It was the predilection of the inhabitants of Manny Panbroke’s neighborhood to put new siding on their little houses every single year, for no good reason, laying it right over the old. As a consequence, the walls, originally stucco or clapboard, then red brick, then aluminum, then California redwood, then white brick, followed by veneer then stucco again and so on, were nearly three feet thick. The effect created deep-set windows, long entrances and houses that looked much, much larger than they really were. Manny Panbroke’s house was no different.
He rose before dawn each morning, and as the coffee dribbled into his cup from the coffee maker, he rattled papers on the kitchen table, checking the want ads first, though he was now retired, and then skimming the obits and the feature section. This morning, there was a little article describing how artifacts, uncovered while a basement was being dug down his street at Number 88, had led to interesting conclusions about aboriginal inhabitants. A small village of about 23 to 30 individuals had foraged and hunted here between 1635 and 1654, when they vanished.
Every morning after skimming the paper, when coffee was stirred with sugar and half-and-half, he took his morning walk, cup in hand, as the sun sparkled over the wet morning lawns and houses of Vine Street. This morning the air was sweet with a pungent smell of purple grape, like the cheap sweet drink of his childhood.
He loved his morning walks. They were a reinforcement of his world, a reaffirmation that all was right, for everything in the neighborhood was right, or seemed so, early in the morning. It was not a fancy place. It was a simple post-war settlement, where there had been only farmland on the edge of the big city. It was down country in those days after the War, when the men came home from years of noise and abuse to settle into the “dream”. This was a typical neighborhood, laid out in straight lines over small hills: each house a plot, each pot a chicken in it, each life laid out in a straight lines running off into the distant shadowy shapes. Shapes of children to come, work to be done, the faraway shadow of retirement, a funeral.
Number 52 was Manny Panbroke’s house. He had installed new aluminum siding the year before and so now, like all the other houses on Vine Street, his walls were approaching three feet in thickness. A ceramic cat climbed the shutters and glanced to the side. The same ceramic cat was popular on other houses and could be found climbing several porch posts and clapboard. People had forgotten the original purpose of these ceramic cats, which was to scare away an infestation of larks in the summer of 1950. The cats did the job and remained a feature of the neighborhood ever since even though no larks have been spotted for four decades. The ceramic cats, like pink flamingos in other towns, lent a certain comfort: they were familiar and so it was hard to do with out them. Manny Panbroke was particularly fond of ceramic cats.
He also had a sincere admiration for the walls and hedges of Vine Street. He noted with satisfaction how everyone on the street took such good care of everything: how the retaining walls, here made of brown brick, there of carefully chosen stone, were always patched thoughtfully, and maintained with great economy. How the hedges were so old now that one could clearly picture young couples planting the original hedges nearly half a century earlier. Young couples, like Manny Panbroke and his wife, Lotte. Fifty years ago, during the war, Lotte had worked at a munition factory for a time. With her hair tied back in a net and wearing overalls that showed her young shape, she inspired many lusty thoughts in those soldiers coming back home for R&R. And, while Manny Panbroke slogged through swamps in Brazil looking for guerilla-saboteur-gun-runners, who turned out to be simple forest-dwelling natives trading monkey carcasses for machetes, Lotte Panbroke enjoyed the attentions of a series of young soldiers and sailors. As a result of her substantial and practiced creativity, she developed at thirst for unlikely locations. She remained unrepentant of this time in her life and secretly thought of it while in her husband’s arms years later.
Manny Panbroke took his time, walking slowly with his coffee cup in hand. The sweet aroma of the coffee swirled and blended oddly in the air with that musty odor of grape. He was thinking of the early days, back when they had just begun to live in this neighborhood, when he found himself in from of Number 22, a pale yellow bungalow with tight little windows under striped metal awnings. It housed, warehoused one might say, one of two twins who Panbroke had watched grow up in the neighborhood. The twins, when little girls, had been the beautiful darlings of Vine Street. Full of promise and charm, they were true beauties. When they reached adolescence, however, they each sprouted conspicuous black mustaches. This event overshadowed everything else good in their lives and changed everything for them thereafter: the one girl, after just a few years of enduring the humiliation, had her mustache surgically removed and, beautiful and charming once again, went on to become quite a well-known local television spokesperson. The other, refusing to give in to the temptation, believing that “they should accept me as I am!” but never really accepting her own self, retired to her dead parents house on Vine and remained in bitter seclusion. Panbroke always reviewed this little history when he passed Number 22, shaking his head sadly, yet hoping to catch a glimpse.
On his morning walks, Manny Panbroke would think about many such things. Like how no one on Vine Street ever got rid of a vehicle when it died, and so backyards were filled with flowerbeds that were really 1952 Chevy convertibles. Or were now doghouses with aluminum siding applied to them so that you would not recognize the car underneath. Or the vehicle behind Number 43 that had been converted into a high-tech spa with a wooden deck around it.
But what Manny Panbroke appreciated even more the little bungalows that stood back and to the side of the little homes. These quaint dollhouse-like buildings began in the late forties as sheds for the storage of carpentry tools when the houses were being built. Times prospered and everyone could afford to buy a cheap Ford or Chevy or a jalopy from the thirties. So the sheds were converted to garages. The dirt floors, packed hard and stained with black motor oil, were popular with cats. The inside walls were left unfinished; just dark rough wood and postwar 2 X 4’s with the rafters exposed and rigged up to store old lumber and pieces of pipe and lengths of molding that would be used again. The outside walls were covered with asbestos shingles so that the roofing nails poked through to the inside wall where the nail points were exposed, making nice tacking points for spiders when laying out a new web. The horizontal 2 X 4’s ended up being used as shelves, upon which gradually gathered a dusty collection of oil cans, nail buckets made out of coffee cans, odd pieces of tin, cloth, and broken tools, rubber engine belts, and other useless things. Things that might come in handy one day but which eventually were tossed out years later when the little garage was again converted. This time, into a little guesthouse, or cabin, or mother-in-law house. A concrete floor was poured over the oily packed dirt, the asbestos tiles covered with brick or aluminum, and cute four-paned windows were set into the walls which were then finished with cheap paperboard and painted a bedroom green. Every house on Vine Street had some version of this little house to the back and to the side, at the end of the driveway. The driveways had into fallen into disuse and were in many cases replaced with grass for, as time went on, everyone parked on the street. What had once been a sweet sight, looking down the street as it curved down over the hill, now looked more like a strip center parking lot. Manny Panbroke had personally dug up the old concrete of his driveway and planted glass, which his wife later dug up and planted as a rose garden. The rose garden had looked bright, sunny and cheerful in front of the old garage, now cottage. The cottage filled up with old pieces of wood, broken appliances, a tricycle, a tattered couch belonging to a dead cousin, and a birdcage and several boxes of unopened birdseed. Manny Panbroke parked his car on the street like everyone else.
As he strolled along on his morning walk remembering when each tree and hedge was planted and marveling at how they had grown so much, how some had even grown old and had been removed by workmen, Manny Panbroke had a sudden vision. He stopped abruptly in front of Number 88 for a moment, vividly picturing what it must have been like long before people had moved here the city. He saw farmland. Then, mulling over the tidbits of information the article in the morning’s paper, he thought no—forest, with deer and bear and Indians, a place where no people would have lived. Only Indians. A place to be tamed; a beautiful place though, where it was peaceful. And full of bugs.
He shuddered, and his thoughts turned bleak, for suddenly he pictured this same neighborhood years in the future, long after that vague dreamlike vision of his own funeral had come and gone. And it was clear to him that where Number 22 stood, where the sad twin lived, all the way to where Number 64 stood there would, no doubt, be a high-rise building surrounded by acres of black asphalt shimmering in the August dog days. And suited people. Young suited people who he did not know. In his vision, he could clearly see his own house. It would be turned into a hair salon for several years, and then into a string of other small businesses—-a barbershop, a pizza parlor, and finally liquor store. The liquor store would be successful enough that the owners would tear down the house and replace it with a modem building with automatic doors and a parking lot. The asphalt of the parking lot would hermetically seal the playground of his children— and all their lost artifacts, little toy cars, buttons, and Popsicle sticks, would await some future archaeologist. Manny could picture it all quite distinctly.
Manny Panbroke’s visions had always been disturbing to him. He did not like them, for perhaps he knew, on an unconscious level, that they were true or at least nearly true. But on a conscious level, he dismissed these fleeting fantasies as soon as they arose, because they broke through his ongoing reverie. And so, the effect of a lifetime of dismissing images and thoughts and ideas was to create an overall feeling that something was not quite right. It was a feeling that something bad was just about to happen or had just happened, that perhaps he would lose control any second and say something or do something wrong, inappropriate, unforgivable. This made him ill at ease and had always done so.
It was Sunday morning, and on Sunday mornings Manny Panbroke made it his pleasure to mow the lawn while his wife Lotte went to church. He did this not so much because he wanted to mow the lawn but because he wanted to avoid church or, to be more specific, God. Not that he considered himself an atheist; atheists were highly suspect, even unwholesome; this thought made him uneasy. He didn’t know what he was. He just knew he didn’t believe in God. At least, not the God he had heard of as a child, or the colorful one whose picture was on the mantle, the personal one that walked around the house arm-in-arm with Lotte. Not Him. So at his own church, the front lawn, he worshiped in his own way, intensely mowing the lawn at a diagonal; the extra effort, he reasoned, justified his staying home: he covered himself in this way.
That Sunday morning, Lotte clattered down the steps in her high heels and past the roaring lawnmower, waving at Manny Panbroke and mouthing instructions over the din. Manny Panbroke nodded and waved as if he had heard her, vaguely wondering who she was really meeting at church or even if she went to church. Because, returning from the war, he had been subject to disturbing dreams of his wife with soldiers, and these visions, like all the others in his life, left him uneasy and dissatisfied. He watched out of the comer of his eye as she pulled away in the car. He went back to on the diagonal lines.
But his concentration had now been broken. And he complained to himself bitterly that nothing ever felt right, nothing ever felt 100%. Now it was ruined, and he could never get the diagonals right. Maybe next week. Angry now, he whipped his head around and stuck his nose up in the air, sniffing, annoyed. “Grapes,” he snorted. “Smells like grapes!”
When Lotte Panbroke returned mid-afternoon she found Manny Panbroke somewhat dazed, around the yard almost on tip-toes trying to get a line on where that grape smell was coming from. She joined him, intrigued too by the odd seductive aroma that brought forth memories of childhood. Its cheap, grape-y smell reminded them both of grape soda and kosher wine, of Saturday afternoons at the matinee movies, and of lollipops and gum, and of other hazy recollections of being small and wild, of having no real sense of time, only the sense of one long day being followed by one long day—interrupted by naps and meals and radio programs and drive-in movies. They walked to the side of the house past the bed of dead rose bushes, past the cottage with its cobwebs that caught memory and word and feeling which it held suspended, waiting for someone, anyone, to open the door. Here, long ago, they had planted a small tree. It was gone now. Only a large stump remained, topped with a wrecked aluminum bird feeder and two gray clothespins weathering in the sun. There, further back, was that row of twelve trees they had planted five years ago, now tall and leafy, entwining themselves in the old wire fence that Panbroke had put up for the kids and the dog some thirty years before that. Manny and Lotte Panbroke, walked toward the trees, following the exotic fragrance of grape until, startled and amazed, they came face to face with a very large conical purple bloom that bobbed at the end of a tendril, erect and erotic. Transfixed, they breathed in its fragrance as if thirsting after cold, quenching water.
Next to this bloom was another and yet and another. Draped over every tree and hedge in their hack yard was a giant vine with broad leaves and pencil-thick tendrils twining about branch and pole, stump and limb. What to Manny Panbroke and his wife had appeared to be the leaves of their young trees were in fact the leaves of the vine, surreptitiously mingling and skulking amongst the branches. The vine, which Manny Panbroke was sure had not been there a week ago, now shrouded the trees. It slithered up the phone pole, wound itself along the electric lines to the house, dropped easily to the sparkling asbestos shingles and curled about the chimney, sprouting the conical grape soda blooms at every joint. Until it drenched the whole property in a kind of dreamy, cheap-sweet dream of childhood memories. Memories, which did not necessarily make Manny Panbroke feel any better, though he could admit to a certain distracted fascination that eased his uneasiness during those moments when he inhaled the fragrance deeply. Then he felt as if he were about to chant some great mystical incantation, as if something was about to happen, as if he might say something really profound.“Boy!” he spoke. “Smells good…” the sound of his voice distilling that uneasy feeling again. And once again he felt if something was not quite right with his life.
Over the next several weeks on his early morning walks Manny Panbroke observed the growth of the vine as it moved, day by day through the neighborhood, always stealthily, always blending into the trees, dropping down to encase a garage or a hedge in broad green bindings. He was not alarmed. It was just another thing in the neighborhood, another feature he noted. Just as he noted that the man in Number 16 stayed inside all day every day until 3:35 p.m. Number 16 would poke his eye out from the dark cave of his seclusion and make his daily walk to the grocery store, where he purchased something that he always carried carefully home in a small brown bag. Manny Panbroke saw these things.
And he saw the vine. To him, after all these weeks, it was as if the vine had always been there, lurking in the background; just one more thing to make him uneasy. Manny no longer paid any attention to the hedges or walls, bungalows or ceramic cats when he took his morning walk. Now he only saw the vine. Day by day the vine had enclosed the neighborhood, seducing everyone in its fragrance, sending all into self-indulgent bouts of nostalgia and regret: people stopped mowing their lawns.
Manny Panbroke spoke to his wife one night about idea of traveling around the country in an RV. He talked distractedly, while the TV yammered on, about what a beautiful country this is and how he’d rather see America first before wasting money on Europe. “This is a beautiful country…” he declared. But he had never been out of the county, let alone the state since he had settled down after the war to a life of absolute predictability; a life to which, his unconscious visions whispered, he may not have been suited. In any case, Lotte wasn’t really listening to him, being distracted by her own nostalgia and regrets; and he, of course, didn’t have a clue as to how to go about traveling around America. “Where do you begin?” he asked aloud of no one in particular. And somewhere in his unconscious ha knew that the fact was, he was perfectly suited to this life. He realized he was, at last, comfortable with his lifelong feeling of uneasiness. Like an old friend, it was, after all, familiar.
And so, one night, not long after he talked to his wife about R. V’s, while they slept separately in their upstairs bedroom, the vine made its skulking way down the chimney, which hadn’t been used in thirty years. It wrapped itself around the banister, inched along the new carpet, coiled itself around the bedpost, and, without disturbing their sleep, made its way into the body of Manny Panbroke.
When Lotte Panbroke awoke to find her husband dead it was with a sense of relief. “Alone…at last,”she cried softly.
Manny Panbroke woke in the morning to find himself bobbing erectly and erotically on a vine in someone’s backyard, oozing a very sickly sweet smell that reminded him of grape soda, and feeling nothing in particular. He never found out what made him feel so messy. And he never figured out what was wrong with his life.
EPILOGUE
Lotte Panbroke’s beauty and physical stamina had endured through forty years of marriage, dozens of lovers, two children, several grandchildren, and the endless tedium of Manny Panbroke and Vine Street. She had what it takes and she knew it.
As soon as it was decent, about five days after her late husband’s enthronement as a flower on a vine, she settled her business and sold the house, glad to see the last of deep set windows, ceramic cats, bungalows, and well-kept lawns, and breaking the news to the pastor with a religious coldness that was the pure flowering of her newborn liberation, and just three weeks after Manny Panbroke’s death, she mounted her new motorcycle and headed down that big highway.
© 2012 Robert Lewis. All Rights Reserved.