To Do the Deal: A Novel in Stories

Boy?

1991

Take That Pull

It was while bartering with an early bird that Kenneth Bodine decided he might be good at sales.

You want $3 for this princess phone? The stoop-backed woman was poking through boxes even as Kenneth and Jodi carried them out into the yard. She held the receiver up to her ear as if listening for a dial tone. I’ll take it for one.

Kenneth walked over to look more closely at the phone she was holding. It had been in the house for as long as he could remember. Two dollars.

One and a quarter or I walk away.

Kenneth laughed to himself. As if he cared whether this old lady might leave his yard sale without buying! He looked over at his wife to see if she shared his amusement. She did not. She was arranging coffee mugs and flower vases on a card table. She wasn’t ready for customers, so she preferred to ignore them. It was left to Kenneth to say, Sorry. One seventy-five’s our best offer.

Pooh on you! The woman waved the phone’s receiver at Kenneth, and its long, tangled cord swayed in the air like a snake ready to bite. She dropped it into the box where she had found it and limped toward the curb, where a beat-up old station wagon was waiting, already laden with goods obtained earlier in the day or perhaps earlier in years past.

And then salesman’s superstition kicked in, though Kenneth did not yet recognize it as such, because he was not yet in sales. He looked down at the yellowed princess phone, dirt accumulated in its push buttons. He looked back at his first customer of the day leaving empty-handed, and he caved. Hey, he called to her departing back. One fifty it’s yours! And I’ll throw in the toaster!

It was the first Saturday in March—a little early in the year for yard sales, but Kenneth and Jodi were cleaning out clutter to make way for their first child, who was expected any moment. A secondary purpose was to pick up some extra cash. Actually, in Kenneth’s mind the financial objective was now primary, because his job had come to an abrupt end the day before. Kenneth was still too shocked to share this news with his wife. Besides, he didn’t want to trigger premature labor. Her due date was in a week.

I added everything up last night, Jodi said shortly after the sale had officially opened for business, but before the yard had filled with browsers. If we sell it all as priced we’ll make $534.

I don’t want to disappoint you, but the most we can make is $532.50.

Kenneth surveyed their enterprise. Out in the front of the lawn was the furniture handed down from his mother but not of sentimental value. Most likely to score significant dollars were the mirrored vanity table with upholstered bench, the dining chairs of dubious quality, and the solid oak bookcase from which Jodi would later and forever regret parting. Mingled among these were the scavengings that, on neighborhood walks the evening before trash collection day, Jodi would find propped against garbage cans and (Kenneth suspected) sometimes in them: the Shaft movie poster, the chandelier missing only a few prisms, the Book-of-the-Month-Club hardcovers with promising titles. A large tarp on the grass was littered with the rejected muddle from two merged households: the less-desirable toaster oven, the backlog of motorcycle magazines with girlie covers, the box of fabric pieces from a half-made quilt that would never be finished. Two card tables next to the front walk, positioned for impulse purchases, held the dollar-and-under items.

Backdrop to this clutter was their 1939 Cape Cod, with its peeling, painted-brick exterior that Kenneth defended as antique and Jodi judged as ready for a new coat. Sycamores, pin oaks, and beech trees fifty years old and twice-fifty feet tall fenced in the view of sky. The boundary of the nation’s capital was barely two miles east of their street, yet except for the fact that so many of their neighbors worked for federal agencies, government contractors, policy think tanks, economic development banks, and lobbying firms, it was a place much like any other in suburban America.

This particular Maryland neighborhood had one other distinction: it was so walkable. A mere block away out the back door was a small shopping center, with its family-owned pharmacy, independent hardware store, and mom-and-pop mini-mart only recently swallowed by a national chain. The post office was a block in the other direction, a co-op nursery school and an elementary school were each a few minutes away, and the middle and high schools were also within walking distance for those who still considered two miles a walkable stretch. Downhill and due south lay the bike path along MacArthur Boulevard, and even farther downhill, on the far side of the Clara Barton Parkway, lay the C&O Canal. These parallel tracks of roadways and pathways wended for miles in both directions, providing a sense of connection to the control center of the country yet also easy freedom and escape. Past the canal, the Potomac River coursed toward Washington, though even more trees—living, dead, and caped by invading ivy—obscured from view its implacable surface and dangerous undercurrents. It was an idyllic neighborhood, but hardly one Kenneth could afford. So when his mother had married a rooted Canadian and departed north, in the year of his own marriage, he had gladly worked out an agreement to buy the house with no money down and payments no greater than the rent on his College Park apartment, and moved back home.

Kenneth’s second sale of the day ended up a return. At ten thirty, as he was making a quick count of mid-morning earnings—$172.50—a woman who two hours earlier had bought one of Jodi’s alley finds tapped him hard on the shoulder.

Hey, Mr. Bill of Goods, she heckled. You sold me a plant stand that has a broken leg.

Kenneth nodded. Yes, this is a yard sale and I sold you a piece of vintage metal furniture for $6. You got a good deal. Can’t you see the brass etching under the rust?

I want my money back.

Kenneth acquiesced without protest and resold the plant stand half an hour later for the same price to a man with a French accent and an insouciant air. Kenneth felt no need to stipulate as-is, but his wife did. Just so you know, Jodi called over to the buyer from where she stood neatening the clothing table, it’s missing the foot of one leg.

Bien sûr. I saw that.

Jodi approached, her curiosity piqued. Just to know—what do you plan on doing with it?

I have an antique store in Georgetown. I will brush down the brass, put a doily on top, and sell it for $80.

But it has a broken leg.

Ça ne fait rien. One can lean it against a wall. The man hoisted the item onto his shoulder and carried it away.

Kenneth saw Jodi watching the man as he stowed the plant stand in his truck and drove off. Her big belly made her stand with her feet apart. He knew she didn’t feel attractive in her pregnancy, though she was. She had resumed refolding sweaters; customers were not buying them, but they liked to paw through the pile. You can tell by the way he handled the table that he thought it was quality, she murmured to Kenneth. I wonder, what’s the name of his shop.

But Kenneth didn’t answer. He was too busy haggling with a dowager who wanted him to agree to a dollar for six shirts.

If Kenneth had been the type of man who applied his sense for numbers to anniversaries, he might have realized: the yard sale was exactly two years and six months from the day he’d given Watermelon the boot. That whole scene had gone down at the Montgomery County Fair tractor pull, Labor Day 1988. They had been sitting on the last row of the grandstand’s planked aluminum seating, not quite hip-to-hip as they might have been even a month earlier. They were watching a John Deere tractor painted an incongruous fire engine red make its attempt to pull 2,000 pounds. The horn sounded and the machine bolted down the track hauling its sled. Halfway across the field, it rose up and bucked like a bronco, belched a cloud of black smoke, and heaved down onto the track in a full stop. As the rescue tractor came out to hook up the John Deere and haul it away, Kenneth thought to himself, I’m done.

Kenneth was not one to make a conscious connection between his own foundering relationship and a tractor that failed at the full pull. Jodi, however, whom he had not yet met but who was sitting three seats to his right, was more given to metaphorical thinking. She took the failed pull as a big slap on the forehead.

Here’s what happened after the John Deere bounced to its humiliating end: Kenneth looked at Watermelon flirting with the stranger on her other side, a pasty-faced man who was politely accepting her attentions. He looked at the man’s companion, a sweet-and unhappy-looking woman. She was wearing a ponytail much like his own, but hitched up higher on the head. He and the woman locked gazes for the briefest of moments. Then he stood up and turned to his girlfriend. Make your own way home, Watermelon.

Huh? Her mouth was open in a circle, a trace of cotton candy on her lips and pink ear plugs poking through her hair. Kenneth wondered why he had allowed himself to be so fixated on this woman’s melon-sized breasts that he had failed to notice her total lack of softness anywhere else. She stopped licking her cotton candy long enough to deliberately turn away.

But Kenneth was wise to this battle tactic. And one thing about him: when he was done, he was done. He was three strides down the aluminum staircase when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned around with irritation, but it was not Watermelon. It was the unhappy-looking woman. I’m leaving, too. Kenneth gave this remark silent acknowledgement. The two of them loped down the grandstand steps before they could lose their collective nerve.

She was right beside him as he exited the stadium. But as they merged into the passing crowd of fairgoers, she moved off in a different direction—like the stranger that she was. Some unknown force of the universe compelled Kenneth to stride after her bobbing ponytail. He touched her on the arm, as she had touched his just moments before. She turned around. Hey, he said. I’m going on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Want to come?

Watermelon. Kenneth had invented the name in honor of the pink-and-green macramé bikini, with black knots for seeds, which the girl had been wearing when they met on Waikiki Beach. It was the last day of his Hawaii vacation and Kenneth was frantic with desire fueled by a week’s infusion of near-naked bodies. Water play only whetted his appetite for another kind of activity. It galled him that by day two, his apartment roommate and trip companion, Kip, had snared a jolly surfer girl with athletic legs and octopus arms. When Kenneth’s turn came he surrendered himself without a nod to discretion.

The young woman in the pink-and-green bikini had approached him as he emerged from the water at sundown after his last surf. He was sad and wistful and already thinking ahead to the next day’s loathsome flights back to the mainland and across the continent. I’ve been watching you, she said. Wow, you’re amazing. Kenneth knew his hang-ten skills didn’t qualify for the come-on, but that was hardly important. Besides, he was dripping wet and wondering what macramé looked like wet, too. I love your long hair, she added. It’s so thick I want to braid it. At a beachside bar, he bought her a coconut drink, and then another; she bought him with a flash in her eyes and a toothy smile. Kenneth returned to his hotel room to change and to casually let it be known to Kip that he had a date. He met back up with the girl at a sushi bar on Kalakua Avenue and consumed enough piña coladas to dampen his ability to later recall any early indicators of compatibility. What did penetrate into his hindbrain was the potent atmosphere created by the tan babe in a mini muumuu sitting next to him, the warm breeze carrying the scent of frangipani, the flesh-colored sashimi glistening on their shared plate, and the good-time vibes emanating from the background bar chatter. And so evening ended as it had promised, with girl leading boy to the backseat of her Volkswagon Bug. It may not have been entirely comfortable, but it was way more than sufficient. Kenneth was so happy in the fragrant darkness that he whispered, I love you, my little watermelon. He didn’t even know her real name.

But she knew his. And his address, too. She must have looked at the driver’s license in his wallet, because two weeks after he’d flown back home, when he was back in the bedroom of his College Park apartment, where he had a stack of orange crates for a dresser, a corner for a clothes hamper, and the skateboard he’d made in seventh grade to remind him that he hadn’t made it all that far beyond childhood, he opened the first letter she mailed him. That started a five-month correspondence. Her letters were filled with loopy handwriting and happy/sad faces and long paragraphs about dramatic happenings at the candle store where she worked. His were a hybrid print-script scrawl of a few spare sentences. One day a letter arrived from California: Watermelon was driving cross country. By the time Kenneth realized what was happening, she had moved into town and harnessed him into a rollercoaster.

Kenneth felt light in the head even though he was upside down in the Looping Starship, and blood was rushing to his brain. It pulsed with the thrill of the midway and of liberation. The stranger next to him was screaming with fear and delight, her long ponytail in that strange style created by gravity pulling at the wrong end of the body. The Starship was at the apex of its arc, clutched in its suspended, inverse pause between before and after. Kenneth had ridden the Starship dozens of times, but the exhilaration it gave him at this moment was greater than ever before, and not just because he was forcing his gaze from the upside-down horizon to the ground a hundred feet below.

I didn’t catch your name, the stranger said as they exited the ride.

Kenneth Bodine.

She grabbed his arm. You’re kidding! Bodine?

So?

I could never take your name. She said this with a woeful expression and a shake of her head. At this reference to entanglement Kenneth felt as if a just-finished nightmare was recurring in new form. But the girl with the ponytail smirked, as if she had just played a good trick. My name’s Jodi, she said. Short for Jodine.

It took a second for this to register, and another for Kenneth to ready a comeback, but it was quick enough. We could name our firstborn Eileen. Or Maureen Justine. If it’s a boy, Mean Dean Bodine. Maybe he’ll make it in major league baseball.

Jodi would take Kenneth’s surname when they married, despite the internal rhyme, or perhaps because her maiden name was Eschelbacher. She would not, however, let Kenneth play the name game with their baby. The girl, when she came, was christened Mary Catherine.

Jodi’s water broke at two in the afternoon, when she and Kenneth had given up on any more yard sale customers but still had a yard full of goods. They had made $319.50, a fair yet disappointing haul. We better go, said Kenneth, all business, yet slightly panicky.

No, we can’t leave all this stuff outside. And I need to change my pants.

I mean it, Kenneth said. You can’t have your baby on my mom’s old bed frame.

Jodi laughed. You haven’t read any of those baby books, have you? This baby will take hours.

Jodi was wrong. Some women in their first pregnancies take a day to deliver—waiting out the afternoon that labor starts with walks around the block, staying up through the night while timing contractions and cursing their sleeping husbands—and in the process, become so exhausted that when morning comes and they’ve finally reached the stage where it’s reasonable to arrive at a hospital, they beg for an epidural before their man has even set down the overnight bag. Jodi would be just such a woman with her second child. But her first was a determined little creature. Like her father, when Mary Catherine Bodine was done, she was done. She quite nearly delivered herself in the front yard of her parents’ Cape Cod. As it was, she arrived in the lobby of Shady Grove Hospital, wailing so belligerently that she earned an Apgar of 10 without having to go through the formalities.

You been in the 4-H building yet? Kenneth figured it was the least likely place that Watermelon would look if she was seeking him out for a showdown. He had already spent two hours there with her earlier in the afternoon, just before the tractor pull, studying the quilts.

I love the 4-H, said Jodi. Lead the way.

They wandered among the displays of pickle jars, the floral arrangements, and the heirloom vegetables, through what seemed like endless rooms. Kenneth did not find it as tiresome with Jodi as he had with Watermelon, whose commentary on the displays had been colored by a generalized competitive disdain. His new companion exclaimed over everything. Look at this potted daisy! It’s earned a blue ribbon. It’s so simple, yet so sweet. It must be in the category of first-time entries by ten-year-olds. This is all so cool. Hey, here’s the quilt gallery!

Kenneth deftly detoured to the honey display, where a young beekeeper was handing out samples in little plastic tubes. Kenneth watched Jodi stick her tongue out to lick a dollop of golden fluid. It emboldened him to ask: Why did you walk off on your boyfriend?

Jodi sucked contemplatively on her sample before she answered. "Your girlfriend was flirting with Russell. It made me really uncomfortable. But then it hit me: what was I jealous of? I don’t love that guy. In fact, he bores me to death."

Kenneth bought two jars of honey from the beekeeper. As they walked away, Jodi continued in confessional mode. I punted, though. I told Russell I had a headache and would take the bus. I knew he wouldn’t offer to drive me home. He loves the tractor pull more than life itself.

Russell and I have something in common.

So you must have been really motivated to leave, with the show barely started.

It was time.

Jodi laughed. Just like that! What’s your girlfriend’s name, anyway?

Watermelon.

Are you kidding me? She grabbed his hand. Look over here! Kenneth found himself standing in front of a display of fruits, largest-in-class. The watermelon was the size of a hefty pig. The feel of Jodi’s hand in his own felt largest-ever, too. His heart was beating loudly. But Jodi seemed calm enough. She was asking him a question. So you just stranded that poor girl?

She’ll get a lift from Russell, if I know her.

Oh, Russell, Jodi sighed. "It’s not his fault he is who he is and I keep wishing he were something a little bit else. It’s like that John Deere tractor, some fool painting it red