Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Harvey turned up the radio. But a moment later there was a knock at my window. It was my older sister Connie. I rolled down the window. “Is the game over?” she asked.

“Bottom of the sixth,” said Harvey.

“I’m making linguine.”

“Did your mom talk to you?”

Connie nodded. I could tell from the puffiness of her eyes that she’d been crying.

“You two want to come in and listen to the game while we eat? Mom says it’ll be okay.”

I gave my stepfather the same hopeful look as my sister. “I got my new transistor radio,” I said, holding it up, as if he hadn’t been with me four days earlier when I picked it out.

“Sure,” he said. He turned off the radio and picked up his nearly empty third bottle of beer. Connie looked at the bottle and then looked at me. “Have you been drinking too?” she asked.

I nodded. “But don’t tell Mom.”

“I won’t tell Mom if Harvey gives me a pull.”

Harvey held the bottle up for Connie to reach in and take through the window. “You see why your mother’s kicking me out, don’t you?”

We had Connie’s linguine, which was seasoned with an ungodly amount of oregano (just the way we all liked it). My mother and stepfather were civil, almost friendly to one another at the table, and when the game was over and the injury of defeat was patched up with positive thoughts from the broadcasting trio on the future of the franchise, Harvey took me aside. Quoting the famous Yankee and future Mets player and manager Yogi Berra, he said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Then he handed me a fork he’d lifted from the table, and turning his face so I wouldn’t see it, went out onto the back porch to smoke another Tiparillo. I didn’t follow him. He had a lot of thinking to do about his next inning.

Adrian Martini took out his handkerchief and wiped the beading sweat from his forehead. It was late September but it felt like late July.

“Are you allowed to call it Indian summer when summer never really left?” asked Benny Baum, the other salesman working the floor that afternoon at Landis Avenue Appliances. Benny took a swig of his Coca-Cola, the third bottle he’d plucked from the frosty commercial cooler that afternoon. The cooler was put there by the store’s owner for the refreshment of his customers, especially those who had stepped into the un-airconditioned south Jersey appliance store and then seemed immediately desirous of stepping right back out again. The reason was this: in spite of meteorological evidence that argued against it, the owner had a seasonal habit of turning off his store’s central air conditioning unit the day after Labor Day. Nobody — not Adrian or Benny or Sophia, who worked in Accounts (and had come to work this day wearing more bath powder than Blanche DuBois) — could talk him out of it.

“Was that a real question or are you being rhetorical?” replied Adrian, sticking his now soggy handkerchief back into his trousers pocket.

“Doesn’t matter. Just making conversation,” said Benny through a half-yawn.

Adrian was only barely listening to his sales colleague. He was watching the two kids presently situating themselves on the linoleum floor in front of the store’s new Magnavox 330-square-inch console. Anticipating their arrival, Adrian had turned on the set and made sure it was tuned to Channel 6. Adrian did this every afternoon he was in the store, and every afternoon he was in the store the girl and boy could be counted on with almost clocklike punctuality to show up between 3:50 and 4:00. This meant that every weekday afternoon of every week, Landis Avenue Appliances got a ten-minute helping of American Bandstand rock and roll, leading into the main attraction: Popeye Theatre , hosted by Sally Starr. Thursday was Adrian’s day off. But he knew that the girl and boy came to watch Popeye and the Three Stooges and cowgirl Sally Starr on Thursday, too (along with the Dick Clark appetizer), because Benny told him so.

The girl, who looked to be about nine, and the boy, who looked to be about seven, had started making their afternoon visits about two months ago. Adrian and Benny figured that the kids didn’t have a TV at home. Mr. Poitras, the store’s owner, didn’t mind. In fact, he liked to think of the kids as props in a sort of real-life diorama about home and hearth and family togetherness — the hearth, the pot-bellied stove, if you will, of twentieth-century America being a sparkling new 330-square-inch Magnavox American Traditional, Normandy Provincial, or Danish Modern console television. ( And nobody beats our competitive prices! )

Benny took another gulp of Coca-Cola. He pushed the cool bottle against his hot cheek. The store was bereft of customers. Both men were feeling lethargic in the heat. “Who sends their kids to an appliance store every day?”

“What’s that?” asked Adrian. The show the girl and boy had come to see had just gotten started. The volume was turned up and Adrian was listening for Sally Starr’s daily salutation: “Hope you feel as good as you look, ’cuz you sure look good to your gal Sal!”

“I mean, we’re not talking adolescents here,” Benny went on. “My Rebecca just turned eight. I wouldn’t let her cross the street by herself, let alone come all the way down to Landis Avenue without some kind of chaperone.”

Adrian shook his head slowly. “Beats me. Maybe someday I’ll sit down with them and get the story. They always seem so engrossed in their show, though; I don’t have the heart to interrupt.”

Fortuitously, his opportunity came ten minutes later, when the power went out. It wasn’t a long outage and Benny attributed it to all the people cranking up their air conditioning at a time of year when the grid wasn’t prepared for the extra demand. Not that Landis Avenue Appliances was making much of a contribution to the temporary electricity crisis; except for the lights and a couple of TVs and the refrigerated Coca-Cola cooler, Mr. Poitras’s store was hardly pulling any watts at all.

“The TV’s broken,” said Kirk, the seven-year-old, looking up at Adrian.

“It ain’t the TV, pardner. Power’s out all over the store. See? No lights.” Adrian called Kirk “pardner” in deference to the boy’s cowboy hat. Kirk’s older sister Angela was wearing a Western hat too, hers very close to the design of that of the “Philadelphia Annie Oakley,” Sally Starr.

“When do you think it’ll come back on?” asked Kirk, his fretful expression betraying the degree to which both Kirk and Angela depended on Sally Starr for their afternoon fix.

“Soon, I’m sure,” said Adrian. “Somebody at the power station probably just has to flip a switch. Would you like a soda?”

Both Kirk and Angela nodded. Kirk’s tongue licked one corner of his mouth in eager anticipation.

Adrian signalled for Benny to come bring the kids a couple of Coca-Colas. “And get me one too,” he added.

A couple of minutes later, Adrian and Kirk and Angela were sitting on the floor of the half-darkened store, drinking sodas and talking about Sally Starr and her favorite horse and Popeye and Olive Oyl and Larry, Curly, and Moe, and the incongruity of a rootin’ tootin’ Old West cowgirl being friends with an animated sailor and three violently bellicose slapstick comedians from urban America. Kirk pointed out that Popeye — at least the full-sized cutout of Popeye that adorned the set of Sally’s show — was dressed like a cowboy. Case closed.

While the three were sitting and chatting and enjoying the “Pause that Refreshes,” a middle-aged couple came into the store to look at the new television models, finding no problem at all with the fact that they would have to do so in the minimal lighting offered by the store’s sunlit front display windows, and Benny Baum, the consummate appliance salesman, finding no problem at all in their finding no problem.