The 2009 Bridge Run Story. Read at BBB, Apr. 2, 2009.

Laughing in a Different Language


Sherry couldn’t sleep. She was using a new chemical to spray for German cockroaches that was supposed to be less likely to cause breast cancer, but it was keeping her up at night.

I woke up at five. She was sitting on the bed with a laptop, smoking a cigarette. The windows were open and the March crickets were going crazy outside.

“Who’s Windsor Creamer?” she said

“What?”

“Some girl from Charlotte just friended you. She says she’s coming into town for the race.”

“Are you logged on as me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you log on as yourself?”

“It’s too much of a pain in the ass.”

I sat up and put on my slippers.

“You didn’t post anything did you?”

“Yeah. You commented on Big Gay Aaron’s photo album from Key West.”

“What did I say?”

“’Nice pecs.’”

“Anything else?”

“You told Jay and Amelia the flowers at their wedding were gorgeous, that you missed them, and XOXOXO.”

I put on my robe and went into the kitchen, made some tea and went into the spare bedroom to practice my bass. I’m a disciplined person. Every morning I rise at five, make some tea, and practice my bass for two hours. Every single day, no matter what, even in the face of life’s cruel ironies like Sherry’s insistence on presenting a sweeter online personality than she really possessed, sending people electronic Margaritas on their birthdays, while in real life remaining too lazy and inconsiderate to log out of my account.

The Charleston symphony may have gone the way of the dial tone, but I was still a classical musician, and Bruegger’s Bagels couldn’t take that from me. My routine was sacred, life affirming, life changing.

It was my north, my, south, my east my west, my working week and my Sunday rest. My Cabbage Patch, my Running Man, my Moon Walk, my Thong Song. My Mary Kate, my Ashley, my right, my wrong. It was as much a part of me as my hair or my teeth or my car.

And the amazing thing was that something so quotidian, so simple had changed my life in the two short days since I’d implemented it.

I clocked in at 7:30 and put my hairnet on. Boss said if I got a haircut I wouldn’t have to wear it but I was preparing for an April fundraiser called Mulletiple Sclerosis.

Steve’s mom dropped him off at 7:45.

“’Ello Guvnuh,” he said. “Cheddar and egg on an everything.”

“The name,” I said.

“’Enry ‘Iggins.”

He was wearing a flat cap with the Union Jack on it. Some eighth-grade girls from the exclusive little downtown magnet school he went to were at a booth drinking smoothies and snickering.

“He’s been doing the British accent for two months now,” one of them said, punching an update into a phone.

That’s the problem with kids now. They’re not cruel enough. If Steve had walked into class wearing that hat when I was in seventh grade, he would have received a humane guillotining of ridicule and the hat would be gone, and unless someone went to the trouble of sketching it in their Trapper Keeper, there would be no image of the memory. Kids now, they drag these things out, making the rounds on every social networking site in use, possibly even holding out for a new one to get invented.

My boss handed me an order.

“I have a bagelwich with country ham on a Frazzle for Jenevieve,” I said.

“Right here.”

A woman with long two gray ponytails handed me her debit card. I swiped it and handed to her.

“Would you like a bag?”

“What kind of bags do you have?”

“Paper. They are paper bags.”

“Oh, heavens no.”

I handed her the bagel wrapped in wax paper along with her receipt. She handed me the receipt back. “And you can please recycle this.”

Then she took the wax paper wrapper off the bagel, picked at some bits of melted cheese and sausage, held the wrapper away from her as though it were an oil-soaked and rather unlovable denizen of Prince William Sound, and, not knowing what to do, dropped it on the counter.

Windsor Creamer was a harpist I knew when I was in the Charlotte Symphony. She was also a serious swimmer and would invariably show up for rehearsal with wet hair hanging straight and close to her head, which had the benefit of keeping it out of the harp strings. She swam twice, sometimes three times a day training for extreme open water events, and pretty much the only time she played her harp with dry hair was in performances.

In music just as in sports one should always perform in similar conditions as one practices, and Windsor had a number of hair-tangling incidents during concerts, the worst of which came at a wedding and brought her large instrument tumbling down, Windsor lashed to it, on the cellist’s foot, breaking a toe and interrupting the giving away of the bride.

Fortunately this cellist was not a true cellist but actually a bassist faking his way through the cello parts for a cobbled-together freelance gig, and instead of whimpering in pain because of a broken toe, he had the presence of mind to cut her hair free with a Swiss Army knife and then make a gesture to the wedding planner at the back of the church, which to the untrained eye looked as though he were wringing the neck of an imaginary pigeon behind his head but was in fact the universal symbol for Scrunchie.

Twenty minutes later the couple walked down the aisle, the harp crash just a wedding quirk, a cute memory that could have easily been a long awkward incident, a flailing musician with her ear lashed to the ground as the man writing the checks repeatedly tried to get his only line of the night in, “Her mother and I do! Her mother and I do!” – fighting to be heard over the hushed groan of the congregation and the howls of a cellist hopping around whining “I only have catastrophic health insurance! The deductible is five thousand dollars!”

Windsor leaned over to the cello-playing bassist.

“Thanks Rick, you really saved my ass.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, just like that. “I’ve never missed a gig and I wasn’t going to start tonight. C’mon, let’s go get a drink.”

“Can’t, I’ve got my speed-work tonight.”

“It’s eight o’clock. The pool’s closed.”

“I’ve got a key.”

“Oh come on, blow it off, let’s go to the Double Door.”

“I’ve never missed a workout and I’m not starting tonight.”

We compromised and I drank a six-pack with my feet in the water as she did 200- meter pieces on three-minute intervals. After a while I got in the pool with her. She taught me how to do a flip-turn and I taught her a few things too.

For instance how to squirt water out of your clasped hands like there’s a little frog in there.

Also we had sex.



That next week I got called back for a second audition with the Charleston Symphony. Leaving town, my car broke down on I-26, and before I could get back to Charlotte they’d offered me the job with a gig that weekend. I moved into a house with a violist who didn’t do his dishes, we had a roach problem, I called the landlord, the exterminators sent Sherry over, and there you go.

Windsor quit swimming not long after that. I’m not sure why, I have to imagine because she could no longer see the pool as a place of focus and discipline but rather as a magical, fantasma-quarium where our two moons had revolved, side-by-side, in orbit around the fairer sun.

Also I heard she had a rotator cuff injury.



At 3 pm, I walked down to A.W. Shucks for my second job. It was pouring down rain and Aaron cut me. I protested.

“I’ve got a golf umbrella,” I said.

“Handing out soggy hush puppies does us more harm than good. Go home.”

“I really need the hours.”

“Take a box of puppies with you.”

“Can I get some ketchup packets?

He tried to act like he was considering it.

“Mm. See the thing about the packets is they’re non-perishable.”

“Hate to tell you this Aaron but these hush puppies ain’t going anywhere either.”

“You want them or not?”

“Fine.”

We were out of ketchup at home and I didn’t get paid till Friday. I walked to Hardees for some packets but they just pointed to the condiment pumps, where I filled seven tiny paper cups and walked home with them in the rain. I’d been putting off getting my loafers resoled and my socks were soaked, so it was more than a little frustrating to see the Bugoneer parked in the driveway when Sherry could have been picking me up.

At home I found my girlfriend the exterminator lying on the bed, watching Divorce Court, eating potato sticks with ketchup and day trading on her laptop.



It turned out Sherry’s act-pissed-off-all-of-the-time-and-everyone-will-think-you’re-irreplaceable routine had worn thin with her dispatcher. Like holes in your shoes, a few more bugs were something people were willing to tolerate these days and she’d been laid off over a month ago without telling me.

“I can’t believe you’re watching Divorce Court!”

We used to record it and watch it over dinner together but had dropped our DVR service to save the six dollars a month.

She shrugged and wiped her mouth.

“And where did you get ketchup?”

“Alice and Mark went to Costco, and they let us buy in on a 64 oz. Jug. We have it Mondays, Thursdays and every other Sunday.”

“Well I guess I didn’t need to bring all of these then.”

“Ew. Is that pump ketchup?”

“It was free.”

“Free what? You don’t even know what brand it is. Hunt’s at best.”

“How much money have you lost?”

“It depends. I think we’re going to see a rally today. Bernanke’s giving an interview after his squash match, and he’s playing someone below him on the ladder, so if he wins there could be an upturn.”

“How much have you lost?”

“I’ve still got forty-three hundred.”

“So you’ve lost how much?”

“Forty-seven hundred.”

“Your buyout was nine-thousand dollars?”

“Oh, I didn’t get a buyout. I have forty-three hundred left in my 401-K.”

I opened the hush puppies and shoved four in my mouth at once. Sherry tried to explain herself.

“It’s okay Rick, I’ve got a good routine going. Every morning I get up and spray the house for bugs. Then I spend thirty minutes scanning Craigslist for work. Then I shower, watch The View and take a brisk constitutional-slash-networking walk. Then I get in a brief nap before Divorce Court comes on, which coincides with the opening of the Asian Markets.”

She continued talking as I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, raised the 64-ounce jug of Heinz to my lips and took a good long pull. I wiped my mouth.

“So that’s why you can’t sleep. What about the whole chemical side-effect thing.”

“Oh I totally made that up.”

I packed a grip and headed out the door.



I forgot my umbrella but I only had a short walk, six houses down.

Steve answered the door.

“Evening guvnuh. Where’s your mack? You’re soaked to the bone.”

Steve’s mom was at her gun club. He made me scrambled eggs, hot dogs and baked beans while I checked over his pre-algebra homework.



I had the next day off from work and slept late. When I woke Steve and his mom were gone. I watched out the window for Sherry to leave on her constitutional. Sherry didn’t like walking so I wouldn’t have much time. I downed my tea, went home, took a hot shower and shaved. I was down to the bottom in just about everything – soap, shampoo, shaving cream.

I stepped out of the shower and dried my hair, cleaned my ears.

At two I met Windsor for lunch at Nigel’s Noodles, a restaurant on the corner of John and King. She was sitting at an outdoor table, drinking a seltzer. Her reddish-blonde hair was cut short and even though she was my age she seemed a little older. Still, she looked good, with the serenity of a well-conditioned athlete.

“How long has it been?” she said.

“Five years. I like your hair.”

“Thanks, yours too.”

“Oh this?” I said. “It’s ironic. It’s for a hipster fundraiser.”

“Cool. I thought for a moment you were in a Duran Duran cover band.”

I felt out of sorts having skipped my routine that morning. I was 35. I needed my routine. I knew we couldn’t talk about hair all afternoon.

“I heard Charlotte folded,” I said.

“Yeah, four years now.”

“Are you still playing?”

“I sold my harp. I needed shoulder surgery.”

“Are you still swimming?”

“You know,” she said. “I can’t really go back in the pool any more.”

“Why is that?

A DASH shuttle rolled by.

“Pardon?”

“I said, why can’t you go back in the pool?”

“Oh, it’s an ear thing. I could wear plugs, but…”

She ordered a salad and I ordered ziti. She was working at a private school, teaching music and coaching girls soccer. She was down here with the varsity team on a training trip to run the bridge. We talked about work stuff, which musicians were playing weddings and which had quit altogether. A conductor we’d both loathed for his affinity for P.D.Q. Bach had taken a job in Germany in 2005.

“He tried to make it seem as though he were following through on a promise to leave the country if Bush got re-elected,” she said. “But he would’ve taken a job in Kansas if there was one.”

During one awkward pause Steve walked by. He didn’t see me. He was wearing a sweater vest and the flat cap with the British flag on top. He got stopped at the light and a bunch of kids with Member’s Only jackets and Shepard Fairey stickers on their backpacks ran up to him. One of them had a flip camera and another tried to interview him.

“Steve, where’d you get your vest?”

“You mean my waistcoat?” he said in a poor English accent.

They kept him through several light changes, asking him to name some Chelsea footballers and to use “mobile,” “quid” and “schedule” in a sentence. One of the cuter girls put her arm around him got him to sing “Chumbawumba.”

It was all a little like watching someone flail around on the ground with their hair lashed to a harp.

“That poor kid,” Windsor said.

“I can’t watch any more of this,” I said. I got up and quickly walked over, snatched the video camera away and threw it in the street. The eighth graders and Steve just stood there shocked. The light changed and a Prius rolled over it. The kid whose camera it had been started to cry. One of his friends said something about his dad being a lawyer.

“Fine, sue me. I don’t have any money. In fact, please sue me. I would love to tell this story to a jury.” I realize I still had my garlic bread in my hand and I took a bite. “How a bunch of Charleston’s most emotionally intelligent kids treat somebody for acting a little different.” I pulled out my cell phone. “Matter of fact, maybe I’ll call the Academic Magnet school admissions committee right now. C’mon Steve. I’ll take you home after I’m done with lunch.”

You should know that I stopped paying my cell phone bill three months ago. I only carried it for the free 911.

I sat him down at the table behind us.

“Thanks Rick.”

“Do your math homework. And take the hat off too. You’re in a restaurant.”

Our food had arrived. I picked up my fork.

“Wow,” Windsor said. “Maybe you should get a cape and a hood with little bat ears.”

“I’ve done two heroic things in five years. The other day I saw a guy kick his dog in the park and I turned around.”

“So what does that make me, your hero muse?”

“I guess so.”

She smiled at me. Her eyes were green. I took a sip of my beer. I forgot for a second that I’d chosen this restaurant only because I had a gift certificate and I wanted someone to see us together, to help me stick to my decision to leave Sherry.

For a second I felt like I was in Barcelona or some place where a man could make breakfast sandwiches for a living and still have dignity and health care, where America with its economy-sized ketchups and common law marriages were an ocean away.

We chewed our food in silence. A college kid rolled by on a long skateboard, looking tired. Another came by on a unicycle.

Windsor leaned in.

“So, who is this kid and why does he talk in a British accent.”

“He’s my roommate. Well, I’m staying with him and his mom. We ran the bridge together once actually. He’s a smart kid, very entrepreneurial. The anglophile thing kind of came out of nowhere. You should hear his Geechee accent. He gives walking tours on the weekends using that one.” “I thought you had a live-in?” she said. “A, uh, shrimper?”

“Exterminator. We broke up.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

A group of musicians came with black cases, headed for the Aiken House for a corporate gig or rehearsal dinner. They waved at me. I waved back.

“God, do you know everyone here?” Windsor said.

She leaned back in her chair.

Across the street from there was a row of live oaks. A spring breeze blew pollen clusters on us like green snowflakes.

The woman behind her was holding a glass of wine and her date said something funny and she threw her head back and laddered out an arpeggio of laughter. In French a rooster makes the sound “cucuricu” – like that, it seemed she was laughing in a different language.

“I love Charleston,” Windsor said. “You’re so lucky to be able to live here.”

“I guess I am, yeah. It’s good to see you Windsor.”

“It’s good to see you too Rick.”

“So what about you, are you seeing any one?” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said.

Conversations seemed charged when you’re in a foreign country. You strip the sweaters off your conversation and speak naked and fleshy words. A lot of that is due to being in a language bubble where no one around you can understand you.

“See, the thing is Windsor--”

“Hey Rick, who’s this new bird?” Steve turned around and butted in. “I’m getting kind of chilly. Can you call Sherry and have her come pick us up?”

I excused myself from Windsor and told Steve to zip it or I’d tell his mom what happened and she’d make him drop the accent and start taking tae-kwon-do again.

He sulked and put his hat back on. I turned back around.

“See, the thing is Windsor,” I said. “While I’m ready to really settle down, and while I do love it here, I’m not tied to Charleston. I don’t have a lease. I’m getting paid by the hour. There’s nothing I need here and there’s nothing that needs me.”

My words tumbled out stillborn, like a politician saying there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the U.S. economy.

When you go to Europe there’s always a sad moment when you’re playing cards in a train station with a bunch of people you just met but get along with better than anyone you can remember and you’re writing all their email addresses in a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera and then you have what addicts call a moment of clarity. You remember how terrible you are at correspondence – if not for Sherry’s inadvertent logging on to your email and Facebook account I wouldn’t keep up with anyone – and you realize that you probably will lose touch and probably won’t be meeting up someday to go rock climbing in Oregon.

But it was still Charleston where moments of clarity don’t last long. Out of nowhere, like a cloud of pollen clusters we were besieged by ten cute high school girls and their goalie. They were all Ms. Creamer this and Ms. Creamer that, showing her pictures and showing each other new clothes they’d bought. These were average-looking girls for a soccer team from a Southern private school, which meant they were anything but average. A number of them were carrying Abercrombie bags and the models on the bags were not holding up well in comparison.

“Oh my God Ms. Creamer, look at the wisteria in this alley we found. Ms. Creamer look at this cornice I sketched, Ms. Creamer look at this cat lying on a book. I just love Charleston.”

A college kid who was way tanner than you’d expect for early April walked by carrying a surfboard, but Windsor stood up and hushed her charges.

“Okay ladies, bring it in. There’s somebody I would like you all to meet.” She walked over to the next table, took the hat off of my little friend’s head and put her hand on his shoulder. “This is Steve. He’s a native Charlestonian and he’s going to be showing us around this afternoon.”

If the soccer team were a flock of pigeons, Steve was a statue that Windsor had just coated in peanut butter.

“That is so cool, were you born in a hospital?”

“Is your house haunted?”

“Can you throw a cast net?”

“Do you know where we can find some Goolah people?”

“Saying something using the words ‘house,’ ‘root’ and ‘Vanderhorst’.”



I tagged along on the walking tour as far as Bruegger’s, by which time all 12 girls plus a few members of the field hockey team back in Charlotte had friended Steve. I believe that made them the only members of that group who were not amateur astronomers.

I stopped in to work to pick up my paycheck. The district manager was there but no one was trying to look busy. They were gathered around a plaque on the wall.

The Best of Charleston results had been announced. We’d won Best Public Restroom.

“This is Rick, the guy who I’ve been telling you about,” my boss said. “This award is all thanks to him. Nobody and I mean nobody keeps the bathroom as stocked with paper and soap like Rick.”

The three of us had our picture taken. Two men in short sleeve oxfords and ties, one man with a Euromullet.

I called Sherry to give her the good news.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I said.

“I’ve been stuffing the ballot box online for the last month. Are you coming home.”

“I don’t know. What are you up to?”

“I’m sitting here at the kitchen table trying to figure some shit out.”

“Can you use some help?”

“Yes.”

The smoothie machine came on and I couldn’t hear her.

“What?”

“I said yes. I need help”

“Okay, I will, yes.”

This story was written for a show Apr. 3, 2008 and posted here Mar. 17, 2009. The eleventh annual Bridge Run Show, with a new story, is 7:30 pm, Thurs., Apr. 2, 2009 at Blue Bicycle Books, 420 King St., Charleston.

***

Annabelle

The 2008 Cooper River Bridge Run Story

Annabelle’s parents were coming to town for the run, which meant, on top of a million other things -- picking up her fiancee’s dry cleaning and getting a reservation at High Cotton and making sure her dad’s Cohibas were in at the cigar store -- she had to check on her phantom apartment, not an apartment really but a small room in a brick 3-and-1 in Byrnes Downe, over the bridge.

She’d been living with Patrick for almost a year now in an attic one-bedroom on Spring, a mile-and-a-half from the 200-square-foot-studio she rented in the Confederate Home, where she used her grandmother’s sewing machine to make damask and seersucker sundresses, fresh takes on the preppy look for girls to wear at horse races and Pi Kappa Alpha formals.

The only one of her cheap little rentals which her parents approved of was the one in West Ashley, and she’d never spent a night there, an 8 x 12 room with a twin bed, a wicker vanity and a dresser full of her old clothes. She was the second girl to use it as pretend housing. The place was too small for three people anyway. All her two roommates asked was that she pay the water and cable bills and they’d keep the ruse going.

Before she could check in on it she had to go pick up her car, which was parked down on the Battery. Her fiancée had sold his Tahoe to buy a laptop and InDesign software, and the parking decals for their house had already been allotted to the college students who lived below them, kids from Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta and Richmond who drove shiny hybrids.

Parked on the street with all the Priuses were Buick La Salles and Lincoln Continentals with custom carriage roofs and bowling-ball paint jobs. Those cars never seemed to get the $40 tickets, even though they didn’t have H-zone residential parking decals, didn’t have room for them with the rear windshields covered in fabric but for a Swoosh or a pot leaf cut out.

Not that Annabelle was bitter that these guys could park freely, not in the least. She considered it a form of reparations and social justice. She had a very open mind about that sort of thing, far more than her mother and father did.

This open mind had come about gradually and suddenly, one such epiphany coming outside the Moulin Rouge on a Saturday night a few months back, smoking a blunt with a stevedore. He hadn’t used the term vernacular art, but when a Mark V had rolled by that actually had a diamond cut in the back windshield, as the band was actually playing ‘Be Thankful for What You Got,’ which is the tune that goes “Diamond in the back, sunroof top, diggin’ the scene with a gangster lean,” her new friend Mr. Baltimore had whistled at the craftsmanship and explained that his cousin worked at Pop’s Top Shop on Line Street, which did most of the carriage roofs in town, and gently corrected her when she said she loved Curtis Mayfield, because the song was in fact by William DeVaughn, well, that was one of the moments when she started to get it.

So if trying to be a sensitive gentrifier meant walking a couple miles down to the Battery, no big deal, it was a joy, passing the flower shop with the died carnations, passing SuperBad clothing, Honest John’s gospel records, the shoe repair shops, the mural on the Crosstown Expressway, “Not by Water but by Fire Next Time” with the Black biblical hero in a red cape, all great examples of the vernacular. Further downtown the outsider art meshed with the hip at Read Brother’s Fabrics and Magar Hatworks, and she could envision her own dress shop someday fitting in very well around here someday.

Annabelle’s phone rang.

“Hey mom.”

“Hey honey.”

“Where are you guys?”

“We are running ahead of schedule actually, coming past Orangeburg now. I’ve got some stuff to put in your freezer -- should we just take 526 to 17?”

“Um, no, mom you know with the race traffic Seventeen is going to be a mess, and our freezer is filled with Perrin’s Weight Watchers and I’ve got this bridal party order to finish. Why don’t you drop them at Patrick’s?”

Annabelle heard her parents talking over the roar of I-26.

“We’re in your father’s car -- do you think it’ll be okay there?”

“Yes mother it’ll be fine.”

Her folks were bringing some venison and a slice of the top of her little sister’s wedding cake, “MARY GERVAIS & CRAIG 3/17/7” written on the foil.

She’d already made sure to boy up Patrick’s place: laundry left undone, peace lily unwatered and drooping, the Entourage DVD menu on the TV. Patrick had quit drinking but Annabelle had collected bottles from the recycling bins of the students downstairs and left them on the coffee table.

She started to double-time it down to the Battery, passing the high-end decorator’s where Tomás worked.

Annabelle had met Tomás six months ago when he sat next to her at Fast and French. He was tall, probably 6’5” and 150 pounds, with a long, angular nose, a thin upper lip and a bulbous lower lip. She’s seen him around town for years and had felt sorry for him until they’d spoken. Now she thought he was exotic.

He wore vintage clothing from a shop in Miami Beach that sold Guayaberas and other cabana wear hauled out of Cuba in exchange for prescription medicines. He was from Aiken, where people still called him Thomas. He drove a 1973 Impala he called the Eleanor Roosevelt, and he collected 1920s ocean liner memorabilia. A recent acquisition was the travel diary, bound in red alligator leather with a gold clasp, of a woman named Ruth Parsons from Ipswich, Mass., whose husband had died when she was 50 and who had sailed alone on the Cunard line to Malta, Malaga, Crete and Cyprus. Patrick had a bachelor party the night Tomás got the diary, and Tomás and Annabelle had spent the evening drinking a bottle of wine and reading it together.

Most of the entries were glib and detailed, about the billfish Mrs. Parsons had seen on the way over, or the pieces of glass she found in Athens for her mosaic-making, but when the boat had sailed into the harbor at Heraklion she had written only: “Clear day, about 60 degrees and calm. Sure wish Henry were here,” and Tomás and Annabelle had both cried, hard, holding each other’s skin-and-bones frames like they were clinging to life rafts, the Golden Globe awards on the TV behind them.

It was another epiphanic moment for Annabelle, and two weeks later that she’d tendered her resignation with Verizon.

Tomás was hilarious and fashionable and he knew a lot about wine, they would go to Dudley’s together and he would bury his nose in the glass and take a long pull -- “Cherries, black currant, Vidalia onions, Ethiopian Yrgacheffe coffee -- Vienna roast -- and just a whiff of meconium.”

He always gave Annabelle black-and-white opinions on her designs and wasn’t above painting her toenails or organizing her closet -- he’d once spent two hours arranging her shoes. When the shit hit the fan with her phantom apartment, there was no one else in the world she would’ve thought to call.

Annabelle was crossing Broad Street when her fake roommate called.

“Annabelle, hey it’s Shelby. Are your folks coming to town for the race?”

“Yeah, they’re on their way. I just had to divert them from going to Byrnes Downe. I’m headed over there right now to make it look lived-in.”

“Yew-boy. I’m sorry, I should’ve called you earlier, but I’ve been totally slammed at work. The month before her wedding Perrin went absolutely Reality Show-Chernobyl, and personally I couldn’t care less but the credit card Comcast had for you expired and they cut the cable off and so Perrin used that as an excuse to go Bridezilla. I had a software go-live in Birmingham and barely made it back in time for the wedding.”

“Oh right, that was Saturday! How was it?”

“So nice. Four hundred guests, colors were tiffany blue and brown, prime rib, Perrin looked beauuuutiful …but, anyway, Annabelle, you have to appreciate what a nightmare the extra room is right now. Perrin moved her mom in there last month and worked her like a Malaysian ten-year-old, the woman sewed ten sixty-foot table runners, assembled two-hundred bags of trail mix with eighteen tiffany blue personalized M-and-Ms in each bag, hand-made forty tiffany-blue candles using wax from her grandfather’s beehives in Sumter. For favors they made a hundred golf club-head covers embroidered with ‘Perrin and Andrew: Can’t Drive a Wedge Between ‘Em.’ They tied four hundred bags of rice grown on Andrew’s ancestral plantation, from the same strand of the original seeds brought over by slaves from the Windward Coast, and at the rehearsal dinner Andrew and Perrin wore tiffany blue and brown Dashikis and sang ‘Down by the Riverside’ with a gospel group comprised of descendants from Drayton family plantations -- but of course two days before the wedding they found out that church policy banned throwing rice and Perrin’s mother and aunts had to untie all four hundred bags and replace them with birdseed -- without Perrin’s help because when the church’s wedding coordinator told Perrin about the policy Perrin lost it and said she was going to burn the place down, so she was actually in county up until four hours before the rehearsal, which turns out is a great way to drop ten pounds in twenty-four hours. Can you hold on a second?”

“Okay.”

“Who wrote this code? Were you trying to see how many bugs you could squeeze into ten lines? Do it over.

“Anyway, sorry Annabelle but all your stuff is in the attic -- I took a short video of your room on my phone this morning so you’d know what you’re getting into. I am sending that to you now, and I have got to go before the idiots working for me crash our system and we have to inventory product on Commodore 64s.”

Annabelle got another block down King Street before the video finished uploading. The floor of her room was covered with rice and birdseed and cashews and empty Weight Watchers containers, the bed was a mound of M-and-M bags and ribbon and scraps of paper and fabric, butcher block paper hung on the walls with elaborate schedules and lists and a giant sign written in magic marker bubble letters that read

NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS THIN FEELS.

What was only going to be a touch-up was now a multi-hour project, still doable so long as Patrick could stall her parents.

She took off her heels and raced down to the Battery. It was noon and there wasn’t a shady side of King Street and she was getting a little moist, even in the sleeveless toile dress that had been such a hit at the Aiken Steeplechase.

She couldn’t remember where she’d parked her car. She passed a yellow Camry a few times before realizing it was her white one, coated in pollen and with a boot on it for dereliction.

She pulled her stomach out of her socks and dialed her phone.

“Norton Design this is Tomás.”

Annabelle explained the situation. Tomás didn’t say anything for a second, and then she heard him speaking to his boss.

“Muffy? I’m going to need the afternoon off…Annabelle?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got to get an Enviga, get my car out of the garage and swing by Tiger Lily’s. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, should have you sitting pretty in an hour.”

Two hours later she still hadn’t heard from him. She’d had to walk all the way back to an ATM on Broad and take out another cash advance on her credit card, then deal with a very unpleasant Traffic and Transportation officer who really tested her enlightened views of racial justice. By that time Patrick kept the conversation with her parents going as long as he could without out-and-out lying about where Annabelle slept or his no longer working as a contractor.

She met her folks at Groucho’s, which she saw as a major appeasement as it meant chancing running into Mary Norville and Blake and pretty much the same crowd she would see all the time if she lived in Columbia and played Bunco with her sister’s friends on Friday nights.

By the time Patrick and her dad headed off to the Smoking Lamp and she and her mom got to my bookstore, Annabelle was out $250 for the boot, the hoagie wasn’t sitting right, and her mother had already thanked God for Patrick’s day job twice and mentioned health insurance three times. You could feel the tension float in the door with them with the April air.

There was a computer conference in town and I’d spend the morning weathering withering comments about my sci-fi section from young men with patchy beards. Annabelle was a joy, with her yellow hair and geek glasses, so excited about the place, almost hoping it would be mustier and weirder, that I would be snobbier, that her mother would hate it.

She went down the hall to find the fashion section and her mom asked if I had anything on “the vernacular.”

“I think we have some slang dictionaries.”

“No, I think it’s like an art term.” She made sure Annabelle was out of earshot. “To be honest I have no idea what it means but my daughter won’t shut up about it.”

I found her a book of Howard Finster, and she flipped through it skeptically while grilling me about parking, local schools, the appropriate amount to give panhandlers. “I know this is kind of out of left field,” she said. “But do you by any chance know the average police response time in this neighborhood?”

Her mom was asking me about my health insurance plan when Annabelle came up with an armload -- Sufism, anarchist philosophy, the letters of Anais Nin, Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the tattoos of the Makonde Tribe in Mozambique, a self-published book of poetry by Nuyorican Transsexuals. She put the stack on the counter.

“Do you have anything else along these lines?” she said.

Her mother asked me where the loo was and Annabelle explained she was looking for a birthday gift for her fiancée.

“Do you have any macabre, gothic illustrations, like Tim Burton kind of stuff?”

“Is he an artist?” I said. “I think we have some books on vernacular art.”

She looked down the hall to make sure her mother was out of earshot.

“Well he was a contractor but he’s actually switching to graphic design. But we’re keeping that kind of quiet,” she said, jerking her head down the hall dramatically.

While I rang her up she got two text messages. One was from Tomás. He’d attached a video clip, panning around her clean room in Byrnes Down. He’d hung impressionist prints on the walls, put pillows on the bed and hung her sweaters in the closet. On her vanity was a bouquet of flowers and a French memory board with pictures of her and her friends holding SOLO cups and mugging cheek-to-cheek.

The second message was from her faux-roommate Shelby, who’d come home to find Tomás at work. She attached a video clip of him, on his knees arranging Annabelle’s shoes and then picking up the yellow sling-back heel she’d worn at her sister’s wedding, burying his nose in it and taking a good long hit.

“Citrus…apple cider vinegar…zoysia grass and magnolia blossoms…the faintest hint of flat Perrier-Jouet champagne…and just a flutter, a soupcon of a Long John Silver’s on a hot afternoon.”

I haven’t seen Annabelle since then. I like to think she and her mom didn’t spend the whole weekend arguing over Roth IRAs and the dreadlocked guy on American Idol.

I try and limit the advice I dispense behind the counter to restaurant recommendations, but as desperate as Annabelle might be to seem more liberal than her mom and as desperate as her mom might be to pull her back towards financial security, on the circle of fifths they were pretty much right near C Major.

There’s always someone who’s going to be freakier than you. You give up your car for a bike, they get a fixed-gear. You quit eating red meat, they eat only what’s produced within a ten-mile radius. You go raw, they start drinking unpasteurized milk.

The same goes for Annabelle’s mom’s world upstate, where she was the lefty-loo. You wear the flag lapel pin, someone else only buys American. You send your kids to Bob Jones prep, they homeschool. You stop drinking tap water because of the fluoride conspiracy, they stop drinking pasteurized milk.

Like a circle of fifths, if go you far left enough or far right enough you meet up at F-sharp or G-flat major, depending on which way you’re coming, and either way you end up supporting Ron Paul and the right to unpasteurized milk.

And you have to imagine that someone who drinks unpasteurized milk has someone else looking down on them because they drink it out of the bottle -- so unnatural and indirect.



But I like to think the spring and summer in South Carolina conspired to let Annabelle and her mom find some common ground. If not while walking the bridge together, looking up at the cables in the middle of the road, the breeze in their hair, then maybe this summer at the lake, or someplace out in the country, the engines and HVACs out of earshot. And if that’s not enough, maybe a nice noodle salad, lightly dressed with olives and feta and asparagus and very red tomatoes, maybe that would do the trick.

Galileo's Window

one of eight stories in the 2006 Piccolo Fiction Open

Galileo Galilei never looked at the sky. He invented the telescope because Olivia D’Antonio had taken over her older sister’s bedroom, three blocks away but within a clean line of sight from his kitchen.

            With the naked eye, he was only able to tell if she was in the window or not.

With his first telescope, he could see her changing, the outline of her breasts, her hips.

With his second model, he could see her face, faintly, couldn’t quite determine her bottom lip from the top. It was like looking at an airbrushed centerfold from across the room.

 He only had a few seconds each night to see her. He knew her schedule. She changed in the window every morning at six, every night around seven. He kept a log. Monday, December 6, at 6:04 a.m., her body was fully exposed for twelve seconds. That Friday night she didn’t show at all, but the next morning she stood naked for a good half-minute. On Thursday, December 16, she was late, and he waited by his telescope.

He waited so long that his roommate Carlo came home, walked in the kitchen to get a snack. Galileo said he was testing out a new model.

               “That still looks like the second one,” Carlo said.    

“It is,” Galileo said. “But I tweaked the lens, improved the focal length.” He aimed at the top of the Duomo and pretended to practice focusing on the cross.

“Oh, okay,” Carlo said.

             The light came on in Olivia’s window. Carlo walked out of the kitchen, smiling. Galileo swung the scope around just in time to see her take her bustier off.

            The Florentine Army was thrilled with the invention and funded its development. Galileo continued grinding his lenses, came out with a third version, a fourth. Each minute spent in his shop, heating and shaping the circles of glass, was a sensual experience, as though his hands were on Olivia’s hips, her thighs, the small of her back.

            January 23rd was a beautiful winter day. The sun went down around five o’clock, the roofline of the city was like a pie crust under sweet cold layers of orange, white and blue.

            At seven, Galileo was in his kitchen, his scope trained on Olivia’s window. It was a new version, very powerful, not easy to focus. At quarter past, Olivia returned from her bath and removed her towel. She had lit more candles than normal and the light was soft and warm, illuminating her every detail.

            She smiled, her mind elsewhere, brushing her dark hair. Galileo was absorbed in her, his scope was so powerful he could only take her in a few inches at a time, only one blue eye, then the other, her nose, then her mouth.

He roamed over the pockmarks of her face, down past her breasts, followed a thin trail of hair that extended from her navel to her waist. He saw stretch marks just above her hips, like ripples left by the tide. He scanned past a mole on her right buttock, found an avalanche of cellulite plummeting down the backs of her thighs.

            He’d never seen her even remotely so close or so clear, and while he’d at first been taken aback by the craters on her face, by the time he found the scar on her left knee, he was more enchanted than ever. No man had ever seen these things, had ever been able to peer so closely at Olivia’s virgin body, and just as he’d already laid claim to her perfect curves and high-hanging breasts, now her every little flaw was his and his alone. He felt a powerful sense of claim over this heavenly being who lingered in the window that night, longer than she ever had before, singing to herself, brushing her hair.

            Feeling as though the scope’s circular field of view was his fingertips, Galileo traced back up her legs, over her soft right hand, up and around her elbow, across one shoulder to the other, down the other arm. His gaze softly brushed the dark hairs on her left forearm, caressed her long fingers, and then, like a record needle hitting a jagged crack, came upon the peak of a new diamond ring.

            His heart plummeted into his socks. Just then the kitchen door swung open, and Carlo came crashing in, a bottle in one hand and girl in the other.

            “Hey pal! Whatcha looking at?”

The girl giggled. They both knew Galileo’s secret. Embarrassed, he swung his spyglass around and angled it up at the darkening sky.

            “Just the moon,” he said, his voice cracking.

            “Oh, okay, buddy. We’ll leave you then.”

            They grabbed two glasses and left, laughing and loud like they came. Galileo kept his eye pressed to his silent worldview. He brought the moon into focus, and was shocked to see that it had craters and hills, was not smooth as everyone had always thought.

            Without lifting his eye, he reached for his field book and made a note. He spent the rest of the night, and many nights after, peering closer and closer, charting the lunar topography, running his eyes over its impure white surface, naming and claiming where no man would stick his flag for three hundred years.