“Come on, Marcie! What are you waiting for? I’m telling you, this shop has the best bargains you’ve ever seen in your life!”
“I’m coming, but best bargains are no fun if I can’t find my wallet. It fell out of my purse when you came to that sudden stop. Honestly, Lynn, I don’t know why I ride with you. You’re dangerous!”
“That man turned right in front of us! What did you want me to do, run into him?”
Marcie ignored the question as she pulled the lost wallet from beneath the seat and returned it to her purse, along with her comb and favorite writing pen. Her sister was such a menace! She always had been, ever since she had stuck her finger in the faucet to see where it went. The fire department had had to come to free her. Finally having put her purse and herself together, Marcie followed Lynn into the bargain store.
From the street, the store did not look like anything special, but inside, it held a charm that can only be described as flea market meets small-town hardware store. Anything one could not find in the mega marts, one could definitely find here. Copper-bottom cooking pans hung overhead. A clerk was helping a man find a hook-and-eye set for a screen door. Speckled porcelain bowls were nested together; your choice of red or blue speckles.
“See?” Lynn said as she took up the bowls. “You could drill a hole in the bottom of the big bowl and have the perfect pot for a field of pansies in the spring.”
“True. That would go with my shabby chic themed patio,” Marcie allowed as she selected a nest of red-speckled bowls. “Oh, look at the old-fashioned toy tractors! They haven’t made these for years! Everything’s plastic today.”
“Those are factory-authorized scale models of actual tractors of the period,” the clerk said as he approached. “This one’s called a Johnny popper because of the sound it made as the exhaust popped out of the stack.” Marcie chose it to sit before the table near the bowl of pansies. She would place a small bowl of flowers on the seat of the tractor.
On the next aisle, Marcie and Lynn came across a collection of bird houses. Some were freshly painted, while others were rustic with most of their paint missing. Marcie looked through the entire collection before she chose a rustic one with hints of yellow and blue paint.
Meanwhile, Lynn was making a few selections of her own. Unlike Marcie, she did not care for shabby chic, but she did like copper. Copper anything. She had found an old copper pitcher, which she felt would be perfect to hold the large spatulas, spoons, and whisks next to her vintage stove. She was wildly passionate about that stove, which she had picked up for a song at an estate auction a few years earlier.
The sisters met up again by an old, hand-crank, bell-ringing cash register. They looked on with pure delight as the clerk rang up their selections. Turning the crank to clear the previous transaction, he keyed in each digit of each price. As he hit a large, square key to enter the sum, a bell rang. He had to consult a chart to determine the correct amount of sales tax to key in, then rang up the total.
“That will be $76.42,” he told Marcie. As she fished her wallet from her purse, he wrapped each item in tissue paper and placed it in a large, brown paper bag with handles. He repeated the process with Lynn’s selections.
As the women left the store, a bell tinkled over the door.
Two Monologues Set in the Early 1940s
I tell you, Marcie, I never saw two such rambunctious children before in my life! Why, when I was rearing my Louise and Willie, I never would have allowed such behavior. Of course, times are different, now. With their father away, in the war, young Stan has no good male influence, only that deadbeat uncle of his. If he’s 4-F, I’m Daffy Duck! Well, of course, little Amy will do anything Stan tells her. So, the next thing you know, you have to call down both of them. If they’re not running in the house, they’re picking up my breakables. I know. I know. They’re just curious. Still, children have to be reared to have good manners. Otherwise, they will grow up to be adults with no manners. Honestly, I don’t know what mothers are thinking about these days. Do they think their children can rear themselves? If this war doesn’t end, so their mothers can come home from the jobs their fathers should be doing and start teaching them right from wrong… There’s just no hope for the world today, no hope, at all. When I came along, I was taught to keep my hands to myself. If I liked something I saw, then all I had to do was tell my hostess how lovely it was. But, oh, no! Today, children just pick things up and handle them, and when they drop them, and they break, they think they can look up at me with sad eyes and I’ll tell them everything’s okay. Well, everything’s not okay! That was my very favorite of the pieces Gordon brought me from France when he came back from the great war. I can’t imagine how he got it home in one piece, but he did, and I did not need a thoughtless child to destroy it. Don’t look at me like that, Marcie. I know you don’t agree with me. You never have. You think I’m as mean as Mata Hari. I know that. I just don’t know what you think I should have done when little Amy started playing with my hand-spun glass figurines. Okay! Then, tell me!
Okay, Lucille, I will tell you. You asked me why I disagree, and I will you. In the first place, you have alienated your grandchildren. They called their mother to come and pick them up, they did. They won’t want to come back, either! And all over a piece of glass! Believe me, Lucy, a piece of glass is all your precious collection will seem like when you’ve alienated everyone in your family. I know I’m being harsh, but I’d rather speak up and set you straight, now, while you can pick up the telephone and call Stan and Amy and tell them you over-reacted. Yes, I do think you should call them and offer them a sincere apology. They are children, after all. But, because you do treasure your spun-glass figurines, I will make this suggestion: You should close off that room when you know the little ones are coming. Lock the door. Then, make a place for them to play, a room where they can touch things and pick them up. Then, if they are curious about something, they can pick it up and examine it, and if they drop something, it won’t break. It wasn’t so very many years ago that they were babies. You wouldn’t give a baby spun glass to play with, would you? Then, you can’t give young children spun glass, either. You limit them to things they can’t break – and that won’t hurt them, I might add. Ten years from now, when they are much older and more responsible and surer of hand, you can take them into the locked room and show them your treasures, and they will think you are absolutely bewitching for having such wonderful things locked away in your special room. Don’t you see, Lucille? It’s all about psychology. You make them do what you want them to do by limiting their access to all things. You unveil life when and as they are ready to handle it. The same goes for your figurines. Either you set the pace or you will, indeed, have your treasures smashed upon the floor. While they are old enough to appreciate their beauty, they are too young to know how to handle them. So, just keep them out of reach until the time is right. Give it a try. You’ll see what I mean.
A tunnel lay open before them; there was only one way they could go, now, for the lane behind them had been blocked off by the mudslide.
This was not what Mark and Sally had envisioned for their weekend camping trip. When they had set out from home the previous morning, the sky had been sunny, and the temperatures had been warm. The forecast had been for good weather until the middle of the following week. But weather forecasts have been known to be wrong, and this one was proving to be as wrong as one could be.
Since dinnertime the night before, a heavy rain had been falling. The mudslide had occurred in the pre-dawn hours, waking the couple from their sleep and causing them to leave their tent and camping gear behind as they ran for safety.
Now, as they faced the mouth of the tunnel, they wondered whether it would offer them safety or whether they were rushing from bad to worse. As a tree fell nearby, they darted into the tunnel. They simply had no choice but to try and get out of the storm and the hell the storm had created.
It was not a long tunnel. Both Mark and Sally could see light at the far end of it. What they did not know was where the far end of the tunnel would take them, in the first place, and whether they would be able to get back through the tunnel if they did not like where the tunnel took them. Would more mud come down the hillside and block them in the tunnel? There were so many unknowns, and if they had had any other options, they would not have entered the tunnel.
Slowly, they made their way along. The more deeply they made their way into the tunnel, the darker it became. With no more than the circle of white at the far end of the tunnel to guide them, they continued along, one step at a time. Mark used a stick he had picked up by the light of the day’s dawning to feel his way along. Would there be rocks to trip them up or, worse, would there be chasms into which they could fall, chasms that would swallow them even more completely than the tunnel seemed to have done? But, no. Mark and his stick felt no impediments to travel, and the couple continued to make their way along.
The closer Mark and Sally came to the light at the end of the tunnel, the more their concerns arose. They should be seeing signs of landscape beyond the opening – trees and sky – but, no. All they could see was the white of lightness. Sally tightened her grip on Mark’s arm; Mark tightened his grip on the stick. Both were afraid. Were they walking into something unknown, something they could not have predicted?
More to the point, were they walking into something surreal or even paranormal? Was this all a dream? Was the storm not real? Of course, it was! Was the mud slide not real? Of course, it was! Then, this was real, too, and the area beyond the tunnel would be real, too. It had to be! This was real life, not the wild imagination of the writer of the latest horror movie.
At last, Mark and Sally reached the end of the tunnel. As the dark walls around them fell away, a world of light and brightness came into view. Water dripped from the top of the tunnel to indicate that, very recently, a heavy rain had fallen. Water ran down the pavement and away from the tunnel. Campers, who had settled in the woods along the roadside emerged from their tents and began to look around.
“At least, we didn’t have a mud slide this time,” one said.
“Oh, not another mud slide!” another exclaimed. “I still haven’t recovered from the last one.”
