Those Plums and Other Stories Read online

Those Plums and Other Stories

  Copyright 2011 Harley Crowley

  THOSE PLUMS and other stories

  by Harley Crowley

  Table of Contents

  Good Neighbor

  Star-Crossed Love

  Inheritance

  Last Trip

  There When You Need Them

  Those Plums

  I Think About You, Maggie

  About the Author

  Good Neighbor

  In the early 1950s all sorts of salesmen came to the door during the day. Mrs. Patterson’s habit was to personally entertain as many as she could manage. It was said in the neighborhood that the Fuller Brush man had his route taken away for spending too much time in her house.

  Her husband didn’t sleep with her. He said he respected her too much. Instead, he slept with secretaries and barmaids, and female desk clerks when he traveled. When they were first married it bothered her, but Mrs. Patterson had learned to compensate.

  She subscribed to Life and Saturday Evening Post, and invited the boy who took her order into her house each week when he delivered her magazines. In those days, magazines were brought to the door by the salesman who signed you up. It was a personal service. The magazine boy had never slept with anyone before, and at first he made up for inexperience with his enthusiasm. But he had very little imagination and by renewal time there were no surprises left. Mrs. Patterson let the subscriptions lapse, although for a while he kept coming around anyway.

  Most women in the neighborhood avoided her because of her reputation, but she did have one friend. The young wife next door, Brenda was her name, lived alone because her husband was in the army in Korea. Brenda had become distraught because she found out he had a Korean concubine, and she spent many hours shedding tears over cups of coffee at Mrs. Patterson’s kitchen table. Mrs. Patterson gave her a gift subscription to Colliers. That worked out well for everyone. The boy transferred his affections readily because at that age they are all testosterone and fickleness.

  Sometimes, when she saw him scuttling up the front walk to Brenda’s house carrying his bag of periodicals, Mrs. Patterson would come outside and tease him, asking if he wanted to stop by and show her his wares, in case she wanted to subscribe to something new. His face would bloom with heat and he would rush to Brenda’s door, while Mrs. Patterson stood on her walkway, one hip cocked to the side and her arms folded below her breasts.

  Brenda got pregnant while her husband was still in Korea. She told Mrs. Patterson, licking at her tears as they ran by the corners of her mouth, and clutching a glass of Olympia beer from the quart bottle Mrs. Patterson had set in the middle of the kitchen table at the sight of her puffy eyes and tragic expression. Mrs. Patterson first experienced a surge of righteous pleasure at the thought of the cuckolded soldier. But her second feeling was more compassionate, and when Brenda had collected herself enough, Mrs. Patterson wiped the circles of condensation from the table and helped her compose a letter to her husband, expressing a perfect proportion of heartbreak at his betrayal, and contrition for her own understandable response.

  When Brenda’s husband came home on leave three months later, Mrs. Patterson watched from her window as he got out of the taxi and hoisted his duffle bag onto his shoulder. Half way up the walk he stopped and stared at his house and Mrs. Patterson held her breath. Then Brenda came out the front door onto the porch and he dropped his bag, straightened up tall like the soldier he was, and strode towards her. After they embraced, he stepped back and put his hands on her belly, and Brenda rested her own hands on his.

  Mrs. Patterson smiled, satisfied, then turned and went to the kitchen to check on the cookies she was baking for the new greengrocer route driver.

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  ~~~

  Star-Crossed Love

  “Chocolate soy chai latte, please.” Joe couldn’t believe it. This was Joe’s Diner. How could she say that? Decaf was as far as he went, grudgingly.

  But she was cute, in an odd way. Black lipstick. Green fingernails. Five-colored hair. She was probably a vegetarian. Joe was a bacon and beef guy. Still, he wanted to please her. He leaned over the counter, making sure she could spot the name stitched on his hat.

  “I could make you a cocoa.”

  “With soy milk?” She beamed.

  He sighed. “Got no soy milk. That’s not real milk.”

  She sat back and folded her arms. “That’s the point, Joe. I’m lactose intolerant.”

  It was over before it began.

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  ~~~

  Inheritance

  The last time they saw each other Hiram O’Donnell hadn’t said the things he might have said. There’s always next time. Except there wasn’t.

  They had supper together at the steak house in the senior O’Donnell’s neighborhood, the place the family had always gone for special occasions. It was his dad’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  “Three quarters of a century,” his dad said. “Sounds old.” Hiram’s fiftieth was next week, so it was a joint celebration. It turned out to have been a good idea, because by the time of his own birthday, Hiram’s dad had slipped out of time, said goodbye to the living, in deed if not in word. If dying is a deed.

  That last night, with the clinking of glasses and flatware and dishes muffled by the thick rug and the brocade fabric on the walls, they had their usual spare conversation. The little oil lamps on each dark table flickered the only light in the room except for the soft glow coming from behind wooden sconces.

  “How’s the golf game going, Dad?”

  “Oh, fair to middling. That promotion going to come through?”

  “Hard to tell.” He wished he’d never mentioned the possibility, but his father always probed for information about how the job was going, and so he’d given him that.

  “Well, you’ve been talking about it long enough, son. Maybe you could goose the situation a bit.” He made a jabbing motion with his fork in Hiram’s direction.

  “I’ll think about that.”

  “You think too much. That’s your problem. You’re almost fifty—when are you going to take hold?”

  “Let’s talk about something else, Dad. What’ll it be, cake or pie tonight?”

  Not much else came to mind, and they were mostly silent through their last dessert together.

  Three days later his mother called late in the evening. He went immediately to the hospital, but the heart attack had already taken his father. It felt to Hiram as if his dad had put something over on him. If he’d lived longer, doddered into his nineties maybe, the balance might have shifted. Instead, he’d quit while he was ahead. Hiram felt like he’d been left stranded, his determination to extract an elusive prize from the old man still intact. But his father had left the field and retired champion.

  **

  On the day of the funeral, Hiram rode with his mother in the back seat of the mortuary limo to the cemetery. The bare trees were starkly black against the snow. His mother put a gloved hand on his and smiled at him.

  “Your dad was proud of you, you know.” She gave his hand a pat.

  “No, I really didn’t know that. He never shared that with me.” He heard his own sarcastic tone and tried to mitigate it with a rueful smile.

  She gave him a thoughtful look. “No, I don’t suppose he did.” She mused for a moment and then added, “He withheld.”

  “Right. That’s a good word. But why?” Out the window uniformed policemen blocked traffic at the side streets as the long procession of cars wound past with their headlights on.

  “Do you remember your grandfather?” She turned towards him and smiled. Then she reassembled her face into a gruff, forbidding frown.


  It was like his grandfather was there in the car with them, dropping by to make sure nobody screwed up his son’s burial. Hiram couldn’t help laughing.

  “Perfect, Mom. You have him nailed.”

  She relaxed into her own face, and then gave him a last quick mug shot of Grandpa. “Herman the Dour,” she said, as the car scrunched into the snow-covered gravel parking area near the burial plot.

  **

  Hiram sat next to his mother in the middle of a row of folding chairs, the coffin suspended on a low platform over the excavated grave in front of them. More chairs were lined up beside them and behind them, filled with friends and associates from a lifetime spent in this town. His mother held a handkerchief in her hand, but there had been no tears. Hiram put an arm around her shoulders and rested it on her chair back. As the droning voice of the minister dissipated into the cold outdoor air, his words coming and going like a radio station fading in and out, Hiram’s mind ran free.

  He remembered his grandfather leaning on his cane in the kitchen doorway in his grey suit and suspenders, mouth twisted in discontent. He saw his father, brow furrowed in irritation at the newspaper, over his morning coffee and toast. And his son, Casey, hunched in concentration over his guitar, experimenting with a new melody.

  Casey hadn’t been able to come on such short notice, but they’d talked on the phone. He was in San Diego now. He’d finished his degree in anthropology, a choice Hiram thought impractical. He had asked Casey if he knew of any employed anthropologists. Now his college-educated son clerked in a bookstore during the day. Still in love with his guitar, he took any gig he could at night, and was trying to break into the music business with his own songs. Hiram couldn’t see where the boy thought he was going. The question popped into his head.

  When is he going to take hold?

  He felt as though he had been slapped awake.

  And then the images fell into a pattern, a patrilineal line beginning with his grandfather Herman, then his father, himself, and finally Casey. Superimposed over the family portrait he saw a grey smudgy line connecting them, running through them, shadowing and diminishing them. It looked like a curse.

  The minister’s voice rose as he began the benediction. Hiram’s mother stirred and straightened in her chair, and Hiram tightened his arm around her shoulders. The sun, low in the west, shone bleakly through the thinning clouds, and cast the shadow of his father’s coffin across their feet.

  It was his turn, another chance. It seemed auspicious to be in this place in this moment, with the corrosive dark line still clear in his mind. Something cumbersome lifted free of his spirit and wafted away over the graves and into the surrounding trees.

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  ~~~

  Last Trip

  The stars were flying all over the place. Thousands of them, swarming like fireflies. I thought it had something to do with the tab I’d put on my tongue. My eyes were jerking every which way, following their crazy paths. I jammed my eyelids shut and grabbed hold of the arms of my lawn chair.

  “Whooee!” I shouted.

  Brian came right over. “What is it, the stars?”

  “God yes—I can’t look at them!”

  “It’s not the drug,” he said. “It’s really happening.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “The stars came loose, I think!”

  “No way.” I peered at him through my fingers. “We’re just having the same trip.”

  “Uh-uh, I didn’t take it yet. I was waiting to see how you were doing.” He grabbed at my arm. “We gotta get out of here!”

  “And go where, if the universe is coming apart?” I still had my wits. I was shielding my eyes from the sky with my arm and I rolled out of the chair onto my knees. The grass was waving at me, which was soothing, and more like what I’d expected.

  “My parent’s basement! Come on!

  I still didn’t believe him but he was acting so desperate I let him drag me up off the ground and we stumbled up the long hill towards the house. I was getting used to the sky. It was so beautiful, all that glittering motion. I wanted to stop and stare but he jerked me along.

  “Do you hear that?” His voice was ragged, panicky. I did hear something—a crackling roar from the other side of the hills that sounded like it was heading our way. That got me moving, and then I was racing him towards the basement doors at the side of the house. I looked back once, at a tree silhouetted against the sky, just as it burst into flames.

  Between us we managed to lift the doors up and we ran pell-mell down the concrete steps. The doors crashed shut behind us and it was black dark in there. Brian fumbled around and found the string pull to turn on the light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

  The basement is where we used to play when it rained, mostly war games with Brian’s plastic soldiers, using his Lincoln Logs to make our forts. They were still there, layered with dust and cobwebs in a red plastic bin. The old beanbag chairs were slumped up against the wall. Brian dragged them to the middle of the room and we flopped down, panting. In the dim light from the overhead bulb it was hard to see, but it looked like Brian’s eyes were bleeding. He didn’t seem to notice, and he leaned across the floor to pull the bin of toys between us.

  We divided up the soldiers and arranged our battle lines, and waited for the world to end.

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  ~~~

  There When You Need Them

  I wasn’t expecting company. When the doorbell rang the place was its usual chaos, or maybe worse than usual-–the books and mail advertisements and newspapers and apple cores, the cereal bowls with Grape-nuts welded to their surface in a shimmer of congealed milk, the clean clothes in a tangled, wrinkled pile on the couch waiting since last week to be folded and put away. I thought about pretending I wasn’t home, but the TV was blaring the laughter of the audience on “Ellen,” giving me away.

  I peered through the peephole, and there was Uncle Elmer’s nose, huge from the fish-eye lens in the door. Aunt Emily, smaller than real life, stood on the porch step behind him, her large black pocketbook under one arm and a bright patriotic package, blue paper with stars and a red bow, in her hand. Well, I can’t resist presents, and Elmer and Emily are old and half blind anyway, so I opened the door and greeted them with the usual apologies for the mess, even though the extent of this one deserved a ramped-up apology. What could I say? “How was the tornado at your house?”

  And this was all my own mess, no one else to blame since the ex moved out. I haven’t had much motivation since he left, his griping being the main reason I did any housework at all. He set my agenda for so long it’s a wonder that I get up in the morning on my own. If I didn’t have to pee I probably wouldn’t start my day until noon or so. Sort of scary, really. What if I can never get my own initiative back? Aren’t people supposed to be able to see for themselves what needs doing and then just do it because it’s there in front of them? I always did it because I’d get in trouble if I didn’t.

  But I was telling you about the visit from Elmer and Emily. I stood back to let them into the house. When Emily saw my living room she said, “Oh my!” involuntarily and clapped her hand over her mouth to stop any other words that might embarrass me. That’s how kind she is. She’s much sweeter than her sister, my mother. Mother would have started right in trying to whip me into shape just like the jerk always did. Actually, I think she trained me for life with him.

  Uncle Elmer was a little more direct but still kind. “Looks like you had a little whirlwind here, Sweetheart.” Which is exactly what I’d been considering telling them, like I said before. But there wasn’t any judging in it, just an unbiased articulation of the facts before his eyes.

  “We heard about the J-E-R-K taking off, and we thought you might be lonesome,” he said. Aunt Emily held out the package and I’m afraid I snatched it. It had been so long since I’d had a present.

  I tore off the paper and ripped open the box. Inside a sterile cellophane wrapper was a pink p
lastic object. It could have been a Mr. Cucumber except for the color, and the little switch on one end. Loose in the box was a pair of AA batteries.

  Uncle Elmer was busy studying my laundry. I looked up at Aunt Emily for confirmation.

  “Well, Honey,” she said, “We thought it might cheer you up”

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  ~~~

  Those Plums

  I ache all over, he said, and I wonder about the future of my body, if it’s going to see better days or if I’m on the way out now. And I said don’t be ridiculous, you’ve said that every spring since I’ve known you, you always overdo in the spring, there’s no stopping you. In another few days you’ll feel like yourself again. He rolled over in bed and moaned, and he put a pillow over his head to block out the daylight and said, I’m going to sleep a while longer, maybe I’ll feel better later, and I said don’t you want any breakfast, you need to eat something. And I pinched at where his love handles used to be, that soft bulge at the side of his hips and all I got was some loose skin.

  I frowned at him. Where’s your nice plump flesh, what did you do with it? And he said I just haven’t felt much like eating lately, and I went over to the window and yanked up the blinds so the midmorning sunlight lay across the bed and I made him turn over, I made him sit up and put the damn pillow down and look me in the face, and I said you are gaunt. You are getting so skinny, and I swear you had a double chin when I was here a week ago, now you’re all angles. What is happening to you?

  And he said it’s those plums. I started eating those plums. And he gagged a little and said, I couldn’t stop once I started. The plums did something to me. And I said we should get you to the doctor, you don’t look so hot, and we should take one of those plums to send to a lab, find out if they’re poison or something. Nobody loses weight this fast, it’s not natural. And he said there are no more plums, I ate them all, and I said all of them? And he nodded, looked ashamed.

  Well, I said, we’ll take a little branch of the tree with us then, and I looked out the window into the back yard and I said which tree is it? I’ll go down and get a piece of it while you get dressed. He staggered over and looked over my shoulder and said it’s gone, they must have taken it back with them. Who must have taken it, I asked him. The ones that planted it, I think, and I said who was that, who planted it, and he sighed, I didn’t want to tell you. I thought it was a dream. And he sank back on the bed and wrapped a sheet around him to cover his bony ribcage. I shouldn’t have eaten them. I knew there was something wrong, they just appeared out of nowhere.