An Indecent Proposal Part II

Part II

"Our mother is no better than a two-bit, Time Square whore," Alexis Steinberg observed. At four in the afternoon, Alexis and her younger sister were sandwiched between the lunch crowd and dinner reservations at the Olive Garden. Reaching for a breadstick, twenty year-old Mandy had nothing to say. Alexis had insisted on the meeting. A third sister, who was married and eight months pregnant, was unable to attend.

The waitress arrived and took their orders. "Father's been dead less than a month," she resumed her diatribe, "and mother moves in with a man she had a romantic fling with back in her college days… some gold-digging Casanova she hasn’t heard from in a quarter century!"

Mandy reached for her Italian soda. She nibbled the cherry away to nothing then pushed the straw to the bottom where all the sweetness had settled. When dealing with her older sister, she always required something to blunt the bitter aftertaste. "Mother has no money. She's virtually destitute," Mandy corrected. "Ralph owns a chain of durable medical supply outlets. He's the one with deep pockets."

"Not even a month," Alexis repeated, "and the woman is shtuping her middle-age brains out with some geriatric lothario."

Mandy took another hit on the sweet crimson juice clotted at the bottom of the drink. She chose raspberry, which had a slightly sharper fruitiness than cherry. "Mother looks better than I've seen her in years."

Alexis helped herself to the tossed salad, laying the onions off to one side. "Yeah, she's blissed-out alright… senile is what she is."

Mandy had no desire to argue the point. Where Alexis was concerned, she could hold her ground, just barely and little more. She stabbed at a tomato, raising it to her lips. "He had a girlfriend, you know?"

"Who did?"

"Dad. Some ditzy twenty-something from the clerical pool."

"How come nobody ever told me?"

"Because they knew you'd go psychotic. More to the point, mom never returned the favor. She may be cohabitating with Mr. Tucker now, but there was no hanky-panky during the marriage."

Alexis screwed her face up in a frightful expression. "How would you know?"

"I asked her."

Alexis threw her hands up in an attitude of disbelief. "You can't be serious?"

"She got all that 'seven-year-itch' nonsense out of her system in college."

"How many lovers were there?"

"She was a bit noncommittal," Mandy parried the question, "but quite a few."

"Jesus Christ!" Alexis, who had raised a meatball to her lips, lowered the fork without tasting the food. "Did the list include Mr. Tucker?"

"Yes, I think so." They turned their attention back to the salad. Ten minutes later, the waitress returned with their meals. Mandy pawed at her Zuppa Toscana with the blade of the spoon. The pungent bouquet of sausage, garlic and oregano sent up a soothing aroma. Ralph Tucker owned a palatial mansion. Mandy drove by the place over the weekend. The home was in a swanky part of Brandenberg just over the Attleboro town line. A developer constructed three, split-level capes on a generous portion of land, leaving most of the old-growth timber intact. Mr. Tucker's home sloped down to wetlands in the rear of the property with a marshy pond that dried up through the late summer months. “So what are you suggesting?" Mandy asked.

"Meet with the bastard who is ruining our good name and find out what his modus operandi is."

Mandy wanted to remind Alexis that they currently had no good name. Embezzling fifty thousand dollars from the brokerage firm, their beloved father had irrevocably trashed their family's reputation. The best they could hope for was that other more sensational crimes - molestations committed by Catholic clergy, Middle Eastern insurrections, far-flung genocides and ethnic cleansings - would cause people to have a short memory regarding the 'Steinberg Caper'. "Why can't you go?"

Alexis slumped back, her features enveloped in a perpetual scowl. "Because I'm liable to lose my temper and say something we will both regret."

They ate in silence, ordering coffee when the meal was done but no desert. "She attended Dad's funeral."

"Who did?"

"The other woman," Mandy replied in her soft-spoken manner.

The waitress arrived with the bill. Alexis, who had an astigmatism, held the receipt at arm's length. "Which one was she?"

"The shrimpy brunette with the wire-rimmed, granny glasses."

A guttural sound welled up in her throat. "How tacky! The way she carried on at the wake, you might have thought she was the bereaved."

"In a perverse sort of way, she was." Mandy pushed her empty plate aside."I read this lovely short story, A White Heron, by Sarah Orne Jewett."

"What's this got to do with anything?"

"I don't know…" Her mind was suddenly becoming fragmented, drifting off topic. "I found it in an anthology of nineteenth century New England writers." Her sister eyed her uncertainly. "It was just a silly sketch - no more than a handful of pages about a little girl, who goes to live with her grandmother on the coast of Maine. She meets a young ornithologist seeking a rare bird that supposedly has been spotted in the area. The hunter offers a large sum of money to anyone who can lead him to the heron's nest so he can shoot the bird and add it to his collection,"

"This isn't the Book-of-the Month club."

"The girl, “Mandy ignored the sarcasm, “climbs the tallest tree in the forest so she can view the entire countryside and finds the heron just where she was sure it would be but refuses to share the information with the hunter and he goes away empty-handed."

"A beautiful story, to be sure,” Alexis replied gruffly, “but what's the point?"

"The bird symbolizes something pure and unsullied." Mandy remained unruffled. "Mom and Mr. Tucker hadn't seen each other in twenty years. He took her back, penniless and brought her into his swanky home no questions asked. That's got to count for something." "Maybe Mom is Ralph Tucker's white heron."

"Aw, Christ!" Alexis buried her face in her hands. "I should have known better than to take you into my confidence."

* * * * *

Later that afternoon, Mandy went to work at Panera where she served up sandwiches, bussed tables and managed the take-out register. She landed the job during her third year at Rhode Island College where she was majoring in nothing in particular with a minor in English literature. Nothing appealed to her. She wasn't lazy and, with a three-point-five grade average, certainly not stupid. With no set goals or professional aspirations, the girl was drifting, drifting, drifting... She was just floating in some weird gestational mindset that wouldn't allow her to get on with life.

"The roast beef with asiago cheese on sourdough," Mandy repeated the order back and waited for the customer's confirmation. Did you want potato chips, macaroni salad or an apple as your side?" At Panera there was no need to commit to any radical belief system, theology, politics or existential weltanschauung.

"And to drink?"

The woman was elderly with a dowager's hump and three-pronged came. Her hands trembled badly, the fingers swollen and disfigured from chronic arthritis as she passed the money across the counter. A younger woman, presumably her daughter, helped her to an empty seat and went off to collect the food.

From the second year of middle school, Mandy watched her parents' idyllic dreams come unglued - first her father's then her mother's. Check! Checkmate! In the end, everything ultimately turned to shit. Some weeks she spent the better part of her workdays scrubbing salad dressing and feta cheese off tables, collecting dirty dishes and cutlery. She didn't care as long as nobody in management approached and demanded, ‘Now you must believe in the efficacy of corporate greed, shareholder's dividends, the sanctity of marriage and the two-party political system.’ When it came to that she would dig ditches for a living or draw a disability check.

On Tuesday, Mandy drove across town to Superior Medical Supply, Inc. An array of aluminum walkers were arranged in rows along the far wall along with portable oxygen canisters and infusion supplies. Cartons of latex-free medical gloves were stacked halfway to the ceiling. A young salesman was demonstrating a motorized wheelchair to an elderly couple. Over by the cash register, an older man was assembling a metal device with chains and a leather seat. He cranked a small lever and the leather seat rose several inches in the air. The harness was out of kilter, listing badly to one side. He raised the chain on the right by several links. "I'm looking for Ralph Tucker?"

"That would be me." Mr. Tucker stood an inch or two under six feet with gray hair and a soft, flaccid body.
"I'm Mandy Steinberg."

"Becky's youngest daughter.” Creased with wrinkles, his lumpy face melted in a congenial smile. "Becky warned me that, if your sister showed up first, to bolt the door and hide in the basement."

“The Grand Inquisitor," Mandy confirmed.

He turned his attention back to the bulky device. “Ever seen one of these?" The girl shook her head. "It's called a Hoyer lift. Handicapped patients too immobile to be lifted otherwise can be transferred easily from one place to another.” As he explained it, the original design was based on a similar device used in automotive repair shops where floor cranes were used to lift heavy engines. "Imagine yourself fifty, sixty years in the future. Somebody in a hospital with only minimal training is jacking you up in a hydraulic lift. Maybe the technician is a green card alien who only speaks broken English. He borrowed a seat from a different unit that doesn't quite fit properly or the hoist chains aren't rigged up according to the manufacturer's specifications. Most companies insist that two workers be present when transferring, but that isn’t always practical.”

Mandy remembered the frail woman with the dowager’s hump from Panera. The old bird could hardly stand up straight, and her feet scuffed the floor as she shambled away from the counter. Howwould the woman manage with a Hoyer lift? And what if she was senile? One minute she remembers to hold onto the support chains, and the next she becomes muddled and inadvertently releases her grip. “Look here.” Ralph maneuvered the lift a few feet forward before returning it to the original position; the cushioned pad swung erratically back and forth like the bucket on a Ferris wheel brought up short at the top of the ride. "The ugly contraptions... they're a big moneymaker, but I'm thinking of discontinuing them."

* * * * *

Mrs. Steinberg called later that night after Mandy returned from work. "Ralph says you stopped by the store today."

"He seems like a decent sort."

"If he can put up with me, he's better than that."

"He treats you good?"

"Like royalty… always did." "Say listen," her mother rushed ahead, "why don't you come for supper tomorrow night?"

"Yes, I’d like that." Mandy didn’t have to consider her response. “Don't bother to bake anything. I’ll bring dessert.”