Sputterpub's Blog

“Oh Brad – I felt like a piece of shit. It didn’t help that she was young and lovely. I mean it would have been awful no matter who slipped and fell, but it was of course easier to feel bad about Aisha because she was so pretty and nice.

“I asked her if I could call 9-1-1. She said no; she had contacted her supervisor and wanted to wait for him. I helped pull her to a better sitting position, got her some water, talked to her. She told me she’d just bought a new motorcycle yesterday. She said she thought she’d heard something snap when she fell. At one point she looked at me with her big brown eyes and asked “Didn’t you hear me yelling?” and I just said no, and mumbled something about working in the back of the house, about music, about weird acoustics. I felt terrible not letting her know that her cries were heard, but it didn’t seem like the time to go into issues about what I thought and why I did (or didn’t) do what I didn’t do. I know that’s chickenshit but I remember thinking it wasn’t about me right then; it was about getting her help and help could come any time and that would interrupt a conversation, so we’d better not be having a complicated conversation.

“But like I said: that’s chickenshit. I was ashamed of myself and didn’t want to go into it. I can do all sorts of rationalizing…about how Aisha got to learn that desperation cries don’t get answered but quiet ones do…or how I thought it was bitch lady…or why didn’t any of the drivers go to her aid, but the fact is I didn’t put myself out, rise to the occasion, do the right thing. I pride myself on righteous behavior, and this morning I failed.”

Brad tried to reassure her but Susan wasn’t having any of it. She was part way through processing the event, and she knew that she’d have to run outside the next time she heard a cry for help. No matter who she thought it was. She didn’t want to feel this way about herself again.

It didn’t take long to settle the tab and get out of the restaurant. Brad and Susan exchanged nods with the waiter and good words with the bartender; they were making progress as Friday regulars.

In the half block to the office they caught up with the demonstration. It was pro-Palestinian and clogging their intersection. They waited at the corner. Brad thought he’d use the time to smoke a cigarette. He pulled an Export A out of the box and was trying to work his lighter when a scuffle occurred. From somewhere right in front of them an Israeli flag appeared and suddenly several young men were attempting to tear and trample it.

Something snapped in Susan. She watched as if she were outside herself while she dashed into the melee and began jerking the flag away from the boys. Boys? That’s what they seemed. She yelled at them like they were her sons, and they relented just enough that she almost had the flag. It was off the ground. She got a good grip on a corner. Then she realized someone else had an equally strong grip on the opposite corner. She pulled, downward, determined. The person at the opposite end pulled just as hard. She started to pull again but then she looked up, into a cop’s eyes, and just released her hold. The flag went with the cop.

Susan is Jewish but no Zionist. That wasn’t it. Maybe it was the Pinot Grigio or maybe the need for a karmic shift or maybe something else, but at that moment Susan, who normally is no respecter of symbols, couldn’t bear to see any flag trampled.

Brad was astonished. A little scared after the fact for his sister, as if she had jumped in to break up a dog fight. He forgot to smoke his cigarette.

Susan relished the adrenaline coursing through her neck, down her legs. She hid the high like an extramarital attraction but she walked with more vigor.

“So on a lighter note,” she said as they finally crossed the street, “let’s talk exact terms about this work arrangement.”

Brad shifted mental gears. “I’m really excited about the possibilities,” he said, “and even though everyone warns that odds are against you when you try to work with family, I’m pretty sure this will be good for both of us.”

“Don’t worry about the odds.”

“Oh yeah. That’s right. Spoken like an actuary.”

Susan giggled. “For what it’s worth, the probability of our success and the probability of our failure are bound to add to one.”

“The same old One?”

“Just One.”

“Well, I guess that’s better than zero,” Brad opined as he opened the door for them.

Susan smiled and cast her reply back like salt. “Way better,” she said, striding forward.

It was a demonstration, but they couldn’t tell if it was for Haiti, Palestine, or janitors. They were so accustomed to Friday financial district activism that they hardly paused. The waiter nodded toward the street with a fond look on his face, and left. Brad asked about the wine. “I think you’re being too empathetic here,” he observed. “Looks like you’re drinking extra when my life’s a mess. Or maybe you’re already having second thoughts about the work thing.”

“Oh no. I have my very own stresses.”

“Yeah well…”

“No. Really. Even today.” She looked for the wine but it was too soon to expect it. “I didn’t behave well this morning.”

Brad sat back, attentive. “The PG&E meter reader slipped on my path at around 9 today, and broke her ankle.”

“Shit!” Brad blurted impulsively. Still without thinking he added, “But I’ve warned you about that path…”

“I know; I know. Don’t start with me. It wasn’t even the main part of the path.” There was a brick walkway from the sidewalk to Susan’s house. It was probably as antique as her 90 year-old abode. The land sloped down from the street to her front door, and the brick path lay on the land. It was picturesquely edged with moss, and after rain it could be as slippery as ice. Susan often swept, brushed, hosed, or scrubbed at those bricks, in an effort to make them less slick. Sometimes in the wettest part of the winter she looped a rope across the pathway where it started at the sidewalk, so anyone approaching her place would be encouraged to tread the lumpy asphalt of her driveway instead of the slick bricks.

It wasn’t a straight walkway. It headed directly for the center of her house from the sidewalk, but it forked six feet short of her porch. The left branch led to her front door. The right side went nowhere: to the part of the house outside the kitchen, without even a yard. The only thing there was the electric meter. It had never occurred to Susan that she should be scrubbing the right-side path.

“Well I’m sure your homeowners insurance will…”

“Oh that’s not what I’m worried about. For all I know, there may not even be a claim. I mean, isn’t this kind of an occupational hazard for a meter reader? They have to come on people’s property under all sorts of conditions, so maybe they take responsibility if they fall down. That part of the path was very slippery, especially after last week’s deluge, but it looked slippery, you know? An experienced person should have known to step off it onto the dirt alongside. Ahh,” she interrupted herself as the waiter set her glass of wine on the table. She nodded her thanks and took two sips. “No. That’s not the part that’s bothering me.”

Brad looked attentive. His spoon hovered over his custard.

“She screamed like crazy when she fell. And I ignored her.” A gulp of wine. “Worse, when she asked me later if I had heard her, I lied.”

“Hmmm.” Brad was surprised but tried to hide it. When they were kids he took all the merit badges. Susan was notorious for lying, cheating, even experimental stealing, while Brad was the good neighbor and excellent sport. Their mother still treasured the letter of commendation from the local police, written after Brad turned in a cash-stuffed wallet he found on the street. But as adults Susan was the honest sibling. Brad’s teasing and story-telling sometimes crossed the line. He waited to hear more.

“Of course I heard her. She was amazingly loud. I was in the middle of doing an aerobics tape and suddenly there were these shrieks: ‘Help! Help me! Somebody! Please! Help! Me!’ My immediate responses were ‘Oh shit, I don’t have time for this’ as well as ‘Nobody in real distress could yell that strongly, that lustily.’

“To be honest (now, anyway), I didn’t think she was for real. And I had no idea she was on my property. I thought she was one of the walking crazies in my neighborhood. I’ve described Tim, the barking man. And I know I mentioned the tall guy with the red helmet who kneels and genuflects at every corner. He’s harmless, and now that I’ve gotten to know Tim I don’t see his barking as all that provocative. But the bitch lady is a whole other matter, and that’s who I thought was yelling.

“She looks clean enough. Fiftyish and dowdy. Carries bags of bags in each hand. Likes to yell at residents if she thinks their dogs should be inaudible or their yards altered. Every time she sees me she curses me. Loudly. Once she even thrust her middle finger right in my face. If I try to be friendly she mimics me and then yells at me. If I ignore her she just yells. I’ve never heard her do a ‘Help Me’ yell but she’s who I pictured as I endured those screams. I thought she was one or maybe two houses away, on the sidewalk. It was sunny this morning, and there was a line of cars edging up the street, and I remember thinking that some of those drivers had to be hearing the screams, with their windows open and all, and since they weren’t reacting, my assumption that it was bitch lady, acting out, was probably correct.”

Susan swallowed more wine. Brad pushed his dessert plate toward the middle of the table and drank the last of his coffee. The waiter stopped by their table and slid their tab in its vinyl folder onto the well-laundered cloth. Susan didn’t look at the total before covering it with her card.

“It got quiet after that. Actually, I’d paused the tape and I went downstairs then for more coffee. I thought I heard a voice and even wondered if bitch lady had gone into the neighbor’s front yard and was mock-calling the police about something; that would be her style. I carried my coffee upstairs and finished my tape.

“Then I went into the bathroom to shower. I opened the window to see if the traffic was still as bad as it had been. ‘Hello?’ I heard from immediately below. ‘Please?’ came quietly. And then ‘Can you help me?’ I leaned out the window and looked down. I was horrified to see a young woman sprawled on my brick path.

“‘Omigod! Just a moment! I’m coming!’ I yelled. I raced downstairs and outside and over to her, where I slipped on the bricks and nearly went down myself.

“So how does a pension actuary differ from the other kind?” Brad asked. He leaned forward in his chair and the buttons pulled across the belly of his blue shirt.

“Actually, it’s just an alphabetic matter,” Susan explained. He heard the smile in her voice and saw it in her eyes. She’d just spent most of their entree time describing what an actuary does. Her brother was trying a career switch – after 25 years of moving around the world with his wife’s job in the State Department, he was newly-divorced, cut loose, back home at 48 and needing a plan. His kids were grown and on their own. His ex was in Cambodia. He’d read that the profession with the lowest stress was that of actuary, and he’d come to Susan to talk.

Their desserts arrived. He was two bites into his creme brulee and Susan tasted her grapefruit soup before she continued. “See, it’s all a matter of statistics. And probabilities built off them. You start with 100,000 people born in a year and count how many are alive each year after. The difference is simply the number who died. The number who lived, divided by the starting number, is the probability of living that year. The number who died, divided by the starting number, is the probability of death. The two probabilities always equal one.

“The insurance actuary deals with probability of death. The functions he uses happen to be expressed with the letters C and M. The pension actuary takes the opposite – the probability of life. His functions are D and N. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same math. Two parts of the ultimate One.” She patted her mouth with her napkin.

Brad eye-flirted with their waiter, two tables away. It wasn’t sexual; he just wanted his espresso before he finished dessert. Also he wanted the staff to recognize him. He and Susan had been there for lunch two Fridays in a row and they were personable and generous; it shouldn’t take long before they were greeted with familiarity and seated with what felt like priority. All his life Brad had been an outgoing hospitable guy. The years abroad, with house servants and an expatriate cocktail life, hadn’t slowed him down.

For that matter, and for an actuary, Susan wasn’t a social slouch either. Their family of origin was argumentative and passionate, and they’d had to learn to get along and get a word in or they wouldn’t have been allowed words at all. Both of them could put people at ease, make them laugh, or get them talking.

Brad caught the waiter’s eyes, who in turn signaled with his brows and chin that coffee was the next task he’d set himself. He mimed a run toward the bar and soon returned with the double macchiato.

“Maybe I should give it a try,” Brad ventured as he stirred in his foam.

“Actuary?”

“Yeah. It looks like you could use some help in the office.” He had been working there over the past week and a half, cleaning Susan’s server and defragging her office PCs…generally tweaking her electronics. He couldn’t fail to notice that she labored longer and harder than her three employees and still had too much to do. “Not like I’d be any kind of actuary any time soon,” he continued. “But you seem to have to do a lot of non-actuarial shit, too…maybe I can help with some of that.”

She put her spoon down. “I’ve always said I wanted a manager,” she stated. “Or a wife.” They smiled across the table. “What the hell: let’s try it.” Picking up her spoon again, she added, “Keep you off the street.”

She considered her accidental career. She hadn’t even known what an actuary was when she took the clerk/typist position at age 22. She was a hippie who thought of herself as a beatnik, who’d turned her back on her math aptitude to be avant garde and write, who landed while awaiting grad school (English, for the writing) in a small stressed office, who quickly came to like the job more than the school and the numbers more than the words.

“Hanging with the Hassids,” was what one of her college friends said when Susan told him she was going to be an actuary. And it’s true that the field drew as many of that Jewish sect as the diamond industry in New York. Some of the professional conferences looked like rabbinical schools. But actuaries also were made from computer-oriented math nerds, from school-age bookies and pot head hackers. There weren’t many forelocks and black hats among the small-plan pension actuaries, and that was Susan’s cohort. There weren’t many women either.

Their waiter paused by their table and offered her more regular coffee. He was at least ten years older than Susan so she knew he’d understand her hesitation at 2 p.m. He told them he worked 12 hour days – 10 to 10 – so caffeine was still his friend, but he pointed out that espresso packs less punch than brew, and suggested a drink like Brad’s. She thought about it. She opted for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead. That made Brad raise his brows, because Susan was the least inclined in their family to drink. He was about to comment when they were all distracted by parade-type activity in the street.