Staggerwing: Stories by Alice Kaltman

By Alice Kaltman

This irresistible collection of stories brilliantly skewers the close-to-rich and not-so-famous of 21st century America. With keen yet kind perspective, Kaltman revels in the triumphs and travails of misfit trophy wives, psychic hotel maids, jilted bridegrooms, showtune-singing security guards, and assorted other oddballs. Always balancing her sharp eye with a soft heart, Kaltman ensures that this collection isn't just funny, but memorable and lovable as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tortoise Books
• Release date: Sep 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781948954419

Alice Kaltman

The daughter of a Merchant Marine and a Rockaway beach babe, Alice Kaltman's life has always been ocean-centric. Now when she's not in the water she writes about surfers, mermaids, and other odd balls. In addition to Wavehouse, Alice is the author of the short fiction collection Staggerwing. Alice's work can also be read in numerous journals, magazines and fiction anthologies. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Montauk, New York where she swims, surfs and writes; weather and waves permitting.

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Contents

Contents

Stay A While

Freedom

Boss Man

Snow Day!

A Melody

Blossoms

Stranger in Paradise

Staggerwing

Bigfoot

The Honeymoon Suite

Tossed

Acknowledgements

Stay A While

I needed a goddamn purpose. Everyone around me was, pardon the lingo, finding themselves. Women my age were going on yoga retreats, throwing clay, volunteering at homeless shelters. None of that appealed to me, and I wasn’t going to do something just for the sake of doing something. It stuck in my craw that there I was, 70 years old, without a clue as to what to do. I’d spent years trudging along, raising kids, feeding a family, being an undemanding faculty wife. It hadn’t been some soap opera, not like some people’s I knew. Quite the opposite. It had been pretty darn boring.

At least the other old gals ended up with flexible spines, leaky flower vases, or goody-good self satisfaction. All I had was my craw and the yucky feeling stuck in it.

+++++++

Things started to change on one of those brain-numbing but bright winter days, the kind of day God created to make me feel like a lazy, resistant fool because the last thing I wanted to do was step outside and freeze my patootey off. I was taking a break from folding laundry, kerplopped on the cellar stairs, slurping some tepid Lipton’s and surveying the crappy reality of my ‘finished basement.’

The ping-pong table covered with file boxes filled with ancient tax returns: shreddable, decades old.

My husband Kevin’s saggy punching bag, hanging useless in the corner like a bum at an abandoned bus stop.

My son Greg’s teddy bear slumped in a beanbag chair. What was that bear’s name again? Grayface. That was it. Such an unoriginal name. But Greg had never been the most creative child, so no surprises there.

My daughter Sophie’s pink Barbie roller skates. Did anyone even roller skate anymore? Sophie surely didn’t. Now it was yoga. Yoga, yoga, yoga. Or triathlon training. All she ever talked about on the rare occasions I actually saw her in the flesh.

The deflated hoppity hop ball. The outdated VCR. The badminton birdies. All those spiky little Legos. Piles of skirts and slacks from a different era, a long-ago size.

And the wet bar. Kevin’s idea, of course. A nine-foot-long red-leather studded embarrassment. For entertaining, or so he’d said back when we’d installed it forty years earlier. We’d had guests down there five times, tops, and all those boozy parties were within the first year. I wasn’t much for entertaining. And back then if the wife didn’t make the social plans, then there were no social plans. Mostly Kevin used the bar to sneak shots while I was upstairs attending to two toddlers, a task I found brutally boring. Motherhood hadn’t been a sparkly fiesta for me. I myself was an only child, raised on a farm by uninspired parents. Hand me a slippery, grimy hog, no problem. But wiggly and whiny children? No siree, Bob.

I got up from my seat slowly, the knees a touch arthritic. It was time to get back upstairs to the good old daily grind. I took one last look around the basement and thought: what a waste of space.

Later that evening I was watching HGTV on the old portable black-and-white while fixing Kevin’s dinner. That home renovation show with those handsome young twins was on. You know the show I mean. The real estate agent twin is a snappy dresser and the other one has a bit more facial hair. Anyway, that’s when it came to me. A sputtering lightbulb of an idea. What if I fixed the cellar up, rented it out? I was a hard worker. Renovating the basement could be my purpose. Heck. There was money to be made.

I couldn’t care less if Kevin put up a fuss. Since he’d retired from the Comp Lit department he did all his drinking upstairs anyway. No more trips to the basement to sneak a few. Sometimes he walked over to the Faculty Club where he found a captive audience for his long-winded monologues. I’ll bet his former colleagues nodded their heads, pretending to listen, thanked their lucky stars that Kevin had finally retired. Lord knew he’d made a hash of it as Chair.

+++++++

The basement has always been creepy, I said over ham loaf and green beans. Even after we loaded it with toys, the kids never really liked playing down there.

Ah ha, Kevin twirled his fork in the air. Here it comes I thought, some edict from on high. That’s because their impressionable minds were filled with horrific images from all that TV you let them watch. Monsters lurking behind basement doors. If you’d encouraged them to read every now and then...

Neither of our kids was big into books. But who could blame them, with Kevin breathing down their necks, spewing sermons about literary crap for hours every night? As soon as they left home, they went as far afield from academia as possible. Sophie, an anorexic exercise junkie and Greg, an unambitious Dunkin’ Doughnuts franchise owner.

People make a killing on these short-term home rentals. We can rent it to visiting professors. Or parents. Or those alumni who take over the town on Homecoming Weekend.

Kevin shook his head. The idea of total strangers in my basement causes me a great deal of unease. With another loose wave of his Scotch-holding hand he added, Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows.

We can use the extra money. I said. Kevin sliced his ham loaf. His knife hand was relatively steady, but his head was wobbling like a dashboard doggie’s. Four drinks already. Three sheets to the wind. Your pension is peanuts.

He looked at me with nothing good in his stare. He was glowering. Glowering. How’s that for a good literary word from a good literary wife? Then he mumbled something sloshy.

I can gussy the place up for next to nothing.

Ha. Next to nothing. I’ve heard that before, Kevin grumbled.

Get a grip, I snapped. I’m no spendthrift and you know it.

Kevin heaved one of his dramatic, condescending sighs. Suit yourself, Martha Stewart.

I got up and took my plate to the garbage and dumped the remains deep in the bin’s belly. My plate made a clackety-clack racket as I tossed it in the sink.

+++++++

The next morning, I pulled out the Yellow Pages and let my fingers do the walking. I hired Pedro and Carlos, an Ecuadorian handyman duo, to help me transform the basement. They rewired the whole kit and caboodle, turned the wet bar into a kitchenette, scraped and repainted the walls, laid a decent sisal carpet over the cold cement floor, installed new fixtures, and added a shower stall in the mildewed half bath last used in the early nineties by Greg and his pot-smoking friends.

I didn’t bother to call the kids to see if they wanted any of their old stuff. Why open up that can of worms? I’d held on long enough. I dropped garbage bags heaped with clothes and toys at Goodwill. The old files were shredded at the local Staples. The VCR player went curbside and was gone the next morning along with the bean bag chair.

I forgot to return phone calls. Library books went overdue. Milk soured. Midwestern dust settled on every possible household surface. Kevin was left to fend for himself for many meals, which he really didn’t mind because it was another excuse to head down to the Club, blab away, get soused, and eat overrated hamburgers, courtesy of the university.

I felt great, as if I were a Broadway producer putting on a show. I shopped for furnishings and decor and kept my purchases as far from Kevin as possible. I avoided him like the plague. Not that we spent much time together anymore in the first place. But while I was on such a roll, the last thing I needed were more snarky Martha Stewart comments.

+++++++

Six weeks later the apartment was good as gold, and I was ready to start my new purposeful career. The night before the first guests were due, I thought: why not inaugurate the place? Do a test run? At 9 pm I shuffled past the TV room door in bathrobe and slippers, a shower caddy swinging in my hand, a towel draped jauntily over my shoulder. I felt giddy, like I was on my way to a fancy spa.

Well, pray tell. Where the hell are you headed? Kevin called from his La-Z-Boy throne.

I was feeling so good that I paused and considered asking Kevin to join me. Back in the beginning we’d gone at it like a couple of feral cats. All spray and sweat and sauciness. He claimed to get hard just thinking about my country girl naiveté. I’d get wet if he as much as uttered one line of his fancy-pants poetry.

Now I glanced at Kevin as he glanced at the TV. The scotch glass rested on his bloated belly, moving up and down with each wheezy breath. Pale flesh and grey hairs poked out between the straining buttons of his Oxford shirt. The shirt I’d ironed that afternoon that now looked like a wrinkled rag. I waited for a smidgen of the old randiness to bubble up in me. But nope. Nothing there. That ship had sailed a long time ago.

I’m going to check out the accommodations, I said.

Ah oui. Le grand appartement, Kevin drawled. Don’t forget to change the boudoir sheets apres.

Mr. Maurice Chevalier. As if I would’ve forgotten. I wasn’t born in a barn, Kevin, I sighed. Even if I was raised on a farm.

He lifted his glass. Touché. He glugged the diluted dregs. He’d be back at the liquor cabinet in moments, but for now he fiddled with the remote and turned the volume way up. Birds screeched. A nature show. The sound of crows chased me down the basement stairs.

Peace finally came once I lay down on the brand new apartment bed. After a few minutes paging through a National Geographic plucked from the magazines I’d arranged fan-styled on the nightstand, I was ready for sleep. I snapped off the reading lamp and settled in like a chicken cutlet sandwiched between crispy 400-count cotton sheets. I tossed my arms overhead, letting my fingers trace the carvings of the brand new pine headboard. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, enjoying the smell of fresh paint and carpet glue. New starts should always smell slightly toxic, I thought as I drifted off.

+++++++

I wish I could tell you that from then on I was a happy, purposeful woman. But things weren’t that simple. Sooner than you can say jackrabbit, renting the apartment became all-consuming in very tedious ways. The bookings. The Paypal account. The chit-chat and small talk with prospective customers. The online ordering of replacement towels and pillow cases. The tidying, the vacuuming, the shower scrubbing. The mystery stain removals. There I was, doing what I’d done my whole adult life: cleaning up after people. A tired old workhorse. It didn’t feel purposeful. It felt like slave labor.

+++++++

After about three months of rental monotony, I found a scarf while stripping the bed. I’d seen Adrianne Wiener with this scarf fluffed under her chin the day she and her husband checked in to the apartment for their four-day, three-night stay. It was one of those wispy, barely-there scarves that women of a certain age knot around their necks to obscure their droopy skin. There it was, wedged between the headboard and mattress, like a secret. Like a sign.

I sat down on the bed and fingered the silk. I’d never been a scarf wearer myself, too fussy for my tastes, though I do have quite the turkey wattle that could use a cover up. So I don’t know what compelled me to do what I did next. I tied the scarf around my own neck, which aside from not being my style, is not something I should’ve done, because heaven knows what other possibly unsanitary purposes Adrianne Wiener might’ve used that scarf for, aside from tying it around her age-spotted, wrinkly neck. But there I was, against my better judgement, looping and fluffing it under my very own chin.

Suddenly I felt an odd tingling up my spine, and before I knew it, I was basking in a glow of giddy good humor I’d never felt before. I felt no desire to get up and go, to do my job, to soldier on. I felt like the kind of person who settles in, who knows how to relax. Someone with a chipper attitude. The kind of person who laughs a lot. A passive, happy person. A lighthearted, fun-loving, where’s-the-party type of person.

The person I imagined Adrianne Wiener to be.

Mind you, I was not one given to flights of fancy. Cockamamie fantasies were Kevin’s domain, with his stacks of unfinished stories, novels, and sonnets accumulating for decades. Him with his Ivy League degrees. Me, barely making it through rural high school. I had enough sense to know what was happening to me didn’t have to do with imagination. It was a visitation. I felt right as rain.

Then the honky dory Adrianne Wiener sensations fizzled out, like helium sputtering from a pin-holed balloon. I was back to dull normal after twenty minutes. The used bed linens were in a crumpled heap to my right. The fresh ones to my left. There was still dusting, vacuuming, and scrubbing to do. I needed to get on the horn and confirm a two week booking with some chemistry big shot from Paraguay. So I took Adrianne Wiener’s scarf off, shoved it in my apron pocket, and got back to work.

Later that day, the scarf was in a padded envelope laying on the Post Office scale about to be mailed to Adrianne Wiener COD. Just as I was about to close my side of the bullet-proof window and send it on its merry way, I grabbed it back and left the Post Office.

I ripped open the Jiffy Pak in the car, tore up the note I’d put in for Adrienne Wiener, shook out the scarf and tied it around my neck once more. My heart was beating tom-tom fast as I drove home. I wore the scarf for the rest of the day. While I pushed my cart around the supermarket. While I paid bills. I wore it while cooking Kevin’s pot roast. I wore it until I undressed and got ready for bed.

I’d like to say it kept me in that easy breezy state of mind, the Adrianne Wiener state of mind, but it didn’t. I suppose I felt a bit less me-like, but that might’ve just been because I was taking a ‘fashion risk’ wearing the damn scarf at all. I didn’t feel transported the