The Cost of Lunch, Etc.: Short Stories Read online

  “Kids were standing up outside wanting to hear him,” the friend said. “Crowds of college kids.”

  “By the way, Saturday the seventeenth we’re having a sort of pre-holiday thing. Wassail bowl and all, right, Rhoda? Most of the department will be there and the boys from the press, and we’d sure like to see you. And your friend too,” he added weakly, but the tone of the invitation was confident.

  Saltzman’s old tomcat eyes went opaque. Duncan was putting it on the line. Even if Saltzman went, he wouldn’t know if Duncan could or would arrange the workshop. Cf. her vague feeling that Duncan could have saved her job. “Sounds fine,” said Saltzman. “I’ll let you know. I’m spending the holidays in New York, and I don’t know when I’m leaving.”

  The friend did not reply. Rattling the ice in her glass Rhoda came alive to ask, “Don’t think I caught your name?”

  “Charlie Roach,” he said, inclining his head.

  “He’s one of the West Side roaches,” Saltzman said and caught Maud’s gaze as she smiled. She had given up. She pitied him with his grizzled beard and still needing Duncan.

  Rhoda was being social. “And what do you do?” her voice slurred from rapid drinking.

  Charlie grinned. His teeth were stained and worn down in his ruddy face. “Anything, Ma’am.”

  “Charlie’s a true fan of the golden rule, though he likes to operate a little ahead of the beat.”

  Rhoda was flustered, as designed, but Duncan was enjoying the show. They couldn’t shock him if they slit their gullets on his tweeds. Saltzman lolled back, withdrawn. She remembered the poems in her purse and bowed her head, fingering the cigarette burn that had marred her dress.

  They were leaving. As they passed the bar, guys here and there slapped Saltzman’s shoulder. On the sidewalk he halted, turned. For a moment he stared at her and she stared back. His eyes, ice green, were glacial crevasses, his mouth curled in a perhaps amused smile.

  The eyes said he was bored sick with women wanting to fuck his name, with men wanting to suck his talent: he’d been used and used like an old toothpaste tube, he was well chewed. She looked back posturing, can’t you see my ineffable Name, I’m as real as you but you only wanted a young girl to chew on tonight: your mistake, Willy, I’m good and you won’t get into my biography for saving me, so there!

  Following Duncan and Rhoda to the car she said hopefully, “Damn, I’m starving,” but nobody answered. In the back seat she huddled into Sandy’s coat. The first time she wore it she had found old Kleenexes in the pocket and unable to have preserved Sandy, preserved them. Then she caught a cold.

  Not that long ago she had brooded over slitting her wrists: she felt ashamed. There were years, years yet of inventive tortures and deprivations, of hollow victories and bloody defeats. She no longer felt sorry for Saltzman. She would wear the same face. The worst that could happen then might be to meet a kid who had eaten her books and survived.

  As for Duncan she could no longer afford his lasagna: she perceived he was her natural predator. The system supported him, and he supported the system. In any attempt to make a deal, he was more powerful than she and would prevail.

  Saving Mother from Herself

  My daughter Suzie and my brother Adam really got after me about what they called my hoarding. I live alone. My husband died when he was just fifty-eight of one of those heart attacks that hit without warning. He was playing golf—something he enjoyed but was never much good at—with another dentist and two podiatrists on the Wednesday when he just keeled over on the fifth hole trying to bang his way out of a sand trap. At first they thought he was kidding them. I was only fifty then.

  I continued working, of course. I was a paralegal for thirty years in a small law office that did mostly real estate, wills and probate and small business stuff. I was really as much a secretary as a paralegal, if I’m honest. But it wasn’t taxing. I liked the two men I worked for and it paid decently, a middling middle class wage, you might say. Four years ago, I retired. Actually they retired and closed the office, and at fifty-nine, I wasn’t about to get hired to do anything better than greeting folks at Wal-Marts or bagging at the supermarket.

  I had the insurance from Walt. I’d put it in CDs like my boss recommended. I had Walt’s social security, which was better than mine would have been. I was okay. The mortgage on our house we paid off decades ago. It was the same house where I raised Suzie and my son Brady. Brady’s out in Arizona, so I only see him maybe every couple of years when he sends me tickets to fly out there. The last time was for my granddaughter Olivia’s wedding. A very nice affair that must have set him back I can’t imagine how much. Olivia’s pregnant now, he tells me. I’ll be a great grandmother before I can take that in. Amazing. Makes me feel ninety.

  Suzie tried to get me to move into an apartment, but why? I’m used to this house. I know my neighbors and they know me. We don’t hang out together, but we keep on eye on each other’s property and have a friendly chat over the fence now and then. I have a nice little garden out back and a two-car garage. This house has three bedrooms so I have plenty of room for my things. That’s what Suzie and Adam object to, as if there’s something wrong with liking bargains and pretty things and useful things other people throw away. If you ask me, people discard too many items nowadays. I feel sorry when I see a perfectly good lamp or glassware or a rug that’s still usable or even a flowerpot sitting in a dumpster or out on the street waiting for the pickup to be taken to the landfill. So I bring them home. I know I’ll get some use out of them by and by. And books and magazines. Perfectly fine to read. And VCR tapes. At garage sales I can always find something interesting. When you live alone, you appreciate entertainment. I always have the TV on even when I’m reading. It’s company. I like to keep up with the news and a few of my favorite programs, but mostly I appreciate hearing another human voice.

  So I collected. Who cares except my busybody daughter and then she enlisted my older brother, who always used to try to boss me around before I married. He and his wife, Liz. She gives me a pain in the you-know-where. She seems to feel superior that she never worked. So she stayed home and raised two children. Big deal. I worked and raised two children and they turned out just fine. She always has her hair done and her nails too. As if at our age, anybody gives a damn, excuse my language, what her nails look like and if they’re pink or red or purple. I’m too busy to fuss about my nails. Long red talons would never survive one of my scouting trips, collecting the wonderful stuff people discard. Besides, until Suzie butted in, Liz and Adam had no idea about my hobby. We always met in a restaurant (they paid). Liz had no desire to come by my house, and I have even less of a desire to visit them. I’d visited once and everything was so tidy and white and black I kept being afraid I’d spill coffee on that huge white couch as big as a boat. Adam and I never did have much in common.

  So what if I filled up the dining room with my finds and the spare bedrooms and the hall that leads to them and half the living room. Who am I about to dine with, anyhow? What do I need spare bedrooms for? In the living room I store my reading material and VCR tapes and some extra VCRs people threw away. You can’t buy a simple VCR any longer, and I keep about a dozen spares for when they go on the fritz. I’m always watching for them because I have a library of almost a thousand perfectly good tapes I can watch whenever I choose. My daughter calls it a mess, but I have them all cataloged. Just ask me. I can pull out any show I want, great old movies, some I saw and loved, others I never got a chance to see. Going to the movies used to be cheap, but now it’s too rich for my purse. Why would I need to go to the movies anyhow with people nowadays being so rude and talking all through the movie and yakking on their cell phones? I have enough movies so I can see one whenever I choose. Now isn’t that luxury? Every tape is catalogued. I have an old file cabinet I found behind the office building on 8th Street and in it every single book and magazine and VCR tape is listed, so I can pull out what I want. It may look a junkyard to Suzie, but it
just plain isn’t—or rather wasn’t.

  It isn’t like Suzie is over here much. She likes to call me every couple of weeks and complain. I only hear from Brady when he has something to boast about or wants to fly me down there for some event where a grandmother is welcome as some kind of certification of family. So he has his life, Suzie has hers and by the way, I also have mine.

  I was just going along living my life happy as could be, collecting and sorting and cataloging, collecting and storing all the useful things I might need later on. I’m not Bill Gates (you didn’t think I’d know who he was, but I saw a documentary on him, one of my tapes) so why should I ever have to buy what I can get free? Chairs, tables, lamps, cabinets, nice ornamental stuff like this stuffed owl I found—where else would I ever get a fine creature like Roscoe? Some people collect art or even stupid things like license plates or baseball cards, and nobody calls the feds on them. What’s wrong with collecting useful things, I ask you? I feel bad for them, thrown on the rubbish heap when there’s still lots of life in them. So I save them.

  Then there’s my daughter yelling at me that I have a sickness.

  “What are you talking about? I always get my flu shots at the senior center. I hardly ever catch a cold.”

  “You’re a hoarder. I saw it all on TV,” she said. “We have to get you help.” Clutching my hand, super dramatic. “We care for you, Mama, so we’re going to make things right.”

  “What do I need help for? I’m doing fine. I’m happy. That’s more than I can say for you.” I meant it. Suzie is always complaining on the phone to me about her husband Ron’s bad habits—he won’t stop smoking, he leaves his underwear on the bedroom floor and his socks on the couch. As if I want to know about Ron’s underwear, give me a break.

  She went on and on but I tuned her out. If I hadn’t learned to do that decades ago, I wouldn’t be such a good-natured person, believe me.

  But two weeks later Suzie showed up at the door with a woman—blond, in her forties and wearing a navy suit. This simpering bitch was a therapist and she plumped her skinny behind down on my couch, which is sideways between the walls of books and zines stacked, neatly I might say, on one wall and my entertainment section on the other wall, my 1,247 tapes. I only have about ten inches clearance between the couch and the entertainment section, but I can squeeze through, so what is the problem?

  This therapist woman goes on about how hoarding is a disease but it can be treated. Then my daughter chimes in that if I don’t let them come into my house and take away all my wonderful things, she will call Elder Services and have me moved into a home. For this I raised her from a squalling baby and put her through community college and paid for her wedding?

  They had me over a barrel, so finally after three of these sessions with the woman who pretended to be on my side but never was, I agreed. She insisted on a tour of my house, making notes on her gizmo, talking into it. She checked the basement where I do laundry, the attic where I store stuff I don’t need yet and the garage with my car in it. It turned out that same TV program that my daughter had been watching that got me into trouble was going to come to my house and film everything. They were going to clean up my house and make everything neat and orderly, the way surely I wanted it, and it wouldn’t cost me a penny. They’d clear things out with my approval, of course (smirk)—with that threat hanging over my head the whole time. I was sweating by then with anxiety.

  “When will all this be happening?”

  She consulted her electronic gizmo. “We can schedule you for two weeks from today. The film crew will come in the day before. Then we’ll have two days to clear all this junk out and clean and make your house like new again. I know it will be hard for you to adjust, but in the end, your house will be livable again.”

  Livable? What have I been doing here, dying? That gave me some time. I started moving my best stuff to the garage. At least I could protect that. I jammed the garage door opener so they couldn’t get inside and moved my car to the driveway.

  The film crew came. They moved a lot of my stuff around to make it look messy. They pushed some of the stuff from the hall into my bedroom so I could barely reach my bed that night. I could not sleep, facing the ordeal. Aside from when Walt died and when Brady had appendicitis and we just got him into the hospital in time, those two days were just about the worst of my life. They top my first delivery when I was in labor for twenty hours, the time I broke my ankle tripping on my neighbor’s dog and was in a cast for a month, and the time Walt had food poisoning from some stupid mayonnaise chicken salad at a picnic. Needless to say, I didn’t make that. Adele Fortunata did. Never forgave her.

  They arrived early, the therapist, a cleaning crew and muscle, along with four huge semis labeled JUNK EXPRESS. Junk they called my stuff. I never picked up anything that wasn’t useful. They were going to strip me bare. I had a stomachache. I couldn’t eat breakfast and the coffee bored a hole in my belly.

  When she saw how upset I was, the therapist took my hand as if I was a baby she was leading out of danger. “You need all these objects because you never properly processed your husband’s death. It was so sudden and unexpected, you couldn’t cope with the grief. You must let it out. You must experience your loss so you can let go of all these substitutes for him.”

  The therapist sat down with me as they carried all my precious things out to the front lawn. The neighbors were gaping. I’d never live this down. I was supposed to pick through everything and save a few things. Whatever I picked, they said I was saving too much. The therapist kept talking about processing grief. She insisted that I had never properly “processed” Walt’s premature death and that hoarding, as she called it, was caused by that. Bunch of hooey. Process? Like can or freeze it? Walt didn’t go collecting with me, but he liked the way I was frugal and found things instead of spending our hard-earned cash on a chair or a vase or some good reading matter. They couldn’t understand how much pleasure I took in saving money and protecting good things that would otherwise end up in the dump. Finally I agreed with everything. Suzie cried and hugged me and I pretended to cry with her. I really did manage to shed a few tears when I saw them carrying out the VCRs and the Oriental rug I’d found rolled up, set out for the trash collector. I had planned to put it down in my bedroom when I had time. I’d saved four VCRs in the garage, anyhow.

  “Now, what would you ever need six VCRs for? They don’t even make them any longer. Don’t you see how much room they take for no use?”

  “How many suits do you have?”

  She looked blank and stared at me. “I don’t know … Maybe six?”

  “Why not just one? And how many lipsticks?”

  She ignored that. Then I saw my stuffed owl Roscoe going out into the trash. I made a grab for him.

  “Now, why on earth would you want a dusty mangy old stuffed owl?”

  I lied. “It belonged to my late husband.”

  “It’s a poor substitute for him, isn’t it? Can’t you remember him without something probably full of dust and insect eggs?”

  I loved Roscoe, his yellow eyes looking at me from the mantel. I made another grab for him but Suzie held me down in the chair. The therapist said, “If it bothers you so much, we can send it to the resale shop.”

  The crew along with Suzie was dividing all my property into things to be dumped and items to go to a resale shop. I found out which one. I could have tried to find out where what they were trashing was going to end up, but I am not a garbage picker and those places stink. I counted my losses but I bore with them; I had no choice. My lovely oak bookcase, my gilt elephant with a howdah on top, Walt’s golf clubs, a round mirror with only a little damage to the left edge, three platters in the shape of fish, the tin of buttons, straight chairs that just needed a bit of work. I imagined running away to Florida or Mexico or Puerto Rico when they were done, to escape scrutiny, but I love my house and I know my way around here, so I sat in the lawn chair and picked through my treasures and watched them
disappear. I wished for a hurricane or a blizzard, but the sky stayed blue and the day stayed mild for early November. I imagined a great wind carrying them all off and me returning to my own home, my private home, and putting everything back where I keep it. But they kept stealing my things and carting them off and I had to sit there and smile for the cameras and listen to that simpering therapist’s bull dung. Inside I was boiling, but I’m not stupid, no matter what they think. They had the upper hand—for now.

  Finally they had “restored” my home to what it had never looked like in all the years I’d lived there, raised my ungrateful children, been married and happy with Walt, made a life for myself that satisfied me. The therapist set up an appointment with me for some other meddler. I promised to go. I could sit through more bull dung if that would get them all off my back.

  Adam and Liz had decamped before the last truck roared off with my things inside. They had a fundraiser to attend for some private school. Adam is in real estate. I don’t know what he does and I don’t particularly care, so long as he lets me alone. Finally Suzie, who had hung around to the bitter end—bitter for me—left, telling me how wonderful the house looked. At last they were all gone, relatives, therapist, muscle men, cleanup crew and trucks. I sat in my boring living room with only the TV for company, a single bookcase of books they’d agreed to leave me, one VCR and ten tapes. The dining room was set up for company who would never arrive. At least they cleaned everything. It does tend to get dusty, but I don’t have allergies, so what do I care. I was exhausted and furious. How would you like a bunch of strangers to invade your house, take three-quarters of your possessions away, tell you what you’re supposed to think and feel—all of which was being filmed for anybody in the country to gape at. I felt humiliated. I felt violated. And they had kept saying how nice it was now and expecting me to thank them. The next morning I brought my few saved treasures from the garage into the house. It still felt bare and lonely. My house and I were bereft, robbed, pillaged!