Excerpt: Obituary

I was twenty-one years of age when I came to Fenster. It was a medium-sized town with a good downtown area, now expanding from one-door shops to larger stores with more modern merchandise and more than one floor. I secured a job almost immediately at one of these; saleswoman in the glove department, three days a week from eleven to three. It didn’t pay much, but it would cover my boarding house rent and two meals a day, plus any incidentals I would require. The supervisor who hired me looked only once at my black eye, and did not ask me a single question about it. When I probed his mind for the reason, I found a tragic memory of a lost sister, married to an abusive brute of a husband, and a reminder that he needed to remove the dead Easter flowers from her grave. I ducked my head in shame at the private knowledge I’d uncovered, but I was grateful for the sympathy and the job. I did not offer him my manufactured excuse about having run into an open closet door. I knew he would not believe me.

The job started on Monday, and today was Thursday. I saw in my mind the boarding house I needed to visit, saw myself signing an agreement to rent the upstairs second bedroom, light, airy and with a good Northern exposure, saw myself settled into the comforting routine of work, communal dinners with the other two boarders, and evenings in the parlor listening to the large mahogany radio. Aunt Bird hadn’t gotten a radio before I left, though a few of my friends had them, and they were prominently featured in the storefront window of Wastrom’s Hardware Store. She and Mary-Delia and I had been regular “haints” of the public library instead, reading through most of their adult fiction offerings, and quite a number of the non-fictions as well. Radio was relatively new then, and Aunt Bird was just slightly suspicious of it. If she was going to spend twenty-five dollars, she reasoned it was not a sound idea to pay it out on a piece of equipment that would be useless in five or ten years. I never argued with her; I knew it was a decent investment, but the library also suited me just fine.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Simmons, my new landlady, was blessed with a modern streak, instead of a hidebound one like Aunt Bird, and she had no such reservations about this new medium. In the evenings, our little assembled group would sit clustered around the polished wood box, while a fire crackled in the hearth driving away the chill in Autumn and Winter, or as the electric fans blew steamy humid air ‘round the room, ruffling the lace curtains hanging in front of the window screens in Summer. Mrs. S. would turn the monster on, and in the dusky parlor gloom, we could watch the faint glow that meant the tubes were warming up and hear the deep electrical hum of coils, as the Emerson sought for a signal. I imagined it reaching snaky invisible arms out beyond the house, over the roof, and into the moving air currents on our planet, waving wildly, and searching blindly for events to channel to us. We listened to the horrible accounts of the Chinese floods—so many died and so many left homeless; we heard the exciting news that New York City now sported the world’s tallest building. We listened to President Hoover make the excuses and issue the edicts that proclaimed our country’s financial maelstrom, and watched as the world followed suit and whole countries collapsed. We listened with our ears, but our minds supplied the video footage. Of course, mine had been doing that my entire life.

I had not hesitated to use my talent since arriving in Fenster. I was away from home, becoming my own independent woman, in no hurry to make a new relationship. This probably frustrated my female acquaintances—I know they felt it was not natural to like being alone as much as I did. But as a working woman, and self-supporting, I could use the excuse that I really had no time for a social life if I wanted to get the bills paid on time. Since I was one of the very lucky ones to be gainfully employed, no one argued the point with me. I needed to make it through this time—which I knew would be ending in two years—without making any enemies. Once our economy recovered, and once the country could hold its head up high again, things might be different. For now, I kept my vigils by gathering as much inside information as I could and using it to my advantage.

I had a great deal of information.