Evangeline

She put an ad in the newspaper of the university he’d been a grad student at: “Garden and lt. handyman work for room and bd; 2 months minimum, 3 preferred.” He calls, says that if she does take him he can only give her two weeks. That he was driving to New York with a friend in the friend’s car and his apartment lease will be up in three days and he’ll need a place to stay. She won’t even have to provide him bed linen; he has a sleeping bag and pillow and pillowcase, though he would like a real bed or mattress to sleep on and to have his own room to write in a few hours a day before or after he does the work she wants done.

She says to be honest the ad’s been running for several weeks and no one’s answered it so far and she’d like to get the work started, so could he come by for an interview and to see if he’d like staying here? She has a young son; he has nothing against children, does he? and he says “No, why ever would I?”

He bikes over that afternoon, rings the bell, nobody answers. Walks around the house calling her name. “Mrs. Tylic? I’m here, Mrs. Tylic — Gould Bookbinder, at the time you said.” “In here,” she says when he passes a screen door at the back of the house. The laundry room. A beautiful blond boy, around two years old, is sitting on top of the washing machine, stretching inside for clothes and dropping them into the laundry basket on the floor. She pretty, girlish-like; in shorts, T-shirt, long hair in pigtails, thin, almost no breasts, though a bra on, small, five-two at the most, bright blue eyes, black hair, pale skin, holding clothespins, one in her mouth which she takes out, shy smile, very white teeth and perfectly formed it seems, slender muscular legs, high behind, young, twenty-two, twenty-four. They talk while she sticks certain clothes in the dryer and hangs on a line above his head other clothes: man’s sweatshirt, seems an extra large; two bras, several small underpants, but a woman’s, not a kid’s, and all with bloodstains in the crotch; leotard, the boy’s socks, which he’d think would go in the dryer. She says another reason she’d like a man here is for her son, since he’s missing even a semi-steady male image with his father almost never around. He points to the boy, shakes his head a little and she says “Bronson knows; his biological pa, B-senior, pops in every third month for lunch to bitch as to how much of his inherited dough he’s given us and to spin Brons-J around in his newest nifty sports car. Now it’s a psychedelic-painted Lotus; that goofer’s loaded.” She doesn’t work, for the time being takes marketing courses at a community college and is also trying to sculpt and pot, lives off the little money her ex-husband is forced by law to give their son and what she manages to pad on the kid’s medical and daycare expenses, which her ex also pays; the house was bought with the money she got from the divorce settlement. “So I don’t have much; the meals will be skimpy. Lots of pasta and canned tomato paste and jug wine, unless you feel like springing for the real McCoy and also one night treating us to a restaurant meal. I need lots of work done that I can’t afford anyone to do. I don’t expect major plumbing repairs but I do want simple electric jobs beyond just changing light bulbs, and the fence fixed, some bamboo dug up from a friend’s property and replanted here, and if there’s time, help in wallpapering the two bathrooms, besides all the ugly old rose bushes removed. Their roots go deep, I want you to understand before you sign on.”

She takes his references, calls that night to say they all checked out and could he start in two days? and he says “As I said, my residence is only a single small room in a large house full of other small rooms filled with rowdy grad students and at night their loud mates, so I can even move in tomorrow. I’ve almost nothing to pack and I can use the sleep too before the long mostly sleepless drive back to New York.”