Gridlock

            Scrabble night, at Miriam’s this week. Her housemate, Meryl, almost never played but usually added to the company. Geraldine was absent, as typical this time of year. Agnes, who always liked to ‘help the board’, focused on the southeast quadrant.

            “Would you accept ‘TABLEAU’ with an X at the end?” she asked.

            “Are you admitting you have the X?”

            “Not necessarily; I might have a blank…”

            “So, with a blank and possibly an A or E or O, you’d earn ten points. You’d get double that without a blank, over at that double-letter score, completing FA for FAX.” Miriam liked to show she didn’t suffer fools. “Or you could play your blank on FA for a five.”

            “Okay, okay—I may actually have the X. So would you take ‘TABLEAUX’?” 

            “Why, to rub it in? I wasn’t so willing for your Frenchy word to triple in the first place.”

            “But we discussed that—like ‘ballet’, you use ‘tableau’ all the time…”

            “I don’t, but your point at the time was taken. Now, just to move your turn along, do this for me: pluralize ‘ballet’, in English.”

            “Um—‘BALLETS’?”

            “With an S or X?”

            “I’m not sure, but…”

            “Do what fits your conscience. I may or may not challenge.”

            Agnes settled for the second choice, especially since she had a B and O to make a handsome elbow, free from challenge. “There,” she almost thanked. “BOX and FAX for 42.”

            Miriam was unamused. “So, you traded hauteur for outdated technology, cashing in on my suggestion. I guess that puts you in the lead.”

            “I guess it does!” beamed Agnes, splaying her hands like a frog.

            Meryl brought Irish coffees on a tray, suggesting “time for a break?”

            “Oh, but Agnes is on a roll,” Miriam gibed.

            “Then rather time to celebrate!”

            Harry, Geraldine’s husband, was pinioning the last lights of Christmas on his roof, spelling out a humongous string of ‘HO-HO-HO’. A life-sized Santa in a sloping sleigh balanced above the letters, straddling the roofline and anchored by ropes plumbing into the back of the house. In front of the sleigh was a long sign that read, ‘Reindeer Getting Ready Out Back’, a curious way to indicate they had secured white-tailed deer in their acre-and-a-half backyard—not reindeer, not nine (though the littlest of the five was named Rudolf). Permission for holding such animals were several years in negotiation, but since the sheep and donkey in the front yard had been well cared for, and since City Hall—if not every neighbor—was in favor of this hype, Harry had his way. Geraldine remained iffy about it, as explained a couple weeks ago when she hosted Scrabble.

            “The game warden agreed only if we took a herd from the preserve that naturally bedded together—he didn’t want to break ’em up, so we had to rent five instead of the single Rudolf we had in mind.”

            “Your enterprise must be getting expensive,” Agnes semi-wondered.

            “It’s getting dear,” punned Miriam, taking new letters from the velvet bag. “Score my VULTURE for 28, would you, Dear?”

            “Just 28 for all that?” Agnes liked to score. “Seems like it should be more.”

            “If I kept my S from last turn, it would have gone for 80. Lesson: always hold an S.”

            “You’re still in the lead.”

            “Not for long,” Geraldine announced, quickly tiling U-L-T-U-R-E-S below Miriam’s existing V, startling her friends. “Just 11 on a triple—not so nice—but clears the shop for 83.”

            “That’s plagiarism!” Miriam mocked.

            “Well, I could follow your advice and keep my S…”

            “I don’t think we’ve ever had a repeat like that,” observed Agnes.

            “I was thinking of clearing over here, with UNRESULT—keeps the triple open if you want to do it that way.”

            Miriam made a moue. “What would you describe as an ‘unresult’?”

            “Hmm. Good question.” Geraldine looked to the ceiling, as she always did when grabbing new letters. “I suppose… if this reindeer idea doesn’t work out, it will be an unresult.”

            “Huh?”

            “Harry’s put a lot of time into this one—much more than the nativity. We’ll even have to charge a little fee to keep us within budget.”

            “How much? A buck?”

            “As a matter of fact, yes—an even dollar, or any bill will do. I’m not in the business to sort change.”

            “So,” Miriam wanted to know, “the result of all your years of spiking the electrical grid is… to make money?”

            “No, no—I wouldn’t say we’re going to profit, unless you count the joy the effort brings.”

            “There’s profit in that,” Agnes affirmed. “My turn—and I’m glad I saved my S.”

            Meryl was actually one of the neighbors who protested City Hall’s carte blanche allowance of an all-out Christmas display “per every homeowner’s right of free expression”, as their advocates demanded. Her point, not to contradict the first amendment, was about zoning and respect for shared space. “Cars inundate our little streets, stopping every couple of feet, spewing CO for at least six weeks”—she almost sounded like a free-styler. Geraldine wasn’t present for her speech, but Harry was, unaware of her association with the Scrabble club.

            “Excuse me, Miss—”

            “I’m not a ‘miss’, but you’re excused.”

            “Sorry—I’m not trying to offend. I do wonder, though, how you personally suffer from my street, which I don’t think I’ve seen you on.”

            “You have an address on a street, I’m sure,” Meryl leveled, “but you don’t own a street. Neither do I. Or—if we want to think of it differently, I own a measure of yours and you, a taxpayer, I assume, own a measure of mine. But it shouldn’t matter—I’m still talking about the increased traffic and pollution that comes with it.”

            “That can be said about anything. Walmart buys up farmland and it becomes de facto a chunk of the town.”

            “Yeah, I protested their pollution, too.”

            “Well, good on you. I’m trying to keep Christmas more real—less ‘made from China’, if you will, so maybe we share that point of view.”

            Meryl was confused by that turn, but let it pass. “I’m just here to comment on shared space. If each of us owned an infinite cuboid from the grass perimeter we each discretely mow to the heavens, whatever they may be—and no planes could trespass without permission, and likewise nothing we’d possibly launch would float beyond our cuboid—then each expression could ring loud and true.”

            “What’s a cuboid?”
            “But that’s what isn’t happening. People want to see your extravagant Christmas get-up, and if they all fit into your cuboid—your lot, if you like that better—then good. But they don’t. They idle on our collective streets and make for gridlock—something Walmart also has to factor if they want to keep the peace.”

            “I think you’re overstating things.”

            “My expression is over-the-top, you think? That’s interesting irony.”

            Harry had enough and tried to believe his silence, starting now, would be the final word. Meryl, sitting down, thought likewise, and both were kind of right.

            Later on, Geraldine intuited who her husband’s nemesis was and told him how she made Scrabble nights—one-third of the time—more than just the game itself. “Conversations after games are interesting.”

            “She kept on using this term ‘cuboid’…”

            “Hmm. I wonder why she never likes to play. Some pretty good words would result—”

            “I think she’s into arguing, not rearranging letters for arbitrary points.”

            “Nonetheless, maybe we can meet her point half-way. I’ve been thinking—maybe this could make a difference: cars could park at Walmart, toward our side, and folks could walk the six or seven blocks to see a lot of houses all lit up, and ours, with Rudolf, could be their destination…”

            Harry did a double-take. “You’re asking to take on more a role this year, even though you always say we go too far?”
            “We do go overboard—that’s become our shtick. But—not just Meryl—others could appreciate this as a way of making harmony—a more inclusive showcase, an esprit de corps…”

            “Alright, alright.” Harry didn’t want more to plan for, though years ago in deciding to go whole-hog into Christmas decorations, he accepted there’d be junctures like this, when efforts weren’t in stringing colored lights or bringing Frosty back to life. “I’ll take on the white-tailed deer; you take on the route from Walmart.”

            Geraldine reluctantly agreed, hoping neighbors—even more so than the megastore—would facilitate this plan. Since Agnes lived four blocks east on the same street, Geraldine telephoned her to see if she’d be on board. “Maybe we can do this, create a little peace on earth—or at least the slice we live on.”

            Agnes agreed. “And should we enlist Miriam and Meryl?”

            “Let’s let them be. I’d like to think they’ll smile at this, but things can backfire and…”

            “I understand. Gridlock works this way.”

            It was an inside joke—Agnes and Geraldine, long before M&M moved to this town, had together watched the vice presidential debate of 1992, when Qualye and Gore and Admiral Stockdale were making their cases to be second-in-command. The take-away, among a scrabbling of other strains, was Stockdale’s fulcrum exposition of why “gridlock”—his voice as graveled as could be—is the reason we’re in political malaise, and why we need to change.

            “Do you remember,” Geraldine enjoyed the memory, “when he didn’t have his hearing aid tuned up? or that he had been a sort of god in Vietnam to his ‘own civilization’, as he said…”

            “I do!—and, looking back, I wonder if he wasn’t so stupid. Seeing all that’s transpired.”

            “Well, hold on, Agnes. Review it by recall—both you and me were pacing in my basement, blushing for an embarrassment that should have been—”

            “I know, I know. It should have been his own. And more than his. He said, if I remember, ‘you can overdo environmental cleaning… If you purify the pond, the water lilies die’—something of that sort.”

            “He did. He put that to Al Gore, as if the environment were nothing he’d done any research on…. And then he said there was this ‘unity over self’—an acronym, he acknowledged, on something military-coded, ending in ‘U.S.’”

            Agnes thought that through. “I don’t remember the ‘over’ part, but… it could have been that way. You’re right: we were pacing around your basement, wondering what in Sam Hill…”

            “More than wondering, I think it’s safe to say.”

            “God, to think that young Gore won that night, and, over time, an old Gore lost.”

            “Gore is gore—one can’t get beyond that nominal.”

            “Well, I think it isn’t hard to separate semantics—”

            “You and me agree. We draw our random letters for the fun of possibilities. But many others—Harry, maybe, and”

            “—I miss those years, honestly. Debates were vibrant, televised, left to think about without rewinding, or meming, or sharing according to some hidden algorithm. We’ve become products of our cubicles…”

            “That’s interesting.”

            “What—that we’re products?”

            “No. The use of ‘cubicles’. Harry said that Meryl was pushing this word ‘cuboids’—”

            “Meaning something different?”

            “I don’t know. It’s worth checking in the dictionary.”

            “As long as it’s not Scrabble’s, only designating a ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

            “Maybe aim for middle ground, like H. Ross Perot?”

            “Mon chéri—like I said in ’92: ‘I gotta walk around!’ And we should, too,” Agnes reminded of the imminent, “if we’re going to get this Christmas promenade to work.”

            They drafted up a brief description of the idea and printed out enough copies to stuff all the mailboxes en route to Walmart, ringing doorbells when they knew someone was there. The owners that decorated their homes most extravagantly mulled their minds about the idea—it looked like a gradual form of banning the tradition. Hadn’t City Hall endorsed their rights to display?

            “Yes, yes—we also benefit from that ordinance,” Geraldine assured. “You know that: we’ve been putting a living nativity scene up for years, now.”

            “Well, half-living,” said the neighbor. “Just the donkey and sheep.”

            “That’s true, the holy family and shepherds and magi are supposed to be the people who come by—that’s always been our point. So, we’re for even more traffic of the pedestrian variety. But car traffic just rolls on by…”

            “With possible crooks,” offered Agnes, “like in that movie Home Alone.”

            Some homeowners wondered if this idea would turn into another form of Halloween, with more expectation per house to give the pedestrians—not candy, per se—rather more of a show. Geraldine and Agnes considered that concern—and having no convincing rejoinder, they stuck to their argument that side-walkers would be preferable to street-trawlers.

            “You almost said ‘street-walkers’,” Agnes elbowed her friend as they continued on to Walmart.

            “These are just words, anyway.” Geraldine determined, her eyes on the edges of the massive parking lot. “But I guess we’d better rehearse what we want to say to our corporate barons.”

            For the next hour, there was an uncomfortable shuffle from one middle-manager to another, everyone well aware that neighborly relations wouldn’t need to reach the inbox of Sam Walton’s progeny. “It must be convenient,” Agnes mused, “that ‘the buck stops here’ does not have to be so practiced in a family-controlled empire.”

            “I guess I’d rather our idea be ping-ponged middle-management than stopped by some billionaire in charge.”

            Eventually, they negotiated a favorable deal. The farthest reach of parking would be posted as ‘preferential’ for those who’d walk to see displays, and the store would advertise this ‘spirit of the season’ as such. There was some talk about discounts for customers who’d get as far as the reindeer—some sort of wrist-stamp to prove it—but Geraldine suddenly got nervous about their house being too much the focus. Maybe next year, after this pilot, the neighborhood could set up a more collective idea like a booklet to stamp, passport-style.

            A final stop on this very full day would be to the police station, which had to fortify a fuller patrol of the neighborhood anyway this time of year. They were fine enough with this idea and promised to park a car near the intersection of Bellevue Street and the access road to Walmart, pointing voyeurs that way and waving others through. The day felt like a win-win-win.

            Until the eggnoggers, as Miriam called them, crashed the scene. This winter was unseasonably mild—no snow or northwinds, but instead a steady overcast that blanketed the increased glow of houses in the neighborhood. Itinerants were bound to be out in droves anyway, pushing strollers on the ice-free pavement, peddling their personalities the way they’d do at tail-gate parties, the parking lot a skansen open-bar.

            Scrawled across many of the signs that Geraldine and Agnes had posted, the phrase ‘Hail the Sparklers’ qualified the tone of innocence. Sparklers—at least in public—had been outlawed several years before, now categorized with unlicensed fireworks. It had been a less contentious fight at City Hall, yet reason enough to let the houses safely sparkle, as a compromise.

            And some homeowners decided they’d compete with Harry’s reindeer, open up their backyards to the revelers who might pay a buck for eggnog, or sparklers on private land, or tinsel snowballs to toss about to the streets. Someone strung a thousand glowing fish and turtles at varying depths into their swimming pool—like stars that slipped below the cloudy sky. While no one came around officially inspecting, a visitor from City Hall would have to wonder if the water and electric wires were—

            “Rest assured,” the owner laughed, “they’re waterproof!”

            Two nights later, a first ambulance sped up the street to CPR a drunk who’d fallen in to swim with stars—that was his dare—getting tied up like a leatherback among a toss of six-pack rings. When his friends knew that he’d survive—or maybe even before the hospital told them so—they posted the whole hijinks on YouTube, tagged ‘finding nimrod on Bellevue’.

            The name of the street informed the algorithm, at least on Miriam’s feed, as ‘Bellevue Xmas’ and ‘Sparkle Bellevue’ followed. And even without the street name, Harry and Geraldine’s house featured in the next video, ‘Redlight Rudolf’. Miriam called Meryl to the computer: “look, this is Geraldine’s backyard.”

            “It’s spacious. But probably claustrophobic for the animals. Who’s the debaucher narrating this?”

            “Sounds disturbingly like the voice that dared his friend to ‘swim with stars’—”

            “Huh?” Meryl hadn’t heard about that yet.

            “Tell you in a sec…. My God, they’re getting in—”

            “Who? Do you know them?”
            “No!” Miriam pointed. “The eggnoggers I warned everyone about.”

            “What are they doing?”

            Miriam pushed the volume button to catch a chant to let me ride that donkey, donkey, until someone got so clever as to replace the donkey direct object with ‘Rudolf, Rudolf, pleeeaze!’ Meryl hit the mute but kept her eyes glued on the screen to see if they would molest these creatures more than verbally. “Where is Harry?” Miriam demanded of the silent screen.

            On cue, he ran into the scene, and Miriam released the mute. “Get outta here, Wreckers! You can’t just—” and his voice trailed off, drowned by the laughter of the director of this film, who decided to end with slurred intrigue: “stay tuned for more redlight on Bellevue!” Apparently, the algorithm had the sense of mind to catch verbal tags for precise locations.

            A second ambulance rolled more slowly down the street on the following day. It raised no real alarms: Baxter Schroeder was ready for some rest-in-peace, having battled several Asian enemies, a VFW that seemed to represent his category, if not his personal, maybe post-traumatic needs, an alcoholic wife (until she died), a neighborhood that seldom understood that he grew up here, in his little house with nothing else around. He never had to scowl ‘get off my yard’, as no one but the mail carrier chanced to set foot on his tiny lot. He’d taken in a homeless man some twenty ago, eventually known—by whom?—as Baxter’s Homo. That’s who called the ambulance, and few on Bellevue held their breath, essential for a eulogy.

            A third was called when one of Rudolf’s bigger brothers had enough, leaping easily the fence Harry had put up and trampling a family, frantic to escape. Their toddler in a stroller got the worst of it: the harness wrapped around the white-tailed’s leg and swung the stroller like a flywheel down the driveway and into the street. The deer used its antlers to disentangle, adding to the horror of the witnesses, none of whom could meaningfully unfreeze. The antlers working instinctively, the buck then ran the opposite way of Walmart, maybe toward the preserve, though that would be miles away.

            The toddler was shaken up—literally, which might have served him better than metaphorically, as the paramedics quickly turned their focus to his parents’ apoplexies. Harry’s, too, when the warden drove up to say they’d have to close up shop—not that such a sanction was so traumatic, but with that ‘Redlight Rudolf’ going viral, Harry’s dignity had dipped below any conception he’d had of himself.

            Geraldine lent comfort, but channeled Agnes in the need ‘to walk around’—not on Bellevue with all its bluster, but somewhere just enough away. She helped Harry shut down the house, unplug the lights, lock the drive-way gate (not higher than the deer fence, but at least another hurdle any others might hazard), then walk toward… as it turned out, Meryl and Miriam’s neighborhood.

            The streets were darker, naturally, yet calmer in a sense of Christmas mystery. Geraldine would regularly drive there, Scrabble nights, usually with Agnes in the passenger seat. The walk was what it needed to be—long and largely wordless, like she’d seen, strangely, scratched into the bathroom wall at Walmart:     

words

   escape me

      when

I don’t know

   what to

      say,

   and do so

anyway—

   trying

      to expire

birds

   remind in

      song

each sunrise:

   simply

      try

   revising

fear to fly—

   aiming

      to inspire

She’d committed that to memory, and recited it as best she could to Harry. He doubted it could be from Walmart—“stuff there’s aiming to be cheap.” Geraldine agreed, it was unlikely penned by middle-management, yet in the wheelhouse of anybody there who’d need to pee, or take the fullness of a part-time break.

            Meryl opened the door and didn’t miss more than half a beat, with “Merry Christmas, Miss and Mister.” Geraldine hugged her and made the obvious introduction, forgetting the apology she’d tacitly rehearsed, that crashing on another’s Christmas… well,

            “Let’s call Agnes, too,” suggested Meryl, even before Miriam’s knowledge of this ding-dong-anti-ditch.

            They fetched two bottles of Merlot from their cellar and topped off the week’s supply of mulled wine. A Christmas Carol was on television, which they watched until Agnes came, then turned it off to sing some of their own, Meryl at the piano. Harry also played—news to everyone but Geraldine—and as the Scrabble board unfolded, he and Meryl learned harmonies from each other’s favorite things to play. Miriam cleared the board twice in the early rounds to leap into the lead, but it was Agnes’ night, again—“you must be on a roll”—as she scored a 158 on QUIXOTIC at the bottom of the board.

            “So you didn’t save your ‘S’?” Miriam needled.

            “Didn’t need to, obviously. But I wouldn’t challenge anybody’s use of QUIXOTICS, should the need arise.”

            Agnes, after midnight and a victory buzz, slowly drove her neighbors home. Not disparagingly, but also not with envy, M&M advised to ‘follow the glow’—“it’s not as high as what met the Magi, but…”

            Bellevue was unusually subdued. Whether Christmas overload, or Walmart having mandatorily closed, there wasn’t any spectacle to scandalize, by eggnoggers or white-tailed devotees. The cop on duty was asleep in his patrol car, maybe just as well. Agnes drove her friends to their darkened house and, unwittingly, aimed the headlights at the figure standing at the nativity. In his hand, clearly, was a sort of rope leading into the covered manger scene.

            Geraldine audibly held her breath, and Agnes did the same. Harry opened up the door and seemed to know exactly what the rope was for—the hidden frame of a white-tailed deer that wouldn’t happily exist without its herd. Harry took the offered leash, shook the rescuer’s hand, and waved for Geraldine, at least, to join in the joy of finding what he thought was lost.

            Agnes got out, too. “I’m sorry about Baxter.” He nodded, then started to move back down Bellevue. “Would you like a ride?” she offered, self-consciously.

            He sort of smiled as he considered, and said “thank you,” and headed for her car. “I know it isn’t really far, but… Christmas Eve, and all…”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)