Laura Buchholz

Karen had been married and divorced three times by the time she was 25, and after the third divorce went through, she and her two twins, Marla and Daphne (8) and her other two identical twins–Kevin and Roger (6) sat at the breakfast table discussing what had gone wrong.

“At least we’re all from the same dad,” said Kevin and Roger, in unison.  “That makes things a lot easier,” said Marla and Daphne, sawing at their shared waffle in unison.

“But dad’s new girlfriend hates all of us,” said Karen.  And it was true, she did.  Paul’s new girlfriend Leslie hated Karen and she hated children and she particularly hated Karen’s children because all of them looked exactly like Paul, even the girls.  Also, Leslie suspected that the children might be even smarter than she was, which they were.  But Leslie was young and beautiful, mostly because she had the money to get expensive highlights every three months.  It’s true that without those highlights she probably wouldn’t look so hot.  This is something that Kevin and Roger had pointed out after meeting her.  But Leslie had a great job counseling people who had lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, so business was booming and she had just bought one of those stacked washer-dryer sets that nobody can afford unless they’re doing really well.  Also she had terrific health insurance and a nice house with a gas fireplace–a house where Paul could have his own room to weave his fiber-art rugs that he sold for 499.99 on eBay.   When the kids came to visit, every other Friday on odd months except March, because he and Leslie were going on vacation to Argentina–they would have a nice place to play, and a big yard.  Leslie thought a big yard was key because she didn’t like a mess and if it was up to her, she would leave the kids outside like dogs to fend for themselves. Paul had never had his own room when he lived with Karen.  So no matter what, this was a step up.

Well.

“I guess I’ll be heading back to school,” said Karen, flipping through the catalogue of continuing education from the Illinois School of Generalized Studies.  “What should I major in, kids?”

“Pharmacy” said the girls, their mouths filled with waffle.  “You’ll get a good job that way.”

“Geriatric anesthesiology” said the boys, who were going through some sort of a phase.

“Hmm.” said Karen.  She opened the book at random and her finger came down on a green page, the title of which was “Xylem and Phloem—Making Cacti Work To Your Advantage”.  This might be it, thought Karen, but she didn’t want to say it out loud, lest  the gods smite her enthusiasm, as they were wont to do.

Later when the kids were over at Leslie’s and Paul’s, Karen went online and she looked at his rugs.  Not bad, she thought.  I like the green one.  But, she thought, maybe at this point she should buy such things from someone else.  She tried to remember if Leslie had any rugs in her house.  She seemed to remember that Leslie was a concrete floor kind of girl.  Concrete floor and blonde highlights.  Well.  Maybe she had a good sense of humor.

The kids dug a hole in Leslie’s yard with their bare hands and made it into their fort.

It’s when you’re really busy that you get things done.  Mike Yardsborough knew this, and that is why, when it was time for him to write his thesis on the origins of masculine thought in the 19th century and its implications for the rise and ultimate fall of the railroad systems as a metaphor for the transfiguration of the male phallotype in the American narrative—that’s when he decided to really pile on the other obligations.  Just to be sure he’d get that thesis done.

Mike called his mom and asked if there was anything she needed done.  Of course she did.  The gutters needed cleaning and she needed new storm windows and she needed a big strong man to intimidate the mailman, who had been scrunching her bills into the tiny mail slot instead of ringing the doorbell and giving them to her personally, unwrinkled.  Mike penciled her in for 2:00 PM on Saturday.  Then he updated his Netflix queue, with a bunch of romantic comedies that he was not particularly into, but he thought he should do his research if he was going to go back online with with Hangout.com, the new dating web site for people seeking emotional connection with attractive persons without the expectation (threat) of eventual commitment.  He made a note to self to call his professional photographer friend Lenny, who could take pictures of him in the alley behind his house, where there was good late afternoon light and he could pretend to be playing basketball.

Mike had never been one to cook very much, mainly because he was impatient and cooking required big chunks of time that would take away from his time online or his thesis writing time or his workout time or whatever else.   But now he went out and invested in some cookbooks.  He joined a co-op and wrote down in his calendar three times during the week–Monday Thursday and Sunday–when he would go to the store and get vegetables.

Then Mike made an appointment for a haircut.

Then he got a dog. A weiner dog and he named him Badger.

Then he brought all those books out of the basement that he bought and had never read.  He put them in piles to remind himself to read them.

Then Mike joined the DFL and signed up to do some volunteer work for them, mostly making signs for other people to carry to various rallies across the country.  A lot of protest signs, he noticed, not a lot of them putting forth their own ideas.  He made a note to self to come up with some of his own ideas when he got home.

That night before Mike did his nightly meditation practice in front of a white–not yellow–candle, he noticed the date on the refrigerator.   March 4.  He only 36 hours left to write his thesis. 450 pages.  He hadn’t started yet.

This is it, thought Mike.  Now I’m really going to be productive.

The hare wanted a re-match with the tortoise. 

“I feel like I wasn’t my best self,” said the hare.  “That’s back when I was online a lot.  Surfing Facebook, updating my Twitter.  I was really fragmented and frankly, hadn’t been training effectively–”

The tortoise yawned.

“Anyway,” said the hare, “I’ve since gone on a juice-fast and I’ve cleansed my colon and I gave up cable and have been on a retreat at the Kripalu yoga center out east—they gave me a mala made of obsedian, which is supposed to be grounding, and I’ve been saying my mantras, which I probably should not share with you because it’s mine, and I need to contain that energy in my aura…”

The tortoise was just finishing up eating a peach.  He’d been at it for three hours and it had been a long, satisfying journey.  He was sad to see it coming to an end.

“Let’s just race,” said the hare.  “It doesn’t even have to be a race.  It can be for fun.  And you know what, I’m not even going to run.  I’m just going to lope along next to you.  What do you think? Huh huh huh? Let’s do it let’s do it whaddya think, whaddya think?”

The hare sat and thumped his back foot.  The tortoise just looked at him.

“Listen, I bet you’re wondering about the finish line. If I just lope along next to you the whole time.  And you know what, it doesn’t even matter.  You can cross over it first.  Or we’ll both cross at the same time.  Or we’ll just refuse to cross the line.  We’ll end the race five meters short.  I just don’t want to go down in history as some ADD sort of idiot who can’t focus for more than 10 yards at a time.  What do you say?”

The tortoise sat still. He ran his thick tongue over his beak, searching for stray pieces of peach.

“So what do you say, huh?  Are you up for this?  Race race race.  Come on.  Let’s do it.  Race race race.  Do you want to race or what?”

“I’m already running,” said the tortoise.  And the hare’s eyes grew wide.

Gregg Trentwink had lost track of time, which was what he was supposed to do because he was in a casino, and in a casino nobody wants you to know what time it is.

He had thought that maybe he had been sitting for about two hours, but in reality, he realized it could have been more like five.

Gregg was still seated at the slot machine, putting in quarter after quarter, and pulling the lever and waiting for the cherries to line up.  He had had so  many permuataions of cherry-cherry-banana, banana banana cherry, cherry banana orange….it just didn’t seem right that he hadn’t had the luck of the magic combination yet.  Yet. He inserted a coin and pulled the lever.

Gregg’s back was getting sore.  He looked around for his wife, who had come in here with him at some point, but was now nowhere in sight.  In fact, nobody was. Maybe Liza was at the pool, thought Gregg.  Liza liked to be in the water and she had limited patience for on-land activities.  She had been sitting near Gregg for a little while, and now she was gone.  Probably swimming laps, thought Gregg, or soaking in the whirlpool.

What time was it?  Gregg looked around. There was the carpet with the seizure-inducing pattern, there was the even, warm lighting that didn’t seem to come from any fixture, but instead merely seeped from the walls on its own, no shadows, no windows alerting him to the shadows of the passing hours.

Then Gregg heard the voice of God.

“Go Outside” boomed the voice, and Gregg winced.  “Who is that?” he cried, and the voice of God boomed out again, “Go Outside, Gregg.  Go Outside Right Now!!!”

And so Gregg picked up his bucket of quarters and he walked in the direction of what he vaguely remembered at one time was probably a door.  It was really odd, he thought, how nobody else was in this casino.  Where were the workers?  Where were the people on vacation?  Where were the bartenders, the blackjack dealers, the lounge acts, the cocktail waitresses in the short black skirts and the blue button-down Oxfords?  Where was everybody????

And where was a mirror? Gregg was not a vain  man but he wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting down and he thought maybe he should at least put a comb through his hair before stepping outside and interfacing with the outside world. Gregg was suddenly quite aware that he needed to brush his teeth.  All he had had to drink for the past however long was endless bottles of purple grape juice, and now that he was standing and walking, what he thought he really could use was a beer.  Yes, absolutely, a beer.  A beer and a toothbrush.

The sliding doors came into view and Gregg broke into a trot.  He sailed through the doors and looked around the parking lot and came to a slow stop.  He looked around.  The leaves were off the trees and it was cold.  Hadn’t he come here in the summer?  And where was his car?  And what were THESE cars?  These were models he had never heard of before.  These were cars he had never seen before.   What time was it?  What day was it?  What YEAR was it??

Gregg walked up to one of the cars and tried to peer in to see if there was a clock on the dashboard.  He got up close, so close he could see his breath fogging up the glass, but the windows were tinted so he couldn’t see anything.  And then he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection.  Gregg gasped.

He looked old.  He looked tired.  His face sagged and his hair looked thin and unkempt.  He spun back around to go back into the casino  but there was no casino.  The sign on the building he had just emerged from was not the Chunk-a-Lunk Chippewa Cheap Change Casino, but a Spray-N-Wash full-service car wash.  There was a truck going through right now whose driver was frantically rolling up his windows as the rainbow foam came down.

Gregg’s heart beat faster.  He jogged through the parking lot and spotted a gas station across a service road.  Gregg burst in like an armed robber and stalked straight to the newspaper and magazine section and grabbed today’s paper.

“Sir?” asked the man behind the counter—”sir?”

Gregg grabbed the paper and looked at the front page.  2011.  It was 2011.  He had been sitting in that casino for 12 years.

Gregg slumped down onto the floor.

“Can I help you sir?  Sir?  Can I help you?”  The man in the red apron stood over Gregg with a flyswatter in his hand.

“Not everybody needs to go to college,” said Kevin, stating the obvious.  But Luther, his exhausted guidance counselor, glancing surreptitiously at the clock over Kevin’s left shoulder, knew it was his job to argue the other side of this point.

“Sure, not everybody NEEDS to,” said Luther.  “But you have the OPPORTUNITY.  You, Kevin, have a full-ride woodworking scholarship to go to Vermont’s Academy of the Ambiguous Arts.  Why would you throw that away?”

“Why can’t I just start my own woodworking studio right now?  I already have one.  In my garage.  Okay, my parents’ garage,” conceded Kevin, “but  still.  I could get my own garage.  And maybe someday, my own house, too.”

“VAAA is a very prestigious college,” urged Luther.  “Almost anyone who is anyone in the small wood-carving industry has probably gone to VAAA.”

“I don’t know,” said Kevin, leaning back in his chair.  “Convince me.”

Kevin sat with his ankle crossed over his knee, the man’s leg-cross.  He wondered if being a career counselor was sort of like being a headhunter….if Luther would be getting 15% from someone, somewhere, if he did decide to go to VAAA.  The truth was that he really really did in fact want to go.  But his ex-girlfriend Leslie who had just dumped him for debate-star and wrestling all-state champion Mike Cutchins—who had then turned around and promptly dumped HER for Elizabeth Mergenson, a quiet country girl who rode horses somewhere out of town–well it turns out that Leslie had ALSO gotten a full scholarship to VAAA, and she had already accepted.  She was going for fiber arts.  She had already bought herself a dress form.  Kevin was still in love with her but he didn’t want to be anymore because the whole Mike Cutchins debacle  had disgusted him and also degraded her and, by proxy, him.  If they got together now, they would be just two outcasts thrown on the scrap heap of Mike Cutchins’ leftover loser pile.  Kevin thought he might want a fresh start.  There was a girl who worked in a convenience store on the corner of 15th and Larson who wasn’t all that bad looking.  If she lost five pounds and grew out those bangs, he thought, she would be even better. Also her name was Davide, pronounced as if it were French, which he didn’t want to do, so in his mind he had to pretend her name was Danielle.

“Kevin?  Are you listening to me?”

“Huh?” said Kevin, “what?”

“The deadline is coming up next Wednesday,  Kevin.  What do you think you’re going to do?”

Kevin paused.  “Did you say full ride?” asked Kevin.

“Yes.  That’s what I said.”

“Hmm.  Hmm.”  Kevin felt the tiny carved wooden elephant in his pocket, and he reached for his pen.

Janice decided to change her hair color back to blond because according to her life coach, blond was the color of enthusiasm and brown was the color of responsibility and the choice was hers, but in fact Janice had already made the decision to go back to blond anyway, and her life coach simply provided the validation that she needed to go through with it.

Things had been going unreasonably well with the fun coach.  So much so that when Janice got her new fun-purse snatched in the back alley of the U-Save-When-U-Buy where she was picking up some snappies (fireworks), she actually managed to enjoy the experience.  She and the mugger went out for drinks afterwards.  Janice told the bartender that she was the mugger’s mom and the bartender bought it.

The mugger ordered a couple of Premium beers and over the course of 90 minutes Janice found out out that his name was Keith and that he was 18, and he had resorted to purse-snatching to get back at his parents for all those years of piano lessons they had made him take.  Keith had wanted to be a football player but his parents were too refined for that sort of thing, they assumed that football was a dummy’s game, or if you weren’t dumb when you started, you’d be dumb when you came out, one way or another, and so instead they had made this big beefy kid with the thick hands and the red face sit down at the piano, setting him up for a lifetime of disappointment and failure.

Janice looked him straight in the eye and told him not to go back to piano lessons.  She told him that it was not too late for him to be a football player, and there was a local league in the city that she knew about, and she gave him a phone number of her old pal Kevin, and Keith took it, gratefully.  Ultimately Keith kept Janice’s purse, because it reminded him of a football, but he let her take out her wallet and her keys and everything else and so she figured it was even.

A good time was had by all .

Believe it or not, there are some people in the world who don’t know that a blizzard is anything other than a very thick shake with big chunks of stuff in it (Oreos, Butterfinger pieces)–chunks and shake that don’t come out of the cup when you turn it upside down.  At least if it’s a good one, it shouldn’t.  Some of them do, though.  There are certain hastily made Blizzards that, lacking the proper integrity, will pursue the path of least resistance when turned upside down–a short journey that leads directly to the floor.  That’s one certain kind of blizzard.

But there is such a thing as a natural kind of blizzard, and it involves a lot of snow coming out of the sky at a dizzying rate, making it hard to see and hard to move the car and therefore greatly increasing your chances of getting towed and having to go downtown to the impound lot and give a guy some money for a “service” that he probably would have preferred not to perform in the first place. Impound lots, like the Park Slope Food Co-Op, are built on a foundation of hate, and you can feel that as soon as you walk in.  Nobody is at an impound lot because they want to be–even the people who work there.  Everybody feels trapped.  But what makes us trapped?  It is our own minds.  Our own minds and also the long line of angry people ahead of us who keep sighing and checking their watches but pretending that they’re doing okay because people who drive Toyota Priuses have evolved beyond anger–didn’t you know that–Oh look someone just punched a hole in the wall.  That’s where the wreath is going to go.

If you are outside in a blizzard and you do not wish to be seen, try wearing white.  This is what white rabbits, snow owls, and winter lizards do, and you can’t see them unless they move.  Humping around in a black parka and wind pants, however, WILL get you seen.  If that’s what you want.  Is that what you want?  To be clearly visible to a snow lizard? Consider this carefully.

A blizzard is dramatic and challenging but rarely lasts longer than a day or two.  Therefore, if you start a game of Monopoly NOW, you will probably be finishing up and also ending a couple of friendships right about the time that the plows have cleared the path to where your car is supposed to be, but is not, because you moved it for the snow day–but on Day 2, not on Day 3, in which case you are probably in for another trip to the impound lot.

This time, consider bringing a book.