The
Spiders and the Frogs
By George
K. George
It was shopping day, the best day of all. It was the day after the cleaning, when Barbara Tener’s home sparkled one half notch tidier than the day before. This weekly improvement was noticeable to her eye and necessary to the hygienic smooth running of her studio apartment.
Two steps to pass the kitchen, filling with steam from the
adjacent bathroom; Barbara stooped to select a recently machine-softened towel
from the middle section of the display shelves dividing the utility area from
the living space. Before Barbara could decide which towel was whitest, she felt
eight eyes upon her. A spiny black spider, a thumb in diameter, clung to the
edge of the shelf above the towels. This was where Barbara’s collection of
pewter mythical figurines, consisting of a dragon, a magician, a unicorn, a
princess and two knights, stood molded in battle and majesty. She had kept most
of everything she treasured in high school, which also included a volume of
young adult fantasy novels, residing on the shelf above, and several Biology
lab reports she was proud of, in a small filing cabinet.
She didn’t flinch, but chose the closest towel and wrapped
herself in it. The spider was certainly alive, probably stirred to the surface
from the thorough vacuuming of yesterday. Its third left leg twitched. Barbara
suspected it was making plans to repel down into the linens. With a long, pale
fingernail, she carefully flicked the spider to the recesses of the shelf. It
tumbled to a stop at the foot of the noble knight, its legs curled tightly to
its body. Barbara was sure she had killed it, but wasn’t sure how—she had been
very gentle. Light caught something in the inner peripheral of her vision. Two
strands of web work were tethered to the princess’ scepter.
Slowly at first, the spider extended its legs to look more like
an octopede than a large piece of lint. It tapped its feet like fingers
drumming. There was no ordinance against owning pets in her building, though
this did not stop Barbara from refraining to keep any. She didn’t object to
this spider. She would have to remember to avoid the shelf with the vacuum,
feather duster and disinfectant—and remember to resist rearrangement of the
figurines’ positions.
Two more steps, Barbara removed her towel and lay on the
loveseat. It felt cool against her hydrated skin. A bit of turning to complete
the effect, and she leaned over to the end table to take a cigarette from a
brass dish. She relit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, tasting what she
believed was a better smoking experience. Each night at bedtime, Barbara lit
and took one drag each from five cigarettes. She then arranged them radially on
the brass dish to be finished the next day. She didn’t know the scientific
principle behind the increased satisfaction she gained from this, but she was
sure there was one.
Her skin dried, and she became uncomfortably warm in relation to
minutes previous. It was time to open the drapes, which meant it was time to
get dressed.
She rustled the towel against her still damp hair to soak out
some of the remaining moisture and took two steps over to the closet-archives.
In high school it was long-sleeved monochrome tee shirts and slacks, but
shortly thereafter dark, drab, knee-length dresses were the only things to hang
from her shoulders. She did not own a full-length mirror, not interested in
real-time imagery of the descent of her forty-three year-old features.
Four steps to the mirror above the sink, Barbara opened a
cabinet and removed the cap of a thick, black makeup applicator. She squinted
and covered the entire surface of each eyelid with it, inset and already dark
with age. She replaced the cap and proceeded to douse her neck with an
imposturous scent; for it was shopping day, and she enjoyed making the bag boys
wonder what it would be like.
Five steps to the only window, she stepped up onto a four-legged
stool to reach the crank that controlled the retractability of the drapes. Her
apartment was cramped for square footage, but bragged a ten-foot ceiling
paneled in embossed tin. Barbara had shopped around until she found a place
that wasn’t contemporary. The drapes were worth putting up with for the
aesthetic.
The stool teetered beneath her. The gearbox was in desperate
need of lubrication, which made the task a chore that produced a terrible din.
So many mornings since she took up residence in the apartment
had Barbara fought with the drapes, tiptoe on the stool with both hands wrapped
around the crank. The repetition caused her mind to recede into memory and free
thought. This morning, as Barbara opened the drapes, images flashed in
high-contrast gray-scale of places she had been as a child. It seemed like she
was looking at models held together with clear tape. Cars, buildings, streets
were all so big and small. They were records of when the drapes were opening,
she thought—when the light of discovery was becoming brighter. Such a long time
it takes. Now it’s just a matter of closing them. It goes so much faster, at
night. They almost close themselves.
The crank locked into the position from which it refused to open
the drapes any further, and Barbara reawakened. She climbed down from the stool
and stepped to the refrigerator. With the same dog-eared shopping list from
several weeks past in hand, Barbara compared the levels in her fridge with the
standard weekly needs.
There was a gentle knock at the door. Her stomach jumped.
Packages were picked up in the lobby. She knew what sorts lurked in this city,
and concentrated particularly in her neighborhood. She remembered the shoebox
full of plastic jewelry, marked, “MONEY,” in bold felt-tip block letters,
behind the toilet. The jewelry looked convincing enough to her, and she put her
faith in it as her only defense should a situation arise. But it wasn’t even
afternoon. Barbara gripped the list with both hands and stepped cautiously to
her door.
The first deadbolt clicked open. The second deadbolt clicked
open. The doorknob lock was unlocked. Barbara slid the chain to the left and
swallowed hard.
The visitor was male. He stood close to the door.
“Yes?” Barbara’s voice shook.
“Hello. Barbara?” the voice practically shouted.
“Yes?” she raised her voice a notch.
“It’s Ernie. Ernie Ford.”
Silence. She couldn’t think of where she’d heard the name
before, but it had a distant familiarity.
“We were lab partners in Biology, eleventh grade…” the shouting
grew less intense as Barbara unhooked the chain, stepped back, and swung the
door open.
“I go by Ernest now, Barbara. I assume you’ve made the switch
from Barbie to Barbara. You never did bleach your hair.”
“Yes.” Barbara took a step back, fighting her ventilation, and
let Ernest step into her home. She realized she had wadded the shopping list
into a greasy ball in her fist.
“As long as I’ve stunned your vocabulary down to that one word,
I’ll tell you why I came. I’d like to ask you to marry me, Barbara.”
Ernie had put on several inches to stand six feet, and had
widened only subtly since graduation. There wasn’t much gray in his hair, nor
in the shadow on his face. Ernest rested on one locked leg while Barbara
stared, dumb.
“Well, there goes all of them,” Ernest shifted his weight to the
other leg, “If you’d like, you could invite me in for an explanation. Or, you
could justifiably spin me ‘round the way I came.”
Barbara slipped behind Ernest and restored the locks.
“Have you had breakfast?” asked Barbara.
“I’ve had my vitamins, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Come in,” Barbara stepped to the loveseat and coiled as close
to the armrest as possible. Ernest did the same on his side.
“You remember me, then?” Ernest asked when there was a
comfortable distance between them.
Barbara remembered high school Biology better, and more fondly,
than any subject. Ernest was a year younger than she, and in an accelerated
learning program. The name alone stirred no memories. Though, with the mention
of the class, she remembered her peer quite well.
“Yes, I remember. How did you find me?”
“It’s amazing—even disconcerting what you can find out with a
computer today. By the way—you, my friend, should not be driving.”
Barbara picked up a cigarette from the dish and began turning it
over between her fingers.
“Kids like us didn’t date in high school, Barbara. ‘Barbie and
Ernie,’—could have you imagined the ridicule?” Ernest jumped into it.
Barbara recalled easing a boy’s curiosity about the shy, reserved girl that she was in a grove of pines after school on several occasions. She wouldn’t venture to call it dating, so there was no reason to burst Ernest’s long-standing image of her during those years.
“Dating was reserved for Jack and Angel, who had their cars… And
parking spaces… I don’t know. What a time to ask you out—dissecting a bullfrog
for its reproductive organs?”
“Leopard frog. Rana… Rana…” Barbara replaced the
cigarette exactly, stood, and headed for the closet. She ran her index nail
down a file of papers until she came across the stapled packet she was looking
for. Running the same nail down the page, she returned to her position on the
loveseat.
“Rana pipiens,” she read.
“You carried me through that class, Barbara. All I really had to do was sign my name on the lab reports.”
Barbara noticed the signatures on the frog skin permeability lab report in her hand. “Ernest R. Ford,” was struck right below hers.
“You knew what DNA stood for on orientation day,” said Ernest.
“Deoxy—…”
“—And I knew I sat at the right lab bench when you rattled it off. You never did let me make the first incision—except that once when the teacher asked you to turn the knife over to me for a change. Your look of panic—like when you opened the door just now—is still just as pleasing. Did I even say this many words to you in school? You were the surgeon and I was your bumbling assistant, handing you the wrong tool without fail. I was too much in awe to pay much attention, let alone ask you if you wanted to go somewhere after the bell. Save me from this rambling at any time, Barbara,”
Barbara stared ahead, through the lab report she held in front of her, without reading it.
Ernest sat up straighter and turned to speak directly at Barbara, “I’m in my forties, and that many years braver. I thought I was locked into a life of silent admiration with every girl that caught my eye. I came to class sometimes without even a pencil, but I always knew the first thing I was going to say to you, and the thing I was going to say next if you happened to say something back—if you said what I’d planned you to say. I didn’t often get around to saying a word to you, in my timidity. Yet I burst in with marriage on my lips now. So, after long last, I’ll ask you,” Ernest took a deep breath, rolled his eyes back slightly to mock a summoning of courage, and with a crooked smile asked, “Would you like to go get some coffee? That is what people seem to start out with these days.”
Ernest insisted Barbara drive to prove he was kidding about the comment on her many publicly displayed traffic violations. Barbara managed the car as though she was under the scrutiny of a DMV official to prove she could.
Barbara only knew of the coffee house franchise adjacent to the supermarket she frequented. It was established that Ernest lived just twenty miles, in a suburb, from Barbara’s near-downtown apartment. A coincidence of locality of family, he assured her.
Her careful parking strategy sent Barbara furiously shifting from drive to reverse, hand flying over hand on the steering wheel, until the car was unarguably centered in the space. They stepped out on the yellow lines, and slammed their car doors in unison.
Ernest tilted his head back and gazed over the abstract plain of tinted sunroofs. Barbara reopened her door and took her forgotten purse from on top of the emergency brake. The two then caught each other’s glance and found a path through the vehicles toward the weekend bustle around the sliding doors of the supermarket.
Doors adjoining the main entrance led them to a shadowless nook, tiled in green and wallpapered in beige.
“What would you like? Go grab a seat,” Ernest said to wide eyes.
“Do they have tea?” Barbara said in a whisper.
“I think so,” Ernest whispered and smiled, and turned toward a girl wearing a bandana behind the counter. Barbara took the closest table, patterned for a game of chess. She squirmed in the surrounding voices and unfamiliar clatter behind the counter. A bearable, slouched position was eventually attained.
Ernest paid with a credit card, struck his signature, and stepped the short distance from the counter to the table.
“What is that?” Barbara naturalized her volume just above a whisper.
“Grande double mocha shake,” Ernest took a sip from the straw.
“I can barely see you over it,” Barbara said, and blew into the small hole in the lid of her paper cup, as Ernest crouched playfully behind the crown of whipped cream and chocolate shavings.
Barbara laughed through her nose, neither aware that the laugh nor the gentle snort were about to occur. She bowed her head and set her eyes on the bottom right square of the chessboard, somehow colored into the laminated surface of the table. It was dark. She immediately wanted, more than anything, to rotate the table so that the correct, white square was in its place.
“So what are you doing now? Mapping the genome?” Ernest reappeared.
“Office work,” Barbara looked up and nodded her head a lot.
Ernest’s mind spun with, “That’s fascinating,” or “What a shame,” but he offered his employment with some deprecation instead.
“I’m a computer programmer for large corporations. I’d tell you all about it, but I’d probably drown you in a puddle of your own drool.”
Ernest spooned a bit of whipped cream from his plastic cup, splattering some on the table. He looked upward and around, “Guess I did that.”
“Hmm?” Barbara looked questioningly.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember. It was a beautiful late spring day, and the kitchen staff thought it would be nice to open the large doors in the cafeteria. You know, the ones leading out to the pines. Anyway, some swallow looking for a place to nest, or something, got in and was scared out of its tiny skull, flapping around in the scaffolding.
“Now, birds have excellent aim when it comes to cars and balding men, but when that bird started dropping bombs on the tables full of the most outstandingly popular clique in school, I swore God made it a marksman,” Ernest put his elbows on the table and his hands through his hair, “I watched that bird from my corner until the custodians swept it out. If only it could have known its heroism.”
Barbara wondered what nastiness the spider back home might eventually catch in its web. She nodded and smiled.
“A taste of their lives after the coming graduation, I suppose,” Ernest stroked his chin, “To think they walked into life after their soap opera in high school with the same expectations and dumb unquestioning. Some probably have as many ex-husbands as they did ex-boyfriends. Gay sons, kissing ass in the corporate hierarchy, sex-offender status—oh! It’s glorious to know they all became mortals,” and he took a long tug at his straw.
“I never had that much scorn, Ernest,” Barbara said, and tested the temperature of the tea on her bottom lip, “I flew above them, is what I always liked to think.”
“I heard them laugh when I walked by. Then their petty battles raged in front of me,” Ernest swept his hand across the table. Barbara looked down again at the dark square in the lower right.
“Mortals all of them,” Ernest reveled, catching a twitch from some of the heads in the room, “I suppose they received notification of that the day the announcement came in homeroom that everyone who had had ‘close contact,’” Ernest made quotation marks with his fingers, “With Becky… Ah… Can’t remember her last name… Anyway, half the school showed up at the nurse’s office for the shots. The urinals were bright orange for a month!”
Month… week… It was shopping day.
“I need to pick some things up at the store,” Barbara straightened in preparation to stand.
“We could go somewhere for dinner?” proposed Ernest with raised, pleading eyebrows. His mouth became small before putting it around his straw.
“Heh,” escaped from Barbara, “I need other things too.”
They both stood.
“You can finish your… shake, I’ll be back.”
Ernest returned to his seat. His height decayed slowly before Barbara. While standing, her scalp barely reached his neck line. The bag boys were fun, but she admitted to herself at this moment, she had an ongoing fantasy with this supermarket.
Out of the coffee shop, and into the equally lit food emporium, it was clear she hadn’t taken note of herself, looking down each aisle, each week. A man with a graying beard, with whom she shared a height, was sure to be shopping this day, any day. His horribly sad eyes, offset by his confident smile and noble knobby nose, were sure to meet hers in the freezer section, and an honest discussion of the quality of the store’s frozen produce was sure to follow.
Barbara walked down the toiletries aisle and found what she was looking for. She paid, and reentered the coffee shop. She set the bag next to her chair.
Ernest noticed the box of feminine products showing through the translucent plastic cellophane.
“Still doing that—?” Ernest froze, looking up at Barbara with the same grin that had grown on his face the split-instant he decided it would be funny to ask this. Afraid to move a muscle in the dead-stop embarrassment he just brought on himself, the grin stayed. The grin made itself known as, “I am confident you will find this funny.” His eyes glassed over, and saddened slowly, pleading for forgiveness. Behind them, before anything effective of, “You idiot!” was screamed at the self, Ernest’s day flashed by.
He saw his arms and legs flailing wildly in vivid color time-lapse, backing from his driveway, changing tapes in the car, standing up, walking up the flights of stairs in Barbara’s apartment building, knocking on the door. The whole time he kept his mind clean of plans, save the main ice-crushing question. Shooting his wit from the wrist was his newfound demeanor.
While waiting for Barbara’s return from her purchases, he had apparently erased his better sense as well as phrases uncontrollably planned. He was trigger happy.
“Yes,” Barbara said with a straight face.
Ernest looked away through baggy slits and tightened the corners of his mouth.
They left the coffee shop. It was late afternoon.
Neither said a thing leaving the parking lot. Ernest tried to resist, but the itch burned like a match head. He turned toward the window and rested his arm on the handle of the door. Barbara came to a stop sign and looked over to see Ernest scratching, rather deeply, the inside of his nostril with his pinky.
“Still doing that?” Barbara said, and smirked full face at Ernest’s surprised eyes.
Ernest’s mouth dropped open to show an upward crescent of graying teeth, “Ha!”
Barbara giggled. She giggled again. And again until they both busted out, doubled over, hysterically.
“Red light!” Ernest screamed.
The car’s tires put down a layer of rubber on the asphalt a few feet into the intersection. Barbara turned pale when a truck limousine zipped in front of them, blaring its horn. Ernest didn’t make a sound, nor look at Barbara.
Eating Chinese out of cartons at Barbara’s apartment, the sun set, and it was time to close the drapes. Barbara climbed up on the four-legged stool. Her hands slipped from the crank at first grasp, and she lunged for the fabric of the drapes for balance.
Ernest put down his plastic fork, “Barbara, you will one day get your very own chin rest if you keep doing that.”
Barbara climbed down. Ernest moved the stool aside, attempted to close the drapes, and had no trouble at all.
© Copyright 2003 george k george