A Marriage Made at Woodstock (2 page)

“Hey, Freddy!” Herbert said happily. Frederick could hear laughter in the background, mixed with music. Herbert was no doubt down at the China Boat, his favorite hangout since his wife had packed up and left him. “This is your brother. I was just wondering if…” Frederick pushed the fast-forward button and Herbert's invitation to dinner sped past in a whir of words. The Girls were not kind to Herbert Stone these days, it was true. But then, Herbert had never been light on his feet when it came to women.

“Lorraine, it's your mother,” the next voice declared. “I realize that nine thirty is much too early for you to be up, but when you
do
turn out, call me. Joyce is quite upset that you forgot her birthday yesterday. She says strangers with mental problems are more important to you than your own sister.” There was a sharp
click
, and then the blessed tone again. Chandra was going to hit the proverbial roof. Frederick smiled appreciatively. He had allies in the strangest of places. He considered taking his mother-in-law on as a client, for free, to repay her for all those years of unknowingly airing his grievances, but her widow's mite would barely warrant his expertise. Too bad. She deserved his finding her a deduction here and there in the IRS haystack. The old battle-ax was good:
Lorraine, I realize nine thirty is too early…

Nine thirty? Frederick looked at his watch. Updating Portland Concrete had taken longer than he had anticipated. Then he remembered Chandra's declaration on the refrigerator.
It
is
of
earth-shattering importance.
They had been married for over twenty years;
everything
in Chandra's life was of earth-shattering importance.

In the kitchen he filled a cup with hour-old coffee and headed upstairs to their bedroom. When all those blended beans went stale, they were still better than the coffee at Cain's Corner Grocery that Chandra was addicted to, although she now carried her own ceramic mug in a personal effort to speed up the demise of Styrofoam.

“Honey,” Frederick said, and poked at the lump in their bed. “You'd better get up. Here's some coffee.” Chandra stretched out her arms, a crucifixion figure, as she did every morning. Frederick had seen the symbolism in it. Not yet ten o'clock and already nailed to the cross for her sacrifices to humanity.

“What time is it?” she asked. She yawned as she reached a hand out in search of the cup.

“A little later than you wanted to get up,” Frederick admitted.

“God, this tastes good,” Chandra said, and he knew she meant it. He had given up on her taste buds years ago. Just as he had given up on the stray cats. “So what time is it, really?” she asked. With a quick flash of her wrist, one slender hand rose up and, with fingers acting like a comb, she swept them through her hair.

“About nine thirty,” he said, though by now it was almost nine forty. He tried to sound frivolous, as though time were a thing to be courted, perhaps, but never obeyed.

“Nine thirty!” Chandra said. “Jesus Christ, I'll be late for the boycott!” She was suddenly sitting up in bed. With over twenty years of practice, he had still not grown used to how quickly she could switch like that, from being stretched out to sitting up suddenly with a new idea, from being pacifist to wishing anticonservationists would get ambushed in back alleys.

“Damn it, Freddy, I
asked
you,” Chandra said. She flashed past him to the bathroom, and he followed. “I suppose you had your nose in that computer's face again.” She was adjusting the knobs for her shower. “You can be pretty thoughtless sometimes,” she said. He leaned against the wall.

“What boycott?” he asked.

“The National Veal Boycott, is all,” Chandra said. “True, there's no software offered on the subject, but out there, in the
hard
wear
of the world, some important things are taking place.”

“It's not even ten o'clock,” Frederick said, “and already you've come up with a computer pun.”

“I don't ask you to join me,” Chandra said, and flopped a thick bath towel onto the floor beside the shower stall. “But I do ask you to wake me up.”

“I've never understood your aversion to clocks,” said Frederick, bringing up a point he'd mentioned more than once. “Almost everyone, including me, has to wake up to an alarm. That's what you call a rude awakening. But
you
get a gentle nudge in the side and a cup of coffee.” He watched as she unbuttoned the top of her pajamas and tossed it past him. It landed with a soft
swish
in the hallway. Her small breasts bounced as she bent to remove the bottoms.

“Put my pajamas in the hamper, would you please?” The bottoms flew past his head.

“
Excellent
coffee, I might add,” he said. He watched as she pulled her hair up into a quick ponytail, most of it still brownish-blond with youth, but some strands now gray. It was, Frederick realized, as if an old abacus, that first computer, was busy at work, counting one hair at a time, numbering the days, marking the years. It was all a means of keeping track, wasn't it?
Updating
humans.
Jesus, but the years were swift bastards.

“One of these days your little country with the secretive coffee beans may need our help,” Chandra was saying. “And it'll be people like Sukie and me who fight to keep it going so that people like you can keep making excellent coffee.”

“That little country happens to be a thriving democracy,” Frederick said, and was thankful that the Ivory Coast was the only African country to offer beans to the Western world. Otherwise, Chandra might be right. Frederick could tune in to CNN some heartless morning to learn that half the beans of his prized blend was now in the hands of some upstart military regime. “They have a president now and can get along quite nicely without any help from you and Spooky. Incidentally,” he added, “there's an orange cat on our windowsill.”

“Just until I get it a good home,” Chandra said. “Ignore it.”

“It has no tail,” Frederick said.

“
That
I can't do anything about.” The shower door slammed in his face.

• • •

Back at his computer, Frederick paged down his menu of clients to James Bennett, DDS. As the files appeared on the screen, he heard the back door to the kitchen open with a gentle creak.

Who in hell?
he thought, wondering if perhaps Joyce, maddened beyond logic, had come after Chandra with a kitchen knife, a birthday gift no doubt from someone who
cared
. But it was not Joyce. Before him he saw two women who looked as though they were editors of one of those feminist magazines,
The
Lesbos
Biannual,
The
Menses
Monthly
, or maybe
Sister
Sappho
, circulation twenty-eight and growing. They peered at Frederick as if to ask what
he
was doing there.

“We did as the paper told us,” said the shorter woman. She was dwarfish, with a long, thick braid trailing down her back. Frederick accepted the paper she handed him.
Sukie. Go around to the back and let yourself in
, the note said.
The
door's unlocked.
How many times had he told Chandra to lock the goddamn doors! And what good did it do for
him
to lock the things when
she
left such notes upon them? Chandra seemed to think murders couldn't occur in Maine. Maybe she and Sukie had boycotted them there or something. And why hadn't he seen the proclamation when he went out for the morning paper? Walter Muller's upstairs light, Frederick supposed, had garnered all his attention.

“Sukie, I presume?” Frederick asked, and balled the second note that day into a perfect salvo. He looked at the windowsill for the cat, but it was gone.

“I'm Halona,” the woman said. “This is Sukie.” A pale, thin creature, looking every bit as tall and anemic as
Sukie
suggested, peered at Frederick over the other woman's head.

“Chandra's just getting out of the shower,” he said, and moved in front of the computer monitor to shield Dr. Bennett's records, as though they were the dentist's exposed private parts. “Make yourselves at home,” he added sarcastically.

“What's that?” asked Sukie, and pointed at the computer.

“It's a computer,” Frederick replied. Good Christ. Had they stepped completely out of the crumply pages of the sixties?

“I mean, what's all the numbers for?”

“It's an accounting package,” said Frederick.

“A
computer
,” said Halona, pushing past Sukie and staring wide-eyed. She pointed at the screen. “Is that the game where somebody steals something and you try to catch them?”

“
Game?
” asked Frederick. “This isn't a
game
. This is information on one of my clients.” It would be futile, he realized, to explain his work to these women. It was then that Chandra breezed into the room, still buttoning her plaid shirt.

“Sorry I'm late,” she said. “Faulty alarm clock.” She threw the sarcasm in Frederick's direction and then disappeared into the kitchen.

“By the way,” Frederick said as Chandra appeared again, a yogurt in one hand, spoon in the other. He'd been savoring the moment. “There's a message from your mother.” He watched the frown appear on her forehead. Sukie and Halona, trained picketers that they were, followed her obediently into the den. Frederick heard the button click, and then the curt message.
Lorraine, it's your mother.

“Lorraine?” he heard Sukie's shrill voice ask. He smiled, delighted.

“My name before I changed it,” he heard Chandra explain. A minute later the trio was on its way, like a tiny mob, back to the computer room and on out to the kitchen. Frederick followed them out of good-natured curiosity. “I even had a notary public involved so the name would be, you know, official. It's on my license. I mean, it's legally been my name for over twenty goddamn years, and she still leaves messages like that.” Frederick shrugged his shoulders helplessly when Chandra's eyes met his.

“An emergency?” he asked, and pushed the tailless orange cat away. The visitors must have let it in, as they did themselves, and now it was twisting snakelike about his calves, marking him well with its scent. He put a foot beneath its stomach and scooted it aside. He could sense a sneeze coming on.

“Emergency my ass,” Chandra said. “Joyce is another year along into what she calls the frightful forties. She likes for people to turn up on her birthday and pity her. Well, I'm afraid I have too many important things to do.” She helped herself to an orange in the fridge and then offered the basket to Sukie and Halona. They shook their heads in harmony.

“Do you need to call her back before we leave?” Sukie asked. “We still got time.”

“I
never
answer her messages when she calls me Lorraine,” said Chandra. “She says Chandra, she gets called back.”

Frederick remembered the first time he'd ever heard her speak the name
Chandra
, as though it were a little song, a breeze from along some river running through the night.
Chandra.
And he remembered
her
as she had been, her hair thick, wet with rain, smelling slightly of marijuana. “It's Sanskrit,” she had told him, and he was caught up instantly in how her lips moved when she uttered syllables, as though they were coins she was offering him. “It means moonlike.” And so it did. And so did she, lovely, pale, changeable thing that she was. My God, but he had fallen in love with her faster than you could format a floppy disk.

“It took her about ten years,” Chandra was now saying, “but she finally caught on. If it's something important she wants, however, you'd be surprised how quickly she can remember names. By the way, my seminar this month, ‘The Psychology of Names,' is in two weeks. Why don't you come?” Frederick suppressed a grimace. He imagined the house full to the rafters with Berthas and Lucilles hoping to become Sukies and Halonas.

“My name means
fortunate
,” Halona said then. “It's Native American Indian.” Frederick stared at her. With her flaxen hair, blue eyes, and buxom chest, he could imagine her as a kind of woman warrior at the vanguard of some Anglo-Saxon assault upon a castle. Mildred, maybe, but not Pocahontas.

“What does
your
name mean?” Chandra was asking Sukie.

“I don't know,” Sukie said. Her hair was thin and fine as a spider's web, her eyes those of the walking wounded. She would have made an excellent Moonie, Frederick decided.

“Where'd you get it?” asked Chandra.

“My mother gave it to me,” said Sukie, backing up a bit, as though Chandra might heave the orange at her in disgust.

“But what does it mean?” asked Halona.

“I don't know,” Sukie admitted. She seemed ready to run. Perhaps she sensed what Frederick already knew: it's a dangerous thing when picketers turned on one another. “It just means
Sukie
, I guess.”

“You need to come to my seminar for sure,” said Chandra. She gave Frederick a quick kiss. “Bye, sweetie. See you after the boycott.” Fine words from the woman he married
. See you after the boycott.
“Oh, and don't forget to pick up a dozen or so marigolds at Home Depot. I'll set them out tomorrow.”

Chandra gathered up some posters from a corner of the kitchen. He hadn't noticed them before, but there they were, sad calf faces peering out of tiny crates. He felt that pang again, the swift kick of guilt.
Frederick
the
Abandoner.
He shuffled the orange cat, batting it along on the end of his foot, out onto the porch behind the three picketers. The membranes in his nose were vibrating wildly.