Sputterpub's Blog

“Rodents and roaches and flies: oh my! Rodents and roaches and flies …”

“Don’t even joke about it,” Jake growled. “It’s not funny. No one needs to hear.” He stood at the counter whisking olive oil into balsamic vinegar and garlic, and he glowered at Deborah over his shoulder while his left hand steadied the bowl and his right arm twirled from the elbow. He always started the next day’s vinaigrette before they shut down for the night. It was their closing ritual: Jake at the whisk while Deborah pushed the big broom.

“We’re practically alone now,” she said. The wait-staff was gone for the day; only Jorge and Paco were still around, and they were emptying the last load of dishes from the plastic trays to the open overhead shelves. Deborah glanced from the two young men to her aging grumpy partner. Paco was string-muscled and small but Jorge was a six and a half foot hunk, full-necked, broad-chested, fine-pored. Deborah thought about young masculine vigor, and she wondered. There was Jake, growing a slight paunch that pulled his weak lower spine forward so he stood sway-backed at the counter. Sprouting gray hair from his ears while he lost it off his head. Getting unrulier in the eyebrows while he got tamer in the pants. “Look,” she declared. “It could be worse. The exterminator told me some places have rats so bold they ride the broom! And roaches may creep people out, but they’re actually clean – they haul away their dead.”

“Tell that to the customers … No. Don’t,” Jake reconsidered quickly. Deborah was a good hostess, an outgoing warm hospitable greeter. But the same liveliness that charmed most of their patrons came with a directness that sometimes surprised them; he wouldn’t put it past his wife to actually joke about cockroaches while escorting a party to a table.

“I know we have a problem,” she said seriously. “But we’re viable. I mean, we’re working on the pest thing, and as soon as we get a stable staff …”

“Yeah. Sure.” Jake coughed out the words sardonically. “We are so far from okay that it isn’t even in sight.” His face showed disgusted despair. He turned from the steel work counter and didn’t notice the cockroach ambling toward the vat of vinaigrette. “If we don’t get our act together and start serving the main courses before the customers have forgotten the starters, we’re doomed. And the repeated inspections are disruptive; you can’t argue about that. We’re starting to get the wrong kind of rep.”

Jake turned to Deborah as he covered the vinaigrette, so he didn’t see the roach become an unwitting prisoner of the dressing container. He wasn’t aware of all the desperate scrabbling that went on beneath the cover, like the race-around of a decapitated chicken, and he didn’t notice when the insect finally stopped trying to push out of the heavy cover and went quiescent within the acetic fumes. He was aware instead of wiping his hands on the front of his apron, walking toward wife-with-broom, insisting: “If we could just get on the right side of that Daddy Warbucks dude: get him to invest enough so we could add staff…”

“He’s got a reservation for lunch tomorrow.”

“Really? With the blonde?”

“Uh-huh. And his name is Campbell.”

Troy Campbell was a big money man around town. He owned acres of real estate and made a hobby of investing in small businesses. He ate at their little bistro often, and Jake had the idea, the fantasy according to Deborah, that Campbell could be talked into investing in them. Deborah pointed out that Campbell put money in small companies, yes, but only the type that could go public and create more wealth for him. Their restaurant wasn’t that kind of venture.

“Well, I say we try to impress the guy tomorrow. We create an occasion to sell ourselves.”

“I don’t think we should count on it.” Deborah spoke without her customary optimism. “When he’s here with that woman he’s into her; he’s not going to be receptive to a business discussion.”

“Let’s see how it goes. Let’s try to get his meal served right.”

They closed up their kitchen and followed Jorge and Paco out of the place. Unknowingly they left the trapped roach to suffer alone in the vinaigrette vat, while all the other roaches and rats had the nighttime run of the place.

Cockroach dreams. No words. Stiff like a carapace, brown like balsamic vinaigrette. No thoughts. Legs moving antenna ranging pushing pulling agitating no-escape quiet-now. While Jake and Deborah sexless shared a bed, the roach in the vinaigrette vat bided under the rim of the cover. While Troy Campbell smoked a cigar in his study and considered forty year-old Karen Montgomery, and wondered how after their tantalizing phone conversations and recent provocative e-mails he could take it to the next phase, the cockroach waited unaware that it waited, for morning and the restaurant preparations.

(continued on Wednesday)

I was a mature eight-year old then. I was aware of time’s passage and even had my own version of calendar; to me we had passed through the seasons of fireflies and of hurricanes, and were moving through crunchy fallen maple and oak leaves to Halloween time. A week later I went to the party filled with opinion about tragedy and dressed as a ghost. But no other guest had watched Madame Butterfly. The closest empathetic ears belonged to those who had wept at “Old Yeller,” but even though my father wouldn’t let me see that movie, I knew that at least there was a real reason the dog had to be destroyed.

Siesel was dressed as Marie Antoinette. I had to have that explained to me because history was not my subject. I disliked the hair; I loved her natural curls so much that I didn’t approve of pushing them under a wig, no matter how elaborate the wig. But I was very impressed with the satin brocade and the amazing ribbon-tied high-heeled shoes.

That year Siesel seemed older than her mother. With her heels, her towering wig of curls, and the empire-wasted gown pushing up what there was to push up, Siesel looked more like sixteen than twelve. And her mother chose to wear an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini. She had a beach cover-up over it, but that was unbuttoned, and in the lantern light of the party she looked like a teenager. She wore all her gold bangles, and they tinkled with the ice in her glass when she raised her arm for repeated speeches and toasts. Her eyes had a funny panicked appearance, like a rabbit caught in headlights, and I noticed that Siesel’s father kept trying to get her to go inside and leave the party to him.

There was no fifth party. The next year the neighborhood kids just grabbed bags and went trick-or-treating, and then winnowed out the unwrapped items and traded away the unwanted items and tried to make the collection last till Thanksgiving. A few months after the fourth party, Siesel’s family shrank and then moved away.

It was early January. There had been enough snow to layer the sidewalks with a thin sheet of ice but not enough to close school. I came home one Wednesday, pulled off my boots as required in the small entry area, draped my parka as preferred on the second-lowest hook, and walked into the kitchen. I was quiet because it was likely my baby brother was sleeping. I knew my other brother was outside building a fort and sneak-eating snow.

My mother stood at the sink, probably washing dishes. Her platinum rings sparkled in the tiny blue glass dish on the windowsill, and her cigarette rested in a U-slot of the brown ashtray, its smoke ribboning upward in the sunlight. She spoke immediately, quietly, without turning around. That was uncharacteristic behavior, so I paid attention.

“Honey, something very sad happened today.” I knew instinctively that Mom should have turned then and let me see her eyes, but she kept facing the sink, back stiff and arms moving. “Siesel’s mother died.”

“How …” I started to ask, but she continued. “It’s very terrible,” she said, and “Apparently she took too many sleeping pills and isn’t going to wake up. Siesel’s father found her when he came home for lunch today. Thank God for that. At least Siesel wasn’t the one to discover it.”

I wondered if the “it” meant Siesel’s mother, if you became an “it” that soon after death. I was shocked and had questions about the death, but not about the suicide. After all, I had seen Madame Butterfly. I knew when I watched the opera that suicide must happen, because no one would include such a concept in a production if it were fiction, because who would believe that anyone would kill herself? If it didn’t really happen …

Siesel and her father and Gretel moved soon after that. I never knew where they went. The last thing I noticed about them was a hideous lethargy that seemed to pull their muscles closer to the ground, so it was an effort for each of them to climb into their Buick the day they drove away.

Their images remained in me. They lurked with the memories of child ideas and occasionally twinkled in peripheral revision. Almost half a century later I mentioned the family to my parents. Dad swept his recollections slowly, like a St. Bernard’s big head, and after a lag said, “The father wrote for television.” Mom declared with strange satisfaction, “All I know is that you came home from those parties to use our bathroom. You said their’s was dirty.”

“Don’t you remember the mother killing herself?” I asked, surprised at my own surprise.

“Did she?” Dad’s face looked puzzled.

“Oh yeah. I think she did die,” my mother said. She took Dad’s elbow. “But I don’t remember how.” She looked vacant, recollecting. “He was pretty funny. She was a ditzy blonde. She used to say there was no point in making the bed if you were just going to use it again that night. Their bathroom wasn’t clean.”

I never got the charm and I can’t remember who did. I never served a cake myself with a charm in it. But I was always pleased with the idea. Charmed, even. Like the concept of a cucumber stuffed with pearls, which I read about in one of the Arabian Nights tales. Useless but enchanting.

Many of my memories from that neighborhood are indistinct; my family moved away when I was barely ten, and Siesel left a year before that. But I have some true recollections – little scenes never captured by my father’s avid camera and therefore remembered as life instead of slides. The annual polio vaccines and the Halloween parties at Siesel’s are vivid points like moonbeams caught in a net.

The first year, the year of the yellow ballerina, Siesel’s mother outshone all the guests. I was in kindergarten; I had just begun to notice other people who weren’t family or kids, and I remember being fascinated with the bracelets and the melodic voice. Siesel was pretty and happy, but no one was as happy as her mother.

The second year Siesel wore a Southern belle costume. Her beautiful red hair was longer, and fashioned for that day into ringlets. I remember the amazing lace on her corseted gown. Gretel was a mature St. Bernard by then, but she trampled mud on Siesel’s hem, and I was surprised at how angry that made Siesel’s mom. I remember watching Siesel’s father lead her mother aside and talk to her, hug her, apparently calm her. I also remember learning that week that my own father wasn’t going to vote for the President. We had been visiting my grandparents, collecting the fallen maple leaves, and as we got ready to go my grandpa asked my father who he was going to vote for. My father answered with the question, “Have I ever voted Republican?” and that started a train of surprise and understanding in me.

The third Halloween party came at a tough time for me. I’d had a tonsillectomy early that month, and my throat was still sore. Worse than that, my spirit was sore from the ether and my attitude was sore from hospital treatment. Worse than those, my parents were fighting daily and my nights, already disturbed by a tender throat and anesthetic nightmares, were punctuated by the sounds of my parents’ quarrels and spiced with hallucinations about divorce.

I was not happy. I acted out in school, sassing my second-grade teacher, and my parents tried to discipline me with words and room arrest. They even said “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” and “Because I told you so.” They made me so angry that I scared them by coming home late, with my hair looking bloody because I had smeared wild berries in it in the field near my school. My mother yelled at me while she washed my hair, and didn’t seem to care when I got shampoo in my eyes. Not long after that, she took me to the beauty parlor and had my long hair cut.

I went as a hobo to the party that year. It was easy to fashion some raggedy clothes but I was jealous as a snake about Siesel’s fairy princess costume. She even had gossamer wings: glitter-spattered tissue over thin wire frames, made by her mother of course, who that year flitted from table to table in a belly-dancer outfit, purple, blue, and green, with yards of gold coins around her slim waist.

By the time of the fourth party, my mother was very pregnant. The baby that would be my second brother was only three weeks away from emerging. I would have rather had a dog. I really wanted a St. Bernard like Gretel, but I would have been happy with any shape of canine. I longed for a companion.

My parents weren’t quarreling at the time. In fact, my father appeared to be devoted to my mom, and my mother seemed reasonably content. They didn’t pay me much attention. My first brother made me seem more like a kid than a baby to them, and with a second infant on the way I took on relative maturity in my parents’ eyes.

The one time I remember doing anything with my father that season was the occasion he took to introduce me to opera. He loved Puccini, and he had me sit with him through an early television broadcast of Madame Butterfly.

Of course I didn’t “get” opera. I was accustomed to suspending my disbelief for “The Howdy Doody Show” or Crusader Rabbit cartoons, but those were for kids; they were supposed to be absurd. I knew opera was for grownups. I sat at my father’s right side on the green damask sofa, and I watched it very seriously. I thought the way the people sang so loudly at each other was silly. I found the story disturbingly, progressively, sad. But what stunned me, what smashed me like a board and flattened me like a falling piano, was the moment when the beautiful lady plunged the knife into her kimonoed breast. It didn’t matter to me whether the death made sense or not. I just couldn’t believe anyone would see such an act as any form of entertainment. It seemed to me, then and forever after, to be a poor choice for any performance. I’ve never understood the sad ending.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

The first thing I noticed about Siesel was her dog. Gretel was still a puppy when we all moved in, but even at six months a St. Bernard is hard to ignore. And she was a perfect example of her breed. Heavy-footed, rounded of back, cotton-white with fields of auburn and umber. She was too young for the characteristic loose lip – it would be a little while before she began spraying us all with clear mucus when she shook her big head or sneezed – but she made opaque messes with big-puppy energy.

The second thing I noticed was Siesel’s hair. It was naturally curly and the color of buffed copper. I hadn’t seen a redhead before, and I would never after meet one of better hue. My books all pictured blonde princesses, which made my brunette self feel second-string, but something about the color of Siesel’s hair moved her out of the arena of normal for me, and into the epic.

Siesel, for her part, probably wasn’t feeling epic. She was nearly nine years old and she had just moved away from all of her friends in New Orleans, yanked with her mother from their homey humid delta to the suburbs of Long Island. She knew the move had something to do with her father’s job; she heard her parents fighting late into the night, and she must have believed what her mother told mine: that her dad wanted to get them out of the South, back to the area where he was raised. She acted lonely. She didn’t like appearing exotic. She considered altering her name, to Cecile or Cecily. Even those were too odd. She paid no attention to the younger kids on the block. I was only five.

The neighborhood in Glen Cove was hewn out of an old berry and clover farm. The developers took pasture two acres at a time, carving streets and cul-de-sacs, laying sewer and water lines, basing and framing and finishing blocks of ranch and split-level houses with rail-fenced backyards. A year after our block was settled, a draft horse broke through the fence into my backyard and caused my visiting cousin to have hysterics. Three years after, all of the farm had been turned into single-family first-time homes, everything except the original two-story wood-frame farmhouse, where the big O’Neill family lived, with the twins Shelly and Stephen and seven other kids.

The way tract homes were developed, entire initial neighborhoods moved in at once. The houses were in such demand that they sold immediately upon completion, and approximately sixty days later the street became narrow with moving vans, and nuclear families ranged around in relocation chaos. There followed additional periods of shelf-building, lawn seeding, and patio development, during which the neighbors took each other’s material and cooperative measure.

My household was friendly. My mother was always outgoing and energetic, my father was competent and cordial, and my baby brother was adorable.

Siesel’s family was exuberant. They weren’t from the Northeast; they couldn’t help but be interesting. Her father was enthusiastic and her mother was vivacious. She wore bright flowing clothes and almost sang instead of speaking. She stacked a dozen gold bangles on her wrists, like a princess from the Arabian Nights. She made a big decorative deal out of every holiday. Especially Halloween.

The neighborhood was completed in August and no one was set up properly for Labor Day; Halloween was the first big holiday after the houses filled. It happened that Siesel’s birthday was on the 30^th of October and their family tradition had always celebrated it with Halloween, so Siesel’s mother threw the first of what would be an annual party, and invited every kid on the block.

That seemed extraordinary. Siesel was a few years ahead of the post-war tsunami, and most of the neighbor kids were four or five or six to her nine, but all of us were invited and Siesel was gracious.

They decked the house out like it was haunted. Cobwebs and strange lights played on the flat back yard and eerie music whined from inside the study. Siesel’s father greeted everyone dressed like Dracula, whose movie wouldn’t be out for two years and would then be deemed so terrifying that I for one, and several other guests as well, would not be permitted to see it. Siesel’s mother appeared as a beautiful Gypsy. Siesel herself was a ballerina that first year; I condensed with envy at the sight of her yellow satin toe shoes and horizontal tulle skirt.

There were lanterns and crepe paper strung from the back of the house to the edges of the fence, and several wooden tables with attached benches and matching cloths. I was seated at the table farthest from the house and the rituals, but Siesel’s mother made sure all of the guests saw the big cake before she cut into it. It was iced in orange and chocolate-so-dark-it-was-nearly-black, and it looked like a flattened pumpkin. It was moist dark devilsfood beneath buttercream frosting, and there was a charm baked into it. That was a tradition in Siesel’s family; the guest who found the charm would receive a prize.

(to be continued on Wednesday)

Kevin got away as soon as he finished high school. He went to college in another state, married there, and began to live quite carelessly with his young bride. They partied hard. They traveled thoughtlessly. Tracy was a little obsessive about air schedules, and Kevin couldn’t resist mocking her. Apparently he’d expended all of his tolerance for planning with his parents; it sometimes seemed to Abby as if he married a woman he could pick on because he’d been too easygoing for too long. He sniped at Tracy when she worried, which led to a lot of arguments between them, which fueled his drinking and drug consumption, but Tracy was into altering her consciousness, too, so they usually ended their evening groggy or passed-out together, and they stayed married.

Abby on the other hand tended to stay home, once she had a home she loved.

She went through two houses with two spouses but the third piece of real estate, with title taken as “an unmarried woman,” was the one with charm. She hunkered down with her dog and her son Matt. She ventured out easily for work, because she liked her job and she knew she would become mentally ill if she never left the house. She vacationed less willingly, nagged into it by parental or fraternal comments like “it just isn’t normal to stay home all the time,” or moved by the occasional idea that it would be good for her and her son.

It was Matt, in fact, who released her from homebodiness. He was twenty before he found the occasion to articulate it, but he finally told Abby that a vacation shouldn’t be so much work. He expressed a desire to go camping, and that sent Abby into paroxysms of list- and itinerary-making. “Whoa,” he said. “As long as we have wood and water, bags and a ground cloth, we’re good to go.”

So they went. Abby added a tent and some maps to the rudiments, but they took off rather carelessly in her old Maxima. They had a few days’ worth of firewood in the trunk, and a five-gallon water container in the back. The styrofoam cooler chilled drinks and fresh vegetables; paper bags held the groceries they acquired on the way to Mono basin. They camped a thousand feet away from an untraveled road, on a field of pumice, beside scraggly pines. They only needed the tent to shelter them from light, because the moon rode above them all the nights of that first trip, blazing enough to read by and blaring into their dreams.

Abby began to learn then, about the liberating pleasure of just going, of being prepared to encounter anything. She began to venture into adventures.

She never was able to show her parents the other way to vacation. By that time, her father had lost his balance and her mother had lost her patience, and they were neither leaving their home of forty years. But she did get to show Kevin. There came a season when his hard drinking caught up with him. He started abusing coke, again, and began to flip moods like a lunatic. Tracy wouldn’t take his passive-aggressive sniping any more, and he landed for awhile back in the company of his big sister.

Matt wasn’t any help. Abby soon discovered that her son had no respect for his uncle. When she looked at Kevin she still saw her sweet brother; she was startled to note that Matt saw a mean, sniping man.

So she tried to show Kevin what she’d learned. She took them on the road. She aimed her car for the high desert but first she made sure they wouldn’t be mooned. She selected the long dark weekend of August, and she parked them at the edge of a rock-bound hidden lake, on clear ground, near trees. Kevin’s nose started to bleed at 6,000 feet.

But the new moon didn’t blare at them. They slept outside under a star-shot bowl of black sky, and they made no plans. They couldn’t tell where they looked and when they dreamed.

Abby’s brother and father seemed to enjoy the camping trips. She and her mother didn’t. For her mom it was just too much work. She was always in charge of meals and cleaning, but when confronted with the narrowness of the Coleman stove and the coldness of the Sierra water, what were simple tasks at home became chores tolled like rosary beads: sort; clean; prime; grill; serve; scrape; scour; rinse.

For Abby, camping was too constrictive. She had to live in even closer proximity to her family. It wasn’t like she had the freedom to range (“you’ll get lost”) or sleep beneath the stars (“bears!”) or even to draw. The first time up there she sketched, taking special trouble with the pyramid shape and steely hues of Lembert Dome as seen, foot-frozen, from a matching rock in the middle of frigid Lyle Fork, and after she returned home she made an oil painting of her careful sketch. She was then enrolled in art classes because she showed some elementary watercolor promise, and her mother had found an old lady instructor who made her mark in the art world by scraping the brand name off oval bars of Camay soap, highlighting the floral framing curlicues with colors, and adorning the scraped central area with a portrait of a President, Elvis, or Liberace.

Mrs. Jukes looked for some moments upon Abby’s painting of Lembert Dome. Then she raised her own palette and recolored the picture, reddening the stone and yellowing the foliage to present Grand Canyon tones. Mrs. Jukes had never seen the Sierras.

Abby didn’t sketch the sights after that. She preferred to take notes and try rhymes. Kevin and her father liked to fish. Her mother seemed to enjoy complaining. Abby’s only favorite part of camping was to get up before anyone else and make her way, quiet like an Indian, to the mound of granite in the middle of the adjoining meadow. The ground was a little soggy and there were annoying clouds of dawn mosquitoes, but it was worth it to get to the stony bump, to perch on the cold rock creases and to watch the dawning sunlight sweep like a curtain of gold across the green basin. It happened every morning. Just once each day. And it happened fast.

Even with all of the planning, accidents occurred. Once Kevin whittled into his thumb, gashing his hand rather deeply just after his nosebleed had subsided. He had to hold his arm above his head for more than an hour before the wound coagulated enough. Another time, Abby’s father twisted his ankle, rushing away from what he was sure was a rattlesnake in the basalt rocks by the side of the road where he’d stopped, near Bakersfield, to pee. Even with all of the tire checking they picked up a nail on the drive home one trip out of a total of six. And although her father took all the recommended precautions to keep bears out of their food, securing most provisions in the storage locker and stringing the rest up from a tree branch, he didn’t protect them from the ravages of nesting rodents; the one time they left their shoes outside the trailer they awoke to find all laces chewed off at the eyelets.

Abby’s parents got very upset when things went wrong. Then they redoubled their planning attempts for the future. The pre-drive check became so rigorous that their departure was always delayed by at least thirty minutes. Her mother spent that whole time reconcluding that their arrangements couldn’t get more reasonable, and chirping at Abby to agree with her.

Kevin didn’t buck the parental planning. Abby tried to avoid as much of it as she could. Soon, his behavior was approved and she was called lazy. He seemed agreeable and she was difficult. She might have hated him for that, except that he was too nice a kid to hate. In fact, Kevin had no problem cooperating but he thought all the plans and checks were silly. He agreed with what Abby said about it, but he thought she was wasting her time trying to change their parents’ ways.

(to be concluded tomorrow)