DANDELIONS: The Old New Year

No one works on New Year’s Eve. Well, a few people do. John Schatz is busy as ever with accounting and inventory, orders and plans. In his younger days he would have taken the month of December off, and most of January. Now there is no time.

Reba also works, adding touches of glaze to a last pot. Of course, she had never considered this work. It is pleasure, all her activity serves her life as an artist, whether throwing clay, or sketching designs, or readying tables and wheels for yet another batch of plates, bowls or vases. Her hands and thoughts are synchronized in one process, unending, unfinished and unfinishable.

Her boyfriend will ring her door soon, bringing a pizza and bottle of cheap wine. Walt O’Conner is another work in progress, she thinks, smiling to herself and returning brushes to a much-spattered coffee can. A few more dabs should do it.

The rhythm of her day has been only briefly interrupted. Her little brother called that morning, from Louisville. He and his wife are holding yet another baby, a girl to add to their two boys. “Made it under the wire, Reeb!” Jonathon laughs, still breathless from delivery room 401. “A New Year’s Eve birthday!” It is gratifying to know Jonathon is producing in this department, as Reba, at forty, does not expect to generate even one. Like vases, Jonathon has already exceeded their parent’s breakage allowance, in pottery-speak. A disturbing thought, she realizes.

John Schatz also stows his brushes. Or the equivalent. He places pens from the Will Call Desk in a 1955 Lucie Rie vase with a manganese rim. The little pot looks like junk, but is worth thousands, the single item he was able to spirit away from the bankruptcy sale unnoticed. “You don’t want a cup with a bunch of Bic pens, do you?” he asked the auctioneer. Bent over a ledger the man, long-hardened to deadbeat or insane owners, shook his head, and continued writing.

Before locking up Schatz assumes yet another costume, taking off his Carhartt jacket and pulling on an oatmeal Billabong hoodie, a cranberry neck buff, and the loose knit beanie he will wear for his bus ride uptown. He carries a small box with a ribbon. Inside is a white candy dish made by Reba, a gift he has wrapped for a friend.

A bus picks him up at the corner of Monroe and 27th. He sits placidly, even fearlessly as the bus grinds through the grimy underbelly of Minneapolis, picking up and depositing a succession of New Year’s Eve commuters. These are largely young men, wreaking of cigarettes, some drunken. At this point in life Schatz is prepared to fight, even to the death, should anyone demand his wallet, or the box he holds in his lap. He is eyed suspiciously by a group of swaying occupants, red-eyed and standing, but he gives off an uncertain vibe, certainly not that of a victim, and is left alone.

John Schatz is travelling to visit a woman he has known for two or three years. She lives on social security and a small pension left by her long-departed husband. Her apartment is in an ancient red brick 24-unit building off Hennepin Avenue. The two met when Ruth Magnussen stood behind him in a check out line. Schatz struck up a conversation. The old woman, so used to being ignored, was captivated by this handsome, flirtatious, “younger” man. They had coffee together at the store Caribou. Thereafter Schatz would visit once a month. They were excellent friends. He was never bored with her company.

Such relationships were not typical for Schatz. He almost exclusively devoted his attention to those who could aid in his professional or romantic life. Ruth Magnussen was one of a handful of exceptions. He played tennis with a plumber, until the loss of his business curtailed almost all recreational activities. For a while he visited a mentally-handicapped man who lived with his parents, to their delight.

Shrewd but unreflecting, it might be said Schatz enjoyed life by the day. Or rather, by the hour.

Reba, on the other hand, finds herself increasingly uncomfortable. The evening changed to black night, and she sat in the gloom of a single lamp. It had begun to snow on her South Minneapolis street. A light, weightless snow, a fairy snow, the crystals produced either by low clouds or the steam freezing from the building’s rooftop ventilation. In any case a pretty snow, sparkling in the streetlight below.

Sitting at her windows, sighing, the door buzzes. She pushes the intercom button and sits again by the widow. When Walt appears he is smiling, a pizza box in one hand and a bottle of Mateus in the other, Reba jumps to her feet.

“I want a baby!”

There certainly are no babies in Ruth Magnussen’s building. The hallways are aromatic, John Schatz thinks as he walks the hallways, of old people, of dust and worn wood. Residents have modestly decorated their entries, a Welcome mat here, a tiny table with a handbell there. On Ruth’s door is a golden tinsel wreath. He knocks gently.

No answer. She occasionally steps out for the paper, or to check on an old woman upstairs, an invalid in a wheelchair. He has his own key, in any case.

“Ruth?” he calls, closing the door behind him. The apartment is very hot. The kitchen light is on. Schatz puts the gift on the counter and finds the apartment thermostat, which he turns down. Her bedroom door is open. The room is dark. “Ruth?” he calls.

His eyes adjust. She is in bed, wearing a sweater, the coverlet pulled chest-high with her arms outside, not crossed but laying over her quilt. Something not quite right with that, Schatz thinks. Her eyes are closed and he takes her cool hand, holds it just a moment, then lays it back and sits in the chair beside her bed.

He sits for a long time. Perhaps an hour. There is just enough light to see her face. There are no wrinkles any more, none he remembers, at least. Her forehead is unlined, her nose small and upturned, her hair dark, like a girl’s, curling in the shadows. She has returned to her youth.

Richard Donnelly

Richard Donnelly

Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. Mr. Donnelly’s first book is ‘The Melancholy MBA.’ published by Brick Road Poetry Press.