Carmen threw the magazine aside. “Got it for a steal.”
The flat screen TV looked ridiculously huge perched on the dresser six feet from the foot of the bed. “I prefer you tell me before making major purchases. How’d you pay for it?”
The blonde-haired girl smiled and glanced in her father’s general direction without making eye contact. “Credit.”
“I’m baking fish for supper. Salmon with that nice lemon-dill marinade.” His daughter seldom cooked and when she did it was always a disaster. The meatloaf she threw together as a special treat for Father’s Day turned out dry as a communion wafer and with about the same appeal. She seldom bothered with spices, never set the timer so she could gauge when an expensive cut of meat was properly done. Jason bought her a crock pot as a birthday present, but found the cooker buried in the hall closet under a pile of woman’s footwear in its original packaging. Fishing the recipe booklet from the bottom of the box, he whipped up a fire engine chili con carne that was to die for. Now the crock pot sat on the counter next to the microwave.
“I’m going to steam some Basmati rice as a side dish.”
“Okay.” Carmen retrieved the magazine. Jason went back down stairs.
Later that night over supper, Jason said, “You came home awfully late last night.”
They were seated at the kitchen table. Since his wife filed for divorce, they didn’t use the living room for much of anything. “I met the girls for a few drinks after work.”
“A few and then some,” Jason corrected. She smiled sheepishly and turned her attention back to the fish.
Around three in the morning, Jason heard the clumsy fumbling at the front door; his daughter stumbled over the threshold and, leaving a trail of feminine outerwear strewn across the lower landing, dragged her drunken carcass upstairs. Carmen never bothered to undress or shower. Jason found her lying supine, neck tilted to the side with a sliver of hardened drool tracking down her cheek onto the patchwork comforter. In the harsh early morning light, her bronzer made her look like she spent too much time under the lights at the tanning salon.
This wasn’t the first time Carmen came home wasted. But at least she was sleeping it off in her own bed. Alone.
“About that TV… I’m not paying for it.”
“I don’t expect you to,” she returned petulantly.
“We own a perfectly nice television. High definition with Dolby surround sound.”
“It’s in the den. I wanted a little privacy.”
A few minutes passed in silence. “I’m doing a story on that sect that took over the old Wilson farm.” He told her about Sister Wendy and the Indigo Children.
“Sounds like a lot of hooey.”
Jason raised a forkful of butternut squash laced with honey and cinnamon to his lips. If the elders had located their commune in hippie-dippy California, preferably somewhere north just off the Pacific Coast Highway, the group might have stood a much better chance of attracting a following. But thirty miles outside of Boston with its Calvinist work ethic and Puritan mindset was a long shot. The sort of hard-working, blue collar stiffs that populated Brandenberg weren’t about to be snookered by a crackpot, New Age cult. Jason would write the article, trying to edit out his own personal bias and let the proverbial chips fall where they may.
His daughter carried her empty plate to the sink. “Since I cooked the meal,” Jason remarked as Carmen headed back in the direction of her forty-inch, liquid crystal display TV, “would you terribly mind rinsing out the dishes?” Reluctantly, she turned back. “And don’t put the Pyrex dish in to soak for at least ten minutes,” he cautioned, “until it has a chance to properly cool.”
After supper Jason drifted into the living room and put on Frank Zappa’s Hungry Freaks, Daddy from the classic mid-sixties recording. He raised the speaker volume then went in the kitchen where he mixed a sloe gin and tonic. The sickly-sweet, pink liqueur always gave him a fuzzy drunk followed by an atrocious hangover. But sometimes that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Mr. America, walk on by your schools that do not teach
Mr. America, walk on by the minds that won't be reached
Mr. America try to hide the emptiness that's you inside
But once you find that the way you lied
And all the corny tricks you tried
Will not forestall the rising tide of HUNGRY FREAKS DADDY
Jason could sit on plush cushions in The Seekers of Truth meditation hall listening to Sister Wendy hawk her metaphysical wares, but it didn’t make him any less of a hungry freak. He was slip sliding away. Sister Wendy with her corny bag of tricks just left him more jaded, misanthropic.
They won't go on four no more
Great mid-western hardware store
Philosophy that turns away
From those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds
The left behinds of the great society
HUNGRY FREAKS DADDY!
After the third listening, Jason reduced the volume by half. He didn’t want the neighbors accusing him of noise pollution. And Carmen might storm downstairs, demanding to know what was wrong with her normally staid and respectable old man.
Later that night as he was laying under the covers, his daughter shuffled into the room and stood in the darkness near the foot of the bed. “Daddy.”
“Yes, Sweetheart?”
“Are my eyes overly large and clear?”
“Like twinkling diamonds.”
“And is my mind precocious with an amazing memory?”
“Einstein, da Vinci, Victor Hugo,… you put them all to shame.”
“Am I one of the Indigo Children?”
“Yes, of course, Carmen,” he replied dreamily. “I’m shocked you would even feel the need to ask.”
“Thank you, Daddy.” She padded back to her own room and shut the light.
At two in the morning, Jason’s shiatsu, Grover, began pawing insistently at the bed rail. Throwing a flannel bathrobe over his pajamas, he accompanied the dog to the back door and watched as it scampered down the stairs, disappearing into the darkness. Normally, Jason might have gone back inside, fixed a cup of tea and waited for the dog to return. But coyotes were recently sighted in the nearby woods and residents warned to keep small pets indoors. Wandering out to the middle of the yard, he found Grover sitting on his haunches like a halfwit staring aimlessly into space. When he approached, the dog stuck out its tiny tongue and started panting. “False alarm?”
Earlier that day, while Jason was relaxing in the cool comfort of the meditation hall with Sister Wendy, his mind kept flitting back to the young girl at the trout pond. In a few days, Maribel would travel to Alaska. He imagined her below decks on a rust-bucket trawler slopping gooey pancake batter onto a griddle to feed a dozen hungry fishermen. There certainly was nothing glamorous about the job. Along with the crew, she would freeze in winter and risk being caught far out at sea in dangerous weather. Jason sensed that, from Maribel Munson’s flinty perspective, the only calamity more terrifying than shipwreck was the prospect of spending another tedious week with The Seekers of Truth.
“Finally!” Grover lifted a hind leg and did his business. Almost immediately, the dog rushed aimlessly in circles sniffing the darkened grass - always a sure sign that the best was yet to come.
Jason gazed up at a clear sky, quarter moon and broad expanse of stars; an aromatic potpourri of fresh-mown grass and lilacs perfumed the dew-drenched, early morning air. When Jason was Maribel’s age, had he ever done anything quite so reckless as shipping out on a commercial fishing trawler?
Reckless, with its implicitly disparaging connotation, was a poor choice of words. Courageous, endearing, pigheaded, outlandish, daring, desperate, exhilarating – all more vivid terms to properly describe Maribel’s wanderlust!
There were a handful of ‘magical’ first moments Jason could look back on with fading nostalgia. The first time he snagged a large mouth bass on ten-pound
line with a lemony hula popper lure. The first time he smacked some wiseacre in the nose at a high school hockey game. The jerk promptly got up off the ice and returned the favor bloodying Jason’s lip, another unforgettable experience. The first time he rode the death-defying roller coaster at Nantasket Beach (the amusement park was closed down many years now). The first time he embraced his future wife.
So when had these magical moments become passé? Or were they nothing more than a transitory right of passage from reckless youth to bland adulthood? You bartered away those high adventures for more sedentary dreams.
The shiatsu with the corkscrew tail suddenly flipped about, a full three-sixty, hunched over, grunted and dumped yesterday’s lunch under a red oak sapling. “Okay, Grover, let’s call it a night.” Sweeping the pooch up in his arms, he bounded up the steps and returned to bed.
A week passed. Jason wrote the commune article. The reportage was fair and objective, leaving the reader to decide for himself if The Seekers of Truth was a legitimate religious order or motley collection of dysfunctional weirdoes.
Wednesday afternoon, the receptionist at the Brandenberg Gazette buzzed Jason on the intercom. “Young girl wants to see you.”
Maribel Munsen was sitting in the lobby her tanned legs splayed to either side. “I left the commune.”
“For good?”
She nodded. “I’m driving cross-country in the morning.” She rose and stretched her lanky limbs. “Where can I get a decent burger around here?”
“Depends on how you define the term ‘decent’.”
Maribel lowered her eyes. When she finally looked up, a silly smirk was inching its way across her face from the upturned corners of the lips to the dark eyes. “This svelte Jewish girl arrived at the commune a few days after I got there. By the beginning of June she’d gained thirty pounds and was suffering from chronic diarrhea.” She lowered her voice a handful of decibels. “I’ve spent the last twelve weeks farting my brains out on tofu salads, organic bean sprouts and whole grain breads heavier than paving stones. Now I need some real food.”
Jason grabbed his car keys off the desk, “I know just the place.”
They drove across the town up route 156 past the junior high school and Benny’s Hardware to Toner Boulevard. “What do you think?”
A Burger King sign loomed directly ahead. Maribel grinned broadly. “Yeah, that should do just fine!”
At the counter, the girl ordered a double cheeseburger and fries with a strawberry smoothie. “Would you like to biggie-size that,” the cashier asked, “for an extra fifty cents?”
Without waiting for Maribel’s reply, Jason said, “I’ll have the same and biggie-size both orders.”
“How old are you?” he asked when they were seated.
She dangled a French fry dripping with catsup in front of her lips. “Twenty-five.”
“I got a daughter your age.”
“And what’s she like?”
He didn’t respond right away. “Carmen,... she’s got a drinking problem. The girl’s up to her eyeballs in credit card debt and sleeps with every horny bastard that sweet-talks her into the sack. Other than that, she’s a swell kid.”
Maribel blinked twice. “You sure are a strange one. So what are you gonna do?”
“About what?”
“Your slutty daughter.”
“I thought we were talking about the drawbacks of a vegetarian lifestyle?”
“We’re finished with that for now. You never heard of tough love?”
Jason was familiar with the concept, but, where Carmen was concerned, it was so much easier to side-step the issue. “The busty blond girl weeding the vegetable garden,” he said, shifting gears. “Is she still there?”
“Studying pagan rituals. Gwen wants to be a Wiccan. She put her husband and kids on the back burner indefinitely so she can howl at the moon and do whatever unencumbered spirits do with their newfound freedom.” Maribel screwed her face up in a foul expression. “There are a lot of lost souls – mostly college dropouts – at the farm. But, truth be told, they’re just a symptom of what’s ailing this country.”
Reaching out, Maribel rested a hand on Jason’s forearm, “I’m not looking down my snotty nose at Gwen. The Wiccan priestess,… she’s just metaphysical road kill - one more victim among a myriad of disenfranchised, lost souls.” The door burst open and a clot of teenage girls dressed in soccer uniforms and calf-high athletic socks flooded into the restaurant. Jason watched the youngsters mugging it up as they formed a raggedy line snaking toward the front counter. What Maribel was saying – it was just an updated version of the sixties Frank Zappa musical anthem: more hungry freaks with no viable options.
Maribel stuffed what little remained of her double cheeseburger in her mouth. The food gone, the girl wiped her mouth then leaned across the table and kissed Jason lightly on the cheek. Totally spur of the moment, there was nothing suggestive in the act; the gossamer brush of her lips was quite possibly the nicest thing to happened to him in ages. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to grab a bowl of chili to take with.”
As weeks passed, the impression left by Maribel Munsen did not fade but intensified, taking on a life of its own. Jason could see the angular, chiseled features as though the young girl was standing in the room no more than three feet away. She wore no makeup. The clothes were neat but utterly unremarkable - her only bit of jewelry, if you could even call it that, a rawhide bracelet looped over her slender right wrist.
At night sometimes when he was having trouble falling asleep, Jason would conjure up her image for a nocturnal tête-à-tête.
“Well hello there, Maribel.”
She was sitting on the Naugahyde sofa Jason’s ex-wife, Melanie, bought with money she earned from the sale of a duplex early on in the marriage “Why do you keep dragging me back here, Jason?”
“I need help sorting things out.”
“What things?”
“The train wreck which is my personal life. What should I do with Carmen?”
“Throw her to the wolves.”
“She can’t cook or keep house. She’s promiscuous and drinks too much.”
“You already told me that at the burger joint,” Maribel reminded him. “Anyway, Carmen’s not the issue.”
“How’s that?.”
“You’re not doing Carmen any favors by wiping her tender nose every time she does something sickening. Your daughter can fend for herself.”
“Those are very sweet sentiments.”
“Can I leave now?”
“No, please… just a little longer.”
“Goodbye!”
One day Jason was in the upstairs study writing out a check for the quarterly real estate tax. Eight hundred thirty-one dollars and seventy-five cents made payable to the City of Brandenberg. All that money for the privilege of living on the goddamn street three more months! He felt a sudden impulse to rip the check into a hundred pieces and then to do the same with the rubbish and water bill that would be arriving in a week’s time. Build a lean-to from twigs and leaves in the woods. Dig a well and live off the land. What land? There was no more free or even affordable land in America. According to Melanie, a tiny parcel no bigger than a quarter acre cost a small fortune!
And about the taxes, the town would eventually put a lien on his split-level house until he paid up or, worse yet, after a few years, confiscate the property. Then he’d be penniless. Homeless. You couldn’t win. All the precocious, bright-eyed Indigo Children had grown up and put their intellects to work as city planners, public officials, lawyers, speculators, financiers and politicians.
For fear of ending up in a straight jacket, Jason scrupulously avoided telling anyone about his growing disenchantment with the American dream. Now, for the first time, haltingly and with a growing sense of personal conviction, he told Maribel Munsen. But he only did this late at night when h
e had trouble dropping off to sleep, and, if she complained about his morose moods, Jason quickly changed the topic to something less strident.
“I found this lovely poem by the German poet, Rilke, buried away in the stacks at the library.” Jason recited the short verse from memory.
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.
After the poem was done, the spectral Maribel stood perfectly still for the longest time. “I hope you’re not planning to share those sentiments with your straight-laced coworkers at the Brandenberg Gazette.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Jason snickered. “Lately I feel more and more like that pathetic slob, dying inside the dishes and the glasses.”
“Problem is,” Maribel replied, “there are no more churches in the East.”
Jason’s former wife, Melanie, flipped houses. She bought foreclosed real estate. Business or residential – it made no difference. Or she found out about someone who was in a financial bind, medical crisis or personal upheaval and turned a tidy profit on their misfortune. His wife always pointed out that what she did was scrupulously honest, since the property owner’s calamity was none of her doing. If anything, she was simply ‘facilitating’ a resolution of unfortunate circumstances.
When Mrs. Abercrombie, who lived three streets over, lost her husband to prostate cancer, Melanie was there in a heartbeat. She arrived at the woman’s front door in the late afternoon with a condolence card, bouquet of roses and offer to buy the property at fair market value. Her idea of fair market value topped out at eighty per cent of the appraised value of residential property in the area, but the distraught widow was only too happy to get rid of the furnishings and move to an assisted living facility in Brookline that boasted gourmet dining and regular trips to hear the Boston Pops Orchestra perform at Symphony Hall.