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From the novel Westlake Village by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Up From the Sandbox
Al and Edie Sampson lived at 12 Whipporwill Way. Lloyd and Katherine Pomerance lived at number 14. They were incompatible neighbors from the day they settled in. Al worked for the telephone company and Lloyd was an up and coming executive with an investment brokerage house. Al was an ex-dogface who found himself armpit deep in the waters off Omaha Beach when the LSI's refused to move in any closer. Lloyd, a college graduate, spent the war at sea aboard the heavy cruiser Wichita. Al marches in every Memorial Day parade in a uniform that grows larger every year. Lloyd attends the annual Wichita officers dinner in Annapolis in black tie.
The two families
moved in to the newly formed community of Westlake Village
within a day or two of each other. Their tentative hellos quickly faded when
they realized they had nothing in common. Lloyd, already distraught at the age
of thirty two, left for work at six-thirty every morning in a suit and a silk
tie, carrying a slender attache case. He was never home before dark. Al was
picked up by the driver of a telephone utility truck who blew his horn in the
street outside 12 Whipporwill Way promptly at 8:30. He wore work clothes and
a yellow safety helmet, and was rarely seen without a Budweiser in his hand
. . . breakfast was the only meal at the Sampson house that did not involve
beer. Lloyd would mix himself a double Beefeater Martini with a twist before
dinner .... the drink of Wall Street lions. He often remarked to Katherine with
scorn that bottles were meant to be poured from, not drunk from.
Edie and Al fell in love at the Feast of St. Gennaro just before the war. It was the first time for both, and in a blinding moment of creative ecstasy, Willie was conceived. Al would measure every event in his later life by that first union with Edie and the devil's throw of the dice on Omaha Beach. Lloyd and Katherine met at the chamber music summer series of concerts at Tanglewood. Their hands touched and their fingers intertwined during the slow movement of the Brahms Clarinet Trio in A. The insistent rhythms of the final movement contributed in large part to the conception of Stacey. Unlike the Sampsons, the union was not a watershed moment for either of them.
Throughout the
years, the incomes of the two couples were remarkably similar.
Katherine got her beaver coat before Edie got her mink, but the Sampson's got
a color television long before the Pomerance's did. Three piece suits do not
always translate into dollars and cents. During the soft summer nights with
the windows opened to the sound of cricket and cicada, one could stand on the
sidewalk outside 12 and 14 Whipporwill Way and feel the pounding boom of hard
rock coming from one, and by straining a bit, the plaintive whimper of Julie
Andrews might be heard from the other.
Lloyd and Katherine's preschool daughter was Stacey -- all golden curls and pink lace panties. If you are familiar with Barbie dolls you know Barbie was frozen in time at the age of twenty. Picture, if you will, what Barbie may have looked like at the age of three. Without a doubt she would have been the spitting image of Stacey.
Al and Edie's preschool son was Willie. At the age of three, Willie was the color of dirt and smelled of cat pee. He often played alone, chained to a sandbox his father made for him. He shared this box with many of the neighborhood cats, including mine. If you bury your nose in a cat's fur, you will not smell cat. Cat's are too fastidious for that. But if you got within ten feet of Willie, you could smell cat.
The smell of cat
was never objectionable to Edie or Al Sampson. Both of them had come from large
Irish families in South Brooklyn and leaving ones children alone to fend for
themselves seemed natural to them. Keeping Willie fed and hosing him down occasionally
was about as far as they went.
"Willie cat pee!" Stacey would call from her upstairs bedroom window
or standing on tiptoe with her friends looking over the cyclone fence her father
had built to separate the Pomerances from the Sampsons.
Other kids walking by the Sampsons house would pick up the chant. "Willie
cat pee! .... Willie cat pee!"
Willie would smile back at them, soaking up the attention as completely as he
did the smell of cat. He would have preferred company. He would have shared
his shovel and dump truck with Stacey or any of the other children passing by,
but their mothers had warned them, "I want you to stay out of that sandbox
.... understand?"
From time to time Edie would look out the back window to check on Willie in
the sandbox. He'd stay out there all day in the summer, even have his lunch
out there. If it started to rain she would bring him in. He would call to Stacey
to come and play with him but she would have none of it. It didn't bother Willie.
He would rather play in the sand than anything. His fondness for sand ran counter
to his father's fear of it. To Al, the sight of sand and the feel of it between
his fingers and toes always brought back that horrible morning in June of 1944..
When he and Edie would take Willie to the beach, Willie thought he'd died and
gone to Heaven. He'd have to be carried, kicking and screaming back to the car
when it was time to go home. Al would be miserable all day, and for the thousandth
time he would fight the battle of D-Day and relate to Edie, in the minutest
detail, a story she heard a
thousand times before.
Stacey rarely went to the beach. With skin so delicate, and hair so fair she was far better off in the shade of a patio umbrella -- dressing and undressing her dolls. She had her father's complexion, his blue eyes and his absolutely colorless hair. She inherited her mother's beautiful jet black eyebrows, thick, perfectly formed, and capable of a wide range of expression. Lloyd's eyebrows were white, like the rest of him. Stacey knew she was an exquisite blend of the best her mother and father had to offer and planned, even at the age of four, to expect a lifetime of adulation. She spent a large part of her day before her mother's full length mirror practicing her smile and her mincing walk that she knew would some day drive men wild.
Very few people
are perfect. Most of us are burdened with imperfections. Stacey had only one
. . . she was stupid, and under the most ideal conditions would never be more
than a beautiful bubble-headed blonde. At the age of four however, stupidity
is hard to determine, therefore Lloyd and Katherine were blissfully serene in
the expectation that their doll-like daughter would graduate from Princeton
at the age of eighteen .... summa cum laude, with a train of tenured professors
begging for her hand. They had to settle for Murray Feldman, the bald headed
chief buyer for Cosmic Imports. Although it seems to stretch the imagination,
Stacey seemed to grow dumber as she grew older. Murray summed it up well during
his courtship of her when she poutingly accused him, "All you want is my
body!"
He replied, "Sure, why, what else you got?" Even Stacey was forced
to agree.
By the age of four, Willie, with sand in his pants could write his name and address in a squiggly hand with a ball point pen. He could dial his own phone number. He could operate the remote control of the television set and turn off the gas to the oven when his mother forgot to. He could show you his birthday on the calendar, in short, he was mentally on a par with his father and, unless something came along to stop him, was well on the road to being a genius. Al and Edie would look at each other in amazement as each day revealed a newly discovered facet of Willie's development. Using his father's credit card, he ordered the Encyclopedia Britannica over the phone at the age of eight. At ten he broke his way into Fleet Bank's depositor records using the high school computer.
When Stacey once
asked him for help with her algebra homework, he could have
told her to pound salt. It would have helped to repay the many injustices she
had heaped on him as he sat alone in his sandbox. But he didn't .... he simply
explained that it wouldn't do any good. "Forget it Stace .... you're a
turd-head, get used to it." Though both of them were the same age, Willie
finished undergraduate work at Penn State six months after Stacey got out of
Westlake Village High.
Stacey left our employment at the Westlake Village "Guardian" to work in china at Cosmic Imports, (that's china with a small "c", like in plates and saucers). She left an emptiness at the paper that Lucas Crosby and I found impossible to fill. even though we had no difficulty adding her duties to our own. When the phone rang Lucas or I would answer it, (we hadn't thought of doing that before). Lucas's wife did what little typing there was to do at night after supper. Intelligence aside, efficiency aside, wit aside, some people leave an emptiness. Stacey took beauty with her when she left the "Guardian", and beauty's every bit as important as brains.
With a rare show
of tenderness, Lucas sighed, "Jesus, I miss that broad."
No one will ever say that about Willie.
©Harry Buschman 1998
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