Scene of the Crime
Content
Scene of the Crime
The dentist’s eyes are blank, have no sparkle. He rarely cracks a smile and never says an unnecessary word. Things like “Hi, how are you today?” which would make his patients relax, are difficult for him. He walks with a limp and no one knows why. His assistant Maria asked one day but she was just making chitchat and didn’t really care. She’s forgotten what he said, but can be forgiven because she’s had a lot on her mind lately. From the chair patients have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that anyone in real estate would die for. He scoffs when he sees the jar of daisies, someone, Maria probably, put on the counter of the small exam room. Maria smiles; she touches people shoulders. She smells nice, wears pastels, soothing colors, but nothing helps him. The daisy! A lousy excuse for a flower. It’s practically a weed! Maria ignores him; it’s the only way she can get through the day. She washes her hands before lunch: soap, water, the sparkle on her ring finger, the sink, the drain, the daisies on the edge of the sink. She sighs and sighs. He makes notes on the previous patient with a stubby pencil. A curious thing, the pencil. Gnawed upon by thousands, usually someone trying to quit smoking. They’ll take the eraser right off and choke on it. Who’s chewed on this one he wonders? Where did it come from? He’s seen so much damage caused by smoking; stains that just won’t come off, receding gums. And yet they smoke. He has hair growing out of his ears and nose. He doesn’t even feel self-conscious about it anymore. Who gives a fuck! These people don’t even brush their teeth! His face
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so close to theirs, they can see into his pores, smell the sweat coming off his fleshy neck. What’s left to hide? Consider his gnarled hands bitten by so many he can barely work anymore. His handwriting is starting to suffer and he has always been proud of his good penmanship. Now his fingers throb, he can barely cinch a tie. Some people are so stupid. Why do they tell their children it won’t hurt? Clearly, it will hurt. Like his fingers hurt. He never married, preferring instead to visit the same prostitute over and over again cycling a new one in and the old one out every few years. Currently he’s with a woman named Rose Aloha. Rose has a mole on her neck and a scar from her appendix removal; she smells like almond oil. He sees her Wednesday afternoons at a motel on the Peninsula when other doctors are playing golf. He shows up early every week, takes care of the room; the turnover of desk clerks, luckily, is frequent. Then he goes to wait in his car, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel until he sees Rose pull up in her faded jalopy she insists is a classic and they enter the room together. But this week the service has called and cancelled their standing appointment. Rose, it was said, is feeling under the weather. Would he like a substitute? No, he would not. **** In the waiting room the air is always a little stale. A few people have thrown up on the rug and it needs a good shampooing. The fish tank hums. Regarding the fin of a fish in a tank: it’s so efficient, yet the fish has nowhere to go. Kids press noses to the tank and will lick the glass if they think no one is looking. But why? Get your tongue off
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that! mothers will say with just enough force in their voices, but then will smile to anyone who looks at them. Kids, they’re crazy. What are you going to do? Maria never forgets to feed the fish. And around they go. She is eating lunch at her desk when she hears him. “Enough! That’s the last fucking one.” Should she have been in there with him? Why then? Why did she choose to eat her egg salad sandwich just then? She doesn’t even like egg salad, is choking it down. Her fiancé made it for her. What is she going to do with him?
Into the road the dentist lurches where a young mother is distracted, driving too fast. Trying to get her kids to a matinee of the circus and she hates the circus. The clowns make her anxious; the whole thing is pompous. She promised them, but felt coerced into it. What else would shut them up? All that whining and now the kids are unruly in the backseat. What monsters! What is their problem? The young mother is running red lights. We should just move to a dugout in the middle of nowhere. Everything will be easier. Both kids are screaming because she can slap and drive at the same time. She’s tearing her hair out. She jams on the breaks. Traffic stops, but not soon enough and he writhes on the pavement like a dying fish. The young mother and some others who jumped out of their cars are hovered over him. His white coat is dirty from the road, the tires. His loafers have come off, blasted by the impact. Someone covers him with a blanket. An ambulance shows up, the police, a fire truck. The young mother is given some water. She doesn’t even know what
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happened. “He wasn’t there, then he was” is her statement to the police. Her two kids are beating on the car windows; they will not get to the circus that afternoon. It’s because she only went to a third rate college, she feels. She is embarrassed about her manicured nails, her clean sneakers, and designer sweat suit. Everything bad happens because she married too young and can’t control her kids. Plus, she has too many nice things she never had to work for. This is what her mother, called Meme, will say as she drinks sherry after sherry, touching the pearls at her throat. How could this have happened? Understand that Meme is not as perfect as she thinks people believe. Meme has guilt too and it is shameful. The paramedics steady the flopping fish who for once appears to be smiling. Was he squinting from the sun? Did he trip on something in the road? Or did he rush right into it? Does it even matter now? He’s flat, looking so reclined, relaxed. “Yes, that’s him,” says Maria who finally made it outside. She’s out of breath, mayonnaise on her fingers. The young mother is frantic, but trying to keep it all calm in the car. Trying to keep her kids from killing each other, one of them has suddenly developed a bloody nose. She was already having a bad day, having been chastised by her husband that morning for smoke coming out of the toaster. He carried it out the back door and hurled it in the yard before hosing it down and stomping off to work. And what will he say to this? Now the young mother is trying to keep her kids calm and the blood off the seats; she only has two hands. She tips her son’s head back, blots his nose with her handkerchief. She was thoroughly questioned, but could tell them nothing. ***
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The young mother will not be charged with manslaughter. But it will take a long time to come to this conclusion and there will be lots of pacing around, lots of head shaking, shoulder shrugging. No one will ever really know what happened, but still it fills the paper, for some reason, for days, which is how Rose Aloha pieces it together and only she knows if what she feels is relief or sadness or a little of both. She enrolls in some extended learning classes. ***
Consider how easy it is to die; the young mother thinks about it. It is, she thinks, the fact that people don’t bump up against death every day that is remarkable. She tucks her children in every night, makes sure they’ve brushed. And then lies down beside her husband who has been surprisingly sympathetic, has dealt with all the insurance paperwork without so much as a cross word. Meme sent over her cleaning lady to help out. But the young mother fears it’s just a matter of time until the other shoe drops. She saw a jumper once on the bridge when she was a girl. Her family was on the way back home to Marin from a party in the city. Her father driving, swerved the car to look. Meme’s hand muffled a scream. The young mother, alone in the back seat, not realizing what was happening, saw a man fly. For years she thought he did that swan dive for her benefit. A few days after the accident the dentist is laid to rest, cremated, actually. A great-niece or someone has come down from Portland to make the arrangements and felt a burial plot would just be, a waste. She racks her brain trying to remember the last time
5
she saw him. The niece gathers and disposes of his effects, which are few— an average number of clothes, some books, magazines, and surprisingly, a humidor with his name engraved on it, a gift from a woman named Gerta. The niece meets Maria at the office one day and Maria cleans her teeth for free. The niece drinks much too much coffee but Maria refrains from saying anything; it is awkward enough. Maria keeps in touch with the young mother as a show of support, phones her daily. “It wasn’t your fault, truly,” she says. The young mother, who has taken up smoking, puffs away while she talks on the phone. Her hands shake a little. Her children play in the backyard with the puppy they’ve been given; she can hear them squealing through the open window. In the evenings when her husband comes home, she walks on eggshells until bedtime. Jobless, Maria spends her days reading old magazines she brought home from the waiting room, taking all the quizzes and one day calls it off with her fiancé after a brutal fight. She had never thrown anything before that wineglass. The fish live with her now and they watch her every night, their steady eyes always on her, their efficient fins hard at work, as Maria sits in the dark surfing the Internet for a new job, a new man. She takes up parachuting. Eventually the dentist’s office is gutted and becomes a real estate agency. Smartly dressed young up-and-comers frequent the building; ambition is a must. Around City Hall talk of more traffic lights has come and gone, as did talk of painting more pedestrian walkways on the roads. And at the scene of the crime no one will slow down to look, gaze, wonder. And over time cars will screech by on their way to
6
and from appointments, to and from the tunnel to the bridge like nothing important happened there,
over the skid marks, past the stray shoe tumbling down the road and the jar that once held the daisies.
7
The dentist’s eyes are blank, have no sparkle. He rarely cracks a smile and never says an unnecessary word. Things like “Hi, how are you today?” which would make his patients relax, are difficult for him. He walks with a limp and no one knows why. His assistant Maria asked one day but she was just making chitchat and didn’t really care. She’s forgotten what he said, but can be forgiven because she’s had a lot on her mind lately. From the chair patients have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that anyone in real estate would die for. He scoffs when he sees the jar of daisies, someone, Maria probably, put on the counter of the small exam room. Maria smiles; she touches people shoulders. She smells nice, wears pastels, soothing colors, but nothing helps him. The daisy! A lousy excuse for a flower. It’s practically a weed! Maria ignores him; it’s the only way she can get through the day. She washes her hands before lunch: soap, water, the sparkle on her ring finger, the sink, the drain, the daisies on the edge of the sink. She sighs and sighs. He makes notes on the previous patient with a stubby pencil. A curious thing, the pencil. Gnawed upon by thousands, usually someone trying to quit smoking. They’ll take the eraser right off and choke on it. Who’s chewed on this one he wonders? Where did it come from? He’s seen so much damage caused by smoking; stains that just won’t come off, receding gums. And yet they smoke. He has hair growing out of his ears and nose. He doesn’t even feel self-conscious about it anymore. Who gives a fuck! These people don’t even brush their teeth! His face
1
so close to theirs, they can see into his pores, smell the sweat coming off his fleshy neck. What’s left to hide? Consider his gnarled hands bitten by so many he can barely work anymore. His handwriting is starting to suffer and he has always been proud of his good penmanship. Now his fingers throb, he can barely cinch a tie. Some people are so stupid. Why do they tell their children it won’t hurt? Clearly, it will hurt. Like his fingers hurt. He never married, preferring instead to visit the same prostitute over and over again cycling a new one in and the old one out every few years. Currently he’s with a woman named Rose Aloha. Rose has a mole on her neck and a scar from her appendix removal; she smells like almond oil. He sees her Wednesday afternoons at a motel on the Peninsula when other doctors are playing golf. He shows up early every week, takes care of the room; the turnover of desk clerks, luckily, is frequent. Then he goes to wait in his car, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel until he sees Rose pull up in her faded jalopy she insists is a classic and they enter the room together. But this week the service has called and cancelled their standing appointment. Rose, it was said, is feeling under the weather. Would he like a substitute? No, he would not. **** In the waiting room the air is always a little stale. A few people have thrown up on the rug and it needs a good shampooing. The fish tank hums. Regarding the fin of a fish in a tank: it’s so efficient, yet the fish has nowhere to go. Kids press noses to the tank and will lick the glass if they think no one is looking. But why? Get your tongue off
2
that! mothers will say with just enough force in their voices, but then will smile to anyone who looks at them. Kids, they’re crazy. What are you going to do? Maria never forgets to feed the fish. And around they go. She is eating lunch at her desk when she hears him. “Enough! That’s the last fucking one.” Should she have been in there with him? Why then? Why did she choose to eat her egg salad sandwich just then? She doesn’t even like egg salad, is choking it down. Her fiancé made it for her. What is she going to do with him?
Into the road the dentist lurches where a young mother is distracted, driving too fast. Trying to get her kids to a matinee of the circus and she hates the circus. The clowns make her anxious; the whole thing is pompous. She promised them, but felt coerced into it. What else would shut them up? All that whining and now the kids are unruly in the backseat. What monsters! What is their problem? The young mother is running red lights. We should just move to a dugout in the middle of nowhere. Everything will be easier. Both kids are screaming because she can slap and drive at the same time. She’s tearing her hair out. She jams on the breaks. Traffic stops, but not soon enough and he writhes on the pavement like a dying fish. The young mother and some others who jumped out of their cars are hovered over him. His white coat is dirty from the road, the tires. His loafers have come off, blasted by the impact. Someone covers him with a blanket. An ambulance shows up, the police, a fire truck. The young mother is given some water. She doesn’t even know what
3
happened. “He wasn’t there, then he was” is her statement to the police. Her two kids are beating on the car windows; they will not get to the circus that afternoon. It’s because she only went to a third rate college, she feels. She is embarrassed about her manicured nails, her clean sneakers, and designer sweat suit. Everything bad happens because she married too young and can’t control her kids. Plus, she has too many nice things she never had to work for. This is what her mother, called Meme, will say as she drinks sherry after sherry, touching the pearls at her throat. How could this have happened? Understand that Meme is not as perfect as she thinks people believe. Meme has guilt too and it is shameful. The paramedics steady the flopping fish who for once appears to be smiling. Was he squinting from the sun? Did he trip on something in the road? Or did he rush right into it? Does it even matter now? He’s flat, looking so reclined, relaxed. “Yes, that’s him,” says Maria who finally made it outside. She’s out of breath, mayonnaise on her fingers. The young mother is frantic, but trying to keep it all calm in the car. Trying to keep her kids from killing each other, one of them has suddenly developed a bloody nose. She was already having a bad day, having been chastised by her husband that morning for smoke coming out of the toaster. He carried it out the back door and hurled it in the yard before hosing it down and stomping off to work. And what will he say to this? Now the young mother is trying to keep her kids calm and the blood off the seats; she only has two hands. She tips her son’s head back, blots his nose with her handkerchief. She was thoroughly questioned, but could tell them nothing. ***
4
The young mother will not be charged with manslaughter. But it will take a long time to come to this conclusion and there will be lots of pacing around, lots of head shaking, shoulder shrugging. No one will ever really know what happened, but still it fills the paper, for some reason, for days, which is how Rose Aloha pieces it together and only she knows if what she feels is relief or sadness or a little of both. She enrolls in some extended learning classes. ***
Consider how easy it is to die; the young mother thinks about it. It is, she thinks, the fact that people don’t bump up against death every day that is remarkable. She tucks her children in every night, makes sure they’ve brushed. And then lies down beside her husband who has been surprisingly sympathetic, has dealt with all the insurance paperwork without so much as a cross word. Meme sent over her cleaning lady to help out. But the young mother fears it’s just a matter of time until the other shoe drops. She saw a jumper once on the bridge when she was a girl. Her family was on the way back home to Marin from a party in the city. Her father driving, swerved the car to look. Meme’s hand muffled a scream. The young mother, alone in the back seat, not realizing what was happening, saw a man fly. For years she thought he did that swan dive for her benefit. A few days after the accident the dentist is laid to rest, cremated, actually. A great-niece or someone has come down from Portland to make the arrangements and felt a burial plot would just be, a waste. She racks her brain trying to remember the last time
5
she saw him. The niece gathers and disposes of his effects, which are few— an average number of clothes, some books, magazines, and surprisingly, a humidor with his name engraved on it, a gift from a woman named Gerta. The niece meets Maria at the office one day and Maria cleans her teeth for free. The niece drinks much too much coffee but Maria refrains from saying anything; it is awkward enough. Maria keeps in touch with the young mother as a show of support, phones her daily. “It wasn’t your fault, truly,” she says. The young mother, who has taken up smoking, puffs away while she talks on the phone. Her hands shake a little. Her children play in the backyard with the puppy they’ve been given; she can hear them squealing through the open window. In the evenings when her husband comes home, she walks on eggshells until bedtime. Jobless, Maria spends her days reading old magazines she brought home from the waiting room, taking all the quizzes and one day calls it off with her fiancé after a brutal fight. She had never thrown anything before that wineglass. The fish live with her now and they watch her every night, their steady eyes always on her, their efficient fins hard at work, as Maria sits in the dark surfing the Internet for a new job, a new man. She takes up parachuting. Eventually the dentist’s office is gutted and becomes a real estate agency. Smartly dressed young up-and-comers frequent the building; ambition is a must. Around City Hall talk of more traffic lights has come and gone, as did talk of painting more pedestrian walkways on the roads. And at the scene of the crime no one will slow down to look, gaze, wonder. And over time cars will screech by on their way to
6
and from appointments, to and from the tunnel to the bridge like nothing important happened there,
over the skid marks, past the stray shoe tumbling down the road and the jar that once held the daisies.
7
