Twin Souls
by
Barry Rachin
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Published by:
Twin Souls
Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Twin Souls
According to Mahatma Gandhi,” Mavis Calhoun spoke breathlessly, “society’s coming apart at the seams, collapsing under the weight of technology gone berserk.”
Mavis and Harry Wong Smith were on ten-minute break, sipping tepid coffee in the Shop Rite Supermarket employee lounge. Twenty-nine year-old Mavis had relocated to Brandenburg, Massachusetts almost a year earlier to the day. She landed the cashier’s job in February. In his senior year of high school, Harry bagged groceries and stocked shelves. Mavis grew up in Knoxville, on the Tennessee River. Her father worked for a lumber firm, harvesting tulip-poplar, hickory, yellow pine, red and white oak. The summer before she moved East, Mavis and her new husband, Travis, traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains and climbed Clingman’s Dome, at 6643 feet the highest peak in the state. Mountain laurel, redbud and irises rimmed the trail. Mavis saw five wild turkeys and a brood of mottled, brownish ruffed grouse in the bush. The adult male kept up an unearthly drumming sound with its wings trying to frighten the newlyweds away. These were the sort of things Mavis told Harry when he wasn’t running price checks on kiwi fruit or chasing down abandoned shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot.
Mavis took a quick sip of coffee “Personal computers, quad speed CD-Roms, faxes, supersonic jets - ”
“There were no personal computers with quad speed CD-Rom in Gandhi’s time,” Harry corrected. “No faxes either.”
“That’s not the point,” Mavis blustered. “Personal happiness can’t be reduced to fat bank accounts or income property.”
Harry shook his head up and down as if on cue. A bogus gesture. But then, Mavis’ thinking was so outmoded and unfashionable—like something out of the psychedelic sixties, his parent’s whacked-out generation. A culture built on tie-dyed T-shirts, flower power, twenty year-olds chanting secret mantras and waiting for the millennium or Armageddon - whichever came first.
“If I owned income property,” Harry countered, “I certainly wouldn’t be busting my rump in a supermarket for minimum wage.” Harry didn’t know or particularly care if any of what Mavis was telling him was true. He could listen to her lilting voice for hours - for the better part of eternity. Stare into her cocoa-brown eyes, while watching the pouty bottom lip form syrupy phrases like ‘dervish whirling’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘transmigration of souls’. Content was irrelevant. A lecture from Mavis on the intricacies of backyard composting would have left Harry equally spellbound.
Mavis smiled displaying a set of perfectly white, even teeth. Her shoulder length hair was straight and black, the nose compact. Except for the pearly teeth, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Mavis Calhoun. Still, the ditsy woman got under Harry’s skin like an itch. Not so much an itch as an irresistible craving.
Harry had his own theory about the woman. Mavis Calhoun was 'covertly' beautiful. The woman possessed an untapped potential for hidden loveliness - a confused landscape of precious imperfections. Hers was not the fragile beauty of classic line and unblemished texture but, rather, a quality resembling the unpredictable exuberance of wild flowers - of catchfly and purple coneflower; the eagerness and zeal of chicory and yarrow; the scruffy, unassuming ardor of scarlet phlox and Queen Anne's lace.
In a rash moment of over exuberance, Harry once told Mavis something of the sort, but the guileless woman balked, didn’t know what to make of the odd remark.
Back hand compliment or sincere flattery?
Mavis simply rolled her chestnut-colored eyes and spoke of something else. Harry never broached the issue again.
In recent weeks, when Mavis tried to snare him with the metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Harry focused on her teeth. The two, sturdy slabs, top front - so durable and immaculate - were symbolic of the woman’s spiritual perfection. Twin alabaster tiles, unblemished by nicotine or periodontal complications.
“Five thousand six-hundred, fifty three people of Chinese origin presently live in Tennessee,” Mavis said. “I looked it up in the state census report.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Thought you might want to know.”
“Total population?”
Mavis leaned forward with a dreamy smile. “A tad under five million.”
Harry wondered if the Chinese community of Knoxville didn’t feel a bit lonely at times. “What’s your husband’s take on Eastern philosophy?”
Mavis scowled. “I showed Travis a picture of Gandhi in his white robe; he said the mahatma looked like ‘a flea-bitten faggot.’”
Travis Calhoun dropped his wife off at work two or three nights a week. A heavyset man, most days he was unshaven and wore torn jeans with a rebel flag sewn on the back of his dungaree jacket. Married at eighteen, they were high school sweethearts. One pregnancy early in the marriage ended in a miscarriage. Mavis never became pregnant again. When Harry mentioned the stillbirth, Mavis swallowed hard and looked away. For the remainder of the day, outside of an occasional price check, there was no carefree banter, and Harry had the presence of mind to leave the woman alone. “No, I wouldn’t think your husband would be overly interested in Eastern philosophy.”
Mavis splayed the fingers of her left hand and studied the wedding ring. The tiny diamond, more like a chip than a bona fide, precious gem, glinted weakly. “That’s why,” Mavis confided breathlessly, “It’s such a blessing to find a spiritual twin soul.”
Another of Mavis’ cockamamie notions held that Harry Wong and Mavis Calhoun were twin souls. She shared this intimation recently in a mad gush of esoterica and Harry, too smitten with her infuriating loveliness, couldn’t disagree. “We really should be getting back,” he said and gulped the last of his coffee.
In the late seventies, Harry’s parents traveled to Guilin in southern China to adopt a baby girl. The orphanage, which sat at the base of an outcropping of limestone pinnacles rising six hundred feet in the air, offered the Americans a package deal. Six months earlier a boy with a wandering eye was born in a nearby province. The distraught parents brought the child to the baby home. One eye gazed curiously about the lobby while the other eye flitted indiscriminately in space. “Our child has a wicked demon,” the mother said and, with her husband, hurried quickly away.
Strabismus: an imbalance of the eye muscle in which one eye cannot focus. A simple operation at Children’s Hospital in Boston rid Harry Wong Smith of the ancestral curse. An act of gratitude, the Smiths included the biological parents’ last name on the birth certificate. East meets west. Harry Wong Smith - a semantic absurdity. Harry never used his middle name - not on signatures, certainly not in public.
One afternoon in early April, Harry visited the Brandenburg library. “I need information on Bernoulli’s principle.”
“Could you be a bit more specific?” The reference librarian was completely bald but sported a thick black beard as though his facial hair had been relocated from the naked skull.
“Bernoulli studied planes,… aerodynamics.”
The librarian came out from behind the desk and led Harry up a flight of stairs to the rear of the building. “You should find what you're looking here.” He pointed to a row of books at chest height and went back to his post. Harry selected three volumes and took them into the reading room. Daniel Bernoulli. He found a lengthy reference in the appendices of the second
book.
The bulge in the upper surface of an airplane wing makes this surface longer than the lower portion. Because the air above moves faster, it exerts less pressure creating an upward imbalance.
Harry began making notes. At the photocopier, he reproduced several diagrams, went back to the table where he had left the other books and began putting together a bibliography of sources and quotes.
Less pressure is exerted by a fluid that is flowing faster than ...
“Fancy meeting you here!” Mavis Calhoun was standing on the far side of the table clutching a sheet of paper in her hand. She wore a summery cotton dress and a string of pearl. The impish smile tore his heart out, churned his mind to mush. She raised the sheet up over her head like a trophy. “You’re looking at the happiest woman in the world! That man,” she gestured in the direction of the reference librarian, “gave me this list of the one hundred favorite novels recommended by the American Library Guild.”
“And you’re going to read everyone.”
“A to Z!” Mavis grinned. “Problem is, I don’t recognize much of any of the authors. My reading to this point has been somewhat …erotic ”
“Erratic,” Harry corrected.
“Yah, that too.” Mavis bent over the table and positioned the sheet under his nose. “How’s this one?”
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Harry’s English literature class read the novel in his junior year. “I think you’d like it. It’s about this girl growing up -”
Mavis leaned forward across the reading table and impetuously thrust a hand over his mouth. “No, for God’s sake, don’t say a word! Don’t reveal a solitary thing that happens, because I’m going to read it cover to cover. Tonight!”
She ran off in the general direction of the fiction shelves. For a solid minute after Mavis was gone, Harry could feel the pressure of her soft fingers against his lips. He should have kissed them - thrown her down on the reading room floor and made mad debauched love to the young woman with the American Library Guild list. Instead, Harry collected his notes and quietly left the Brandenburg Public Library.
When he reached home, Harry took the three library books into his bedroom and laid them on a desk next to the study guide. The assignment was due in a week. Tomorrow after finishing his shift at the supermarket, he would copy out the rest of the material. Friday he would cobble together the artwork - drawings, graphs and scientific formulas. The science project would be finished with time to spare.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - it was a masterpiece to be sure. Mavis was probably already lying in bed next to her Neanderthal, redneck husband scanning the dust jacket. Maybe she would slog through the first fifty pages, at best, and then lose interest. Forget fifty! Harry doubted Mavis Calhoun would survive much past the first twenty. Everything with Mavis was slap dash, close enough for jazz. She was a sprinter not an intellectual, long distance runner. The other day at the supermarket, Mavis had gone off on a rant about some newfangled metaphysical theory. Harry couldn’t even recall the half of it. He couldn’t remember because, when Mavis held court, Harry zoned out. The verbiage fell away and, in its place was a pristine, immaculate silence, a communion that transcended the spoken word.
Harry showered and brushed his teeth. After blow-drying his hair, he cross-referenced what he had learned about Bernoulli’s principle in the first book with the other two. Yes, everything was under control. When air was put in motion, the turbulent fluid created an imbalance in pressure above and below generating thrust, a forceful shove.
Mavis Calhoun entered the Brandenburg Public library reading room, causing Harry Wong Smith’s feet to imperceptibly levitate an infinitesimal fraction of an inch off the ground. It didn’t fall under the rubric of aerodynamics and certainly wasn’t the sort of thing he could use in a science project, but the phenomenon was every bit as real! Mavis Calhoun and Bernoulli's principle were all tied up in a metaphysical blur. The woman from Knoxville, Tennessee generated so much emotional thrust that she literally lifted Harry out of his being, sent him careening into the cosmos like one of the romantically beguiled characters in a Chagall painting.
Flavor-of-the-month. Through the summer, Mavis immersed herself in the German existentialists, Kurt Vonnegut, Baba Ram Dass plus a hodgepodge of Sufi mystics and poets. There was no mention of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or any of the other offerings on the ALG summer reading list. Regarding her eclectic, literary preferences, Harry had no opinion one way or the other. To witness Mavis’ exuberant passion for truth (or whatever else she hankered after) was worth the price of admission.
One day Mavis cornered Harry in front of customer service. “I found this enchanting poem by the Persian mystic, Rumi, but I’m not sure if I understand it.” She recited from memory leaning hard on a southern drawl that made the verse sound childishly commonplace:
Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny.
But look up from the board now,
look how I’ve brought in furniture
to this invisible place, so we can live here.
When she finished, Harry blinked a half dozen times and stammered, “It’s beautiful but I haven’t a clue what the poet’s talking about.”
Three weeks later, Harry was restocking yogurt in the dairy aisle. Nellie Higgins from customer service approached from frozen foods. A pear-shaped woman, Nellie pranced about the store on her elephantine frame as though she were auditioning for the Boston Ballet. “A smashed jar of spaghetti sauce in aisle six needs seeing to.”
Harry stepped back from the refrigerated dairy case. “Mavis Calhoun’s husband just showed up with a dozen roses,” Nellie added with a sour smile. “Laid the flowers down with a flourish and left. Just like that! Not a word.” Nellie thrust her hands into her pink smock. “Sure wish someone would bring me a dozen roses for no good reason.”
“I’m sure he had his reasons - good or otherwise.”
“And what’s that suppose to mean?”
“Nothing,” Harry muttered.
Nellie grinned stupidly. “Don’t let puppy love cloud your judgment.”
Harry felt his cheeks burn. That Harry was sweet on Mavis was old news. Still, no one at the supermarket had the right to make fun of their friendship. Not when the cashier at express checkout was having an affair with the assistant manager, a sordid back-alley romance, and one of the meat cutters was dating a fourteen year-old. “I suppose you heard the rumor.”
The remark caught Harry off guard. “I got ears. I hear things,” he replied noncommittally.
“Mavis’ husband worked in a textile mill down south. Got into a squabble with another redneck.” Nellie lowered her voice and moved closer. “A lovers’ triangle... he killed the guy.”
“That’s old news,” Harry lied.
“Police claimed it was self defense. Never even went to trial.” Nellie picked up a plastic tub of Dannon cherry yoghurt. “Still it’s just hearsay. Could be a lot of bunk.”
Harry felt nauseous, light headed. He recalled an incident in early December. Travis Calhoun showed up midway through the afternoon shift, a heart-shaped box of chocolates tucked under his beefy arm. With a boyish grin, he laid the chocolates on the counter, blew an impetuous kiss and hurried away. Mavis pawed at the gift-wrapped box as though it contained an assortment of worthless rocks before stuffing it under the counter. Never once - not even when Travis mouthed the kiss - did he actually look at his wife; rather, his eyes ricocheted aimlessly off the customers, store fixtures, a cardboard display hawking Oreo Cookies at half price.
“What’d he kill him with?” Harry asked.
Nellie put the yoghurt back in the box and shrugged. Even when she was standing still, her unruly hips seemed to be decamping in a dozen, different directions. “Bare hands, a knife, crowbar, gun - what’s the difference? One punk’s rotting in a premature grave, while the other’s playing Don Juan passing
out long stem roses.”
A lover’s triangle. Was Mavis, Harry wondered, the unnamed, third party? Or was the adulterous woman the dead man’s wife? Harry stifled the urge to retch. “But it’s just a rumor?”
“Mindless prattle,” Nellie confirmed, shaking her head vigorously up and down. “People run their mouths. Say any fool thing that pops into their demented heads.”
“Aisle six. Spaghetti sauce.” He went off in search of a mop and pail.
*****
Through the winter, Harry sent away for college catalogues and admission forms. His father graduated from Northeastern University on Huntington Avenue across from Symphony Hall. Five years in the cooperative studies program earned him an engineering degree plus an offer from one of the more prestigious firms in the student placement program. Harry’s marks in math and the sciences were consistently high, and Mr. Smith was encouraging his son to follow his own example.
In the Sunday supplement to the Brandenburg Gazette Harry read an account of a Wall Street broker who left his two-hundred thousand dollar job to manage a bed and breakfast in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. “Best thing I ever did!” the ex-broker boasted. A banker from the Midwest took early retirement so he could devote the remaining years of his life to saving wild horses. “What wild horses?” Harry wondered. And if wild horses live freely in natural surroundings, why did they need saving? But then, as Mavis would say, it was all a matter of ‘karmic destiny’. Engineer, classical musician, supermarket bag boy, rescuer of wild horses, innkeeper - the possibilities were limitless.
Harry dutifully filled out his college applications and mailed them off with the processing fees. His private fantasy was to spend the next thirty years at Shop Rite pricing cherry yoghurt, stocking dried apricots, basmati rice and farm-fresh vegetables. He’d marry a woman like Mavis Calhoun, start a family. To hell with conspicuous consumption! They would live in a tiny matchbox of a house - cramped, but perfectly cozy - drive second-hand cars, scale back their expectations to nil. From Brandenburg center, a 40-minute drive south on 495 brought you to the sand dunes at Horseneck Beach where the all-day parking fee was five dollars. There was the free, bird sanctuary in Norfolk, a children's playground alongside the zoo just outside the city and a local art museum. You didn’t have to be rich, just frugal. And, of course, you’d need a clone of Mavis. A Mavis facsimile was absolutely essential.