Theory X

“Mother has been dead…..”
“Don’t say it!” came the command from the other end of the line. With one heavily-gloved hand, Sara lifted the lid on the spaghetti boiling on the stove. It was writhing around in the roiling water like a nest of angry vipers.
“You need to clean your stuff out.”
She put the cordless down on the counter and poured contents of the pot into a strainer. Huge clouds of steam billowed up and around her head. The phone, and the barely discernable squawk from the phone were temporarily rendered invisible.
Sara was tired. The day had ended with barely a whimper at the forgettably-named ad agency where she’d labored over a phalanx of sketches that, in her opinion, far outshone the original idea. But instead of murmuring appreciatively over the finished products the ridiculously-named and even more ridiculously dressed studio manager had merely clucked and taken them away with not so much as a thank-you very much.

The phone nattered on in its resting place on the counter and Sara emptied a tin of sauce with mushrooms into another pot and put the flame on.
By-your-leave, indeed!
She was last to go. Left alone at the sketch table to finish up what had obviously been the most problematical of the toy line, the other freelancers slipping away as anonymously as they’d chosen to be all day. Bucket lights suspended from the ceiling were turned off and the studio had been emptied of all the useless hangers-on who did little more than attend meeting after meeting and doodle prodigiously on leather-bound binders before getting into their expensive cars and roaring off for some evening fun. She’d shrugged on her coat and said goodbye to the only other person visible, a sad-looking MIS grunt tinkering with a crashed MAC, and headed out into the night.
The winter night had come for her, and with it biting cold.

The phone went silent.
She calmly redialed and when the line was picked up, apologized.
“Sorry, juggling too many things and it nearly went into the soup.”
“Sara…..”
“Chip, you have to get your stuff once and for all.”
“What’s the damned hurry?”
Sara had heard this all before.
“Your shoes stink.”
There was more sputtering on the other end.
“And your socks, too.”
Superheated, the sauce puffed up like a bloodied soufflé. She quickly pulled it to safety and sighed audibly into the phone,
“I’m finished with this conversation, Chip. Get your junk out of here or it will be on the lawn…..the slushy, freezing lawn, by next week.”
Then she hung up.

When the phone rang again she had a mouthful of spaghetti.
“What!” she managed.
“Sara?”
The voice sounded familiar. The last of the spaghetti slid down her throat. Gone, gone.
“Is this Sara?”
“How the hell did you get this number!” she cried.
“Whoah, don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
“I’m eating,” she said unnecessarily. She was going to hang up anyway,
“No, wait!” It hovered near her ear.
“I got your number from your mother.”
Sara put the phone back as close as she could to her mouth.
“My mother, for your information, is dead.”
“I know.”
“You never knew her.”
“I did.”
Sara didn’t know how to respond to this.
“Please,” said Nate. “Please don’t hang up on me.”

Theory IX

Bud came home well after dark to find his brother sitting on the couch. Implements of dinner were scattered around him on the floor and he looked asleep, a china teacup balanced delicately on his stomach. He tried to sneak past.

“Oh, girl....”
The plaintive refrain from a Beatles’ song rose out of the dark shape. Nate had a beautiful voice when he chose to share it.
“Doof, you scared the shit out of me.” Bud went to turn on the sole light, a battered Eames floor model they’d rescued from a dumpster. Someone had pasted Scooby-Doo stickers on the shade.
“Hey, Bud.” Nate sounded tired.
“Any dinner left?” Bud was pulling at his valet bowtie. It seemed to be getting tighter every day and Nate teased him it was because of the weights he was lifting in the garage. ‘Soon, I’m going to be calling you Bulldog.’
“Vermicelli in vodka sauce with Bella mushrooms.”

The two brothers separated, as was their custom, for the night. A thin ribbon of light from the kitchen door provided the only illumination after Nate had heaved himself out of the depths of the couch and shut down the lamp.
“Oh, gir,rl…..” he began again. The replying dishes clamored and pots crashed easing his troubles and turning his attention to sleep, which he did, toes up on the sofa, cup and saucer cradled in his arms.

************************************

On Monday Sara got a call from Circle Me, with a job for the week. They needed an illustrator for a toy concept meeting at a downtown advertising agency. Sara had been working less and less lately and she took to wondering if it had anything to do with her dislike of the head recruiter. But then she was careful to hide her feelings.

Still, work was dwindling and it might be time to find another placement agency. It couldn’t be the quality of her work - she’d always gotten good reviews from clients. And she was a quick study, picking up the style and pace of the assignment without complaint. But the bigger advertising agencies had stopped calling for repeat work and she was being sent out now for increasingly smaller outfits, with commensurate drops in her hourly rate.


This client was in a loft on John Street and she’d been in the same location when it had been occupied by others. A succession of start-ups with the same fresh faces and eager energy that had gradually dwindled into oblivion. She introduced herself to the smartly dressed woman at the reception (wasn’t it the same curved plywood desk?) only to be directed back into a bullpen of sorts where a dozen or more art-school students (for they looked that age) were busily sketching at a railroad flat of tables. They barely looked up when a woman with flaming red hair and thigh-high boots materialized out of a warren of wavy-glass cubicles.

There was that look again. Too nice. The others scribbled furiously, not a familiar face in the bunch.
“You must be…..” she searched her memory. Not very bright, thought Sara.
“Oh, yes!” she cried and arched her eyebrows to indicate that she had, in fact, remembered, and then fairly pushed her to an empty seat next to a boy-child with multiple piercings and a faux Mohawk.
His striped sweater sleeves were longer than the ends of his fingers but it hadn’t slowed him down any. He was making fashion work for him.

Sara edged away on the stool, it screeched on the concrete floor and he gave her an unflattering look.
The red-headed woman had disappeared.
What was she supposed to do?
Looking around surreptitiously she bided her time by then digging through her large drawstring bag for the box of pantones and drawing pencils.
The boy looked up and sighed.
“Honey…..”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.
“You idiot, that’s the name of the studio manager!”
“Sorry.” She needed this person, this pierced, stuck-up brat.
“Anyway, Honey has assigned everyone on this block to do working drawings of one of 12 SKUs. And you,” he finished with a flourish, “have number 12.” He then pointed to the bottom of the rubbish heap of choice, a badly drawn concept sketch, no doubt by the untalented product manager, of a hideous thigamajig with seven arms and some kind of squawk box attached to its bulbous head. No doubt it came with a clever name dreamed up by the creative director who came with the team. The sketch had been fingered by everyone before being abandoned, alone, in the middle of the table.

Mercifully the boy left her alone after that and Sara, after glancing at the other work in progress, set about to do her part.

Behind her Honey, resplendent in a fake fur vest as she prepared to take an early lunch, whispered to a co-worker as they peered around the bookend cubicle.
“Look at her,” she said, jabbing a red fingernail.
The man saw a woman hunched over the table, a dove amongst a flock of peacocks, her baggy grey sweater loosening woolen threads of silver to float upwards where they threatened to take hold in the unruly brown hair.

Honey shuddered.
The man shrugged.
“She’s working hard. Isn’t that all that matters?”
The studio manager looked up over the sea of glass anxiously. Her bosses expected miracles in the three days they had to get this presentation together.
She’d take a brown mouse.
She’d take a dead body if it would produce for her.

…..but the pinched face, the owlish glasses from another era. The agency had told her she was young, OCA trained.
Where had they found her?

Theory VIII

Sara’s hands were full of tea things so she ignored him. The room had cooled somewhat as the day had begun to cloud over, withdrawing into the inevitability of the season. There seemed to be no heat source in the room, just as she had remembered it, the air currents ran with the time of day and were just as unpredictable.

She lifted the biscuit up again and after licking the chocolate from her finger, repeated,
“These are good.”
Nate snorted.
“You don’t have to sound quite so incredulous.”
“It’s just….”
He stood up again, restless.
He thumped over to the drum set and eased himself onto the stool. It squeaked but admirably held.
Her tea had grown cold and she put the cup down. He seemed to have forgotten she was there.
“Mabel!!”
He let loose with a blood-curdling, banshee cry, picked up a pair of drumsticks and crashed them onto the nearest drum, then hit the cymbal over and over. The sound was deafening. It was then she realized he had an iPod and was listening to something.
“Well!” she said with disgust and got up, leaving the tea cup perched precariously on the lounge arm.

As she neared the door she turned to reprimand him (even though his back was to her and she knew he couldn’t hear anything) and before she could speak he lifted his hand with a dismissive wave before launching into a frenzied solo.

He could play the drums too. It was all lies, she thought with grim satisfaction and made sure to bang the door behind her.

**************************************8***********************************

That night she decided to cook. It had been a long time and it took a half-hour searching before she found her mother’s Joy of Cooking, splattered over and yellowed with age. Perhaps some pork chops from the freezer would do. Her mother had loved pork chops and surely there were some left over.

The freezer was in the basement. Sara hadn’t been down there in a long time. She stood at the top of the stairs trying to make out the dark shapes below. Her parents never had bothered to put in a light switch. Only a string hanging from the ceiling light, lost somewhere in the depths. She kept one foot on the landing and leaned backwards to keep close to the warmth of the stove. Beside her the windows overlooking the garden were dark reflections, revealing nothing of the world outside. They had begun to frost over, silver patterns obscuring all else.

Not your fault.
Oh yes, oh yes.

Geordie was six days old. She’d seen him from their stoop, crying and crying.

And there were other times.
Oh yes, oh yes.

The girl skating on the river.

She was so full. Fullsome. A lovely girl. There wasn’t room for anything else. The patterns of things were so clear to her, why hadn’t they been to anyone else?
Outside the air crackled and popped, burst onto the glass as a visible testament to the forces of nature.
So predictable.

The darkness was too much. She shut the door and eased away from the swollen, tired frame, covered with so many grimy prints it was hard to tell when and from where they’d come.

The water on the stove began to boil.
And boil.

That night she lay in bed and thought about Bud. Bud the beautiful. Bud the crazy. Bud the provider. Nate had crashed his drumsticks and beaten his feet on the floor but Bud could not be banished. He was for dreaming. She turned on her side and watched a spider hang gracefully from the top of the window frame. She folded into herself. Took out a flashlight and read her book under the covers.

Bud stayed outside, like a ghost.