Sally Pfoutz Impressions on the Page

Excerpt from Incabbing

When you find it impossible to let go of someone you have loved, you go incabbing. Incabbing is when you just happen to be passing by your ex-lover’s house – rolling by, snatching glances. You may be on your way to work, to the drycleaners or the food mart, and almost without meaning to, you drive by your ex’s house. Even if it’s on the opposite end of town. Even if it’s the middle of the night and you’re wearing a nightgown under your L.L. Bean parka.

It’s just plain good fortune a dog or a cat isn’t crossing the road in front of you, because your eyes are fixed on your ex’s open window, where the curtain rustles gently, and your heart starts to race as you picture him alone, or wrapped around the naked limbs of someone new. Then you step on the gas, realizing he may just recognize the sound of your car’s motor or the way you clear your throat without thinking. You may not even love this person anymore, but you still need to drive down that road, by that place. Incabbing is your way of holding on to something that is lost.

Shilpa had never been good about separating -- from her pets, playmates, friends, lovers, parents. She couldn’t even get rid of things -- clothes, knickknacks, useless pieces of large furniture like the 1950’s telephone stand that had always sat in the hallway beside the kitchen of her parents’ house; rickety veneer, shoved in the corner of her closet, and coated with dresses and skirts and pants she hadn’t worn in years.

“You need to make a list of everything you want from the house,” her father instructed her as a waiter carved off paper-thin slices of roast beef. Shilpa glanced across the room at Doris in her green chiffon, her champagne-colored hair stiff as Tupperware. One of her sons was dancing stiffly with her, his arms nearly straight out in front of him, one latched to her middle, the other to her shoulder, a foot of empty space between them. Doris was happy, her son looked pained. The blond bombshell, Robbie called her. “We’re going to get the house ready to rent next week,” her father continued. Shilpa still thought of her childhood home as her parents’ house, though it had been fairly deserted for the past few years and her mother was long gone. “Doris and I will be married before Thanksgiving,” he boasted.

Several weeks later, she moved through the rooms of her parents’ house choosing carefully, considering each piece -- the crystal glassware, the sterling silver in the Strasbourg pattern, linens of all colors, pictures, chests, sofas, tables and chairs, as if they were fragments of her mother’s soul. Her mother had grown-up poor and after she married, she had collected with reverence the kinds of things privileged people took for granted.

Shilpa met her father for lunch at the Lawyer’s Club and handed him the slip of paper as if it were a bank statement. She stood away out of respect for it or him or her mother, she didn’t know what, while he read it. She was startled when he merely gave it a glance and jammed it in his pocket. “Doris wants everything to come to her house,” he said gruffly. “She said it was unfair of me to enter the marriage empty-handed.”

“But Doris has a beautiful house full of furniture,” Shilpa said. But the waiter had arrived. So she stopped, sat down obediently when the waiter pulled the chair out, carefully unwrapped the utensils from her napkin, and placed it in her lap. “Okay,” she said. Robbie had warned her not to fight with her father if it had anything to do with Doris. That’s the kind of fight that starts a feud, he had said. Robbie had a stepmother named Margot, and as big as he was -- at least six-one, and as old -- twenty-four, he avoided Margot like the plague, convinced she wanted to run his life, or re-do it.

“Okay,” she said again, stunned, her breath seeming to evaporate off her rather than being exhaled. It was the kind of thing she was afraid to react to, like a bomb that suddenly appears on the table in front of you. You move away cautiously, hoping to escape with your life.

Later her father asked her to help get the house ready to rent, and she was in the bathroom sponging the sink with Ajax, pulling old medicines out of the cabinet and putting them in a shoebox. Then she took the box out to the hall where Doris had piled up things she was throwing out -- musty magazines, boxes of books, Christmas decorations, an assortment of tattered luggage from the attic.

Doris was ravaging the wood floor of Shilpa’s parents’ bedroom with steel wool and ranting, “Some people just don’t know how to take care of a house.” Shilpa stood behind her mightily ashamed. On her way out, Shilpa snatched up the small blue suitcase she had brought home from her mother’s deathbed. It was sitting on the Salvation Army pile. She thought she could feel the limp nightgowns tumbling around inside as she hurried down the flagstone walk. She flung it into the back seat of her convertible, got in and drove off. She pretended not to see Doris in the upstairs window. Robbie carried the blue bag in that afternoon and it sat by the door of their apartment for weeks. Shilpa never really saw it, it was like a shadow or a stain.

Robbie and Shilpa had a good marriage. Every night on the way home from work they’d buy a cheese ball rolled in chopped nuts and a box of Triscuits which they’d eat in front of Andy of Mayberry. Then at eight or so, they’d walk to town for a double-dip ice cream cone and every night before going to sleep, and sometimes before walking for ice cream, they’d make love. Robbie liked to hold onto her when he slept and it made her feel secure and powerful at the same time, like some great benign teddy bear protector.

Doris and Shilpa’s father got married in Doris’s Catholic church. The service swelled as the priest chanted in Latin and altar boys hurried down the aisle raking the air over the guests’ laps with a collection box on a long stick. Shilpa saw lots of red. The carpet was red, the flowers were red, the hymnals were red. At the reception afterwards it was easy for Shilpa to skim through the rooms of Doris’s house, the place was so packed with flitting puffy hairdo’s, cigar-wielding suit jackets, trays full of tinkling drinks. She was looking for something, anything she might recognize, a tablecloth, a picture, a chair or a chest, but there was nothing she could find, not one single thing in Doris’s house that had come from Shilpa’s parents’ house. “Where are Mom’s things?” she breathed in her father’s ear after he finished toasting Doris. His face bulged red with drink.

“Shilpa, this is my goddamned wedding,” he hissed at her.

She waited awhile later and caught him about to enter the bathroom alone. “But Daddy, where’s everything from our house?”

“Can’t you respect this day. Can’t you do this for me?”

She was waiting for him when he came out of the bathroom. She saw Robbie at the very end of the hall watching her warily. He would leave her alone. He knew there was no stopping what was about to happen. She stood in her father’s path. He also knew there was no getting by her. Her father came close to her as if he were about to share a sweet confidence. “Doris is storing your mother’s things downstairs until she can find the right place to put them.”

“You mean they’re in the basement?” She gave him a hard-boiled peeled eyeball look. He was impervious.

Shilpa and Robbie were invited to Doris’s house for Thanksgiving dinner that year. “Everyone will be here,” Shilpa’s father told her on the phone. “Be sure to wear something attractive and bring a relish tray,” he ordered.

“Everybody probably means all of Doris’s incredibly perfect adult children and their matching spouses.”

“Well, we don’t have to go,” Robbie said. “We could go to my house. Mom asked us.”

“No, I want to go there. Just this once.” He shrugged. Shilpa was coming to understand that when it came to holidays, Robbie didn’t care a lot where they went as long as there wasn’t any fighting.

The first thing Shilpa noticed upon entering Doris’s house Thanksgiving day was her mother’s sterling silver flatware, terribly ornate and bought piece by piece with the money she made substitute teaching. Doris had placed it on the card table where the grandchildren would be dining. The large adults’ table was set with Doris’s own silver.

After dinner, Shilpa spotted a solitary door in the front hall. She thought it might be the basement door. When the women were in the kitchen dishing out ice cream for the children, and the men were in the T.V. room watching college football, Shilpa opened that solitary door, and slipped through, closing it gently behind her. Then she descended into darkness, her hand snaking an unseen banister.

To her left were the things she was seeking; the wing chairs pushed back to back, the sofa turned up on one end, bed posts poking out behind mattresses, bureaus one on top of the other. The Jackson press, circa 1840, solid cherry, and worth more than Doris’s entire dining room suite, had been rescued by her mother from someone’s back porch and pain-stakingly sanded and rubbed with beeswax until it glowed. It sat beside the fireplace behind a dead rubber plant, its top littered with school textbooks and coat hangers.

Her mother’s sterling candelabra -- This will be yours, Shilpa -- sat on the floor, tarnished as dull pewter. The corner cupboard jutted out into the room awkwardly its base totally surrounded with clutter—a swamp of throwaways. Shilpa went over to it, shoved a stack of boxes aside with her hip, and opened the glass doors.

Little footsteps pattered overhead, followed by heavy thudding male steps or perky high-heeled mommy or Aunt Cindy steps going this way and that. As dishes clattered in the kitchen, Shilpa wandered through the laundry room looking for the outside door. It was locked, but she found the key on the ledge above it. It hadn’t been opened in a long time because she had to pull and tug to unstick it. In the stairwell outside, leaves had formed a circular nest over the drain. She brushed them aside with an old push broom she had found and used it to prop open the door.

Suddenly she needed to hurry, the decision to take what was rightfully hers having been made the instant she opened the outside door. She rushed back to the corner cupboard and knocked over a can of pencils which had been sitting precariously on top of a column of boxes. It clattered to the floor. Shilpa froze with her hand on the cupboard door, waiting like terror in the night, for the basement door at the top of the stairs to open, exposing her. She heard Doris’s loud, shrill voice calling the men ‘couch potatoes,’ for the T.V. room was practically overhead. She heard the men, almost instantly, as if to drown Doris out, jump up and shout, “All right!” “Way to Go.” and “Touchdown!” Sometimes it seemed to Shilpa, it doesn’t take anything at all to make men happy.

Shilpa snatched up two silver goblets, straining to hear Robbie’s voice in the mid-game analysis, hoping he was so involved in the game he wouldn’t notice her prolonged absence. Then she turned left and right with a goblet in each hand, before seizing upon a box of books at her feet. She set the goblets down, emptied the books, and began packing the box, snatching linens from the sideboard to place between the breakables. She claimed a Georgian silver serving spoon, a stack of botanical dessert plates, and several Swedish crystal wineglasses. When the box was full, she folded the four corners to secure it and hastily rearranged what was left behind in the cupboard.

Before shutting the doors, she snatched five tiny liqueur glasses, pink, green, purple, blue, amber and placed them carefully into the deep wide pockets of her madras skirt. She carried the box through the laundry room and up the concrete steps. It was drizzling outside and the sky was now nearly black. Lights blazed in all the surrounding houses -- it was Thanksgiving, after all, she reminded herself. She didn’t have an inkling of where the backyard gate might be, or for that matter, where Robbie had parked the pick-up, since the street was lined with cars when they’d arrived and he’d dropped her at the door.

She started across the slick carpet of grass in her high heels, as the rain quickly soaked through her blouse and matted it to her back and arms. Her teeth started chattering as she came up dead at the south side of the house, away from the lit windows. There was no gate; at least none she could detect. She considered the picket fence for a moment, then leaned over it as far as she could, feeling the spokes gouging into her ribcage, and dropped the box. It thudded, a good sign; she had packed the glasses pretty well in the linen napkins. But there was a telltale tinkling sound in her skirt pocket. She’d forgotten about the liqueur glasses. Reaching down in her pocket she couldn’t help crying out when a shard of broken glass tore into her index finger.

Then she was spotlighted, as instantly and soundlessly as quick death. “What do you think you’re doing?” a male voice demanded. All Shilpa could see was a shape to the right of the front hedge. She didn’t make a sound. “Come on, I can see you. Now step away from that fence with your hands out front.” Shilpa stretched her arms out in the spotlight and she could see her hand was badly cut and dripping blood. Her blouse was plastered to her and running brown where the box must have stained it with dust.

“Are you the police?” Her instincts told her no, but it was a fancy neighborhood. Maybe he was some kind of private detective.

“No, I’m John Lemores, Doris’s son-in-law. Former. Who the hell are you and what’s in this box?”

“These are my mother’s things. I--I’m taking them back.”

“Back where?”

“Home. To my apartment, anyway. My mother’s dead and Doris had these things in her basement. She wasn’t using them, she doesn’t even need them. She has her own silver and crystal.”

“I don’t understand. What was Doris doing with your mother’s things?”

“She married my father.”

“Doris remarried? I don’t believe it.”

“Well, it’s true. Last month. Who are you again?”

“Her former son-in-law.”

“Someone in Doris’s precious family is divorced?”

“Cindy.”

“Wow. The pretty one,” she said more to herself. She had all of Doris’s kids labeled. “But who’s that guy then? Oh, sorry.” He didn’t answer and she didn’t want to look at his face to see if he knew Cindy had a boy friend or a new husband or whatever. She shook her hand a little to let the ribbon of blood drip off.

“You’re cut.”

“I know.” Sometimes everyday exchanges must run their course, even in the most absurd situations.

“So you’re stealing these things?”

“Yes.” She nearly held her breath.

“Gate’s on the other side.”

“Ah ha.”

“Here, I’ll give you a hand.” He set the light in the grass and reached over the fence with both hands. She felt his hands grip her waist as she tried to find a toehold in between the pickets. Then he lifted her up and over.

“Thanks,” she said. The liqueur glasses felt like seashells in her pockets. She scooped out what she could, pried up the lid of the box, and placed the glasses and shards inside. Then she got one of the linen napkins and wrapped it around her cut hand. After that she looked up and down the street until she spotted Robbie’s pick-up. “It’s the dark blue truck down there,” she said to John. He got the box and retrieved the light, then walked along beside her. “So what exactly are you doing here?” she asked him.

“Incabbing. My folks live in Denver and I couldn’t swing airfare right now. Got my own business and things are tight. Cindy has the kids Thanksgiving. I have them Christmas. I didn’t know it would be so hard. How dry is the turkey?”

“What? Oh,” she laughed a little. “Dry as split wood.”

He set the box in the back of the pick-up.

“Thanks,” she said again.

“Well, so, how do my kids look?”

“Cute. Really adorable. They’re nice kids.” She hadn’t noticed the kids really. There were a bunch of them in there.

“What are you going to tell them when they ask why you’re soaked, how you cut your hand, and what happened to all the stuff in Doris’s basement.”

“There was a cat burglar?” They started back to the house.

“You were just looking for the bathroom.”

“Right, and I went downstairs and he jumped me. He was already packed and ready to go and he decided to make me go with him.”

“But you got away.”

“Yeah. I hit him with...with...”

“One of the glasses he was stealing.”

“Yes.”

“Good luck.” He stopped beside a red Ford Escort.

“You, too. I hope Christmas is better.”

“It’s bound to be.”

She watched him drive off, before going back to Doris’s through the gate and down the basement steps. The men were yelling again, she could hear them through the closed window. They must be winning. She closed and locked the door and replaced the push broom. Then she stripped off her blouse and skirt and put them in the dryer, hoping the game would go into overtime. She washed her hand in the laundry tub. The cut wasn’t so bad after all.

Of Hearth and Home
Previously published in élan

Mr. and Mrs. Fixer-upper, that's us. It all started with a 12-foot wide 1800s townhouse in one of those "changing neighborhoods" -- a realtor's catchword that meant we could afford it. As Mark stood atop a ladder and pried Perma-stone off the front, neighbors gathered around offering comments. "That's good insulation, why you gettin' rid of that?" These were people who liked to brag they paid more for their Cadillacs than they did their houses. "Gotta take it down to the brick," Mark said over his shoulder. The onlookers were skeptical, but a year later our house was the first on the block to get an historic plaque.

My contribution was mostly hauling, among other things, giant trash bags full of chunky horsehair plaster, and a clawfoot tub that somehow made it up the tiny staircase with the 90° turn. I’ve moved a lot of heavy things with my husband over the years, and I’ve witnessed the miracle of his brute strength just because he thinks I’m helping at the other end. Once it was a 1940s refrigerator, out the basement door, turn and tilt, up the steep cement stairwell. Across the bumpy backyard, stop at the curb, watch out for your feet. "How many guys did it take to move this thing?" three men from "Special Pick-up" asked as they muscled it onto a truck lift. "Just my wife," Mark replied.

Our next house needed little renovation. What better time to invest in a dilapidated Capitol Hill rowhouse with my sister and her husband? Soon the men were gone every weekend, coming home filthy and exhausted. With a new baby and both of us working full-time, this arrangement grew old real fast. When I insisted we get out of the deal, they were furious, which brings to mind the old adage: never do business with family. This didn't stop us from buying my father-in-law's house though, and my penance was to face his wrath every time I transplanted something in the garden. It wasn't unusual for him to come roaring up to the front door bellowing, "What happened to my irises [or roses, or camellias]?" Since he continued to play bridge with our neighbors, every so often I'd get a phone call that went something like this. "Mary Edna says there's a toilet sittin' out at the curb. You shouldn't have to replace that yet."

Five properties later, with the kids off to college, we bought our version of the life in the country dream -- a farm that needed total restoration. At settlement, Mark insisted that the seller pay for damages to the wood floor caused when a water heater was dragged out. The seller slammed his hand on the table. “This is a land deal! That isn't even a house. I was gonna burn that down!” Mark can have that effect on people, but he certainly knows what he’s doing. During a year of weekends he turned the “not a house” into a beautiful home.

Now it's off to the seashore; our latest project is a sweet little 1920s farmhouse in the town of Chincoteague. It has the kind of facelift that provokes Mark. They painted the floor around the rug! They replaced the original woodwork with this blankety-blank-blank? He yanked a piece of the fake molding off the doorframe, then began tearing the paneling off the plaster walls, triumphant when he discovered a hidden stovepipe hole over the dining room mantel, identical to the one in full view under the mantel. If we had hooked up the wood stove we could have caught the place on fire!

You never know what you’ll find behind the walls. While cleaning up the attic after getting a new roof, I was having a moment of despair, wondering why I bothered to sweep black silt into a dustpan since most of it was going right up my nose. Just then, Mark called to me through the dusty haze and held up an antique needlepoint he found between the rafters. With Joy We Greet You it said.

Each time we make the journey to Chincoteague we bring in the new, and rip out the old, filling the truck with stuff for the dump. One time we brought a stove, since the one that came with the house had all 4 burners in permanent pop-up mode. We made the exchange, and for the rest of the weekend we were, as Mark laughingly proclaimed: “Tooling around the peninsula with our junk stove.” And so it all starts again.

Excerpt from Madawaska Road

My father traveled a lot the year after my mother died. It was my senior year in high school, and, being the youngest, I was the last one at home. I found the house to be scary-vacant. I’d pull one of my mother’s heavy textbooks off the bookshelf—17th Century Literature or Don Quixote, open it, and stare at her signature and phone number. I’d cook, give my dog a bath, simply gaze out the windows at the first autumn without her and then the first winter without her. I’d sit cross-legged in front of the full length mirror in my bedroom, smoke Marlboros, play my guitar, and sing songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

One day when there wasn’t any school my father instructed me to stay home because Regina the maid was coming. I resented him acting as though Regina couldn’t be trusted. She had worked for us for two years by then. I wanted to go to the mall with my friends, so I did, and thought nothing of it, until I pulled up in front of my house at six o’clock that evening.

There was my father in his business suit sitting on the front steps pushing a cup of coffee at Regina who was sloppy drunk, her wiry hair mashed to one side, her yellow cotton shirtwaist twisted around her legs, her stockings ripped at one knee, the bare skin bulging out. He was trying to pour coffee down her throat and I got a tongue lashing.
“You were supposed to stay home. Now clean up that mess in there. I’m going to drive her to the bus stop.” He put the coffee cup down so hard on the cement step, it cracked and fell over, spilling coffee on Regina’s hand but she didn’t seem to feel it. Her eyes were dull, she looked at me without recognition.

I stepped around her and went inside, watching as he lifted her up with his hands under her armpits and helped her as she stumbled down the flagstone walk to the driveway. Once inside the house, I couldn’t see anything wrong. Then I went into the new room where he kept his liquor in a pine washstand. The doors were open wide, a bottle of bourbon was on its side, and across the room I saw that the floor lamp had crashed into the glass fireplace doors.

I set the bottle up, screwed on the top tight, and closed the cabinet doors. I righted the lamp, swept up the glass, and threw it away and then I went to sit on the couch and wait for my father. I was sorry, not about going out when he told me to stay home, I was sorry that Regina wouldn’t be coming to work for us anymore.

Suddenly I saw my mother’s tired, pinched, once beautiful face telling me proudly that she had been careful to explain to Regina that leukemia was not catching. “They don’t understand things like that,” she had confided in me.

My parents didn’t know Regina at all and I didn’t like the way they looked down on her and seemed to assume she was stupid. She had always been nice to me, especially after my mother died. She was considerate and kind. She didn’t avoid me and looked right in my eyes when she spoke to me. One afternoon I was upstairs in the kitchen and she was in the basement ironing. I wanted to ask her advice. I looked in the fridge and saw a chicken there, shut the door and went to the top of the basement stairs. “Regina?”

“Yes?” She had a soft eager way of speaking.

“How do you like to cook a chicken?”

She came to the bottom of the stairs and looked up at me brightly. “I like to sprinkle a packet of onion soup mix on top of it; do you have any of that? Then I cook it slow, at about 300 for an hour.”

“Thanks,” I said enthusiastically as I turned around and began bustling in the kitchen. We didn’t have any onion soup mix but I chopped up onions and splashed some vinegar on top of the chicken and put it in the oven, trying to ignore the extreme sadness I so often felt during that time.

…

I was assigned to iron my father’s shirts since Regina wouldn’t be coming back to work for us anymore. One day I opened the games closet in the basement next to the ironing board and saw her purse there, a cream-colored plastic satchel. The sight of it there next to board games like Monopoly and Battleship frightened me. I immediately stopped ironing, got the bag, hurried to my car and drove all the way to the grocery store to leave it on top of a public trashcan.

In the grocery store I wandered the aisles pushing an empty cart and tears streamed down my face. I had no control over the crying. People looked at me. One man followed me. I think he was a security guard even though he wore plain clothes. I saw him veer off my trail and snatch an open box of cookies left by a girl about my age. He followed her to the cash register and handed her the box, saying something like, “Oh, miss, you forgot this.”

I abandoned the cart and walked out. We exchanged a mutual glare as I passed. His stare was full of suspicion. I think he must have thought I’d managed to swipe something the moment I was off his radar. That was before electronic buzzers. He’d have had to search me to know for sure and I think I might have relished it, the injustice of it.

Nothing That Ever Happened

Kurt Vonnegut & his mustache & the Vietnam war.
I can never think of that man without seeing his face
as if reading him involved constantly turning the book over
to view his photograph. It wasn’t all about the war back then.

What about driving your father’s girl friend’s 442 convertible
along the parkway on a summer night? Or skipping school
to march in an anti-war demonstration and getting tear-gassed?
Oh yeah, that was about the war and we deserved it.

Remember that teacher whose husband left her and sometimes
we’d find her crying at her desk? I was sorry I scared her that time
I told her my mother was an English teacher but she couldn’t come
speak to the class because she was dead.

Not as sorry though as when my father told me my drawing
of JFK was really good but my art teacher the next day went on an angry
tirade about how awful it was and it wasn’t art either. I read all
the Vonneguts that year. This was before Great Books or even Toni Morrison.

When we went to hear him at the Library of Congress, they kept us waiting
and dripping in the great hall, as if, I imagined later, they—the organizers,
were arguing with Vonnegut—the recalcitrant teenager. Because no sooner
were we finally seated than he walked off stage in protest over the war.

I saw his profile, that mustache dripping, his trench coat, looking drenched,
the girl in the floor-length sweater waiting in the wings. The way they didn’t look
at each other as they met up and walked away. So Welcome to the Monkey House
ya’ll because nothing that ever happened back then was as bad as the war.