A Key to Paradise

A Key to Paradise


If you wish to appeal this decision … Grace Paulson crumpled the letter from the district court and flung it in the trash.

The Brandenberg Toyota dealership had promoted her ex-husband, Stewart, to assistant manager in June. He cruised about in a fully-loaded Camry XLE—a twenty-five thousand dollar car with heated outside mirrors, chrome-tipped dual exhaust, a rear lip spoiler and leather-wrapped steering wheel. All this extravagance, and yet the state of Massachusetts couldn’t see fit to increase his child support by twenty-five, lousy bucks.

And that was only half the problem.

Grace’s daughter, Angie, arrived home two hours earlier. The seventeen year-old collected the mail and laid it out—sales fliers, junk mail, credit card applications, magazines and assorted bills—on the bed along with the court letter perched conspicuously on top of the pile. Angie was sure to ask about the letter, and Grace would be compelled to tell her. To tell her what? Your father, the congenital philanderer who favors blustery lies over simple truths, is a skinflint. He begrudges his own flesh and blood an extra hundred bucks a month.

As Grace crossed the hall and entered her daughter’s bedroom, she caught her reflection in the mirror. For the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday, her dark eyes set in a porcelain-pale, complexion were still her most appealing feature; the oval face and slender neck were classic Modigliani. But like any seasoned appliance, there had been a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and incipient crows feet about the eyes. The not-so-subtle indignities of aging.




Angie was curled up on the bed reading a paperback. On the cover was a picture of a bearded Hindu poised in full lotus position. A chalkboard hung from the mystic’s neck by a piece of jute.

With the breakup of her parent’s marriage, Angie developed a spiritual wanderlust. There was a short flirtation with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists. Trips to a reading room on Huntington Avenue and an occasional Sunday service had lasted a sum total of three months. Later Grace found several Hari Krishna brochures wedged under her daughter’s bed. They were wrapped in a furry tangle of dust bunnies. She never broached the issue.

More recently, Angie had gone off with a friend to spend the weekend at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. The teens drove the entire length of the Massachusetts Turnpike, through the scenic Berkshires crossing over the state line heading westerly toward the Catskills. Nothing came of that either. There were no metaphysical earthquakes. The whirling dervishes didn’t brainwash or kidnap her. The girl returned with a bad case of diahhrea and craving for junk food.

Grace gestured vaguely at the paperback. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“I’m hungry.” Angie threw the book aside. Could you make me a crazy omelet?”

In the kitchen Grace cracked a couple eggs and scrambled them with a fork. She diced some sweet onion together with green pepper and warmed them in a pan until the translucent onions turned pearly. While the vegetables were cooking she laid a row of sliced pepperoni on the edge of a plate and opened a bag of cheddar cheese. Angie hadn't mentioned the letter from the court and that was good.
“Gina Grabowski says the gym teacher tried to look down her blouse while she was tying her sneakers.”

“Really!” She added a dash of salt and pepper. When the vegetables were sufficiently caramelized, Grace slid them directly from the pan into the egg then poured the batter back into the pan. She drizzled the cheese over the egg, topping the concoction with a layer of pepperoni. The egg began to sizzle. She added a splash of water and covered the pan, steaming the omelet. That was the trick. The bottom never burned and it came out perfect every time.

Grace could imagine a half dozen over-sexed male teachers who might (the operative word here was ‘might’) oggle Gina Grabowski’s smallish boobs, but the gym teacher was not on the list. Kurt Smiley was a deacon at Saint Phillip’s Church and taught CCD classes two nights a week. Grace lifted the lid. A cloud of sweet smelling steam floated toward the ceiling. She folded the sides of the omlette toward the middle, added another teaspoon of water then lowered the lid.

“As I recall, Gina Grabowski acuse a male teacher of a similar indiscretion last year.” The spicey odor of the pepperoni and cheddar billowed through the kitchen. She slid the egg onto a plate, placed a dollop of sour cream on top of the omlette then topped off the creation with a splash of mild salsa.

“Wicked good!” Angie smeared more sour cream and salsa on what was left of the omlette. The oils from the pepperoni bled into the egg staining it with an orange glow.

Grace put the uncooked food away and stared intently at her daughter. Angie resembled neither parent. She was big boned with a fleshy nose and bronze complexion. Not pretty in the traditional sense but attractive, sensuous even, in her quirky, understated way. If nothing else, she was predictable. Like a compass that always reorients itself no matter how much it is jostled or pushed about, Angie’s inner pathfinder always registered due north.


“About the book,” Grace pressed.

“It’s no big deal!”

The yogi, according to her daughter, became disillusioned with the ’material world’ and took a vow of total silence. Language was vile and corrosive to the spirit. Confronted with other sentient being, he communicated by scribbling brief messages on the chalk board. After several years, The yogi announced that, on such-and-such a day, he would put away his chalkboard and begin speaking again. But when the moment arrived, he had a change of heart, went into spiritual seclusion and never spoke another word for the remainder of his worldly existence.

Grace squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink and let the water fill. “You’re not planning…”

“Cripes, it's just some dopey book!”


                                                * * * * * *


It was midday and most teachers at Brandenberg Middle School were eating lunch in the staff dining room. Ed Grayson, Chairman of the English Department, entered the room. Ed was a bit of an oddity at Brandenberg. Frail, with a pencil moustache and effete, self-absorbed expression, he kept apart from the rest of the staff but was not unfriendly or unapproachable. A real bookworm. Under his left arm was a tattered, hard-covered volume which he placed on the table. The binding of the book was coming unglued, the spine just barely holding the frayed, yellowed pages together.

“Now that’s an ancient artifact,” Grace Paulson quipped. She was teaching eighth grade English language skills and had worked with Ed on the curriculum committee during the summer.
"A collection of Pushkin's short stories," Ed replied turning his attention to the food on his plate. Grace wracked her brains. She had a good grounding in Russian literature—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. She’s even read some Turgenev and a smattering of Gogol but no Pushkin.

After a moment Ed raised his head and noticed Carl, the janitor’s helper, staring at the cloth-bound object by his tray. "It’s quite good," Ed said. His thin, delicate fingers danced over the torn binding.

Carl’s face went blank and then the hint of a smile formed at the corners of his lips. The smile faded just as quickly as it had appeared. "I’m familiar with Pushkin."

There was an uncomfortable pause - as though some code of academic etiquette had been breached and no one in the dining room quite knew how to set things right. Ed Grayson smeared the watery brown gravy from his meat loaf onto the mash potatoes with the flat side of his knife. "You’re familiar with Pushkin?" He repeated Carl’s words without bothering to look up.”

"The father,” Carl said, “of modern Russian writing”.

Tapping his fingers in rhythmic staccato a second time, the Chairman of the English Department opened the front cover of the book and began turning pages at random. His forehead furrowed and lips tightened in a thin, bloodless line. "But that's not possible," Ed countered in a slightly nasal, petulant tone. "Pushkin wrote in the early eighteen hundreds. There was nothing modern about his prose. Perhaps you have him confused with someone else."

"Didn’t say that.” Carl glanced up at a florescent light that had been flickering erratically then resetting itself throughout the meal. The corners of the bulb had turned a sickly bluish-orange; there was no more life left in the mottled tube. “Pushkin broke with the romantic tradition. Everything changed after that."

Dead silence. Those teachers who, for the sake of propriety, had averted their eyes, now stared intently at the janitor in the blue coveralls. Ed Grayson blanched; he had the look of a man free falling through space. No one spoke for the remainder of the meal.

Grace glanced curiously at the janitor’s helper. How long had Carl been employed there? She couldn’t recall when the wiry man first appeared at Brandenberg Middle School. It may have been in the spring of 2004, a particularly cold year with many ice storms and an endless series of illness that thinned the classes by half on any given week. Or it might have been the following September. No one really noticed. Nor did they care.

The janitor's helper. Teachers sometimes used the term interchangeably with his name but not in a mean-spirited way. There was technically no such thing as a janitor's helper. But the man was too old, in his late thirties, to be a career-minded new recruit. He swept the floors, scraped and painted old furniture. He washed the windows and emptied the trash. He did whatever Bob Watson, the head janitor for the past fourteen years, told him to do. He did his job quietly, unobtrusively. Hardworking and dependable, you saw him and didn't see him at the same time.
A nonentity to most of the staff, he brought a sandwich and a piece of fruit to work in an old-fashioned lunch pail and sat in the far corner of the lunch room, most days, with the cafeteria workers and bus monitors. Lean and muscular with a perpetual scowl, he ate his food without looking up or taking part in the general conversation. Neither liked nor disliked by the rest of the staff at Brandenberg High School, he was the janitor's helper.

When the meal was done, Carl rose abruptly and grabbed his lunch pail. "After we set the gap on the boiler," he said over his shoulder, directing the remark at the head janitor, “I'll change that dead bulb.”

"No hurry," Bob replied with a dry grin. "Whenever you get to it."


                                        *******

Once word got out that Ed Grayson, head of the English Department, had been bested, one-upped, made a fool of - take your pick - by the janitor's helper, the teaching staff were divided in their loyalties. Those who disliked Ed and saw him as a pretentious windbag got a sadistic satisfaction out of the incident, while strangely refusing to admit that the janitor's helper could score any higher than dull normal on a Stanford-Binet.

Those who supported Ed Grayson - which was most of the senior teaching staff and the head librarian, Miss Curson - felt that Ed had been duped; in all likelihood, Carl was talking off the top of his head and had never read a damn thing worthy of literary consideration.

“You know that custodian, Carl, ...the janitor’s helper,” Grace spoke in a casual unassuming tone, as though the information was of no great importance, “what do you know about him?”

Pam Sullivan, the office manager, raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips by way of a response. "You sure are desperate for a date.”

Grace winced. She told her about the incident with Ed Grayson and Pam’s mouth eased into a wicked grin. “Serves him right, the arrogant snot!” As a part of the office staff she had no allegiances to the head of the English Department and felt free to speak her mind. Unlocking a file cabinet, she fingered through a stack of manila folders. “Carl Solomon. Lives over on East Ave. Whenever I call over there some old lady with a foreign accent answers the phone.”

“His mother?”

Pam shrugged. The door opened. A boy with jet black hair and Hispanic features dropped off an early release form. He waited patiently while Pam checked the signature. Pam always nabbed the underage forgers. She knew where a step father habitually lifted the pen off the paper in the middle of a signature or crossed the t’s with a downward slash. The boy sauntered off down the corridor in the direction of the entrance. “Tomorrow high noon, Ed Grayson will be waiting to ambush the Janitor’s Helper.”

Grace cringed hearing the term coming from someone with little more than a high school education—a person who probably hadn’t read a romance novel through from cover to cover much less any world literature in the last ten years. A bell rang shrilly. Students spilled out into the hallways and began rushing pell-mell off to their next class. Grace ran her tongue over her lips. The skin felt dry and rough. “How long has Carl been working at Brandenberg?” It felt weird using his first name.

“Damned if I know. A couple years at least.” She grinned wickedly. “Seems like we got ourselves a real mystery here.”

Grace didn’t like where the conversation was going. “Maybe the incident was nothing at all. A tempest in a teapot.”

“A what in a who?” At the far end of the hall, Principal Skinner exited a classroom with a teacher’s aide and was moving in their direction. Grace reached for the door. “Gotta run.”

                                          *********


The rest of the day went by in a blur. Several students stayed after for help with an essay assignment: WHAT I WOULD DO IF I WON THE MASSACHUSETTS LOTTERY. One freckle-faced, floppy-eared boy, who reminded Grace in a twisted sort of way of Alfred E Newman from Mad Magazine, said he would spend at least a hundred thousand dollars on Play Station 3 video games. “Yes, well let’s see if we can get that down in print,” Grace said.
She tried to picture the gawky youth as a middle-aged family man burdened with an family and mortgage, but her mind balked at the effort. What if this silly kid ended up marrying the girl of his dreams and life was a huge success? Grace’s life over the past few years had spun out of control, her dreams gone up in acrid smoke.

“A comma after the dependent clause,” she said gesturing to a spot on the page. The boy looked up. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator circulating randomly between floor. Then he smiled, a goofy, endearing gesture and, with a knot welling up in her throat, Grace smiled back.

Another bell rang. The clock on the wall registered two-thirty. Grace and her daughter would be on the road to Cape Cod by six. They had her cousin’s cabin for the weekend. A mini-vacation in Mashpee. No matter that the weather had turned abruptly colder with frost on the early morning ground. The Cape was especially beautiful this time of year free of summer tourists and gridlock. And she definitely needed to get away.

Bob, the head Janitor stuck his head in the door. “Pam said you were looking for me.”

“I need construction paper. Two reams.” Because of a tight budget and dwindling resources, art supplies were kept under lock and key in a closet off the boiler room .

“I’ll get that for you now.”

Everybody liked Bob, both students and faculty alike. Short and heavy set, he lumbered about the school with a pokey, low-keyed authority. When the rear door got damaged by an errant delivery truck, he rebuilt the frame from scratch and hung the new door. Grace had watched him during outdoor recess shim the jamb using shingle shakes, plumbing each side with a 48-inch level. When the new door was hung, it swung freely and closed tighter than the original. Once finished, Bob packed his tools and went back to collecting adolescent trash and cleaning heel marks.

“Here we are.” Bob held the boiler room door open for her and they were both were greeted with a blast of warm air. “Need anything else?”

“Just the paper,” Grace replied. Bob removed a key from a box perched on a cluttered desk and disappeared into the supply room. Grace stepped closer and bent double at the waist. Where had she ever seen anything so beautiful? The box wasn’t so much a container to store small things as a work of art, a sensuous, freeform sculpture. Grace ran a finger over the coffee colored surface, which was smooth as a freshly powdered, newborn’s bottom. Almost a foot tall, the object was egg-shaped with two, sleek drawers which followed the sloping contour of the wood.

Grace shook her head in disbelief. “Your talents are endless!” She said as Bob came up behind her with the reams of paper.

“Black walnut,” he ran a finger over the carcass, “with red birch handles.”

Grace pulled a drawer gently open. “And this?” She indicated an orangy wood with paisley swirls ranging from blood red to lemony yellow.

“Amboyna burl from Cambodia,” Bob removed the delicate drawer and handed it to Grace. The inside was lined with emerald flocking. “The tricky part is gluing the amboyna directly to the walnut.” He caressed the surface with a stubby finger. “The wood is wet-sanded with tung oil through eight grades of sand paper. It takes a week or so for the finish to properly cure. Then it’s rubbed out to a high luster with rottenstone and beeswax.”

There was a loud swoosh as the boiler suddenly fired up. Grace’s nostrils tingled with the faint odor of diesel fuel. “It belongs in a museum not a boiler-room.”

“That’s not for me to say,” the janitor replied with a mischievous grin.

Grace handed the drawer back to him. “What?”

“Carl built the box. He’s the artisan.” Bob Watson shook his head emphatically. “This stuff is so far out of my league …” He left the sentence unfinished. The boiler clicked off and a pump turned over making a rhythmic, whirring noise. “If you want to see more of his handiwork, Carl has another box on display at the Brandenberg Art Center through the holidays.” Grace felt the breath catch in her throat. Something inchoate rumbled deep down in her solar plexus sending waves of indefinable emotion rippling up to the surface. Bob returned the key to the drawer and inserted it in the box. “And yes, despite all rumors to the contrary, he does read Russian literature.”


                                                      ********


“I’m home.” Grace dropped her car keys on the kitchen table. Sprawled out on the living room floor, Angie, was watching a soap opera. On the TV a middle age woman with tubes coming out of every conceivable part of her anatomy was crying hysterically. “Myrna’s still alive?”

“They put the funeral arrangements on hold.” Angie replied.

“While she renegotiates her contract.” She thumped her daughter on her shoulder. “Packed?”

“All set.” Angie jumped up and flipped the TV off. They only took the bare necessities - a couple changes of underwear, towels and sheets. No cosmetics. There was no one Grace had to impress on the Island. She had budgeted the trip as down time, a chance to decompress, recharge her emotional battery.

“The Village Idiot got kicked off the school bus,” Angie said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone. The Village Idiot was Dwight Goober, a twelfth grader who lived two streets over. He’d been in trouble with the law since elementary school when he defaced the brand new playground at Lexington Park with graffiti. Dwight, who always struggled with academics, couldn’t even get the spelling of the four-letter words right. That’s how the police knew it was him. Who else could be so dimwitted? And he readily admitted defacing the playground as though it was some noteworthy, badge of honor. The court put him on juvenile probation and his mother had to pay a fine. Over the years his penchant for petty vandalism and mayhem reached legendary proportions.

“What did he do,” Grace asked.

“Punched a kid.” Angie pulled on a wind breaker but thought better of it and switched to a warmer jacket. She stuffed the windbreaker in her overnight bag. “Ellen Barrows...”

“Nice girl. What about Ellen?” Grace asked.

“Ellen Barrows—that’s the girl Dwight clobbered.

Grace retrieved her car keys and checked the time. She hoped to reach the Cape Cod Canal before sunset. “You didn’t say he hit a girl.”

“You didn’t ask.” Angie grinned but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. “When they passed out brains, Dwight thought they meant ‘trains’ and said ‘I’ll wait and catch the next one’”

“The Village Idiot has to live two streets over.” Grace set the security alarm and they went out the door.



                                            *********


The drive to Cape Cod was uneventful. Few people were heading south this late in the season. The maples and oaks gradually gave way to scrub pine rooted in bleached soil. A huge hawk sat far up in a tree just outside of Fall River. As they sped passed, the bird spread its massive wings and flew off to the north. An updraft of frigid air lifted the bird high above the earth. “Your father’s stopping by to see you Tuesday,” Grace said. The predatory bird had nudged her memory, a free association of sorts.

“Whatever.” Angie curled up in a fetal position next to her mother, her knees jammed up against the dash. They reached the Bourne Bridge that took them across the waterway in record time. Halfway around the rotary, they picked up route 6 that meandered all the way to Hyannis, where the Kennedys lived and, still further north, to the gay and lesbian populations of Provincetown. Grace spotted a diner up ahead. She must have drove this route a hundred times or more and never noticed the brown, clapboard structure. A dozen cars lined the front of the building. “Hungry?” Angie nodded and she pulled the Volvo off the road into the parking lot.

“This is weird!” Angie muttered and flicked her eyes in the direction of the main counter. Most of the customers were Indian. Some wore braided hair and cowboy shirts. One man with prominent cheekbones sported a string tie fastened with a turquoise clasp. All the customers seemed to know each other. Behind them, the door opened and more smiling Indians straggled into the diner.

“Mashpees,” Grace spoke softly. “They’ve lived in this region for centuries.”

These unasuming townies were the direct descendents of the legendary Indians who greeted the Pilgrims when the first arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600’s. The Wampanoag Tribe presently numbered about 1500 on the Cape. Each July 4th they joined with other tribes from across the country to celebrate their traditional customs, folklore and dance. Grace had attended the Mashpee Wampanoag Powwow often when she was younger. They feasted on fried dough and clam cakes, listened to the tribal drumming and chants. The highlight of the three-day event was the fireball contest held at dusk on Saturday night where a flaming, kerosene-soaked rag ball was kicked and tossed about in an attempt to score points. Soccer with a decidedly homicidal flair!

The restaurant reeked of mash potatoes, hominy grits, meatloaf and fresh-ground coffee. They found a booth near the door and the waitress, a dark-skinned woman with a braid of hair that hung down to the small of her wide back, took their order and hurried off.

“How we treated the American Indians is a black mark on American history.” Grace said. “The Trail of Tears, The Little Big Horn. The Seminoles in Florida. All a part of our shameful past.” But only fifteen minutes later, Grace leaned forward and whispered, “Angie, didn’t you order a cheeseburger with fries?”

“Sure did.”

“Well that man,” she indicated an elderly man with a craggy face and a feather in his long dark hair, “came in ten minutes after us and he’s being served a cheeseburger with fries.”

“Plus a tossed salad and blue cheese dressing,” Angie rested her chin on the edge of the table and blew out her cheeks in protest.“ This stinks!”

The pudgy waitress came out of the kitchen with a spaghetti dinner, which she place in front of a man seated at the counter. She freshened his coffee then began a leisurely conversation. “That fellow,” Angie was furious now, “came in no more than five minutes ago. How do you figure it?”

“Trail of Tears. The Battle of the Little Big Horn. The Seminoles in Florida.” Her mother replied. “It doesn’t appear they’ve forgiven past indignities.” Now Grace’s blood was beginning to percolate. An inconvenience was one thing. What if they had no intention of ever serving white people? She could complain, draw attention to the fact that half a dozen customers who arrived after they did were already eating and maybe—hocus pocus—the food would suddenly appear. Or maybe, out of shear vindictiveness, the cook would push their order back by another half hour. Grace wished she had a kerosene-soaked rag ball to kick toward the front of the restaurant.

The food arrived. Arranging the plates on the table, the round-faced waitress smiled. It wasn’t so much a nasty smile as one of bland indifference. Cheeseburgers and fries. The fries were burnt and greasy; the burgers, despite the ridiculous wait, undercooked.

“Well, we’re off to a good start,” Angie muttered.



                                                      *********


Back on the road they picked up route 151 heading east and entered the outskirts of Mashpee. The sun was almost down. “Sons of bitches!” Angie spit the words out rapid fire, an explosion of venom. “Stinking Indians!”

Grace wasn’t quite sure how she felt. Were the Indians to fault or was it just the same old same old? Another drop in the never ending pitter patter of life’s disappointments. Too many shitty experiences like the Mashpee diner, too many false starts and shattered dreams could wreck your faith in humanity. In recent months, she felt her purpose in life frittering away. And that frightened her.

There was a relative on her father’s side of the family, Aunt Nellie, who died a chronic malcontent. Even as a young woman, she collected grudges and personal slights where others found pleasant memories. Into her eighties, the woman was drowning in bile and ill will. Grace didn't want to look in a mirror forty years from now and see an embittered crackpot glaring morosely back at her. “Those Indians made us cool our heels and the food was garbage.” Grace spoke without rancor. “Lesson learned. Next time we visit Mashpee we don’t break bread with the Redman.”

Finally they reached the causeway that connected the island where the cabin was situated. “What the heck is that?” Angie pointed to a large bushy object stuck on the top of a telephone pole. The pole was eighty feet tall and tilted at a queer angle. A short, chirping whistle filtered down to the marshy wetlands.

“Osprey nest.” Grace replied. With their white breast and belly, Ospreys were one of the largest birds of prey in North America. The wingspan alone could reach well over five feet. “Osprey feed almost exclusively on fish,” Grace explained. “The birds are protected under the endangered species act and with good reason.”

A large bird suddenly appeared, soaring in from the bay and landed on top of the structure. “They look like they can fend for themselves,” her daughter replied. Grace shook her head. The species had gone into a steady decline since the early 1950’s due to pesticide poisoning. But after the ban on DDT, the massive birds bounced back. They built their nests frequently on manmade structures like telephone poles, duck blinds and even channel markers.

Grace eased passed the pole on the thin slip of roadway and found the cabin a short distance nestled between a row of holly and slender birch trees. What little light was left quickly bled out of the sky and the New England night arrived serene and darkly beautiful. From the upstairs bedroom they looked out over a calm bay. Too far away to be seen, the island of Martha’s Vineyard rose out of the Atlantic waters due south. Nantucket, the former whaling center, sat only a handful of mile off to the east.

The women quickly arranged the linen, washed up and got ready for bed. Angie shuffled into the bedroom barefooted. She kissed her mother’s cheek. “I didn’t mean what I said about the Indians.”

“The strangest thing happened today." She pulled Angie down on the side of the bed next to her, kissing the nape of her neck and told her about the tattered copy of Pushkin's short stories, the Janitor's Helper and the Amboyna burl box.

When she finished, Angie asked, “What else do you know about the guy?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“A regular mystery man.”

Grace blinked. That was the same thing the receptionist, Pam, had said. “For the time being, yes.”

She pressed her mother’s hand. “I’m tired. Goodnight.”

When she was gone, Grace thought, “A thousand questions in search of a thousand-and-one answers.” It was an old Sufi saying she had read somewhere, possibly in graduate school, the implication being that a person, no matter how sincere and earnest, can search a lifetime and still comer up short. Grace listened to her daughter’s steady breathing - deep, serene and unencumbered. The sleep of a youth with little to no excess emotional baggage. As tired as she was from the drive south, Grace hovered on the edge of sleep but could not slip across the threshold. Some bit of unfinished business?

Wait. She did know something else about the enigmatic mystery man. But really just more of the same. One more bit of ephemeral nothingness. A thousand-and-one questions in search of a thousand-and-two illusive answers.

A little more than a year ago, the teachers at Brandenberg were negotiating a new contract with the school committee, and meetings were going poorly. In December just before the holidays, a number of staff refused to attend a parent-teacher conference. The act of defiance, which was plastered all over the local newspapers, backfired and was interpreted as a slap in the community's face. Many parents, who previously were sympathetic toward the teachers, felt betrayed. Among teachers who attended the conference and those who stayed away, a rift developed; best friends were no longer on talking terms, and an ugly mood settled over the school unlike anything Grace could remember.

She saw little of Carl during this time. He seldom ate his lunch in the staff dining room and was either working snow removal or doing repairs in some other wing of the building. One afternoon when the children had been sent home on early release, the janitor's helper came quietly into her classroom. He walked with the weight of his body far back on his heels - the strong, earthy gait of a man used to doing heavy, physical labor. His expression was flat, opaque. "I have to wash the floor. Did you want me to come back?"

Grace looked up from the pile of papers she was correcting. His face was framed in the habitual scowl, but the tone of voice was unmistakably neutral and polite - almost, but not quite, friendly. "No. That won't be necessary. I'll be out of your way before you get to the front of the room."

Stacking the chairs and desks to one side, he left the room and returned with a mop and pail of water. His eyes shrouded over, turned dull and inward as he leaned into his work. Rinsing the water after each pass, he swabbed the floor down with smooth, muscular strokes, paying special attention to the baseboards and space under the heating vents. When half the floor was washed, he dragged the dirty liquid out of the room and returned with a bucket of clean water. Moving all the furniture to the other side, he repeated the process.

"We're refinnishing the wood," he said leaning on the mop handle at the far end of the room. The entire length of the floor between them was still quite wet. For the second time, Grace put her pencil down and looked up. The classroom floor was covered in linoleum tile, except for a smaller section toward the rear of the room that was solid oak. It was originally installed as a decorative feature. Decorative and utterly impractical. Over the years, the finish had been eaten away, the porous surface reduced to an eyesore.

"This oak," he said tapping the floor with the head of the mop, "may look a mess, but it’s in reasonably good shape. This weekend I'll be sanding away the stains and dirt to the bare wood. Come Monday morning, it will look like new." Carl rubbed his chin meditatively. "We're using a water-based sealer that dries real fast and leaves very little odor."

Having said this, he lugged the filthy water back out into the hallway and disappeared. In the morning the children would be back with their dirty feet and untidy habits. Once more the scuff marks, bits of scrap paper torn haphazardly from spiral binders and other bits of educational debris would litter the floor - the disorder and chaos of half-formed minds.

On Monday as Carl had promised, the classroom floor near the coat racks in the back of the room had a bright new look. All the scrapes, gouges and discolorations were gone. The oak had lightened to the color of golden wheat. There was an odor from the high gloss finish but it was slight and inoffensive. Even the blackened stain - India ink - near the water cooler was mysteriously erased, the wood fiber sanded flush then finally bleached back to its original color before the final, satiny film was applied. Later in the day when the children were gone, Grace sat for the longest time staring at the new floor and wondering at the hidden allegory: the dirt and dust swept clean; the blemishes and discolorations undone; the multi-textured grain of each, thin board stripped, restored, made whole again.

A new floor. A new life.


This novella runs about a hundred pages long and will be updated on a regular, weekly basis. I expect to have the entire book online by the end of January.

barry