A woman who lived across the street from our apartment called me from my wife’s cell. Told me to come home. There had been an accident. She was also the one who met me in the street as I was standing over my wife’s corpse just under the fire escape. I vaguely remember a small crowd around me as I stared down. Bet you some of the guilty ones were right there, just at arm’s length. So me, a small gathering of potential suspects feigning outrage, and neighborhood fishwife busy body bitch, Frannie Lebow, hysterically crying, holding my hand like she knew me and telling me what happened with an almost too eager delivery.
Beth had been in the middle of painting a giant mural on one of the walls in Biya’s bedroom. A bunch of soccer ball-sized bumblebees, flitting around a forest of brightly colored, three-foot-tall flowers. Now, Beth was no artist by any stretch of the imagination. She had majored in economics at Rider, but anything… anything to keep the kid and herself busy, happy, calm. Normal was good. Beth had been working on it for a couple days, and every afternoon when I would get home from work, my daughter would excitedly collect me at the front door and drag me into her bedroom to see Mommy’s daily progress. No, Dad, you can pee in a minute.
Beth was never neat about anything she did. She could for sure tell you where everything was in the apartment, and she was an exceptionally thorough cleaner, so you’d never know the mess had existed—but her process was, well, explosive. And her work on the super-sized flower mural was also executed in the same true-to-form, harry-caray, Beth fashion. Brushes everywhere, multi-colored fingerprints on coffee cups, and remnants of paint spills that had been only half wiped up. The pink thumbprint on the butter container was the best.
I had just left the apartment for work, about 7am, (same day I learned about magical Murori from Ted) and Beth, I guess, realized she needed something. Not following our never open the living room window commandment, which we had discussed about 7 million times, Beth had climbed out onto the fire escape to shout after me. She didn’t call me on the phone. She decided to yell into the street, where everyone heard her. Fran was watering a plant on her own balcony and heard it. I, however, did not. I had just turned the corner.
Fran says this is when all hell broke loose, because two women, whom she did not know, but was sure they did not live in the neighborhood, started to yell and point at my wife from the street below. Because there was purple splotch on her head. A little lingering paint from a three foot tall flower. Right smack dab in the middle of her forehead. Good going, Beth.
Now, could my wife have shouted down, I am painting a mural on my daughter’s wall? Sure. Could she have quickly grabbed the paintbrushes and paint can and dumped them over the fire escape as proof? Maybe. But she didn’t. She did the totally wrong thing. Beth panicked.
Fran said Beth shrieked, “Oh No!”(pretty much the worst thing you could shout, right?), cupped her hand to her mouth like she had been caught, scrambled back inside, and slammed down the window.
So once upon a time…
Yelling on the street about how there is a purple left.
Yelling on the street about how she has a little girl.
Mob forms (same way you’d imagine it would, just no torches or anything.)
Wife tucks daughter into cabinet to hide her.
“Be very quiet, honey, no matter what you hear!”
Mob breaks down apartment door.
Child is missing.
Mob demands to know where kid is.
Wife tells them it is none of their mobby business.
Wife is thrown out of window.
Mob’s Colombo-like detective skills match paint on wall to paint on wife head.
Mob disperses quietly.
Husband stands over crumpled body of wife.
Franny Fishwife tells story and holds husband’s hand against his will.
Husband thinks of sticking a paintbrush through Fishwife’s eyeball.
After that, you’d think I’d never leave my little girl alone again. You probably think it’s atrocious that I do. That I tuck her in three cleared out lower kitchen cabinets, equipped with blankets, pillows, an LED battery-operated chili-pepper light string, an exciting array of plush pastel animals, a few picture books, a Hello Kitty! thermos, and some of Beth’s lavender sachets from her lingerie drawer. What am I? A monster? Leaving my daughter in the dark, after what happened to her mom?
Okay, Smartie. Let’s take Daddy Doyle’s Multiple Choice Quiz, shall we? Don’t worry, you don’t have to study to pass the test. Ready?
When you are running out of food, and it is the end of the world as you know it, you should:
Go out onto the street holding a kid with a blue head in one hand and a tire wrench in the other.
Go out once a week, tuck your kid in a safe hiding space, and pray nothing goes wrong.
Starve
So, how’d you score, everyone?
Tommy’s Deli has three aisles of tall metal shelving that run back to a wall of four glass-door refrigerated cabinets. One door has a long crack in the glass, and it runs the length of the door, hastily taped over with black gaff tape. The tape barely holds it together, but somehow I don’t think the city code officer will be stopping by tonight. Over one of the glass doors is a sagging vinyl Pepsi sign pushed into the sheetrock with two rusty thumbtacks, the famous red and blue logo chased by some dingy orange flames. And while there are indeed soda cans in one of the glass cabinets, they are not cold and they are certainly not Pepsi. Just a mish mash of bargain brands, mostly lemon-lime, and a few cans of birch beer covered in what looks like dried mud. The other glass cabinets, also sans-frigidness, are filled with everything and anything. Blankets, flashlights, Christmas wrap, folded Great Adventure t-shirts (all small), a few random board games that my kid would have recognized, about 25 boxes of semi-crushed bran flakes cereal, a few soiled boxes of gingerbread pop tarts (Kelloggs execs musta tied one on before the new flavor conference meeting that day) and enough cans of chicken-n-star soup to build a small fort.
Except for some of the flea market items bulging from aisle shelves, the deli looks the same as it always had, even before the mantis propelled her bony shoulder blades into all our lives. The walls of the narrow store are dark pumpkin, roughly painted over bubbled sheetrock. A checkerboard of half-decayed fiber tiles remain in the drop ceiling. Ugly ass, uncovered fluorescent tube lighting. A green plastic house plant in a brass pot suspends from three chains in the center of the store. A large wall clock, reminiscent of grade school, minute arm missing, hangs on the left wall, its lower rim touching a pyramid of powder cleanser cardboard tubes. And the award for reverse feng shui goes to…
I grab six cans of soup from the glass cabinet, hang a quick left to swing back up aisle two, and crash into the ponytail lady, knocking her armful of naked baby food jars to the floor. And yep, they all broke.
“What the hell-” I hear Tommy bark from up front. Ponytail has already dropped to a squat, frantically searching through the mess, fingers be damned, for a jar that might have avoided the carnage. There aren’t any. Just broken glass and carrot mush, some of it on the tips of her pointy black boots.
She looks up at me, eyes all a tear, and the most pitiful voice I ever heard says, “Bobby likes the carrot flavor.” But here’s Tommy now with a dustpan and broom, scooting me out of the way, and asking us who’s paying for these, and I know it’ll be me. Does chivalry get a mark? And if so, what color would it be?