As Far as I Could Tell

Mark left the viewing after a socially acceptable period of time. Or at lest what he thought was a reasonable amount of time to stay at the funeral of the wife of one of the guys on your bowling team. In the twenty years he and Jack had bowled together he’d never met his wife, only heard Jack joke that if he didn’t have his Tuesday night out of the house away from the ball-in-chain, he’d be been shipped off to the asylum years ago.

Mark wanted a drink more urgently than he wanted to take his suit off, so he stopped at the grocery store to get some beer before heading home. As he was walking to the beer cave in the back of the store, his phone beeped alerting him that he’d received an email. He stopped in the wine aisle just long enough to remove the phone from the pocket inside his suit jacket, click the screen on, and discover that he’d earned new rewards points from the big box electronic store across town. As he looked up, putting his phone back in his pocket, he saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She looked about 5’8″, black hair, bright red lipstick–She looked like Bettie Page, he thought.

Mark was lousy at picking up women. In the 20 years he’d been dating, the only girls he’d ever managed to pick up were ones he met at the bowling alley, and he’d only ever pulled that off 4 times, the last of which was 6 years ago. Six years was a very long time, long enough to cause a man to abandon all hope. After the first three years of his dry streak, he no longer saw the point in scrubbing the shower or washing the sheets on his bed. Why bother if no one else was ever going to come in contact with them?

Maybe it was the fact that he’d just left a funeral. Maybe it was because he was quickly approaching middle-age. Or maybe she was just too beautiful not to go out on a limb for, but something gave Mark the courage necessary to get this woman to fall in love with him. He knew nothing about her. All he knew was that fancy people drank wine, so he’d have to come up with something fancy, “cultured,” he’d heard people call it. He slowly made his way toward her, occasionally picking up and considering different bottles of wine all along his path. When he finally made his way next to the woman, he took a deep breath and picked up a malbec, “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about wine. Do you think something like this would go well with lamb?”

The woman looked up at him. “I wouldn’t know, I’m a vegetarian.”

This didn’t discourage Mark, in fact, the only thought he had was that he was really going to miss hamburgers.

“Oh, no, of course. Me too. That’s why I asked. I’m on my way to this horrible dinner at my boss’ house, and they’re serving lamb. I’ve already eaten a chickpea salad and some veggie stew, so I won’t be hungry all night, but you know how it is. The boss invites you to dinner, you go, even if an innocent life was sacrificed in the process. I thought bringing wine was the least I could do since I’ll be judging them the entire time.”

The woman seemed not to care how righteous Mark was about his vegetarianism. “Well, I do think they say that lamb goes well with red wine, so I’m sure what you’ve got there will be fine.” As she said this, she grabbed a Cabernet and started to walk away.

“Is this the 1812 Overture?” Mark asked, desperate to get her to stop. He only knew the name of one piece of classical music, though he didn’t know the specific tune to accompany it. He did know several songs by sound, being a big fan of war movies, and the one that just started playing over the grocery store’s Muzak system was one of them.

“I’m sorry?” the woman stopped and asked, not even sure if Mark had been talking to her?

“You know, the 1812 Overture,” and he started whistling along.

“Ride of the Valkyries, actually,” she said, “Wagner.”

“Of course, Wagner,” he said all but smacking his palm against his forehead to show how foolish he’d been. “When it first came on, I thought it was the Mozart.”

“No, you thought it was Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture. You don’t actually know anything about classical music, do you?”

Now a full-blown panic had set in. “Teach me,” he blurted as she walked away again, but this time she didn’t stop. She just kept going until she was gone.

Jim knew he never should have hired his wife’s sister to be his assistant. For one thing, he didn’t need an assistant. Before Stephanie came on board, he’d been running a six man operation. Now it was a six man, one dimwitted sister-in-law who’d never had to work a day in her life before her husband got sent away for exercising his right to not pay taxes for the last decade. After the feds read him his rights, all he said was “Don’t tread on me,” right before tripping over his too big flip-flops as they nudged him into the back of their sedan. Thanks to the current age of technology, some neighbor had been kind of enough to record the incident and post it on YouTube. The video had 476 views, 453 of which were Jim.

When Jim’s wife, Alice, asked him to consider hiring her sister to be his assistant, he pointed out that he’d run a successful landscaping company for 15 years without one, but once he realized he’d be cutting Stacy a check one way or another he relented. At the very least, maybe she can get the filing caught up, he thought.

For the first couple of weeks, Jim tried to give Stephanie the benefit of the doubt. It’d been a long time since he’d had to train someone, so maybe he didn’t give her all the details she needed to complete her menial tasks. For example, it had never occurred to Jim to file is invoices from least to most expensive, but he couldn’t very well be mad at Stephanie if he’d never told her he preferred they be filed alphabetically by last name. Stephanie had never answered any telephone but the one in her house, so it probably didn’t seem like a bad idea to reply, “I’m sorry. He’s in the bathroom. Lord knows when he’ll be out of there, Mexican for lunch, you know,” when a potential customer called while he was indisposed. Jim tried to remind himself how scary this must all be for Stephanie as he patiently corrected her every mistake. Or at least he did at first.

Jim’s company had operated so smoothly for such a long time, that he’d never considered that hiring one new person could practically bankrupt him in six months.

Jim had never liked the idea of hiring an accountant or bookkeeper to do what he could manage for himself, but maybe if he had, they’d have taken the time to look at the itemized statements for his phone bills. He noticed they were going up steadily, but so was business. Not to mention the state had just redrawn the area code lines, and he was now paying long distance prices every time he had to talk to half his clients. It wasn’t until this month when the phone bill spiked from $500 to $4078.22 that he finally looked through the supplemental pages that came with his bill. At first he didn’t understand what he was looking at. Line after line of collect calls from a number he didn’t recognize, with calls lasting anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. He picked up the phone and called the number. “West Virginia Correctional Facility.” He hung up the phone.

“Stephanie,” he shouted, “Could you come in here for a second?” Stephanie popped out of the small side room that Jim had set up as a seating area for meetings with his staff. She was flapping her hands in the air, either trying to take flight or dry the nail polish that Jim could smell as soon as she got to his desk.

“Yep, boss?”

Jim yelled as he shook the phone in her face. “Stephanie, your head’s so far up your ass, you probably have to swallow this thing just to be able to talk on it . If I ever see you pick up a telephone in this office again, you’ll need a doctor to surgically remove it for you.”

“Jim, I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said over the noise of Jim slamming the phone back on his desk.

“I’m talking about your idiot husband. What’s he doing calling you here, and what’re you doing accepting collect phone calls on a phone that’s not yours?”

“Well, Jim, I could never afford to take those calls at home. You don’t pay me enough.”

“Oh yeah, well as of this moment I don’t pay you anything.”

Just then, the phone rang, and at that moment, Jim knew he was dealing with a lost cause. In the six months she’s worked there, he’d taught Stephanie nothing, given her no practical skills. And to top it all off, she was still dumb enough to pick up, even as he was reaching for the thing.

“I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone right now. No, I’m sorry, I can’t disturb him. Jim’s right in the middle of firing someone.“

“I’m quitting. I’m quitting. That’s it. I’m quitting.”

“Calm down, Michael. You’ve only got three weeks left of your student teaching. It would be stupid to throw it all away now.”

Michael’s cell phone was switched to speaker phone and setting on the back of the toilet in the unisex bathroom at the back of the teachers’ lounge. It was lunchtime, but no other teachers were in the lounge. Michael thought back to when he was a kid, walking past the teachers’ lounge on his was back from lunch. Going past just as someone entered or left. The way spying your first grade teacher with a Virginia slim barely hanging onto her lower lip as she talked to the creepy gym teacher could really make this all-powerful woman seem a little more human. Teachers hadn’t been allowed to smoke in schools since he was in the third grade, which is probably why he didn’t have to worry about any of them overhearing him scream over the sound of the running faucet as washed finger paint off his shirt for the third time that week.

“I’m not kidding, Sofie. They’re fucking barbarians.”

“Hey, I’d much rather be cutting out construction paper hearts with safety scissors with you than where I am.”

“Oh come on. Middle school? That a breeze. When was the last time you spent 45 minutes combing glitter out of your hair?”

“When was the last time you had a pubescent 14-year-old threaten to slice your throat with his protractor while holding his algebra book in front of his crotch to hide his erection?”

“You win.”

Michael wondered how all this had happened. All he remembered from those first few years of schooling, aside from the smoking teachers, was watching filmstrips every day, and playing the recorder in music class twice a week. The most difficult thing he ever went through before the age of 12 was the Presidential Fitness Test, which he failed. Every time. And no one cared. And he liked kids. He really did. He couldn’t wait for him and Sophie to have one or two of their own. But he couldn’t have imagined this would be so hard.

He did his best to dry his shirt under the hand dryer, but when he put it back on, the giant wet spot on his back had soaked through his undershirt and onto his skin before he’d even buttoned the last button.

“I have to get going, Soph. The afternoon class will be here soon.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to head off and teach a bunch of 15-year-olds how to find the area of a circle. I don’t even know why anyone needs to know that stuff.”

“I always wondered about that.” Sometimes teaching kindergarten felt more like babysitting, but at least he was trying to teach these kids some skills they’d actually use every day for the rest of their lives. Like the ability to resist the urge to pick your nose in public. Or that reading can be fun.

“You gonna make it?”

“Oh, It’s smooth sailing now. The morning class are the real assholes, but I think we’ve finally turned a corner with the afternoon group.”

“Really? What’s the big difference between a bunch of 5-year-old assholes and a group who’s turned a corner?”

“Well, in the afternoon class, everybody showed up with pants on two days in a row, so it’s getting better.“

“That’s how you can tell? Wish I could say the same for my 4th period algebra class.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what happens to these kids between home and here. I’d say 80% of my day is occupied by making sure no one takes their clothes off.”

Michael took one last deep breath and picked his phone up off the back of the toilet, turning the speakerphone off and placing the headset to his ear. “I’ll see ya at home, Soph.”

“If I’m stabbed to death by a peach-fuzzed future dropout who resents being asked to hand in his homework, know that I loved you.”

When Michael heard Sophie hang up, he put his phone back in his pocket. A quick check in the mirror showed a small skin of dried glue right at his hair line. I’ll get it later, he thought.

He opened the door and left the teacher’s lounge just as the bus monitor was guiding his class down the hallway. “Mr. Dawson! Mr. Dawson! Look!”

“Wow, Scotty! What is it?”, he asked as the boy fished something out of his pocket and thrust it into Michael’s hand. Michael could tell by the feel of whatever Scotty had just put in his hand that he’d rather not hear the answer to his last question.

“It’s a grasshopper.” Michael looked down at the wingless, lifeless, headless? thing in his hand and was suddenly glad he’s skipped lunch in order to wash his shirt. “You can keep it,” Scotty offered proudly.

“Thanks, buddy,” was all Michael could think to say. I liked it better when they half of them came off the bus without pants, was all he could think to think.