I found a statue of an old man holding a battered briefcase and took a seat on the marble pedestal. Weird, I thought, hoping that someday, if someone made a statue of me, I’d be holding something more impressive like a spear, a trident or a bloody head-on-a-stick French Revolution-style. I spread my legs and dipped my head upside-down to read the engraving. “Robert Frost: Beloved Poet and Professor.”
“Sorry, old guy,” I said, “I didn’t recognize you.” I felt a surge of guilt. The most important former resident of my hometown, and I had smirked at his briefcase. “Following me around?”
I reached down to rub smudge off my shoe. The ground tilted a bit to the left and I missed.
“I like your work,” I said, hoping someone was around to appreciate how humorous it was for me to be complementing a slab of marble. “Nice and simple. Not like that complicated shit Eliot writes.”
I lifted my head and held my hands out in front of me, spreading my fingers wide and examining my bitten nails.
Beer swished in my stomach. A couple wobbled by. A dread-locked girl held up her unsteady companion with a desperate look on her face. For a moment they swirled into the landscape. I blinked and the lines between them and the sky were clear again.
“Of course I’m leaving soon,” I said. “Heading west, baby,” I shouted, throwing my hands above my head.
My stomach groaned.
“I am not a contrarian, Mr. Frost,” I said. “This is ridiculous.”
I leaned onto my left side and hugged my legs into my chest. When I woke up, the sun was hot on my cheek. Some shirtless dudes were tossing a Frisbee on the green.
I returned home to a note taped on my front door. It read, “caught a 20-pounder this morning that I can’t finish myself. Dinner at 5. – George,” on dancing-acorn-themed stationary.
“It’s unlocked,” George shouted at my knock. I entered. “In here,” he called. I followed his voice down a darkly paneled hallway into a cramped kitchen. George was hunched over the stove wearing a ruffled apron. He looked too tall to stand upright indoors. The fish sizzled in a frying pan, it’s insides heaped in the sink next to the stove. The spine jutted upwards towards the faucet.
“Largemouth bass,” he said to me. “Biggest I’ve ever seen.” A drop of oil splattered out of the frying pan, stinging my arm. “You fish?”
“Never,” I said. George was wearing flannel pajama pants cut off just above his ankles and a pair of backless slippers, grayed and flattened with wear. Something about him felt familiar, safe. “I’ve always wanted to, though,” I said, realizing the truth in my statement as I spoke it, “I always felt like I was missing out on something.”
“Marcy loved to fish,” he said. “It used to be just me and her around here in the fall.”
“She told me all about you,” I said.
George lifted his eyebrows, two white caterpillars arching their backs.
“Is that so?”
The fish was mouth-watering, finger-licking and earth-shattering after two weeks of marshmallows and canned goods. George watched me use a piece of Wonder bread to soak the juice up off my plate.
“There’s more I didn’t cook,” he said. “It’s for you, but I’m going to leave it here in my freezer because yours is getting turned off tomorrow,” he said. I looked up, pausing with the bread halfway between the plate and my mouth.
“The lawyer for Marcella’s estate called me this morning,” he said. “They asked me to shut down the water, too.”
I shoved the entire piece of bread into my mouth.
“I’ll leave it on for you, man,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
The fish activated something crazy, something insatiable bungee-jumping around my stomach, tap-dancing across my taste buds. I needed real food. The next day I ate two banana splits on the job, but that something kept at it. I stopped on my way home from work to buy a dozen of the world’s biggest, freshest eggs. I biked the rest of the way home without noticing the covered bridges or the lopsided farmhouses on my commute. Instead, I contemplated all the different things I could do with the biggest, freshest eggs in the world. I will teach myself to cook, today, I thought. Omelets, eggs benedict, hard-boiled eggs, soft-boiled eggs, smelly-boiled eggs, sell them to people over the internet, make it big. Make it big with the biggest eggs in the world, make it big with the biggest eggs in the world, I hummed to myself.
When I arrived home there was a fit, ponytailed woman hammering a sign into my front lawn. “For Sale,” it said. “Call Cathy Berman at 802-432-6791.”
The problem with being a person who lives in a place is that, inevitably, that place starts feel like a limb. A bedroom, a dormitory, an apartment, a country, a town, a state, an arm. Wait, you say as they rip down the tavern in the center of the town. This is my town and that’s my tavern. I see it every time I drive down this road. Wait, you say, seeing “New Hampshire” screen-printed on someone else’s sweatshirt. That’s my state. You can’t write that there. Wait, you say, when the sign goes up on the front lawn. You can’t sell this place; I live here. All my ghosts are here. It’s mine.
“Can I help you?” I said to the woman. She glanced up at me over her shoulder.
“No,” she said. “Not at all.”
“Why are you selling this house?” I asked, choking back a “my.” C’mon Al, I thought, it’s not yours.
“I’m a realtor,” she said, now turning her body square to me. She crossed her arms over her chest. The realtor scanned me with a sour expression on her face, looked over her shoulder to the house, then back at me.
“Is that your car?” she said, pointing to my leaf-covered Honda.
“Marcella is my great-aunt,” I said, taking a step backwards towards the road.
The realtor’s expression softened. “Oh, the lawyer for the estate didn’t mention you’d be here. I’m so sorry for your loss.” She walked towards me, her ponytail swinging. She extended her hand. “I’m Cathy. I’m staging the place for potential buyers.”
Cathy Berman, I sputtered as I paced through the house. Cathy Berman bitch bitch bitch Cathy Berman. She’d had been in here. The trash was emptied; the floors were swept. Cathy fucking Berman.