[stylist] holiday exercise, part 2, try 2

[Chris Kuell]

Apologies to anyone who got this yesterday. I didn't receive any mail from this list all day yesterday, until about 11 a.m. today.

The following is a chapter from a novel I'm working on, called 'Rub It In'.  As background, the narrator is Dan, a 42-year-old massage therapist who lost  his sight 10 years earlier from SJS, a rare allergic reaction to  antibiotics. At that time, he had just purchased a two family house with his  girlfriend, but she couldn't cope with Dan's blindness and hit the road. Dan  was able to keep his head above water financially when he had good tenants,  but the Bonds family-George, Violet, and their 3 kids, stopped paying rent  when George supposedly hurt his back at work and filed for disability. After  5 months and 2 postponements, Dan finally took them to court, but the judge  gave them 3 more months to pay what they owed before being evicted, since it  was winter and Violet was pregnant with another kid. With the downturn in  the economy, Dan has lost several clients and can't make his mortgage  payments. A wealthy client, Joel, knows of Dan's troubles and makes a deal  with him. If Dan will date and eventually marry Joel's ex-wife, Marilyn, Joel  will pay Dan $500 per month, which is significantly less than his alimony.  Dan takes the deal, never intending to marry Marilyn. until he actually  falls in love with her.

Some other details are that Gary is Dan's best friend, and together they are  rebuilding a 1977 Camaro (Marilyn's first car) to give her on her birthday.  Amos, a yellow lab, is Dan's guide dog. Ingrid is Dan's older sister, and  she's bipolar and lives with their mother. Dan's father died of a heart  attack when he was 13.

As a generic disclaimer, everything I write is adult and real in nature. If  those things offend you, don't bother reading further. All comments,  criticisms, suggestions, etc. are welcomed.

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Rub It In

By Chris Kuell

 

Chapter 27

 

 

"Come on," Ingrid said, pushing a gift into my lap. "Open it."

I slouched on my mother's couch, a lumpy, plaid-green thing that had been on this spot since 1982, a pile of gifts by my side, caught up in a haze of nostalgia for Christmas' past. And stomach cramps. Mom made the traditional breakfast of pancakes, sausage and scrambled eggs while Ingrid picked me up at the bus station. We were all starved by the time we sat down to eat at eleven, and I put away enough chow to feed a Marine. And then I drank a cup of Ingrid's coffee, which I should have known from past experience to steer clear of. If you don't have any Liquid Plumber, Ingrid's coffee will usually do the trick. Same for killing ants and stripping paint. But she made it for me, and it was Christmas, and I figured with the four pounds of food in my gullet-what could it hurt? Dumbass. 

 

"Awesome," I said, accepting the gift. It was rectangular, maybe the size of two paperback novels. Less than a pound. I shook the box, something jiggled inside, but I didn't get any kind of vibe from the motion. Covering my mouth with the gift, I belched. Second-time breakfast-yum.

 

"Just open it," Ingrid said."And excuse you."

 

Half the fun in opening gifts with Ingrid was to tease her by not opening them. "Hmmm, I'm thinking maybe it's an eight-track tape of Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell."

 

"Right. Or Frampton Comes Alive. Just open it, Rooster."   

 

Ingrid was the only person in the world who called me Rooster, or who I would allow to call me Rooster, and she only did it when she wanted to get to me. She gave me the name when I was two because in the Winnie-the-Pooh videos, I always liked Roo best. A shrink would probably love to dissect that little tid-bit. Somehow that character flaw earned me the label of Rooster from my big sister.



 Or. maybe a talking thermostat." I shook the box again. "Seems about the right size."

 

"You're getting closer," Mom chimed in. She was sitting in a big leather recliner Ingrid and I had pitched in together to buy about five Christmas's back. I pictured her smiling, a crocheted afghan on her lap, happy to have the family together on Christmas. Her kids in the same roles they've played for the past forty-years.  

 

"Mom!" Ingrid complained. "C'mon Rooster-enough with the guessing already."

 

Ingrid wasn't the best wrapper, fortunately, so I easily found a seam, ripped the paper off the gift and wadded it in a ball. The garbage box was from the gift I'd given Ingrid, a blue flannel nightie wrapped in an intentionally overly-large Seagram's box I got from Don's Liquors. It was over by Ingrid, to the right of the tree. I set in the free-throw position and lobbed the wrapping paper ball with a high arc. A second later I heard it hit the rim of the box and glance off to the side.

 

"Close," Mom said.

 

Marmaduke, who'd probably been sitting in Ingrid's lap, leapt into action and started batting the paper ball around. Still a bit of kitten left in the chubby critter.

 

Inside the box Ingrid had given me was a plastic item wrapped in a plastic container. After some probing and swearing and a torn fingernail, I managed to separate the device from the packing. It was hard plastic, technology of some sort, with four small buttons and a big one the size of a dime. Light, so probably needs batteries.

 

"Know what it is?" Ingrid asked.

 

"Nope."

 

"It's a talking, digital answering machine. It's also got talking caller ID."

 

"Hey, that's awesome." I felt the device for a few seconds, thinking of the land-line I got rid of two-and-a-half months ago. 

 

"There's batteries in your stocking," Ingrid said. "I'll put them in and show you how it works."

 

While Ingrid set up the answering machine I couldn't use, I took Amos out for a walk. Movement was good, as was the fresh air. Only about eight inches of snow were on the ground, most of it packed down by kids and others who had traveled this way. The smell of wood smoke from fireplaces tinged the air, and off in the distance I could hear excited kids playing with new Christmas toys. We made our way to the pond. The edge was frozen, but it was too early to go out more than a few feet. Amos agreed. 

 

How many times had I been on this pond as a kid? A thousand, maybe? Not including swimming in the summer. Skating, fishing, trying to get the Pearson's Irish Setter Rusty to pull us while we wore cross-country skis. Dumbassed Teddy Mcleary tossing an M-80 into a fishing hole, laughing like a hyena on nitrous while the rest of us ran as fast as we could toward shore, certain the explosion would shatter the ice beneath us. Kissing Sally Fielding in the glow of a full moon, her wincing from my cold hands as they groped under her sweater. A lifetime ago. 



I brought in an armful of firewood to restock the pile in the house and threw another piece in the wood stove, which was still very warm from the morning. The smell of cooking turkey was in the air and Mom had put Miracle on 34th Street into the DVD player. It was one of our favorites. I smile every time I hear William Frawley say, "All right, you go back and tell them that the New York State Supreme Court rules there's no Santa Claus!" 

Ingrid and I had fun making wacky messages on the answering machine, and in the late afternoon I curled up with Amos on the couch and took a nap.

 

After gorging myself for the second time that day, including a healthy slice of blueberry pie with whipped cream, I did the dishes while Mom told me about her new podiatrist, then I slipped upstairs for a shower and to give Marilyn a call. She was at her daughter Maggie's in Tewksbury, but I figured she wouldn't mind if we talked for just a minute.

 

"Merry Christmas, baby," I said in my best Elvis imitation when she answered.

 

"Dan, is that you?" 

 

"Yes, it's me," I said in my Dan voice. I'll have to talk with her another time about the subtleties of King speak. "How's things at the North Pole?"

 

"Great," she said. "The kids are so much fun. And you?"

 

We debriefed quickly about our days, and then she apologized and said she needed to get back with the family because they were watching a movie with the little ones before bed.

 

"What are you watching?" I asked.

 

"Miracle on 34th Street. It's one of my favorites."

 

I smiled to myself and missed her terribly at that moment."Me too. Go enjoy your family, and I'll see you tomorrow."   

 

Back downstairs, I joined Ingrid on the couch as she clicked through the television stations. She settled on a news story about a man in Camden who had caught his house on fire while attempting to melt the icicles off his gutter with a blowtorch. It struck me then that I didn't miss TV that much. 

 

"Who you talking to?" Ingrid asked.

 

"Who?"I answered.

 

"That's what I asked," she said in that big sister tone. "Upstairs, on the phone. I heard you talking to someone when I went to the bathroom."

 

And then it's like I was twelve and she was fifteen again. "A friend."

 

"Then why'd you talk in your old room, with the door closed?"

 

"Why were you spying on me while you were pretending to go to the bathroom?"

 

"I wasn't pretending-I had to pee!"

 

"Prove it," I said.

 

"Prove it? Prove what? You're the one with the big secret. C'mon-what's her name?"

 

"Her name is Suzie, but most people just call her Thorn," I said. " Because of the tattoo on her neck. She lives in Desmoine, she's got seven kids, and we're thinking of getting married, depending on what happens next April."

 

"Married?" my mother gasped from her recliner.

 

"Why?" Ingrid asked, not quite as gullible as my mother. "What happens in April?"

 

"That's when her husband gets out of jail," I said, bending to pet Amos and hide my face.

 

"Husband? Jail?" Mom sounded horrified.

 

"He's lying," Ingrid pronounced. "I can see him smiling."

 

"Daniel, quit teasing your sister."

 

"Okay, okay," I said. The weathergirl on the television was predicting ten to 18 inches of fresh snow tomorrow. "Her name is Marilyn. She's 44, divorced, works as a librarian in Falmouth. We've been dating," I paused to calculate how long we'd been 'dating'. I met her in September, on Halloween she'd told me to stay away from her and get help with my mental health, and then we'd had fantastic sex on Thanksgiving. ".about six weeks now."

  

"Rooster's got a girlfriend," Ingrid sang out.

 

"Forty-four is too old," Mom said. 

 

"I'm forty-two," I said. "It's two years older than me."

 

"It's too old to have children," Mom declared. "And I want grandkids."

 

"Does she have any kids?" Ingrid asked. Ingrid was almost forty-six, so I suppose Mom had given up on her. 

 

I filled them in on Maggie in Tewksbury and Amanda in Namibia. Ingrid said she'd watched a show on Discovery about how whites still hold most of the power in Namibia, despite the country being 95% black. There are millions of orphans, and kids don't go to school because they are too focused on surviving. Mom asked how we'd met, a subject I successfully danced around, and she forced me to promise to bring Marilyn over for dinner some night. When the grilling subsided, I pleaded tiredness and headed upstairs to bed.

 

Aside from a sewing machine Mom had set up in my room after I'd moved out twenty-years ago, the room had changed little. Here was my bureau, one side still decorated with the Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Beatles stickers of my youth. Above the mirror hung the Red Sox pennant Dad had bought me the afternoon we'd gone to Fenway to see the Sox play the Orioles. Next to the single bed was the window where I'd tried to shoot squirrels a thousand times with my pump-action Crossman BB gun-without a single hit. I thought about the Playboy magazine's I used to hide under my mattress and even slipped a hand under to check, but that aspect of my teenage years had been disposed of.   

 

Mom had lent me a comforter for Amos, who curled up at the foot of the bed and conked out in no time. I, on the other hand, laid in bed listening to the wind rattling the windows, remembering how as a kid I would play with my plastic dinosaurs long after Mom and Dad had put me to bed, falling asleep on the toys so I'd wake up with a triceratops horn poking me in the ribs. Thirty years ago I'd sat in this very bed going through my Keds box full of baseball cards, segregated into rubber-banded bundles by teams, putting together a dream All Star team. Carlton Fisk behind the plate, Don Sutton on the mound, Jim Palmer in reserve. Pete Rose at third, Concepcion at short and   Greg Luzinsky-the Bull--on first. Long before internet fantasy baseball I'd played imaginary games in my head, my team always destroying the opposition. So long ago.      

 

The wind outside blew long and steady, a tree branch rattle the gutter, I closed my useless eyes and was back in this bed in February 1979. After the ambulances and the police and the excitement had gone, Mom sobbing in her and Dad's room. After going to the hospital and having Mrs. Landsdale come stay with us even though Ingrid was seventeen. Then that terrible look in her face as she told me and Ingrid that Dad was gone and we'd never see or talk or play or be reprimanded by him again. Never. No more ball games or fart jokes. No more trips to the hardware store in Alfred or ice creams at the Dairy Queen. No more helping me with math homework or letting me eat pizza in the living room when Mom wasn't around.   

 

Kids can't really appreciate death. When the family dog Sparky croaks, they get sad, maybe even cry a little, but a week later they've already forgotten if it was Sparky's front left, or right paw which was white. Sure, my own sadness at Dad's death was great, but it must have paled in comparison to my mother's. While I laid in this bed wondering who would take over as first base coach of my baseball team, my mother was wondering how she might ever fill the hole suddenly ripped from her heart. And sadly, she never has.  

 

Eventually I drifted off into a dreamless slumber, interrupted sometime later by a familiar whine and a morning dose of dog breath.

 

"Hey buddy," I said, rubbing my best friend's head. "Give me three minutes."

 

After a breakfast of muffins and tea, and much hugging and kissing and promises to call more often, I had Ingrid take me to the bus station. Snow was beginning to fall, and the bologna skins Ingrid called tires didn't give me much confidence. I kissed her, thanked her for the gifts and told her to go before the storm got worse. The 11:10 to Portland was already delayed, and by the time Amos and I made it home there were four or five inches of fresh snow on the ground. Of course, none of the squatters would ever pick up a shovel, so we trudged through the white stuff until Amos got me to the door. A box sat on the stoop by the door, about the size of a toaster oven. I brought it in and dumped it along with my backpack on the kitchen table.  

 

After changing into jeans and a sweatshirt, I grabbed my winter gloves and made my way to the garage. I let Amos run free in the snow-filled backyard while I began the process of clearing the drive and walkways. The day wasn't too cold, and the snowflakes were large and heavy. I guess I wasn't feeling very charitable, so I only cleared the first twenty feet of the driveway, the porch and walkway. RV Larry's camper was quiet, the snow undisturbed, which must mean he's inside toasty-warm with Violet and Georgie. Just then the front door burst open and the rug rats came spilling outside.

 

"Merry Christmas, Dan." Hillary sounded chipper, probably longing for normal human contact.

 

I tossed a shovelful of snow onto the growing bank. "Merry Christmas to you too, Hillary."

 

"Ma-wee Twitmas," said a smaller voice.

 

"Was that Oscar?" I asked Hillary.    

    

 "Yup," she said. "He can talk now."

 

By this time Amos had joined us and all the kids were petting him. I heard Ivan's snotty laugh as Amos licked his face.

 

"Uncle Larry told us to ask you where to go sledding," Hillary said.

 

"We got new sleds for Christmas," Ivan said with a sniffle.

 

"Twitmas," Oscar added his two cents.

 

"You did, did you?" 

 

"Mine's red," Hillary said, taking control. "Ivan's is blue and Oscar's is little and green."

 

"It looks like a fwog," Ivan added.

 

Ignoring the absurdity of using a hibernating amphibious species as the basis for a winter sport, I told Hillary I used to see kids sledding over at the high school, where there's a pretty good sized hill to the right of the practice field. As I was speaking, I felt a small hand pressing snow into my leg.

"Oscar-what're you doing?" The little squirt only giggled. 

 

"He thinks he's throwing a snowball," Hillary said. "He can't throw, so that's what he does instead."

 

I stuck the shovel into the snowbank and knelt down closer to the boy's height."First, you gotta make a good snowball," I said, scooping a fistful and squashing it down. I made it smaller and rounded it a bit with my gloves before handing it to him. "Go ahead-throw it at me."

 

I waited, heard the scratch of a winter jacket moving, but nothing happened.

 

"Go ahead," I said.

 

"He did," Hillary said. "Somehow it went backwards."

 

"Here," I said, making another snowball. "Everybody has to learn how to throw a snowball. Can you, Ivan?"

 

"Uh-hunh," Ivan said.

 

"No you can't," Hillary said like a bossy big sister.

 

"Can too."

 

"Yeah, but you throw like a retard."

 

"Okay-none of that," I said.   

 

"Do not."

 

"Do too!"

 

"Shut up you two and come over here." I handed each of the kids a snowball, then made one for myself. "You throw a snowball just like a baseball. You cock your arm like this." I demonstrated for the kids. "Then you shift your weight forward, throw that hand out as hard as you can and release." I threw my snowball off in the distance somewhere. "See how I did that? Now, each of you try."

 

No sooner had I spoken than I got hit in the chest with one. "Not at me," I declared. "Find another target. How about the birch tree? It should be over there," I pointed. 

 

"Too far," Ivan said.

 

"Oh-kay." I said, thinking. An easy target that wasn't me or Amos. "Well, how about your Dad's car?"

 

The car was only seven or eight feet away, was a large target and a good one for the rookies in the group. I instructed the kids to practice by throwing at least 20 snowballs at their father's car, then escaped back to my apartment with Amos.

 

Inside, I fixed a cup of hot chocolate and called Marilyn to check on our evening plans. "How's the snow by you?"

 

"White and plentiful. It's coming down pretty hard," she said. "I haven't been outside, but there must be six inches. Channel five says we're going to get ten to fifteen. Any better by you?"

 

Even though we only live about fifteen miles apart, the weather can vary. "No, same here. I just shoveled, and by the time I'd finished there was another inch down. You feeling adventurous, or should we act our age and do the responsible thing?"It hurt to say that. We'd decided to celebrate Christmas after she had gone to Tewksbury to see her family and I'd seen mine. Draw out the holiday just a bit longer. I was looking forward to a nice dinner, then going back to Marilyn's for our gift exchange and if I was lucky, I'd get to unwrap the best gift of all. 

 

"Define responsible," she said.

 

"Drinking a bottle of wine with you in the hot tub, then running outside to make snow angels in our birthday suits."

 

"That sounds like fun, sort of, but responsible, I'd say not." 

 

Her voice was playful, and I really wished I'd gone straight to her place. We decided tonight probably wouldn't work, and postponed our dinner and gift exchange until the following night.  

 

As I washed out my mug and wondered what to do with my evening, I remembered the box I'd brought in earlier. Buried inside the forty billion Styrofoam peanuts were two brand new side mirrors, including rubber gaskets,  which I'd bet my last dollar fit on a 77 Camaro. There wasn't a Braille note, of course. I turned on my computer and scanner and used OCR software to read the packing slip. The billing address was Mr. Brown, PO Box 7703, Portland Maine-which was Gary's. Being somewhat of a conspiracy theorist, he'd taken the PO Box under a fictitious name years ago. I'm not exactly sure why-after all, couldn't The Man still track him by tracing who owns the PO Box? But I'm no Columbo, and there's no talking sense to Gary sometimes.     

 

I put on my jacket and gloves, told Amos to mind the fort, grabbed the box with the mirrors and headed to the garage.

 

On the front porch I got the shock of my life. A harsh, grating sound hit my ears. The sound of a snow shovel on frozen blacktop, coming from my driveway.

 

Of course I'd heard the sound before-that wasn't it. It was that I'd always been the one making the sound. In the almost three years the Clampetts had lived here, not one had ever touched a shovel. Never. No, that was the landlord's responsibility. 

 

The walkway had at least 2 inches of fresh snow as I moved to the driveway. Someone scraped, grunted and tossed.

 

"Shouldn't you be doing this?"

 

The sound of Georges voice went through me like shit through a goose. My initial thought was to drop the box, make a snowball and plug his pie hole the next time he flapped his gums. But then I thought-not now, he's shoveling. Shoveling. The guy trying to get disability is shoveling.

 

Gary's voice came into my head. Take a picture. Use your cell phone and take a picture. 

 

But my cell phone was on my kitchen table, I had no idea how to use the camera function, and in the end, where would it get me? No Closer to the eight grand they now owed me.

"Merry Christmas, Georgie," I said before going to the garage to install my new mirrors.