Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (8 page)

Bill Bliss disagreed. He wrote to the newspaper, too. In a response letter that appeared in late September, he accused Archie Idlewilde of completely misunderstanding Artemisia Guile. “Nobody got duped,” he wrote. “This was a summer fling to remember. An extraordinarily gifted artist strummed our heartstrings for a few months. Then he moved on before we could get bored with his feats. I for one will always want more Artemisia even though I understand that it could never again be the same as it was this past summer."

On certain sleepless nights, while we pace through silent houses, the floorboards creaking underfoot, our children murmuring in sleep, we find ourselves alone with that acute sense of longing. Around our desire flock the debates, the questions, the splitting of hairs, the speculation—our pursuit of Artemisia Guile—like the tribe of gulls wheeling over the Merwin Building Plaza on cold autumn mornings.

The pursuit is a way of multiplying her presence. We speak the name to hear it repeated; we dispute details not out of thoroughness but from a desire to view again and again from all angles our “infinite AG.” We repeat our questions and revisit the discussions in our salons until, in the end, we arrive once more at the beginning. Then someone reminds us that: “We believe it was in the middle of May, while our lawns greened and the red-orange eyes of daylilies debuted, that the graffiti first appeared in our lakeside Ohio town."

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Kat Meads

The realtor stank of cigarettes, as did the realtor's car, a rough and ready Jeep Wagoneer packed floor to seat with listing printouts and half-eaten snacks.

Roger rode shotgun; Carla wedged in the back. At her feet, a homeseller's prep sheet in a font large enough to read without bending:

Three's company—
Don't
tail the realtor and

prospective buyer.

Never
apologize for the state of your house.

Always
let the realtor do the talking, he/she is the professional—
you aren't.

She and Roger weren't selling a house. They weren't truly in the market to buy. But even browsing seemed to require a professional chaperone. Susie Johnson, realtor, Roger had selected at random from a multiple-listings website.

"So how long have you called Tidewater home?"

Carla let Roger explain.

They weren't
really
Virginians, neither of them. They were Navy brats who just happened to turn eighteen while their fathers were stationed in Norfolk and stayed put when their families moved yet again.

"So you grew up together?"

No. But one military brat can usually ID another in a bar, in a supermarket, standing in the lottery ticket line. They'd each purchased scratch cards, five apiece. With their combined $10 winnings, they'd lunched on hot dogs in a trashy park, compared histories and awarded the following career distinctions: Carla's Dad, Five-Star Ambitious; Roger's, Blindest Patriot. Then they'd compared hair color: his slightly redder, hers significantly thicker.

"How many states before age ten?” Roger had tested on that park bench.

"Seven,” she'd answered without pause.

"Bingo. Which probably means we should bow to karma and apply for a marriage license today."

Instead, they'd waited an entire week. Grown-up military brats are either commitment phobes or fast attachers. As it happened, she and Roger shared a sub-classification too.

"Does the smoke bother you?” Susie Johnson asked, an hour into their smoky ride-around. “As Virginians, you might not be aware: North Carolina's the tobacco capital of the world."

"Hmm,” Roger said. The noise he made to pacify, not necessarily agree.

Chesapeake Bay was an impact crater. Everything was something, Carla thought, while comparing the something they whizzed by (tasseled corn and green-stuffed ditches) to the view from their apartment (chain-length fences, a mini-mart's ice machine).

When the Wagoneer swerved onto the rutted shoulder, Carla bounced; Roger yipped (his startled response). With burning ash, Susie Johnson pointed out a derelict house, also green-gobbled.

"A little pruning and those grapevines would thrive."

Dead sycamore branches hung in pairs and threesomes. Leggy camellia bushes fanned across the windows. The driveway was impassable. Susie Johnson seemed perfectly content to discuss the property's merits and demerits from the Wagoneer's driver's seat, so who had suggested they take a closer look? Afterwards neither Carla nor Roger could remember.

The all-purpose realtor key didn't trip the lockbox dangling from the front doorknob but while nosing around Roger discovered the back door ajar. Dead leaves spiraled inward from that opening crack, forming one question mark after another.

"Push came to shove, we'd have climbed in through a window,” Susie Johnson declared after the fact, so why give the brag credence?

Inside smelled decrepit: old boards, old wallpaper, old people disinclined to ventilate. Vast colonies of spiders. Expired flies suspended from cobwebs, dangling upside down like trapeze artists whose daredevilry had gone awry.

"Floorboards,” Roger radared, eyebrows lifted for emphasis.

She'd already noticed: wide and minimally stained.

"Dining room,” she alerted. A single room with more windows than their entire apartment.

"Trim those camellia bushes,” Susie Johnson directed, “and you'll never have to turn on a light."

An exaggeration. But just.

Back on the back porch, Carla noticed a black-dot alphabet of crusty watermelon seeds. At the far edge of the property, toward the woods line, the remnants of a deluxe-sized dog pen.

For rabbit dogs, “huntin’ hounds,” Susie Johnson explained. “But it'll pen any breed."

Carla's and Roger's hmm's coincided. They didn't own a dog.

In the vicinity of a weeping willow, Carla was seized with the desire to plop down on rangy crabgrass, cloud gaze, pluck at dandelions.

Odd.

Also, equally, true.

Back in the Wagoneer, Susie Johnson failed to ask for their phone number but handed each her business card. The heirs stuck with the dog-pen/watermelon-seed house would probably accept a lowball bid, she intimated. Probably she never expected to hear from the Virginians again, but did, the very next day, when Carla and Roger faxed over an offer that, once accepted, doubled their work commute.

After the closing, they put in for instant vacations, then spent two weeks slaving like members of a road gang under armed guard, scrubbing, stripping, chopping, hauling, dead to the world, the house and each other by nine every night. Neither could remember what both had assumed they'd never forget: the 24-hour thrumming of the mini-mart's ice machine. In their fixer, they made all the noise.

Technically, Roger still had a day left of vacation when his boss called. It wasn't a problem only Roger could fix, but his boss preferred he fix it. If you were a military brat who'd somehow managed to escape the allure of racetracks, tattoo parlors, and online ordering, employers tended to rely on your mediation skills. It was an oft-proven fact.

"Better safe than sorry,” Roger's boss said.

Roger said: “If we ate nothing but hot dogs, starting now..."

But they couldn't afford to retire anytime soon, even if they ate pebbles. Roger kidded occasionally, dreamed perpetually.

As it happened, she wasn't sorry to spend a day in the house alone. It gave her a chance to putter, peek and pry at her own pace, disdaining the project list taped to the refrigerator door.

Every closet still smelled of mice and mothballs—they hadn't gotten around to simpler cleaning chores. None of the windows in the guest bedroom would open, jammed by paint that had dripped and dried. She could have scraped at windowsills, sponged the grime off wallpaper in the hallway and guest bedroom, most of those paper bouquets sun-bleached to vanishing point. Instead, she ventured into the attic. She'd only been there once before, trailing the realtor and her fire hazard cigarette up the fold-down ladder.

"Big enough for a skating rink,” Susie Johnson had whooped, but neither Carla nor Roger joined in the rave. They didn't need the extra space for storage, for anything. The downstairs square footage was triple what they'd been used to, gobs more than they could fill.

There was no compelling reason to visit the attic again, so why did she?

Afterwards she couldn't remember.

Dirt dauber nests, rusty coat hangers, filmy canning jars. Arachnids the size of cockroaches. Along the center pitch, she could almost stand without crouching, but when she sneezed, rebounding, she bopped her head.

The green caught her eye—a smidgen between pink insulation.

Why had she so readily stuck her hand into the hole?

Afterwards, she couldn't remember.

The first hat was straw, pale green with a yellow band, dusty but hardly the worse for wear, the last two black with elaborate veils. Nine in all.

An odd thing: to wall up hats. But so what? (Mental shrug). Life squirmed with oddities.

She was sitting on her heels in a circle of hats, not touching any of them when a dog, singular, began to howl. She cupped her ears, the better to listen and distinguish between the first howling dog and the pack that now seemed to be throwing themselves against a jangly fence. When she raised up on her knees to check further on the commotion, she slid a bit and caught a splinter. Picking it out of her knee, she tuned in to what could only be described as heroic effort: the grapevines stretching and straining to reproduce the cut-away. The other something surging, just below the window, turned out to be crabgrass. When she leaned forward from the waist up, careful not to slide, she saw it waving, already higher than the camellias, so high it almost blocked out the Jeep Wagoneer that passed and re-passed the driveway, glowing orange.

If growth continued at its current rate, Roger would need a scythe to reach the front door. Finding someone to sell him a scythe after five o'clock might pose a problem. But Roger was resourceful. She had faith.

She sat back on her heels, electing, in what seemed her best interests, to stay quiet and uncompetitive. The larger black hat with the sweeping veil had definitely begun to crowd. At least there were no sailor hats among the bunch. Roger would be very glad to skip that standoff. No negotiating with sailor hats. No sailor hats to distract or cause distraction. She had absolute confidence Roger would take full advantage of that strategic blunder, when and if the crabgrass let him through.

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Eric Schaller

I. The Postman

There was a postman whose father was a postman and his father a postman before him. Like them, the postman wore a blue-gray uniform with a stripe down the pants leg and, like them, he delivered mail on six days out of the week, resting on Sunday as was the tradition. Times change and traditions change, and many of the postman's brethren took to wearing running shoes. Some even wore spikes so as not to slip on the icy winter sidewalks. But the postman still wore black leather shoes and polished these to a high gloss before he went on his rounds each morning.

The postman walked most of the time, but at a pace that made the pedestrians seem statues frozen in mid-stride, he a breeze sliding amongst them. Over the years, he came to know his postal route so well that he could predict under which awnings the birds would build their nests and the number of icicles that would descend from any given rain gutter. He could have walked his route blindfolded. He even did this once, at night, when the entire city was dreaming, just to prove to himself the possibility, and did not stub a toe.

When your feet know the path then your mind is free, and so the postman was never bored, whistling a tune as he walked that put the birds to shame.

One day the postman found that roadwork had begun on the street adjoining an apartment building to which he delivered the mail, along the route that he normally followed. Large machines now tore the street apart and other machines layered asphalt and tar, all under the supervision of men in uniforms. Furthermore, a tape of orange plastic with the words NO TRESPASSING blocked his path.

He approached the tape and touched it with his right hand.

A man dressed in blue and wearing a yellow hard hat called out to him. “Can't you read?” the man said. The question did not invite an answer.

The postman was bound by his code of employment to deliver the mail and so he decided to follow another route to the building, one of which he had heard but previously had no reason to use.

The route he chose was down a dark and narrow alleyway and was shorter than his normal delivery route. But, as luck would have it, he was set upon by a pack of dogs just when he thought he had reached the door to the building. These bit him and ripped his clothes, then raced off taking the bag of mail with them. The postman did not know whether to follow the dogs or to run off in the opposite direction. He sank to his knees and wept, for he was a proud man, and resolved to try yet another route.

The next day he followed the alleyway where the garbage from the apartment building was stored. Officially, the garbage was removed once a week but, at the time of this tale, the garbage collectors had been on strike for over a month and garbage overflowed the trash bins and accumulated in great mountains along the alleyway. The day was hot and the smell of garbage intense. The postman covered his nose with a handkerchief, but to no avail. He passed out from the odor and, while he lay oblivious, rats came from the garbage and took his mail to line their nests.

On the third day, the postman returned to his former route, even though roadwork was still in progress. He ducked beneath the orange plastic tape that read NO TRESPASSING, passed between the machines that tore the road apart, and avoided the other machines that layered asphalt and tar. The men who supervised the machines called to him using profane names, but he blocked his ears and continued on. In this manner he successfully reached the apartment building and delivered the mail.