Rita didn't dislike her job at Woolworth's the way Eddie disliked his. In fact, she didn't mind it at all. Especially Saturdays. She came in at eleven and stayed till closing at seven-thirty. The lunch counter remained busy through about two o'clock and there was a fair amount of dinner trade. Now one might wonder why anyone would want to eat dinner at F.W.Woolworth, especially on a Saturday night. But it was Shelter Island, a little island with very few eating establishments of the low priced variety. As a summer haven for tourists there were several fine restaurants, restaurants with the word "cuisine" under the name, like "Alberto's, Fine Italian Cuisine" or "Kleinschmidt's, Fine German Cuisine." But there were no restaurants called Stanley's Fine Inexpensive Cuisine and no (heaven and zoning laws forbid) fast food joints. An ice-cream parlor, a tiny luncheonette, F.W.Woolworth and two ferries, north and south, ready to take you to every imaginable type and price range of food. But the ferry cost one dollar each way; no resident discounts, so "Woolworth's Fine Cuisine" did a bang up lunch and a good Saturday night business.
When Rita got to her station (Mr. Stoneman insisted every employee called where he or she worked their station), Margaret Brodsky was well into setting up lunch. When six o'clock rolled around Rita was left alone to make those delicious tuna melts, egg salad sandwiches and franks and beans masterpieces. She loved that last ninety minutes, gaining more than a measure of satisfaction from feeding those mostly senior citizen mouths.
Rita quickly noticed something different, unusual about Mrs. Brodsky (Margaret had tried for sometime to get Rita to call her by her first name; no go, Rita felt "weird"), but couldn't quite pinpoint it.
"Hi, Mrs. Brodsky, should I do the coffee?
"Just did it, dear. Why don't you just sit down a moment and have a cup. You've got a long day in front of you."
Rita did a double take, catching herself before she made one of those eye narrowing, nose-curling faces that projected, "Are you kidding me?" Look, Mrs. Brodsky was a very nice lady, pleasant and good to work with, but her work was her work and your work was your work and that was it. What's this 'take a coffee break' stuff when I haven't even started work, Rita wondered. She went over to the freshly made pot, poured a cup and sat down at the end of the counter. She watched Margaret Brodsky work at a pace noticeably faster than usual, smiling at anyone and everyone she spotted and decided something great must have happened to her very recently. A moment later Mr. Stoneman walked by and stopped at the other end of the counter where Margaret was making the very fabulous tuna fish salad. They stood together for only a minute but that's all it took for Rita to solve the puzzle. First of all, Mr. Stoneman stood bent over with two hands leaning on the counter. She had never seen him any way other than standing straight up or sitting down. Secondly, they both laughed that little giggly laugh that Rita had only seen adults make. And, lastly, when he turned to walk away she heard the word Harold as Mrs. Brodsky touched his arm. Rita had never heard anyone call Mr. Stoneman Harold and never ever had she seen anyone touch him. He'd never gotten close enough for anyone to be able to touch him. Rita looked down into her coffee with a grin so wide it met in the back of her head.
The rest of the day at the store was uneventful for Rita (and Margaret and Harold for that matter) until a few minutes before six o'clock when Margaret began getting ready to leave. Rita had tried to come up with an unobtrusive way to ask Margaret what the deal was with her and Mr. Stoneman. She hadn't done very well with it and finally settled on, "Mrs. Brodsky, what's with you and Mr. Stoneman?"
Now, if Rita had known Margaret Brodsky better, known her at all, she wouldn't have hesitated to ask her anything. And Mrs. Brodsky's answer made Rita begin to understand that.
"Oh, well, we got to talkin' last night and one thing led to another and we went out for a drink. I actually had to talk him into going back to my place, but he never made a move on me. I'm old fashioned you know, honey. (She actually believed that) I'd rather let the man be the aggressive one, but I won't wait much longer. I'm going to see him tonight and I'll let you know what happens Tuesday."
Rita attempted to mask her shock and must have done well as their only additional conversation was Margaret saying good night. Rita was still too stunned to say anything, but did manage a smile and a nod of her head.
"Jeez," Rita thought to herself as Margaret walked away. To Rita, her co-worker was just an old widow who took good care of herself. She knew she went out a lot, especially on Saturday nights, but she never dreamed Mrs. Brodsky was "like that." "Jeez," Rita said to herself three more times in the next four minutes.
Rita finished the rest of her shift and at seven-twenty, with only a couple of people left at the counter and empty booths, she put the little "Closed" sign on the counter top. She already was just about through cleaning up and closing down and by seven-thirty was ready to lock up. She said good night to Carlos the janitor and the two remaining female aisle clerks and waited for Eddie. She had at first thought it strange that Mr. Stoneman would give her the responsibility of closing the store on the nights she worked, but stopped wondering when he raised her hourly wages twenty-five cents. The truth of it was that he had asked every other employee (except Carlos) with no takers. His staff was comprised solely of middle aged women who wanted no part of keys and locks and accountability. Rita was his last resort but it worked out just fine for Mr. Stoneman, Rita and especially Eddie Brown.
After noticing each other at a school Valentine's Day dance he left without speaking to her but on the way out was able to get her name from Mike Torre's kid sister. He had wanted to speak to her but when he was through playing, packed and ready to leave, he spotted her talking to a couple of boys. Eddie's basic shyness ruled the moment and he settled for her name and the fact that she worked most nights at the Woolworth. His information didn't include the fact that she was off on Mondays, so his second attempt to meet her after their Saturday night eye contact was the next Tuesday, February 19th. Rita would always consider that their real anniversary, a fact and a date Eddie would forever be clueless of.
He came around seven that night, sat down at a booth and waited for Rita to come over. She hadn't seen him come in, approached his booth from the back and got as far as, "What can I get for..." before she recognized him. She lost her breath for more than a few seconds as Eddie grinned and asked her if she remembered him, the drummer at the Saturday night dance.
Remember you, she thought, I dreamed of you last night and spent my whole lunch period today finding out as much about you as I could. What she had unearthed was little more than his name, that he had quit high school at sixteen and that he had worked at the I.G.A. She had gone there to check him out on Monday, but when she came into the store, he was in the back room.
"Yes, I do, Hi."
"Hi," he returned. Eddie's shyness again took over and all that was left of the moment was Rita asking what she could get for him. Now, to Eddie's everlasting credit, he made, for him and his circumstance, a brilliant move, one that would afford him the maximum opportunity to figure out what to do next in his quest. He ordered the biggest meal on the menu, the infamous franks n' beans combo. "And French fries," he added to play it even safer.
"Anything to drink?" she asked.
"A coke, please," he responded feeling very in control. She left and Eddie was alone to plan his next move. He found himself breathing kind of heavy but still able to put thoughts together. He decided he would wait for a lull in her work (there were a couple of men at the counter, but just him in a booth) and ask her to sit down and share a coke or coffee or something. In a moment he smelled the beans cooking and franks frying and realized there was a major flaw in his plan. He had just had dinner at home. A big dinner. It was one of those rare nights when everyone was home at suppertime and his mom had made fried chicken. He was stuffed. "Shit," he thought. He remembered when, as a little boy, he used to feed many of his meals to his dog under the table. He looked around for any stray animals wandering the store. He decided to ask for extra napkins to fill with whatever food he couldn't shove down his throat and into his now queasy stomach.
By the time Rita brought him his unwanted meal both counter singles had gotten their checks. She placed the food in front of him and sat down facing him in the booth.
"My name's Rita," she said. "What's yours?"
Eddie grinned. "Eddie Brown. How you doin'?"
Rita grinned back, sensed correctly that she would forever generate whatever conversations she would have with this skinny but cute guy and proceeded to give Eddie a sanitized version of her life story with enough questions about him to keep him involved. Eddie's memory of that night was only how good he felt when she sat down with him and how lousy his stomach felt when he got home. With Rita watching he had to eat the whole damn meal, and while he certainly never regretted the evening, he vowed to begin planning out the big moments in life before they began. Of course, it would be many years before his vow was to approach reality.
Margaret, as candid a person as she was, still held back a bit with Rita. Fact of the matter was that she was more excited about seeing Harold Stoneman again that night than she could remember being in years. After their quiet drink at a little Greenport bar following a one-sided conversation during the ferry ride, Margaret had struggled to get Harold to come back to her home. He finally agreed "for just a moment" and he just about kept to that schedule. He was obviously nervous, never touched the coffee she poured for him and was gone in less than ten minutes. But in that brief time, Margaret felt she saw something in Stoneman, something that had reminded her of Charlie. Had she misconstrued Harold's quietness for Charlie's patience? Had she had a gem right under her nose for years or was he the dud most people in her place considered him? It wasn't completely clear to Margaret as to why, but she had a feeling something grand was happening.
Harold had agreed to have dinner with Margaret at her home more as a way to get away than as something he really wanted to do. When he got home after their little date, his undershirt was soaked and he felt as if he had walked ten miles with a great weight on his back. The weight stayed with him when he attempted to fall asleep, acting as a distraction from sleeping, forcing him up and in front of the TV. As he attempted to watch an old movie, he tried out several different ways to get out of the dinner at Margaret's. Once he settled on a plan (he'd act anxious to go early in their working day but develop a stomach disorder in the afternoon and beg off), he was able to get to sleep. But something akin to a miracle, at least when you consider it was Harold Stoneman, happened. He awoke with an entirely different attitude about his promise to Margaret.
"Look," he sternly told himself out loud, "it's just a dinner. She's a nice lady, I'm a lonely man who could use a friend and why can't that friend be a woman?" What Harold had failed to take into consideration, of course, was Margaret's agenda. A very major blunder as things would turn out.
Harold found Margaret's little bites of conversation and smiles a pleasant distraction to his workday. Since the official closing notification, he often had the "what's the point" feeling, something he struggled with constantly. But today there was no struggling. Sometime after lunch he had begun to allow himself to think of his upcoming date with Margaret as just that. And it felt good. It was as if a new Harold was emerging; calmer and somewhat more confident. Since he had awakened that morning with a new take on this budding relationship, that it could be the start of a true friendship as opposed to a "man woman thing," (Harold didn't use or even think in words like relationship or romance) he found he was becoming ambivalent. He found himself imagining he and Margaret walking hand in hand, even arm in arm. He hadn't touched a woman beyond a handshake in dozens of years, nor had he missed it. But here he was thinking, for Harold, the unthinkable, but only because most of him continued to say, "just a friendship, it's just a friendship." He was clearly aware of the contradiction in his head but somehow felt okay with it.
Margaret's cooking hadn't improved in the years she'd been alone. She wasn't a good cook when she married Charlie and never really became one. Since Charlie's death, she ate most of her meals at the Five and Dime, with the men she dated or, on occasion, at Carol's home. So, tonight she was going to be the chef she never was. Shrimp over rice, fresh asparagus, and oven baked (packaged) dinner rolls with fresh from the bakery apple pie. Not a meal one would be likely to see on a TV cooking show, but for Margaret, a major undertaking. She felt good as she put the meal together and wondered why she had so disliked cooking for Charlie. She couldn't come up with an answer and let it go.
Dinner was scheduled for seven-thirty and Harold, very over dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, pulled up in front of Margaret's home at exactly seven-twenty-nine. Conscious not to be even a minute early, he slowly got out of his car, closed the door and bent down to retie his perfectly tied shoelaces. Until that moment he was still feeling calm, again having mixed feelings about where this was all going, but still all right. As he straightened up he saw Margaret coming through the front doorway of her house and beginning to walk toward him. His heart began to race, pound would be more accurate, his hands began to sweat and he felt streams of perspiration down both sides of his body. Rivers actually. "Run away, get out of here" was the message Harold's nervous system was screaming. Instead, he froze. Margaret walked right up to him, greeted him warmly and took his waterlogged right hand in her left.
"Harold," she smiled, "you're right on time. I've got a nice bottle of red wine (Oh, my God, Harold thought at the sound of the word "wine." I should have brought wine. I should have brought something). "Come on in and open it up for me."
Harold's lips moved but nothing discernible came out as they walked to her door. His mind flashed to a Jimmy Cagney movie he'd seen. Cagney was walking with a guard and a chaplain to an electric chair. Margaret led him inside and practically deposited him on her sofa.
"Why don't you take your coat off," Margaret said over her shoulder as she walked to get the wine. In the few seconds since she asked him to open the wine she changed her mind. She was trying to play down the fact that her date was a basket case. She decided she'd open the wine, pour it and go about putting him at ease.
"Take deep breaths," Harold remembered his father telling him when he'd get what were identified as anxiety attacks. They came often as a child, less often as a teenager and not in many years. In fact, not since the time in 1969 that the eastern region vice president of F.W.Woolworth visited (inspected) his Shelter Island store. As long as Harold was in control of his situation he was fine. And Harold had spent the last thirty-odd years making sure he was in charge. Girls, and then women, had also caused him to be extremely uncomfortable but that was an easy problem to avoid and he did. No dates since that disastrous Sadie Hawkins dance in the ninth grade. None, zero. He didn't count the five minutes he spent with the hooker he found himself with one night while going through Army basic training at Fort Dix. He was the third of a group of three and found the situation frightening and revolting.
"I'll give you five dollars if you let me just sit with you for a while. Then I'll tell my friends we did it and you won't say anything. Ok?"
He remembered that night vividly now and took several more deep breaths.
"Here you are," Margaret said as she handed him his wine and sat down next to him on the couch. "Dinner is just about ready. How about a toast before we go in and sit down."
For a second, Harold thought she meant for him to come up with something. He took one more deep breath and tried to put a thought together.
"To the start of a real friendship," Margaret toasted.
Harold's heartbeat slowed, the room turned from gray to Technicolor and a smile crossed his face. Not only did he not have to say the toast Margaret had said the magic word, friendship.
The dinner went well. Margaret was Margaret, dominating the conversation but still forcing her dinner companion to stay involved. He heard a far more detailed version of her life story, and actually did a thorough job of telling her of his two years at an Army base in Alaska.
"It was very cold there you know, very cold. Very quiet though, I was able to do a lot of thinking. Decided the Army wasn't for me." Margaret couldn't help but notice how Harold never mentioned any relationships with the other soldiers. She decided it must have an extraordinarily lonely time for him. That life was a lonely place for Harold Stoneman she thought. After dessert and coffee on Margaret's back porch the combination of the digestion process and all the adrenaline his body had pumped a couple of hours before made Harold both tired and serene. He glanced at his watch, saw it was nearly nine-thirty and began to plan his exit. As Margaret spoke of her love of dancing (he'd missed her question about whether he liked to dance; she just paused a second and went on), he came to the conclusion that setting up another "friendly get-together" (it would take him some time to get back to using the term date) would be the smoothest way out. He finished formulating his thought and blurted it out as Margaret was in mid-sentence.
"How about us going to a movie next weekend?" he interrupted.
Margaret was somewhat used to being interrupted. She went on and on and knew it. But his words startled her and for more than a moment she remained quiet. In those seconds she reminded herself never to be surprised at men, especially the outwardly shy ones. See, she told herself, you were worried he wouldn't ask you out and you'd have to ask him again. She tilted her head to the side, took a deep breath and gently smiled. To Harold, in that moment she looked prettier then at any other time in what was to be the very brief affair of Margaret Brodsky and Harold Stoneman.
"I'd love to," she said.
"Great," Harold responded, "we'll work out the logistics (an old Army word Harold hadn't used in years) during the week. Listen, I'm really tired. I'm gonna get going."
"No, no, let's just go inside for one glass of wine for the road. And will you take that jacket off and loosen your tie," she commanded.
Well, Harold reasoned, the living room is closer to the front door and once I finish the wine I'll be leaving on her terms so she won't try to make me stay any longer.
"Okay," he said, loosening his tie but leaving his jacket on. He sat down and in a flash she was next to him, hip to hip. She handed him his glass, touched her glass to his and toasted again.
"To us," she said. A shorter and more pointed toast than her earlier version and one which caused sweat on Harold's hands so fast he nearly dropped his glass.
Margaret carefully placed her wine on the coffee table directly in front of them and turned back to Harold.
"You're the sweetest man I've met in years, Harold. Maybe the best guy since Charlie." She paused, waiting for his reaction.
"Thank you, Margaret. The dinner was great and I enjoyed being with you."
Harold's words pleased Margaret and somewhat surprised Harold. Placing her arm on the back of the sofa, she bent toward Harold and gently kissed him on the mouth. She backed away and again paused.
"Thanks for a splendid evening, Margaret." Harold rose. "I'll see you Monday."
She walked him to the door and was working out a way to kiss him again as he opened the door quickly and left.
"Thanks for coming, Harold," she called after him.
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Material Copyright © 1998-2003 by Jim Bearden