481

Chuck

As a child of eight or nine, Chuck began fantasizing about being the only person left on Earth. He didn’t think loneliness would be a problem, because he was awfully good at not having friends. Nor did he think he’d miss anyone in particular—least of all his mom, because he did not believe she truly loved him.

Chuck relished the idea of unrestricted access to anything and everything, especially to all the toys he’d coveted that were beyond his family’s means, and all the candies, cakes, donuts, and ice-cream sundaes he did not get to eat on account of Mean Old Mister Tooth Decay. In other words, it wasn’t omnipotence per se that rang Chuck’s chimes within his childish world of make-believe. It was license. And shortly after the onset of puberty, he discovered that the license his reveries found most appealing had become decidedly licentious; which is to say Chuck had evolved from being the only person left on Earth into being the only male person left on Earth, and ooo-la-la, la-laaa.

But not to worry. Chuck rarely ventured beyond First Base in flexing licentious license with the women of his dreams—not even after reaching manhood. In fact, another kind of fantasy had taken root in Chuck’s brain by then and was demanding more than equal time.

In this other more compelling, albeit ultimately distressing, fantasy, Chuck imagined reliving a week or two of his childhood with the discerning mind of an adult at play in his brain pan. He imagined scrutinizing everything and anything—especially the grownups who’d populated his world back then, and extra-especially his mother. 

Did she really not love him? Had he been misreading the signs?

In looking back on those times from the vantage point of his twenties and thirties Chuck never found convincing evidence that his mother’s routine professions of maternal affection had been anything more than spun sugar. He saw himself as the bitterly inconvenient truth of her existence—the avatar of her thwarted ambitions.

And so Chuck found himself fantasizing about again being eight or nine but with his adult powers of observation and evaluation fully operational. He imagined playing under the dining-room table while his mother and her best friend, Mrs. McCann, shared secrets over coffee in the living room; he imagined catching, this time, all the words that had flown over his head. And he imagined studying his mother’s features more closely and peering deeper into her eyes to locate true tenderness when she greeted him after school.

But the distressing part for Chuck was, he knew he hadn’t missed or misinterpreted anything as a child of eight or nine, or six or seven, or four or five. Because love is like a vibrating string that induces vibration in a string close by, and the strings in Chuck’s heart had never known inductive motion.

# # #

886

Hope

“Who is it?” David bellows into the intercom. He stresses the who instead of the is, making the statement more like a warning or a scolding than an inquiry—an oral BEWARE OF DOG sign in all caps with triple exclamation points.

“It’s Vincent,” Vincent responds coolly, attempting to deflect this unanticipated animosity with contrapuntal amiability. “I’m here about the fountain pens?”

Vincent waits in the rain for what seems like forever, and is about to press 4A again when David ends his signature pregnant pause with something unintelligible and buzzes Vincent in.

The vestibule smells like a mixture of damp dog and cooked cabbage, and the stairway’s right there, as impatient and in-your-face as the bellicose voice on the intercom. Vincent hears a salvo of deadbolts unlatching in the vertical distance and starts taking the steps two at a time. It’s like him to meet every challenge with a headlong rush, but in this instance it’s more like getting the blood flowing to offset the chill. By the fourth floor he’s winded and trudging, and has to lean over the railing with his forehead on his forearm while his heart-rate reluctantly stabilizes.

David’s left the door ajar, but Vincent knocks just the same. Lightly. The door swings a few more degrees and Vincent can see David slouching on the sofa, staring at the TV with his open pie-hole verging on drool.

Vincent steps in and stands there, waiting for David to acknowledge his presence or at least exhibit one or more signs of life. He’s like Silas Marner in full-on catatonia, Vincent thinks, David’s Kim Jong-il sweatshirt notwithstanding.

“It’s lucky for you I’m no ‘Dunstan Cass,’” Vincent jests in a bid to break David’s trance. “Otherwise, I’d’ve grabbed your sack of gold and been long gone by now.”

David languorously turns his pallid, doughy face in Vincent’s direction and begins boring a hole through Vincent’s forehead with his eyes. He lets ten or fifteen seconds elapse before uttering, “Huh?”

It comes as no surprise to Vincent that yet another obscure literary allusion—in this case to George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in which magnum plot twists occur during the eponymous protagonist’s random cataleptic seizures—has shot wide of the mark. It’s not the first time, it won’t be the last, and Vincent has long since stopped giving a shit. And so, with neither amplification nor apology, he begins recapping his reason for being there.

“Okay ... well ... I’m the one Marjorie from the resale shop called you about—about your late mother’s fountain pens. You told her I could come by any time as long as I brought plenty of cash, and ... well ... here I am.” Vincent downplays the cash stipulation by chuckling as he says this, but David’s deadpan expression does not change. Nor do David’s eyes stray from Vincent’s forehead, which Vincent endures without discomfiture, having been forewarned of the young man’s idiosyncratic forehead-gazing by Marjorie when he was purchasing Hope’s dishcloths.

At length, which is to say absurd length, David lowers his eyes and says, “You’re the guy who bought Hope’s dishcloths, yeah?”

“Right. Yes. That’s me,” Vincent replies, nodding.

“Why?”

“Why? Oh ... well ... I do some photography and I found them at the resale shop and I thought they might make a charming still-life arrangement.”

“Charming?” David repeats, finding Vincent’s forehead again. “Yeah, I guess Hope had a knack for ‘charming.’ You could even say ‘charming’ was Hope’s métier.”

Vincent isn’t sure if David is being sarcastic with this reference. Moreover, he wonders if it’s a subtle payback in kind for his errant invocation of a George Eliot novel. He hasn’t heard or seen the word “métier” since Jack Nicholson, as sardonic gumshoe Jake Gittes, used it in the 1974 motion picture Chinatown. He dismisses this conclusion out of hand, however, as giving a douchebag too much credit. “Métier,” he says, smiling crisply. “Haven’t heard that word since Jack Nicholson used it in Chinatown.”

“Bingo,” David answers. He counts to twelve in his head, rises, and says, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Vincent follows David into the kitchen, where David motions for him to take a seat at the table—at the table, Vincent realizes: the round, chrome-trimmed, 1950s-era Formica table where poor Hope had keeled over into a plate of chicken-fried steak.

The table has what’s called a boomerang pattern, featuring overlapping stylized boomerang outlines in light, medium, dark, and bluish gray tones against a soft gray background. Stimulated by the acuteness of this detail, Vincent’s imagination goes hyperactive and his skin into gooseflesh-mode as he envisions Hope slumping there so pitiably. An undignified, unworthy way for someone so sweet and gentle to leave this world he thinks, and the thought pierces his heart like a poison dart.

Because, Vincent just knows Hope had to have been sweet and gentle; because only a sweet and gentle soul could have knit exquisite dishcloth after exquisite dishcloth. And pondering her breathtaking handiwork and undeserved tragicomic demise has imbued Hope in Vincent’s mind with an almost unbearable poignancy. He has become as obsessed with her as Dana Andrews was with the presumably murdered Gene Tierney in the quintessential film noir Laura. Only in this film there’s no hope of Hope coming back from the dead to find true love.

# # #

731

Queenie

“No, I’m dead serious, man,” Barry insists. “Sell me what you’re wearing.”

“You need to seriously go fuck yourself, man,” the man answers, shoving Barry aside with sufficient force to make him stumble backwards and collide with a bike rack.

“I need your damn clothes!” Barry bellows at the man’s rapidly receding, FUBU-clad figure.

Barry hasn’t exactly fallen to the ground, but almost. He’s awkwardly commingling with the bike rack and has to wrench himself upright. In doing so, he snags his pants on a sharp burr protruding from a protuberant galvanized bolt.

“Shit!” he exclaims on discovering the resulting rip in his brand new Gap 1969 Limited Edition Premium Jeans (rigid rinse, with selvage trim on the coin pocket). They and his brand new Gap (PRODUCT) RED™ cotton T—in soft black with the word “HAMME(RED)” raggedly silk-screened to simulate a cracked and faded, dozens-of-washings look—had been purposely selected from an official Gap window manikin to impress Queenie, the object of Barry’s ardor, with (a) Barry’s Zeitgeist-synchronized sense of style and (b) Barry’s deeply ingrained social awareness.

If the jeans by themselves don’t get the job done, Barry had reasoned, then surely the fact that half the profits from his T-shirt had gone or would eventually be going to a global fund to fight AIDS, will.

In other words, mission accomplished.

Or so Barry had believed while brandishing cash at the Gap. He’d even embellished the ad hoc ensemble with a military-inspired wool jacket featuring four extra-generous flap pockets, shoulder epaulettes with button closures, strapped cuffs, and a concealed nylon hood.

It was all over but the waiting, Barry was certain—meaning, the waiting outside the bodega where Queenie had been shopping the day she saved his sorry ass (as Queenie had put it) when his Harley had fallen on top of him, and she had lifted it from his sprawling person with the apparent ease of a mommy freeing a traumatized two-year-old from a toppled trike.

Four days he had waited. Four days! And then, on the fifth day, there she comes, glowing and gliding towards him like an ethereal form, moving as if in slow-motion through a throng of faceless pedestrians paralyzed in their tracks by her grandeur.

The world becomes a blur for Barry as Queenie floats past him and into the store. He stands there shivering in the sweltering heat, waiting for her to emerge, his heart marking the minutes at two beats per second.

Barry hears her before he sees her. Hears her calling, “Yeah, man, the same to you!” And as she slides back into the sunlight, he hears himself speaking to Queenie, saying, “Hey—remember me?”

“No,” Queenie answers with a tone that’s equal parts indifference and impatience.

Barry gulps like some kind of over-the-top buffoon in some cartoonish melodrama. Like Jack Larson as “Jimmy Olsen,” for instance, in any 1950s episode of Adventures of Superman.

“I’m the guy you pulled the motorcycle off of,” he says, pointing. “Up the street? Over there?”

Queenie’s amber eyes give Barry a thorough going over, then light up with recognition. “Jesus Christ, it’s the Marlboro Man! Who you tryin’ to be now, Jack—that ‘Bono’ dude? And why you wearin’ that fuckin’ coat in this fuckin’ heat, man?”

Barry realizes he’s sweating buckets, but carries on as though he weren’t, as though he were indeed channeling Bonovian cool. “Listen,” he says, “I just have to ask you again—”

“Ask me what?”

“If you’ll go to Starbucks with me. When I asked you the last time, your exact words, as I recall them, were ‘No fuckin’ way.’”

Barry smiles at Queenie after saying this. Smiles like they’re sharing a joke or reminiscing about some distant contretemps whose memory they’ll shortly be washing away with raspberry mocha.

Queenie smiles back at Barry and keeps smiling at Barry while delivering her reply. “I’ll put it a little differently this time,” she says, giving his bulky pockets and pointless epaulettes a final, bemused inspection. “How about, ‘No fuckin’ way—José.’”

She leaves Barry standing there, slack-jawed, in a puddle of perspiration. All seems lost as he watches her walking off, swinging her bag of groceries in sublime unison with her strides.

But then Barry sees Queenie checking out a FUBU man who’s passing her on the sidewalk and coming his way, and decides all’s not lost after all.

# # #

209

Little Barry

Big Barry, to all intents and purposes, has disappeared and Little Barry wants his daddy back. Gone without a trace are Big Barry’s pirate trappings and sundry cowpoke furnishings, and with them his peerless “Big Barry” persona.

Worse still, like a self-inflicted mortal blow Big Barry has upped and sold his Harley Davidson—the thundering, fire-belching, ass-kicking “hog” against which Jimmy’s father’s lily-livered, chicken-legged Vespa motor scooter had exuded about as much machismo as an antique treadle sewing machine.

“Where’s the hog, Daddy?” Little Barry had demanded with a quivering, panic-singed voice, his horrified eyes all but sucked from their sockets by the black hole where the motorcycle had formerly held sway like a gunmetal god in Big Barry’s garage. “Where’s the hog?—”

“Sold it,” Big Barry had answered, just like that. And just like that Little Barry’s universe had collapsed to pinhead proportions.

And so, when Big Barry brings Little Barry home a little earlier than usual on Saturday afternoon, Little Barry does not emulate Big Barry’s erstwhile cocksure saunter on making his way from the curb to the porch. He runs as fast as he can, desperate to escape the stranger in his father’s car, determined to reach the haven of his bedroom before the first sob.

# # #

315

Chuck

Chuck flips the switch that puts his Kindle to sleep, then the one that shuts off the blue-white diode of his reading lamp, which he wears on his head. It is a headlight in the literal sense, complete with an adjustable elastic band, and much more convenient and effective than any clip-on reading lamp he’s ever owned. He removes that and sets it and the Kindle on the nightstand and checks that the alarm’s turned on on his digital alarm clock.

The room’s dark now, and the ceiling fan’s gently thrumming. But even under conditions so conducive, Chuck’s mind, as usual, won’t allow nodding off. It starts working, as usual, on something, and the something in this case is how wonderful is the book he’s reading—a novel from 1915 called The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford—and how much lonelier the fact of that makes him feel.

Chuck always feels lonely. But being unable to share with anyone the sumptuous perfection of Ford’s prose or the novel’s masterfully woven story-line or the powerful insights and delightful wit the book contains aggravates his isolation to the throbbing point. Chuck simply does not know anyone who would give a rat’s ass about The Good Soldier or about Ford Madox Ford.

Or about Chuck himself, come to think of it. Which Chuck does, of course, come to think of.

Why am I here? he winds up wondering, inevitably. It is his inevitable meta-theme. He means nothing to everyone, something to no one, increasingly less to himself. He thinks about all the photo albums his image must be in—an anonymous background element in thousands of keepsake snapshots snapped by untold strangers at parks, fairs, zoos, monuments, historic and scenic points of interest, and by marginal acquaintances at social gatherings whose fringes he routinely helps populate.

“Background fodder,” Chuck mumbles, rolling onto his side. “My raison d’être.”

# # #

183

Milena

Shortly after David dumped her for that bimbo he picked up at his mother’s funeral, Milena decided there wasn’t any point in keeping her Mirena intrauterine contraceptive “up there” any longer. She’d had the nasty little pickax-looking gadget inserted more so for David’s convenience and pleasure than her own, and apart from now being pointless it had acquired a sort of snide symbolic stature—an ever present reminder, within the most intimate region of her innermost self, of the all-encompassing sway which that motherfucking shitass (her latest appellation of choice) had held over her.

So she made an appointment and went to the doctor and had the gizmo removed as a Mother May I? giant step toward moving on.

Only, the ground had collapsed beneath her footfall, as it were, and moving on from David had proved to be outside the compass of Milena’s resolve. Lying on her back in bed at night, she found herself staring through closed eyelids for hours on end at an unfathomable, impenetrable blackness; struggling for an answer, straining to understand why:

Why? Why wasn’t I good enough for him?

# # #

675

Crystal

Queenie and Crystal are conversing over coffee at the new Starbucks on 152, across from the new Hungry Howie’s pizza franchise, adjacent to the new Hy-Vee grocery store. Crystal is vaguely sipping a venti raspberry mocha. Queenie’s draining a venti chai tea latte as though there were no tomorrow—in great, which is to say grande, cup-compressing draughts.

“Leave some for the fish,” Crystal jokes meekly. She’s been saying pretty much everything meekly since becoming tormented with the memory of the snot bubble that billowed from her nostril and embarrassed her to death in front of her fifth-grade class.

“Fuck the fuckin’ fish,” Queenie quips mid-slurp, “and the sea horses they rode in on.”

Crystal laughs. No one can make her laugh like Queenie can.

Queenie sucks the cup to the point of collapse, slams it down on the table, leans back, says “Ahhhh,” wipes her mouth with her sleeve, then says, “Jesus! That was damn good. I’m gonna go grab me another—”

Crystal smiles, nods, and begins absently tearing an unbleached-paper napkin into more or less uniform strips. Across 152, a man in a blaring pink sweatshirt emerges from Hungry Howie’s with a large pizza box in his hands. Crystal notices the steam wafting from the box, but the sweatshirt does not register. She begins twisting the napkin strips into miniature ropes.

Queenie comes back in her usual flash and drops into her chair. “Doggone, I love these things,” she says, swigging a little less vigorously now on account of the piping hotness.

“Y’coulda fooled me,” Crystal responds meekly.

“So listen, girl,” Queenie begins, ready at last to get down to bidness. “You gotta get over this snot-bubble bullshit. You’re worse than that ‘other monk.’”

“Huh? What other monk?” Crystal asks, baffled. (No one can baffle her quite like Queenie can, either.)

“Good God, Crystal, gimme a break—don’t tell me you ain’t never read no Zen koans?”

“No,” Crystal answers with a flush of unwarranted shame. “I don’t even know what they are.”

“Ach du fuckin’ lieber, liebchen!” Queenie exclaims, amazing Crystal with her unexpected use of German. “I mean, mein Gott in Himmel, they’re little stories that teach you somethin’, only not in so many words.”

“Okay, and—?”

“And you’re just like the second monk in the one about the girl and two monks.”

Queenie pauses and lets Crystal’s curiosity build through two long pulls on her latte, then picks up an untwisted napkin strip and dabs her lips and continues.

“There’s these two monks, see. And they’re walkin’ through this woods. And they come to a river and there’s this beautiful young woman standin’ there, and she don’t know what to do ‘cause she’s afraid she’ll ruin her kimono and her pretty little flip-flops and white split-toe socks if she tries crossin’ that river. And the first monk goes, ‘Hey, what’s up, girl? You afraid you gonna get all wet if you try crossin’ that river?’ And the girl’s all, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ And he just picks her up and carries her across, just like that. And she’s all, ‘Hey, thanks a million, monk,’ and they all go their separate ways. “But the other monk starts stewin’ over what happened, ‘cause in their thing, you understand, monks ain’t s’posed to touch no women. And finally, after like four or five miles, or whatever, he just can’t hold it in any longer, and he goes, ‘Hey, man, what was up with carryin’ that fine young thing across the river? You wasn’t s’posed to touch her, man.’ And the first monk turns and looks the other monk straight in the eye and says, ‘Listen, Chuck, I put her down back at the river—you been carryin’ her all the way here!’”

Crystal looks up from her rope-making and Queenie leans forward till their noses nearly touch.

“Crystal,” Queenie says, letting her stentorian voice slip to a loud whisper, “It’s time to stop carryin’ your fuckass bubble around. You need to go ahead and put that bitch down, girl. Ain’t nobody else give a scheisse.”

# # #

274

Barry

Sitting cross-legged on the curb with his sizzling groin and Queenie hovering over him like that, Barry was feeling sheepish for the first time in his life and in no way inclined to argue money. Besides, his sensibilities weren’t wholly self-directed; he recognized and accepted legitimate obligations, and believed he did owe Queenie for the groceries some asswipe walked off with when she dropped her shopping bag and rushed to his rescue.

Whatever the case, had it not been for Queenie’s instant intervention, his motorcycle’s super-hot exhaust pipe might have totally toasted his almonds. And so with no little effort, Barry extracted his wallet from the pocket of his snake-skin jeans. He was shaking a little and hoped Queenie did not interpret this as fear.

“Twenty-three sixty-five, you say?”

He fished out some bills and thrust two tens and a five-spot towards Queenie’s looming form.

Queenie plucked the bucks from Barry’s tremulous fingers. “Danke shön,” she said. Then she reached down and snatched another five from the still-gaping billfold. “Let’s just call it thirty, Chuck. I gotta re-shop that stuff, you understan’, and time’s money.”

Barry watched Queenie stuff the cash in her bra and wondered where this Abyssinian goddess had been all his life. He could feel his whole body blushing as though irradiated by her aura. Slowly, without thinking, he began divesting himself of the trappings of his persona—the bandanna, the earrings, and finally the spurs.

Then, naked as it were before her, he haltingly posed a suddenly imperative question:

“How about ... Starbucks?”

# # #

320

Queenie

Barry loved making a big fat production of backing his big black Harley into a curbside parking spot, slapping down the kickstand with a booted heel, and easing out of the saddle in the über-manly slow-mo manner of the Marlboro Man. He was sure all eyes were on him (where else would they be?), and that he was making bosoms swell with desire and dicks shrivel with envy.

Only, today—today just wasn’t going to be Barry’s day for Marlboro Manly display.

The backing to the curb had gone without a hitch. The slapping of the kickstand had kicked ass per usual. But the dismount did not come off as planned. The spur on Barry’s boot got caught on a fringed-leather saddle bag as he was swinging his right leg rearward, causing him to lose his balance and fall to the ground, pulling the motorcycle down with him.

“Help!” Barry shrieked, as the engine’s hot exhaust pipe instantly began searing his groin.

Much to Barry’s good fortune, Queenie, a woman of uncommon strength and unhesitating action, happened to be strolling toward the scene of his distress on her way home from the corner bodega. Dropping her sack to the sidewalk, she sprinted the twenty or so yards to the writhing victim of his own excess and yanked the Harley upright as though it were a Huffy.

Barry rolled over and crawled to the curb, sucking air through his teeth against the pulsing pain radiating from his scorched scrotum. “Omigod—it HURTS!” he squealed.

“Serves you right for wearin’ spurs on a goddamn motorcycle, fool!” Queenie scolded. “I saw what happened—and who you tryin’ to be anyhow, the fuckin’ Marlboro Man?”

Barry, feeling sheepish for the first time literally ever, just sucked more air and cupped his crotch with both hands.

“And look here, bitch” Queenie continued, “you owe me twenty-three sixty-five, ‘cause now some asshole’s gone and stole my fuckin’ groceries!”

# # #

219

David

It’s early evening as we join David and Rachelle enjoying some quality time together on the over-stuffed sofa in Rachelle’s snug, fifth-floor walk-up. David, who’s just “had his way” with Rachelle, as he likes to put it, is beginning to nod off when Rachelle digs him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Oh my God, David—look at this,” she says, gasping.

She’s referring to the disturbing video then being aired on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. It’s one of those caught-in-the-act videos captured by a parking-lot surveillance camera at a big-box outlet; in this instance, a Target Superstore in Bentonville, Arkansas.

In the video a young mother is seen leaning into the back seat of a dark-colored Chevrolet Suburban and whacking the daylights out of a child who’s hidden from view by the roof of the vehicle. The woman whacks and whacks and whacks and whacks, her ponytail bobbing and swaying with every blow.

Rachelle’s eyes begin to blur with tears. “That woman should be taken out and shot,” she says.

David, however, is observing the episode from another point of view. He’s transfixed by the fetching rhythm of the child-beater’s bobbing and swaying ponytail, finding it alluring in the extreme. It is, for David, pure poetry in motion. What’s more, he really digs her ass.

# # #

332

Barry

Little Barry told his mom he wanted spurs for his seventh birthday, and she replied over my dead body without glancing away from The Price Is Right.

Although Little Barry’s brain struggled to process the reference, Little Barry intuitively understood that his mother’s response was less promising than maybe or we’ll see, and probably amounted to no. But since she hadn’t specifically said no, he decided he’d ask her again later, tomorrow maybe, and slumped off to his bedroom.

Little Barry also intuitively understood that he needn’t bother bringing up pierced earrings, and that his mother loathed the very sight of Big Barry—a fact which thoroughly confused Little Barry, because Little Barry wanted to be just like Big Barry, the coolest dad of all the dads of all the kids he could think of who had at least one.

None of the other kids’ dads rode a motorcycle as big or as loud as Big Barry’s, for example. None of the other dads even had a motorcycle as far as Little Barry was concerned, because he was pretty certain Jimmy’s father’s Vespa didn’t count. And even if it did count, Big Barry’s motorcycle, which Big Barry called his “hog,” was twice as big and about a hundred times as loud. Why, compared with Big Barry’s hog, Jimmy’s father’s Vespa seemed no louder than his mom’s portable sewing machine.

And it pretty much goes without saying that Jimmy’s father did not wear spurs while riding his Vespa. What would have been the point of that?

Safely ensconced in his bedroom, Little Barry extracted from beneath his pillow the red bandana Big Barry had bought him from Piratemerch.com and tied it on his head as best he could. Then he dragged his mother’s Samsonite suitcase out from under his bed where she stored it, set it upright in the middle of the floor, and climbed on. The suitcase made a pretty good motorcycle if Little Barry pretended hard enough, even though it was pink.

# # #

356

Vincent

“What are these?” Vincent asked Marjorie, the lady at What Goes Around Resale, a shop he popped into from time to time in his perpetual quest for still-life subject matter.

“Hand-knit dishcloths,” Marjorie said.

“Jesus,” Vincent said. “They’re little works of art. Every one’s a different pattern, did you notice?”

“Yes,” Marjorie said. “The lady who knitted them used to knit ‘em like crazy. We have a couple of her pattern books, too.”

Vincent took the booklets from Marjorie, examined the covers of Nifty Knit Dishcloths and Color Splash Dishcloths, and began flipping through the pages. “Jesus, these things take seventy-five, eighty-five yards of ‘one hundred percent cotton worsted weight yarn’ each. Amazing.” Then, “What do you mean ‘used to’? Did she die?”

“She did, poor soul,” Marjorie said. “All alone at her kitchen table. Of a brain aneurysm, according to her son.”

“Alone. That’s really sad,” Vincent said. “I wonder if one of these is ‘Tidy Time’—”

“Couldn’t say,” Marjorie said. “We got most of her things. Clothing mostly. She had a lot of fountain pens, too, of all things.”

“Fountain pens?”

“Yeah. But he changed his mind on those. Said he was going to try and sell ‘em on eBay instead. He was an odd one, that one. Gave me the creeps the way he kept staring at my forehead. Wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

“How much for the books and all the dishcloths?” Vincent said.

“Would you be interested in her yarn bag, too?” Marjorie said.

“Lemme see it,” Vincent said.

Back at the studio, Vincent arranged the yarn, the books, and the dishcloths on a gleaming mahogany table, adding a clear glass vase and three stargazer lilies as a background element. And while he did this and loaded the Hasselblad and positioned a foam-board reflector, he thought about the woman who’d died all alone, and wondered what had possessed her to churn out cotton dishcloths like crazy.

Had he only been privy to the fact of the matter—that knitting dishcloths, for Hope, had just been a way to hide from her husband—his still-life tableau might have been somewhat less saccharine.

# # #

199

Chuck

Rachelle made Chuck quiver, and being introverted and introspective he rarely found the nerve to do much more than mumble “G’morning” or “G’night.”

One unusually brazen Monday he asked her in the lunch room how her weekend had been, but she neither turned her head nor answered, which Chuck took as a not unexpected (or undeserved) snub, but which in reality had had everything to do with too little volume on his part and too much on the microwave oven’s—Rachelle being, at the end of the day, an attention-seeking missile.

Her fragrance did much to fuel Chuck’s ardor, too. It lingered in his nostrils and then in his libido long after every encounter. And when he overheard her telling Crystal that her perfume was called Obsession, he thought it less an amusing coincidence than a warning from the gods, because Chuck had no doubt that a heavenly body like Rachelle could provoke jealous ire even on Mount Olympus.

And thus it was that Chuck interpreted the unisex-lavatory episode as Divine Intervention—as opposed to Dose of Reality—when he stepped in one day to a blast of Obsession waging fruitless combat with the asphyxiating fumes of a massive dump.

# # #

265

Rachelle

Six full months and seven filled notebooks later, Crystal’s plan to purge her head of poisonous content—by putting down on paper every embarrassment, every regrettable incident, every single thing she’d undo or do differently if only she could—hadn’t been going so well. The enormous snot bubble that had bloomed from her schnoz in front of the whole class that day in fifth grade was no less vivid in her mind’s peripheral vision, and no less mortifying.

It occurred to her that confiding in someone might help; and after an exhaustive mental vetting of everyone in her acquaintance, she decided to confide in her coworker Rachelle about this unremitting fixation. “After all,” she said to herself in the car on the way to work, “Rachelle confided in me that time in the break room.”

Yes, with a few suggestive winks and a liberal application of air quotes, Rachelle had indeed divulged to Crystal the sexual (air quotes) quirks of her new boyfriend, David, whom she’d met at the funeral of some woman who lived in her mother’s building—when she was living, Rachelle had hastened to clarify. “That woman loved her some fountain pens too, yo” she’d added parenthetically.

And so, mustering every molecule of gumption she could summon from what seemed like every cell in her body, Crystal confided in Rachelle about the snot bubble, and gained from that simple act a rush of closure that almost made her swoon. But the blessed relief proved all too brief when, not twenty minutes later, Felix poked his head into her cube and said, “Good morning ... Bubbles.”

# # #

250

Hope

It wasn’t until later in life, much later, that Hope had begun to appreciate the interesting child she had been, and, perhaps, to some extent at least, find something to admire there, something to hang some self-worth on.

Take her early and persistent ardor for fountain pens.

She’d bought her first fountain pen—a clear-barreled Schaefer with a chromed metal cap—at eleven, at Woolworth’s, for a dollar. It came with two royal-blue cartridges, and Hope had found the kit’s comparatively exotic allure (versus Bic ballpoints and number 2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils) irresistible.

A dollar at that time, make no mistake, was a substantial sum, was more than some grown-ups earned per hour, and so the impulse to purchase the pen had brought with it a sizable opportunity for buyer’s remorse. But only constant delight had followed, as well as a succession of increasingly costly fountain pens, each more sublime than its predecessor in heft and feel and fluency.

Hope had been the only kid she knew who used fountain pens. From sixth grade on she’d done all her homework and quizzes and even her high-school math tests in fountain pen.

As an adult, she’d composed journal entries and greeting-card captions with a Parker. Had jotted grocery lists and notes-to-self with a Pelikan. Had had a green-marble Waterman Phileas medium-point (always, always a medium point) in her purse hanging on the doorknob when she died, and had been saving her pennies for a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 instead of a rainy day.

# # #

492

Queenie

Queenie just loved The Price Is Right. So much so that she kept right on watching after Bob Barker retired in June of 2007, and that comparative dullard Drew Carey took over as host—although, in all fairness, not even avuncular Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” could have effectively replaced the man Queenie regarded as the all-time God of Game Shows and principal deity of daytime TV.

But as much as she loved the program, Queenie had a few issues with The Price Is Right. She did not like—which is to say, wanted to murder—those asshole contestants who were always asking “What was the last bid, Bob (Drew)?” so they could go exactly one dollar higher and thereby screw their fellow contestant out of a fighting chance at winning the frigging prize and getting to dash onstage for a shot at a Chrysler Town & Country. I mean, play fair! Queenie thought. That shit just bugged the shit out of her.

And as for all the cars the show awarded, and had been awarding since something like 1972, well, it only stood to reason that a percentage of those people had wound up getting killed in the cars they won on The Price Is Right, which took irony too far the way Queenie saw it. I mean, those poor souls figured winning a car was the luckiest damn thing that ever happened to them, or ever would happen, and look what a nasty joke that turned out to be, Queenie thought. Just nasty.

Then there was Plinko, the game where a contestant let five fancy pucks slide down a peg-studded inclined board into slots at the bottom with cash values ranging from zero dollars to ten thousand dollars. The announcer always made a great big deal about the CHANCE TO WIN UP TO FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, but no one had ever done that, or ever would do it, the way Queenie saw it. It was just so much bullshit. The closest anyone had come was thirty thousand one hundred dollars, during Drew Carey’s first season, and before that it was something like twenty-two thousand. Queenie knew this because she had looked it up online. It always seemed to Queenie that the chips had eyes for those two slots worth zip.

But anyway. It was Plinko Queenie thought of at the top of the stairs one morning, with three rolls of toilet paper in her arms for reloading the TP holder in the powder room, just beyond the stairway. She dropped one roll onto the first step and watched as it bounced its way to the bottom and straight through the powder-room door. Score! Queenie thought. The second roll scored too—and so did the third.

Son of a bitch! Queenie thought. Unaware that that was going to be not only the luckiest thing that would happen in her life that day, but for the rest of the year.

# # #

305

Crystal

Not even the doe cantering across open grass barely thirty yards from the highway could break Crystal’s fixation on the thing that had been haunting her all day long and just would not shut the hell up. Under ordinary circumstances she’d have thrilled to a flash of dashing fauna while driving home from work. But that snot bubble had ruined this, too.

Why did that have to happen? she kept asking herself with the disbelieving indignation of someone who’s scolding God. How could you have let that happen?

The sudden recollection of that bubble—as big as a golf ball or a paddle ball at least—could not have been more vivid or seemed more immediate had Crystal been Proust biting into a madeleine.

She’d been standing in front of her fifth-grade class, nervously delivering an oral book report, and with no forewarning and for no apparent reason had snorted in mid-sentence, such that a huge bubble of snot had bloomed from her left nostril to the shrieking, guffawing delight of everyone in the room, Miss Goik included.

Why did that have to happen to me?

And why did that mortifying memory have to come rushing into her brain as she was buttering her wheat toast at 6:44 a.m.? And why had she not been able to blind her mind’s eye to it from that moment on? There seemed to be no stopping the video loop; not with the quotidian activities of the workplace or the casual banter of the lunchroom or even with a doe cantering over open grass.

So Crystal decided to purge her head of poisonous content by putting it all down on paper—every embarrassment, every regrettable incident, every single thing she’d undo or do differently if only she could. She started filling her first spiral notebook that evening, believing that looking backward was the best thing she could do for herself, going forward.

# # #

185

David

During Warren’s viewing, David had thought it might be droll to baffle the (air quotes) bereaved by combining penetrating stares with ridiculously long pregnant pauses.

And so whenever someone approached him to offer his or her condolences, he would stare disconcertingly at a point slightly above the middle of that person’s forehead and inwardly count hippopotamus one, hippopotamus two, until he reached twenty-five before saying “thank you” or whatever random remark happened to pop into his head. Then he’d salt the rest of what passed for conversation with absurdly protracted pauses—without shifting his unblinking gaze—until the disconcerted well-wisher flaked off, ostensibly to respectfully regard Warren’s corpse or appreciatively examine one of the two meager floral arrangements book-ending Warren’s coffin.

At Hope’s funeral service he opted to go with enigmatic air quotes instead. For instance, when a lady from Hope’s apartment building commented on how good Hope looked in repose, David replied, “Yes, she certainly does,” air quoting does.

But a little later, when Milena took him aside and told him she was late—air quoting the word late—he had no frigging idea what she meant.

# # #

181

Barry

Which one was it, anyway? You know, Certs. Was it a breath mint or a candy mint?

That’s sort of how Barry was on his Harley hog. Was he a pirate? Or a cowboy? The argument pro pirate was fortified by the head bandanna and the hoop earrings. But then what to make of the chaps? And more particularly, the spurs?

Yes, the spurs.

Nickel-plated, rowel-less spurs, which, come to think of it, were of the sort for riding to the hounds. Or show-jumping. So the question, more probably, should be, was Barry a pirate or an equestrian when out profiling on his Harley?

One thing for certain: Barry was a thoroughbred phony. He did nothing that was not premeditated, that had not been calculated for augmenting the persona.

When you spoke to Barry, you were speaking to a guy who’d imagined spurs, who’d sought out and purchased spurs, who’d donned spurs to elicit frissons of wonder and admiration from those sufficiently fortunate to witness his grandeur.

And when Barry spoke to you, it was usually the spurs doing the talking.

# # #

244

Warren

Within three days of Warren’s interment, Hope had eradicated almost every shred of evidence of his noxious presence in her life.

His clothing to the last repugnant sock had been hauled to the Good Will donation bin near Hy-Vee or chucked into the parking-lot dumpster. She’d gone to the bank and had his name taken off their accounts, ordered new checks bearing her name only, shredded the two boxes of unused checks that had survived his Royal Hind-ass, and filled the Rubbermaid bathroom basket with his pills, potions, lotions, salves, suppositories, and sundry grooming utensils, first dunking his triple-headed Norelco shaver into the toilet by its cord a few times for good measure.

The Viagra she pounded into powder with an upholstery hammer at the breakfast bar, tablet after tablet, all thirty-four of them, savoring the satisfying, saved-by-the-bell sensation that accompanied every blow.

But for all the catharsis Hope realized from this elaborately constructed deconstruction, there really was no getting even with Warren. He’d gotten through life unscathed by his own causticity; had lived his whole sixty-eight years as an irredeemable bastard oblivious to the loathing in his wake.

Bull-headed, bullshitting, wife-bullying Warren had held a worldview precisely like that of a rodeo Brahman. Because even if “ridden” the bull—as far as the bull is concerned—never loses. The cowboy always winds up on the turf, and the bull always leaves the arena the way Warren left this world: a smug, strutting, self-satisfied winner.

# # #

280

Chuck

Charles Uriah Farley had been given his name by an asshole father and a mother asleep at the wheel. And by the time he was savvy enough to be in on the joke he’d been going as Chuck for far too long to circumvent the inevitable. He swore at one point, though, that he’d punch the next jerkoff to blurt Chuck you, Farley! like he’d invented the gag on the spot. But Chuck never made good on that vow, of course; just withdrew a bit further instead.

Shaped for introspection by a misshapen name, Chuck U. Farley acquired a predilection for performing such mental calisthenics as calculating how many pints of pee get pissed at Arrowhead Stadium during your average Kansas City Chiefs game. It intrigued him to think that an exact amount of pee gets pissed every time—not exactly the same amount, obviously, but an exact amount, at any rate, every time.

He liked the idea of unknowable finite numbers, you see. Numbers beyond all knowing, yet no less finite for not being known.

Another thing Chuck liked to do was imagine something bad and then counter it with something good. Priests buggering altar boys, for instance, countered with a goldfinch plucking thistle from his seed feeder. (It wasn’t qualitative he was after in this; only quantitative.) And it occurred to him one day, that just as with the pints of pee at Arrowhead Stadium there were finite numbers attached to all the malevolent things and all the benevolent things in the universe. Finite numbers beyond all knowing, but which, if tallied and compared, could settle the question once and for all of whether God is good or evil.

# # #

225

Hope

She’d been the kind of breathtaking baby that stopped people short. A baby with a mesmerizing gaze who would engage your eyes as though regarding the core of your being—the very truth, as it were, of you. She’d been the kind of happy and happy-go-lucky child who could infuse everyone around her with a feeling of inexplicable and ineffable gladness.

And yet, in spite of the sparkling start, her life had evolved as a more or less steadfast march from bundle of joy to bundle of nerves; nerves relentlessly assaulted by a mean-drunk husband and an emotionally distant, possibly demented, son.

She had tended toward undercooked poultry and overcooked meat—yet charmingly so for all the assiduous effort she unflaggingly put into getting it right. But it had been Hope’s fate that no one would find these charming tendencies endearing, or rightly appreciate her facile mind or capacity for provocative thought. One such thought Hope’s facile mind had come to harbor was that her destiny had turned out to be that of a figurative and literal conduit for pointless perpetuation. Nothing more, nothing less.

There had not been, and would not be, a pot of gold at the end of her rainbow. No rainbow, as far as that went. Just a tangerine-colored Corelle plate of chicken-fried steak, buttered green beans, and mashed potatoes.

# # #

296

Milena

When Milena saw the TV commercial for Mirena, an intrauterine contraceptive offering up to five years of pregnancy-thwarting hormone-delivery directly into her uterus, she thought of her mother’s Japanese-American friend, Mrs. Iwasa, who never could get the hang of Milena’s name, being herself thwarted by the letter L, and was always calling her “Mirena” instead. And no, maybe that wasn’t exactly in the nature of a fortuitous portent, but it was at least a provocative coincidence, and so she decided that, yes—yes, she would go ahead and ask her doctor, as the promotional message strenuously recommended, if Mirena was “right” for her, even though the tiny plastic implement bore a somewhat discomfiting resemblance to a miner’s pickax. A resemblance all the more menacing for its ability to dig into, and sometimes pierce, a woman’s uterine wall, as the commercial lightly, if not liltingly, cautioned.

It also cautioned Milena about back pain, headaches, nausea, irregular bleeding, ovarian cysts (but the good ones that usually disappear), a decrease in libidinous impulse, and the fact that if pregnancy should occur with Mirena in place, it could threaten Milena’s life. The commercial didn’t say anything about having to check the thing’s threads once a month, but no matter; Milena had pretty much stopped listening after hearing the potential blessings: no more having to take that pill (so busy!) and no more baby worries for five sweet years. Just set it and forget it, like her Showtime Rotisserie, and what a godsend that was!

So she asked her doctor to put one in, and he of course was only too happy to oblige, money being money. But Milena’s hear-no-evil indifference to Mirena’s less sanguine attributes made him think she might be as big a nut case as her boyfriend David.

# # #

186

David

David had his own way of seeing things, and sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if his own way of seeing things was not a good deal more than quirky or eccentric or endearingly odd. In other words, he could not be certain he wasn’t a bona fide nut job. On the other hand, a good deal too many people lived their lives bereft of creative impulse, the way David saw it, and David drew more than a modicum of pride from his voluptuous ability to think outside the box.

And so, when he came home later than usual that night and found his mother face down in her chicken-fried steak, his initial response, after satisfying himself she was actually dead, was to dial 9-1-1. 

But then it occurred to him that he would probably never have another opportunity to break bread with a corpse, much less his mother’s corpse, and how singular it would be, in not just his frame of reference but in pretty much everyone else’s, to do just that. 

And wouldn’t you know it? 

His mom had gone and overcooked the goddamn meat again.

# # #