Benny took another gulp of Coca-Cola. He pushed the cool bottle against his hot cheek. The store was bereft of customers. Both men were feeling lethargic in the heat. “Who sends their kids to an appliance store every day?”
“What’s that?” asked Adrian. The show the girl and boy had come to see had just gotten started. The volume was turned up and Adrian was listening for Sally Starr’s daily salutation: “Hope you feel as good as you look, ’cuz you sure look good to your gal Sal!”
“I mean, we’re not talking adolescents here,” Benny went on. “My Rebecca just turned eight. I wouldn’t let her cross the street by herself, let alone come all the way down to Landis Avenue without some kind of chaperone.”
Adrian shook his head slowly. “Beats me. Maybe someday I’ll sit down with them and get the story. They always seem so engrossed in their show, though; I don’t have the heart to interrupt.”
Fortuitously, his opportunity came ten minutes later, when the power went out. It wasn’t a long outage and Benny attributed it to all the people cranking up their air conditioning at a time of year when the grid wasn’t prepared for the extra demand. Not that Landis Avenue Appliances was making much of a contribution to the temporary electricity crisis; except for the lights and a couple of TVs and the refrigerated Coca-Cola cooler, Mr. Poitras’s store was hardly pulling any watts at all.
“The TV’s broken,” said Kirk, the seven-year-old, looking up at Adrian.
“It ain’t the TV, pardner. Power’s out all over the store. See? No lights.” Adrian called Kirk “pardner” in deference to the boy’s cowboy hat. Kirk’s older sister Angela was wearing a Western hat too, hers very close to the design of that of the “Philadelphia Annie Oakley,” Sally Starr.
“When do you think it’ll come back on?” asked Kirk, his fretful expression betraying the degree to which both Kirk and Angela depended on Sally Starr for their afternoon fix.
“Soon, I’m sure,” said Adrian. “Somebody at the power station probably just has to flip a switch. Would you like a soda?”
Both Kirk and Angela nodded. Kirk’s tongue licked one corner of his mouth in eager anticipation.
Adrian signalled for Benny to come bring the kids a couple of Coca-Colas. “And get me one too,” he added.
A couple of minutes later, Adrian and Kirk and Angela were sitting on the floor of the half-darkened store, drinking sodas and talking about Sally Starr and her favorite horse and Popeye and Olive Oyl and Larry, Curly, and Moe, and the incongruity of a rootin’ tootin’ Old West cowgirl being friends with an animated sailor and three violently bellicose slapstick comedians from urban America. Kirk pointed out that Popeye — at least the full-sized cutout of Popeye that adorned the set of Sally’s show — was dressed like a cowboy. Case closed.
While the three were sitting and chatting and enjoying the “Pause that Refreshes,” a middle-aged couple came into the store to look at the new television models, finding no problem at all with the fact that they would have to do so in the minimal lighting offered by the store’s sunlit front display windows, and Benny Baum, the consummate appliance salesman, finding no problem at all in their finding no problem.
Eventually Benny and his customers wended their way over to the dormant Magnavox American Traditional. “Wish you could see the picture on this new 2-MV357 model,” said Benny. “I’m thinking of trading in my very own RCA for this technological marvel.”
“What kind of wood is this?” asked the woman, reaching over Angela, who politely scooted out of her way. The woman ran her hand over the grain of the cabinet top.
“Hold on to your hat, madam — it’s mahogany! And even though we don’t have one in stock yet, Magnavox also puts out a Far Eastern Contemporary model similar to this one in ebony.”
“I like ebony,” said the woman, who was holding an all-black clutch. Addressing Adrian, who was still sitting Indian-style on the floor, she said, “Are these your children? They’re quite well behaved. My grandchildren would be running all over the store, sword-fighting with the rabbit ears.”
“No, these aren’t mine,” said Adrian, smiling politely.
After Benny and his customers had sauntered off, Adrian looked at both Kirk and Angela and said, “Whose little ones are you?”
“We live with our mother,” answered Angela.
“No father?”
Angela shook her head.
“We don’t have a daddy, but we’ve got a bunch of uncles,” offered Kirk.
“Not really uncles,” corrected Angela. “Mama has a lot of boyfriends.” This last statement came out as simple fact — neither brag nor censure.
Adrian wasn’t sure if he should ask the question that next begged to be asked. But the kids had been forthcoming up to this point, and it was about time, he thought, to get a better sense as to why Kirk and Angela spent ten hours a week being babysat at Landis Avenue Appliances by Adrian and Benny, Sally, and Popeye the Sailor Man. “Is this when your mother’s boyfriends come to see her?”
Angela nodded. It wasn’t an eager admission, and yet something in her look told Adrian that she might be willing to elaborate. Unfortunately, the conversation was cut short by the return of an electrical current to Landis Avenue Appliances. Kirk jumped up and turned the television back on.
“You’re in good shape, kids. Probably just missed some cartoon you’d already seen.” Adrian pulled himself up from the floor. He was still a youthful thirty-four, but his legs protested. Restored to his feet, he tousled Kirk’s short-cropped brown hair. “Say hello to Sally for me,” he said, walking away. Kirk and Angela both nodded, their eyes fixed on the screen, waiting for the cathode ray tube of the Magnavox American Traditional console to charge back up and Sally to miraculously appear out of the ether.
The next day, Adrian’s day off, was devoted to errands: the bank, the post office, a visit with an old high school buddy turned insurance agent who had been after Adrian for months to buy a term life insurance policy, even though Adrian wasn’t married and had no other beneficiary to speak of, except for a mother in Red Bank whom he would no doubt outlive.
The highlight of the day was to be lunch with a woman he’d met at a party thrown by a friend of a friend in Bridgeton. Adrian recalled the woman as having been funny and smolderingly beautiful — a hot fudge sundae cross between the cool of Jackie Kennedy and the heat of Mamie Van Dorn. Adrian and his impromptu date for the evening had spent very little time talking about themselves, the preferred topic of their increasingly intoxicated, flirtation-larded colloquy being the differences between the primetime intern Dr. Kildare and the primetime surgeon Ben Casey, though Adrian never once mentioned that he might know a little something about television programming since he sold TVs for a living. Like Adrian, the woman lived in Vineland — only a couple of blocks from the appliance store, actually — and after Adrian offered to drive her home that night, she had been all over him with her Yellow Page — walking, bright-red-polished talons while he labored heroically to keep the car on the road. (“Why,” he wondered to himself in the midst of her hungry advances, “couldn’t women be just as deliciously horny sober as they are when they get tight?”)