Ava put the Kierkegaard reader aside. “A lot drier than yesterday.”
“Your brother stopped by.”
“Yeah, I know. He dropped off the rug steamer.”
Mr. Frick shook his head. “Gary came back again earlier this afternoon.” He pawed at the oak floor with a leather slipper. Ava noticed that, since her mother’s death, her father looked frailer, withered and parched as an autumn leaf. “Apparently, your brother, the investment counselor, made some bad decisions in the bear market and needs to borrow money.”
Ava cringed. “How much?”
“Quite a bit,” Mr. Frick remarked opaquely. “Problem is, I love your brother dearly. I just don’t trust him. Never did. I told Gary no… he would have to look elsewhere.”
“And what was his response?”
Mr. Frick’s features contorted in a melancholy grimace. “Not to be denied, he wanted me to take out a home equity loan... sort of a cash advance on his share of the inheritance.”
Ava felt a tightening in her chest. Her breath was coming in shallow, choppy gasps, and the young girl had to pause while the rage subsided before she could respond. “The man has no shame.”
“In my will,” Mr. Frick spoke with brutal authority, “you’re the trustee… power of attorney. “ Her father cleared his throat. “Your also the sole beneficiary, since I’m leaving you everything - the house, furnishings, whatever remains from investments and retirement savings.”
Ava stared at him in disbelief. “Is that fair?” She wasn’t thinking so much of Gary, the scheming schmoe, but rather her sister-in-law and two nieces, the oldest of which was just entering middle school.
Hoisting his flannel pajama bottoms up higher on his skinny waist, Mr. Frick gazed at his daughter somberly. “Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas.”
The boiler clicked on in the basement and Ava could hear the water pump pushing the heat through the house. “Unlike your brother,” the older man translated, “you don’t know from any funny stuff”. “Gary, the high-roller, drives a Cadillac Seville, vacations in Acapulco twice a year and wears custom-tailored suits,” he added coldly. “Let him reevaluate his present circumstances and learn to live within his means.” The widower trudged back to bed. When he was gone, Ava breathed in deeply and let the air stream out of her lungs in a barely audible groan.
The other day when her troublesome brother returned the rug cleaner, Ava was fixing herself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. He looked distraught, utterly exhausted. “When the hell are you going to get a real job and move out on your own?”
“Nice way to open a conversation.” Ava smeared mayonnaise on the bread then arranged the cheddar cheese and tomato slices. Since the late fall, native-grown tomatoes were hard to come by and prices had skyrocketed ridiculously. Ava paid seventy-nine cents for the plump, vine-ripened beauty she was positioning on the sandwich. She only needed half. Her father could chop what remained in a salad with his supper.
“Well it’s true,” he shot back petulantly. “You’re almost twenty years old and act like some shiftless eccentric.”
“Lacking focuss doesn’t imply dishonesty,” Ava replied. “Shiftless people may be lazy freeloaders and hopelessly ineffectual. Being shiftless doesn’t automatically make them disreputable.”
Gary squirmed uncomfortably and gazed out the window at the bare trees. A blue jay was picking through the empty seed husks on the metal feeding station in search of the last few bits of edible protein. Ava kept a stash of sunflower seeds and cracked corn in the basement, replenishing the feeder on a weekly basis from late November through March. “A person can be shiftless,” she continued, “and still maintain his personal dignity. Of course that presupposes the individual in question does nothing flagrantly dishonest.” Ava watched as a pad of butter melted on medium heat. She lowered the sandwich into the Teflon pan and pressed down with a spatula. “Exactly how much of Mrs. Sardelli’s retirement savings did you squander?”
Earlier in the week, an article appeared in the Community Section of the Brandenberg Gazette: Local investment advisor indicted for misappropriation of client’s funds. Gary had covertly moved an elderly woman’s entire life savings from government-backed securities to a high-risk hedge fund that relied aggressively on selling short, leverage, swaps, derivatives and arbitrage. Three weeks into the transfer, the fund tanked and investors lost everything. Now the district attorney was indicting Ava’s brother for fraudulent misappropriation of funds.
“Does dad know?” He brushed her original question aside.
“Not yet.” She flipped the sandwich over and pressed down with the spatula again. Gary sat down and massaged the back of his neck distractedly. “You could sell your house,” Ava suggested, “and try to negotiate with the authorities for a reduced sentence.”
“And where the hell are my wife and kids gonna live?” He whined with unfocussed rage.
Ava wasn’t about to suggest that he move back home. The disgrace would kill her father. And anyway, adding Gary, the flimflam artist, and his nuclear family to the mix would turn their idyllic existence upside down. Try as she might, Ava couldn’t muster a grain of sympathy for her brother. “I’m the job Gypsy,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
She removed the sandwich from the pan and sliced it at a diagonal. Placing a dill pickle on the side of the plate, she brought the meal to the kitchen table. “When I finished high school last year and couldn’t find steady work, you used to ridicule me. ‘Ava’s a brain-dead, job gypsy… can’t settle down, score a husband, make a normal life.’” “I’d rather be a shiftless job gypsy living at home with my widowed father,” she observed, raising the pickle to her mouth, “than a two-bit crook.”
In the morning, Rufus arrived early and began cutting the wallpaper into seven-foot strips. With an aluminum square, he marked the pattern repeats, trimming the paper at a right angle. Using a plum bob, he determined the placement for the first sheet. “How did you make out with the carpet steamer?”
“Great!” Ava was sitting on the third riser of the stairs leading to the upper level, nursing her morning coffee. “Once I got that vacuum plate screwed down, it worked like new.”
Rufus rolled a sheet of prepasted wallpaper inside out and submerged it in a plastic tray of lukewarm water. Beginning in a corner near the picture window, he positioned the sheet against the wall. Mr. Frick had chosen a sedate fruit pattern in pastel green and gold hues. The cream-colored background caught the early morning light brightening the room while creating the illusion of more space.
“Nice choice,” he said with genuine enthusiasm. Rufus brushed the wet sheet out with the bristle brush, smoothing in both directions from the middle toward the outer edges. When the first piece lay flat against the wall, he ran a small tool with a serrated, metal wheel over the bottom edge trimming away the excess and pressed the paper snug against the baseboard molding. “These older houses,” Rufus noted, “got character. The high ceilings and ornate cornices – you don’t see that anymore.”
“Yes, the place has special warmth.” The girl was still in shock over recent, domestic developments. Ava and her father had their own, separate agendas. Mr. Frick never questioned what Ava was doing with her botched-up life. For sure, her father was going through his own dark night of the soul since losing his wife. Days could pass without seeing one another, and yet their mutually exclusive lives intersected in random, unforeseeable ways. Which is to say, they loved each other at a safe and manageable distance.
Du weiss nit fun kein hochmas. The pithy, Yiddish adage left nothing unsaid. Ava would get everything, while Gary received a lengthy prison sentence and the Bronx cheer. “Are you familiar with the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard?” Ava asked.
Rufus chuckled in a gruff, throaty manner. “I quit high school in the eleventh grade. Outside of an occasional Playboy or Hustler, I haven’t read a goddamn thing since then.” He grabbed up a second sheet and soaked it in the tub. “Why do you ask?”
“Since high school, I have been trying to structure my life around Kierkegaard’s guiding principles.”
“And how’s that going?” Rufus eased the dripping sheet in place, butting it firmly up against the first.
“Hard to say. It’s not the sort of thing where you go to sleep in a metaphysical quandary and wake up the next morning thoroughly enlightened.” The wallpaper, as it inched across the room, left to right, was coming nicely. “Hopefully, before I’m carted off to a nursing home in geriatric diapers, things will fall into place.”
Ava went to the market. When she returned Rufus had already finished two walls and was trimming the paper over the fireplace. “My father left a check for you. I’ll place it on the dining room table, if I leave before you’re finished. Rufus, who was balancing on a ladder, grunted something unintelligible. “You’re doing a swell job!” Ava waited a discrete interval, but there was no reply.
In December the weather turned sharply colder with temperatures dipping well below freezing in the early morning hours. Ava began dressing in layers. At the Emerald Square Mall just over the town line in North Attleboro, she bought a pair of fleece-lined snow boots, thermal underwear and a week’s worth of heavy-duty, woolen socks.
Snow descended the first week in January. From the relative warmth of the gas station office, Ava watched the fluffy whiteness envelope the blacktop. An hour later with the snow already several inches deep, a metallic blue dodge Caravan pulled up at the last row of pumps. Ava traipsed out to car. The driver didn’t even bother to roll down the window. Rather, he cracked it open, an infinitesimal sliver, and barked, “Fill it with regular… check the oil.”
Thump! The hood of the minivan lurched upward as the driver pulled back on the latch release. Ava loosened the gas cap. She topped off the tank, raised the hood vertical and pounded on the driver’s side window with a gloved fist. “We need to be clear about something.”
Reluctantly, he lowered the window. The man’s pleated tuxedo shirt was outfitted with shiny black studs, a cummerbund encircling his waist. “Is there a problem?” The tone was shrill, petulant. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“Problem is, you’re always in a hurry.” Ava leaned her elbows into the van depositing a clump of dry, powdery snow in the man’s lap, “As I recall, every time I fill your gas tank you ask me to check the oil but never purchase anything else. If I didn’t know any better …” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
The man shoved a credit card through the window. “Forget about the stupid oil.”
Ava processed the card and brought it back to the car. The fellow mumbled something angrily under his breath. “Excuse me?”
“Just close the hood so I can get back on the highway.”
Ava gazed out across the whiteness. The dry cold didn’t bother her. The new woolen socks and fleece-lined work boots kept her feet toasty warm. If anything, the crisp, early-season snow was invigorating. She bent down and stuck her nose up against the frosty glass. “Not this time.” She strolled back to the office, turning around in time to see the Caravan fishtailing crazily out of the gas station.
A steady flow of customers passed through the Texaco Gas Mart up until dusk, when the streets became completely deserted except for an occasional snow plow. In the cramped office, Ava flipped the space heater on high to take the chill out of the air. Around eight-thirty a foot of snow was already blanketing the ground. A lone pickup truck skidded around the corner and pulled into the station. Rufus, wearing a stocking cap and green plaid jacket, slogged through the packed snow toward the front of the building. “Any of that wallpaper fall down yet?” the tall man inquired with a sly smile. He had a face like a lopsided, weather-beaten pair of shoes, the heels worn away at a perverse angle.
“It’s still where you left it,” Ava grinned back at him.
“Hell of a night to be pumping gas.” Rufus arranged himself in a chair and extended his damp boots toward the heater.
“I might not be long for this job.” She told him about the musician floundering around in the snow.
Rufus made several vulgar references regarding the piano player’s parentage then cracked his knuckles. “That Danish philosopher you mentioned the last time I saw you...”
“That would be Soren Kierkegaard.”
“What would Mr. K say about the bonehead in the blue Caravan?”
Ava thought a moment. “‘Think of a hospital where the patients are dying like flies. Every method is tried to make things better but it’s no use. Where does the sickness come from? It comes from the building; the whole building is full of poison.”
“Society is morbidly sick, and the piano player is Typhoid Mary.”
“In a matter of speaking, yes.”
Rufus let loose a throaty chuckle, the steamy air floating toward the ceiling. “At least you turned the tables on the creep by refusing to do his bidding.”
“If he complains to the boss, I could lose my job.”
“Do you care?”
Ava grinned brazenly. “No, not at all.” A car pulled into the station and the girl went out to pump the gas. “Why did you come here in this awful weather?” she asked when the customer was gone.
“I liked talking to you.”
“But you hate people. You’re a self-proclaimed misanthrope.”
“True enough,” Rufus returned, “but you’re the exception that makes the rule.”
“I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment.” Ava slid open the ‘Lost and Found’ drawer and pulled out the velvety, pea green pouch. “What do you make of this?” She emptied the contents on the table.
Rufus stared at a ratty-looking book, the cover of which had been completely torn away, and three brass coins. The three coins were about the size of quarters but thicker with square holes in the center. The surface of each was inscribed with an exotic script. “Are these subway tokens from another planet?”
“This,” Ava picked up the frayed manuscript, “is a copy of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Change, and the coins are used to predict the future.” She told him about the fellow with a penchant for lottery tickets and chewing tobacco who ran off in the rainstorm. “A week ago Tuesday, was the two-month anniversary so I decided to open the bag and take a peek.”
Rufus gazed out the window. The snow was leveling off now with no additional accumulation; like a Frost poem, the pristine whiteness exuded a certain picaresque serenity. “Do you understand how it works?”
Ava held one of the queer coins up to the light. “Assign the value ‘three’ to each head result, and ‘two’ to each tail, and then add the values. The total will be six, seven, eight or nine. A chart in the back of the book explains how to interpret the numbers and construct hexagrams from the bottom up.”
Rufus picked up the book and thumbed through the tattered pages at random. “Have you tried it yet?”
“No, but my brother got himself in a legal mess. My family has been going through a difficult time lately, so I thought I might give it a whirl.” Without further explanation, Ava reached for a switch on the wall and the huge, fluorescent display sign over the diesel pumps went dark, shrouding the entire front lot in silvery shadows. “My boss called just before you showed up. He said I could close early with the snow.”
She threw a separate switch that killed power to the individual pumps then reached for the three coins. “What do you think, Rufus?”
The man smoothed his droopy moustache in a repetitive, soothing gesture. “Oh, why the hell not!”
Ava tossed the coins up in the air and watched them clatter onto the Formica surface of the counter. She added up the numbers, which came to six, took a piece of paper and drew a broken line.
____ ____
“Old yin.” Ava threw the coins four more times and each throw produced another broken line.
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
“Strange!” Rufus muttered. “How come everything keeps coming out the same?”
Ava shrugged. “I keep getting six or nine,” she explained, “which is a broken line.” On the final throw, the coins added up to seven.
__________
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
Ava ran her finger down a glossary of all sixty-four symbols in the front of the book until she reached the twenty-third. “The Po hexagram indicates,” she read from the accompanying text, “that it will not be advantageous to make a movement in any direction whatsoever. The first six divided, shows one overturning the couch by injuring its legs. The insult will go on to the destruction of all firm correctness, and there will be evil.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Rufus growled.
Ignoring the questions, Ava returned to the text, but all the remaining broken lines leading to the top held an ominous message. Finally, she pointed at the topmost solid line. “The undivided line becomes the prominent or principle one,” she was reading from a separate commentary printed in smaller script toward the lower portion of the page. “Decay or overthrow has begun at the bottom and crept up to the top. Small men have gradually replaced good men and great until only one remains; and the lesson for him is to wait. The power operating against him is too strong.”
Agitated, Rufus rose to his feet. “For God’s sakes, what question did you ask?”
Ava’s face was ashen, her lips compressed in a tight band. “Can’t say.” She slammed the book shut and returned it to the suede pouch along with the brass coins. Putting her hat and gloves on, she said, “I’m going home now.”
“Did you get the right answer?”
“Right answer, wrong answer... you don’t necessarily get what you’re looking for,” Ava replied evasively. “The I Ching doesn’t work that way.”
Rufus held the door open for her. “Would you mind if I stopped by again some time?”
“No, not at all,” she replied, pulling the door shut and checking to make sure it was properly locked, “though, like I said, it’s a contradiction in terms, for a misanthrope to want to spend time with anyone.”
Around two in the morning Ava called Rufus. “You got home safely in the snow?”
“It was a little icy, but other than that… How’d you get my telephone number?”
“It was on the wallpaper receipt. Would you like to go out with me?”
There was a short pause. “What did you have in mind?” he stammered.
There’s a Brazilian film playing all week over at the Avon Cinema on the east side of Providence. The movie is in subtitles.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
“I’m finished messing around with the I Ching,” Ava blurted, almost stumbling over the words. “Caput! I’m returning the green pouch to the Lost and Found drawer.”
“Okay.” Rufus seemed mildly confused by her persistence. “Whatever you think is best.”
“I brought it home and, about an hour ago, flipped the coins one last time.”
“And how did that work out?”
“A hell of a lot better.”
“So you got an answer you liked?” It was the same question Rufus raised back at the gas station, just worded differently.
“I asked two completely different questions,” Ava qualified so it’s not a fair comparison. “Let’s just say I’m rather pleased with the way things turned out in both instances.”
There was a protracted silence. Ava had the distinct feeling that Rufus was mulling over what she had just told him. “More recently,” he pressed, “what question did you ask?”
“It’s a long story. Tell you about it when I see you.”
Small Favors
As though struck by a battering ram, the bathroom door flew open. "Toilet Paper!" a raspy female voice bellowed. "I need a fresh roll, ASAP!"
From his vantage point thirty feet away in the den, seventeen year-old Lenny Berman could see the chunky woman hunkered down on the toilet with a copy of the National Inquirer spread discretely across her broad lap. A pair of shapeless, tan panties nestled around her ankles. "Who's out there? Is that the Berman boy?"
The raucous outburst blindsided sixteen year-old Marcie Callahan, caught the woman’s daughter totally unawares. "Yes, it's Lenny.” Turning beet red, Marcie staggered to her feet. In the hall closet she located a fresh roll of Charmin extra-soft. Her mother unraveled a handful of sheets, positioning the plump roll on the floor next to the bathtub. "Hi, Lenny!" Mrs. Callahan tittered. "You caught me in a compromising situation, if you know what I mean."
The boy, who wasn't sure about social protocol, nodded. Lenny and Marcie were reviewing notes for an upcoming English test. To Kill a Mockingbird - over the past three weeks the junior class had slogged through the Harper Lee classic. The test was on Friday.
A moment later, Marcie returned to the living room, her eyes fogged over with tears. "Do Jewish mothers defecate with the bathroom door wide open?"
"It wasn't that bad," Lenny affected a mollifying tone.
Actually it was that bad and worse. The woman clearly had no sense of privacy or personal boundaries. Mrs. Callahan wore every vapid emotion on her sleeve like a badge of honor. Privacy was a four letter word with every bit of family business, gossip, scandal and tittle-tattle in the public domain. Scrunched together in a modest, three-bedroom cape far too small for a family with six siblings, the Callahan clan subsisted like bees in an overcrowded hive. The children, even the oldest, were doubled up in bunk beds and the line outside the bathroom at seven-thirty in the morning stretched down the hallway with considerable squabbling and discontent especially from the younger set.
"My family," Marcie seethed, "they run around the house in their freakin' underwear and leave the bathroom door wide open; they belch and fart and do all sorts of gross and disgusting things." She whipped around and stuck her soggy face up under his chin. "Do you know what it's like living in a sordid freak show like this?"
Lenny was getting frightened. Shutting the door so no one would hear, he put a hand on her arm but she sloughed it off. “It's like those goddamn illiterate, dirt farmers in the Harper Lee novel. The Ewell clan… Mayella and Bob. Those inbred, hillbilly morons who don't have a stitch of class, culture, brains or social graces… that's my folks, if you care to know. So what do you say to that, huh?" Marcie tilted her pretty-ugly, tear-stained face at a sharp angle. "What do you say to that, Lenny Berman?"
Lenny gawked at the maudlin mess that was his best friend since middle school. She had dirty blond hair cut short, a broad fleshy nose and eyes the color of the Atlantic Ocean on a staggeringly sunny day in late August as viewed from the pearly sand dunes of Cape Cod's Horseneck Beach. "I don't care about your debauched family,” Lenny replied. “I’m crazy about you."Slipping an arm around her waist, he kissed her on the mouth. Nothing tentative, he kissed her a second time even more insistently. When the kiss was done, Marcie flopped down on the sofa.
"I don’t just want to be friends anymore.” Lenny touched the side of her face with his fingertips. I want you for my girlfriend."
Marcie considered the request. "I'll be your girlfriend, sweetheart, sex slave… anything you want, but I need a small favor and it's a bit complicated."
After she explained herself, Lenny said, "Okay, that’s fine… what about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird?"
"It's been almost five minutes," Marcie observed. "I'm sure my lovely mother is finished moving her bowels; we should be able to study without further distractions."
Yes, I'll be your girlfriend, sweetheart, sex slave… anything you want, but I need a small favor. After the flurry of kisses, Marcie Callahan told Lenny that she desperately needed to understand how 'normal' families functioned.