A Work in Progress

Glancing up from an inch-thick pile of invoices, Tawana Saunders recognized the middle aged fellow standing in the doorway as a reporter with the Brandenberg Gazette. Back in April, he had written a few paragraphs on the ShopRite Supermarket when they donated food to the local soup kitchen on the south side of town.

“Eudora Grossberg working today?” the reporter asked.

Peering over the reporter’s shoulder at an oblique angle, Tawana could see the beanpole of a girl stuffing butternut squash in a plastic bag. Favoring dark-framed glasses that were forever sliding down on the bridge of her narrow nose, she reminded Tawana of the rubber-necked Olive Oil in the old Popeye cartoons. And then there were the wrinkled cotton blouses haphazardly thrown together with frumpy, mismatched skirts that looked like they were bought, sight unseen, off the bargain rack at a consignment shop. Eudora Grossberg was a grotesque—a physical train wreck of a woman with no polish or pizzazz. “Checkout aisle three. She’s bagging groceries.”

He fished a fountain pen and small pad from a shirt pocket. “Mind if I borrow her for ten minutes?”

The black woman pushed her seat away from the desk. “For what purpose?”

“We received a letter from the senior editor of the Yale Review. They published one of her short stories in their hoity-toity literary quarterly this past February, and now the piece is being anthologized. There may even be a book deal in the works.” The reporter was noticeably pleased at the young grocery clerk’s good fortune. “Our newspaper wants to do an article in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday edition on a local, up and coming fiction writer.”

“Yes, I don’t see why not. Spend as much time as you need.”

The reporter made a motion to leave but turned back. “Do you know how many unsolicited manuscripts the Yale Review receives in the course of a month?” Tawana shook her head. “Hundreds if not thousands. And that includes a smattering of established writers with national name recognition.”

“And they chose our own Eudora.”

“Chose her twice—¬once when they printed the story and a second time when the editorial staff recommended it to the anthology.” When the man left the office, Tawana craned her neck staring up over the flat panel computer screen. The reporter was gibber jabbering away with the lanky girl who never even bothered to pause from sorting the customer’s groceries as she fielded his questions. Eudora positioned a bulky, twenty-five pound bag of Purina dog food on the bottom rack of the metal cart along with a jumbo pack of toddler diapers. Fifteen minutes later Tawana looked up again. The reporter was gone. Eudora had shifted over to aisle five, where an older cashier, who was painfully slow and prone to mood swings, was ringing up an order.

By noon everyone in the store knew about the reporter and Eudora’s short story, but that wasn’t the girl’s doing. Gail Crowley, the bigmouth gossip from customer service, collared the reported as he was leaving and extracted a blow-by-blow description of what was going on. “We got a regular Shakespeare among us!” the tubby blonde crowed. Gail, who probably hadn’t read anything more challenging than the National Inquirer in the last dozen years, waddled off to tell the workers in fresh produce about Eudora’s newfound celebrity status.

Back in her office, Tawana checked her calendar. In the morning, she had to be in district court. A seventeen year-old negro was caught shoplifting the week before Thanksgiving. At his arraignment, he pled ‘no contest’. An incorrigible thug, it was his sixth offense, and Tawana had to appear in court Tuesday morning representing the market as plaintiff. The previous month the perpetrator had been a fourteen year-old Caucasian, a bleary-eyed, latchkey brat from one of the inner city subsidized housing projects. A month earlier, an unwed Latina on AFDC. Driven by poverty, stupidity and enlightened self-interest, they came at you from multiple directions, in all ethnic varieties, sexes, shapes and colors.

In the parking lot, two plain clothes detectives nabbed Reginald Owens as he was unlocking a metallic blue Cavalier sedan. They handcuffed him and threw the back youth in the back of an unmarked police car but not before relieving him of his stash of stolen meats. A small crowd gathered, watching from a discrete distance.

A black kid ripping off fillet mignon in the meat department - what must they be thinking? The fourteen year old boy, who was caught in a similar bind in October, became so unhinged when the police collared him, that he wet his pants. The urine dribbled down the front of his dungarees reaching to the cuff. That was a good thing. At least, at some primitive level, the under-aged crook grasped the severity of his predicament. Reginald Owens was too thick-skinned. When the cops pulled him aside, he affected the hollow-eyed indifference of a hardened felon.

* * * * *

“Congratulations!” As she was leaving work for the day, Tawana bumped into Eudora running down stray grocery carts in the ShopRite parking lot.

“It’s no big deal.” She jabbed at the bridge of her glasses with an index finger, pushing the frame up on her nose, but they immediately careened back down coming to rest at a cockeyed angle.

A grocery cart began rolling away and Tawana positioned it back in the stack. “What’s your short story about?”

“It’s creative fiction,” the girl replied.

“Yes, I understand, but where do you get your ideas?”

Eudora stared at the black woman then waved her bony hands in the air. “That’s a bit hard to explain.” She leaned heavily into the train of stacked shopping carts that ran a good twenty deep and inched the mass forward toward the front of the store.

Tawana felt her face flush hot. Of course Eudora would conveniently sidestep both questions. Properly understood, creative fiction was meant to be read not served up like a platter of exotic pastries at a coffee klatch. “I just read a wonderful book.” For some inexplicable reason, the store manager was tripping over her words. “Maya Angelou’s collected poems.”

By way of response, Eudora snorted making a disagreeable sound. “You don’t like her poetry?”

The unlovely girl studied her bony hands which were chapped and raw from the cold. “Robert Hayden… now there’s a decent poet.”

“Never heard of him,” Tawana replied.

Eudora swallowed and her Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in typical Olive Oil fashion. “Hayden wrote a poem, Those Winter Sundays.” Lowering her eyes, she recited the poem from beginning to end in a lilting singsong cadence. When the poem was done, she raised her head and noted, “A poet could spend a life time laboring at his craft and never create anything quite so perfect.”

A flurry of icy wind caught up a pile of dead leaves and sent them swirling in a brittle, orangey funnel. The poem was devastatingly beautiful. Tawana could feel her heart pounding in her ears. “Yes, that was quite amazing.”

A freckle faced boy and his mother passed by with a load of groceries, mostly junk food -potato chips, frozen pizzas, ice cream, three quarts of cream soda plus a carton of cigarettes. Tawana had a compulsive habit of psychoanalyzing customers by their purchases. "I’ve wanted to write something for quite a while but don’t seem to get anywhere.”

Eudora smiled opaquely. “And what’s the something you want to get down on paper?”

“That’s the problem,” Tawana replied with an embarrassed frown. “Perhaps I should join a local writers’ group.”

“In all likelihood, you’ll end up with some MFA graduate student.” The thin girl pulled her collar up around her throat, but the flimsy coat was of the early fall variety and much too thin for a blustery December. “A snooty misogynist, who filters your prose through his male chauvinist biases.”

Eudora collected the shopping cart that the freckle faced boy had abandoned, adding it to her collection and pushed off toward the front of the building. “Bring me a few pages of your writing and I’ll take a look at it.”

“Yes, I’d appreciate that.” She watched the girl struggling with the absurdly long wagon train and had to stifle an impulse to help Eudora negotiate the carts toward the front of the building. But then, store managers were obligated to maintain a certain professional decorum.

* * * * *

Later that night, Tawana told her husband, Ellis, about the Brandenberg Gazette reporter and her odd encounter with Eudora in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. “If she’s so bright, how come the woman’s bagging groceries?”

Déjà vu. Tawana had asked herself the very same question. By assuming an entry level position and showing no inclination to improve her circumstances at the supermarket, Eudora Grossberg had effectively turned the American dream upside down. The girl was hardworking and honest; she got along well with coworkers and scrupulously avoided the endless, petty gossip and intrigues endemic to such businesses.

A low profile oddball, Eudora never flaunted her eccentricities. She brought her lunch plus a piece of fruit to work in a brown paper bag and drank coffee from a thermos rather than indulge herself with a café mocha cappuccino or any of the Green Mountain deluxe blends they sold by the cup at the deli counter. The girl seemed intent on earning the least amount of money possible while subsisting on a pauper’s salary. Was it a masochistic act of penance? Denial and self-flagellation worked well for medieval nuns and half-naked religious zealots contemplating their navels in Himalayan caves, but at the ShopRite Supermarket such austerity was neither fashionable nor chic.

Tawana knew friends from college who were active in social causes. The class valedictorian ran off and joined the Peace Corps where he served in Kenya for a year and a half doing God-knows-what. Then he returned from the Dark Continent, enrolled in law school and later earned a fortune as a six-figure ambulance chaser in the medical malpractice racket. The last time they met at an alumnus function there was no more talk about hybrid, high-yield grains or crop irrigation systems in underdeveloped, third world countries. The social activist had morphed into an insatiable braggart with an equally revolting ego to match.

“That lovely poem Dora recited from memory,... there were well over a dozen lines.”
“Impressive!” Her husband chuckled. “So how are you doing with your writing?”

“What writing?” Tawana rolled her eyes. “I've got an outline that’s little more than a mishmash of fragmented ideas - three pages that go absolutely nowhere.” Tawana had gotten the notion into her head that she would write a book. Something with an ethnic flavor—spunky black woman climbs the corporate ladder to claim her niche in the American business community. Horatio Alger with an Afro-American, chick-lit twist.

Think wonders, shit blunders. A great idea in principle, her manuscript never emerged from the embryonic drawing board. For all her determination, Tawana Saunders couldn’t finesse the project off the ground. Chalk it up to writer’s block, brain freeze, anticipatory fright—she began the literary undertaking eight months earlier and had absolutely nothing to show for it except a new computer with all the fancy bells and whistles.

In the den she sat down at the computer and Googled Robert Hayden. Yes, there it was—the sublimely precious pearl-of-a-poem Eudora shared with her in the frigid parking lot.

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on
in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze.
No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold, splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Tawana read the poem through a second time and then a third. Yes, it was a masterpiece—a cri de coeur as poignant and resonant as any full-length novel. A simple and unadorned poem written by an unassuming black man over half a century ago! No flowery rhetoric or purple prose, just a sixteen line barrage of innate wisdom.

“That lovely poem Eudora Grossberg recited… I just found it on the internet.” Tawana was lying in bed next to her husband. “The imagery was so beautiful it took my breath away.”

“That’s nice.” Ellis had been fading off to sleep.

“Here’s the crazy thing,” Tawana drew the conversation back to her original remarks. “A casual reader would never imagine that an Afro-American had written the poem.”

“Your point?”

“Robert Hayden came from the ghetto. His parents fought constantly throughout his childhood.”

“How do you know all this?”

“After finding the poem, I researched his bio on the internet.”

Throughout childhood, the poet's home was filled with the ‘chronic angers’ and violence he hinted at in his poems. Nearsighted and short of stature, Hayden was ostracized by his peers at school and suffered debilitating bouts of depression.

“From such a life he fashioned exquisite poetry.” In the street a dog barked setting off a cacophony of yips and yaps as far as several streets away. There were other thoughts that Tawana Saunders meant to share with her husband, but a snuffling sound followed by the man’s steady breathing indicated Ellis had drifted off to sleep.

What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

What did it take to write a sentence half that beautiful?

Perhaps she would consult Eudora Grossberg, who dressed like a bag lady and chased down runaway shopping carts in the ShopRite Supermarket parking lot. Yes, she must make a mental note to do just that. No, better to get up out of bed right this very minute and scribble a brief reminder - something, anything to jog her memory so that in the morning when she was rushing about getting her daughter’s breakfast together, feeding the dog, washing the early morning dishes …

Before she could put a period to the sentence, Tawana Saunders had slid off the shelf of consciousness and joined her husband in sleep.

* * * * *

In the morning, Tawana reviewed work schedules for the coming week. Myra Dobbins from the dairy department was going out on maternity leave, and one of the meat cutters slashed a finger to the bone the previous Wednesday trimming a pot roast. When Eudora Grossberg took coffee break at ten forty-five, the store manager slipped the girl a small manila folder. “Some recent writing. Mostly character sketches and dialogue.”

Eudora took the folder and laid it on the table next to her food. “Give me a day or two.”
“One question.” The store manager smoothed the front of her dress with the flat of her hands. “You are obviously an intelligent woman. There are conservatively a dozen positions here at the market you’d qualify for, if you wanted to earn a bit more money.”

“And if I didn’t know any better,” Eudora replied unscrewing the cap on her thermos, “I might imagine you playing Henry Higgins to my Liza Doolittle.” There was no trace of resentment in her tone. The My Fair Lady quip was self-mocking.

Tawana chuckled and shook her head. “Touché. I was totally out of place.”

“No offense taken.”

Tawana sat down on the chair next to her. “I hunted down the Hayden poem on the internet.”

Eudora crooked her head to one side and winked at the store manager, a conspiratorial gesture. “Doesn’t get much better than that.”

“No it doesn’t, does it?”

* * * * *

Where’s Eudora?” Tawana asked early Monday morning.

“Called out sick,” Gail said. “She’s got that twenty-four hour bug that’s going around. Poor kid! Couldn’t stop coughing in the message she left on the answering machine.” She leaned over the counter. “Did you read that article about her in the Sunday paper?”

“Yes, it was quite something,” Tawana replied. A New York literary agent had noticed Eudora Grossberg’s story when it first appeared in the Yale Review and, on the merits of the single work, offered her a book deal. A collection of short stories and poetry was scheduled for release in the spring. “Where does Eudora live?”

“Buckley Place.” Lois replied.

Tawana drummed her fingers on the Formica counter. “That old mill complex that was renovated into apartments?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Over by the railroad tracks, Buckley Place was a grimy, low-rent residence, mostly tiny efficiency apartments. Tawana went back to her office, closed the door and called Eudora at the number listed in her personnel file. An answering machine picked up. She replaced the receiver on the phone without leaving a message. Around four in the afternoon, she made her way to the deli counter. “What are the soups?”

“Beef barley and chicken escarole,” the man behind the counter replied.

“Give me a quart of each.”

Tawana left work early and drove across town to Buckley Place and parked her Toyota Celica in a lot marked ‘visitor parking’. The building, which had been given a cosmetic face lift only a few years earlier, already exuded a down-at-the-heels shabbiness. The lobby was dimly lit making it next to impossible to read the tenant directory.

“Got a cigarette?” Like an apparition from the nether world, a disheveled, middle-aged man with a lumpy, disfigured nose lurched out from an open doorway. He smelled of rancid body odor and his shirt pocket was torn away in a useless flap.

What was I thinking, coming here alone without mentioning it to anyone? “Don’t smoke.” Tawana edged away and, while still eyeing the man, groped for the doorknob leading back out into the street.

“Who’re you looking for?” The fellow’s eyes, bulgy and jaundiced, never strayed from her face.

Tawana took a tentative step backwards but the queer fellow immediately closed the gap and was hovering so close she could feel his sour breath on her cheek. “Eudora Grossberg,” she mumbled still fumbling for the illusive doorknob. “I brought her some soup.”

The man swayed back and forth as though in a drug-induced stupor. “Dora? She’s up in 3B.” Turning away, he hurried to the far end of the foyer and jabbed the elevator button several times. “Dora’s sick bad. Threw up twice last night. Can’t keep nothin’ down.”

When the elevator door opened, the strange fellow stumbled in and held the door open for her. “Say, you wouldn’t have a cigarette to spare? I’m just about crapping my pants for a butt.”

Tawana was feeling light headed. “You already asked me a moment ago, and I told you I don’t smoke.”

Looking muddled, the man scratched an earlobe. “Funny, I don’t remember.”

The carpet on the third floor landing was torn and one of the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling flickered erratically. He shambled down the unheated hallway a short distance and knocked at a door.

“Who’s there?”

“Just me,” the fellow replied, “and some fancy-shmancy lady. She didn’t offer no name and I didn’t ask.”

The door opened. Dressed in flannel pajamas and bedroom slippers, Eudora Grossberg squinted myopically out at them. “I heard you were sick so brought fresh soup from the market.”

If Eudora was shocked to see the store manager standing in the dank hallway, she didn’t show it. “How sweet! Sure, come in.” She held the door wide, and the odd fellow trailed Tawana into the efficiency apartment, flopping down on a chair near the window. “I see you’ve met Dennis.”

The man with the shapeless nose grinned sheepishly, pushing his bottom lip out in a perverse caricature of a smile. "So how you doing?”

“Hungry as hell.” Eudora removed a couple of spoons and bowls from a cupboard, poured a generous portion of chicken escarole into each, handing one to Dennis. They ate in total silence. When the soup was gone, Eudora had a mild coughing fit then turned to the man with the unflattering nose. “You didn’t jump out in the hallway and scare Mrs. Saunders, did you, Dennis?”

“Oh no,” he blustered. “Didn’t do no such thing!”

“Actually, he was quite polite,” Tawana protested. “Even told me what apartment you lived in and escorted me up here like a perfect gentleman.” Dennis sat up straighter in his chair and puffed out his lower lip, which was still moist from the soup. Then he rose and, without saying goodbye, wandered out of the apartment leaving the door wide open.

Eudora shut the door. “Dennis, he’s a little …”

“Yes, I can see that,” Tawana said.

“I had a chance to read through your material.” She lifted the manila folder off a shelf and handed it back to the black woman. “From a technical standpoint, the writing is solid, but the author is among the missing.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“About the Robert Hayden poem,” Tawana continued. “It took my breath away.”

Eudora put the soup in the refrigerator and rinsed out the bowls. “That visceral quality ... it’s what’s missing in your writing.”

“What do you suggest?”

Eudora sat down on the edge of the bed. “Don’t play it safe. Write from your private anguish… confusion and darkest fears.”

“Like Hayden does.”

“It’s a good place to start,” Eudora confirmed.”

The apartment was tiny. The bedroom and kitchen merged into one living space with a closet and claustrophobic bathroom near the rear wall. By the window a computer rested on a table. It was a Windows 98 model, a prehistoric relic that backed up off old-fashioned plastic diskettes and couldn’t support any of the sophisticated thirty-two bit software programs that had emerged in recent years. The supermarket had shifted over to the Microsoft XP software in two thousand six and junked all the outmoded machines. Next month they would switch again to the Vista operating system - more elaborate gadgetry, bells and whistles.

“We’re all works in progress.” Eudora Grossberg was sitting up on the center of the bed now in a modified lotus position. There was something transcendently beautiful about the awkward, introverted woman.

Works in progress. Sadly, not all mortal creatures turn out all that well. A fleeting image of a defiant Reginald Owens flitted across her mind. A minute passed. Dennis returned with a fresh cigarette. He sat down at the kitchen table and smoked voraciously, discarding the burnt ash into an empty coffee cup. “This cigarette’s got menthol,” Dennis noted. “I don’t like menthol. It tickles my tongue.”

“I want to apologize again for my faux pas—the My Fair Lady gaff. Who the hell am I, an upwardly mobile black woman, telling you or anyone else for that matter what the hell to do with their life?”

Eudora exploded in a spastic coughing fit. When it was done and her breathing back under control, she blew her nose and lay prone, staring up at the ceiling. “Myra Dobbins is in her eighth month and fat as a whale,” Eudora spoke in a hoarse, nasally tone. “I’d like a crack at her job unless it’s already promised to someone else.”

Dennis took a final drag on the stumpy, mentholated cigarette. He tossed what little was left of the butt into the cup, rose and went off to panhandle another smoke.

“The job is yours.” Tawana also got up to leave. “I’ll post the position as tentatively filled first thing in the morning.” She placed a hand on the sick woman’s shoulder. “You don’t look so hot, Dora. Take the rest of the week off.”

Later at home, Tawana sat in front of her fancy new computer staring at an empty white canvas. What was it Eudora Grossberg suggested? Don’t play it safe. Write from your private anguish… confusion and darkest fears.

An hour later Tawana's daughter wandered into the room. “What are you doing?”
“Writing the great American novel.”

The girl pointed dismissively at the screen. “All you got is three lousy paragraphs.”

Tawana leaned over and brushed the girl’s ebony cheek with her lips. “Consider it a work in progress.”