“The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.”

—Truman Capote

A SHORT STORY

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

for J.S.

Scaffolding ahead tarnished the entrance to the renowned ‘temple of society.’ “Perfect,” Alice Darling muttered as she strode across East 55th Street. When a younger coworker at her side, Tammy St. Clair, asked what she’d said, Alice replied: “Nothing.”

How long since that damned award was announced had it taken to get to this point, to finally be acknowledged by them? On the morning of the announcement, many months ago, Alice had stepped off the elevator on the 21st floor of Hatchet-LaFayette Media—hung over. It wasn’t unusual for her. Still able to rebound after a late night, but the time was fast approaching when black coffee and a hastily downed egg on a roll at her desk would no longer do the trick; no longer fortify her for the work ahead at ‘special interest’ magazines for women. When she had to, Alice relied on autopilot. Designing layouts like, Retouching Drab Normal With Fab Floral? Not a problem.

Alice Darling’s neglected personal life restarted its crucial, if impermanent, recovery as soon as the elevator descended from the 21st floor with her in it. After she'd passed through the soul-shrinking chill of the vast lobby’s travertine walls, waved goodnight to a benign security guard, hustled past the spaceship above the restaurant in the sunken outdoor plaza and then bounded up the short flight of stairs to Broadway, brightly lit by the Winter Garden’s marquee, a little bit of the day’s accumulated weight lifted from her shoulders. Back in her rent-controlled apartment on the upper eastside, she inhaled the blissful restorative tonic of oil paint and turpentine as she wolfed down take-out Szechuan. Nourished, she brandished a paintbrush and attacked the canvas.

If Alice left the office later—more often than not—then she went directly to Jimmy’s Corner, a down-at-heels bar not far from the office. Bolstered by a shot of Maker’s Mark she'd begin the transition to card carrying artist, swearing before the nightmarish tribunal in her head that she was not a corporate slave. She taxied uptown—sometimes close to midnight—and uncorked a bottle of red wine to stave off despair. Morning arrived like the natural catastrophe one might have been warned about, and still ignored. She’d lift an invisible gun to her head cradled in a sweat-soaked pillow and perform the ritual: “I am not who they think I am. I can get through this day.”

But on that fateful morning, as she mentally tapped her way through the department, eyelids lowered to half-mast, she passed Tessa Rizzo, another designer already slapping layouts of plaid-engorged living rooms onto the color Xerox machine.

“O-o-o-h, hello award winner.”

Alice squinted at the pert young woman. Tessa’s Lesbian bravado in the office could be heard cracking under weighty, argumentative phone calls with any one of her numerous family members, all Italian and all very Catholic. “Morning,” Alice mumbled to the mouthful of Chicklets-sized white teeth. She struggled to remember if she’d brushed hers.

Passing the corner office of Donna Gatti, editor-in-chief of the division, Alice saw her and the executive editor, Olive Munroe, with Rosalie Simpson, who was the art director and Peter Hightower, her deputy art director. They interrupted their huddle at her approach. Offered was the collective cryptic smile that usually predicted a pain in the ass. An entire layout would have to be redone—not her fault they would hasten to add—but blah, blah, the photographer, blah, blah, not enough, blah, blah. She’d heard it before. The department was run on a shoestring strong enough to strangle the life out of designer and editor alike. You bit the bullet. Got on with it. That’s what they liked about her.

Alice had shared an office with Peter Hightower. He stood out, the only male in a department of women; an escapee from a town in Wisconsin that he never talked about called Sioux Creek. Peter was single, in his late 20s. He affected an old school manner, a throwback that bordered on parody. Always in a jacket and tie even in the warmest months, his manner was genteel, with a not too self-effacing edge. The introduction of computers had allowed his inner nerd to flourish and he became indispensable in a department of overworked, computer-illiterate women. Everyone quietly guessed he was deeply closeted. In their office Alice took in an expansive view of Times Square rippled by winter slush. From above the streets looked furred with mold.

A light tap at the door was followed by: “So, you’ve heard the news.” Bunny Edmond assumed a golfer’s pose in the doorway, relaxed and yet, controlled. Arms crossed, skin newly tanned and waspishly freckled. Alice tried to gauge Bunny’s expression, inscrutable under a velvet headband that kept her auburn pageboy, recently highlighted, intact. Pleasant or stern, one could never tell. They had already shipped the quarterly issue of Decorating Inspirations magazine. It was on the newsstand. Bunny had just returned from a brief, well-deserved escape to Cabo San Lucas with her fiancé. What could possibly be the problem?

Alice mumbled through a mouthful of eggy roll that she had not heard any news. She drained coffee from a Styrofoam cup, sighing as she tossed the empty into the wastebasket.

“What’s going on, Bun?”

Like a grade-school teacher carefully praising a student for a job well done Bunny raised her chin: “We’ve won the Folio, Alice. Decorating Inspirations won. Best editorial. Best design in our category.” To Alice’s bemused expression Bunny added: “I know, right? A first for this department.”

Marta Kowalksi burst into the office, drawing Bunny and Alice to her ample chest, enthusiastically hugging them both. She was the managing editor, a generously proportioned round-faced blonde with an infectious laugh. Marty, as she was known, lived in Forest Hills, Queens with her husband who was a police officer now retired. Everyone knew how she’d met him. He had seen her weave out of a neighborhood bar one night and slowly followed her in a squad car until she safely reached her apartment building. Irritated, Marty confronted him. He liked her spunk and that, as she liked to tell it, was that. She managed the freelancers—all the disparate personalities—smoothed tensions between art and editorial, and expertly maneuvered a shifting tide of decorating magazines, journals of fitness and weight loss and those how-to craft issues with hellish instructions that designers avoided like devilled eggs on a sweltering summer day. Marty was bossy in a den mother sort of way and usually gregarious when she wasn’t under extreme pressure. Meaning when she was out of the office and halfway into a pitcher of margaritas.

She left Alice’s office with Bunny and her cheery congratulations resounded throughout the department. Later she was seen humbled before Donna’s desk, nodding her head in agreement.

A memo from the editor-in-chief arrived. It named the magazine, but not the designer and the editor. That memo and later a departmental meeting stressed that no one person could take credit for what was clearly a group effort. When Tammy dared to ask why Bunny and Alice should not be given a round of applause, she was met with Donna’s coolly calculated response: “We in this department work like a well greased wheel and as such every spoke in that wheel is important to its function.” She peered around the room, looking through rather than at anyone. Olive stood at attention by her side, planning her next cigarette. Rosalie stared at the floor and Peter searched for neutral ground. “Understood?”

The Folio award, an engraved crystal spearhead (no shaft, Alice observed) was delivered directly to Donna’s office where it sat on her desk, out of reach. Anyone who was in her office for more than 30 seconds witnessed her caressing it. Her Folio.

Since then Alice has been moved from the front office and the natural light she shared with Peter to a windowless cubicle in the back. The reason given was that she would need her own computer. The department had only just gone digital with that award-winning issue. Alice swore on first rumor that she would just as soon tend bar then go through the hell of learning the computer—at her age—and went so far as to check out bartending schools. But even she knew the dangers of an unrequited life landing in close proximity to alcohol. Instead, Alice sweated bullets tackling Quark and Photoshop and the expected frustrations, which came mostly from Donna Gatti who would be the last to embrace the digital age and the first to make you pay for her ignorance.

Donna, Olive and Rosalie had been nominally critical before the award whenever Alice and Bunny were teamed; happy to sign off on layouts, relieved not to have the kind of headaches they got from freelancers. Instead of granting them the leeway with design and editorial they’d had, the three conjurors stirred an ambiguous pot and mercilessly rejected, then revised, and refused until all traces of the original design and editorial had disappeared under their heavy-handed confabulation.

With summer approaching it was hinted that Alice and Bunny were finally going to be recognized. Or rather, as Rosalie said, “We should have a proper thank-you.” Rosalie was a middle-aged woman with an over-active son and an indifferent husband. She dressed like a good sport, like someone who needed to please. The Buster Brown hairstyle never changed. She had passed the moment when white ankle socks and black loafers made her look youthful. Peter felt certain ‘a proper thank you’ was meant for Alice and Bunny. Since the obvious change in Rosalie’s attitude toward her Alice wasn’t so sure.

But now, months later, they were about to celebrate with lunch at a table covered in thick white linen and set with gilt-edged china and flyweight crystal. The menu was French; the society of the place divinely encapsulated in a short story by one of Alice’s favorite authors. She would stay-tuned, listen for conversation ‘catty and thinly-veiled.’ As they entered, Alice glanced past the maître d’ to the few smartly attired elderly patrons seated at banquettes along the wall. The room was nearly empty. It had been some time since Mr. Capote was strategically placed on a banquette under the famous murals, perched on his haunches and beginning to gnaw at the hand that paid for the Cristal. Zagat’s bemoaned the restaurant’s loss of followers. And it was August.

They were ushered to their seats and a silver-haired waiter, honed by propriety, appeared.

“Oh, I feel like Dorothy Parker,” Donna crowed as she placed herself first with queenly attitude at the round table in the middle of the room.

Parker, my ass, thought Alice and cracked: “Wrong table, Donna.”

“What’s that, Alice?” Donna smiled tightly, splayed her freshly manicured fingernails in corporate mode before her.

“Wrong table,” Alice laughingly repeated and added: “Wrong restaurant.” She filled in the silence at the table caused by her overstepping by further overstepping. “I can see every monster as they come in,” she recited in a breathy whine. Heads lowered. Napkin fumbling ensued. Donna Gatti stared. Alice continued in her normal voice, staring back: “You know, Truman Capote.” She gestured to the banquettes, “This place?”

They had been coached on what to wear, how to behave. The French-owned company spared no expense producing upscale and not significantly profitable magazines: Belle, Belle Interior, Luxury Driver, and Urban Home. The Special Interest magazines, which had normally operated under the corporate radar, were for the time being in the spotlight. Conditional as that attention was they had to impress, or at least not embarrass. The magazines they produced profited handsomely from bored singles on line at the supermarket, dieters, craft project addicts and harried homemakers looking to make ‘quick-n-easy’ suppers. Unlike the fashionably thin women in the offices at Belle who clicked around like they were on a catwalk, they were too big, too loud, unsophisticated and they worked like mules.

All were in outfits they had worn for the photograph to appear in the issue that was just about to go to press. Even Alice was guilty as charged. Crowded in front of the fountain in World Financial Plaza the week before, Alice had been positioned on the far left of the group and in the photo she appeared to be escaping. Donna was furious. What was she thinking! But there was no time and she didn’t want to spend the money on another photo session. It would have to do. Besides, Donna—a step higher in the center—looked good. The men in production had a laugh when Alice corrected the color, always entertained by her caustic observations. She’d once impetuously scrawled at the top of the erase board and they never wiped it clean: “Better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.”

Rosalie, the first to be addressed by the waiter, shyly declined a drink before ordering from the menu. He continued with Donna who ordered her usual I-am-really-a-fun-gal-outside-the-office Johnny Walker. She demonstrated a student-level French to the waiter who expertly feigned both approval and disdain. Alice looked away, embarrassed for her. She had to have been up all night practicing that, Alice mused.

“I’ll have the same,” Olive drawled. That was expected. Both had been nastily divorced in middle age and replaced by younger women. When her cat died Donna vowed never to have another living thing in her personal life. Olive had a daughter. Apart from that, they resembled each other. Similarly styled, they wore clothes like resentment: severe and relentlessly replayed. Alice was the last to order and added her choice—a Kir Royale—to the list that included martinis and a Cosmopolitan for Peter. Rosalie, seeing she had underestimated, called the waiter back and ordered the scotch.

Alice sat between Tammy St. Clair who was twirling an olive in her pursed lips and Bunny, who had foregone alcohol. Tammy was an editor and the one she was closest to in the office, the one with the most potential for rebellion. Not that she did, rebel that is. But Tammy never left an editorial meeting without questioning something. A good twenty years younger than Alice, Tammy gravitated toward Alice’s leonine qualities. If Alice saw anyone after work, it would be Tammy. She was the only one ever invited from the office to view her paintings and from then on became an enthusiastic supporter. When they’d had a few drinks and Alice needed a sounding board, Tammy provided the cheerleading. Life excited Tammy. She was thrilled about a Grateful Dead concert at Madison Square Garden in September. Alice nearly fell over when she told her. Was that guy still alive?

Normally contained, Bunny was even quieter than usual. She was old New York and grew up on Park Avenue in the 90s, the only one of them who had dined here before. Coming from a family of professionals—father a banker and mother a university professor—it was a complete mystery to Alice why Bunny was in magazines and not editing some literary masterpiece. She revealed to Alice that morning that she’d had an offer from Bridal Veil magazine. She'd used it as leverage with Donna for an increase in salary and was not only turned down, but also lectured on loyalty. Bunny decided to walk.

Friendly for the most part, out of habit rather than choice, they sat as a group self-consciously adding to the restaurant's accolades. Constraint began to thaw like ice under a rainspout in early spring. Little by little glasses of wine were emptied and refilled. Conversation loosened but was still tied to office trivia. Wary of putting her foot in her mouth, yet bored with the direction the chatter had taken, Alice told of the time a friend of hers, a writer in Paris, had interviewed the head of the company, Bertrand LaFayette. He owned a vast collection of Surrealist art and Alice’s friend was writing a biography of the Mexican Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. She began describing what her friend had told her of the opulence of his estate just outside Paris.

Donna charged over Alice’s tale, unable to relinquish the spotlight. “Will you look at this feast!”

Olive’s smoky laugh followed: “Imagine eating like this every day?”

Plates of Dover sole, fillet of black bass in potato crust, house-smoked salmon and roasted cod lay before them. Donna had ordered something called Noisettes de Veau Sauce Brun aux Morilles. They left her to it and went for the fish.

“S-o-o-o, let’s have a little game and everyone tell us what you would be having for dinner tonight if you had not had this delicious meal.” Donna’s rosacea had spread from her cheeks across her nose and was invading her forehead. Clearly she was feeling the alcohol. “I’ll go first.” She would be in her kitchen, over the sink, eating from a bag of salty pretzels.

“Why over the sink?” Alice ventured.

“Crumbs,” Donna replied and burst into earsplitting guffaws.

Peter, with his glass raised and pinkie crooked, revealed he would do, as usual, with a quiet burger in his neighborhood bistro in the West Village. Olive would have whatever her mother had made for her granddaughter.

“Well, you know how much I love to bake,” Marta offered and then comically pointed to her waist.

“Something Italian” piped Tessa and then asked Alice what she would be having.

“Oh, probably a freshly tossed…bottle of Maker’s Mark.”

They were interrupted by the tinkling clue of a toast to come. Rosalie stood up in awkward awareness of her surroundings, holding her wine glass aloft. “I can tell you what I would not be having.” She wrinkled her nose. “The es…the scarp…the snails.” She waited for the table to quiet down and went on: “We should not forget what we are celebrating today.” She looked at Bunny and Alice on her left. “It was a great honor for the department and we really owe it all to…” Rosalie turned to her right, “…to Donna!”

A hesitant round of applause died quickly. Alice pressed her forehead to a glass of cold water. Tammy whispered, “Okay there?”

Donna rose from the table, adjusting her too tight skirt, pulling at her jacket. “I’ve got to powder my nose,” she giggled. “Alice,” she suddenly demanded, “get me a cognac.”

Alice put down the glass and leveled a hard gaze at her boss. “Do I look like a waiter?”

Rosalie hurried to repair the breach, shooting a look of disgust toward Alice. “I’ll get it for you, Donna.” They ordered dessert, which all but Marta had left unfinished.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. Donna jokingly instructed them to take the rest of the day off. By the time they returned to the office it would be time to leave anyway. They passed the empty coatroom that once swelled with endangered animal skins. In the street Alice asked: “Anyone up for another? We are celebrating after all.” She started backing away. “Jimmy’s Corner? Guys? Anyone?” Excuses were mumbled as the rest of them trailed behind Donna. But Alice knew, in time, that others would join her on the barstools at Jimmy’s Corner.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©September 2009.

"The Twins." Gone but not forgotten.

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”—Hermann Hesse

SHELTER IN A STORM

There were over 26,000 trees in Central Park before the 18^th of August. Now there are a few hundred less, though there are still quite a few lying where they fell, most of them facing toward the east, having been hit by 70 mph winds roaring across Manhattan from the west. Some are standing tall, seemingly oblivious to their amputated limbs and the fate that awaits them. Others have completed the transformation and lie with their brethren in steaming piles of mulch. A sweetly fermented air hangs over the north end of the park.

The Mister and I live a block from Central Park at the north end above 96^th Street. The night of the storm at a little after ten o’clock the first flash of lightning had us stop what we were doing, put down the book, turn off the computer. Reverting to childhood anticipation, we shut the lights in the apartment and stationed ourselves at the windows in the front room that overlook the onion tops of the Russian Church directly across the street making a fine mis-en-scene for stormy theater. Our big black cat, Sidney Vicious, conceding the signs, shot under the bed. Delighting in the escalating rain and the sharp, thunderous cracks after spidery displays of lightning, The Mister still finds my insuppressible shrieking funny. The downpour came faster and heavier. Windows rattled. Soon a Mt. Sinai building that looms over the skyline a block away disappeared behind the pitch-blackness. An eerie resonance, almost like cannon roar, exploded out of sync with the expected thunder after a lightning flash and we agreed: this is pretty damned powerful. We stared at the slender trees on the pavement below, seeing them bend with the wind, each one bowing in line with the others and we began to fear for their wellbeing.

Before we knew it the storm was over. The trees below straightened. All had rejuvenated from the experience. We thought.

In the morning, alerted by an e-mail from a friend and neighbor who had walked her dogs early, I headed into the park with my camera. I didn’t take it on, the extent of the damage, noticing first the fallen limbs and branches clustered outside the entrance to the park on Fifth Avenue. Further in the devastation became painfully clearer. From then on, day after day I saw such splendid trees, grown tall and seemingly only vulnerable to threats like Dutch Elm disease and the Asian Longhorn Beetle, torn apart. Park trees have been felled in isolated incidents due to infestation, but the walker breathes a relieved sigh because it’s prevention at work. But so many had fallen to the ground in a tangle of limbs so topsy-turvy one could not tell one tree’s branches from the others toppled alongside and on top of each other. Raw craters abounded, left gaping from a wind so forceful it uprooted the trees that had once stood there. While some familiar trees in the east meadow were either uprooted or torn asunder I was relieved to see the two The Mister and I had claimed for ourselves still standing across the path from each other, their branches still entwined at the tips. Mine is the huge American elm and his is the slightly younger London plane. My elm had lost only a few branches from what I could tell, nothing life threatening.

The media did not forgo the 9/11 references that pop up in every local newsworthy calamity. “It seems like Central Park was essentially the ground zero,” said David Wally, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in Upton, N.Y., on Long Island.

But the sight of the two trees I considered solely mine since they were saplings—I call them “The Twins”—first planted under the shade of the pine trees on the rocky hill some 40 years ago—gave me a start. Initially I could not even recognize them, so mauled were they. It was like an angry god had reached down and rent their limbs, dumping them like giant matchsticks to be buried under thickets of severed branch. Already the leaves on those branches were silver-colored and dead. I wept without restraint. After awhile I noticed that the trunks on both, even the more mauled of the pair, seemed in good enough nick. Spinning positively, I hoped they could be saved.

After viewing the devastation in the rest of the north end, The Great Hill area especially, I held out for a more hopeful outlook for my trees. The Great Hill, the area around West 106th Street, lost several dozen trees. The New York Times reported that, “Some of the trees—pin oaks, red elms, tulip trees—dated as far back as the turn of the last century.” At 100th Street and Central Park West a chestnut tree, recorded as having been planted by Frederick Law Olmsted more than 150 years ago, suffered storm damage and was to be felled.

Since the storm I have made daily treks through areas of the north end, sometimes ducking under the ubiquitous yellow caution tape draped across footpaths and stone stairways, or wrapped around clusters of wounded trees like discarded party streamers after a particularly wild blowout. The refuge-like silence that usually welcomes a contemplative wanderer like me to the area that is known as the north woods has been ruptured by a sonorous growl, ratcheting off rocky outcroppings, drowning birdsong and the familiar flush of waterfalls. If one didn’t know better, there might be reason to be fearful; that just around the familiar curve of a wooded path that I am following is a formidable deterrent, a beast unlike any other, one to be avoided at all costs.

Instead, I continued exploring, humming along to the John Cage-like dissonance of the music of tree-eating machinery surrounding me.

On some of those walks, either alone or with The Mister, as one does after a public calamity of any sort and we tend to be more approachable, we had many informal conversations with strangers. A woman I met on that first morning in the aftermath told me how surprised (and upset) she was to see so much destruction. She lived only a few blocks below the storm’s path and so out of range of the full impact. Her first reaction was that Mayor Bloomberg had reacted heavy-handedly after the death of a man a few weeks ago from a falling tree limb, and ordered any potentially dangerous tree felled. We kvetched like old neighbors about their mayor in true New Yorker style and then focused our attention on her two adorable mutts. The younger of the two, just a pup, was rescued while she was on vacation in The Virgin Islands. She and her husband simply cut him down from where he was hanging as bait for dog fighting! A man we met at The Great Hill accompanied us as we walked back home, relating to us the far wider devastation in Riverside Park, that the park was closed and how cars were smashed in the street. We parted around the lake at 104^th on the West Side but he hesitated a few yards ahead of us, turned, and trotted back to direct me to a raccoon in a tree branch he thought my camera should not miss.

Days later, an article in the New York Times shattered the hope that “The Twins” would be spared: “This is the saddest part to me,” said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, as experts gave little hope to two damaged yellow buckeyes, in the horse chestnut family, that still towered over thickets of downed foliage but seemed destined for the wood chipper.”

Notwithstanding my sadness at this news, I was surprised that I had not actually known the proper name of the trees: yellow buckeyes, in the horse chestnut family. They were always just my two trees, “The Twins.”

For over forty years I have sought out these trees for many reasons and for no reason at all but just to see them growing on the edge of the field. Two spindly saplings are pictured in a black and white photograph I have somewhere. I was a much younger woman then and married for the first time. It was not a good marriage and the turmoil that came out of an ill-conceived union often sent me on lost walks in the park. Then the north woods were not considered safe ground. I was careless, thoughtless, or brave in those days—whatever you want to call it—and I often banged through the undergrowth of the north woods demonized after any number of noisy, tearful arguments. By the time I had returned to “The Twins” my soul had restored, at least until the next round of conflict. They would always be shelter for my personal storms.

Married now to The Mister for over 20 years, I won’t say there weren’t any number of agitated walks necessitated by the struggle to get to know each other early on, but they dissipated and were replaced with countless walks side-by-side in the part of the park we love best. We began to think of “The Twins” as an old married couple, secure in each other’s company, content with their fit. In all seasons they have never wavered from each other’s side, not in the over abundance that spring brings nor the harsher days of winter.

New trees will be planted, it says on the Central Park Conservancy site. A child today will grow up with a tree or trees that become dear to his or her heart. I found a Greek proverb that happily summed it up for me: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Before and After the storm on August 18, 2009

Central Park, East Meadow

"Corner shop, it's the last one down…" fairalldanzmusic

"There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness…"—Mike Leigh

LIVING IN A MIKE LEIGH WORLD

When the Mister and I first got together yonks ago we introduced each other to our favorite filmmakers. In that brief halcyon of dating, before we bravely bit the matrimonial bullet, we saw, first off, Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire and Mike Leigh’s High Hopes. I was instantly hooked on Leigh who was new to the U.S. at the time (or at least new to me) and we searched out every film of his that we could find on video (Remember, this was yonks ago). The moment a new one came out here we rushed to see it, never disappointed.

There was a time in our travels between here and the UK when it suddenly occurred to us that in every social and familial situation we found references to any one of the Mike Leigh films. I don’t recall which of us actually said it, but at some point we came to the same conclusion: We were, indeed, living in a Mike Leigh World. Which, of course meant we had to write a song. And so we did.

ON YOUTUBE

Paul Fairall singing Mike Leigh World. Lyrics and music by Paul Fairall and Linda Danz. Recorded in a 19th century farmhouse at Chatham, New York in the Hudson River Valley on August 13, 2009.

MIKE LEIGH WORLD

Got it all but the kitchen sink
Sweet dreams for everyone
Johnny thinks that he’s all alone
When there’s class war
In the living room
In a flat and you’re all knocked up
Two doors down and one floor up
Corner shop with the shade pulled down
Sweet dreams for everyone

We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high hopes for everyone
We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high time my old son

Put it all on the mantelpiece
Sweet dreams for everyone
Abigail’s in her party gown
And in the mean time
She’s on her own
In a flat and you’re all knocked up
Two doors down and one floor up
Corner shop at the end of town
Sweet dreams for everyone

We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high hopes for everyone
We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high time my old son

Take it all from the working man
Sweet dreams for everyone
Penny saves for a rainy day
When the clouds burst
And wash it away
In a flat and you’re all knocked up
Two doors down and one floor up
Corner shop it’s the last one down
And there’s no place for anyone

We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high hopes for everyone
We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high time my old son

Caravan of dreams
Parked on the street
Looking so neat and tidy
Sitting out in the shed
You’ve gone to bed
A bottle of wine gone to your head
Baby’s gone to bed

We’re all living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high hopes for everyone
We’re living in a Mike Leigh world
And it’s high time my old son

© fairalldanzmusic on our myspace page.

ONLY THE CONEY

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

Been walking around in a kind of dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah melancholy lately; wrapped in displacement by ill-fitting, ephemeral thoughts. Could be that I am a Leo, sun-signing on the beach of aging. Or, that life moves so fast now, and I have finally learned to move more slowly and so am left gawping in the interim before I adjust again.

When I was a kid it was television, then color TV; handwritten letters and thank you notes, and then a man walked on the moon. Fast forward to Facebook and Twitter and conspiracy theories about the moonwalk—that it was played out on a Hollywood soundstage, one small theatrical step for man, one politically milked event for mankind. And fewer heartfelt thank you notes originate now beyond the implied haste of e-mail or are left before an audience on Facebook . I don’t know anything about Twitter, beside it having a limit of 140 characters in a message, er, tweet. But handwritten notes of thanks for, say, a dinner lovingly prepared for friends, or some little gift sent—through the post—rarely occur because one has to write them, and then, gasp, mail them. What may be good for the environment and the life of trees has actually produced mountainous junk heaps of discarded computers. Though dumped in other countries, of course, far away from here. Happily there are still a few of us relics of the Snail Mail Age around, but we are disappearing.

No thank-you notes in the mail mean fewer recognizable faces employed at the post office these days. Customer lines at the Third Avenue station on the Upper East Side are longer now. Postal employees retire and are not replaced. Toni is one of those clerks still working and she sums it up: “It’s the Internet.” Toni and I have been sharing pleasantries for years, some of it kvetching and more of it the flashing of personal indicators: her son has grown up in our conversation, problems with his schoolwork when he discovered the guitar and now he’s graduating from high school. My life has changed since I lost my job and Toni always asks about our music. I wonder how long it will be before one more casual conversation with a neighborly human being is missing from my life.

We had been contemplating a Park Slope venue on Friday evening. A friend who is a drummer was playing in Brooklyn and the proximity to the Chipshop was tempting indeed. Ummm, fish and chips washed down with a cool shandy. But I hesitated, because of the dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah-ness. I was missing something and though I didn’t know what it was at the time, I was not ready to ignore what it was that I was missing. Know what I mean?

The Mister never denigrates my self-indulgent despair when it happens. He listens; the prominent brow of Aries suitably furrowed. Then he says, “Pecker up, lad.” And I do. Or rather it does, metaphorically speaking.

I wasn’t in the mood for more alienating hipster crowds that make me feel like a stranger on the planet, a tourist in my hometown. We went with the original plan: Coney Island’s Burlesque By-the-Sea. We would head for a meal in Brighton Beach first.

The young, very pregnant woman panting heavily on the B train nearly derailed our plans. Thinking I was seeing things, I tried not to stare at her until I overheard the older woman with her. “I can see she wants out!” And catching my wary eye she informed us—cool as you please—that the young woman was in labor. We exchanged smiles. I watched as an unborn baby girl did a little womb dancing for her very uncomfortable mother. The young woman’s mother proudly exclaimed that she was a grandmother six times over, “…and I’m only 45. Had enough grand daughters. Counting on my sons to bring me some boys.” The Mister and I whispered in agreement that we would not dessert her and her mother if she were to give birth in the subway car. A wild imagination had me unconsciously fingering the shawl I carry prepared for the artic temperatures of air conditioning. I would become that prairie doctor, ready to swaddle a newborn. She continued to prod her daughter to, “Breathe, breathe, we are almost there.” One male passenger looked decidedly nervous and I admit I was relieved when she told me they were headed for St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, which was the next stop. She was impressively calm beside her volcanic daughter, chatting amiably and we wished them well as she guided her onto the station platform, telling me it was good for her daughter to walk; that if her water broke in the street she would call an ambulance.

The rest of the long ride was uneventful and we kind of basked in the feel good of the earlier moment. In Brighton we went straight to our favorite Russian café, The Ocean View under the El on Brighton Beach Avenue. Smoked fish, cold borscht crisply laden with sweet slivers of red beets and cucumber and a mound of fresh fried potatoes covered in a variety of mushrooms and sprinkled with fresh dill fortified us for our walk along the boardwalk to Coney Island. The last time we were here was in the fall with our good friends from Leicester. It was nippy and nearly deserted then and we got to huddle over shot glasses of vodka in the Café restaurant Volna.

The August heat had brought out the crowds, a dazzling array of ethnicities. Mostly families, there were also many older couples and children everywhere fighting the torpor that comes from having spent many playful hours in the sun. Lively chatter everywhere around us rose above the cry of seagulls, the music that never fails to cheer me up. Being wheelchair bound was no hindrance to a pair of young lovers gazing out to the sea.

Ahead the lights of Coney Island drew us into a bigger crowd, a heaving, playfully boisterous crowd. “Hit the freak. HAHAHAHAHAHA!” The raspy-voiced recording looped over and over: “Hey lady. You in the tight pink shorts. C’mere. HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Shadowy figures bent over fake automatic weapons shooting paintballs at the darting figure in the pit below.

We were in Coney Island. A stop in Rudy’s Bar & Grill for an antidote of vodka was in order before the evening’s performance of Burlesque-By-the-Sea. Rudy’s is a twilight zone of memory and present with only a bit of the future lurking in some hipsters who sit quietly and warily at a table and have not yet claimed the place as theirs. Bikers and biker chicks abound. Grandmothers bustle past the teenage boys in the requisite low-slung baggy cargo shorts. A bottle-blonde muscleman is a dead ringer for Joe Pesci. Another man, small and dark-skinned, his lean arms roped with snakey veins, wanders through the bar crowd selling rosary beads. A father cradles his boy in his arms and dances with him, twirling him around while mother watches. Salsa music blares and a bald-headed woman shimmies alongside a multi-tattooed man. One customer’s request for piña coladas is met with a gruff response from the barman: “I don’t use the blender at night.” “Gimme a Bud—a big one,” gets a much speedier reaction. The Mister and I are treated to a free round by another barman because we never asked for it, as the hapless woman next to us mistakenly did. “But, I thought you were supposed to give me a free one on the third round, no?” He wasn’t having it and made sure she knew it was at the discretion of the bartender. And there up on the wall behind the bar, among the huge collection of photographs of vintage Coney, a moldy dust jacket from the book: Ruby. The Gem of Coney Island, neon beer signs and the obligatory warning to pregnant women is a faded color photo of Richard Nixon clasping a reluctant Pat to his side.

On the boardwalk the crowds ignore the late hour and little kids are whizzing around amusement rides in the kiddie park that used to be Astroland. For fifty cents you could see a one-hundred-pound rat! Think of it, what can you do these days for fifty cents? “Save Coney Island” T-shirts are everywhere but Coney seems to have saved itself. Rough little theater groups perform on makeshift stages, applauded by huge friendly crowds as performers comically play out Depression-era scenarios of failed mortgages, lost jobs and repossession by greedy bankers.

The scheduled fireworks start late and we agree that we’ll have to miss the burlesque show this time. We’re on Coney time, after all. But we’ll be back. The fireworks, a decidedly very low-tech affair brought back more fond memories than anything Macy’s has ever elicited as the ooohs and aaahs chorused around us. Sleepy children slumped in strollers, oblivious. One mother explained that they had been on the beach since that morning and smiled indulgently as she rocked her son back and forth. Another woman, extravagantly manicured, described the filet-o-fish she’s had earlier. “I hadda throw out the fish. That’s how bad it was. Fries so greezy it was up in my nails. I stuffed them into the bread and had a potato sandwich!”

We had one last stroll along the boardwalk, listening for strains of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime from a small but live orchestra.

It’s not all bad, this New Agey communication. I have friends on facebook who enjoy life and friends who enjoy life and can still take the time to discuss life’s lesser moments like the destruction of hundred year-old trees on a broad boulevard in Barcelona. We don’t ignore the plight of carriage horses in Central Park and can link to friends who rescue horses on a sanctuary in the Hudson River Valley. We can write about our causes and report on political demonstrations we’ve attended. We can be happy for each other’s country when it gets something right, like the recent Supreme Court decision to hear the case of Troy Davis, an innocent man on death row.

But sometimes the human voice, the handwritten note or, even better letter are what lifts the spirits. Drifting away from the late-night crowds only just beginning to make their way home the last song from the karaoke bunch on the boardwalk lingers behind us. You just cannot imagine Stevie Wonder singing: “I just e-mailed, or I just twittered…” No, it can only be, “I just called to say I love you.”

CONEY ISLAND IN AUGUST

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.—Louise Glück

A SHORT STORY

LAUGHING GAS

“LIFE is unfair.”

Diane turned cautiously from her mother’s sharp rebuke, avoiding what might have come next. She pressed her chin into her breastbone, biting her tongue. She’d already tempted fate by questioning the unfairness of it all, but that hand of fate could pack a wallop if she didn’t just zip it immediately. There is nothing she can do about it now. She fingers the soup can-sized rollers in her hair. It had taken her all morning to carefully section her fine straight hair, demanding patience she had very little of. If only she looked like Sandra Dee she’d get a boyfriend like Bobby Darin who was a lot better looking than Frankie Russo.

Not that she has a boyfriend. Not that she’s even allowed to have a boyfriend. That’s what the argument was about last night. The Shrimp had tracked Diane and Frankie to the playground. Her little sister Suzie was called The Shrimp—among other things—because she was so tiny. Anyone who didn’t know guessed she was much younger than her ten years. Diane should have raced from the grasping, juiced up boy as soon as she heard her mother yelling from their first floor window into a courtyard already emptied of kids who had come when they were called. And when her little sister peered into the cement barrel tunnel on the playground and urged: “Better get home for dinner. Mommy’s gonna kill you,” she should have been nicer to Suzie, not screamed at her as she sped away from them. She should not have yelled, “You suck!”

Her mother’s expression twisted from annoyance into rage as her youngest delivered the reason for Diane’s lateness. If her father had not been there, resigned under the desultory plume from his cigarette, staring at an empty dinner plate, then Diane surely would have felt her mother’s hand across her cheek. Instead, he tossed the cigarette into the sink on his way to the refrigerator. “She’s boy crazy that one!” Her mother stabbed a finger at Diane. “She’ll wind up like that…that Sharon.” A familiar hiss escaped as he popped the tab on a can of Rheingold and halted her rant. He looked at Diane. “You are too young for a boyfriend.”

Now Diane’s Saturday is ruined. “You want to be a grown up?” her mother challenged. “Then take your sister to the dentist.” At least this time she had been spared her father’s mantra: “Yours is not to reason why. Yours is but to do or die.” Well, she was dying, that’s for sure. Whatever she might have been doing was far better than what she had to do now.

“You aren’t going out like that, young lady.”

Diane had painstakingly ironed the ruffled bands on her prized “angel” shirt, which stopped just at her midriff, leaving a bare patch above her favorite pair of pedal pushers, cinched at the waist with cute little buckles. Her mother’s sting still on her skin, she tossed the offending blouse to the floor and replaced it with a plain pink button front, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Out of sight, she will flip the collar up and pull the shirttails into a knot, freeing her tummy. Her Keds shine whitely with a fresh coat of polish. She’s pulled her useless hair into a tight ponytail until it hurts. Even teased within an inch of its life it has no body. Suzie stares dolefully from the foot of her bed, one of two identical single beds in the claustrophobic room they have always shared. “It…your hair…looks better like that.” She had no privacy, no privacy at all! Diane shot back: “You suck.”

“Hold her hand crossing the street. Especially on Northern Boulevard.” Diane prodded her sister through the front door and into the courtyard mumbling, “If she’s so worried about you why doesn’t she take you?” Susie’s lower lip puckered. “We could walk.” “Well, of course we could walk, stupid. We are walking.” Diane held out the coins her mother had given her. “Save on carfare,” she mimicked, “you have nothing better to do with yourself so walk there.” “I mean,” Susie piped, “we could walk back, too.”

They exchanged a conspiratorial look. This had happened before. They could be arguing, screaming like banshees one minute, punching, and pinching each other. Then something would happen to bring it all to a stop, some way of getting back at her.

Ahead, slouched onto a bench as if he was joined to it, sat Frankie. Older than Diane by a few years, he pretended not to see her. He plucked the cigarette pack from his sleeve and tapped it onto the back of his hand. “Hey there, little one.” He winked and ran the palm of his hand over slick black hair. Susie giggled and lowered her eyes. “Come on,” Diane urged, pressing her sister’s delicate shoulders, sneaking a glance at Frankie who was still not looking at her.

They picked up the pace from there to the schoolyard at the top of the walk. A few of the neighbor boys were chucking a basketball, but the handball courts were empty. Diane pulled The Shrimp from the low-slung chains looping brown-patched lawns. Because their apartment’s first floor windows eyed the stoop entrance and overlooked benches where tenants congregated, the family quarrels were public theater, their mother’s harangues legendary. Airless summer nights drew the colored kids to the schoolyard with their parents and older brothers and sisters. Diane’s heartbeat fell in with the conga drums and she’d lie in bed imagining the women dancing, the street lights on their skin like flickering candles in the dark, humid night. Until her mother, not content with screaming at them, decided enough was enough and stormed up to the schoolyard. The drums would go quiet. Diane counted off the steps it took before her mother was far enough away from the dancers to be meaningless again and the drumbeats resumed, along with Diane’s sleepy smile.

• • •

Susie meandered in lopsided dreaminess ahead of her older sister’s watchful eye as they traipsed along 48th street heading for Sunnyside. It always struck Diane that not far from the impersonal complex of public housing, there were neat yellow brick homes in comforting rows along a street shaded with trees at the far end, kids’ bicycles tilted into wrought iron banisters. Her mother’s parting reprimand ringing in her head, Diane took her sister’s hand at the crossing on Northern Boulevard. It was a no man’s land of auto dealerships and ill-defined structures split by the broad boulevard. Determined drivers whizzed past them. Safely on the other side, Susie wrenched her hand from Diane’s grip and sprinted on spindly legs in crisp cotton shorts, putting some distance between them. The sight of the Empire State building on her right in the far distance reassured Diane. Next year she would go to a public high school in Manhattan. She’d passed the test. It was a dream come true. No more of this babysitting. She’d have friends and dates and drawing classes and way too much schoolwork.

Susie slowed, squatted and pretended interest in some scrap on the sidewalk but Diane knew that the train trestle ahead spooked her. It was a foul and scarred strip of grimy wall, weeping with blistered paint under a skeleton of iron pilings and train tracks encrusted with pigeon shit. The stench of urine on a hot summer day hurried even those hardened pedestrians. “’Fraidy cat,” Diane jeered and then laughed to soften the blow. Susie turned. Her shoulders were drawn under her ears. Her brow was deeply furrowed, her eyes looked darker and older in her small face. “I’m not!” she cried. Diane laughed again. “You are so.” But she hurried to her sister and in an unconscious move they clasped hands and when Diane shouted, “Run!” they tore under the train trestle, hollering for all they were worth as a cloud of pigeons burst from their path.

The other side brought them to a canopy of trees, alongside a chain link fence woven thickly with ivy. Wooden cottages, cheerily painted, nestled alongside two-story brick homes, front doors shaded with green-and-white striped awnings. Embellished iron gates led from the sidewalk to shady places behind the houses. White wooden porches graced red brick homes and flowerpots hung from hooks. Hydrangea bushes ballooned in front gardens, blossoming violet and blue, lavender and pink, depending on what bit of iron or copper was buried at their roots. Sunlight dropped through the trees onto the pavement, splashes of light from a natural palette. The complex of low-storied houses called Sunnyside Gardens was a paradise to Diane. A few steps up from the street and you were in a landscaped garden so private you could hardly believe it. Lace curtains billowed out from open doors. White morning glories, like wedding bells, shivered when you touched them.

At Queens Boulevard Diane grabbed Susie’s hand again. It was always tricky getting to the other side of the broad, congested road and Diane took no chances as they hurtled across one way, stopping under the viaduct looming above them, before they took their chances again on the other side.

The dentist’s office was up a flight of stairs in a narrow two-story building on a quieter avenue behind the boulevard. The waiting room was a small, nondescript area just outside the office. Dr. Tucher stood in the doorway between the reception area and the examining room, expecting them. His smile was hard to describe. Like it came with his face and never changed. He smelled clean and his hands were always cold. The few straight-backed chairs were old, and so were the magazines piled onto a rickety table in the corner. In the winter, the radiator gurgled and steam coated the window. Today a fan perched on the radiator in front of the open window whirring softly. Diane had never recalled seeing any other patients and she slumped into a chair, prepared to wait.

He spoke softly, not exactly gently. “Come along.” Susie passed under his arm and when he put a hand on her shoulder she flinched. Dr. Tucher urged her, “It won’t hurt, and you’ll be right as rain.” Diane called after her, “Hey, peanut.” Susie turned, her look disengaged. “It’s not that bad,” Diane crooned. They disappeared behind the closed door.

Diane was glad not to have to be in that chair today. Everything about the experience was off putting. The office equipment, all of it a nauseatingly pale translucent green like she imagined the color of sea slugs. She hated the feel of his cold hands prodding the inside of her gaping mouth. They smelled abnormally clean. Her mother was usually with them but after awhile Diane was relieved when she’d disappear on errands for the duration. Her mother was a bit too flirty with the doctor who let his hand linger on her arm sometimes. She and her sister would joke later and call him ‘Dr. Touch Her.’ And that gas mask. Ugh. The first time he placed it over her face she reacted so strongly that he looked distraught and worried allowed that he had somehow hurt her. He carefully explained that the gas would make it painless, even make her feel good. She was not persuaded and instead endured the long needle he’d had to shoot into her gums to anesthetize a compromised tooth. Susie would be distracted with the silvery balls of filling he let them play with.

Diane dropped a thin pile of magazines onto her lap. Life magazine. All old issues. She put an issue of National Geographic back on the table. Her annoyance returned. Not even a current copy of Seventeen. Jack Paar squinted from a cover of Life. Her dad called him the Pinko, or rather, that Pinko. She slid it back onto the table. Here was Debbie Reynolds on the cover of Life, in Spain. She’d like to go to Spain someday. She was surprised to see Marilyn Monroe next. It was an old issue of the magazine but one Diane had never seen. Flipping through it she saw an article about a young woman in Japan who was called a ‘commoner’ and how she was marrying a Prince. So, it could happen. Diane held her breath as she slowly tore Marilyn’s sexy image from the magazine. She folded it carefully and slid the page into her pants pocket.

There was no clock in the waiting area. Diane fidgeted irritably. Her little sister was so little and even more maddening than ever. She hated sharing a room. They were so different. Everything about her life, her dreams, had to be secreted in her diary and then even that was not safe. Diane bristled, recalling with anger the day she arrived home to see Susie, surrounded by her friends on the stoop, reading aloud from that diary, its lock cleanly cut from the covers. Exasperated, Diane pictured their reward after this. A treat at the ice cream parlor on the corner, thank you mother. They would have to walk home but it would be worth it. She might have suggested the White Castle—mystery meat her dad called it—but Susie was the one getting drilled and she would want ice cream.

The door clicked open. Susie, head lowered, slipped quickly past the doctor. “Okay there?” she asked. He assured Diane she was fine, that she was still feeling the affects of the gas. “You’re taking the bus?”

Outside Diane started for the ice cream parlor. Susie stood still, looking around her like she was lost. “What’s up?” “I don’t….” “You don’t what, want ice cream?” Diane crouched down to look at her sister more closely, see if her jaw might be swollen. But apart from that vacant look, she seemed fine. “Peanut?” she urged, “Are you sure?” Then resorting to her father’s precocious nickname she whispered, “No ice cream for the zinzemeier kartuffel glazer?” Diane reached for Susie at her waist, aiming to hoist herself back up. Her sister’s body went rigid, as if a thunderbolt had shot through her. “Get off!” she shrieked, her face reddened and clenched. Diane, stunned, straightened up. “Okay, okay. Sheesh, you’re touchy.”

After a few silent moments Susie murmured, “Bus” and she clasped Diane’s hand.

They rode home in silence. Diane stared out the window. Next year she would go to a public high school in Manhattan. She’d passed the test. It was a dream come true. No more of this babysitting. She’d have friends and dates and drawing classes and way too much schoolwork.

LAUGHING GAS is an original short story by Linda Danz.

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©August 2009.