Once not so very long ago, in a place much like this, lived a family who looked forward every week to dining at a fine restaurant.  Such care over the menu!  Such surprising ingredients and combinations, fruits and vegetables from many countries, and main dishes—fish from far oceans, and meats from farms that the family hadn’t known were right in their neighborhood.

“Not only is every meal here tasty and nutritious,” the husband said.  “But we always learn something.”

“It’s well worth the money,” his wife agreed.

“So much effort,” the little boy said, and pulled at his little tie.  Because, since it wasn’t every day that the family went out to the fine restaurant, and because the restaurant cost money, it was important to dress up.

“I like it,” the little girl said.  She wasn’t sure if what she liked was dressing up, or that they only went out once a week, or what she ate.  When she thought about them, she couldn’t tell these things apart.

continue reading The Parable Of The Fine Restaurant And Magic Cookie Jar

So the Massachusetts election reminds me of that point in Monopoly when, if you’ve been luckier than your opponents, you’ve gotten the first monopoly of the game, put some houses on your properties, and had your opponents land on your monopoly once or twice, and you compare your assets to theirs and you think alright.  The game isn’t won yet, but you’re safe and you can sit back.  Relax.  Enjoy it.  Then one of your opponents gets Boardwalk and Park Place and mortgages his or her other properties to buy houses.  And you land on Boardwalk and you think, how bad could it be?  All his or her other properties are mortgaged.  I still have this fine monopoly.  I am safe. And you pay in cash, because you can, and you like the idea that you can pay in cash, because you have such a good monopoly.  But this leaves you without the cash to buy more houses, and when your opponent goes around the board once or twice without landing on your monopoly, he or she has the cash to put more houses and then hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, and when you land on one of them again—it doesn’t matter which one—you have to mortgage your monopoly and you have no means of income and no more cash, and you realize that there is no gradation between winning and losing and the moment you lost your monopoly on monopolies was when you lost.  And you think why didn’t I take this more seriously? And fortunately it’s only a board game, and you run out to the kitchen so the winner has to put away all the money and the little houses and hotels, and you make popcorn and then it’s time for dinner and after that bed and TV.

Finally she tweezed out the worst of them.  Eyebrows—why did one side go gray—not even gray; white—before the other, and why were the white hairs twice as long?  In her bathroom you had to stand bent with your head tilted even to seem them.  But if you bent you saw them all right.

The phone rang.  Her ringer sounded like a doctor’s office.  Like she was getting called into a doctor’s office.  The call was from Ohio.  At least her phone showed caller ID before you flipped it open.  Otherwise it was like carrying a piece of Chernobyl in your purse.  She held the phone upside down, away from her face, and tapped up the volume.  She didn’t know anyone in Ohio.

continue reading Who Calls From Ohio?

We took the idea to Cleveland, and we took it to Saint Louis.  In Chicago Ken said he had to take me to Millennium Park—no one could leave Chicago without going to Millennium Park.

At the corner of Michigan Avenue, five or six men had set up folding chairs.  It was windy; across the street to our right was a bridge, and two stories down, a river.  Office towers rippled in the water, green and glass and cold.  One of the men asked Ken if he wanted a shine.

continue reading Sales Pitch

They sat with Moira in the Croton-Harmon station, across from an escalator down to the platform. The train from Albany was forty minutes late.

“Amtrak.”  Bill rolled his eyes.

But it was still better than putting Moira on one of the two locals that came and went while they were waiting.  The locals would have taken her to Grand Central, and from there she would have had to schlep all her suitcases onto the subway or else pay for a cab to Penn Station.

“All the southbound trains leave from Penn,” Bill said.

“I know,” Moira said.  “That’s how I got here.”

continue reading Now We’re All On Facebook

The grandfather sets the washing machine to fill with cold water.  That was one of the things his wife had whispered from the hospice bed: “You can do almost everything in cold water.”  He’d stained a beige shirt pink before realizing: there were other warnings she’d forgotten.

This load is all browns and reds.  It’s November.  Can’t go wrong with buffalo-checks.  He bought a shirt for his grandson’s birthday—the boy’s thirteenth?  The boy knew to be polite.

The grandfather’s wife would’ve known what to buy.  While she did the laundry she would’ve been planning Thanksgiving.  The kids would’ve been planning to visit.  The grandfather could’ve been planning to take his grandson hunting.

He can see the boy stretching to match his stride across the stubble fields.  A desultory snow is falling, big flakes that melt on the tips of kids’ tongues.  It’s bright; the snow won’t last.  And where did the boy go?   The grandfather hears a dry husk snap behind him.  All the dogs he’s ever had are bounding over the stubble, tongues flapping so they seem to smile: Dixie and Patrick, Timmy and Bongo, Nell and Katie, her bad leg healed at last.  They’re all running to greet him.

The morning lovers lived downstairs, and if she overslept they gently tapped her headboard against the wall.  The afternoon lovers crossed her kitchen ceiling to their bed, and she played them space jazz she thought they’d think was sexy, and wouldn’t know.  Saturdays she was left no hint, upstairs or down.  She woke to sidewalk cafés already full, women in sweatpants at the fruit market.  If she visited friends—and she had lots of friends, when she wanted them—she wore her loudest heels, so that anyone upstairs or down could hear what they were missing.

He preferred oil to soap.

“People were using soap for thousands of years before they discovered germs,” he said, “and now you’re telling me it just turns out to be useful?”

I wasn’t telling him anything.

This wasn’t the main reason we broke up.  But it’s always the first I mention.

The first night Veronica sat with what she hoped was a sad little turn to her mouth.  How dare Reyna, yes, how dare she?  They—the four women, though these days it was more often three, and even two some Fridays—had never said women only, but Fridays had been women only for as long as they’d been meeting, years now, since they’d all worked in the same office.  And he was so young, twenty-five, certainly no more than thirty.  He sat at the end of the table with a sliver moon of a smile.  That’s what he reminded Veronica of with his head tilted slightly the way girls tilted their heads these days—a sliver moon.  He handed her the ashtray and didn’t move out of her smoke.

“Those things will kill you,” he said.

continue reading Bar Night

Ethan held the coffee grinder over the kitchen sink so it wouldn’t resonate through the counter-top—one, two, three seconds, all the way to thirty-one.  Courtney was still in bed, comforter pulled up to her chin.  She liked to see the grounds as fine as espresso.

The rest of their building was sleeping, too.  It was a U-shaped building, squared off around a courtyard.  The superintendent had staked out a half-dozen tomato plants in pots down in the courtyard.  The plants were in shadow most of the day, but you had to work with what you had.  In the kitchen windowsill across the ‘U’ from Ethan and Courtney, as usual on Saturdays and Sundays there was a bottle of antacid.

“Brenda Starr was out again last night.”  Ethan brought Courtney her mug, half filled with coffee, half with one-percent milk, heated, with whole milk foam around the top.

They referred to the woman across the ‘U’ as Brenda Starr.  She had red hair and once Ethan had seen her speaking into a Dictaphone.

“You notice her every weekend.”  Courtney blew lightly across her foam.

“Do I?”  Ethan liked teasing her.  At first, he’d worried that she didn’t like teasing.

“Every weekend.”

“I hadn’t noticed I noticed,” Ethan said.

“You do.”

From then on, he did.