In Peanut Shells
© Mark Gurarie

    “There’s another one born every minute,” she imagines muttering to herself.  It is crowded, overheated, festering along the streets.  Hazy outlines of milling crowds in the precious shade.  Everyone is looking; no one is looking at her.  Her fedora should be shiny, she figures, but it is dull gray in the too bright light.  Ketchup stains.  Pigeon poop.
    Her walk is a jumble of graceless little steps on soft, worn down soles.  She pulls her bags closer and they crinkle in response.  Their wrinkled Walgreens logos seem to shrug as if the bags of peanuts, the broken walkman, the cassette tapes, the empty bottle of yoo-hoo inside had nothing to do with them.  She nearly bumps into a large man in a jump suit.
    “I could own all of this,” she wheezes, wrings her scarred hands with a dramatic motion and the bump of Walgreens bags.  She appraises the glass buildings, the older marble and concrete, the revolving doors. 
     “Mine,” she whispers, with a wink to the American Apparel mavens in leotards on the billboard.  As she shambles along, gangs of students part ways around her, lower their voices, avert eyes.  Another one, another one.  The nicotine stains on the scruff around her mouth seem to glow, become a deeper orange.  They are all simpletons, robots, pawns she thinks, scanning the benches for a place to sit with her bags.  When she finds a seat, she slouches for a while, than jolts upright.
    “I am your queen, you are slaves,” it says, using her mouth, as usual.  “My slaves.”
    A young woman on the opposite side of the bench zips her purse, stands and walks away.  The old woman tries to imagine a smile on her face wiped away by a mushroom cloud, but she never really caught her face.  Just this annoyingly fine auburn hair flopping with every crinkled bag, every thwap of the flip-flop, receding into the crowds.  She has started to sweat: there are worse things.  She searches the gaps between buildings for angels.  Catches sight of one, drunker than the rest, a little bit slower on the flap.  This winged cherub, seated and groggy on a window pedestal, casually leering back at her.
    “Lady,” she hears a child’s voice.  The angels between buildings scurry off, and she looks down.  It is a toddler girl with tight braids and pink berets.  The little one smiles, hops twice, points to her head. “Hat!” she says, giggles, beaming from her pudgy cheeks, “hat.”
    After the initial euphoria of meeting a toddler wears off, the old woman finds herself in a staring contest.  She is juggling knives, torches, in the center ring.  The crowd holds its breath.  The little girl’s little brown eyes seem to grow.  Grow the size of buildings, dangle from cranes, shed scaffolding with a blink. 
    The old woman is digging through her pockets and her bags looking for her juggling balls.  She starts to cough, haplessly working through the five pockets of her jacket.  She finds them, the invisible balls, and starts juggling.  The toddler is transfixed.
    “Come on, Estelle,” a woman’s tired voice pleads, “let’s leave the woman alone.”
    “Hat!  Hat!”  The kid repeats, insistently as she is lifted into momma’s protective embrace.  The two disappear in the opposite direction, away from the angels, the old woman figures.  She returns the invisible juggling balls to her pocket, spits through her teeth.  The spittle smacks the ground authoritatively.
    “Well, there’s another one born every minute,” she says, pulling at the gray scruff on the back of her neck.  “Another one born every minute,” she imagines muttering.    



Harem Queen
© Neal Storrs

    The night was warm, with a breeze blowing in off the gulf. The bar was one of those wooden decks that extend out over the sand off the back of a beachside restaurant. I’m told that’s where the real money is made, even more than off the steak and lobster dinners served inside in the dining room. We’d arrived too late for the sunset, but not for the sound effects from the Gulf of Mexico, which had it all over the three-piece band playing island music over in a corner of the deck. Not that they weren’t good. Even I could tell they knew what they were doing with their marimbas and guitars and steel drums. Island music is not my cup of tea. To each his own. But there’s no sound on earth more beautiful than waves breaking on a beach at night. How it’s possible to hear that same gathering, muted crescendo over and over and never get tired of it is a miracle.
    Brings to mind a related incident that happened seven years ago. I was driving my daughter, who was ten years old at the time, down Beach Boulevard, less than a mile north of the deck where my friends and I were sitting. It was after ten o’clock and I was in a hurry, because I knew her mother would be pissed that I was so late getting Carina back home. I happened to glance over to my left between two high-rise condo buildings at the same moment a wave broke against the seawall. A floodlight lit the spray of foamy tendrils a ghostly white as they twirled up into the black sky, hung motionless for a split second like a ballet dancer defying gravity, then fell back down into the gulf and out of sight. As soon as I got to a place where I could pull over I turned around, drove back and parked on the shoulder of the road. We must have sat there and watched that wave break at least twenty-five times and it gave me the same thrill every time it happened. One second nothing but black sky, the next an explosion of spot-lit silver water, a work of abstract art that materialized out of nowhere. It was always almost exactly fourteen seconds between waves. Never fewer than thirteen, never more than fifteen. I say “that wave” like it was always the same wave, but of course it wasn’t. It was always different. But somehow it was always the same, which I guess makes it some sort of miracle. Waves crashing on an unseen shore make a beautiful sound. Seeing a dancing spiral of water without hearing the sound that caused it is also beautiful. Maybe what makes them that way, what they have in common, is the fact that your imagination gets involved in filling in the part that’s missing.
    The restaurant was called Eve’s Bite, and the bar attached to the back was Wasted Figs. I was there with two other media hacks and one media superstar. You’re not going to believe which one. Are you ready? Shivani Rathmangouri. We were actually sitting at the same table with the great Shivani Rathmangouri. See why I said you’re not going to believe me?
    My buddies and I had been there several hours, having adjourned thence from the Sheraton across Beach Boulevard just in time to miss the presentation of the closing remarks at the Twenty-Third Annual Southeastern Conference of Media Professionals. By the time Shiva joined us it was close to eleven. None of us wanted to ask her what took her so long, what she’d been doing, or who she’d been doing it with. We were afraid of what the answer might have been. All I know is, when she got there the waves somehow started sounding even better.
    I don’t know how many times in the course of that three-day conference my friends had entertained the same fantasies about Shiva that I had. It wasn’t one of the things we discussed about her. I’m guessing it must have been more than just once or twice. Everybody knows what Shivani Rathmangouri, the goddess of CNN’s stable of globe-trotting reporters, looks like. We’ve seen her reporting from a street corner in Baghdad that had been blown to rubble seconds before, from the flooded Ninth Ward of New Orleans, from Monica Lewinsky’s bedroom. There’s a story going around the nation’s newsrooms that if you look really close at the last video Bin Laden released you can see Shivani off in the distance, sitting on a rock and smoking a cigarette. It doesn’t matter what the setting is, how awful the pictures of death and devastation that surround her, Shivani always manages to look like a movie star. Skin the color of warm brandy. Eyes that could melt chocolate. Put it this way: In the typical male fantasy involving a harem, Shivani is the woman every man would want as his harem queen.
    One of my friends actually tried to put a move on her when he happened to find himself alone with her in one of Sheraton’s elevators. I don’t blame him, and not just because a major newsmagazine has voted her one of the ten sexiest women in the world. You know how Shiva can make you feel like she’s right there in the room with you, talking to you and you alone about deeply personal issues, things that really matter to you, even though you’re sitting on your living room couch and she’s somewhere on the other side of the world. Having now spent three days up close and personal with Shivani Rathmangouri, including feeling her hand resting on my forearm as she was laughing at one of my stupid jokes, I have to tell you I’m still not sure how she does it, exactly where her magic comes from. All I know is every moment of the time you’re with her you feel like she’s flirting with you. Only it’s much subtler, more complicated than what we call flirting in America. It’s sexual but somehow it’s innocent at the same time. Or maybe it’s not even flirting. Maybe it’s just me who calls it flirting because my perspective is limited, especially compared to hers. When you’re with Shiva everything seems to take on a higher meaning. It’s like she lives on a separate plane from the rest of us. No wonder my friend from Boston tried to see how far he could get with her. Nowhere, of course, but being Shiva she knew how to shoot him down without making him feel too much like a pathetic loser.
    The truth was ― at least the truth as I saw it, and that’s the only kind of truth any of us is privy to ― had Shiva found any one of the three of us even remotely appealing, which of course would never have happened in a million years, not even if we were the last people on earth, as the story goes, but if by some weird twist of fate she had, I’m convinced it would have been me she’d have chosen. Typical male bullshit bragging, you’re thinking. You’re probably right. Listen to this. I read recently that every fat, balding, middle-aged man in America thinks that if only he could get his hands on Heather Locklear’s phone number he could get her to go out with him.
My friends had a leg up on me, not that it was ever going to do them any good. They were out-of-towners, and had rooms right there in the Sheraton, the same hotel where Shiva was staying. I, on the other hand, being a local yokel, went home on each of the two conference nights to my one-bedroom, one-bath, one Labrador retriever apartment. And my big empty bed, where I dreamed myself to sleep by imagining all seventy ineffable inches of Shivani Rathmangouri, with her soft silky hair and those smoldering eyes, lying next to me. Or otherwise spatially configured. Maybe truth is the name we give to what we want to be true.
    Why she chose the three of us to be her boon companions at that conference must forever remain one of life’s most perplexing mysteries. My buddies and I don’t see each other all that often, maybe once every two or three years at a conference like that one, or maybe at the Super Bowl or some other major event like that. We met twenty years earlier at J school at the University of Florida. Myself, I was nothing more exalted than a sportswriter on a local paper. At least my friends were on-air talent, one of them the sports guy on a Chicago area TV station, the other the host of a talk-radio show in Boston. I’m sure Shiva was impressed by our resumes. Right. And you wouldn’t be surprised to see Tiger Woods hanging out with your local pro, because they’re both golfers.
    I admit it made me feel smug as hell to watch the jaws drop as the four of us strolled up and down the hotel’s plush hallways. Seeing Shivani arm-in-arm with three nobodies must have been like seeing an American Idol winner who just released a hit album going out with one of the poor slobs who lost in the first round. Whatever her reasons were, Shiva’s loyalty was unswerving. If she heard about a speaker who caught her interest she never failed to ask which one of us wanted to be her escort. I guess that was a kind of flirting, because she must have known that all three of us would tag along, even if it was to listen to what we knew, or thought we knew, would be forty-five minutes of boring crap.
    Like I said, I’m just a sportswriter. I’m no Sigmund Freud, that’s for sure. But if I had to analyze what was going on behind those stunned faces gawking at the four of us as we breezed through the hotel lobby, I’d say that what I saw, besides disbelief, was jealousy. Not so much of us, we didn’t deserve it. But jealousy of Shivani. A lot of those faces belonged to people who had very successful careers in their own right. They were jealous that Shiva had reached what was pretty much the pinnacle of her profession before she was thirty years old. But if there was a negative vibe in the air, Shiva wasn’t affected by it. She didn’t even seem to be aware of it. She stayed the same the whole three days, warm, friendly, and totally natural. She seemed to float above the petty little problems the rest of us spend half our days worrying about, and half our nights losing sleep over. Have you ever met someone who seemed too good to be true, and then when you got to know them better it turned out they really were? Maybe Shivani wasn’t everything she seemed to be. Maybe it was all a big show. But even if it was, would it matter? The real Shivani Rathmangouri is the image we see on TV. If we believe she’s a certain way, even if that way is unbelievably perfect, then that’s who she really is, for us.
    There was one time she got me and my buddies very scared. We were sitting around a table in the lobby, getting ready to go listen to the conference’s keynote speaker, George Clooney. He gets invited to things like this because the organizers think they can pass him off as a real media person just because he’s played a few roles in a few movies. Guy takes himself way too seriously, if you ask me. We’re sitting there, thinking any minute the elevator door was going to open and Shivani was going to come waltzing out. But she didn’t. Fifteen minutes went by after the Clooney talk started and she still hadn’t showed up. We started to get worried. I was wondering if maybe we hadn’t taken her for granted, if you can believe something as crazy as that. Guys like us taking Shivani Rathmangouri for granted! We called her room. No answer. We checked out all the places we thought she might be, the coffee shop, the spa, the salon. She was nowhere to be found. It pissed me off when one of my friends bet that wherever she was she was with the richest, biggest-name guy at the conference. As we walked back to the lobby I’m telling myself to be grateful for the time I had with her, savor the memory, I said to myself, because the next image I saw of Shivani Rathmangouri might well be halfway around the world, schmoozing with some Bedouin tribal chieftain in his desert tent. I started getting into my harem fantasy for real then, imagining her lounging on a Persian rug, guys in the background smoking houkas, when all of a sudden out of nowhere she showed up, hugs all around, and asked, “Did I miss anything?”
   
                                                                 *  *  *
   
    “Just before I came a man told me a story.” I was looking at Shivani’s profile when she said that. She had twisted around in her wicker chair to face the beach. I liked thinking of her enjoying the sound of the waves as much as I did. Then she turned back to face the three of us. We were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder across the table from her, like school kids waiting for the teacher to give them their lesson. “I was in one of the t-shirt shops, trying to do something which, if you knew my daughter, you would know is impossible. I was looking for a t-shirt that she would not be ashamed to wear. You would not believe how insanely picky she is. It has to have a message, and it has to be the right message. She’s so idealistic, so judgmental. A man came over and told me he recognized me. He was just a normal, everyday American man. It could have been any one of the three of you.” Shivani laughed. I could tell she wanted us to know we shouldn’t take that comment the wrong way. You know that laugh of hers, don’t you? That airy, exotic trill? “He said he had a story I had to hear. Can you imagine how many times I’ve heard that line? But in this man I saw something that was different, and I must say it was very much to my own amazement that I found myself accepting his invitation that we go to the coffee shop next door. As we stood at the counter, and he was giving his order, I thought, Shivani Rathmangouri, this is not something you do. You are too intelligent to do this. What is there that is different this time? Why did I agree to come with this man I had never met before? And I thought, well that is what I am going to find out. That is why I agreed to come with him, to hear his story. We picked up our coffee, found a table, and the story he told me is this.
    ‘There was a teacher. He taught English in a high school in a town not far away. It was the only job he ever had. The town was the one in which he was born and had lived, with few exceptions, his whole life. At least he had always believed that was how his life was and had always been. But the man had recently begun having very odd thoughts, very strange feelings. He had, in the last month, begun wondering if he was in fact who he thought he was, if his life was what he’d always taken it to be.
    ‘This man had a habit, which he had followed like clockwork for years. Every Friday during his lunch period he walked out the main door of his school, across the parking lot, then onto a bluff over a bay off the Gulf of Mexico. At the bottom of the hill and a little to the north was a bridge that ran from the mainland to the town’s beachside community on a spoil island across the bay. The bridge was three-quarters of a mile long, with two lanes on either side of an eight-inch high concrete median.
    ‘Every Friday at noon he walked to that same bluff overlooking the bay, not to eat, but just to sit on a bench and enjoy the view of the water. He would think about his wife and son, about the book he was reading, a biography of Marcel Proust. He worried that the recreational league soccer team his son played on wasn’t giving Jules enough playing time, though he had to admit the boy was slow, and small for his age. Still, if that was the worst thing he had to worry about his life wasn’t so bad. It was, by and large, like most people’s lives, boring, but bearably boring most of the time. Except for that sixth sense that had been telling him he was somehow different from other people, that his life wasn’t at all what it seemed to be. 
    ‘Then came the Friday afternoon when everything changed. The day was warm, with a breeze blowing in off the bay. Sitting on the bench, looking out over the water, he found he couldn’t bear the thought of returning to his classroom and giving his students the same assignment ― make work, to tell the truth ― that he gave them every Friday afternoon. The assignment was to write a two or three-paragraph story talking about what they thought might happen to them over the upcoming weekend. Or that might happen to one of their friends, or a member of their family. Or, better yet, much better, to a fictitious character they made up in their mind. He couldn’t bear the thought of going back into his classroom and asking his students once again to dig deep into the hidden corners of their imagination and create someone new, someone from another planet, another time, another dimension!
    ‘He was used to a mild sensation of dread at the thought of returning to his classroom. He knew that was normal. But on that particular Friday his dread had elevated itself to the status of angst. He knew he couldn’t face asking his students to do the same old assignment he always gave them. And not just because a sizeable percentage of them would simply not do it. He knew they couldn’t do it. None of them. Not a single one of his students was capable of writing a story worthy of the name, meaning one in which someone or something sparks to life. It wasn’t because the kids in his class weren’t bright, nor was it because there weren’t plenty of things that happened to them that could be turned into a story. Romantic entanglements. Moral dilemmas brought on by peer pressure. Domestic violence involving emotional, psychological or physical abuse. Then it dawned on him what the problem was. It wasn’t a dearth of narrative fodder in their lives, it was because of what they lacked on the inside. There was plenty happening to them on the outside, but inside them was no soil in which a story could take root and grow. They lacked what would only come with age. They lacked perspective. They lacked experience.
    ‘He got up from the bench and took a step closer to the edge of the bluff. He felt drawn to the water, its laughing silvery surface. He felt, in some dimly intuited way, that the beauty of nature was mocking him for his useless and absurd existence.
    ‘Suddenly a date appears in his mind, as clearly as if he were standing in front of the calendar nailed to his kitchen wall. March 26, 1971. Everything he thinks of from that point on he sees and hears as if it were projected onto a screen inside his head.
    ‘A man and a woman are in a car that is crossing the bridge from the town on the mainland to their house on the beach. It’s late at night, after midnight. They’re on their way home after their regular Friday night bridge game with another couple, their oldest friends in town.
    ‘The bridge is almost a mile long, and is flat all the way from the drawbridge, which lies just off the mainland, to the spoil island that holds the beach community. The sky is filled with stars, and a light breeze carries the smell of salt water and the oleanders and magnolias that grow near the shore on both sides of the bay.
    ‘Though the woman perceives nothing romantic in the sights and odors that surround them, the thought that there is something sexually stimulating about the woman has entered the mind of the man, who is in fact her husband. This thought, or rather this feeling, has nothing to do with the stars or the fragrance of the flowers growing around the bay. It has to do with the eight glasses of beer he drank while playing bridge with their friends, and with the fact that his wife has raised the hem of her skirt above her knees to enjoy the feeling of cool air blowing across her bare skin.
    ‘All four of the car’s windows are rolled all the way down. It had crossed the mind of the man that the wind blowing across his face will help him stay awake. Not that he is worried that they may have an accident. A man in that condition does not worry about accidents. Instead, he thinks that he is glad that he is tipsy, because it is making his wife look better than at any other time since the birth of their baby, the eight-month old male child who is asleep on a blanket in the back seat. Their babysitter had bailed on them at the last minute, forcing them to take the child along to their friends’ house on the mainland. He releases the steering wheel from his right hand and slides his fingers along the seat, then onto his wife’s left thigh. He pulls her skirt further up her leg and rubs the bare skin.
    ‘The woman swivels her head angrily and tells her husband to pay attention to the road, he is swerving back and forth across the two lanes on their side of the bridge, almost hitting both the median strip and the railing, which consists of a string of five-foot high Ionic columns. It is surprising that one would find such craftsmanship as went into forming the finely sculpted columns in this small Florida gulf coast town.
    ‘The man, whose name suddenly reveals itself to the teacher standing on the edge of the cliff, leans over to his wife’s side of the front seat, curves his arm around her shoulder, and pulls her against him. She pushes him away from her, but this has the effect of causing him to cut the front wheels of their car sharply to the left. The car bumps up onto the median and becomes airborne perpendicular to the traffic coming from the opposite direction, from the beach, where the bars had closed only minutes earlier. The driver of the vehicle closest to the airborne car swerves sharply to his right. His front fender glances off one of the Ionic columns, causing the rear of his car to spin under the airborne car, which then soars higher into the air before coming down atop the railing, where it balances for three or four seconds, like a seesaw, before pinwheeling upside down into the bay.
    ‘The woman screams out the name of her baby. It is the same name as that of the English teacher who is standing at the edge of the bluff overlooking the bay. Water is pouring in through the windows, she can’t see, she doesn’t know if what her hands are frantically clawing is the front seat or the back, the floor or the ceiling, and she knows she is going to die, but none of that matters. She is thinking about only one thing. She must get her baby out of the car. By the time her hand touches one of his tiny feet her lungs are filled with water and she has almost lost consciousness, but her fingers close around the tender flesh, and somehow, with the superhuman effort that people can be capable of in moments of extreme stress, she lifts her infant son to one of the windows, and somehow she knows, even though she herself is dead, that it is time to let go.’”
    Shivani stood up and slowly stretched that supermodel body of hers. In a light, sleeveless dress, she walked to the end of the deck, kicked off her shoes and jumped down onto the soft white sand. She started moving in the direction of the water, the source of the beautiful sound of the invisibly breaking waves.
    “I’m going in,” she called back at us over her shoulder. “Anyone care to join me?”