Talking River Review FA 1996:
THE ELEMENTARY LABYRINTH
Art Fausel had the swimming pool built while his wife Dottie was doing seventeen days of hiking through the woods of Connecticut for three graduate credits. The Audubon Society had given her a scholarship. All she had to do was drive three hundred miles and sleep in a tent. They didn’t say anything about how the trip would help her teach fourth grade.
Art figured he owed her. As soon as school had ended in June he’d gone back to drinking during the week. It was a hazard of teaching, twelve weeks of nothing to do turning him into a teenager sneaking around with a false ID. Especially since all three of theirs were gone now, the youngest eighteen and off to the Navy the week after graduation.
Worse, Dottie had started having a few drinks of her own, joining him most nights, which led to no good since the gin didn’t agree with her, no matter what she poured into it. Art was a tonic man, and he knew where a certain number of drinks would take him. Dottie’s staying up with fruit juice of some kind ruining her liquor had disrupted him, something hard to explain, but she said the seventeen days of camping would do her good and leave him to a lesson in responsibility, a sort of test where the answers lay in things like landscaping the yard after five years of letting it go to seed. Art opted for following the progress of the builders on the hill behind the house, going in and out of the kitchen, drink in hand, to admire his surprise.
He didn’t see how it mattered if he had a few lapses. He wasn’t driving the freeways and back roads, not without a driver’s license for eight months now, four more to go, even with the DUI school where he was humiliated while a dozen classmates twenty years younger spoke about sorrow and good intentions using references to MTV and sitcoms, none of it keeping him from the short hauls to the package store for gin and snack food.
He was right, he thought, accomplishing something while she was gone, and when Dottie made it home in one piece as well, he stood smiling in the driveway and swept his arm up the hillside to the inground.
“What happened to the back yard?” she said.
Instead of discovering the pool, she seemed focused on the near-cliffside of red stones. “So the whole thing won’t come down,” he said.
Dottie looked skeptical, and he didn’t blame her. He’d asked the same question before he’d paid for two truckloads. “The grass always burned out anyway,” he said. “The rocks are better than a scraggly lawn for holding that hill together.”
“Really. You get that guarantee from the company that poured them?”
The next afternoon, after an all-night rain, Art noticed the small gullies in the stones. He sat on the steps that climbed to the pool, holding his second gin and tonic and thinking about the consequences of that hill sliding down, the support for the pool giving way. As soon as he finished his drink he dialed the number from the Yellow Pages. “You’ll get a little of that,” the contractor said. “You rake them a few times, and it never amounts to anything.”
“Sure,” Dottie said when he told her. “Anyone else would have planted crown vetch or ivy or sedum, something aggressive to hold that soil.”
“Sedum?” Art said, feeling the afternoon turning to mush.
“You should have waited until I got back,” Dottie said. “I know a dozen things to plant there now. We toured highway embankments and a turnpike interchange.”
Art wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d listened to the sales pitch that claimed those stones, properly arranged, were just as effective as a million tangled roots. “Who would believe that?” he thought now, seeing the short tidal wave of collapse tumbling through his house while Dottie screamed “I told you so.”
“Look at this fern,” she said, suddenly pointing at a spread of green shoots among the azalea. “It’s New York.”
“And you know why?” he started.
“Because it burns its candle at both ends.”
He stared at the branch to understand what she’d just said, but saw nothing but a fern like all ferns, green and fuzzy-looking.
He followed her inside. She poured herself three fingers, topped it with orange juice, and listened to Art’s defense of the contractor’s handshake, oral assurance. “You bet,” she said, the thunder rolling in from the west, the rain beginning before they’d finished their next drinks.
It was dark when the rain stopped. They’d watched it pour while they ate potato chips and finished a bottle. “God damn it, Art,” Dottie finally said. “This doesn’t look good.”
“Save it until it matters,” he said, but just before midnight the two of them took a flashlight up the stairs, reeling in the humidity of late July and sweeping the beam across a relief map for the finger lakes.
“Christ,” Art repeated.
“He’s not coming,” Dottie said each time, following him to the garage where Art pulled the rake from the wall.
“Where are you going with that?” she said.
“This can’t wait,” he said. He banged the handle on the door frame, jammed it as if he were trying to hold back a snarling dog.
“You’ll break your neck out there. The neighbors will think you’ve buried somebody in that hillside.”
“They need to get over that.”
“Jesus, Art, have another drink and drown yourself.”
“That’s one thing you got right.”
“I’m gone,” she said. “I’m off to the land of common sense.” But instead of going inside, Dottie dropped behind the wheel of the Plymouth and backed out into the street.
Holding the rake like a balance pole, Art skidded after her, wobbling in front of the car. “You stop now,” Art said, getting his balance and standing in the beam of the driver’s side headlight.
Dottie mouthed something through the windshield and waived him to the side. “That’s enough,” he said, his weight sagging back on his heels so he wasn’t ready to jump sideways when she lurched forward.
The bumper caught him below the knees like an open-field tackle, spinning him into an awkward sprawl. “Run me down,” Art moaned. “Run me down.” He curled a bit, feeling more comfortable, and lay on his side in the dark. Just for a few seconds, he said to himself, and then I’ll get up like this never happened.
And then he heard a voice say “Look!” from an open window across the street. It was Rick Santoro’s wife. Because of the way he was lying, Art could see her framed in the parted drapes of her bedroom.
Santoro moved in beside her, fumbling his glasses on, and Art let out one more “Run me down” to let him know how he’d gotten this way.
“Is he moving?” Kari Santoro said, but Rick had disappeared already, and Art heard the side door close, saw a figure move off the porch and down the driveway.
Art knew the man on the sidewalk regretted being his neighbor, that Santoro’s hesitation was fueled by visions of death and squalor, and he wondered if Santoro was capable of reversing himself without comment, whether he thought his wife would need protection because of what she’d seen. Art moved one leg and then the other, pedaling slowly. When he said “She run me down,” Santoro stepped forward like a man who’d changed his estimation of the evening to domestic squabble, whiskey, and the guilt he would feel if his neighbor noticed him peering between two halves of his southwestern-design bedroom drapes without following through with aid.
“My wife thought you were dead,” Santoro said.
“Not yet,” Art declared, because he saw headlights approaching and knew Dottie had returned, making a decision at forty miles per hour to steer that car precisely where she meant it so the result would be as clear as a biopsy report.
“She’s back,” Art observed out loud, and then he lay still and the two of them watched until the car sped past them on the right, made a three-point turn, and then, moving slowly, nearly brushed them on the left before parking along the curb.
“You run me down,” Art shouted then, and Santoro looked back at his bedroom window.
“Should we call the police?” Santoro said.
“What for?”
“You might hurt each other.”
“You’ll have to call every night.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Santoro said, but he was backpedaling toward his yard. “I won’t sleep now,” he said. “My wife will keep me up with this.”
“Art and Dottie can take care of themselves,” Art said, sitting up.
“Maybe not.”
“Chanson D’Amour,” he sang, but Santoro didn’t seem to get it, not recognizing the French lyrics off the record Art’s sister had played for a month when he was in fifth grade.
“Art and Dottie Todd,” he said as verification, but Santoro may not have heard as he waved over his shoulder from the side porch. “It was only a bump,” Art added, standing up and facing Dottie. “It hurt worse when Jack Fetko ran into me with his bike in fifth grade. I wouldn’t get out of his way either.”
“ART?” A man’s voice asked the next afternoon. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” Art said, but he thought it was a prank call.
“We’ve been talking, Art, and we agree you ought to be ashamed,” the man said.
“Who’s this?” Art asked. He walked to the window and looked across the street, expecting to see somebody on the kitchen phone.
“I’m just the spokesman, Art, but it’s all of us.”
“Tom Dodd,” Art said, “if this is you the shame is yours for calling like some pervert.”
There was a pause. “This isn’t Tom Dodd,” the voice finally said. “But that doesn’t matter.”
Art thought about trying “Rick,” but he didn’t see anybody in the kitchen, and then he couldn’t think of the names of any other neighbors, not even the name of the man in the house to his left who he’d always called “Corvette” because he looked silly, in his 50s, behind the wheel of the yellow one he renewed each model year.
He went outside and started the lawnmower. It was something he could do to march himself back and forth where whoever had called could see he wasn’t bothered. Nobody was going to call again. There wasn’t any committee in the neighborhood, and if he just kept moving, Art thought, they would settle behind him like those red stones.
“This is hard,” Dottie said when she walked in on his first drink an hour later. “I work with that man.”
“Rick Santoro doesn’t have any balls.” “Of course he does. He stopped talking to me before the school year was over.”
“What did he say before?”
Dottie looked puzzled, like she’d memorized an answer for an essay test and the teacher, after twenty years, had changed the question. “He told jokes when I was around, mostly dirty ones everybody laughed at but me. And then he stopped telling them.”
“Somebody else might have told him to knock it off.”
“Hardly.”
“But they could have.”
“You’re the sort of person who produces hung juries,” she said. “The killer smiles at you throughout the trial because he knows you’re the one.”
Art poured himself a quick double, splashing the tonic over the ice cubes. He looked at Dottie, held up the bottle with the label facing her. “I’m cutting back, Art,” she said. “Two and out for me. It’s my new rule.”
“I get it,” Art said.
“Well?” she said, and repeated it after he’d finished his second drink.
“I’ll go for a walk,” Art said. “I’ll keep busy. It’s not that hard.”
The small buzz stayed with him in the afternoon sun. He hesitated at intersections, measuring the traffic before he crossed the street. He looked at window displays as if they were museum arrangements. And when he arrived at the library which doubled as the town’s and the school’s, he walked up the stairs and entered the periodical section as if he expected to find something fascinating.
The library was packed with children who seemed to be having a scavenger hunt among the stacks. Art felt like a fool, as if he were a teacher’s aide for his wife’s class, lost and silly among children who would never listen to him.
He tried the door beside the newspapers. He was surprised it was unlocked, because he knew it opened onto the stairs leading down to the underground tunnel which crossed to the school complex. It seemed like an omen, that he should go ahead and follow the tunnel which was only open on snowy and rainy days to let students go back and forth without slopping through the weather.
The tunnel’s flattened zig-zag pattern, as always, reminded Art of The Cabinet of Di: Caligari, some expressionist’s way of showing the elementary labyrinth of childhood failure. There were only two corners to turn before he could see the other flight of stairs. At its base stood a boy and girl embracing, the boy’s hand, Art thought at a distance, under her sweater. As he got closer he saw that it wasn’t, that unless the boy had deftly slipped it out, the whole idea had been generated by shadows.
Both of them stared at him, evaluating. “Hey bud, you lost?” the boy said, letting Art know the score, a teacher neither recognized, someone with so little authority the girl laughed softly into his shoulder, pressing herself against him.
“Just browsing,” he said, and saw immediately that he had declared himself a fool. He kept his fee moving, hearing the girl laugh again, muffled into the boy’s throat so Art could imagine the short burst of her warm breath above his collar.
He reached the top of the stairs at the same time he heard “Dickhead” from behind him. And then he was thankful that the second door swung open as well.
In the foyer on the school side, next to the administration offices, was a plaque summarizing the history of the tunnel. For the first time in twenty years of passing, Art took a look. The tunnel, the plaque said, went back to the Civil War, was used to get runaway slaves out of whatever building was standing here at the time. A second plaque, much newer, told a brief history of “The Jell-O.”
“In many ways,” the plaque said, “Jell-0 built this town. Half of its residents were employed there until the factory shut down . . . ”
Art had read this sign before. He’d looked at all the old pictures on the wall, each of them enlargements from old yearbook photos. The oldest of the pictures, by the style of the clothes, showed a group of girls holding cards that spelled Jell-O. Each of the girls was laughing, and there was a bus behind them and two grim-faced women in dark, bulky coats that reminded him of what his mother had worn when he still held her hand on street corners. Those girls were dressed for warmth, nothing behind their cards that suggested fashion or wealth, and he guessed that they were on a field trip, probably just finishing a tour of the Jell-0 plant. Those women, he thought, were surely home economics teachers, and the idea of working your life away making colored powder that people all over the world turned into molds of heaving sugar was still a joke to these girls who were going to enter the factory for keeps in a year or two.
Those old women behind them knew the statistics: these girls were going to make babies or cheap desserts. They weren’t going to learn anything that would help them move to a place where the climate wasn’t awful, where town maintenance didn’t plant orange snow sticks beside the fire hydrants a week after Halloween.
“You should have been here when the Jell-O was flourishing,” the principal had told him during his interview. “People would come from all over for the tour. They’d drive back to wherever they’d come from with the package of samples the guides gave out. Grape. Strawberry. Lime. Raspberry. Lemon. Cherry. They got little six packs with handles. The Sampler.”
“Woodward Memorial Library,” the principal said, taking him on a tour. “The Woodwards were sisters who inherited all the money. They’d stop people on the street and give them one-hundred-dollar bills. They never married; they didn’t bring that sort of trouble on themselves.”
And then he’d finished by telling Art the reason for the ten-foot-tall orange sticks: “So they can find the fire hydrants in winter under all the snow.”
Without school in session, he had nothing else to do but chance the tunnel again, walk up the stairs on the other side and exit through the library as if he were a tourist.
The couple, fortunately, was gone. He had the tunnel to himself, started watching the walls, sure he would find graffiti, obscenities from decades of teenagers. Not one word. Nothing carved so deep a daily wash would be ineffective. He bent over to examine the wall near the floor, some place where you could list every foul word your friends suggested, laughing each time you passed because the cleaning lady had missed it again with her sponge.
Nothing. Not on the other side either when he duck-walked over to it. Standing up, Art nearly lost his balance, spinning to catch the wall with his hands and turning quickly to see if anyone had been watching. He was out of sight of both staircases, the angles in each direction so much the same Art couldn’t tell for certain which way he had been facing. And although it didn’t matter, Art stood there for a moment sorting out the clues that would allow him to choose correctly, making sure the stairs he’d reach would take him back to where he’d started.
“BILLY CALLED,” DOTTIE said as soon as Art got back. “He’s coming home.”
“Good.”
“No, it’s not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s twenty-three going on five. He would have done better on his own in grade school.”
“Why’s that?”
“He’s picked up a lot living here.”
Art poured gin into the Cal Ripken cup Billy had given him after they’d eaten at Burger King. Billy had paid twice the cost of the Coke when he’d bought them Whoppers in order to get the soda poured into a plastic cup which honored the consecutive game streak of a player he’d never seen in person.
The cup held twenty ounces, five of it gin, ten of it tonic, the rest in ice cubes. “A couple of those will do you,” Dottie said, and he handed her the gin and grapefruit juice. It probably had a bar name, he thought, the kind of thing Billy would know, the kind of names he’d be hearing again in a couple of weeks.
He watched the way Dottie nursed her drink, getting angrier because she put it down after every sip as if she didn’t want to be seen holding a drink in case somebody was peeking in the window. He had to wait for her to finish before he could refill the Ripken cup.
“Another?” he said, and she nodded, settling down maybe, Art thought, so he gave her a double, figured the melting ice would disguise it if she managed the first few sips. She swallowed and grimaced, and then she leaned back, looked out the window, and said, “This has got to stop, Art.”
“Billy knows we drink.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“I know the point—everything embarrasses you.”
“Exactly.”
Art gulped his drink like she was thinking about pouring it down the sink. “That’s two times two already,” she said, and when he answered, a few hours later, he had to snap the bedroom door Dottie had locked behind her from its frame in order to tell her he’d squared his ration again while playing Humble Pie’s live version of “I Don’t Need No Doctor” ten times at the volume the stereo salesman had labeled “divorce.”
Dottie screamed once and then shut up, looking past him and through the living room window at the swirling lights. “Oh Christ,” she said, and Art went down on all fours, crawled to the window and opened a crack in the drapes. Two police cars were parked in the street. “The police are here,” he said, crawling over to check the front door lock, but Dottie was gesturing him toward the spare room.
One policeman was already on the porch, his back to the front door. He looked like a salesman who’d just seen the lights go off after ringing the bell.
A second policeman was shining a light in the kitchen window. It seemed a good way to get shot, Art thought, and he said so as soon as he found Dottie in the one room which had no windows. She sat still, her eyes open, he could tell.
And so he started a whispered commentary, telling her how both of the policemen were inspecting the house, how they were probably going from window to
window. And then he shut up entirely, relying on the strategy of “Nobody’s home,” what he had said, from behind the front door, the year before he started school, answering every knock with that phrase, whether or not his parents were there, convincing some of the visitors, at least, to leave.
They sat in the spare room and listened to both doorbells, three knockers. They heard voices, one of them louder than the others, calling them by name through two circuits and a final sequence at the front door. “Everything okay in there?” a policeman said. “Can we help you?”
“We should go on a trip,” Dottie said, the voices silent for a minute.
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter. As long as we’re somewhere else where we could smile. We’re so much in character here we’re like television actors.”
“You name it then.”
“I want to go back and see the school where I taught before Billy was born. Let’s go to Marshall School.”
“That’s two hundred miles,” Art said. “Marshall’s been closed for years. It’s probably gone.”
“They wouldn’t tear it down. It was a perfectly good building.”
Art made a two-hour tape for the trip, labeled it “Ever Decreasing Volume” because it began with Humble Pie and ended with James Taylor. He played it the whole way through while Dottie drove, and then he said he wanted to drive so she could enjoy things, get herself oriented again. “It’s only an hour,” he said, and when she hesitated, he added, “The police don’t recognize me here.”
“Down here,” Dottie said at a stop sign fifty miles later. She pointed left, but Art pulled straight ahead. “This is wrong,” she said. “I was the one who worked here.” Art drove a quarter mile and saw the school on the right.
“Well, that’s something,” Dottie said, but by then Art thought she might be talking about the boards in the windows, the thistle and milkweed and wild morning glories. They could see three sides of the school from the front lot, but all they discovered was there were windows left in only one room. “My room,” Dottie said, already out of the car and walking.
“This isn’t Brigadoon,” Art said, catching up. “Nobody’s been in the school for years.” Trucks rolled by on the turnpike above the back of the school. He stopped to evaluate an unfamiliar plant with attractive berries which were surely poisonous. Marshall School, it said on the cornerstone, 1928. A mat by the front door was stenciled Alpha Belles Welcome You, so woefully hopeful Art thought it had been thrown there as a joke. Inside the one windowed room there were drapes visible, but he would have to climb along a ledge to look inside. “I’m going next door,” Dottie said. “I’m going to ask whoever lives there what happened here.”
Art was satisfied with finding one mown area cut around the flagpole, everything else meadow and ruined asphalt lot. One pile of composting weeds lay near the decorative bushes, as if someone began and gave up, one day’s work for a merit badge or an Earth Day project.
He drifted back toward the car, waited for Dottie on asphalt which looked as if it had been shattered, a million shards crumbling and lifting. “This is the way the world will look when we’re long gone into carelessness,” Art thought, and then Dottie walked up to save him from philosophy.
“I found out,” she said. “A group called the Alpha Belles used my room after the school closed. They organized sales parties. Like Tupperware.”
Across the street was the one building which had been built in the last twenty-five years—Competitive Strategies, Inc./New Beginnings Church—Dottie read the compound name without irony. “Let’s take a look around back,” she said. “We might as well see the whole thing.”
In the back of the building was a playground in good repair. A jungle gym, monkey bars, a slide and swings and two basketball hoops. “Was this here?” Art asked.
“I don’t know,” Dottie said. “I never went outside. Everybody went home for lunch in 1970; there wasn’t any recess.”
Art nodded, but neither of them were wondering about the sense of putting in a new playground a year or two before the school would close. From the edge of the playground the hillside swept up to the turnpike. The guardrail was rolled back like an opened Spam can. There were tracks down the hillside, huge swaths of mounded dirt furrowed among dead milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace. Twenty feet from where they had stopped, the playground was covered with glass and pieces of metal. “Look at all this,” Art said.
“At least there wasn’t anybody here when it happened.”
“I know that,” Art said, but he thought there might have been, teenagers drinking at night, sitting on the bicycle racks, the truck driver falling asleep and plowing down the hill without even touching his brakes.
“There are accidents and then the world goes on,” Dottie said. “There’s no choice.”
Art nodded, but he thought she was wrong, that if she looked closely she’d see blood. He wondered if the driver had been drunk, and then he decided the man had been asleep or had a heart attack, that the shape of the ruts revealed no reaction at all before the truck had plowed into the back of the building.
“We’re all right now, aren’t we?” Dottie said. “We’ve outlived some things and that’s what happens if you don’t panic.”
“I think so,” Art said, agreeing to the second half.
“You think you’re surrounded and then it’s as wide open as that guardrail.”
“Let’s have a look at what those Alpha Belles did to your room,” Art said. “Let’s see the rest of this while we’re here.” He stood on the bicycle rack and leaned into the plywood which covered the nearest window. It buckled and then caved in. “Come on,” he said, offering Dottie his hand.
They coughed through stacked furniture, worked their way to Dottie’s old room where there was enough light to look around. “My old desk,” Dottie said, leading Art to where it sat in the open end of a fifteen-student- desk horseshoe.
Art dusted off one of the small desks and sat down. “I’d like to pour us drinks right now. I’d like to give you something nice.”
“It’s okay, Art,” she said. “You’ve done enough getting me in here.”
“This is something, isn’t it? Those kids are long gone.”
“Yes, they are. And so are the Alpha Belles.”
“I’ll bet there’s something on a desk about you, something a sixth grader would carve,” Art said. “I’ll bet they let all this furniture go to hell at the end.”
“There might be, Art, but it’s a long shot.”
He got up and started reading, but the desk tops were uniformly clean. In the back of the room, another twenty were stacked in a pile, each of them dark with graffiti. They were all initials and rock groups and dates. He owned a couple of the albums. The Wall. Back in Black. None of the desks had anything like a message or a full name.
“Nothing much,” he said, but he started pulling at the drawers in the teacher’s desk, finding a ruler and a box of staples.
“Really, Art, there can’t be anything.”
The last drawer tumbled off its tracks and clattered by his foot. “Christ,” Art said, but he reached down and lifted what he’d found. “It’s a beanbag or something,” he said. He threw it to her and she caught it with one hand.
“A hackeysack,” Dottie said. “Kids still play with them. They kick them around like soccer balls.”
She threw it back and he fondled it a moment. “Maybe that’s the one 1 took from David Acker or the one I took from Josh Wilson. I’d just throw them in the drawer and tell them they could have them back in June. They’d forget after a while and so would I.”
Art stood up and dropped the bag, kicking it with his shoe. It shot against the wall and fell in the dust. “You have to keep it going,” Dottie said. “You have to have touch and control, so you can direct it toward somebody else in a circle.”
He tried it again, chasing after the hackeysack, reaching it with his shoe just before it hit the ground, skidding it past her and under the stack of desks.
“The hell with that,” he said, but when he knelt, Art saw the sack could be reached if he was careful.
“Leave it be,” Dottie agreed, but he knew this sack
was hers, that she’d put it in the desk years ago and nobody had claimed it.
He was sweating and coughing, but he worked his arm through the crossbars and legs, feeling the stack tremble each time he nudged the rungs to clear a wider space for himself.
“Jesus, Art, you’ll kill yourself,” he heard Dottie say, but then he had the sack in his hand and was backing out, and when he pushed himself up and turned, she was right behind him, her foot lifting at once to receive what he kicked her way.
