Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (27 page)

You tune those thoughts out the way you learned to tune out sounds in the loft.

You call out to Lesley. Someone will come. You sit and wait.

Originally published in On Spec,
Summer 2004 Vol 16

No 2 #57

Laurie Channer
is a Toronto writer. She won second prize and an honorable mention in successive years in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest and has had her debut novel
Godblog
optioned for film. She is currently working on a mystery/thriller series of novels.

Rob Hunter

Sally Schofield was new to Sur la Mer and with the soccer mom’s requisite formula family: minivan, flaxen-haired children only moderately overweight, large hairy husband with pattern baldness. The invitation was for cookies and conversation. It had been Hilary Braunstein’s turn to break the news.

“Did I ever tell you about David, my first husband?” The two women were seated in a suburban kitchen, an American icon: coffee and cookies and a carafe of freshly cut daisies formed a barricade across the centre of a polished granite countertop, defining their spheres. The newcomer was seated near the door—an easy exit.

“Sorry? I didn’t realize you had been married before.” Sally’s cookie was dipped, tentatively, held under the steaming surface, then removed.
Well, we’re cutting right to the chase, aren’t we?
thought Sally. The cookie was not eaten, but studied.

No collagen here,
thought Hillary Braunstein. Sally’s cookie was held poised at lips too full, too young, too moist and sensuous to be anything but the genuine article.

“He wasn’t . . .” began Sally. Had David died in the war? Unlikely. The cookie’s fate hinged on Hillary’s answer. The question and the cookie hung between them.

“A gated community like Sur la Mer should be the ideal place to raise a family,” said Hillary.

Evidently, whatever had or had not happened to David was on hold for the time being. Hillary’s veering off topic was considered endearing by her friends. “You never know where Hillary is headed next,” they said. Sally found it irritating.

“You know—as far from New York as you can get and still be in it,” said Hillary. “Ocean bathing surrounded by water on three sides . . .” She made a needless adjustment to the perfectly arranged daisies. “. . . and that nonpareil view of the lights on the Verrazano Bridge. At night, of course.”

Five blocks.

The year before their move to Sur la Mer, Jim Schofield had leaned into the wind and pulled his chin lower into his coat collar, shoulders hunkered up against a March wind scuddering in from the Jersey piers.

He should have stayed in Wisconsin. It was five cross-town blocks to where he’d parked his car—five
Manhattan
cross-town blocks, the better part of a mile—in the rain, sleet, snow and the pounding heat of high August.

An exquisite pain took that moment to drive a rusty cavalry sabre into the pit of his stomach. That second martini at Lloyd’s Bar. Or was it the third? He’d have to cut back. Jim gagged at the curb. He bent over with his head between his knees and vomited in cascading waves. He felt immediately better but his eyes were now blinded by tears. He felt for the curbing with his heel, but it wasn’t there; he tripped and stumbled. In a yellow arc, a medallioned taxi swerved past in a tight uptown turn, its driver leaning on the horn and screaming curses in a foreign language.

Yeah—from here on out, one drink then home. He should have stayed on the farm in Wisconsin.

Sally Schofield was a pretty blond woman who still looked good in a flowered spring frock.
The luxury of bare arms, not a wattle or a saddle bag on her
, thought Hillary. Sturdy legs—well-shaped, tanned, shaved and moisturized.

“You shave your legs.” It was a statement.

Sally looked surprised and re-crossed her legs, a defensive posture. “You’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little antsy. I don’t do interviews well. That’s what this is, isn’t it? An interview, the ice-breaker, the Welcome Wagon?”
This was all so very TV-Land—
The Andy Griffith Show, Leave it to Beaver
, just like on cable
.

“Of course, you are in denial.”

“What?”

Hillary hummed a slight tune as she dithered with the daisy-painted saucers, sugar bowl and creamer that formed the
cordon sanitaire
between them. She reordered a stack of paper napkins. “We try to keep all this
entre nous
, strictly between us girls. Lycanthropism has enjoyed a, an, uh . . .
unfavourable
public image. Too much goddamned TV. That is why newcomers get the tour and the lecture. You know the drill: peasant cunning on the rampage, ozone filled air from Tesla coils and Van de Graaff generators. Great lolloping hordes of shopkeepers and railway clerks come panting up rocky switchbacks to Doctor Frankenstein’s castle with their pine pitch torches—burn and destroy, kill, ravage, extirpate, their answer to the
outré
—quivering with dread at anything outside their daily grind.”

Five blocks.

The walk should have helped with the spare tire hung carelessly at his midriff, but the day’s end martinis Jim Schofield allowed himself at Lloyd’s negated all the walk’s good work. The homicidal taxi had by now disappeared into the traffic at 42
nd
Street, its horn a descending Doppler ringing between the walls of buildings. He shuddered as he crossed an empty 39
th
Street against the light. Behind him the light turned to WALK and the smell of freshly savaged flesh, steaming and bloody, filled his nostrils. A red haze splattered across the insides of his eyes.

Cow slaughtering. Eight-year-old Jim Schofield rolled on the blood-wet ground with the yard dog: any other day a Wisconsin farm boy playing with Ol’ Shep. At one particularly tempting chunk of offal, the yard dog snapped at him. Jim bit the dog’s ear off. Jim spat—dog blood was different, somehow forbidden. He stood to throw up, then scrambled into an empty silo with his trophy as the yard dog whimpered under the swaying corpse of Barbie AB619.

His aunt Irene had stood, sauced-eyed, in shock. “Jim . . . no.” Deep in the hollow, ringing silo they pulled him clawing and howling off the cow’s entrails. After that Jim was watched. The family did not speak of the business of the cow killing ever again.

From an alley stuffed with trash, one of the city’s derelicts beckoned to him. This was one of those alleyways of permanent twilight prowled by drunks, junkies, building supers and the homeless. The man was curled up on a ventilation grate, knees under his chin. He looked pretty well beat-up, but then they all did.

Home, he had to get home.

Jim turned to go. Another moan, weaker, brought him back. The guy was hurt, maybe by those gangs of wilding teenagers he had heard about. He had to help. He steeled himself to the likelihood of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as he crouched over the man.

The man was having trouble breathing. Jim tore at the man’s clothing, exposing his chest. The man’s throat was russet-ripe, a sun-swollen fruit full to bursting. As the taut skin popped, hot blood burst into Jim’s mouth and dribbled past his lips to cover his face. Where it clotted and dried.

“Penises,” said Hillary Braunstein. “Seal penis bones. David, my first husband, cut and polished them for amulets. In Alaska. The sexually challenged wear them: Sid wears one. He rode away on his motorcycle to homestead in Alaska—David, that is. He left me for subsistence farming and penis polishing. That was 1988. He said he was going for cigarettes.”

“Oh,” Sally’s cookie hovered, unmoving. Sally was silent. The ball was still in Hillary’s court.

“How did you two decide on Sur la Mer?” Hillary asked.

“Oh, I thought you knew. It was your husband, after all.” Sally entered her comfort zone; the cookie was eaten. “Jim met Sid at one of those boys’ sports nights they have after work. It was in a bar . . . In the city? Sid didn’t tell you? After that it was every month like clockwork for about a year. All Jim could talk about was moving out here.”

“Ah . . . yes.”

Sid Braunstein aimed his remote at a wide screen plasma TV. “You into baseball? I’m a Red Sox nut. Had to sign up for satellite service to get the games.”

The two husbands sat out on the deck in white painted wicker chairs with cushions whose bright oversized daisies echoed the motifs of Hillary’s kitchen. Sid Braunstein was a jovial, hairy man with a tightly packed body, a college jock who hadn’t let himself go in middle age. His paunch looked solid enough to have genuine muscle behind it. Sid worked out. Jim surreptitiously touched the bulge at his own midsection. Sid noticed.

“Don’t let it get you down. Free weights.”

“Huh?”

“Free weights. I have a mini gym in the garage. And the girls watch our diets. This . . .” Sid held the bowl of clam dip aloft like a druid holding a chalice high to catch the first rays of a dawning solstice, “. . . is a plenary indulgence.
In durance vile here must I wake and weep and all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep
—Robert Burns. It’s about getting banished to the outer darkness, as it were . . . while the girls chat up the neighbourhood amenities.”

“Yeah, Burns.” Jim had read Robert Burns in high school.

“Mmmm . . . don’t know how she does it, Hillary,” said Sid Braunstein. “Armed with but a simple blender and a whack of cream cheese, spices and clams, she can create ambrosia. Help yourself to another beer. We’re not shy here.”

“Uh, yeah . . .” Jim scoured his memory for Red Sox statistics.

“Jim met your Sid in Manhattan,” said Sally Schofield.

“A sports bar. Lloyd’s on Madison Avenue,” said Hillary. “Sid’s baseball hangout. I know. He was on his way to the train and caught your Jim in an alleyway off 39
th
Street making a shambles of a homeless man. It was too late for the derelict, but Sid got your husband sedated and back to the clinic.” The older woman crossed and then uncrossed her legs. The legs were marvellously long, tanned and slender. “Your Jim wouldn’t remember. None of them do; that’s why the wives have to be in charge.”

Limousine legs
thought Sally.
And doesn’t she love to show them off.
She blushed at getting caught staring at her hostess’ marvellous legs.

Too young, too pretty
, thought Hillary. And
dumb as a post. Let’s toss her a bone
. “David did come back, eventually, but by then it was too late.” Hillary waited while Sally reflected on this last tidbit.

“Oh . . .” A neat change of subject.
But she was the one who brought it up, the missing first husband
, thought Sally.

“I know this because he sent a postcard once. One postcard: ‘Dogs run free, why not we?’”

“There are huge national parks in Alaska,” said Sally.

Maybe not so dumb.
“He was tired of feeling confined? He needed room to roam. All this was before Sur la Mer, of course. The mere suggestion of a gated community would have driven him right up the wall.”

She’s doing the legs thing again
, thought Sally. She couldn’t pull her eyes away fast enough.

Gotcha,
thought Hillary.

“There is a forgetfulness—a mild amnesia, you might call it. The lacunae are sometimes . . . ahh, embarrassing. Like this?” Sid pulled what might have been a medallion from inside his aloha shirt. A polished disc reflected opalescent gemstone hues. It was fastened around his neck by a leather thong.