Bracing both elbows against his side, Marcus began bending the rod with his free hand. Well before the bend was completed, he handed the rod to Andrea. “Now you finish.”
She fumbled with the metal, adjusting her grip several times until she felt the stiff rod relent. “It’s coming now.”
“Yes, but is it ninety degrees?” Marcus held a Tri-square alongside the bent shaft. “Just a tad more and you’ll be there.” When the angle was respectably close, they repositioned the vise-grip and completed the final two bends. “Character disorder… that psychological term... you said it’s a structural problem.” The odd comment having nothing to do with the task at hand, Andrea stared at Marcus with mild confusion, trying to decipher his intent. “What you see is what you get,” he stumbled over the words.
“In a manner of speaking.” Andrea turned the bent rod over in her hand. She had drifted slightly astray on the third bend, but Marcus finessed the metal, brought it back in line with an adjustable wrench. Now the rectangular section fit perfectly in the wooden base. “There are all sorts of exotic, mental disorders… hysterical, compulsive, sociopathic.” She began to chuckle as though at some private joke. “Even a phallic character disorder.”
“Really!” Marcus eyebrows arched ever so slightly. “And what might that be?”
“Do you want the Freudian definition or the stripped down version?”
“Keep it simple.”
Andrea’s pushed her dark-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of her pudgy nose as her features morphed through a series of comical expressions. “The phallic type… they’re generally selfish and egotistical as hell… notorious for cheating on their spouses.”
“Which is to say, they got a major screw loose.”
“Couldn’t have said it better!” Andrea’s dark bangs bobbed up and down. “Now can we get back to woodworking?”
“One last thing.” Marcus stabbed at a blond pile of sawdust with the toe of his shoe. “Is it just criminal types who suffer these fatal flaws or - ”
“Oh, no,” Andrea cut him short, waving both hands in the air emphatically. “There are more character disordered people walking the streets on any given day than locked up behind bars.” Andrea pursed her lips, a mischievously wry smile. “Perhaps you know somebody who fits the bill.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Phallic character disorder… anyone from your immediate family, friends or business associates who deserves that unsavory moniker/”
Marcus chuckled and shook his head. “No, not really.”
Andrea held the drive shaft chest high. “Now can we mount the propeller and glue the wooden cover in place?”
* * * * *
The middle of the week, Marcus’ brother-in-law wandered into the back yard where he was tearing rotten plywood paneling from the side of the shed. Jeffrey had the look of a beaten dog. The man hadn’t shaved in days, and his graying hair was matted in the front. He stood with his disheveled head tilted to one side, watching as the wall came down. “The shed tilts to one side.”
“Yes, I know. It’s been that way for eighteen years.” Unfortunately, when Marcus built the structure, he was a rank amateur. The foundation tended to follow the downward pitch of the land. He hadn’t a clue how to fix the problem. The finished structure, which resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa, was sturdy enough if somewhat irregular. “I suspect it will limp along in that precarious state for another couple decades.”
Jeffrey took a couple steps closer. “What spacing did you use on the two-by-fours?”
“Sixteen on center.” Marcus pried a mangled nail from the damaged wood.
“How you gonna hammer nails in new wood, when you can’t see where the studs are located?”
“I had a funny feeling you were going to ask about that little dilemma.” Marcus tapped the wall a foot above his head. “I’ll set a nail in the wall above each vertical piece and then snap a chalk line to a corresponding mark on the foundation where the stud rests.”
“Clever as hell!” Jeffrey nodded appreciatively.
“Even if the chalk line careens at an utterly cockeyed angle, it will faithfully follow the lumber hidden on the far side.”
“So the nail grabs solid wood.”
“Yeah,” Marcus confirmed, “that’s the general idea.”
“Brenda left me… moved all her stuff out of the house while I was away on a business trip.” Jeffrey retrieved a bent nail that had fallen in the grass. “Did you know she was seeing someone on the sly?”
“She stopped by the other day,” Marcus spoke haltingly, measuring his words. “That was the first I heard of it.”
“The cheating… it wasn’t the first time.” Jeffrey’s voice cracked and he had to turn away to compose himself. “Over the years, there’s been a series of romantic intrigues.”
His sister in the role of home wrecker - Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary. Unaware of his sister’s salacious propensities, Marcus felt nauseous, lightheaded.
The other party – she never even mentioned his name, never intimated anything about falling in love or meeting a spiritual, twin soul. Rather, there was a detached, business-like quality to the impending breakup, as though his sister was using the present arrangement as a slimy stepping stone from a tiresome marriage to a more manageable situation. “Did you ever confront Brenda with her shenanigans?”
“In the past,” Jeffrey replied bitterly, “she got all maudlin, teary-eyed… claimed that the debauchery meant nothing. Each affair only made her realize how much she treasured our marriage.”
“Until this last time.” Marcus shook his head. “My sister… she’s all mixed up.”
“On the contrary,” Jeffrey shot back, “I’m the emotion wreck. Brenda knows perfectly well what she’s doing.”
Marcus seated the claw of his hammer on a bent nail and pried it free. When he looked up again, Jeffrey was gone. Marcus replaced the front and both sides but ran out of steam before reaching the back of the shed. By the afternoon, the late June heat had topped out in the low nineties with a tropical-grade humidity that sucked all the oxygen out of his lungs and left him weak in the knees.
Putting his tools away, he went indoors and showered. In the kitchen, he removed a tub of red pepper hummus from the refrigerator and popped an onion bagel in the toaster. Several years previously, his sister decided to go strictly vegetarian, allowing no meat, cheese or poultry across the threshold. No matter that her husband was an all-American, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy.
At a pool party Brenda hosted, she served up a platter of bagels slathered with hummus, spinach and tomato slices. She drizzled the exotic appetizer with olive oil, freshly minced basil and parsley. The unusual hors d'oeuvres was just about the only thing of worth that Marcus associated with his sister anymore.
And now the marriage was defunct, blown to smithereens.
Marcus bit into the onion bagel and luxuriated as the disparate flavors enveloped his taste buds. The tomato dissolved into the salty chickpea paste as the succulent herbal garnish worked its flavorful magic.
With woodworking, whether it was repairing a rotted shed or building whirligigs, Marcus always found solutions for seemingly impossible problems. The cockeyed shed was a classic case in point. With the wind-powered ornaments, hardly a week passed that Marcus didn’t discover a way to improve on a craft design. Frequently it was a matter of trial and error, a stumbling, bumbling process of elimination. Not this, not this, not this, THAT!
But you couldn’t finesse human nature.
The damage Brenda perpetrated on a guileless world at large was exponential. Common decency never factored into the cosmic equation. Thirty-eight years on planet earth and, except for hummus bagels, she hadn’t learned a practical thing of value.
* * * * *
“I can’t paint for crap… got no eye for color or proportion,” Andrea confided.
They were situated upstairs in the kitchen, where Marcus spread a collection
of acrylic paints, brushes, a plastic palette and the unassembled pieces of her whirligig across the length of the table.
“This isn’t the Sistine Chapel,” he returned dismissively. “Not the Mona Lisa either.”
“Yes, but I’m really quite awful.”
“When you were a little girl, did you have coloring books?”
“Sure, every kid did.”
“Well then, just think of what we’re doing as coloring with paints instead of crayons.” Marcus handed her a brush and the woodchopper’s left leg. A light pencil line at the bottom of the limb indicated where the ankle left off and the shoe began.
Squirting a generous dollop of blue paint into the palette, he handed her a sable brush. “Paint the pants down to the pencil mark near the ankle.”
Andrea’s hand trembled as she raised the bristles to the upper thigh. “If you’re having trouble controlling the brush, brace your right wrist with your left hand. She did as he said and the tremors subsided. “Start your initial stroke a half inch away from the edge and brush up. Any globs you can work back down into the piece.”
When Andrea reached the bottom, she looked up. The blue had smudged well across the pencil mark onto the top of the shoe. “See, I told you I couldn’t paint!”
“There’s a trick… a technique for fixing irregularities.” She eyes him doubtfully. “We can fix it,” Marcus continued, “once the paint dries on both sides.”
Andrea painted the legs front and back. With a tiny brush, Marcus added shoe laces. Reaching across the table he tapped her lightly on the forearm. “Watch closely.” Grabbing a felt-tipped Sharpie he deftly ran a thick black line across the area where the paint had smudged and the defect disappeared, swallowed up by the crisp, dark line that now separated the pant cuff from the top of the shoe.
Andrea shook her head in disbelief.
“Your first coat of paint sealed the wood grain so the black ink couldn’t bleed into the porous wood. You get a razor-sharp line every time. It’s a simple fix with the added benefit that the silky-smooth line makes the surrounding colors pop.”
“Everything looks so much better… more professional!”
“What color should we use for the face and hands?” Marcus shifted gears.
“I don’t know. Nothing you’ve got here looks quite right.”
“Then we’ll improvise… concoct our own.” He squeezed a generous splotch of white onto the palette, mixed several drops of chocolaty brown plus an even smaller quantity of orange. Stirring the mixture forcefully with a paint brush, a lightly tinted flesh color emerged. “Keep the wood directly in front of you, even if you have to rotate the work several times as you paint,” Marcus instructed as she spread a film of the blended paint over the forehead toward the broad-brimmed hat.
“How many craft fairs are you doing this summer?” she asked when the face was finished.
“I’m not doing any.” He told her about the soggy debacle at the farm and his more recent fiasco with Swenson’s Boutique.
“Why not set up your own website and sell your crafts through the internet.”
“I can just barely retrieve my emails,” Marcus replied sheepishly. “Setting up an online store isn’t a realistic consideration.”
“Too bad.” Andrea turned her attention back to the woodcutter’s hands, painting to the wrists before flipping the wood end over end and tidying up the fingers that gripped the axe handle. “Selling on the internet… it’s the way of the future.”
“Unfortunately, I’m mired in the past.”
* * * * *
At the final meeting they assembled all the wooden parts with glue, nuts and bolts. Marcus attached a strand of 16 gauge wire from an eye hook embedded in the woodchoppers belly to the metal cam. A ceremonial gesture, they spun the propeller and the axe arched high in the air over the man’s shoulders. Chop! Chop! Chop! The twosome watched as the tiny log was blasted to splinters.
“Well’ that does it.” With a bittersweet half-smile, Marcus handed Andrea the finished craft. They climbed the basement stairs and lingered awkwardly in the kitchen, neither knowing what to say.
“Couldn’t help noticing your latest creation… the king or rock and roll.”
Marcus’ features lit up momentarily. “Yeah, that’s a hoot!” The newest whirligig featured a slightly rotund Elvis Presley decked out in an ivory-colored jump suit and dark sunglasses, strumming a guitar. When the propeller was set in motion, a wire rod fixed to the crooner’s waist sent the hips gyrating in a maniacal frenzy. “Elvis’ Pelvis… that’s what I call it.”
Andrea Simpson approached and stood so close that Marcus could feel her breath on his face. “A business proposition…I construct a website for your line of custom-built whirligigs with pictures, product captions, merchandise order form and email contact… the whole shebang, and you teach me how to make Elvis Pelvis.”
In response to Marcus’ dumbfound expression, she added, “I took a course in web design as an undergraduate… got all the computer software, everything you need to get up and running in cyberspace.”
When there was still no response, she thumped him in the chest several times with a taut index finger. “So, what’s the verdict?”
Marcus was only now looking her full in the face – that unremarkable, acquired taste of a face that he could never quite get out of his mind anymore. Twenty-four-seven, it floated back to him throughout the day, even in that Arcadian, twilight realm between sleep and fleeting wakefulness.
She held a hand out. He grabbed, shook once and sealed the pact. “Okay, I’ll teach you.”
“The Elvis’ Pelvis whirligig… how long should it take?”
“Oh I dunno. That’s tough to predict.” Marcus’ expression was perfectly serious. He still hadn’t thought to let go of the woman’s hand. “A few weeks… a month maybe. Perhaps the rest of our lives.”
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