Nickle and Dimed
She wants to change his mind.
“Jesus, Dad, are you even listening to me?”
“I am, I am. What were you saying?”
“I was saying that you shouldn’t live at the shore. You should stay in your house and sell the shore house.”
“I like the shore. If I live there then that will be my house and my house will be the shore house. So to speak.”
“Why the shore, though? It’s too far from everything. I can’t pick you up and take you places if you live at the shore.”
“What places do you need to take me? Where do I need to go?”
“We’re at the doctor’s now, Dad, the doctor I drove you to. If you live at the shore then I can’t take you to the doctor’s.”
“No doctor’s at the shore? There’s plenty.”
“But they’re all on vacation, Dad.”
“Even better. They’ll be rested. Who wants a busy doctor? This guy here is plenty busy, judging from the people in this room. He’s maybe too busy. Needs a vacation. I’ll see him then.”
“Why do you want to move to the shore. Huh, Dad? Why?”
“I like it there. Thing is the town now is nickle and diming me to death. Now I have to pay for garbage pick up. Can you believe that? Thirty years the town pays for garbage, now I have to.”
“But nickles and dimes don’t add up to dollars, Dad. The shore is all dollars, everywhere. It’s all dollars. You should be worried about that, Dad. Not the dimes.”
“Eh.”
“Don’t eh me, Dad. You eh’d Mom for all those years she couldn’t take it anymore. I’m all you’ve got, and if you move to the shore I won’t be there. I’ll be here, with the kids. The kid’ll miss you, Dad.”
“Eh. I like the shore. I like the sky.”
“We got sky here, Dad. It’s the same sky. Everywhere you go around the world, it’s all the same sky. Everybody’s looking at the same sky.”
He juts out his lower lip.
“You’ve been to war?”
Suffrage
He suffered in silence
So he avoided it completely,
Though even he hadn’t noticed
Until someone pointed it out to him.
Not even a friend, just this guy who slurped coffee
On the elevator every morning, someone who he’d thought
Liked hearing his thoughts on the game the night before,
His political views, the next day’s weather.
In the awkward moment
That followed—the efficient elevator, the coffee lidded—
Winded and unglued,
He surrendered.
Bangor Maine
11 April 2007 | Brett | Stories
Einstein has nothing to do with this. That was what she had told herself when she accepted a job offer from the Institute for Advanced Study. She told it to herself again when she bought a white, clapboard house in Princeton’s Mercer Hill Historic District. And it was what she had told herself, over and over, as she leaned her back into an oak tree, a man in electric blue running shorts kneeling at her Sauconys. She had found herself scritching him behind his ears as if he were a cat, which seemed to be what was expected given how Bangor was lapping at her. Though she had felt in no way like a bowl of milk. That might actually have been pleasant, or something approximating pleasant. It had been more like he was trying to clean her, not thoughtfully but instinctively, compulsively. Einstein has nothing to do with this, she had thought, not with the tacit agreement that had resulted in this having happened, and not with anything that might make it stop nor eradicate its memory. I am consenting, she had thought, and then, to replace that thought, Einstein has nothing to do with this.
Marcia had long prized her ability to think. Not think logically. Not think dispassionately. For her, these qualifiers were redundant, perverse.
She had attended Cambridge because it suited her, read physics because it fit her disposition and intellectual abilities, continued on to Caltech because it gave her an opportunity to work alongside colleagues whose interests most closely approximated her own. Rational people do not follow their high school sweethearts to England and California, get married in Reno, then continue on together to Princeton. A thinking person understands coincidence and probability. Almost all odds are long, and the fact that something occurs, even if it occurs infrequently, should never be confused with kismet.
Sometimes things simply work out, and sometimes they cannot possibly work out, and one has to be prepared to be objective in either instance. They had happened to be admitted to the schools that topped their individual lists, and those schools had happened to be near each other, and so they had continued to date, and then they had gotten married when it seemed more useful to be married than not to be married.
His work in linguistics at Oxford, UCLA, and Princeton was exemplary. Her ability in physics, had she been a violinist, would have qualified her to play in any symphony in the world, but would never be that of a soloist. The evidence was preponderant.
One must never lie, not to others, and not to oneself. Her parents had believed strongly in Mark Twain’s advice on lying: if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. Ethics and fidelity were functions of rationality, not emotion.
And yet there she was, not only cheating for the first time in her life, but faking for the first time as well. Einstein has nothing to do with this, she thought. Einstein has nothing to do with any of this.
When it was over, at least most of it, he had kissed her on the forehead, just below her hairline. “Who is this Albert?” Bangor had asked. “Your husband?”
“Albert?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It happens all the time.”
“Okay.”
“Stop by the shop later,” he said. “I have a new recipe in mind. For a milkshake. In your honor.”
“Maybe.”
And then they were two joggers, back on the trail, her pace at first slightly quicker than his, though eventually much faster, her breath far quieter. Instead of finishing her run as she usually did, with a quick shower at home and lunch at her desk, she had run a bath and called the office to tell them she would be taking the afternoon off.
Though it was a warm, late-spring day, she ran a hot bath, filling the tub to the point where she would barely be able to move without splashing water over the rim. It was a technique she had taught herself in her early teens, before she had overcome her impulse to restlessness. She would lock the bathroom door, fill the tub with hot water, then force herself to sit still until the water grew tepid. If she spilled any water over the side she would refill the tub and repeat the process.
The tub in her parents’ house had been claw-footed and deep, and she had developed an appreciation for its shape. For her Princeton house, aside from having the bedrooms painted, having a period-appropriate claw-foot tub installed in the second upstairs bathroom was the one alteration she had made before moving in.
Marcia studied the tub before getting in, drained it, cleaned it thoroughly, ran the water again, and called Theresa, who greeted her before she spoke.
“How was your run?”
Marcia had anticipated the question, but realized she had failed to prepare a response. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”
“Welcome to Princeton,” Theresa said.
“What’s with this place?”
“I don’t know,” Theresa said. “But it works.”
Theresa, the director of fundraising at the Institute, was Marcia’s closest friend and also her boss. After leaving the physics department at Caltech, Marcia had joined its fundraising office and immediately began bringing in an unprecedented volume of noteworthy donations. Her success followed her to Princeton, and she found in Theresa not only a mentor, but also someone who shared her sincere devotion to advanced research and the tasks associated with attracting the donations that support it.
Theresa had taken her to one of Bangor’s shops for the first time to celebrate the Kessler Trust contribution, the first large gift that Marcia had secured for the Institute. Bangor Maine owned a small chain in town that sold ice cream and chocolates. The rumor among a select but apparently ever expanding group of Princeton women, Theresa had told her, was that he added a new item to the menu each time he had an affair with a married resident.
A month later, on the drive back to the office after celebrating another gift, Theresa divulged that she herself had trysted with him a couple of years earlier. “I’m Chocolate Cherry Chunk,” was how she had put it.
None of which made sense to Marcia. Theresa and her husband, Brad, seemed to be one of the happier couples she had ever met. Moreover, the idea of Theresa ever having found anything appealing in Bangor seemed inexplicable.
“I have a bath running,” Marcia said to Theresa. “I really should get off the phone.”
Marcia had found herself turning it over in her head, trying to formulate a theory. There didn’t seem to be any reason for Theresa to put herself into position to inspire Bangor Maine’s Chocolate Cherry Chunk. But she was at a loss for evidence and so eventually, almost out of scientific duty, she had acknowledged Bangor’s clumsy flirtations, casually divulging her running route and schedule during one the times that she and Theresa had stopped in Bangor’s shop. He had begun running with her, at least as much as he was physically able, but she felt unmoved by whatever charms seemed to have moved Theresa and, allegedly, legions of others. Yet the menu seemed to expand at least weekly.
And so, earlier that day, she had cocked her head toward a secluded grove off the edge of the track and Bangor had put his sweaty palm into her hand and taken the lead. “An excellent choice,” he had said, and Marcia almost backed out of it, whatever it was, but she had gone that far and figured she might as well find out what all the fuss was about.
“Want to go for a milkshake later?” Theresa asked.
“You’re kidding,” Marcia said.
“Later then.”
“I’m going to take that bath now,” Marcia said.
“You really will thank me for it,” Theresa had said, and then hung up.
Marcia slipped into the tub with studied calm, and the bathwater reached to the precipice of the rim, but the only water that escaped left as steam. The water temperature was on the safe side of scalding, but only just, exactly how she liked it, pacifying and consuming. She settled in and let her mind work through the evidence.
If anything, Bangor’s appeal was less scrutable than before. The only thing that seemed clear to her that he wasn’t merely appeal-neutral, but was instead far less than appealing, very likely universally so, particularly as an indulgence. She considered the possibility that she was mistaken, that others saw or felt something she hadn’t, but the supposition struck her as epistemological and therefore pointless. Perhaps Theresa was simply playing a joke on her. But that didn’t seem like the sort of thing Theresa would do, least of all to her.
She thought back to the day Theresa had taken her to Bangor’s shop and introduced them. They had been celebrating something, Marcia thought, and remembered the Kessler gift. Marcia had walked into Theresa’s office to tell her the gift was official and Theresa had been so pleased that she had actually clapped her hands excitedly. Even now, thinking back to it, Marcia felt awkward. She had been brought across the country, she was being paid three times what her husband was making, and she had landed several gifts for Caltech that were several times larger than the Kesslers’. This was what fundraisers did. Did Einstein clap excitedly after a Kurt Gödel lecture?
“He’s proud of you,” Theresa had said.
“Who?”
“Whose picture do you have in your wallet?” Theresa asked.
“How do you know about that?”
“I don’t,” Theresa said, “But you don’t have any pictures of him in your office, so I figured there must be one in your wallet.”
“You never looked in my wallet?”
“You think you’re the only person who came here to be Einstein? If I had a million dollars for every genius who came here in search of a unified theory, this place would be fully endowed and I’d be shopping my resume.”
“You hired me to raise money,” Marcia said. “Einstein has nothing to do with this.”
“Look, Einstein was Einstein before he got here, but he wasn’t happy about it until he’d been here for a while. And now he’s proud of how hard you worked to land the Kessler gift. And so am I.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what you need?” Theresa had asked. “A treat. And I know just the place for you to get it.”
And they had gone to Bangor’s and gotten ice cream and the rest of what happened had happened, and now her bathwater had gone tepid and her husband would be home soon. She got out of the tub slowly, dried herself thoroughly, pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and then changed her mind. From the bottom of her underwear drawer she pulled out a camisole she hadn’t worn in years, not since the weekend of their wedding. She had bought it as a joke, something the two of them could laugh at together, like the drive-thru chapels or the squads of bridesmaids dressed like background singers.
The fabric felt cool, almost liquid against her torso, and she caught herself blushing even though no one else could see her. The urge to pull her shorts and t-shirt back on was almost overwhelming, though evidently not, because she resisted it, remained in her camisole until she heard a key in the door, and then she ran down the stairs to greet him.
She thought he would laugh at her, but he didn’t.
Three Stories About Paranoia
9 April 2007 | Gerry | Stories
- The Lock
The last time I checked the front door deadbolt it was locked. Wasn’t it? It was just five minutes ago, but I thought it was locked. Definitely locked. Could I have unlocked it when I touched it to confirm its lockedness? Could a finger’s feather brush do that? Maybe. Now I’m not sure.
Maybe it was one of the kids? Those jokers. One of them might have unlocked it just to make me crazy. Sure they were only five and two, but just last week my brother Bob’s eight-year-old son logged on to his, Bob’s, PayPal account and sent two hundred dollars to a Nigerian scammer to claim nonexistent lottery winnings. Who’s to say my own five year old couldn’t unlock a door at midnight just to mess with me? He’s so much smarter than my brother’s kid.
Could the lock simply unlock itself? If it’s a sentient lock, alive and aware, and it’s in revolt, like the house boy apes in that Palent of the Apes prequel! Sentient Kwiksets rule the future! Christ, just one more thing to worry about.
What if someone picked it while I was in the bathroom and is now hiding until I go to bed, when he’ll murder me in my sleep? i guess I better make some coffee. It’s going to be a long night.
- Cake Batter Can Kill You
Marcy couldn’t believe the sight: husband Mark and daughter Lacy licking batter-dipped wooden spoons, laughing like children. Only one of them had the right to do that.
“What the hell are you two doing?” Marcy reached for the spoons but her loved ones pulled them away.
“What’s it look like we’re doing?” Mark said. “We’re eating what’s left of the cake batter.”
“But it has raw eggs in it! Are you two crazy?”
“No. I’ve eaten cake batter every time I’ve ever made a cake. My mom used to let me eat it, and I’m letting Lacy eat it.”
“But you could get salmonella poisoning. You could die.”
“True, but it tastes so good.” He scraped the spoon against the inside of the bowl and licked it clean. Lacy did the same. “Besides, you could die from something today.”
“What a horrible thing to say!”
“Marcy, saying something aloud doesn’t make it come true. Watch. I wish my wife wasn’t a nervous twitchy woman.”
“I don’t twitch, Mark.”
“But you’re still nervous.”
Lacy stomped out of the kitchen door into the backyard, where she stepped on a bee, went into anaphylactic shock, and died before Mark and Lacy had a chance to wipe the batter from the corners of their mouths.
And boy did Mark feel awful about that.
- I’m Only Afraid When I’m Alone in the Dark
It’s a childhood fear. Darcy would admit it if it ever came up in conversation, but because she’s forty-two, divorced, and the mother of three young boys with active imaginations, even when it does come up in conversation she can’t talk about it.
She’s afraid of God. But only in the dark.
In daytime, her fear disappeared under the sanitizing effect of sunlight. When the sun set, her fear crept from the newly formed shadows and sat beside her, occasionally touching he nose with it’s omnipotent hand. The fear is analagous to someone awakedned in the middle of the night by a sourceless noise and immediately, if briefly, fearing a boogeyman crouching in the closet, inching open the door to minimize the hinge’s squeak, creeping from beneath the dirty clothes, intent on murder. Unlike that equally groundless fear, hers did not lift as the fog of sleep burned away. Throughout the night, eyes open, limbs trembling, she feared God.
Oddly enough, she no longer believed in God, just feared Him. It was the Catholic in her struggling to be reborn. She fought against it, and only succeeded during the day.
Saddest of all, she had no one to pray to to relieve her nocturnal misery.
Finding Jesus
31 March 2007 | Gerry | Stories
Jon dried his palms on his pants. Like dragging on a cigarette—the habit was gone, but the similes remained—it gave him something to do while he thought of something to say, without the lingering smell. So he just sat there, rubbing his pants as if a genie would appear and grant him a few much-needed wishes.
His mother, Ingrid, always impatient, said, “What is this all about, Jonathan? You gonna sit there all day rubbing yourself? You’re not a teenager and this isn’t the bathroom. What’s going on? We haven’t all been in the same room together on purpose since we thought your cousin Cindy had thyroid cancer. Remember, Auggie? When Cindy got fat and we thought she had cancer?”
“Only you thought she had cancer,” Auggie said. “You don’t get fat when you have cancer, Ingrid. You lose your hair.”
“My husband, the cancer doctor.” Ingrid’s lips disappeared in what passed for her smile. “So why am I missing General Hospital, Jonathan?”
“I have something important to tell you.” He looked at each of them—his mom, dad, and two brothers—in turn, locking eyes long enough to mark the importance of what he was about to say but not long enough to cause anyone to feel uncomfortable. “I want to tell you all that…that I’ve been born again.”
Ingrid clucked. “As if the first time wasn’t painful enough for me.”
“I’m serious, Ma.”
“So am I.”
Auggie rested two fingertips across his pursed lips, as if readying a kiss for a child’s scraped knee. “What does that mean, exactly? ’Born again’? I mean what does that mean?”
“It means I’ve found Jesus.”
Stuart, Jonathan’s older brother, laughed. “I didn’t know he was missing.”
“Yeah, I saw his picture on milk carton,” said Chick, Jonathan’s younger brother. “Have you seen this savior? Please call the Center for Missing and Exploited Dieties.”
“Boys,” Auggie said. It was his trademark toothless rebuke.
“I hoped you would support me.”
“Well what do you need Jesus for, anyway?” Ingrid scowled. “Why can’t you be a nice Catholic like the rest of us and leave this Jesus crap alone?”
“You said the same thing to him when he wanted to try out for that musical in high school,” Auggie said.
“Jesus was in a musical?” Stuart said.
“I mean that she”—Auggie thumbed at Ingrid—“didn’t want him to do that either.”
“Yeah, and remember the florist thing in college?” Chick said. “And what about the interior design thing he wanted to do?”
“Mom,” Stuart said for the men, “why don’t you just let him be?”
“Yeah,” Auggie said toothlessly.
“Ma, I can see your upset,” Jon said.
“Jonathan, I’m your mother. I’m not upset, I’m disappointed.”
“All right, I’m leaving.”
Jonathan closed the front door on the argument inside, walked around the corner, and got into the passenger side of an idling Mini Cooper.
“So, did you tell them?”
“I did. In a way I did.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I told them I came to Jesus.”
“More like came on Jesús,” Jesús said.
Jon leaned over the kiss him. “So I dropped the accent. Believe me, they’ll be so happy I’m not some evangelical nut job they won’t care about us. Let’s just drive. OK?”
Lost in Queen Anne
7 October 2005 | Brett | Poems
There are walnuts or chestnuts or
the Puget Sound equivalent
lying in the streets of Queen Anne
in early October being collected
by Goretexed Asian seniors, women mostly,
using sticks or canes and orplastic bags
On each block a yardman and
dogs with their people - old men
or young women, never paired -
and Washingtonians who ask for directions
and an elegant woman, her gray hair bobbed
standing at a second floor window
who retreats into the room when she
realizes I’m returning her gaze, a shiny
Mercedes in her driveway looking cold and ignored
With its twists and sculptures and views, Kerry Park is a
site, the rumor of Ranier, the foot traffic, grand where
Bhy Kracke Park is gentle, a tickle in the throat
Observing Social Graces
6 October 2005 | Brett | Poems
They are a marvel
talking without doubling back
statements clear
willing to share enthusiasms
or poke fun at themselves
starting conversations during which
they’ll mostly listen, but also at home
performing if necessary
For you can’t help but like them
despite their good manners
and you forget to wonder
if they like you, if it’s cultivated
or came from ther families,
if this is how their families
see them, if they let them
or are their parents
too awestruck to know
Democratization
29 September 2005 | Brett | Poems
In fifteen minutes I
can Get Things Done or
take an invigorating nap
or learn about Sal Mineo’s
sadness, Stephen Wolfram’s social
gracelessness, what Mark E. Smith
is actually saying on those records
The names for things, they’re there
the word that describes the smell of foxing, the formula
for the chemical reaction that
unleashes it, entropy awaiting digitalization
Two Geniuses
21 September 2005 | Brett | Poems
Self-experimentation as a source of new
ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood,
health, and weight is
a heartbreaking work of staggering genius:
Seth and Dave, drawing pictures, drawn to
themselves and San Francisco,
trying to be good and get noticed.
They remind me of everyone I know, just more
willing to admit it, working honesty until like socks
it loses its shape and slithers down their ankles and
bunches around their toes.
I am standing as I write this.
Raising Perfection
19 September 2005 | Brett | Poems
Because she knew how
to get things done
she raised her children
quickly and easily, almost
50% faster than her college
roommate, whose children
arrived at MIT late
and overbudget