“Should we finish? Are you hungry?”
“Are you kidding? Let’s just go. Drop me off, and I’ll take a quick shower and grab some things and try to get Candy to drop me, and you can drive me back in the morning. I don’t feel like squeezing into my car tonight.”
“Right. There is of course still the issue of your not telling me an important thing.”
“Tell tell tell.”
“I could call Vern Raring at the switchboard and see if he knows.”
“Good luck getting him instead of like Enrique the cheesemaker.” “
“Lines. I forgot. Walinda was livid. I’m sure all that made for quite a day, what with you being worried about untellable matters, et cetera.”
“The badness of this day has been enormous.”
“As it were.”
“Not funny at all. That man has waddled around the bend.”
“Well, look, he’s trying to leave.”
“Don’t envy that busboy one bit.”
“Hell of a check, I’ll bet.”
“I’ll sure never park in his space.”
“Here, allow me.”
“…. ”
7. 1990
/a/
Lenore Beadsman was in possession of the following items. One of two square bedrooms with polished wood floors and inoperative fireplaces on the third floor of an enormous gray house belonging to a Cleveland oral surgeon, in East Corinth. Three large windows, two facing west, all so clean they squeaked, only one open, because only one had a screen. From the windows a view of the outside at the right-hand edge of which the tight seam of geometric suburban ground and dim sky was punctured by the far thin teeth of Cleveland. Windows through which late in the day came a sustained blast of pumpkin-colored Cleveland sunset. Windowsills that were really window shelves, and jutted out so far from the low window-bottoms they could be sat on, and were, although there were nails and sharp perpendicular paint chips, which problem was solved by the placement of black corduroy cushions, which Lenore also owned, on the sills.
A chest of drawers from Mooradian’s.in which were clothes and on top of which, leaning on a triangular cardboard support that folded out of its back, was a photo of Lenore, her sister, her two brothers, her great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman, and her great-grandfather, Stonecipher Beadsman, grouped around a deep wooden globe of the earth in a pretend den in a photographer’s concrete studio. Taken in 1977, when Lenore was eleven and temporarily minus front teeth. There was also, leaning back against that picture, an unframed picture of Lenore’s mother, in her frilly white wedding dress, linen, next to a large window filled with filmy spring light, looking down and arranging some wedding-related items in her hands. The picture resting on a spread-out cotton handkerchief with “Midwestern Contract Bridge Championships, Des Moines, Iowa, 1971” embroidered onto one comer.
Three drawers of socks and panties and so on, and one drawer of soap. A bed, unfortunately at the moment unmade, with a shiny old heavy maple frame and a pillow with a pillowcase with a lion on it that Lenore had had for a very long time. A shelf in the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs on which were crowded bottles of seltzer water and ginger ale, some dark old carrots with limp tops, some limes. An area of the freezer crammed full of plastic bags of frozen vegetables, frozen mixed vegetables, on which Lenore largely lived.
A soft easy chair, old, covered in thick brown pretend velvet, that could recline so far back one’s head almost touched the floor. A footstool with a woven straw top. A small black table that served poorly as a desk and was at the moment bare anyway. A black wooden chair that went with the table and was irritating because one of its legs was shorter than the others. An even more irritating, blindingly white-bright overhead light fixture. Two ceramic low-wattage soft-light lamps with painted nut-and-flower scenes on the bases, purchased as alternatives to the overhead light, lamps that threw huge praying-mantis-ish shadows of Lenore and Candy Mandible on the room’s cream walls after sunset.
Eleven boxes of books from college, most of them Stonecipheco boxes, with red-ink drawings of laughing babies on the cardboard sides. All the boxes unopened, the athletic tape wheedled from the college trainer on the pretext of a mysterious pre-graduation sore ankle not even cut off, yet, and turning yellow. The boxes piled on either side of the west windows and supporting a tape player and a case of tapes and a fuchsia depressed and budless from lack of water in the August heat. A popcorn popper that popped popcorn with hot air. A box of Kleenex. A pretend tortoise-shell hairbrush. An old walker in the east comer, with two aluminum parabolas joined by twin mahogany support bars with soft cloth handgrips and the name YINGST carved in the wood of a bar above a hanging Scotch-taped publicity photo of Gary, the especially smiley Lawrence Welk dancer. Half-access to a bathroom down the hall, meaning half-access to a sink, a commode, a medicine cabinet, a tub with a shower fixture, and a soap-crusted shower curtain covered. with profiles of yellow parrots.
A bird cage on an iron post in the northern comer of the room. A mat of spread newspapers, beaded with fallen seed, on the floor below it. A huge bag of birdseed to the right of the newspaper, leaning against the wall. A bird, in the cage, a cockatiel, the color of a pale fluorescent lemon, with a mohawk crown of spiked pink feathers of adjustable ‘height, two enormous hooked and scaly feet, and eyes so black they shone. A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging by a string of Frequent and Vigorous paperclips in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s own bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist. Nevertheless. A bird that very occasionally and for a disproportionate ration of seed could be induced to stop hissing and emit a weird, extraterrestrial “Pretty boy.” A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of, itself. Lenore refused to clean the mirror anymore, because as soon as she did so it was, in about half an hour, covered with dried spit again. A Black and Decker hand vacuum to vacuum seeds and the odd fallen feather or guano bit lay on the floor to the right of the bag of seed, having fallen out of its wall mount a few nights before.
Some personal items in the bathroom. A closet full of white dresses. A shoe stand bulging like a raspberry with black canvas. A bookshelf over the desk table half full of books in Spanish. Also on the shelf an annoying clock that clicked and buzzed every minute on the minute, and a little clay Spanish horse with a removable head in which was Lenore’s spare key. Above the west windows, broken venetian blinds that fell on the head of whoever tried to let them down. A tiny frosting of cracks in the glass of the tops of the windows, from airplane noise.
A manual called Care for Your Exotic Bird. A patch of chewed wall behind Vlad the Impaler’s cage from where Vlad the Impaler had gnawed on the wall in the dark when the mirror-show had closed, a patch from which plaster protruded, and about which Mrs. Tissaw was not pleased, and in regard to which a bill was promised.
Rick dropped Lenore off and she ran upstairs and came into her room and took off her dress. There was music and clove smell from under Candy’s door. Lenore’s room was filled with sad hot orange sunset. Vlad the Impaler had his feet hooked into the bars at the top of his cage and was hanging upside down, trying to find some reflective purchase at the very bottom of his smeared mirror.
“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Lenore in her bra and panties and shoes.