Whiteout

Mt. Claire Inn overlooks the Connecticut River. It was built in the 1760s as a resting place for travelers; today it’s a weekend retreat where one-percenters enjoy handmade quilts and designer martinis. I have a degree in math, but out in the wilds of western Massachusetts waiting tables at Mt. Claire is as good as it gets. Ben, our handyman, is outside heaving logs into a wheelbarrow. All the waitresses have their eye on him. He never talks to me. “Ben! You need to stoke the fire in the lobby. They’re predicting a blizzard. Twenty inches.” Ben is from Vermont. Snow doesn’t impress him. “Good,” he said. “Grab a bottle of bourbon and hide it behind the woodstove. Later, I’ll tell you about the time I was camping off the Kancamagus and got stuck in a whiteout.” I smiled and nodded just as the first fat snowflakes began to drift.

Oil Man Blues

“How much is left?” Ken asked, looking up from his newspaper, as if the question were a causal one. “About an eighth,” said Vicki. Her forehead wrinkled as she peered out the window at the swirling snow. “We’re going to have to call.” Ken sighed, setting the paper down. “I guess we can skip paying the electric this month. Cut back on groceries.” Vicki pulled the collar of her wool sweater around her neck. “We skipped electric in December. We’re still behind.” “Just order 100 gallons,” said Ken. “That’ll last a couple of weeks. We’ll figure it out.” Ken stood up from his chair and crossed the room to put his arms around his wife, who still stared out the window. A thin crust of ice had begun to form along the edges of the glass. “I’ll call the oil man,” said Vicki. “No, I will,” Ken said. “Let me.”

Mrs. Asarian

After church on Sundays, Mrs. Asarian would stand outside the kitchen door, smoking long cigarettes while the other mothers brewed coffee and sliced cakes. She wore sheer black stockings and pencil skirts, and looked like she’d come from another time. Six months before, she’d moved to town with her two teenage sons: strapping, dark boys. They bought a historic house, an enormous colonial that had been vacant for years. Her olive complexion and thick accent caused kids to whisper that she was a gypsy. But I knew she wasn’t. People said that her husband was dead. When no one was looking, I would lift the church hall curtains to watch her. Freshly shoveled snow piles surrounded her high heeled feet as she held her rabbit coat closed with one red-fingernailed hand. Smoke curled around her head, and sometimes, if I was too slow, she would look at me and smile.

Goldfish

Michelle was the kind of kid my mom didn’t want me playing with. He knees were always dirty, and she said “shit!” and “damn it!” whenever the mood struck. Once, I saw her kill a toad with stick. Her father was dead.

One afternoon, Michelle came to my door with a plastic shovel in her hand, the kind you use at the beach.

“Come on,” she whispered, motioning for me to follow her. We ran through the patch of woods connecting our yards.

In her backyard she knelt down and began to dig until a hill of sandy dirt formed. She reached into the hole and pulled out a small fish, its eyes like plastic discs.

“It was my brother’s,” she said.

A call from inside the house prompted her to toss the goldfish back into the hole and quickly bury it.

I ran home, and never told a soul.

Canada

Timmy Paine tossed his backpack onto the bedroom floor. Crammed with pajamas and socks, he struggled to get the zipper closed. Just as he tossed the bag over his shoulder, his mother came in. “Where are you going?” she said. “There’s no school. It’s Saturday.” Tim was only in the second grade, but he knew what day it was. “I’m going to Canada,” he said. When his mother didn’t reply, he offered, “There’s polar bears there. And I won’t have to listen to Jeff. He says I talk like a girl.” Jeff was Tim’s older brother. He was in the fifth grade and knew just about everything. “It will take a long time to walk to Canada,” his mother said. “Why don’t I give you a ride? We can get ice cream on the way.” Relieved, Tim handed her his backpack. “Can you carry this? It’s kind of heavy.”

Dead Girl

Outside the funeral home I heard a boy say that she had fallen off the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Broken her neck. She never knew what hit her, he said. I was 13. The dead girl had been a junior in high school.

The line to see her snaked around the building. Boys with long hair, wearing ties they’d borrowed from their fathers, and girls with thick blue eyeshadow smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. Someone passed a bottle of Jack. There were no adults there, just very old kids.

She almost looked like she was sleeping, except that she was too still. There was a puffiness to her face that didn’t seem quite right. They had dressed her for the prom; the crinoline sleeves of her gown like poofs of pink cotton candy. Some kids prayed, but I couldn’t. I just stared at the roses in her corsage.

Corner Store

When you walked into Rocco’s the first thing you noticed was the smell. All Italian stores smell this way, at least the real ones, like warm cheese and cured meats. These smells still transport me to my old neighborhood, where the houses stood just feet apart and mothers hollered from their porches.

Rocco’s was owned by an older couple, originally from Sicily. Their son was a doctor and they had a newspaper clipping about him under glass at the counter. Sometimes on weekends you’d see him there, wearing a stained white apron at the deli.

The freezer was in the back. There were rabbits wrapped in thick butcher paper, whole chickens, veal and geese. But the best things were the ices: little cardboard cups of joy that came in a rainbow of flavors. For a quarter you could get one, then sit out front eating it with a wooden spoon.

Cat in the Wall

“How’d he get in there?” said Amy, peering into the opening in the basement wall with her hands cupped around her eyes.

“Got me,” I said, taking a look. Barney, our 18-pound Maine Coon, peered up at me with his yellow eyes. The cat had squeezed his massive frame through an opening in the wall that an animal half his size would have had trouble with. He was trapped.

“What are we going to do?” said Amy. “We can’t just leave him there.”

A metallic aroma, the scent of panic, perfumed the damp cellar air. She was right. We couldn’t leave him. But we wouldn’t get him out without tearing down the wall, and we were only summer tenants.

The cat let out a mournful meow.

“Barney’s going to die!” Amy cried.

So I brushed the tears away from her little cheeks and grabbed the hammer from the toolbox.

Magic Show

“Come on! It’s starting!” Greg, my neighbor, hollered from the sidewalk.

“What’s starting?” I said. Behind him, groups of kids hurried down the street.

We’d moved to the neighborhood just weeks before. I was shy; a bookworm, waiting for school to start. Greg was the only kid I’d met.

“The magic show!” said Greg, exasperated. “At Mr. Hale’s house!”

At the end of the Hales’ dirt driveway, rows of kids were seated on the grass.

White-haired and very thin, Mr. Hale wore a black top-hat and tails. In his hand he gripped a wand, producing doves from an urn. He asked for a volunteer to be sawed in half. I raised my hand. No one breathed.

“Just relax,” Mr. Hale whispered. “There’s nothing to it.” I got into the box and held my breath.

A collective gasp went up. And when I emerged in one piece, I was a star.

Ice Cream Truck

You still see them in the mill cities: ice cream trucks trawl the neighborhoods like hulking beasts seeking kids with loose change. Their knife-sharp melodies perforate our thick summer evenings like an ice pick passes through butter.

When I was a kid, that music was a call to run, to beg your mother for a dollar and hurry into the street. Today hardly anyone comes.

Our ice cream truck is yellow. Cheerful decals decorate its sides. The driver, a slender Vietnamese man, speaks little English but smiles as he passes. The speakers on his truck blare “Silent Night” and “Easter Parade” because he’s unaware, or perhaps doesn’t care, that the songs are out of season. We joke that he got the soundtrack cheap, but in our neighborhood those tunes have become the soundtrack of our after-supper-time summer nights.

Alone, our Asian ice cream man rolls on, sometimes long into October.

Crazy Ed

Usually when you saw him he was pushing a battered grocery cart loaded with cast-off pine boards and cardboard boxes down the sidewalk. He always wore a skirt, and sometimes women’s shoes: doubly odd when you considered his men’s flannel shirt and full beard.

Back then we didn’t know about post traumatic stress disorder or cross-dressers or mental illness, so we just called him “Crazy Ed.”

“Hey look,” someone would say as Ed’s cart squeaked past, “Crazy Ed’s got an old fender from the junkyard!”

Ed didn’t make much sense when he talked, and sometimes kids were mean, but he never seemed to notice.

He’d go to the coffee shop downtown and slap his $0.50 down, mostly pennies and nickels, telling anyone who’d listen about the people he knew in the Army. Then, instead of a tip, he’d leave a matchbook or a few pebbles and be on his way.

Old Boy

His smile is more yacht party than business meeting as he greets me with a loose handshake, the mild crinkling around his blue eyes the only evidence of his age. My senior by at least a few years, the way he runs his fingers through his sandy hair reminds me of a self-conscious boy.

We talk business—he’s in charge after all—but the conversation quickly drifts to his children’s prep school and his own days at Deerfield. They just put a new roof on the family house on Nantucket.

When I bring the subject back to the matter at hand he reclines in his chair. He’s clearly comfortable in his blue blazer. His shirt is unbuttoned at the neck.

He seems preoccupied for a moment and says, “I’ll have Ann draw up the papers. Let’s get some lunch.”

I realize then that he had intended to agree all along.

Tattoo Artist

When he finally stands I notice that he’s hunched in the shoulders, his tall frame bent inward from decades of huddling over living bodies. An elastic bandage circles his wrist, its tendons long ago frayed by the vibrating gun. Like slender roots, strands of gray invade his long beard. Only his eyes, clear and smiling, betray his cleverness.

The walls of the tiny shop are covered with his artwork: powerful Samurai warriors holding aloft drawn swords, magnificent lotuses, birds-of-paradise on the wing. An air conditioner gurgles above the front door. The scents of stale coffee, wet ink and fresh blood hang in the air.

He returns smelling of tobacco. As he contemplates my arm, the music of an unknown concerto drifts from the radio, and for the first time I understand that it’s not a tattoo he’s etched into my skin. It’s part of me I didn’t know was there.

Farm House

When I step onto the porch I can tell that things haven’t been well. Peeling paint and sagging floorboards are all that’s left of the spot where we once had so many good times. Inside, the kitchen walls are worn away, revealing slats of wood and crumbling plaster.

My friend stands at the stove frying potatoes, her toddler son clasped to her hip. It’s been too long since I’ve seen her.

The dog is gone, the yard choked with weeds, the old truck a rusting hulk in the driveway.

“So how have you been?” I can’t think of what else to say.

My friend smiles a crooked smile. She sits down at the kitchen table and lets out a heavy sigh. “Things could be worse,” she says, pointing to the fireplace where several bricks have come loose. “By the time the bank takes it they’ll have to knock it down.”

Junk Man

Jimmy “Two Wheels”—a name he’d picked up in the Army that he couldn’t seem to shake—inched his orange Dodge pick-up down Collier Street. Lined with stately old homes, it had the some of the best picking in town come trash day.

Bob, Jimmy’s retriever, sat in the passenger seat, upright like a person, as Jimmy pulled over at number 629. Out front was an old three-speed Schwinn, a 1960s model, with a black frame and white-wall tires. He’d had one just like it when he was ten.

Energized, Jimmy hopped out of the Dodge and snatched the old bike. The chain was rusted stiff but it didn’t matter. He had everything he needed to fix it.

Jimmy tossed the bicycle into the back of the truck alongside the stacks of old hubcaps and bundles of wire he collected for scrap. He whistled a tune all the way home.

Orchard

Ellie hiked the grassy hill into the orchard, where she and her brothers played as kids. The leaves had gone with the November rain, the apple trees gnarled, black claws against the pewter sky. Under her left arm was the plastic box from the funeral home.

Bill wanted to spring for the urn in the catalog, but their father would have thought it frivolous. He’d asked Ellie spread his ashes among the Roxburys and Pippins, the antique trees he’d spent his last 20 years tending like infants.

At the crest of the hill Ellie saw the entire orchard, all of it hers and her brothers’ now. Inside the house the lights flickered on. The funeral guests had gone, leaving behind lasanga and sympathy cards.

In the heirloom grove, Ellie pried off the lid. Like gray sand, she spread her father’s ashes around the trees like fertilizer, nourishment for his apples.

Coffee House

A university couple sat on recycled kitchen chairs at Martin’s Coffee House—once an old machine shop—studying Russian literature. Their heads bowed toward one another’s cups.

He’d be graduating soon, just weeks, and she hadn’t yet told him: every minute she spent without him drained her soul dry like Mohave sand.

How could she say it? He was older. Brilliant. His girlfriend was stunning.

The tattooed barista steamed organic milk. She bit her lip. Across the table her friend—were they just friends?—looked up from his book and smiled.

Feeling courageous, she reached out for the back of his hand. She opened her mouth to speak.

The flyers on the wall fluttered when the door opened. One of his friends—out of breath—said he was late for something. He’d have to go.

Alone, she remembered his brown eyes.

“Dear, Charlie,” she wrote. And the barista steamed on.

Autocomplete

His mind racing, Martin stared at his laptop. A swell of nausea washed over his insides. He’d hit “send” without checking the address. His wife’s and Maria’s names both began with M.

His tie loose around his damp collar, Martin drove home from work, the radio too loud. He tried to imagine what might await him: boxer shorts strewn across the hedges, shards of China littering the hallway.

The late-day July sun blazed down on the highway blacktop, softening its edges. Rush hour traffic, always heavy, slowed to a turtle’s speed.

Behind him sirens wailed. In the far right lane was a red Toyota Corolla, its left side ripped away. The driver lay on the road covered with a plastic sheet.

Martin got out of his car and ran. Scorching waves wafted up from the asphalt. The last time he’d seen Melissa’s car had been that morning in their driveway.

Turkish Coffee

So there we were again, in that little Japanese place near Martin’s Square. Kenan orders sushi for both of us. He asks me if this is OK.

“Of course,” I say. What am I supposed to say?

Kenan wears a gold chain around his neck as wide as a baby’s finger. He tells me about his wife, Christina—how she doesn’t understand him—as he slides his fingers along the back of my wrist.

When we leave the restaurant, the silky air of the June night envelops my bare shoulders like a veil. My sandals click against the pavement.

“We will get coffee,” Kenan announces as we approach a café. White bistro tables line the sidewalk.

His hand slips beneath my dress as he tosses back his espresso.

Christina makes him coffee like this he tells me. He drinks it at all hours. I have no idea how he sleeps.

Housekeeping

Melanie Parks rolled her steel cart, heaped with towels and complimentary pens, up to room 217. She slid her card into the lock.

In the twenty-four years she’d been a maid at the Greensborough Hilton, Melanie had seen almost everything, including a Vietnamese pig helping itself to the mini bar. Once she’d found a diamond ring in the shower drain. And although it could have ended most of her troubles she’d reported it to the manager.

Melanie opened the bathroom door, her housekeeper’s fingers grasping the brass handle. On the counter sat a brand new bottle of Chanel No. 5.

The glass was weighty and luxurious. Its contents shimmered like liquid amber.

She sprayed the perfume into the air, the mist filling the windowless room.

Unexpectedly she was nineteen again, waiting in the basement of First Baptist for her wedding.

She slipped the bottle into the pocket of her apron.