Collected Short Stories Volume II
by
Barry Rachin
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
Published by:
Barry Rachin on Smashwords
Copyright © 2016 by Barry Rachin
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This short story collection represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
The Willy-nilly Hedonist
A week before the wedding, Benjamin Brannigan visited his grandmother. He found the older woman in the sun room crouched over a tray of black Simpson lettuce seedlings. The plants were arranged in two-inch peat pots. “What’s with the blue powder?” He indicated a plastic container with a granular substance.
“Water-soluble plant food,” she replied,” with equal parts nitrogen, phosphate and potash.”
Benjamin surveyed the greenery. “None of the plants seem to be benefiting from your overindulgence.”
Granny Brannigan scowled. “Early April is still too early to grow plants indoors.” She rubbed her lantern jaw thoughtfully and adjusted the wire-rimmed glasses higher up on a beaky nose. “Not nearly enough sunlight or warmth.” “And how’s my favorite grandson?” Granny Brannigan said, shifting gears.
“Not so hot.” Benjamin sat down heavily in a wicker chair. “Angela’s been cheating on me with a co-worker, since as far back as the engagement. The wedding’s off.”
Granny Brannigan, who had been sprinkling topsoil mixed with worm casings, humus and perlite into an empty container, gawked at the young man. “Ouch!” When there was no immediate response, she added, “Did you tell your parents?”
“Not yet. I only found out last night.” The dark-haired boy with the sallow complexion and hazel eyes looked haggard, emotionally unhinged. He delivered the grotesque news in a numbed monotone. “I’ll call all the guests to cancel the wedding and return gifts, of course.” After an awkward pause, Benjamin noted, “Angela claims that she’s a hedonist at heart and the engagement was a mistake.” His features dissolved in a weak smile. “I looked the word up in the dictionary.”
“And?”
“Hedonism is the ethical theory that pleasure and the satisfaction of desire is the highest good and proper aim of human life.” Granny Brannigan massaged her massive jaw a second time. “Your fiancée is a birdbrain.” She spoke softly in a dispassionate manner. The observation wasn’t so much a reprimand as a statement of unassailable apriori truth.
“Former fianceé,” Benjamin corrected. “Our marriage is a distant memory… caput, finito, defunct, dead on arrival.”
Granny Brannigan held a peat pot up to the light. On the verge of collapsing, the stringy, transparent stalk was much too thin to support even a single green leaf. In addition to the lettuce there were heirloom beefsteak tomatoes, dill, oregano, basil, chive and cilantro in various stages of failing health. All was lost!
“Like a baby born prematurely,” Benjamin noted.
“Yes, a good analogy, but unfortunately there’s nothing I can do to correct the defect.” The woman pinched the stalk with a fingernail and tossed the wilted growth aside.
Pointing at the ruined seedling, Benjamin cracked a sick smile. “That’s pretty much what Angela did to me last night.”
His grandmother reached out and patted his hand sympathetically.
If anyone had asked Benjamin, who among his closest friends and relatives loved him most, the answer would have been a no-brainer. With Granny Brannigan there were never any hugs, kisses or mawkish terms of endearment. Language was a trap. Nothing of the sort. Far too much got frittered away in emotional excesses. She portioned her affection discretely. A gently pat of the wrist following a failed engagement would suffice.
Benjamin scanned the hickory table which resembled a horticultural battle zone. All was lost. Two dozen tiny pots had been upended, the scraggily, brittle plants thrown in a heap. “Doesn’t seem like your vegetable garden is in any better shape than my wedding plans.”
The older woman’s features dissolved in a cagey grin. Throwing a fistful of tarragon sprouts aside she rose “Come with me.”
In the basement a collection of spruce two-by-fours cut into four-foot lengths were stacked in the far corner. “I need to rip these boards on the table saw.”
“For what purpose?”
“A cold frame… I’m gonna make a miniature greenhouse,” Granny Brannigan replied, “so I can plants these seeds outside without risk of a late-night frost or insufficient sunlight damaging the young plants. But that’s a project for another day.” Flicking the light switch, she led the way back upstairs.
“I could stop by Saturday and help you resize the wood,” Benjamin ventured.
“If you like.”
In the foyer Benjamin noted, “I’ll have to call Father Stan and tell him that the wedding’s off.”
His grandmother grounds her teeth and an unintelligible sound gurgled up in her throat. “You’ve been through enough already. I can handle that insufferable blowhard!”
A devout Catholic who never missed a Sunday Mass or day of holy obligation, Granny Brannigan, despised the parish priest. She ridiculed Father Stan as a hellfire and brimstone fanatic, a brittle-minded cleric who trafficked in original sin and the mortal unworthiness of his sinful flock. Granny Brannigan once confided that she wouldn’t be surprised to find Father Stan lurking in some dingy alley selling indulgences – leg bones of medieval saints, moldy scraps of sacred cloth or other holy relics of questionable origin.
* * * * *
Benjamin could tally the woman he dated prior to meeting Angela on the fingers of one hand with several digits to spare. Each was precious in her own way. Each fatally flawed. None marriage material. Rita Winetraub, a Jewish girl whose parents emigrated from Poland, epitomized Benjamin’s romantic folly.
Graduating college magna cum laude, top of her class, she was well read, spoke several languages fluidly and had once, in a philosophy class, debated A.J. Ayer’s theory of logical positivism. Rita played second bassoon in the community orchestra. She whipped up gourmet meals replete with fresh herbs and spices, tutored English as a second language at the learning center and loved her nieces and nephews to distraction. Serenely quiet with an adroit sense of humor, the young woman was sexually frigid.
Rita kissed and hugged in a perfunctory manner. Physical intimacy was a tedious chore to be endured rather than savored. In every other respect the girl was normal, kind, considerate, decent. But Benjamin wanted the complete package and couldn’t cope with her blasé indifference to what seldom occurred in the bedroom.
At one point Benjamin confronted Rita with her aversion to intimacy. “It’s just the way I am,” she returned in an off-hand manner.
“Maybe you would feel differently… more passionately with a different man.”
“I’ve been with other men.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“It’s just the way I am,” she repeated for good measure.
It’s just the way I am. A cousin on his father’s side of the family was born with cerebral palsy. The poor unfortunate walked with a spastic gait and chewed at a cockeyed, lopsided angle for the longest time before swallowing a mouthful of food. Luck of the draw - no one was to blame for the cousin’s birth defect. With Rita Winetraub physical intimacy was a nuisance, a distasteful ordeal to be shrugged off and forgotten as quickly as possible.
One muggy afternoon in mid-June three years earlier, Benjamin was lounging on a bench in Copley Square. Rita, who worked in downtown Boston, was meeting him for lunch. Trinity Church and the John Hancock Tower were clearly visible. He had only been waiting ten minutes, when a familiar face emerged from the deluge of college students and middle-aged urban professionals. Rita approached with a lilting gait, her hips rocking rhythmically from side to side. A print dress in pastel earth tones showed her fleshy arms to good advantage. Like something out of a Modigliani painting, the porcelain face, supple, elongated neck and chocolaty eyes were perfect in every respect.
Benjamin rose and went to kiss her, but at the last instant she pivoted so that his lips brushed her cheek. “You look beautiful!” he murmured. Reaching down he grabbed her hand. “Where would you like to eat?”
Rita gestured with her eyes. “There’s an outdoor café two blocks down on Clarendon Street.”
At the restaurant she laid both hands on the linen table cloth, palms down with the slender fingers resting inadvertently in a prayerful gesture. Benjamin reached across and cupped her hands in his own. “You are the loveliest creature on planet earth.”
“And now you’re repeating yourself, “she quipped, “having just said something of the sort only five minutes ago.”
At that moment something in Benjamin’s superheated brain went awry. Feasting his eyes on Rita, he saw two completely different women - the twenty-three year-old overflowing with elegant grace and her glacial doppelganger, who later that night would unearth any excuse not to sleep with him. “I think I’ll order a Cobb salad,” Rita announced, pushing the menu away, “and maybe a slice of carrot cake for desert.”
Marriage was a partnership, for better or worse. Nowhere in the ceremonial vows did it mention extenuating circumstances. After sixteen months of the drip, drip, drip of physical rejection, Benjamin broke off the relationship.
By comparison, sex with Angela was consummated in a fiery flash, a rapacious burst of lust followed by drugged sleep. The pudgy girl with the squat nose splattered with coffee colored freckles and perpetual sloe-eyed grin was an instinctual, primordial creature. Angela didn’t think things through. Emotion urges surged and ebbed away with kaleidoscopic whimsy. One night when they were getting ready for bed, Benjamin said, “I found this clever book of poems at the library.”
“Poetry… it’s not my cup of tea,” Angela muttered. “Not interested!”
“Just wait a minute.” Reaching for a well-thumbed paperback on the bedside table, he flipped through the pages in search of a particular passage. Locating the verse, he began reading in a singsong cadence:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you;
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you truly want;
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
Cross the doorsill
Where the two worlds touch.
The door is…
Angela groaned. Reaching out, she splayed her fingers over the page and roughly pushed the book away. “Enough already!”
“Rumi was one of the greatest Persian poets, but perhaps this particular verse is too esoteric for your tastes?”
“Silly… dim-witted.” She rejected his rationalization. “That business about the doorsill where the two worlds touch… it’s just dopey gobbledygook.”
“I’m not going to force you to listen if you don’t want to.” Returning the book to the night table, he glanced at her uncertainly. Angela was staring at the stucco pattern on the bedroom ceiling. “I want to go to Maine this weekend.”
“Boothbay Harbor or Old Orchard Beach are nice this time of year.”
“No. I had something else in mind,” she parried his suggestion. “The shopping mall at Kittery… they’ve got designer fashions at wholesale prices.
* * * * *
Several of Benjamin’s friends from high school had already married and abruptly divorced. They chose poorly, impulsively, or not at all, because, over the four-dimensional continuum of time, love was little more than an emotional crap shoot. One encountered romantic bliss between the covers of a Harlequin paperback; everything else was Russian roulette.
Don’t turn your back on happiness in pursuit of perfection!
Benjamin fell back on this saccharine adage, when deciding that Angela should be his soul mate, the mother of his unborn children. In the new world order, what worked for his parents, who were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary in October, was no longer relevant. He loved Angela and they would make a life together. He wasn’t settling, selling himself short. No, nothing of the sort!
* * * * *
Around the middle of the week Granny Brannigan called. “Are you coming by Saturday morning?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I need a few things from the hardware store,” she said. “A box of inch and a quarter deck screws plus a heavy-duty plastic drop cloth.
“Okay.”
“Yesterday morning I spoke to Father Stan… told him the wedding was off.” The older woman began chuckling – more like a spastic, dry cough than bona fide expression of mirth. “The priest became rather indignant… acted as though he had been terribly inconvenienced. Even demanded to know what went wrong.”
“And?”
“I told him that the bride-to-be morphed into the town slut.” “By the way,” Granny Brannigan blurted before Benjamin could collect his thoughts, “I also need a carton of heavy-duty staples and a pair of small brass hinges.” Without waiting for a reply, she hung up the phone.
When he arrived Saturday morning, Benjamin’s grandmother was already in the basement setting the fence three-quarters of an inch from the carbide-tipped blade on the table saw. “Those are your plans?” He indicated a hodge-podge of pages scattered about the workbench. The cold frame would be four feet long with a plastic-covered lid that sloped gently toward the front of the project. Lap joints held the rectangular lid together with plastic sheeting stretched across the inner surface and stapled firmly on all sides. A miniature greenhouse for less than five dollars!
Benjamin pointed at a piece of wood resting nearby. “You’re gonna rip that stud in one pass?”
“Too dangerous.” His grandmother rotated the crank on the front of the saw, lowering the blade until it was almost flush with the table’s surface. “We’ll do it in small increments.”
Flipping the switch the tool came alive with a brutal, metallic whine. Positioning the first board firmly up against the fence, she eased the fir into the saw. The shallow kerf cut like butter. When the rear portion of the board was a foot from the whirring blade, Granny Brannigan released her grip and Benjamin pulled the board the rest of the way. Flipping the board end-over-end, the twosome repeated the process.
Granny Brannigan raised the blade a modest quarter of an inch and repeated the process. A minute later the thick board came apart in two equal sections. “Three more boards and we’re done!” The woman repositioned her wire-rimmed glasses back on the bridge of her nose.
“You’ll want to drill pilot holes,” Benjamin cautioned when the rest of the lumber was cut, “so the wood doesn’t crack, when you fasten the sides together.
“I won’t forget.” Granny Brannigan raised the bladed and wedged a piece of scrap wood firmly against the miter gauge. She made a pass for the lap joint, measured the depth then adjusted the blade accordingly.
* * * * *
Later that afternoon the phone rang. Benjamin?” Angela’s voice was composed, friendly enough in a distant sort of way.
“Yes?”
“How’re you doing?”
How was he doing? The woman had just upended his universe, turned his guts inside out. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to stop by and collect the rest of my belongings.”
Benjamin’s brain went blank. In a fit of sadistic rage following the breakup, he toyed with the idea of doing something outlandish, sadistic, boorish, intentionally crass - like piling all her personal effects in back yard, dousing them with gasoline and lighting a bonfire. But the mayor’s office had just passed legislation the previous year. Outside burning required a municipal permit from the fire department.
He also considered carting all Angela’s clothing and accoutrements - the frilly, push-up bras from Victoria’s Secret, French-cut bikini underwear and hundred-dollar, Michael Kors shoes - to the Salvation Army where refugees from an assortment of third world banana republics could indulge themselves in a stylish feeding frenzy. “When did you want to come,” Benjamin stammered.
“Now if it’s not too inconvenient.” Her voice was remote, bordering on impersonal. Scarcely a week had passed and Angela had moved on, given Benjamin the bum’s rush. The wedding that never happened and idyllic life they meticulously planned together were little more than a historical artifact.
“When did you realize that you were a hedonist?”
“Excuse me?”
“You can come now to collect your stuff. I’ll leave the front door ajar, Just lock it behind you when you leave.”
“You won’t be there?”
“No. It’s less awkward this way.”
Benjamin drove to a sports bar a mile from his apartment and watched the Boston Celtics battle the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James in the first game of the NBA playoffs. With Boston up by twenty points at halftime, the game was a complete rout. Returning home, Angela was long gone. He showered and went to bed but not before remembering a curious incident.
As he was leaving after his last visit to Granny Brannigan, the woman suddenly began snapping her arthritic fingers fitfully as thought trying to recall some fogbound memory from the distant past. “There was this massive book in three volumes… twelve hundred pages in all.” “Anthony Adverse… that’s what it was called. Hervey Allen was the author. Anthony Adverse… they even made it into a movie in 1936 with Olivia de Havilland in the lead role…”
“Why are you telling me this?” Benjamin pressed.
“One of the main characters, a middle-aged housekeeper was a hedonist.” Granny Brannigan began to giggle uncontrollably, “an insatiable nymphomaniac as I remember.” With a rickety, rheumatic gait, she shambled closer and tugged on her grandson’s sleeve.
“Angela is selfish and crass. She lacks common decency. Her sexual predilections are more a matter of convenience rather than personal conviction. The housekeeper in Anthony Adverse was a hedonist in the truest sense of the word. Angela’s just a spoiled brat.”
* * * * *
A month later Benjamin stopped by his grandmother’s house. He found the woman in the back yard crouched over the newly minted cold frame. The plastic frame had been swung far back. She indicated a thermometer propped up in the corner next to a pot of red pepper seedlings. “Gotta be careful. With the plastic lid down, temperatures can climb to well over a hundred degrees!”
Benjamin was studying a row of butter crunch lettuce. Each plant hugged the earth, the emerald green leaves unfolding in a profusion of succulent new growth. At the rear of the cold frame a half dozen beefsteak tomatoes swayed in a light breeze. The young plants stood a foot high, the sturdy stalks coated with a gossamer, grayish film. All was right in the world.
Sanctuary of the Whirligigs
Ignoring the paved, red brick walkway, the dark-haired woman cut across the lawn to where Marcus Rosedale was lounging on the front stoop. Even by the most generous standards, she wasn’t particularly pretty. Thick, charcoal eyebrows perched over pallid cheeks, sloping haphazardly toward fleshy lips. It was the sort of unremarkable, aesthetically commonplace face one seldom noticed in a crowd.
Some women possessed a certain penache. Even when wearing torn jeans and a blouse bought off the discount rack at the bargain outlet, they wreaked of haute couture. Sadly, this one was not of that ilk. How she appeared in middle age was not much different from how Marcus imagined she would look thirty years later when applying for Medicare and her social security pension.
She waved an arm at a collection of wind-driven lawn ornaments scattered across the weedy grass. “Are these gizmos for sale?”
“Whirligigs,” he corrected. “They’re called whirligigs and yes, I’ve got plenty in the basement.”
The woman stabbed at a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, pushing the frames up on the bridge of a doughy nose. “Yes, well I really like the feisty chicken.” She pointed toward a brightly painted wooden ornament perched on a spruce pole. A gust of wind tickled the blades of a purple propeller, sending the chicken’s upper torso bobbing up and down in the direction of a terrified earthworm. A red barn with tufts of hay spilling out of an upper loft served as a makeshift rudder, steering the contraption into the fitful breezes.
“Hennie Penny.” Marcus grinned good-naturedly. He disappeared into the house, returning moments later with a replica of the mechanical device.
“They’re all so clever,” she said, gesturing toward a red-capped lumberjack, who was chopping wood with an axe near a rock garden. Several feet away, a less-ambitious, bearded man snoozed leisurely in a rocking chair that rhythmically bobbed back and forth as the wind pumped a drive shaft hidden just below his feet. Directly to the left, a brown bear clawed the air with an outstretched paw, just out of reach of a salmon leaping from a frothy pond. It was all good fun – a comical, self-contained universe in microcosm where only good things hap