David Wallace - Broom of the System

“She threw shoes?”

“Andy sees in this Lenore person a chance to change the past. Andy is always trying to change what he can’t change. He’s a silly. And remember there are two sides to every coin.”

“….”

“Always lots of branches in the same relationship-tree.”

“I don’t think this branch stuff is right, Mindy.”

“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”

“Lenore is pretty heavily involved with Mr. Vigorous, is the thing.”

“Ah, Mr. Vigorous.”

“Who was really your neighbor, in New York City, when he was married?”

“In Scarsdale he was, yes.”

“This whole thing is making me feel a little eerie.”

“Branches and trees, darling.”

“But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved.”

“Andy sometimes likes to hurt, too, when he’s not himself.”

“But I mean they’re really close. Lenore more or less lives over there with him a lot of the time. Mr. Vigorous is incredibly jealous.”

“Poor thing.”

“He even bought the bird for Lenore that’s on ‘The Partners With God Club’ right now.”

“ ‘The Partners With God Club’? On the evangelist network?”

“Didn’t you even see it when you went over to Gilligan’s Isle to see Andy?”

“I only saw him. I was only there to say hello, it turned out. I was only there a moment or two.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, I remember this, he said, ‘Guess how much shit I want out of you right now, Melinda-Sue.’ He says that sometimes.”

“Sheesh.”

“He calls me Melinda Sue.”

“….”

“But you say her bird is on the show?”

“Her bird more or less is the show right now. The bird, Vlad the Impaler, except on the show he’s got some weird Italian name that Reverend Sykes said Vlad the Impaler chose in a moment of ecstasy…”

“Hart Lee Sykes?”

“Yes. Vlad the Impaler is a cockatiel who can sort of talk, or at least repeat things so convincingly it’s apt to seem.like he’s talking, and the Reverend gets him to ask people in pathetic-Christian-TV- viewer-land to send money, and they do. Our landlady is with him in Atlanta, and our landlord says she says the money is supposedly tidal-waving in, right now.”

“I’ll have to watch this.”

“It’s on every night on cable at eight, on I think like channel ninety, one of those cable channels.”

“Hmmm.”

“Except now Rick’s being all spastic and weird about the bird, Lenore says. He has the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop, which if you do any time at the F and V board you’ll get to know really well, because our lines are like super fouled up and we get a lot of their calls, but anyway he has the receipt, and he says because Lenore didn’t give him this certain gift at Christmas, Vlad the Impaler is legally and emotionally his. That’s what Lenore says he says.”

“….”

“And maybe he’s really trying to get ahold of the royalties, because Vlad is apparently raking in a lot of royalties, from the tidal wave of money, but that just wouldn’t be like Rick. Rick is intensely weird, but he’s not weird about money. Money just isn’t very important to him.”

“But he legally owns the bird because Lenore didn’t give him something?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I really shouldn’t say.”

“I’ll pay for lunch. Including dessert.”

“A spanking. Rick supposedly wanted a spanking.”

“A spanking?”

“That’s really all I should say.”

“And he owns the bird, on the show.”

“Kind of hard to take a man seriously who wants a spanking for Christmas.”

“That doesn’t match my memory. My memory is of a nice man in a beret who spent a lot of time at his den window and helped get Daddy out of the lawn, sometimes. I guess we’ll see.”

“Your Daddy was in the lawn?”

“….”

“I think you’ve misjudged Lenore.”

“So I gather.”

“I think you’ve misjudged Andy, too, if you excuse my saying so. I don’t think you can expect to get him back by pretending to be a different violet branch of the same tree.”

“Shall we go?”

“Here’s the check, thanks a lot, Mooradian’s tends to get a little expensive.”

“God, you’re not kidding. This bill is obscene.”

“I think you and Andy just need to sit down and rap. You should try to go out of your way to see him tonight, straighten things out.”

“Tonight Andrew S. Lang is taking Lenore Beadsman to some gymnastics show.”

“No.”

“The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”

“I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him.”

“We’ll see.”

/e/

“This is suck!” said a small oriental man ahead of Lenore in the line.

He turned to her and said it again. “This is suck!”

With him was another man and two women, all in leatherish jackets. They were all nodding, agreeing that it was suck. Lenore thought they were maybe Vietnamese. She knew Vietnamese people tend to have really high cheekbones. Lenore’s junior roommate at Oberlin had been a Vietnamese woman.

“Pardon me?” Lenore said to the man.

The man took his hands out of his jacket pockets. “This is suck, that we must wait like this. We have been this line for a long time.”

“Pretty decent little old crowd, all right,” said Wang-Dang Lang. He jingled his car keys.

Lenore turned from the man and looked behind her in line. There she could see two girls, from maybe about high school, with short hair Lenore could tell was a very strange color, even between the lights of the Building and the marquee. They both had on big winter coats that looked like some shiny quilts sewn together. Whatever they were talking about they couldn’t believe.

“I just could not believe it,” said one of the girls, who, Lenore saw, had paper clips hanging from her ears.

“What an asshole,” said the other girl.

“No, I mean I could not believe it. When he said it to me, I just totally freaked out. I totally freaked. I was like:” the girl gestured.

“What a gleet.”

It was cold for September, tonight. Lenore had on her gray cloth coat. Lang had on a sheepskin jacket with some false wool fluff around the collar. They were now near the ticket window, after about half an hour.

“Very nice of you to take me, Andy,” Lenore said. “On such short notice, what with Mindy in town, work, et cetera.”

Lang smiled down at her and played with his keys.

“Rick just pretty clearly didn’t feel like going,” Lenore went on, “and he more or less told me to ask you to go.”

“Well shoot, that makes it a bit like an order, then.”

“Candy has to work tonight over at Allied, is the thing.”

“I don’t look at it like a job, Lenore,” Lang said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Kopek Spasova’s really supposed to be great.”

“And your Daddy told you to go?”

“Dad doesn’t tell me to do anything. He said he’d appreciate it, is all. If I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.”

Lang grinned. “You sure about that, now.”

“Of course I’m sure. If I thought this was going to be suck, to coin a phrase, I wouldn’t do it.”

“My own personal Daddy tells me to do something, I as a rule do it.”

Lenore looked at him. Her breath went up toward him a little before it disappeared. “Except he told you not to marry Mindy Metalman, you said in the car.”

Lang laughed. “OK, usually I do what he says.” He looked serious. “Sometimes me and Daddy just take a while to see eye to eye.”