Tom Hanks - Uncommon Type - Some Stories

“The Patels have first names that hurt my tongue,” Harlan joked. “I call them Mr. and Mrs. Patel.”

“Irrfan and Priyanka.” Darlene shot a look at her husband. “And would it hurt you to learn their kids’ names?”

“Actually, yes it would.”

These were Bette’s kind of folks.

Darlene rattled off the names. “Ananya, Pranav, Prisha, Anushka, and the youngest boy is Om.”

“Om, I got,” Harlan said.

The Smiths over there gave away apricots from their tree by the bushel. The Ornonas over there had the ski boat that never left their driveway. The Bakas family in the big blue and white house had huge parties every Greek Easter and if you didn’t show up the family would bring up your absence for the rest of the year. Vincent Crowell operated a ham radio at all hours. His was the house with a huge antenna on the roof.

“And Paul Legaris teaches science at Burham. The college. Has two older kids.” Harlan reported. “Heard his son is joining the Navy.”

“A teacher,” said Bette. “Thus the footware.”

“Come again?” Darlene asked.

“He gave us a ham in flip-flops. On his feet, not on the ham. I thought a man wearing flip-flops in the middle of a weekday was, you know…”

“Comfortable?” said Harlan.

“Unemployed.”

“No classes in session in August.” Harlan sighed. “I envy a man in flip-flops on a day like today.”

Pop! Bette saw Paul on campus, between classes, sitting on a bench on the quad, surrounded by coeds, pretty girls who had Legaris for Introduction to Biology, and he was always so free with his time. One of those coeds was sure to have a thing for older men in positions of authority, or so Paul Legaris hoped.

The warm summer evening beckoned the kids back out onto Greene Street as Bette cleaned the dishes, then headed upstairs to find linens and make the beds. From the window of the bedroom shared by Dale and Sharri, Bette saw Paul wheeling a large tube out of his garage—his aforementioned telescope—on a hand-made dolly, aided by some kids. By the time darkness fell completely, Bette had plugged in her Bluetooth speaker and paired it with her phone so Adele could provide a mournful score for the evening’s chore of lining closet shelves and untangling hangers. Bette was still organizing dresser drawers when she heard one of the kids slam the front door and stomp up the stairs.

“Mom?” Eddie yelled, coming into what was going to be his room. “Can I make a telescope?”

“I admire your spunk.”

“Professor Legaris made his own telescope and it’s amazing to look through.”

“ Professor Legaris, huh?”

“Yeah. The man who lives right next door. His garage is full of amazing stuff. He keeps a bunch of wires and tools in a big wooden thing called a chifforobe. He has three old TVs with knobs on the side of them and a sewing machine you have to pedal.” Eddie jumped onto his bed. “He let me look into the Cosmos, whatever that is, through his telescope. I saw the moon and, like, a shadow of the sun was covering part of it.”

“I’m no professor, but I think it’s the shadow of the Earth.”

“It was funny. With just my eye, the moon looked like it was being sliced out of the sky, but through the telescope, you could still see the cut-up part, but it was red. Craters and everything. He made the telescope himself by hand.”

“How do you make a telescope?”

“You get a round piece of glass and grind on it for a long time, then make that part shiny, then put it on one end of a tube, like for carpets. Then you buy eyehole things.”

“Lenses?”

“Opticons, I think he called them. He teaches a class on how to make your own telescope. Can I?”

“If we can find a tube, like for carpets.”

The kids went to bed late that first night on Greene Street, but having spent so much energy running around they all conked out, pronto. Before she could forget, Bette put three dollars under Sharri’s pillow in exchange for that tooth, the fairy being rather flush with cash.

The day finally over, Bette opened a bottle of red, red wine and called Maggie, telling her about all the neighborhood kids, the Pittses and the Coke connection, and yes, her vision of Paul Legaris.

“What is with your luck with men?” Maggie asked.

“It’s not my luck,” Bette said. “It’s the men. They are all so sad. So obvious. So desperate for a woman to define them.”

“Desperate to fuck you,” Maggie deemed. “And there you are, right next door. If he comes over next time smelling of some Rat Packesque cologne? Bolt the door. He’s after you.”

“I hope he’s aiming for his students. Teaching assistants. Sorority girls.”

“Those could get him fired. The hot divorcée who moved in next door is legal game. He may have binoculars trained on your windows right now.”

“If he does he’ll see Eddie’s Star Wars curtains. My room is on the other side of the house.”

As August yawned deeply into its dog days, Bette avoided contact with her next-door neighbor, not wanting to hear Are you doing anything tonight? again. She drove home, scanning Greene Street for signs of Paul Legaris. Once he was on his front lawn and he waved as she pulled into the driveway, calling out, “How you doing?”

“Just super, thanks!” she said. She hustled inside like she was very busy with something when, in fact, she had nothing going on. Another time, there he was watching the neighbor kids kicking footballs in a game called Pig on the Fly, so she grabbed her idle phone and pretended to be on a call as she went into the house. Paul waved at her, but she just nodded back. During the evenings she feared the doorbell would ring and there he would be, freshly showered and smelling of Creed, asking if she wasn’t doing anything, would she be interested in dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory? She had once taken her dentist up on that very offer. He turned out to be such a narcissistic bore she changed her dental care provider. Around then she declared an Armistice in the Dating War, and now she was hell-bent on keeping her new life on Greene Street void of attachments and thus disaster free.

As it turned out, the kids saw more of Paul Legaris than she did. He was washing his car on a Friday evening (who washes a car on Friday evening?) when Bob picked them up for his weekend of custody. Bette showed her ex-husband around the lower floor of her new house as the kids packed their weekend bags, then she watched as they all piled into Bob’s car. Paul came over when Eddie wanted to introduce his dad to the guy who taught Cosmos at the college. The two men chatted longer than necessary, Bette decided. When Bob and the kids drove off, Paul went back to washing his car. Though she did not have a vision about the exchange, she wondered if the two men had compared notes on, well, her .

The next morning Bette slept in, wonderfully late on a Saturday morning without the kids. She came down the stairs of the quiet house barefoot, in a pair of yoga pants and a light cotton hoodie, carrying her iPad.

“Hey, big boy.” In bare feet she steamed up her morning elixir, taking it out to the backyard before the sun broke over the roof and the heat became too much. She took her iPad with her; it seemed like years since she had used the thing anyplace other than in bed. She sat in a plastic Adirondack chair under the backyard tree, scrolling through back issues of the Chicago Sun-Times Sunday magazine, then lingering too long on the Daily Mail website, when she heard klock klock klock klock klock.

A woodpecker was doing the woodpecker thing somewhere.

Klock klock klock klock klock.