Oh-Oh City Page 2

  I call it the creeping-museum syndrome – everything we own becomes more museumlike the older one gets, including ourselves.

  "Uh-Oh City!"

  I forgot to mention this. The floorboards between the ground floor and basement in our house are not thick. The first time I heard that loud and strange exclamation coming from down below, I looked to my wife in her chair nearby for enlightenment. We were eating lunch, and, by coincidence, both of us happened to be holding potato chips in midair.

  "What is 'Uh-Oh City'?"

  "That seems to be her war cry when she finds something interesting."

  "Oh. I take it, that means I'll be seeing her soon? The egg salad is very good today. There's something new in it."

  "Horseradish. Beenie gave me the recipe. Isn't it good?"

  "Scott, you're back! What are these?"

  "Hello. They're old New Yorker magazines, as you can see."

  "I saw, all right. You want to keep them, or what? I found 'em down the cellar, but half are so rotten they don't even have print on them anymore."

  She was right, but the scold in her voice reminded me of Miss Kastburg, my insufferable first-grade teacher. That was not a good memory.

  "Beenie, you're here to clean the house, not clean it out. Leave the magazines, O.K."

  "Even the rotten, ones? I could sort through 'em and –"

  "Even the rotten ones. I like rotten. I turn the pages more carefully."

  "You're an odd one, Scott."

  "Thank you, Beenie. Just leave the magazines."

  She reappeared several other times, holding mysterious or forgotten objects at arm's length, wanting to know if they could be thrown out. On each occasion, Roberta and I enthusiastically agreed they could.

  The last time she trudged up, the stairs sounded heavier, more weighed down. No wonder – she had a television on her head, and looked like an African woman carrying her pot to the well.

  "My God, Beenie!"

  "Oh Beenie, what are you doing?!"

  "Bringing up treasure! Do you folks realize what you've got here? This's a Brooker television. These things are collector's items! Some people say the Brooker was the best TV set ever made in America. Strong as a Model T Ford."

  My wife and I exchanged smirks. "That was the first TV we bought, and it was terrible from the moment we got it. Nothing but trouble. How many times did it break down?"

  Roberta looked at Beenie and shrugged as if the breakdowns were her fault. "At least five. Remember that terrible fat man who used to come and fix it?"

  The memory of his Vandyke bearded face came to me like a blastful of exhaust from a dirty truck. "Craig Tenney! I remember the name written in yellow on his blue overalls. The worst! The only pompous TV repairman in the world. Not to mention the fact that he was also a crook …. Beenie, put that thing down. You'll hurt yourself."

  "Nope, that's not true. Once you get it up on the head, your neck'll pretty much support anything. Waddya want to do with it? Don't leave it downstairs. I'm telling you, whether it works or not, it's worth a good chunk to a collector."

  "Well then, it's yours if you'd like to have it."

  She looked at me appraisingly. "How come you kept it if you don't want it?"

  "Probably because I was too lazy to cart it to the dump. Really, if you want it, take it."

  "You've got a deal. I know a man who'd be interested."

  Ihadn't laid eyes on that set for years. it had lived so long in the basement that even if i had seen it, i didn't remember because it had grown invisible. objects have a way of doing that when they are broken or serve no more function in our lives. yet seeing it again like that in the light of day, returned once more to the middle of our living room where it had once owned the eyes of an entire family, i found myself remembering things about that set. like the awful repairman who used to pontificate to me about the state of the world while purportedly fixing the damned machine.

  There were also nice memories. Like the whole gang of us sitting around that tube after dinner, eating hot-fudge sundaes and watching "Laugh-In" or "Star Trek." Unlike others, I've never had any real objection to television besides its basic silliness. When I was growing up, we listened religiously to silly shows on the radio, so what's the difference? Our kids were always devoted readers and decent students. If they liked to plop down in front of the set for an hour or two after school or a football game on the weekend, O.K. I was often there next to them, enjoying both the show and their company. It also came back to me that the first time any of the kids ever asked a question about sex came while watching that television. In the middle of the "Dick Van Dyke Show" one night, Norah informed us she'd heard from a girlfriend that babies were made when men and women went to a hospital, lay down on separate beds, were connected genital to genital by a long white rubber hose, et cetera. Was this true, Dad?

  So, great things had happened in the presence of this now-departed pain in the ass. It almost made me want to ask for it back.

  Apparently, Roberta had had much the same experience. Over dinner that night, she told me she'd been thinking about the television, too, and different memories connected with it.

  "Remember switching it on, and, at that moment, Oswald was brought out and shot by Ruby? I remember it so well. The world was in mourning. We all walked around like we were drugged. No one thought something else was going to happen. But right there in front of us on that TV, it was like the first public killing ever televised!"

  "We saw it on that one, the Brooker? Are you sure?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll be damned."

  "My son, Dean, lives way out in the country. He and his wife, Gaby, have got this dachshund named Zip. It's a nice little thing, but the problem is, their next-door neighbor had a rabbit for a pet that Zip was always trying to get. They let this rabbit run loose in their yard, and it drove the dog crazy. Every time he'd see the thing, he'd bark and scratch at the ground or throw himself at the fence separating them. It caused bad feeling between the two families, but what are you going to do?

  "One night, Dean and Gaby were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, drinking coffee. Who comes in covered with dirt from head to toe, carrying the dead rabbit in his mouth and proud as General MacArthur? Zip. The little stinker'd finally figured a way under the fence and killed the poor thing. Well, you can imagine what happened! Gaby had a conniption fit and grabbed it away from the dog while there was still something left. Luckily, Zip hadn't bitten into it. They guessed he'd killed it by shaking it and breaking its neck.

  "But what were they going to do now? Both of them could just imagine what the neighbors would say in the morning when Dean and Gaby brought it over and explained what'd happened.

  "They talked over all the possible ways out of this, and finally came up with a real long shot. Clever, but a long shot. Gaby took the rabbit and washed it real well. Shampoo and everything. Then she got out her blowdryer, if you can imagine that. Dried and combed the damned body till it looked brand-new and fluffy. Peter Cottontail-fresh. By this time, it was about ten at night, and part two of the plan.

  "Dean took the beautiful dead lump, snuck into the neighbors' backyard, where it'd lived in a hutch up on stilts, and put the body back in its home. Then he tiptoed back, and the two of them went to bed with crossed fingers. What they were hoping was, the neighbors'd see it dead out there, and think it'd died of a heart attack or something in the night. Natural causes. But next morning early, they heard this crazy, wild scream next door, and both of them thought the jig's up. A little while later, the neighbor woman, who by the way was very religious, came banging on their door, looking like she had just seen a horror movie. White as a sheet and talking a million miles an hour, she kept saying, 'A miracle! Honest to God, a miracle! Turns out, yesterday morning their poor little bunny died. So she and her husband dug a deep hole in their backyard and buried him. But when she came out this morning to hang laundry, she found it back in its hutch, clean as a cloud and looking like it hadn't sp
ent the night under a foot of dirt. Mr. Resurrection Rabbit! He was still dead, of course, but hey, you take you miracles where you can find 'em!"

  The three of us were sitting on the porch. Beenie had finished the attic and had been coaxed by Roberta into telling the story. I had the feeling she was happy to hang around and chat awhile rather than go home to her empty apartment. We knew about her children, her dead husband, a general description of what life had been like for her till now. From what I'd heard, it wasn't a special life, but a good one. She was proud of her children, had her health, enough money to get by, and a sense of humor that buoyed her and made her the center of attention when she wanted to be.

  "Well, I gotta go now, but I'm warning you two: next week I'm tackling the garage and shaping it up. That'll take me all day, so I won't have time for much of the rest of the house. But once it's done, the only thing we'll have to do around here is maintenance."

  It was futile to argue that, even more than the basement, we never, ever went into the garage other than to park the car in the winter. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the fact that our small world would be shipshape in a week. Looking at what she'd done in the basement and attic silenced both Roberta's and my protests. The places had been transformed from Grimesvilles to a lot of ordered space and certain interesting objects that, like the television set, evoked enjoyable memories and were thus fun to see again. A red sled we'd hauled the kids around on in both Minnesota and New Mexico, a doll that'd once meant the world to two little girls, and, to my own delight and astonishment, the paperback copies of Pierre & Redburn I'd used in graduate school and thought had been lost in a move eons ago. Beenie just kept toting stuff in, looking grim and impatient at the same time. "How about this? was her usual shorthand question for whether or not we wanted what she held. Although even that was abbreviated toward the end to "this?," Roberta and I sat there waiting to see what would emerge next, what part of our history would return to the surface like a periscope up for a look round. It was hard saying good-bye to some of these things, although there was no earthly reason to keep them. Despite being broken or burned or obsolete, they were our past. Small pieces of a shared life that had worked and grown and found its place in the end.

  A few days later, I went to the supermarket to do the shopping. It's a chore I enjoy because the abundance of a market heartens me. I grew up the fourth of five children, and, although we had enough to eat, there was never more than enough. To walk into a store, see all that gorgeous stuff, and know you can buy anything you want or two of anything you want, is a pleasure for me even today. Roberta and I had our lean times, but since we came from similar backgrounds, food was something we never scrimped on. The car could be old and dying the roof full of leaks, but meals at our house were always plentiful, and if the kids wanted to have a friend over for dinner, pull up a chair.

  Because both of us enjoy cooking, we alternate nights in the kitchen, but the shopping is my job, and I'm glad to do it.

  Surprisingly, the argument over what an author really meant in his work had flared again in my Hawthorne class, and the students divided down the middle into those who believed the artist had the final say about his product, and those who felt any interpretation was valid so long as it was appropriate and well supported. I took no sides, but followed the discussion closely after one earnest girl bit off more than she could chew by saying "Look at God, assuming there is one. What did He mean by creating the world? We could say the separate religions are literary critics because each is convinced their interpretation is correct. But are any of them? Isn't God the only one who knows?"

  "Yes, but your 'author' is dead, or silent, and won't tell us what He meant. So it's up to us to figure it out, right?' scoffed another.

  Smarty-pants theology. Wise guys sneering at the miraculous. I kept quiet, but it irritated me to hear these hermetic twenty-five-year-olds pontificating snidely about something both obvious and important.

  Still preoccupied with discussion, I was automatically scanning the shopping list and taking things off the shelves, when, looking up, I saw Beenie Rushforth twenty feet away. My first impulse was to go up and say hello, but she seemed so content with what she was doing that I held back.

  She had an open bag of cookies in her hand and was eating one. Nothing special there, except for the look on her face, which was pure bliss. She'd take a bite, close her eyes, and I could almost hear her groan of pleasure. Swallowing, the eyes would open again, look at the cookie as if it were telling her wonderful things, take a bite, et cetera. Either they were the best cookies ever, or she had something else going. Standing there watching, I realized with a shock that I was as bad as my students. I couldn't simply think that here was someone enjoying a moment of their life. No, with all that happiness showing she had to be a little daffy or strange or just plain off . Why are we so suspicious of the good?"

  "Hey, Beenie."

  She smiled at me, but her expression didn't click recognition for a few beats. "Hey, Scott! How are you?"

  "Fine. Those must be great. You look so happy eating them."

  "They're good, but I'm not smiling at the cookies. It's remembering something I did as a kid. We were poor, and I was usually hungry the whole day. Even during meals. There were a couple of markets in our town, and I did the shopping for my mother. Every time, I went to a different one, because I had a trick up my sleeve. I'd get everything she asked for, then I'd take a bag of cookies – it didn't matter what kind, because they all tasted great to me. In every store, there was at least one blind corner where the people who ran it couldn't see you. I knew where each one was. I'd get my cookies, step over there like I was browsing, and verrry carefully open the bag along the seams. You can do that if you watch what you're doing. I was an expert! Now, when it was open, I'd take out two. Only two! And shove those babies into my mouth. Then, chewing really lightly so no one could see, I'd put the bags back on their shelf way in the back so they wouldn't be found soon. I never got caught, and was very proud of it."

  "But it's not so much fun, now that you can afford to buy the bag?"

  "Well, I'll tell you, Scott. Five weeks ago the doctor told me I'm sick. Since, then, just about everything tastes better than it used to." She said it as fact. Not a trace of "pity me" in her voice.

  "Beenie, I'm sorry. Is there anything we can do? Are there treatments-"

  "It's too far gone. I was feeling lousy for a long time, and kept telling myself to go have a checkup, but you know how those things are: you're lazy, or down deep you're scared and don't want to know …. Anyway, you get more scared when you start feeling really bad. So you go when it's impossible to get through a day, and you know pretty much by then it's real trouble –" She pursed her lips and shook her head. "Remember that word 'folly'? You're the English teacher. How come no one uses that word anymore?

  "Anyway, I decided I was going to take their medicine and treatments, but if they get in the way of the time I've got left, then the hell with it –I'm living my days the way I want. And you see this bag of cookies. I ate three of them, and I'm putting the bag back on the shelf, and I ain't paying for it, like the old days. Once a thief, always a thief. But you can never make cookies taste as good as they did."

  "Would you like to go for a cup of coffee?"

  " No, I've got to go clean a house now. That's one thing I like doing very much. You go into a home, work hard all day getting everything right, then give it back to the owners and let them live in it for another week."

  "You're certainly the best we've ever had."

  "Thank you, Scott. I'm glad you said that."

  Naturally, Roberta was shocked when I told her about the meeting. She asked the same question, sat in the same sad silence I had during the drive home from the market. My father used to call it "touching the razor"– you hear that someone you know is dead or dying, and the first impulse is to rear back as though you had touched a razor blade.

  "Is there anything we can do?"

  "Let her cle
an the house. She said that's what she likes to do best now."

  "Put all her houses in order, huh?"

  "I guess you could say that. She spoke so matter-of-factly. 'I'm sick, and it's too late to do anything.' For some odd reason, it reminded me of her dead-rabbit story."

  * * *

  I was about to enter the classroom, when I heard her voice behind me. "Scott?" I turned, and there was Beenie, an uncertain smile on her face, her hands clasping a small, shiny red purse.

  "Beenie! Are you taking classes here?"

  "No, I wanted to ask you if it was all right to come to one of yours. I called Roberta just after you left today, and she told me to come right down. I thought, why not? He can only say no."

  "Sure you can come. We're doing Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories. Do you know them?"

  " No but that's O.K. I want to sit in a class and watch what it does. The subject isn't important."

  "Then, madam, please come in."

  The students were already in the room, and looked interestedly at her when we entered together. I introduced her as Dr. Rushforth, and said she would be sitting in that day and observing. I had never brought anyone else to the class, so the kids were doubly interested in my colleague.

  It was the first time I'd seen her in anything other than jogging clothes. She wore a bench-brown skirt and matching cardigan over a white blouse with a large bow at the neck. Somehow the outfit diminished her. In her sweatsuit, she was a gray package of energy. What she wore today made it look as though she were trying to fit in with a bunch of bores.

  As class proceeded, I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She kept a smile on throughout that reminded me of the smile we create when we're spoken to in a language we don't understand, but don't want to offend the speaker. A vaguely tuned-out look. It made me wonder more why she'd come in the first place.

  When it was finished, she remained in her seat. I went over. "They like you, don't they? Your students."

  "It's good if they do, but sometimes better if they don't. Then they want to compete with me, so they put everything they've got into their work. Why did you come, Beenie?'