By Kenyon Geiger

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 16″ x 20″. “Cirlce” series.

It was finally settled: the competition was rigged, and Mrs. Klein would not be receiving her lifetime supply of free groceries after all. She set the letter down on her countertop with shaky hand and shaky breath. This was not a surprise. Aside from the mystery of how the competition was supposedly rigged, the news brought with it a strange comfort for Mrs. Klein. She was used to things not working out. 

Her mother always thought of everything as God’s will, all part of His divine plan; this was atypical for a Jewish woman, at least in Mrs. Klein’s experience. Her mother reminded her more of the parents of the evangelical friends Mrs. Klein had at school; they often talked like that, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Of course, she wasn’t Mrs. Klein then, back when she was in school. She was Rebecca, a little girl with her entire life ahead of her. 

The two-bedroom apartment in one of the affluent suburbs of Boston that she had shared with her husband took on a peculiar character of foreboding and limitation after reading the letter, the dismissal, the bad news. The competition was rigged. The room turned to water before her. She would have to do something about this. She couldn’t just take it lying down. That’s how she took everything. This was her big win. Her big win. She had called her sisters, her nieces, friends. She had won! Free groceries for life! Can you believe it? No. Now it was: Can you believe the competition was rigged? Yes. Of course, everyone would be able to believe that. Things didn’t work out for Mrs. Klein. 

# 

She stuffed the letter in a drawer and went into the bathroom to put on eye shadow and lipstick, apply finishing touches. 

Mrs. Klein was to meet with a man at a Turkish restaurant for lunch, a man she had been on three tedious dates with already, but found herself incapable of saying no to a fourth. She was sixty, relatively fit for her age, though was suspicious that her naturally dour disposition and morose humor had put lines and shadows in her face that attracted the wrong sorts of characters. She didn’t know precisely what this meant, but she felt the perception strongly, believed it with all her heart.  

The man’s name was David as well, and both he and her husband insisted on being called David and not Dave. Other than that they were quite dissimilar. David the husband had increasingly grown more and more comfortable over the years, his waistline expanding in proportion to that comfort. There was a self-satisfaction to him, an engineer who could bore you into a coffin within three sentences—at least to Mrs. Klein—and who cared, as far as his wife could tell, only for three things in life: lamenting the troubles his brothers had gotten into over the years, the state of Israel, and how to disassociate from the dispiriting realities of childless aging. David would have scoffed at this diagnosis, but this was how Mrs. Klein saw it, and she knew she had his number better than anyone. David the husband was a simple man, not a simpleton but a simple man. His intelligence was utilized in complex ways to erect defenses, to avoid pain, to suture various psychological wounds from the kinds of banal traumas we all experience, thought Mrs. Klein. The man was essentially a coward, but so was everyone. The kind of circular thinking that could drive a woman crazy. 

David the bad date was an amalgam of contradictions and thus harder at first to analyze. He resembled Allen Ginsberg with his thick glasses and disheveled beard but was serious in tone and had what Mrs. Klein observed as something of an obsession with order and neatness. On their first date, he asked the waiter to replace the silverware due to water spots three times, tied and retied his shoes at least four times, requested bottled water with no ice.  

A condition, Mrs. Klein was certain, some form of trauma or overprotection as a child, but then she was surprised to hear that he’d grown up on a farm in western Massachusetts. Hippie types or radicals Mrs. Klein surmised, but—as if reading her thoughts—David the bad date offered that his father was fixated on Rousseau and Emerson and with the idea that people needed to touch the dirt and the grass every day to feel human. His father was an English teacher like Mrs. Klein, apolitical. He left the family when David was graduating high school, ran off with another teacher half his age to California and started an entirely new family. “You must hate him,” Mrs. Klein said. “Oh no,” David the bad date said. “We love each other dearly, talk every week on the phone. I’m very close with my sisters. One of them works for Steven Spielberg.” 

There were other contradictions, he said he hated Massachusetts but had never lived anywhere else. He had “no idea how money worked,” and laughed before proceeding to brag about his house in Newton, his “cabin” on Sebago Lake, his car collection. “You have a car collection?” Mrs. Klein had said, incredulous. “A minor one,” he’d replied, arrogant and with a glint in his eye. She didn’t ask what kinds, she didn’t care. She had her teaching pension, a good salary but that was all. The subject of money unnerved her. There was debt, the slinking phantom of uncertainty surrounding the paying of bills.  

Her husband had made some bad business deals. His brother, Sheldon, blew all their savings on a scam Mrs. Klein would have seen a mile away had they talked to her about it. Having lost all their money, David the husband never apologized, his vitriol pointed at Sheldon, all of his brothers’ general incapacity. He raised his voice, flung invectives out of his mouth with a kind of bravura, walked around the house for several weeks gesticulating, clenching his fists. It was a dramatic show. All Mrs. Klein could do was watch. 

Upon waking one morning, he discussed the crocuses, a distant cousin of his in Tel Aviv, the way cereal made his stomach hurt now, all while buttering an English muffin. It was in the same kitchen where she would get the news that she’d won the competition. The same kitchen where she would come to find, not unlike several previous occasions of heterogenous circumstances and yet all amounting to a familiar conclusion, that she had in fact lost. 

“He went into the living room,” she would tell her sister later. “And he turned on the television. I wanted to ask him something—I can’t even remember what it was now, but it was important. I remember that. I had to know. I went into the living room and—yeah, he was sitting in his chair. Dead. Peaceful as can be.” “You knew he was dead right away?” “Right away.” “What a thing.”  

What she didn’t tell her sister, a woman ten years younger and with the kind of charmed existence that baffled Mrs. Klein, was that her husband’s dramatic show in the preceding weeks was not unlike the dramatic show that was his entire life, that it was in fact a staging in a series of dramatic performances that made up the sixty-two years of David Klein.  

They got by. There was no romance, but there was no great turmoil either, no violence. Another sister of Mrs. Klein’s had relationships that were small tempests, sucking in unsuspecting passersby and spitting them out onto distant lands, weary and left to pick up the pieces. Even still, things had a way of working out for her. 

Mrs. Klein applied the makeup with rapid movements, her heart tightening in her chest, her mind jumping from one unpleasant thought to another. Her heart beat on. David the husband’s heart quit on him. He never spoke about his heart. They had never spoken of children. It was assumed, after a time, that she was barren, though this was never verbalized either. She assumed that he assumed. They never spoke of it.  

She hurried out of her apartment, alarmed and anxious. They had never talked about it, had never moved it around in conversation, prodded it, theorized on it, queried it, lamented it, never laughed or sobbed over it, never talked. How could that be? 

# 

David the bad date had selected a booth by the window. He was studying the menu when Mrs. Klein approached. Taking her seat, David the bad date set the menu down with what Mrs. Klein took as an overly dramatic flourish. The big smile. Who was this man fooling? Is everything a performance with everyone? “Carol!” he exclaimed. “Rebecca,” she corrected. “Of course. I knew that. Carol’s the name of my mother.” 

How strange. How strange everyone is. Everyone’s a stranger. For all his faults, at least David the husband was familiar, knowable. No one is perfect. What to overlook, and what not to. The thinking would drive Mrs. Klein crazy.  

“Do you like Turkish food?” 

“It’s fine,” she said. 

“Fine? What fun is fine? Have a strong opinion.” 

“I think it’s fine. That’s my opinion.” The nerve of this man. 

“All right,” he laughed. “Hey, what do you say you cook for me on our next date, huh? With all those free groceries?” 

She wanted to kill him. She busied herself with the menu instead. “Where’s the server?” 

“Tell me how this works. There’s a limit to how much you can buy, I assume. Does the limit you can spend increase over time to account for inflation? I read recently that people spend substantially more on groceries now than they did five years ago.” 

He needed an article to tell him that? “I don’t know,” she muttered. A bead of moisture ran down from her armpit and she wanted to cry. The server came and mumbled her way through the specials. They ate while David the bad date discussed himself in increasingly flattering ways, bragged about a new car he’d purchased. They drank a Bourdeaux that David said was “killer,” and Mrs. Klein politely declined dessert before thanking him for the date. Over the course of her long teaching career, Mrs. Klein had to deal with thousands of different people—children, parents, administrators, other teachers, guidance counselors, school psychologists. She reverted to the autopilot mode of existing that she used on all of them, firm and confident speech pattern, an intentional politeness and kindness masking the black pool of emotions and warring thought fragments underneath.  

Getting by. Getting through it. How to communicate this to another soul. A stranger. Everyone a stranger. 

“I was serious about the meal,” David the bad date said, his face more boyish and his voice warmer and more youthful from the wine. “What?” “I mean, you get all this free food. Why not, right?” “There’s no free food, David.” “From the competition, I mean.” “I know. It—it didn’t happen.” “The competition?” “I didn’t win.” “I’m sorry. I’m a little confused” “Yes. I am too. ‘Rigged,’ they said. Whatever the hell that means.” “Rigged? That’s preposterous. Who was the outfit behind this?” “A little grocery store in Natick.” “A little grocery store in Natick had a competition for free groceries, and that competition is rigged, using their own language.” “That’s right.” “This sounds fishy.” “I just want to forget everything.” “Someone’s playing a game with you.” “I’m going home. Thank you. For everything.” “I’m going to talk to them.” “Please, don’t.” “I really think it’s best. Why don’t I follow you to your apartment? I know a very good lawyer.” 

# 

In the shadows of her hallway, searching for the light switch, Mrs. Klein watched David the bad date amble into her kitchen holding their second bottle of wine that he’d taken with him from the restaurant. The image was arresting. With his beard and the way he moved, it made her think of carnivals in Europe, dancing pagan revelers. This strange man in the apartment she had shared with her husband for twenty-three years, and him being named David as well. 

He flicked on the light and disappeared into the kitchen. “Where do you keep your wine glasses?” he asked. 

By the time she got to the kitchen, David the bad date had found the glasses and was filling them. “Can I see the letter?” he asked. 

She retrieved it from the drawer and presented it to him. He looked it over carefully. 

“First thing in the morning, I’ll call and we’ll get this settled,” he said. 

Her apartment was another realm with this man in it. There was something Old World about him to her. Funny memories were coming to her. She attributed it to the wine. 

Whenever something odd happened, her father always said, “I feel like I’m on Neptune.” 

She remembered her mother’s sadness, how Mrs. Klein hated it, but that her mother was happy one summer when they spent an entire week in Maine at her mother’s cousin’s house. It was hot on the drive and Mrs. Klein’s sister, Agnes, was making them all laugh with her wild impressions of family members. Mrs. Klein was laughing so hard that she thought she would faint. She must have been twelve or thirteen.  

When they pulled into the house in Maine, it was old and had bulkhead doors and a gravel driveway. There was something so beautiful about it to Mrs. Klein. There was a big field behind the house, a tomcat that hung around, large apple trees in the backyard, hammocks. The girls caught fireflies and sang pop songs and giggled around the fire at night.  

Their mother was drinking wine too, Mrs. Klein remembered, something she so rarely did. Her cousin, Richard, wore glasses and liked to come up behind you and poke you in the small of the back and laugh. It was a thrill. 

Richard’s son was Matthew, a kid older than Mrs. Klein but somehow of the same spirit. They magnetized to each other, in a way, without either one knowing that it had happened. Matthew told her that first night that “my heart is Irish, but my soul is Jewish.” He smiled without any hint of devilment or mischief. He could look you in the eye for an eternity. It too was a thrill. 

“Have you read Kafka?” Mathew said. “Who’s that?” “Read his diaries first.” “All right.” “What about Joyce?” “Joyce who?” “All right, Ulysses and Kafka’s diaries. That’s your summer reading list. Next summer you can tell me all your thoughts on Leopold and Molly and Max and good ol’ Franz.” “All right,” she said. She could remember the way the flames played on his face. She could remember the exact pattern. What a thing. 

After they left, she asked her mother to stop at a book store and she bought Ulysses and Kafka’s Diaries, and she could remember the way the books smelled, the newness of them, the black and white photographs of Joyce and Kafka. She held them to her chest on the ride home, smelling the ocean through her open window. A life was ahead of her, she could feel in that moment. Adventures and magic awaited. 

“I usually don’t drink this much wine,” she said to David the bad date. He was sitting next to her on her couch now. “Oh, I hope you don’t think I’m a sot,” he said. She laughed. “What a great word,” she said. 

She loved the sentences in those books. She asked her English teacher for books with beautiful sentences and he invoked Flaubert, Henry James, others. He wrote her out a list. She didn’t know what half of them were talking about, but she could read them. She loved the words they used, the language. She thought of Matthew all year. She counted down the days until summer. It was assumed they were going back. They had all been so happy. Why wouldn’t they go back?  

It must have been June, right before school ended, when she said something to Agnes and Agnes said, “We’re never going back there. Daddy found out.” “Found out about what?” “Mom’s boyfriend.” “Mom has a boyfriend?” “Richard? Remember?” “That’s her cousin.” “Uh-huh.” “What?” “Betty got up in the night to go to the bathroom and she could hear them having sex. She told Daddy.” “You’re lying.” “Remember how she told us not to say anything to Daddy about where we were?” “Yeah, because it would just make him sad, she said, that he had to go on a work trip and we got to go to Maine.” “Uh-huh.” 

How sick she was. How her stomach had flipped. The nausea that was like a den of snakes inside her. 

“What made you want to become a teacher?” David the bad date asked. 

“Oh—” She almost gave her pat answer. The same one she gave every time the question was posed. She became a teacher because she wanted to help young people gain the skills that a strong foundation in the English language arts can give them. She liked arming young people with the appropriate tools to succeed in life, to make the world a little bit better. 

She stopped herself though. She couldn’t remember why, was the truth. She couldn’t remember falling in love with David the would be husband, couldn’t remember those early years together. At a certain point, she was taking care of him, dealing with him in so many ways. Teaching let her be around books, gave her a job. It became a task to complete. Life became a series of tasks to complete. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

“I understand,” he replied. He took another sip of wine. “And what about kids?” 

She took a long swallow of wine. After a time, it became evident she wasn’t going to answer so David the bad date smiled politely and said he should go. 

“How about I call you in the morning and we’ll go at this thing together?” he said standing. 

She didn’t know what he meant at first, but then remembered the competition. 

David the bad date went for the door. He didn’t seem like such a bad guy now, or perhaps it was the wine talking. She wanted to kiss him. She better not. She would be taking care of somebody again before long, and she was too tired for such a thing. 

A quick goodbye and he was gone. 

# 

In the rejuvenated morning, Mrs. Klein cleaned by the brilliance of the early light. It was like she had been born again. She read Melville with a cup of coffee before cleaning, and was euphoric again with words, with language, with literature. She went to the storage area in the basement and lugged up boxes and boxes of books, novels and collections that she held dear, or had always wanted to read, that David the husband had banished at one point, saying her spending on books was “unhealthy.”  

So many books. Denis Johnson and George Eliot, Willa Cather and William Kennedy. She held them to her face, read stray sentences, breathed them in, sneezed and breathed some more. She was nearly in tears. She waited for David the bad date to call. Soon he would call and they would go to the grocery store. They would confront them. They would win. That’s how you win, you refuse to lose. It was all so simple now, everything. Life was capacious once again. 

Ten turned to eleven, and eleven to twelve, with no phone call. Finally, while she was cleaning the window sills and blinds, there was a knock on the door. She moved quickly to open it, ready to tell David the bad date everything, to not hold anything back. 

Standing on the other side of the threshold was a police officer. He was young and muscular with a military haircut. 

“Hi, ma’am, sorry to bother you. I believe you had an interaction with a man we now have in custody.” 

“All right.” 

“Can I come in?” 

“Sure.” 

The officer stepped inside, his eyes going to the boxes and boxes of books scattered about the hallway and the living room. 

“House cleaning?” the officer asked. 

“Yes.” 

The officer looked around. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen out of his pocket. 

“Do you know a man by the name of David Esterbach?” he asked. “He may be going by another name.” 

“Yes,” Mrs. Klein nearly whispered. 

“Has he been in your home?” He jotted something down on his paper. He had an officious air. 

“Yes, he was here last night.” 

“Did he say anything regarding money, business ventures, anything like that?” 

“No.” 

“Did you find anything missing this morning?” 

“No, of course not.”  

The officer looked up from his notepad and into the eyes of Mrs. Klein. “I’m just collecting information. Someone else will be in touch with you, if necessary,” the officer said. “It may not come to that.” 

“What is it you think he did?” Mrs. Klein asked in a small voice. Her hands were on her hips now, she realized, and her voice was breathy. “David is a very nice man. I think there’s some kind of mistake here.” 

“Did you get a letter recently informing you that you’ve won a competition of some kind.” 

“Yes. Why?” 

“This man—well, the grocery thing’s a scam of his, a con.” 

Mrs. Klein scoffed, laughed out of an admixture of shame and nervous surprise.  

“Ridiculous,” she said. 

Words were spoken by the officer, but it was as though they were encased in fluid, had about them, along with the edges of Mrs. Klein’s vision, the walls and air and her familiar objects, the substance of dream. 

Mrs. Klein plucked a book from the box and threw it against the wall, a hardcover that made a smacking sound. She threw another, and another. She was vaguely aware of a growling noise, vaguely aware that it was emanating from herself. Middlemarch went careering towards the office door where the spine of the book connected and caused it to flip end over end. Dubliners sailed along like a discus. The entire Library of America Philip Roth editions made tremendous thudding noises as they hit the white expanse; she caught a glimpse of Roth’s wry smile, his balding pate, the strange authority in his eyes, before it left her hand and narrowly missed a framed photograph of David the husband and her in their spurious couple’s pose, their smiles goofy and forced, nothing authoritative about David, everything about the image an unconvincing performance, a deception. 

Trembling, she looked over to see the officer by the front door, concerned and alarmed. The door was ajar. He put a hand up and was about to open that facile, performative yap of his and let some linguistic consortium of nonsense dribble out and she couldn’t take it any longer, she couldn’t stand it, the falsity, the mendacity, the acting, when meanwhile she had sacrificed everything beautiful and important and mysterious in life for—what?—she didn’t even know! 

She picked up another book, a Don DeLillo tome, when the cop slipped out the door. She threw it anyway, heaved it with all her strength, and it collided with a satisfying clap against the wall. 

She grabbed another book and chased after the officer, ran through her doorway. The whole world a fiction.  

 The stairwell was dark, cave-like, and she moved through it with maladroit speed. The darkness of the stairwell, opened up into the brightness of the day, the sidewalk and quiet residential dead end street that she had seen so many times, day after day, the same people and trees and dogs and cars, every day coming home, going out, coming home, and did she really see it, or was she deceived even in this? 

On uncertain legs, her rush of energy waning, Mrs. Klein watched the police officer climb into his patrol car. Deborah, the oddly tanned woman who jogs and smacks her gum while she talks, was crossing the road with her mastiff mix that was always trying to break free from its leash. Mrs. Klein saw with horror, a thrust back into the dry reality, that Deborah wanted to talk. Mrs. Klein was shaking. She was still holding the book. 

A brief clearing out of her consciousness occurred, a moment where decisions could be made. Mrs. Klein ignored it. She attempted a run at the patrol car, to get closer where she could then throw the book and witness with pleasure the officer’s reaction, how the day would be upended, how the artifice would be perforated. 

Mrs. Klein did not get beyond two steps before she fell. She tripped over the curb, her body dropping against the pavement. 

Deborah screamed, the mastiff mix barked. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” Deborah said, before running off yelling, “Henry! Come back! Henry!” 

Mrs. Klein opened her eyes to see the dog running away having broken free from its leash. The patrol car driving off. The leaves of the trees glittering in the sunlight and the breeze.  

Richard had set off fireworks that night. The way they popped and fizzled and materialized out of nothingness, out of the darkness. How she sat in the lawn chair and watched, trapped somehow even then. Her feelings for Matthew never expressed, her feelings for life. The way she listened to her sisters’ sleeping breaths later on, that too life, the sounds of life, all three of them spread out in sleeping bags on the floor, the whole world about them, before them, inside them. How sad Melville was. The way David looked last night in the hallway, his shadow long and dark. How sad her mother was. How embarrassing the heart was. 

She listened to the woman’s frantic calling, a far-off lawnmower, kids in the neighborhood. She wondered if grocery stores ever held competitions before, if anybody ever won them. 

---

Kenyon Geiger is a writer, educator and poet. He lives in the Boston area.

Stephen Reichert (American, b. 1975), Baltimore City, Maryland, is a multidisciplinary artist with recent solo shows at Hancock Solar Gallery, Co_Lab, Baltimore City Hall, and Sotheby’s Roland Park Gallery; a current show at The Fox Building; and group shows at Ellington-White Contemporary, The Peale Museum, American Visionary Art Museum, Arts Fort Worth, University of Maryland, National Art League, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Abington Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many others. He is the editor of the poetry magazine Smartish Pace. Reichert is represented by K. Hamill Fine Art & Design.