Serendipity Green Page 8
8
April is a cold, muddy mess. May is not much better. Robins, forced to build nests and mate under these miserable conditions, are edgy and aggressive, ganging up on the sparrows and mourning doves. Goldfinches are refusing to turn gold, preferring to wear their melancholy winter brown. Squirrels are groggy from too much sleep. Canada geese are suffering from diarrhea. Tulips are dwarfed, their petals lackluster. People aren’t washing their cars, or picking up the pop cans and cigarette wrappers littering their lawns, or cleaning the muck out of their gutters. The owners of garden centers, their greenhouses stuffed with unsold petunias and marigolds and impatiens, are pulling out their hair. Kmart and Wal-mart have more bags of topsoil and peat moss and cedar wood chips than they know what to do with. Denny’s hasn’t sold a single glass of iced tea. Frank and Carla Cooke, owners of the Dairy Doodle, are up to their elbows in frozen custard. Farmers can’t plow. Men sit in their garages on their idle riding mowers watching the wet grass get higher and higher, while their wives rearrange cupboard after cupboard. The girl’s softball team at West Wyssock High hasn’t played half its games because of the rain, and in a one case, because of the snow.
Some blame the terrible spring on global warming. Some blame it on the coming of a new Ice Age. The Reverend Raymond R. Biscobee on Sunday, rain stomping up and down on the roof of his half-empty church, blames it on the filth available at the library. “God is warning us,” he says.
Still, the people of Tuttwyler, Ohio, have to get on with their lives, Howie Dornick among them.
One Friday evening he takes a long shower with a new bar of Ivory Soap. He puts on his suit pants and a light blue shirt, and then, after watching the clock tick away to 8:30, gathers up the bag of fancy muffins he bought that afternoon at the Daydream Beanery and walks up South Mill, across the square, then down East Wooseman to North Grant. After stopping at the In & Out for a box of Tic-tacs, he forces his legs up Oak Street to Katherine Hardihood’s two-bedroom ranch. He stands on the front step for a long minute and watches Delores Poltruski pull into Dick Mueller’s driveway. Finally he rings the bell. And he knocks, just in case the bell isn’t working.
Katherine Hardihood isn’t at all surprised by his appearance at her door. She’s invited him to stop by. The dress pants and blue shirt and bag of muffins do surprise her, though. Pleasantly surprise her. Also makes her more nervous than she wants to be.
“Smells like Pine Sol,” Howie Dornick says, sniffing the living room air.
“My cat has a hard time controlling himself.”
“Pisses things, does he?”
Katherine Hardihood takes the muffins to the kitchen and puts them on a pink depression glass platter. She pours two cups of freshly dripped coffee—freshly ground from the hazelnut-flavored beans she bought that morning from the Daydream Beanery—and putting everything on a reproduction tin Coca-Cola tray, returns to the living room.
Howie has positioned himself on the end of her sofa. “It’s going to be just like last year, isn’t it?” he says, putting down the Newsweek he wasn’t reading. “It’s going straight from winter to summer. No spring at all.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood have been seeing each other quite a bit lately. D. William Aitchbone has seen to that.
“These muffins are wonderful,” Katherine says, peeling back the sticky paper cup and taking a guppy bite out of her muffin’s crunchy golden skin.
They talk about the Daydream Beanery for a while, he shaking his head at what a prissy place it is, she telling him that it’s where she bought the coffee they’re drinking, which, he agrees is pretty tasty. They talk about the trouble EDIT is causing for the library, including D. William Aitchbone’s ongoing threat to nominate Ray Biscobee for the board. They talk about his ongoing proposal to privatize village services—it looks like he has the votes to push it through at the June meeting—and they talk about the cause of all this trouble in their lives, Howie’s unpainted clapboards.
“Do you really think I should paint?” he asks.
“It’s up to you,” she answers.
“I don’t know,” he says.
They finish all the muffins and half the coffee, and then, as if D. William Aitchbone secretly has implanted computer chips in their buttocks and brains, these two unappetizing people copulate right there on the couch, with the light on, and the drapes wide open, with Rhubarb watching from the top of the sofa, the scent of Pine Sol, Ivory Soap, and hazelnut wafting.
Howie Dornick walks home at one in the morning, wishing his mind was full of fresh memories of wonderful sex. But it hadn’t been wonderful sex. It had been horrible sex. It was obvious from Katherine Hardihood’s shaking knees that she had never had sex before. And his excessive sweating and inopportune passing of hazelnut-scented gas hadn’t helped matters. Nor had his penis. It hadn’t been in contact with a vagina since his year in Japan in the early sixties, and just like Japan, it had remained rubbery and ambivalent throughout.
Still, the kissing beforehand had gone fine, as had the hugging afterwards. After they each spent some time in the bathroom cleaning up, they had another cup of coffee, and shared a bowl of Cheez-its, letting Rhubarb lick their orange fingertips while they watched public television’s umpteenth re-broadcast of Yobisch Podka’s 1991 performance with the Santa Fe Symphony.
When he reaches the porch of his unpainted two-story frame on South Mill, Howie Dornick presses his face against the raw gray clapboards and cries. In the morning he drives all the way to Wooster. Passing the Wagon Wheel Restaurant, he spots a car in the parking lot that looks just like the American-made Japanese luxury job D. William Aitchbone drives—same pewter paintjob and everything. He drives on to Bittinger’s Hardware and walks straight for the young man standing behind the cash register, who has shorn bootcamp hair, an earring, and a tee-shirt that reads BONE HEAD.
“How can I help you?” the young man asks in the friendly, efficient voice the hardware-selling Bittingers have been using for ninety years.
Howie frowns at the tee-shirt. “I need some house paint.”
“You’ve come to the right place.”
“I’m painting my house. On the cheap.”
“Gotcha.”
The Bittinger boy leads Howie Dornick down the wallpaper aisle to a pyramid of paint cans by the nail-nut-bolt-and-screw display. “Not our best, but the best for the price,” he says, using a line he’s heard his father and grandfather use a thousand times. He taps on the can lids as if they’re a stack of bongo drums.
Howie stares at the pyramid of cans, in his head trying to multiply the sale price by the number of gallons he figures he needs. He doesn’t like the total he comes up with. “Anything cheaper?” he asks.
“Nothing I’d feel right selling you,” the Bittinger boy says, another well-practiced family line jumping off his tongue.
“I’ve got to do this on the cheap,” Howie Dornick says.
The Bittinger boy knows the Bittinger credo: Sell up if you can, sell at sale price if you must, but sell something if you call yourself a Bittinger. And he wants to stay a Bittinger, at least until he graduates from Ohio University. He studies not only his customer’s shabby clothes, but also the poverty in his eyes. “If this is too steep, we’ve got some stuff in the back I could give you at a real good price.”
“I’m interested in a real good price.”
The boy gives his customer the follow-me Bittinger wave and starts down the wallpaper aisle. “Once in a while somebody orders a custom color, then doesn’t pick it up, for whatever reason.” He turns down the garden tool aisle and gives the seed rack a spin just in case his customer might want to plant something. “Where you from?”
“Tuttwyler.”
“I went to Squaw Days once. Almost entered the tobacco-spitting contest.”
The small talk tempts Howie Dornick to ask the Bittinger boy about the message on his tee-shirt. “What makes you a bonehead?”
“No kidding.”
The Bittinger boy drums on the chest like a National Geographic gorilla. “Eventually I’d love to work with somebody like Donald Johanson. You know, from the Institute of Human Origins? The guy who discovered Lucy? Australopithecus afarensis? In Ethiopia? The little three-million-year-old hominid babe? Did you know Johanson used to work at the Natural History Museum in Cleveland? Working with a heavy hitter like Johanson is a long shot. Believe me, a reeeeaaaal long shot. I’ll probably end up in a crime lab solving murders. But that’s OK. More fun than selling hardware.”
Bonehead, all right, Howie Dornick thinks.
The garden tool aisle empties into the heating and plumbing supply department. Between the air conditioners and the sump pumps stands the door to the back room. The Bittinger boy leads his customer through it. He knees in front of a stack of paint cans and twists them so he can read the labels. “I’ve got to warn you, some of these colors are reeeeaaaally something.”
Howie Dornick squats next to him. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Well, I’ve got four gallons of this yellow. The guy who took over the Klean Kar car wash on Route 3 wanted something that would really catch people’s eye. Two days after he took it over, somebody shot him while he was emptying the quarter boxes. So we got stuck with this really bright yellow.”
“How bright is it?”
“I can give you a real good price. I can give you a real good price on all this stuff.”
And so Howie Dornick leaves Bittinger’s Hardware with not only the four cans of car-wash yellow, but also with three cans of video-store blue (the electrician hired to rewire the old empty store burned it to the ground, the Bittinger boy told him), two cans of beauty-shop blue (the three women partners had a falling-out over what their shop should be called, Hairway to Heaven, Shear Magic, or Cheap Cuts), one can of gold (The Bittinger boy had mixed that one for a Wooster College fraternity house, but the brothers spent the entire fix-it budget on a propane grill, leaving repainting of the big peeling Greek letters above the front porch for another year), and one can of darkroom black (ordered by a freelance photographer who fell off a barn roof trying to take a panoramic shot of Holsteins coming in for milking, for the July cover of Ohio Cow magazine). Despite the misfortunes of these various Woosterites, Howie Dornick leaves Wooster a happy man. He’s gotten all these cans for the price of one can of sale-price white.
As soon as his customer drives away, the Bittinger boy calls home. “Dad,” he says, “you’ll never guess what some guy from Tuttwyler just bought. All that paint in the back.”
“Hope you gave him a good deal. You don’t make your money on what people buy from you today, but on what they buy from you tomorrow.”
“Gave him a real good deal.”
“Good. You’re not wearing that goddamn tee-shirt, are you?”
Bittingers never lie, not to each other, not to anybody. Still, they are skilled in the art of evasion. “Tee-shirt?”
“A hardware man can’t be thought of as a bonehead,” his father says. “People have to believe hardware men know everything. You sell him any brushes?”
“One of the cheap ones with the plastic bristles.”
“Didn’t you explain that a good brush is more important than the paint?”
“Twice. He said the cheap one was good enough.”
“He’ll be sorry.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“And he still bought the cheap one?”
“We’ve got to keep our DC trip a secret,” D. William Aitchbone says, after the waitress at the Wagon Wheel brings his scrambled eggs and wheat toast. “I don’t want anyone to know until the VP’s visit is chiseled in granite.”
Victoria seals her lips with an invisible key. Reaching over the table, the yoke collar of her spring dress exposes her cleavage to the fake candlelight cascading from the wagon-wheel chandelier above their table. She drops the key into D. William Aitchbone’s shirt pocket, the nail on her pinkie finger sliding over his nipple. “I haven’t been to Washington for years. And never to the White House.”
“Karen and I took a tour with the kids when we were there last summer,” Aitchbone says, the touch of Victoria Bonobo’s finger sending a watt or two of electricity up his spine. “We didn’t get to see any of the offices or anything. Just the ceremonial rooms.”
“The VP is just a regular guy,” Victoria says. She presses her palm against her mouth to keep from giggling. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but he tried to feel me up at my brother’s wedding.”
Aitchbone’s estimation of the VP takes a nosedive. “You’re kidding?”
Victoria takes her fingers away from her mouth and touches the back of Bill Aitchbone’s hand before taking a packet of grape jelly from the bowl by the napkin holder. “Well, it wasn’t really that bad. I was old enough to be felt up. And he wasn’t married yet. Or in politics. And I didn’t let him get that far!” She scrapes the grape jelly onto her toast. “I can’t wait to go, can you?”
Katherine Hardihood stays in bed half the morning. She can still feel Howie Dornick’s hairy belly on her ribs. She can still feel his hip bones on her hip bones. She can still feel the part of him that parted her. She can still smell the sticky stuff that went everywhere, the Ivory Soap and the hazelnut, the Cheez-its dust under her fingernails. Despite Howie Dornick’s unappetizing appearance, he’d been tender and thoughtful and apparently quite an expert. She cannot wait to invite him over again.
The weather is suddenly better. Farmers can plow. Men can mow. Women stop cleaning their cupboards and start cleaning out their flower beds. Tuttwyler’s collective edginess fades. A collective serenity sets in. Katherine Hardihood invites Howie Dornick over for pizza.
It is supermarket pizza, made on an assembly line in a faraway state, with a minimal amount of mozzarella and sausage, plastered to a cardboard disk and wrapped in plastic. Not much of a meal to offer your lover. So Katherine Hardihood doctors it with fresh mushrooms and fresh green pepper. Howie Dornick thoughtfully brings another bag of fancy muffins.
Between the pizza and the muffins they copulate for the second time in five days.
“You’ll never guess what I did Saturday,” he says, pants off, shirt on, crumbs of muffin sticking to his naked knees.
She looks up from the television listings. “What did you do?”
“I bought paint. In Wooster.”
“You went all the way to Wooster to buy paint?”
“I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“You didn’t want Bill Aitchbone to know.”
“I’m not sure if I’m going to paint or not. He’s put me in a real pickle.”
She kisses him on the cheek. “Bill Aitchbone lives to put people in pickles. You heard his uncle died?”
“Think he’ll sell the farm?”
“Jiminy Cricket, Howard, he’s sure not going to farm it.”
Howie brushes the crumbs off his knees. Rhubarb comes to lick them out of the carpet fibers. “I don’t think I bought enough paint, anyway,” he says.
9
Even though Katherine Hardihood invites him over for supper twice more before the end of May—they are getting nearly as regular as Dick Mueller and Delores Poltruski, they joke—Howie Dornick is no more confident with his sexual performance than the first time. Nor is he any closer to deciding what to do with his clapboards. Then walking home from work on the first Monday in June, stopping to scrape a pancake of chewing gum from the heel of his work-boots, he overhears Paula Varney, standing in the open doorway of Just Giraffes, telling someone on her cellular phone that Bill Aitchbone and Victoria Bonobo have gone somewhere together. “Really,” she is insisting, “Vicki Bonobo and Bill Aitchbone! Suitcases and everything!”
At dawn the next morning Howie Dornick calls Mayor Woodrow Wilson Sadleb
yrne at home. “Woody, I won’t be at work today. I’m sicker than a dog with something.”
“No problem,” the mayor tells him.
With that out of the way, Howie Dornick puts on the worst clothes he has—he has plenty to choose from—and after a quick cup of instant coffee goes to his garage. He rolls out an empty fifty-five gallon drum. He sweeps out the dead flies with a broom. Then he carries out the paint he bought at Bittinger’s in Wooster, and can by can pours it into the barrel: the car-wash yellow and the video-store blue and the beauty-shop blue and the fraternity-house gold and the darkroom black. He stirs the paint with the broom handle until his growing worry stops his arms. But it isn’t the color that’s worrying him. It’s the amount of paint. It isn’t going to be enough.
And so he goes to his basement and finds a can of satin finish peach his mother once bought with the intention of painting the kitchen. He also finds the two-quart can of shellac she bought with the intention of refinishing the upstairs baseboards and door casings. While he’s at it, he gathers up the bleach jug by the washing machine.
From under the kitchen sink he gathers up bottles of floor wax and furniture polish. From the bathroom he takes bottles of rubbing alcohol and Listerine and hydrogen peroxide. He empties it all in the barrel and stirs with the broom handle. It thins the paint but doesn’t add much volume.
And so he goes into the garage and collects six cans of 10W-30 motor oil, an almost full jug of windshield wiper fluid, a quart of Kingsford charcoal lighter, and three, two-gallon containers of something everyone in Ohio has plenty of, antifreeze. Into the barrel it all goes. He stirs with the broom handle until the mixture is mixed. He goes inside and pours himself a cup of coffee. He sits at the table sipping, still unsure whether he is actually going to paint. When his cup is empty, he pulls down a bag from the top of the refrigerator and takes out the cheap brush with the plastic bristles that the Bone Head warned him not to buy. He rams it in his back pocket, walks timidly to the garage and pulls his ladder from the rafters. He leans it against the back of his two-story frame.