“Yes, it was quite something,” Tawana replied. A New York literary agent had noticed Eudora Grossberg’s story when it first appeared in the Yale Review and, on the merits of the single work, offered her a contract. A collection of short stories and poetry was scheduled for release in the spring. “Where does Eudora live?”
“Buckley Place.” Lois replied.
Tawana drummed her fingers on the Formica counter. “That old mill complex that was renovated into apartments?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Over by the railroad tracks, Buckley Place was a grimy, low rent residence, mostly tiny efficiency apartments.
Tawana went back to her office, closed the door and called Eudora at the number listed in her personnel file. An answering machine picked up. She replaced the receiver on the phone without leaving a message.
Around four in the afternoon, she made her way to the deli counter. “What are the soups?”
“Beef barley and chicken escarole,” the man behind the counter replied.
“Give me a quart of each.”
Tawana left work early and drove across town to Buckley Place. She parked her Toyota Celica in a lot marked ‘visitor parking’. The building, which had been given a cosmetic face lift only a few years earlier, already exuded a down-at-the-heels shabbiness. The lobby was dimly lit making it next to impossible to read the tenant directory.
“Got a cigarette?” Like an apparition from the nether world, a disheveled, middle-agede man with a lumpy, disfigured nose lurched out from an open doorway. He smelled of rancid body odor and his shirt pocket was torn away in a useless flap.
“Don’t smoke.” Tawana edged away and, while still eyeing the man, groped for the doorknob leading back out into the street. What was I thinking, coming here alone without mentioning it to anyone?
“Who’re you looking for?” The fellow’s eyes, bulgy and jaundiced, never strayed from her face.
“No one in particular.” Tawana took a tentative step backwards but the queer fellow immediately closed the gap and was hovering so close she could feel his sour breath on her cheek. “Eudora Grossberg,” she mumbled still fumbling for the illusive doorknob. “I brought her some soup.”
The man swayed back and forth as though in a drug-induced stupor. “Dora? She’s up in 3B.” He hurried to the far end of the foyer and jabbed the elevator button several times. “Dora’s sick bad. Threw up twice last night. Can’t keep nothin’ down.”
When the elevator door opened, the strange fellow stumbled in and held the door open for her. “Say, you wouldn’t have a cigarette to spare? I’m just about crapping my pants for a butt.”
Tawana was feeling a bit light headed. “You already asked me a moment ago and I told you I don’t smoke.”
Looking muddled, the man scratched an earlobe. “Funny, I don’t remember.”
The carpet on the third floor landing was torn and one of the fluorescent lights recessed in the ceiling was flickering erratically. He shambled down the unheated hallway a short distance and knocked at a door.
“Who’s there?”
“Just me,” the fellow replied, “and some fancy shmancy lady. She didn’t offer a name and I didn’t ask.”
The door opened. Dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers, Eudora Grossberg squinted myopically out at them. “I heard you were sick so brought fresh soup from the market.”
If Eudora was shocked to see the store manager standing in the dank hallway, she didn’t show it. “How sweet! Sure, come in.” She held the door wide, and the odd fellow trailed Tawana into the efficiency apartment, flopping down on a chair near the window. “I see you’ve met Dennis.”
The man with the shapeless nose grinned sheepishly, pushing his bottom lip out in a perverse caricature of a smile. Only then did Tawana realize he was mentally retarded. “So how you doing?”
“Hungry as hell.” Eudora removed a couple of spoons and bowls from a cupboard, poured a generous portion of chicken escarole into each, handing one to Dennis. They ate in total silence. When the soup was gone, Eudora had a mild coughing fit then turned to the man with the funny nose. “You didn’t jump out in the hallway and scare Mrs. Saunders, did you, Dennis?”
“Oh no,” he blustered. “Didn’t do no such thing.”
“Actually, he was quite polite,” Tawana protested. “Even told me what apartment you lived in and escorted me up here like a perfect gentleman.” Dennis sat up straighter in his chair and puffed out his lower lip, which was still moist from the soup. Then he rose and, without saying goodbye, wandered out of the apartment leaving the door wide open.
Eudora shut the door. “Dennis, he’s a little …”
“Yes, I can see that,” Tawana said.
“I had a chance to read through your material.” She lifted the manila folder off a shelf and handed it back to the black woman. “The writing is solid, but the author, Tawana Saunders, is among the missing.”
“Which is a polite way of saying it’s bland and predictable.” Eudora nodded, an abrupt flick of the head. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
Eudora put the soup in the refrigerator and rinsed out the bowls. “About the Robert Hayden poem,” Tawana continued. “It took my breath away.”
“That visceral quality ... It’s what’s missing in your writing.”
“What do you suggest?”
Eudora sat down on the edge of the bed. “Don’t play it safe. Write from your discomfort, your confusion and darkest fears.”
“Like Hayden does.”
“It’s a good place to start,” Eudora confirmed.”
The apartment was tiny. The bedroom and kitchen merged into one living space with a closet and claustrophobic bathroom near the rear wall. By the window a computer rested on a table. It was a Windows 98 model, a prehistoric relic that backed up off old-fashioned plastic diskettes and couldn’t support any of the sophisticated thirty-two bit software programs that had emerged in recent years. The supermarket had shifted over to the Microsoft XP software in two thousand six and junked all the outmoded machines. Next month they would switch again to the Vista operating system. More elaborate gadgetry, bells and whistles.
“We’re all works in progress.” Eudora Grossberg was sitting up on the center of the bed now in a modified lotus position. There was something transcendently beautiful about the awkward, introverted woman.
Works in progress. Sadly, not all mortal creatures turn out all that well. A fleeting image of a defiant Reginald Owens and his pig-headed, sociopathic mother flitted across her mind. A minute passed. Dennis returned with a fresh cigarette. He sat down at the kitchen table and smoked voraciously, discarding the burnt ash into an empty coffee cup. “This cigarette’s got menthol,” Dennis noted. “I don’t like menthol, cause it tickles my tongue.”
“I want to apologize again for my faux pas—the My Fair Lady gaff. Who the hell am I, an upwardly mobile, middle-aged black woman, telling you or anyone else for that matter what the hell to do with their life?”
Eudora exploded in a spastic coughing fit. When it was done and her breathing back under control, she blew her nose and lay prone, staring up at the ceiling. “Myra Dobbins is in her eighth month and fat as a whale,” Eudora spoke in a hoarse, nasally tone. “I’d like a crack at her job unless it’s already promised to someone else.”
Dennis took a final drag on the stumpy, mentholated cigarette. He tossed what little was left of the butt into the cup, rose and went off to panhandle another smoke.
“The job is yours.” Tawana also got up to leave. “I’ll post the position as tentatively filled first thing in the morning.” She placed a hand on the sick woman’s shoulder. “You don’t look so hot, Dora. Take the rest of the week off.”
Later at home, Tawana sat in front of her fancy new computer staring at an empty white canvas. What was it Eudora Grossberg suggested? Don’t play it safe. Write from your pain,… your discomfort, confusion and darkest fears.
An hour la
ter Leslie wandered into the room. “What are you doing?”
“Writing the great American novel.”
The girl pointed dismissively at the screen. “All you got is three lousy paragraphs.”
Tawana leaned over and brushed the girl’s ebony cheek with her lips. “Consider it a work in progress.”
Return to Table of Contents
The Indigo Children
Jason Endicott arrived at the Seekers of Truth commune shortly before noontime. The mid-July air was stifling, temperatures hovering in the low nineties. He lingered outside the renovated cow barn that served as a meditation hall. Most of the animals having been sent away, the few remaining Holsteins that made up the herd were housed elsewhere. Over the years, the foundation settled, pitching the structure at an odd angle. Most of the red paint had flaked away or faded to a muddy brown.
“Sister Wendy’s been delayed,” a young, rather effeminate-looking man wearing Bermuda shorts and floppy sandals approached from the direction of the dining hall. “You can wait here or down by the lake.” He pointed toward a ridge of trees at the far end of an organic vegetable garden. No water was visible from where they were standing. “She’ll be back half an hour tops.” The young man shuffled away.
A bug-eyed gray squirrel scurried across the rutted ground before disappearing up a thick maple tree. Subdued by the oppressive heat, the songbirds were less vocal than earlier in the morning. Abandoning the meditation hall, Jason struck out for the wooded area beyond the vegetable garden. He passed a group of women weeding. Dressed in jeans and cotton blouses, they were in their early twenties to late thirties. Nobody looked particularly happy with the brutally humid weather as they bent over the rock-strewn earth, tugging clumps of weeds and throwing them aside.
At the edge of the field, Jason spotted a dirt path leading down to a small lake. Fifty feet from shore a solitary woman was sitting on a rock. She was lean with no figure to speak of. A thin slash of a mouth was offset by dark hair and hazel eyes. The girl had the sort of hardscrabble, androgynous face that would have been equally suited for a member of either sex. Still, she was mildly attractive with a rough-textured feral quality that stood in stark contrast to most of the women he had passed just a moment ago.
“Want a toke?” The girl, whose dirty brown hair was tied back with a red bandana, raised her arm to reveal a marijuana joint.” Jason shook his head. The girl shrugged, sucked a deep draft of sweet smelling smoke into her lungs and gazed serenely out over the placid water. Alongside a clump of water lilies, a painted turtle’s wedge-shaped head emerged for a brief moment before disappearing beneath the surface.
“Is that allowed?”
“I should hope not,” the girl replied with mock severity. “But I been here three months now and know all the tight-ass elders. You don’t fit the mold.” She took another hit and leaned back. “I’m Maribel. Maribel Munsen.”
“Jason Endicott. I’m with the Brandenberg Gazette. We’re doing an article on the commune. I’m here gathering information.”
The newspaper had sent him to do a human interest story on the New Age commune that set down roots five years earlier in the dilapidated farmhouse west of the city. The Seekers of Truth were antagonizing local residents with their long, flowing robes, odd beliefs and messianic zeal. Jason visited the commune once previously to see about doing a piece for the newspaper’s Sunday supplement, but nothing came of it. As an outsider and ‘nonbeliever’, the group elders who managed the sect’s day-to-day operation didn’t trust him. But now they needed some positive press to offset the creeping paranoia emanating from the local community.
“Have you seen the trout?” Maribel strolled over to a small dock that extended twenty feet out into the shallow water. Before they even reached the pressure-treated, slatted walkway, he could see a school of huge fish gliding back and forth between the short pilings. Their underbellies sported a rainbow of pastel hues ranging from tangerine to neon green. “What a waste of protein!” Maribel muttered.
“How’s that?”
She fixed him with an impish grin. “The Seekers of Truth believe in the Buddhist concept of ahimsa, which states that all life is one and sacred.”
“Which is to say, the sect is vegetarian.” She nodded once. “And what’s your take on that?”
She took a final hit on what was left of the joint and flicked the smoldering roach in a lazy arc into the water. Several curious fish swam to the surface for closer inspection. “Give me a worm, a piece of string and a hook and I’ll hand you your answer on a serving platter.”
A huge trout suddenly broke the surface of the water snagging a water bug in its smallish mouth. “After three months, you must have formed an opinion regarding the sect.”
Maribel retreated back to a grassy stretch of soil and sat down. “I’m leaving next week. That should tell you everything you need to know.”
“Actually, It tells me nothing,” Jason shot back.
The girl removed her bandana and let her hair fall down around her shoulders. “You passed a bunch of girls weeding the vegetable garden on your trip down to the pond.” Jason nodded. “Did you notice the freckle-faced blonde with the big boobs?”
Jason grinned self-consciously. “She’s probably the only one from the group I do remember.”
“That’s Gwen. She’s twenty-three. Ran off and left hubby with and two toddlers in a ratty, third-floor apartment in Central Falls so she could come here and connect with her inner essence.”
Melanie stuck a piece of straw between her teeth and lay back prone on the lumpy ground. “You can shit all over your spouse and abandon your children, all in the name of personal fulfillment.” She rose up on her elbows and smiled good naturedly at Jason. “Like I said, next Wednesday I’m heading out to Alaska. See if I can scare up a job cooking on a commercial fishing trawler.” She pointed at the endless parade of trout slithering in and out from under the dock. “No more ahimsa.”
“It is our belief,” Sister Wendy explained,, “all that exists is God. This of course leads naturally to the concept of personal divinity.” The red-robed woman was college educated, svelte with dark hair knotted in a tight bun - the picture of discrete respectability.
“We are all Gods,” Jason parroted back the implicit message.
They were sitting on a pair of ornate, brocade cushions in the meditation hall. Much cooler inside, the room was empty except for a large Persian carpet near an altar decorated with fresh-cut wild flowers and a picture of the sect’s leader, an elderly man of Eastern descent with a flowing white beard. The room reeked of incense – patchouli, sandalwood and several exotic scents he couldn’t identify.
“You certainly are a quick study,”
“Dr. Raschke, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver, describes New Age practices as the spiritual version of AIDS. What’s your take on that?”
Sister Wendy’s expression soured. “I’m unfamiliar with Dr. Raschke’s beliefs.” “From a Pantheistic point of view, all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality.” The woman spread her arms, palms upward, in an expansive gesture. “The universal religion can be visualized as a mountain with many sadhanas or spiritual paths.” “All paths,” she held the final consonant in ‘all’ out for dramatic effect, “eventually reach the top.”
Sister Wendy was the perfect shill, huckster, promoter, pitchman and metaphysical cheerleader for the Seekers of Truth. But Jason wasn’t buying one word of her fabulous esoterica. To be sure, the woman possessed a clever tongue. She would have made a great lawyer or politician. Problem was The Seekers of Truth were just a tad too far left of the loony bin to ever gain any traction in a straight-laced community like Brandenberg.
They might have made inroads with the acupuncture or homeopathy. But the Primal Scream Therapy and iridology pushed the local yokels over the edge and gave the clan members a pair of black eyes from which they could never recover. Each whacky
pursuit – polarity therapy, crystal healing, spirit channeling, divination, I Ching, Tarot Cards, scrying, dervish whirling, séances, reflexology and therapeutic touch – only served to push the group further to the margins.
At one point toward the end of their meeting, a young boy – he couldn’t have been any older than six or seven – ran pell-mell into the room. Spotting Jason, he smiled and rushed back out the door. “One of our Indigo Children,” Sister Wendy gushed.
“Never heard the term before,” Jason replied.
“It is our belief in the New Age movement that children with special powers and indigo colored auras have been born in recent years. As small children, Indigo’s are easy to recognize by their unusually large, clear eyes.”
“Okay,” Jason murmured skeptically.
“They are precocious children with amazing memories and a strong desire to live instinctually. These Indigo Children are sensitive, gifted souls with an evolved consciousness who have come here to help change the vibrations of our lives and to create one land, one globe and one species.”
“And that little boy?”
“My son. One of the Indigo Children.”
Jason had the sudden urge to vomit, to regurgitate his entire lunch, a Kentucky Fried Chicken value meal with coleslaw and potato wedges, in Sister Wendy’s velvety lap.
Kaching! Kaching! Kaching!
The Elders of the commune planned to build a substantial guest house divided into dormitories where, for a modest fee, spiritual novices could deepen their appreciation of the Eastern mysteries. Of course it was no mystery where they got the money to bankroll the commune. A brochure of scheduled summer events listed no less than fifty-two offerings! Which probably explained why Sister Wendy could afford to drive around in a fully-loaded BMW convertible. Kaching!
Later that night at home, Jason went upstairs to the bedroom opposite the den. His daughter, Carmen, was perched on the top of the bed lotus-style, thumbing through a fashion magazine. “That TV wasn’t here when I left for work,” He said gesturing at a forty-inch plasma, LCD display.