Call of the Beguiled

Call of the Beguiled

The first time I laid eyes on Cheryl Oliphant the young girl was sitting in the feeding station of the Brandenberg Park Zoo with a South American Tree Boa nestled in her lap. While the snake’s bulky body lay relatively dormant, the four-foot, emerald green python was wriggling its tail in a repetitive, undulating motion. “Are you familiar with green tree pythons?” Cheryl asked in a matter of fact tone. I shook his head and teetered backwards toward the door. The snake she was fondling measured three inches thick at the middle. “A tree python lowers its tail and wiggles the end to attract prey.”

“That’s always nice to know.” I took another step backwards and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the main entrance. I’ve seen a lot of nuttiness in my fourteen years on planet earth, but a girl my own age making nice-nice with a boa constrictor is just a tad bit too weird for my predilections.

The dark-haired girl stroked the python’s scaly head as though she was petting a lovable puppy. “Younger reptiles exhibit this behavior more often than adults. Captives will also use tail luring when hungry. But you don’t have to worry. She already ate breakfast half an hour ago.”

I didn’t particularly care to learn what the girl had fed the lemony green snake. My best guess would be frozen mice. The zoo director probably bought them wholesale from an exotic pet food distributor. But then what? Did they leave the icy rodents out overnight to thaw or defrost them in the microwave? And how many minutes did you have to zap a frozen mouse so the boa didn’t get heartburn? The eccentric girl reached out with a free hand. “I’m Cheryl Oliphant and my scaly friend is Nicolena.”

“I’m Teddy Rasmussen.” I took her smallish hand and gave the fingertips a gentle squeeze.

The Brandenberg Zoo was small but cleverly designed. The open enclosure that featured kangaroos near the entrance gate was home also to Charley, the donkey, a party of domestic white-tailed deer – spotted red markings in summer, diffuse, brownish-gray coat through the chilly winter months – and three mischievous wallabies. An indoor rain forest was kept well misted and heated to a sauna-like eighty degrees; the building housed a colorful array of tropical birds, fruit bats and a nocturnal marsupial from Indonesia that kept scrupulously out of sight during the daylight hours. A separate brick structure at the far end of the zoo sandwiched between the monkey house and rodent display was maintained in perpetual darkness. A collection of garish turtles, lizards, salamanders, snakes and exotic fish called this gloomy repository home.

Truth be told, Nicolena, the South American tree boa, made more of a lasting impression on me than Cheryl Oliphant. The girl – she looked to be about the same age as me – was short and dark with a compact frame that was neither fat nor particularly svelte. The hair was jet black and close-cropped, the eyes a deep chocolaty walnut that accentuated her earthy complexion. She wasn’t unattractive but the infuriatingly dour girl never smiled once in all the time she sat there stroking the god-awful reptile. And there was an oppressive sadness about her, a melancholy that seeped from her limpid eyes like dead weight.

And one other thing - she was bright as hell, a regular zoological brainiac! Not that I’m a slouch when it comes higher education. I’m a solid AB student except for the stupid subjects that no one has any practical use for like physics or chemistry or trigonometry or calculus or stuff like that. Then my grade might slip an academic notch or two. But that’s by choice, which is to say, I voluntarily choose not to perform up to my full potential. It’s never a matter of laziness or faulty IQ. Cheryl had been taking summer classes at the zoo straight through from elementary school and now was helping out as an assistant zookeeper, an adolescent docent assisting newcomers to the camp program. “Well, anyway, welcome to the Zoofari summer camp,” Cheryl added. “We’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other over the next few weeks.”

At four o’clock in the afternoon, my mother arrived. “Well, what’s the verdict?” she asked as I stowed his backpack in the rear of the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“Yeah, it was tons of fun.”

“And how are the other kids?”

“Most of them commute from Mansfield and North Attleboro. There’s only one kid that I recognized from middle school. And there’s a helper, Cheryl.” I had almost forgotten about the stony-faced Oliphant girl.

“And what’s she like?”

“I dunno. Hard to say.” I flipped on the radio and fiddled with the knob until I finally located a country and western station blasting a Kenny Chesney tune.

Cheryl Oliphant’s father also pulled into the parking lot the same time my mother drove up in the Jeep. He was a dead ringer for the daughter – short compact torso with dark hair and fastidious features. Despite the short stature, he appeared quite handsome. The blue pinstriped suit was definitely not bought off the rack from any discount department store. The designer shoes, likewise, probably set the guy back a solid two hundred bucks. Mr. Oliphant grabbed his daughter’s hand and led her to a Jaguar convertible. Her face remained blank, expressionless. Nicolena, the South American tree python exuded more pizzazz – infinitely more joie de vivre – than her underage handler.

Later that night after supper, my mother positioned a sack of King Arthur flour on the kitchen table along with a container of sour cream, orange juice and dried apricots. “So what did you learn today?”

“The zoo staff … they talked a lot about global warming, endangered species and protecting natural habitats.”

She sifted three cups of flour into the Teflon-coated baking pan of her bread machine then added a generous dollop of sour cream. “Did you get to see the sloth bears?”

“Oh, yes!” I perked up. “They’re originally from the jungles of Sri Lanka and eat pretty much everything including ants, honey, fruit, grubs, grass, flowers, eggs and carrion.”

“I’m impressed!” My mother tossed a half cup of orange juice into the mix along with two eggs and began chopping the apricots into thin bite-size wedges.

“Here’s the funny part,” I grinned good-naturedly. “Sloth bears love termites. The bugs taste like candy to them. In the wilds, a bear digs open a termite mound with its claws, blows away the dirt particles, then pushes its snout against the hole and vacuums up the insects.”

“Ouch! Now that could be painful proposition.” The woman threw the chopped apricots into the pan along with a teaspoon of salt and several rounded tablespoon of yeast which she spread away from the salt. “Here, smell this.” She sprinkled a small dusting of herbs from a spice bottle into the palm of her hand and held it under my nose.

“Mmmmm. What is it?”

“Fiori di Sicilia flavoring.” She measured out an eighth of a teaspoon, spreading the aromatic spice around the perimeter of the pan. “Now tell me more.”

“To keep from being bitten by the angry termites, sloth bears seal their nostrils using specialized nose flaps.”

The regular zoo staff delivered the background information about the exotic beasts, which were playing in a large open-air pit specifically designed for the shaggy creatures. Cheryl, the unflappable docent, offered up the curious tidbit about the bear’s specialized nose flaps. While the somber-faced girl was giving her spiel, one of the creatures let out a collection of atonal roars, squeals, yelps, huffs, rattles and gurgles that carried a good two hundred feet all the way to the front gates of the zoo. The girl spoke in a dull monotone like she was regurgitating the material from a memorized script. No getting around it, when it came to the animals, she probably knew as much if not more than the regular staff. Still, the tortured soul shtick was beginning to grate on my nerves. The girls I knew from middle school – some were goofballs, weirdoes, bimbos, flirts, and ditz brains, but at least they had a life! This one looked like she was engrossed in some heavy-duty weltschmertz.

“That business about the sloth bears,… how absolutely intriguing!” my mother tittered. “It’s only the first day of camp and you already learned a ton of interesting things.” She closed the lid of the bread machine and pressed the one-and-a-half pound loaf button. After a moment the small spindle on the bottom of the machine began to whirl in intermittent half-strokes. A minute passed and the mixing arm spun continuously churning the ingredients in a loose ball of sticky dough.
“What the heck are you making?”

“A sour cream apricot loaf. I’ll bake it up tonight and place a fresh slice in your lunch bag for tomorrow’s session at the zoo.”

* * * * *

In the morning, I found Cheryl Oliphant over by the otter display. The zoo designed a rather ingenious habitat for the eight river otters permanently on display. A deep swimming pool emptied out to a shallower, fifty-foot long channel that fronted on the pedestrian walkway. The otters would belly-flop into the pool at the far end and race in a swirling corkscrew fashion up to the Plexiglas wall before flipping end-over-end and hurtling off to the far side only to repeat the process again and again. It was one of the most popular attractions at the zoo and the rodents never failed to hold up their end of the bargain with outrageous feats of gymnastic prowess.

“River otters are members of the weasel family, like skunks and ferrets,” Cheryl recited with clinical detachment, “and can hold their breath under water uninterrupted for eight, whole minutes.”
“All they ever seem to do is play and sleep,” I fidgeted, shifting the backpack higher on my shoulders. Cheryl was sort of pretty – not like the fashion plate, blond-hair-blue-eyed cheerleader types that sashayed around the middle school with their perky noses angled skyward. Rather, hers was a hopelessly neurotic, muted loveliness.

“Well, yes, they do that too. River otters are environmental indicators and only stay where water is clean. Industrial pollution has driven the rodents from much of their traditional range.” She glanced up momentarily to make sure I was paying attention. “The good news is that cleanup and relocation programs are helping the animals make a comeback.”

“Swell.” I was getting weary to death of her endless zoological prattle. To be sure, the girl was bright as hell – a hundred times smarter than any of my Zoofari classmates, but after a while the drip, drip, drip of meaningless trivia wore a person down. “What are you reading?” I indicated a small paperback sticking up from a pocket in her backpack.

“Jack London. A collection of his short stories.”

“I read Call of the Wild,” I said.

“The Sea Wolf was my favorite.”

“Yeah, me too.” Cheryl seemed impressed that I had read both books. Actually that wasn’t completely accurate. I had only skimmed Call of the Wild, leapfrogging over the last hundred pages in order to write an overdue reading assignment for seventh grade English. As I remember, I squeaked by with a sixty-five and a sarcastic, cautionary warning from the teacher scrawled in red pen. I never laid eyes on The Sea Wolf and only said I did to impress the girl.

Cheryl pulled the book free of the flap. “There’s a story, To Build a Fire.” She lowered her voice even though no one else was within a hundred feet of where we were talking. “It’s about a gold prospector in the Canadian Yukon who falls through the ice as he’s traveling alone in the wilderness returning to camp. He has to light a fire in order to dry his wet clothing and keep from freezing.”

“It’s cold as hell up there.”

“At seventy-five degrees below zero spit freezes as soon as it leaves the mouth, making a crackling sound like a small caliber gunshot.”

I stared at her uncertainly. Several camp counselors passed by nodding as they headed toward the main office. “Jack London wrote two versions of the same story. The original had a happy ending, the second not so pleasant.” A blue jay nestled away in the dense foliage of a maple let out a barrage of energetic squawks before flying away. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write multiple endings to events in our lives? Pick the ones that suit us best.”

“Unfortunately, most people have no choice in the matter,” I muttered. “I saw your father yesterday afternoon when he picked you up after class. Your old man looks just like you.”

The girl’s features contorted in a foul expression. “That’s where the similarity ends,” she replied gruffly. “My father has affairs with women half his age and treats my mother like garbage. My parents shouldn’t really even be together, but that’s for them to work out.”

The outburst caught me unawares. I shifted uncomfortably on the balls of my feet and watched the otters make another pass in front of us before lithely doubling back to the wider end of the pool. One of the sleek brown rodents crawled out of the water long enough to devour a chunk of raw fish in the feeding trough. “I have a problem with my filter,” Cheryl muttered apologetically, almost as an afterthought. It was clear she regretted the emotional flare-up and was trying to make amends.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I replied, wishing I had gone directly to the staging area rather than pausing to commiserate with the eccentric girl. Cheryl Oliphant had seemed so engaging and sensitive when we first met. But now I was experiencing major doubts. Maybe what I mistook for an offbeat, quirky personality was a brittle façade masking morbid tendencies – a proverbial Pandora’s Box of adolescent pathology! And what was that crazy business about filters. There were oil and air filters on cars – fuel filters on the domestic oil burners my father serviced. The week before Zoofari, I went on a service call with my old man to a home where the filter on a four-hundred gallon oil tank was clogged with sludge and sediment. He replaced the cylinder and bled the air out of the gravity feed line.

“My mother says that I have this pathological tendency to say every foolish thing that crosses my mind without filtering content. I blurt things out impulsively … things that, even if true, are inappropriate.” Cheryl blinked several times and her voice cracked. “They sent me to a psychiatrist. He gave me some pills.”

“Did it help?”

She shook her head from side to side. “The medication made me feel like a zombie. After the first week, I stopped taking it.” She made a sharp snorting sound that only vaguely resembled a laugh and, without warning, reached out and poked me on the upper arm. “My parents have marital problems so they send me for counseling. Does that make any sense?” She didn’t wait for a response. Rather, Cheryl’s voice dropped several decibels, assuming a droll, self-mocking tone. “Last Tuesday I overheard them quarrelling and, for the first time, they used the ‘D’ word.”
Now I was in it up to my eyeballs! This petite brunette with a South American boa constrictor for a best friend was spilling the beans about her dysfunctional family. I knew the girl less than two days and she was having emotional dysentery! “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she parried my remark.

Mr. Oliphant was having a love affair with a woman half his age, a secretary at the insurance firm he managed, and wanted out of the marriage. Cheryl broke off her commentary, running her slender fingers through her dark hair in a repetitive gesture.

“So what happened?”

“My father got a lawyer. He’s drawing up the paperwork. A bittersweet, convoluted smile enveloped her features. “My dad’s moving into an efficiency apartment over the weekend.”

I stood quietly now, mulling over what I had just heard. “How much time before class starts?”

“About eight minutes.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a prolonged sigh. “We should probably head over to the main hall.”

“No, not yet.” I went and sat on a gray bench close by the monkey house. A plaque on the side of the structure explained that it had been fabricated from recyclable waste – plastic milk cartons, TV dinner plates and such. “Here, eat this.” I handed her the inch-thick slab of sour cream apricot loaf that my mother, with much fanfare and ceremony, had cut an hour earlier.

Cheryl closed her eyes and bit into the golden bread shot through with orange flecks. Then she smiled - the most beautiful, rapturous, enigmatic and mystifying display of transcendent emotion I had ever witnessed. “God, this is delicious!” A pungent, fruity sweetness wafted through the muggy, early morning air.

“My mother baked the bread last night. It has sour cream and orange juice and apricots and some crazy spice that can only be found in the remote mountain regions of Sicily but don’t quote me on the Sicily thing.”

She broke the uneaten piece in half and handed a portion to me. When the magic bread – the bread that made the singularly saddest girl in the universe smile as though it was the second coming of Christ – was gone, Cheryl reached out and placed the splayed fingers of her right hand on my chest. “You are the sweetest boy in the world.” Like a benediction, her hand floated down my body falling away at the stomach. “And now we should go to class.”

* * * * *

Each Saturday throughout the summer vacation straight through until Labor Day I went out with my father, a furnace repairman, on emergency calls. My mother said that, since I was clever with my hands, “mechanically inclined just like your old man” – those were her exact words – it would be as good as a first job.

“How much do I get paid?”
My mother flashed a dirty look. “Room and board plus the usual amenities.”

I wasn’t quite sure what the 'usual amenities' entailed but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my life, which seemed to be in a perpetual holding pattern over a destination not of my own choosing.

My father was a lanky, outdoorsy type with an unruly mop of dirty brown hair that fell down over his ears. My mom suspected him of trimming the shabby mess with a pointy scissors squirreled away with the razors and dental floss on his side of the medicine cabinet, but my father always pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to incriminate himself regarding the butchery and self-mutilation that passed for personal grooming. When it came to shaving, the man was equally lax, running a Schick twin-blade disposable over his stubbly chin no more than twice a week at best so that he never grew a full beard or appeared clean shaven for more than a few, random days per month. However, my dad’s personal grooming habits had no appreciable impact on business. The man, who was honest to a fault, never charged a penny more than the job demanded and guaranteed all his work.

The first house call was in an upscale neighborhood on the historic East Side of Providence. The oil burner shut down in the middle of the night and there was no hot water. My father slid the metal face plate on the front of the burner to one side and stuck his nose up against the belly of the furnace, sniffing the acrid air.

“How many times did you try the reset button?” he asked.

The owner, a thin, rather effeminate looking man with a sallow complexion and horn-rimmed glasses, scratched his earlobe. “I don’t remember. I kept hitting it but nothing happened.”

I didn’t like the sissified guy right off. He sounded snooty – like he had a bad case of book brains. Book brains was a term my father coined to describe a person with a PhD in nuclear physics, who could design an nuclear bomb but had trouble tying his shoe laces or balancing a checkbook. It was people with book brains who were running the country into the ground. President Obama, according to my dad, had a terminal case of book brains. So did all the fat-cat politicians in Washington D.C.. They talked a good line and, at face value, seemed harmless enough but were a menace to society. And they never worked with their hands.

“You don’t recall how many times you pressed the red button?” My father repeated the question.

“I forget exactly. What difference does it make?” Acting as though his fragile feelings had been injured by the ‘indelicate’ question, the gaunt man hurried from the basement without waiting for an answer.

“The walls of the furnace are flooded,” My father spoke in a sober drawl. “If the motor fired up with that much fuel in the system, it could have caused an explosion and burnt the house down.” He grinned sheepishly and punched me lightly on the upper arm. “But we won’t share that minor detail with the owner.”

He knelt down on the cold cement and waved a half-inch wrench at the furnace. “Draft regulator, stack control, master switch, blower, oil pump.” The man proceeded from top to bottom identifying each mechanical part. “Transformer, motor, oil shutoff button, burner assembly and, on the inside, is the combustion chamber.”

Pulling the metal cap off the transformer, he placed the blade of a flat head screwdriver vertically on the further pole of the electrical unit and then lowered the blade until it rested a fraction of an inch away from the opposite pole. A dim flash of electricity arced, jumped from the transformer to the screwdriver but just as quickly died away to nothing. He repeated the process a second and third time. “Transformer’s burnt out.” He reached into the toolbox and located an adjustable wrench. “Go out to the truck and get a replacement. There’s a pile of spare parts over to the right alongside the wheel well.”

“Did you notice how it killed him to write out the stupid check?” My father chuckled. We were a good three miles away from the home.

“Yeah, he did seem rather aggravated.” The homeowner, who mentioned that he taught comparative literature at Brown University, made a half-hearted attempt to smile when the burner fired up and my father began packing his tools. The supercilious grim quickly petered away when he was handed the bill. You could tell that the chump was in the habit of bossing other people around, having his own way ninety-nine per cent of the time.

“You weren’t here even an hour.” The emaciated man waved the bill fitfully in the air. “Isn’t this a bit steep?”

“Parts and labor – that’s all I charged you.”

“Well, I dunno …” It was a nasty, vindictive jab as though to suggest that my father was somehow taking unfair advantage. I hated the guy. I wanted to kick him in the shins or tell him outright what a pompous ass he was. But my father didn’t seem the least bit ruffled by the customer’s snide superiority. He waited patiently while the fellow wrote out the check with a gold-nibbed fountain pen that looked like it might have cost more than the new transformer.

“What a jerk!” We were back on the highway, a light drizzle misting the windshield. I still couldn’t get the image of the spiteful professor out of my mind.

“I’m paid,” my father replied, “to fix the burner, not refashion his personality.”
“What if he refused to pay?”

“The guy might be a money-grubbing skinflint, but he’s too shrewd for that.”

“But what if he went ballistic and tore up the bill,” I insisted.

“Simple enough.” My father flipped the knob for the intermittent setting on the windshield wipers. “I’d remove the new transformer and put back the broken one and that would be the end of it.”

The second call was a little old lady with a dowager’s hump and crippling arthritis. She hobbled to the front door with a three-prong cane and a well-fed, Siamese cat following at her heels. From the way my father stopped to pet the cat and commiserate with the old lady before going downstairs into the basement, I could tell that he felt sorry for the craggy-faced woman all crippled up like that and hardly even able to move from the living room to the kitchen without the cat skittering under her wobbly legs.

Nothing was wrong with her furnace. A fifteen-amp fuse had blown. My father reset the circuit breaker and the burner fired up of its own accord. The woman sat at the kitchen table with a checkbook and ballpoint pen. “How much do I owe you?”

My father waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no charge unless we find something wrong.”
That wasn’t true. The company charged a flat-rate service charge just for showing up regardless of what was done to remedy the problem. The woman with the dowager’s hump placed the checkbook on an end table. “Perhaps you’d like some sugar cookies to take with?”

A Tim Horton’s coffee shop loomed up ahead. My old man has always been partial to their coffee, swearing up and down that it’s ten times better than the dishwater they served up at Dunkin’ Donuts. He pulled into the parking lot.

“That old lady back there looked to be in her eighties,” my father observed.

We were sitting in a booth nursing our hot drinks. I was nibbling a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich on a croissant. “Except for the kamikaze cat that’s always running under her rickety legs, she must live alone,” I noted.

“Someday, it’s just a matter of time, we’re all gonna be like her - a little absent-minded, forgetful … getting our pills paid for by Medicare and living on social security.”

“Don’t seem like a barrel of fun,” I noted.

“Well, at least she got the whacked-out cat for company.”

A boy that I recognized from zoo camp came into the coffee shop with his parents and a younger sister. He nodded affably and went off to sit in the far corner. I was thinking about Cheryl Oliphant – my favorite pastime lately – and how her fractured, disjointed commentary got under my skin. “Call of the Wild - did you ever read the book?”

My father, who had been lost in his own, private thoughts, looked up distractedly. “Yeah, we studied that in high school - the adventure story about the sled dog up in the Canadian wilderness during the gold rush.” He scratched his grizzled chin and took a tentative sip of coffee. “Buck was the dog’s name, if I remember correctly.”

“London wrote a short story about a man struggling to light a fire to keep warm after falling through the ice and getting his feet wet. Years later the author went back and rewrote the story but with a completely different ending.” I finished off the croissant sandwich, washing the flaky crust down with what was left of my milk. “Everyone wants things to turn out a certain way.”
“Like the Brown Professor, who was hoping I’d give him a break on his repair bill.”

“You charged him the going rate.”

“I didn’t charge him a cent more than what the job required, but he would never see it that way. Stingy bastards like him will always nickel and dime you to death.” He spoke in a perfunctory tone devoid of animosity. “How come the guy in the story was traveling alone?”

“I don’t know.”

My father shrugged. “Thing is, you gotta try and do the right thing by people – never take an unfair advantage but, at the same time, don’t let the troublesome types walk all over you. We live in a community and everybody’s got too …” His voice broke off as his thoughts hit a cerebral cul-de-sac. “Aw, cripes! I don’t know what I’m babbling about anymore.” Mercifully, my father home-grown philosophy was cut short when his cell phone began twittering feverishly. He spoke briefly to the party on the other end of the line then flipped the phone shut and stowed it in the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. “Looks like it’s going to be a busy morning.”

The third repair call was gas not oil. A middle-aged woman with great legs and sandy blond hair that cascaded down over her ears in curly ringlets met us at the door. “There’s no heat, no hot water.”

My father placed the metal toolbox on a wooden bench and removed a thin metal plate covering the bottom of the gas heater. Dropping down on his haunches he peered into the guts on the burner. “Pilot light’s dead.” He pressed down on a button and held the flame from a butane lighter up against the nozzle. Half a minute later he released his grip on the pilot button and the light went out. He relit the gas and repeated the process a second time. “Thermocouple’s burnt out. Totally fried.”

“Is that bad?” the blond asked. She was quite a looker with pale blue eyes and massive breasts - soft and inviting like something out of a Playboy centerfold. Not that the woman’s clothing was terribly revealing, but I could see by the curvy contour of her cotton pullover that the woman had a wickedly fine torso. And there was no ring on the third finger of her left hand. I might be just a goofy, dumb-ass kid, but I’m savvy enough to check for these things.

I’m sure my father, who doesn’t miss a beat, picked up on that too, but, after an appraising peek at the prodigious family assets, he immediately settled in with the heating element and was all business. “Replacement part costs a whopping eight dollars and ninety-five cents and takes less than five minutes to replace but, I’m not suppose to tell you all that.” With a small wrench he loosened a brass fitting and pulled a copper wire away from the burner. “There’s your culprit.” He placed the coiled tubing on the cement floor.

The woman knelt down and retrieved the damaged device. “How does it work?”

My father had already ripped the cardboard packaging from the replacement part and was positioning the silver nozzle under the burner. “What you’re holding is a thirty millivolt thermocouple.”

“Which means nothing to me.”

“It’s really quite basic stuff. A thermocouple is made from two dissimilar metals. If the gas flow is interrupted or the flame accidentally goes out, the sensor immediately closes, shutting the fuel supply.”

“Any idea why it broke?” the woman asked.

My father shrugged. “Just normal wear and tear, that’s all.” He depressed the red button a second time and relit the pilot. Fifteen seconds later he released the pressure, lifting his finger away altogether, and the pilot burned continuously. “That’s it! You’re back in business.”

“I got a question.” I said.

“Fire away.” We were a mile and a half from home and, courtesy of the hump-backed lady with the three-pronged cane, nibbling on sugar cookies dusted with multi-colored sprinkles.

“From when you first met Mom, how long did it take to figure out that she was the one?”

“Strange question.” Up ahead a lady with a baby carriage was standing at a crosswalk. He braked to a halt and waited while the woman reached to the opposite curb.

“That’s not an answer.”

We passed the Brandenberg Fire Station and the post office. “A guy I knew from high school, Victor Palumbo, had this girl, Lois, who he wanted to go out with. Lois was best friends with your mother but didn’t really know Victor all that well and thought he might be a big gavone.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a disparaging Italian term describing a jerk, phony, embarrassment, whatever.”

So what happened?”

“Lois arranged a double date. As I remember, Victor and Lois had absolutely nothing in common so the budding romance proved a big flop.”

“The double date – that was the first time you ever laid eyes on Mom.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“From when you met her, how long - ”

“Five minutes,” My father cut me short. “That’s all. I knew inside five minutes.” We pulled into the driveway. My old man had to reorganize his truck for a commercial installation. I went into the house where my mother was folding laundry in the den. There were three separate piles – bath towels, hand towels and washcloths. A mound of unmatched socks were resting in a straw clothesbasket.

Five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes. The words reverberated through my brain like a Buddhist mantra.

Later that night as I was lying in bed waiting to drop off to sleep, I got to thinking about Cheryl Oliphant. The inscrutable enigma-of-a-girl had been shadowing me day and night. I would be taking out the stinky garbage and a fleeting image of her with Nicolena, the South American python, would mysteriously flit through my brain - a randomly bizarre misfiring of the neural synapses. Or I would be nursing a glass of milk before taking my shower and sense her presence like some invisible sprite.

I tried to imagine what it might be like to be married and come home to her, a dozen years older, of course. Cheryl would have supper waiting every night when I returned from work. A bucolic existence, we would jibber-jabber about nothing in particular just like my own, thoroughly dopey folks. Mrs. Oliphant, who I had seen dropping her daughter off most mornings during the first week of zoo camp, would be a regular guest, but the philandering father would be persona non grata, barred from ever setting foot in the inviolate sanctuary of our home. Of course, my mother would teach Cheryl how to bake breads, not just the exotic dessert loafs with fruit, eggs, cream and honey but the hearty traditional recipes with fresh herbs, whole wheat, molasses and sour dough starter. At fourteen, I possessed a wide-ranging and engrossing imagination. Funny though, how things always worked out so much better in my fourteen year-old fantasy than mundane reality.

* * * * *

“Got any more sour cream apricot bread?”

My mother was packing my lunchbox Monday morning. “Your brother and father went a little overboard with the loaf last night, but I think there may still be a little left.” She raised the lid on the breadbox. One last slab of the orange-flecked loaf remained. My mother placed the bread in a separate sandwich bag, nestling it between an overripe banana and bottle of Gatorade.

“When were you planning to make more?”

“Not for a while yet.”

I fumbled with a knot in the shoelace of my left sneaker. “Could you bake another loaf so I could have it for the middle of the week?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Teasing the tangled string apart, I eased my foot into the shoe. “Would you and dad ever get divorced?”

“Such a crazy question!”

“No, it isn’t. There’s this girl at the zoo – her parents fight and everybody’s miserable.”
“Well, that’s not good.” Her eyes wandered from my face to the bulky slice of sour cream apricot loaf perched in the lunch box. “Your father and I get along just fine so I don’t think divorce is a viable option.”

I wasn’t quite sure what the word ‘viable’ meant, but the woman’s intent was perfectly clear. Suddenly, my mother reached out and pulled me against her plump body. “Now you have an utterly stupendous day at zoo camp and don’t worry about such nonsense.” Her voice assumed a no-nonsense authoritative edge. “And be kind to that poor girl whose parents don’t know how to behave.”

My folks, like the river otters, were creatures of habit. My father got up every day and went to service heating and air conditioning units. He came home promptly at six. He gave his wife a box of candy each Valentine’s Day and a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card the first Sunday in May. We went on vacation every summer to Booth Bay Harbor where the family didn’t really do much of anything spectacular but always managed to have a great time. I dragged along behind my parents and younger sister as they flitted about the touristy shopping area, buying T-shirts that said stupid things like ‘I’m a Bona Fide Mainiac!’, purchasing coffee mugs that were ridiculously overpriced and homemade blueberry jellies for relatives and friends. My folks had a walloping donnybrook-of-a-fight once or twice a year. My mother usually won, and my father sulked for a day or two but never held a grudge. And that was about it.

What did Cheryl Oliphant say about river otters?

They were environmental indicators. Once a stream became polluted with noxious waste, the animals, who were a part of the ferret and weasel family, quickly abandoned the area in search of clean habitat. Cheryl’s father was a philanderer, an inveterate liar and heartbreaker - a toxic waste dump of emotional pollution. He soiled his nest.

* * * * *

The hand on the chest – that was a big deal.

Not quite as big as a kiss or hug but right up there. When I gave her the second slice of apricot bread, Cheryl rewarded me with another unearthly beatific smile. I unzipped the front flap on my lunch bag and transferred the treat to the girl’s backpack. “I’ll save it for later.” Something had definitely changed. She seemed more relaxed. “My father moved out over the weekend.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be,” Cheryl protested. “It’s so much nicer with him gone.”

Monday the Zoofari class was introduced to the South African meerkats, relatives of the mongoose family. They reminded me of miniature squirrels strung out on amphetamines. The meerkats lived underground in burrows, housing about twenty animals with each member having a specific job that benefited the community as a whole. There were babysitters, sentries, hunters and teachers. Sentries stood on a log or bush and watched for predators and other threats. When one was seen, the sentry let loose with a warning call that allowed the others to reach the safety of the burrow in plenty of time. The animal spent much of the day above ground playing. When not engaged in play, they were usually busy digging or turning over stones in search of food.

Next, we got to meet the lions, white ruffed lemurs, a fennec fox and silver-cheeked hornbill before progressing on to the diadem snake, binturong, snow leopard and Madagascar fody. By Wednesday of the second week, we were learning about speckled mousebirds, Japanese macaques, a Visyan warty pig and red-crowned crane. Thursday there was a summing up of the camp experience, and Friday the parents were treated to a formal presentation before collecting their children for the last time.

“Jack London was an autodidact.” Cheryl waved the dog-eared paperback in front of my nose. On this our last day together, she was still obsessing over the author who wrote multiple endings to the same story.

“What’s that?” As an endless stream of visitors, parents and rowdy siblings paraded past, I wanted to kiss her something awful – right there in front of the mesh wire cage housing the gold-crested mynah birds.

“An autodidact is a self-taught person, someone who never got a proper education.”

Everything was falling apart and all she could manage was more inane banter. “To hell with Jack London!” I sputtered and, leaning forward, kissed her full on the lips.

Somewhere in the distance the sloth bears let out a cacophony of bizarre polytonal grunts and squeals. “Do it again,” she demanded, and I kissed her impetuously a second time but had to make it brief because a couple of bratty preschoolers came skipping around the bend singing the idiotic theme song from SpongeBob SquarePants.

“I’ll call you later tonight after supper.” I could hardly catch my breath. “Let’s meet somewhere tomorrow.”

“There’s a playground with toddler swings and a jungle gym off Reese Avenue.” Cheryl’s eyes were glazed over.

“It’s not that far from where we live. I’ll hop on my ten-speed and see you there around one. We can spend Saturday afternoon together.”

That’s when I sort of went bonkers—snuffling, gagging and bawling my eyes out like some emotionally labile lunatic. My brain shut down—went on sabbatical. The kiss, the sloth bears howling freakishly in the distance and a certain self-taught adventurer who never benefited from formal education—they all congealed together, converting my cerebellum into a slurry of vapid mush.

“What’s the matter?” Cheryl pressed.

“A person traveling alone in the wilderness falls through the ice and his legs go numb, freeze solid …” I couldn’t continue. I just didn’t know what else to say, because the main thrust of the argument was running so far ahead of my putrid brain cells that I couldn’t keep pace much less catch up to the scattering of evanescent thoughts. Now I understood how my father felt at the Tim Horton’s coffee shop when he got all balled up in his grandiose palaver.

Cheryl Oliphant sidled up to me. Her compact hand slid into mine, a perfect fit, and held the fingers tight. Lifting up on her toes, she nuzzled my wet cheek. “Make it twelve-thirty, and, before we visit the playground, come by the house to meet my mother.”