glasses. Your giddy smile. Your cropped black hair. And your long fingers cavorting on our upright, and your infinitely expandable store of tunes and lyrics including music hall ballads you learned from your grandmother who learned them from hers. You can sing their favorites too: every line of Raffi.
Each time you come, the two children and I imagine your journey eastwards, the bus barreling from New York through New Haven New London Providence, crossing the Cape Cod Canal, and landing in Hyannis, hub of the universe to my sons, certainly the hub of the Cape. Then the next bus pops from village to village until it reaches tip-of-the-Cape Provincetown. One of those villages is Ours. Oh, she’s in New London – she’s on the Bridge, looking down at the water – she’s changing buses in Hyannis. Now we move towards you -- we get into our car and drive to the bus stop on the south side of Main Street. Some bus stop! -- three glass walls and one tin roof enclosing a bench just long enough for four backsides. The boys call this glass enclosure and its twin across the road the Transparent Houses.
Here you are! You step off the bus; and because the month is March, you are wearing a black pea jacket and a black-and-white striped scarf wrapped twice around your long neck. Fifty? You could be thirty. You carry a satchel that belonged to your other grandmother the doctor. Fifty? You could be seventy. You walk past the Transparent House. James and Teddie are jumping up and down beside the car. You bend to hug them, and straighten up, and hug me.
The whiff of you! It’s the scent of our life together, our single life, our double life. In your brief embrace I relive my existence between twenty-five and forty. I think of the man in the apartment upstairs, and his collection of high-heeled boots. Of the waiter who would never reveal his name, maybe because of those unmarked cartons in the kitchen. Of that Euroglam we called The Presence, who seemed not to enter a party but to materialize in the midst of one, as if she could switch herself on and off at will. The time we Got Organized, and threw out some bonds from Erie County worth who knew how much and also our lease. The time we wandered into the wrong Bat Mitzvah in a Long Island Syna-plex, and stayed for lunch anyway. The night, ten years ago, that I met Jeff. I came home and told you about the overweight doctor soon to start a practice on Cape Cod. I told you about the sweater he wore, knitted in shades of rust and mud, with little orange whiskers here and there. Any man who could buy a sweater like that was a danger to himself.
“So you’ll marry him,” you said evenly.
“Somebody has to,” I explained.
And now, here, last Friday, after lunch at the Pancake House and an afternoon at Bosky’s Wild Animal Farm and an hour discussing dinosaurs and a dinner of Boeuf Bourguignon, for I am still a good cook, you and Jeff and I bathe the boys and read them stories and put them to bed. Then we sit around the kitchen table with a bottle of wine like retired bandits. Jeff’s wardrobe hasn’t improved in eight years and my hips haven’t gotten narrower. As always I invite you to stay forever. Nature meant children to have three parents -- why else did She make nannies. But you can’t stay; there’s the job back in New York, and there’s your Italian class, and you’re the only resident in our old apartment building who knows CPR. You and Jeff talk peaceably about climate change – he doesn’t believe in global warming, and you don’t even believe in the globe, my gentle flat-earther. I’m the one who fears that we’re all going to melt, to seep away. I begin to nod, and it’s catching. We go to bed.
The weekend spins like a carousel. We bike, eat, read, play more games, walk along the chilly beach. We adults stop to watch the boys behind us watch the footprints behind them fill up with water. And then I make a stagy business of tying my sneaker until the procession goes past me and I can get you all in my sight, my four loved ones: tender napes, humble buttocks, hair wool corduroy and that striped scarf like a flag. James turns to make sure I am still there. Satisfied, he turns again. Your eight legs move, not in concert. I grow rigid with happiness.
Sunday morning we read the papers and play games and take a shorter walk, this time under scrub pines. Jeff doesn’t join us because he has to do paperwork, poor single practitioner, so we leave him wedged between chair and desk, adding figures and forgetting to carry. I’ll fix it all later. Slap, slap, slap: our sneakers on the road. “The Presence,” you say abruptly.
“What about her?”
“She died.”
“I didn’t know,” I mutter.
You shrug, or at least your pea jacket does.
“Was she run over?” James inquires.
You give him a kindly look. “She was. By a disease.”
I wonder but don’t ask if the beautiful Presence lingered in a hospice, visited by all her friends. I wonder if the funeral coffin was open, or if, dying, she instructed that it be closed.
Sunday afternoon, as always, comes too soon. After lunch you and I and the boys get into the car and drive to the other Transparent House, the one on the north side of Main Street. There you will catch the reverse of Friday’s bus, the one going from Provincetown to Hyannis.
This Transparent House stands in front of a tiny seventeenth-century graveyard that by ancient irreversible law cannot be built upon, though CVS has tried. I pull up in front of the cemetery and we sit in the car, watching through the back window for the bus which will appear over a little rise in about five minutes … in three … in two. We get out. Of course we are alone: March is no season for vacationers and Sunday not a day for commuters. We wait beside the Transparent House. A few people go into the The Faithful Dog diner. You unwind your scarf and wind it again. The boys stamp their feet. You tell us to go home. The bus is sometimes a little late, you remind us; but it always comes.
It might have broken down, I say; you have no cell phone to call us with, I say; we need a few things at the convenience store, I say. We’ll go to the 7-Eleven and come back and if you’re still here we’ll say good bye again. So we embrace, you and I, and you stoop and kiss the boys, and then you do enter the Transparent House.
We linger over our purchases. But when we return you are still waiting, satchel at your feet, hands in your pockets. I lean across the passenger seat you recently occupied and open the window. “We’ll keep circling these blocks,” I yell. “What happened to that damned bus …”
“Nothing happened to that damned bus,” you yell back. An old man comes out of the The Faithful Dog.
I drive off. “We’re going to circumnavigate,” I say to the boys.
We take a wide tour at first, and even stop to look at the windmill that no longer grinds anything, and at the public library with its new addition, and at the sign in front of the Chokecherry Day Camp, June to September, ages 5 to 7. “I’m not going to that damned camp,” says James. When we get back to the Transparent House you are still within it. We wave, you wave. “Circumgavinate,” Teddie directs.
We circumnavigate, we circumgavinate. Each time we pass the Transparent House you are standing like a sentry in your pants and jacket and scarf. Your head is turned towards the unforthcoming bus. The panes of your glasses catch the waning winter light.
“Gee,” says James. &nb | 
