The customer pursed his lips and seemed lost in thought for a brief moment. “Which is to say that mankind can still form moral judgments, in spite of a natural inclination toward selfishness.”
Only now did she bother to look him full in the face. A wan smile creased her lips. Claudia began reassembling the scattered pieces that lay on the floor. The customer with the broken drive belt sat down on a folding chair alongside an impressive display of spiffy vacuum cleaners.
Vacuum World serviced other models but sold Hoovers exclusively. The display that ranged along the entire front of the store featured the top-of the-line Platinum Collection Cyclonic bagless, the WindTunnel II upright, the Anniversary self-propelled Model and a host of lesser expensive, stripped down models with price points a tad under two hundred dollars.
"Society, according to Adam Smith,” Claudia picked up on the thread of his previous remark, “is the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking."
“Yes, that’s vintage Adam Smith,” He rose from the chair and rubbed his face distractedly with the palm of a hand. “Are you doing anything later tonight?”
Having finished the repairs, all that remained was to stretch the decorative rubber molding around the base of the machine. Claudia’s unlovely face betrayed no emotion. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
* * * *
Lawrence Lanni took the call from his mother in his office at Brandenberg Mental Health Services. She was crying – blubbering hysterically and making little to no sense. Claudia had gone mental, suffered a nervous breakdown or some similar form of acute psychological derangement. Could Lawrence stop by the house after work and please not to tell anyone about his sister’s emotional collapse? “You’re going to have to set things right,” his mother sobbed. “Put things back the way they were.”
Put things back the way they were. Lawrence didn’t know if that was such a great idea. As he understood his mother’s account, his sister, who had led a morbidly safe and predictable existence over the past twenty years, went out for drinks with a customer she met earlier in the day at Vacuum World and slept over the man’s apartment. “Where is Claudia now?”
There was a brief pause as though his mother didn’t understand the question. “She’s where she always is – at the freakin’ store.”
“So she didn’t really fall apart?”
“No, she’s at work, fixing broken motors and selling Hoover vacuum cleaners.”
Lawrence glanced up at the clock. His ten-thirty appointment, a paranoid schizophrenic with a Jesus complex would be waiting downstairs in the lobby collecting faults and injustices. “So she’s not in any immediate distress.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Mrs. Lanni hedged.
“Besides the sexual escapade, what other crimes did Claudia commit?”
His mother’s voice trailed away to an embarrassed whisper. “Nothing I care to discuss over the phone.” The line went dead. A moment later the intercom buzzed. Lawrence’s next appointment was waiting impatiently for his fifty-minute counseling session.”
* * * *
Lawrence arrived at his parent’s house shortly after seven. His father, who looked haggard, opened the door and ushered him into the living room where his mother was curled up on the sofa clutching a box of Kleenex in her lap. “Where’s Claudia?” Lawrence asked.
“Gone out,” his father said in a flat monotone.
Claudia seldom went anywhere after work. She watched the evening news; she read; she did needlepoint and macramé. Outside the immediate family, she had no personal life. “Gone where?”
“That’s what we need to discuss,” Mrs. Lanni replied, dabbing her swollen eyes with a tissue. As his mother explained things, Claudia had gone off to work Tuesday morning but never showed up for supper. She came home the following morning and then only to take a quick shower and change her ratty clothes. “I asked her,” Mrs. Lanni continued, ‘Where were you all night?’, and she says, ‘I spent the night with a customer catching up on lost time.’”
“That’s a euphemism,” Mr. Lanni picked up the thread of his wife’s conversation, “a polite way of saying that Claudia - ”
“I understand,” Lawrence interrupted, “perfectly well what mother was saying.”
In his practice as a clinical psychologist, Lawrence met woman who were pathologically promiscuous, hedonistic in the extreme. Some tried to pass their sexual gluttony off as a form of libertarian fervor. This is the way I choose to live my life, and it’s none of your goddamn business! That was all well and good as long as the carnage and collateral damage was minimal. But of course, none of this applied to Claudia. She had always lived a reclusive, staid, stolid and utterly prudish existence. For the past fifteen years she went to work every day at Vacuum World. She attended Mass with her parents on Sundays; she subscribed to the Atlantic and the New York Times Review of Books. Claudia played on the tennis team in college. A few years back she joined a tennis club but after injuring her groin attempting an overhand lob, that, too, fell by the wayside. “Who is this guy she slept with?”
“That’s the problem,” his father said. “We know nothing about him.”
“Claudia and the horny bastard who took advantage of her naiveté—apparently they share a common interest in economics.” Mrs. Lanni seemed frightened, dazed. The older woman tapped her forehead with a taut index finger as though trying to recall some tidbit of incidental trivia. “Your sister was prattling on and on - some crazy nonsense about invisible hands and eighteenth-century, English mercantilism.”
Yes, that would be vintage Claudia!
Lawrence massaged his eyes and stared out the window. Across the street, the Hispanic neighbor was running a noisy riding lawnmower along the perimeter of his property. The Morales family – they emigrated originally from Guatemala. Nice people. Very sedate and proper. Not like the Lannis, whose nymphomaniac daughter was whoring herself out to every Tom, Dick and Harry who needed a replacement drive belt for their vacuum cleaner.
“I’m going to fix myself a cup of tea.” Mr. Lanni edged toward the kitchen and, with a flick of his eyes, indicated that Lawrence should join him. When they were safely out of earshot, the older man said, “Your sister’s always been the frugal, business-minded sort.” He put the water on to boil and set a teabag in a cup alongside the sugar bowl. “Less than ten years after buying the Vacuum World franchise, she’d squirreled away enough savings to buy the building outright.”
His father wasn’t telling Lawrence anything he didn’t already know. “What’s your point?”
Mr. Lanni removed a spoon from the drawer and laid it next to the teacup. “No one’s ever shown any romantic interest in Claudia. A parent can’t help but worry that this fellow – whoever the hell he is – might be some conniving gold digger taking unfair advantage of your sister’s loneliness and emotional vulnerability.”
“You’re using the term incorrectly.” Lawrence stared at his father in mild disbelief. Gold diggers are usually treacherous women who flimflam men.”
Mr. Lawrence waved both hands over his head in exasperation. “You know perfectly well what I mean!” The water had come to a boil and he removed the kettle from the heat. “Claudia’s acting out of character. Something has to be done to protect her.”
Put. Put. Put. Put. Through the side window Lawrence could see Mr. Morales puttering along the portion of his property that bordered the street. His youngest daughter, a chubby, chocolate-skinned girl with Mayan features, was sitting on his lap, clutching a doll. “And what the hell am I suppose to do?”
“Go visit Claudia. See out what the hell is going on with this shady character. What’s his modus operandi?”
“In addition to mental health,” Lawrence groused, “now I’m a private investigator?”
Mr. Lawrence patted his son on the shoulder. “Do it for your mother’s sake.”
Lawrence was tired. After listening to other people’s problems for eight solid hours the
last thing he wanted was this. He often thought of Brandenberg Mental Health as a veritable Pandora’s Box of human anguish and nuttiness. Many of the clients, like the paranoid fellow zonked out on stellazine he met with after his mother’s phone call, were incorrigible. No, that was a poor choice of words. Crooks and pathological liars were incorrigible. The mental patients reminded Lawrence of characters in a Greek tragedy where their miserable fate was preordained.
But what to do about Claudia?
Mr. Lanni removed the teabag from the dry cup and returned it to the carton in the oak, raised-paneled cabinet. He put the spoon, cup and saucer away. He hadn’t wanted anything to drink. It was just a ruse to get Lawrence alone, subterfuge of a benign sort. “I saw your sister for a few, brief minutes earlier tonight before she ran off to spend quality time with her mystery man.”
“And how did she seem?” Lawrence asked.
“Insanely happy! Her eyes sparkled and cheeks were flushed. She was brimming over with ...”
“Passion?”
Mr. Lawrence grimaced. “Not necessarily my first choice of words but, yes, that too.”
* * * *
When the children were young, Lawrence’s eighty year-old maternal grandmother came to live with the family. Grandma Sylvester hated her son-in-law. She always felt that her daughter could have done better and told anyone who cared to listen that the marriage was a disappointment, an unfortunate lapse of judgment and common sense that could only be rectified by divorce. No matter that the Lannis got along just fine. Knowing how she felt, Mr. Lanni ignored his mother-in-law. When the incessant nagging got unbearable, Mrs. Lanni would scream, “Shut up you insufferable witch!” But the woman, who was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and navigated the house in a motorized wheelchair - courtesy of her hated son-in-law - was fearlessly outspoken. She actually enjoyed the strife.
“Every time she does something hateful,” Claudia observed mirthlessly, “Grandma acts like she’s having multiple orgasms.” After each spiteful harangue, the girl noted how the elderly woman smiled gleefully and seemed more physically animated.
“What’s an orgasm?” Lawrence asked.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
Grandma Sylvester viewed Claudia as a major disappointment. “It’s a shame you’re not pretty like your mother.”
Claudia winced but caught her emotional second wind and replied, “You say something wickedly cruel and offensive, and then you smile at the victim of your abuse. That’s sadistic.”
“Well it’s perfectly true. Just go look in the living room mirror if you have any doubts.” The simpering expression faded noticeably.
“I have no illusions about either one of us,” the young girl shot back. The old woman stared back at her with unbridled malice.
One day Grandma Sylvester was badmouthing Mr. Lanni in front of the children when Claudia muttered, “Let’s go for a little ride.” The girl was thirteen years old at the time, Lawrence two years younger. She wheeled her grandmother out to the curb next to the trash barrels and pulled up the rubber brake pads firmly against the slender wheels. Claudia dropped down on her haunches and stuck her nose in front of the decrepit woman’s mottled face. “I dragged the trash barrels out to the street earlier this morning.” She pointed to a green container resting no more than a foot from the woman’s right elbow. “Some animal must have ripped the plastic bag apart, because there’s about a million and a half maggots crawling around under the lid.”
“You’re full of shit up to your eyebrows,” The grandmother hissed.
“Really?” Claudia removed the plastic lid. She grabbed the handle and tipped the barrel at a forty-five degree angle. A swarm of white, frothy worms were writhing along the inner surface of the putrid container. “I’m going to leave you here so the sanitation engineers can haul you away with the rest of the smelly garbage.”
Mrs. Sylvester began to cry and whimper and moan and make queer little animal sounds that were painful for Lawrence to hear. “This isn’t funny, Claudia,” Lawrence cautioned. “I don’t like what you’re doing.”
She grabbed her brother by the shirt collar and dragged him back into the house. “It’s June. Seventy degrees with bright sunshine. The old coot isn’t going to shrivel up and die.”
Lawrence began to cry. He went and looked out the window at his grandmother slumped over, her scrawny shoulders heaving up and down with despair. His father was at work. Mrs. Lanni had gone to Stop & Shop for groceries and wasn’t due back for another half hour. “You can’t just leave her out there.”
“Shut up!”
A blue Toyota cruised by and the driver waved at Mrs. Sylvester. At the far end of the street the car pulled up at the stop sign before continuing on its way. “What if a neighbor sees her and calls the police?”
“For as long as I can remember, that horrid woman has been saying cruel and hurtful things. Now she gets a dose of her own medicine.”
Five minutes passed. Claudia went out to the curb and retrieved her grandmother. “If you say a word about this to anyone,” the girl said in a perfunctory, offhand manner, “I’ll come into your room late at night and hold a pillow over your pus-ugly mug until all the hatefulness is choked out of you.” The woman who harbored a vindictive slight for every occasion, seemed in a fog. “I’m only ugly on the outside,” Claudia added as an afterthought. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Thirty-five minutes later Mrs. Lanni returned home. “Children, go get the groceries from the car.” She turned to the listless, subdued woman in the wheelchair. “You seem a bit peaked. How are you, mother?”
Mrs. Sylvester wet her lips. She crooked her neck to one side and stared pensively out the bay window toward the curb where the noisy diesel-engine garbage truck had just pulled up alongside their house. A dark-skinned man deftly lifted the thirty-gallon, plastic barrel dumping the contents – maggots and all - into the rear. “I’m fine,” she croaked. “Everything’s just swell!”
Later that night, Lawrence shuffled into his sister’s bedroom and stood by the night table. “I don’t think you’re ugly.”
His sister reached out and grabbed his slender wrist. Pulling it close, she planted a wet kiss in the palm then closed the fingers one-by-one in a loose fist. “I am rather homely,” Claudia said, “but there’s infinitely more to life than fashion and glamour.”
“I wouldn’t love you a tiny bit more even if you looked, danced and sang like Hannah Montana,” the boy said haltingly. There was no reply. “Would you have suffocated Grandma Sylvester if she told on us?”
“For all her hatefulness the woman is basically a coward,” Claudia came at the question obliquely. “After that business with the maggots, she would never risk finding out how psychotically demented I am.” A moment passed and Claudia began to giggle.
* * * *
Lawrence said nothing to his wife about Claudia’s one-night stand or the visit with his parents. He wanted to think things through, process the information. But what information was there? His forty-three year-old sister, who up until the previous Tuesday was undoubtedly an unsullied, pure-as-the-driven-snow virgin, was having a raunchy sexual escapade. What was it his mother had said earlier on the phone? You’re going to have to set things right. Put things back the way they were. His brain balked at the notion of tampering with Claudia’s eccentric lifestyle.
Lawrence’s wife entered the bedroom, her damp hair wrapped in a terrycloth towel. “How were your parents?”
“Good,” Lawrence replied absently. “Just fine.”
He never really felt sorry for Claudia. Back to elementary school, she had always been an odd duck. Not crazy or pathological or mentally defective or troublesome. His sister viewed the universe from her own quirky perspective. That’s why she never accomplished a damn thing with her education. She wrote a master’s thesis on some abstruse concept in Keynesian economic theory, but bought a vacuum cleaner franchise rather than sha
re her formidable, intellectual gift with the academic community. Still, Claudia had made a life – a life apart – and who was to judge the intrinsic worth of the decisions and choices she made along the way. By comparison with the rogue’s gallery of personality disorders and mental defectives who plodded through the Brandenberg Mental Health Clinic on any given day, Claudia Lanni could serve as poster child for a mature lifestyle.
Well, at least up until a week ago last Tuesday.
* * * *
Wednesday in the late afternoon, Lawrence swung by Vacuum World after leaving the clinic. He called ahead to tell Claudia he was stopping by. The ‘CLOSED’ sign was hanging in the front door but his sister’s maroon Audi was still parked near the dumpster. He went and rapped on the plate glass door until she finally came out from the back room.
“I was wondering who was making all that fuss,” she said with a relaxed grin. Claudia led the way to the rear of the store where she had a small office. On the computer screen a software program was cycling through a series of administrative tasks. “Every so often, “she said by way of explanation, “I have to purge dead files from my bookkeeping program or the software slows down to a zombie-like crawl.”
Lawrence stared at the screen, which offered a statistical readout every so many seconds of which obsolete files were being cleaned from the hard drive. “You look different somehow.” It certainly wasn’t the clothes. His sister still dressed like a geeky, over-the-hill tomboy and her wedge-shaped suede shoes exuded a distinctively klutzy, unisex aura. No, it was something more subtle.
Claudia looked utterly radiant.
Her skin glowed. She was smiling – something she only did rarely and with minimal enthusiasm. Her pale blue eyes twinkled with a luminous fire, and she was breathing differently, too. Lawrence had never been aware of his sister’s body as anything other than a passive, non-participating lump of flesh. Now with each joyful gesture and flash of emotion, her chest heaved and nostrils flared. “Must be the company I’ve been keeping lately,” she shot back coyly. “I’m seeing someone.”