"An Enigma"

Meeka hugged Ms. Krantz before she left tonight. “It was a pleasure to meet you,” she’d said, wrapping her arms around Ms. Krantz’s wide frame. Ms. Krantz had just sat there looking like she’d swallowed a heaping spoon of horseradish—bitterness and shock contorting the folds of her flabby face.


“Whatever,” Ms. Krantz finally said, flapping a liver-spotted hand at her. She’d cleared her throat and stared hard at the latest large-printed romance she’d brought. But her reading glasses were still dangling against her velour housecoat. Meeka was right: Ms. Krantz did have a heart pumping under all of that fleshy meanness, after all.


Now Meeka is gone and I am nursing a glass of orange juice in the kitchen as an excuse to study the enigma of Ms. Krantz.


“What the hell are you looking at?” Ms. Krantz barks.


“Were you ever married?” I ask, and pull up a chair beside her.


She shakes her head like I’ve shot her with a bolt of electricity. “Don’t you have a phone call to make?”


I stare at the three hairs sprouting from her cheek mole and fight an urge to grab my mother’s tweezers and pluck them out. “I already tried her twice. She’s not home,” I say, and purposely tilt my head to the side. I’ve seen psychologists on TV do this and always marvel at how the gesture enables their patients to ‘open up.’


“Well, what do you want from me? Go try her again.” She folds a corner of the page from her novel and hauls herself up from the chair. “I’ve got to get Goofy ready for bed,” she says, referring to Jack’s flannel Goofy pajamas. She trudges the short distance from the kitchen to the den and stops. When she turns to me, her eyes look glassy, and it has nothing to do with her cataracts. “I was married. A long time ago, before you were even an embryo, kid. He died during the war, and I died right along with him. Are you happy now, Miss Nosy?”


I stare at the dips and valleys on her face and try to imagine its topography before gravity took over. Clear blue eyes and strong cheekbones wink back at me, and with it, the woman who gave her heart to someone, devoid of thick, yellow toenails. It occurs to me that Ms. Krantz looks like a mound of flabby flesh because this is the way she sees herself. “I’m sorry,” I finally say.


“Forget sorry. It’s a waste of time, kid. You want to be somebody’s charity case? Go help that mother of yours. Be happy that she’s found someone. It sure the hell ain’t easy,” she says before putting a hand to her thick middle. “Goofy, come on. Enough with that damn video game!”