Mr. and Mrs. Scribendi and the Big Responsibility

Oh at last. We’ve been walking on eggshells here. Mr. Scribendi hasn’t said a word, of course, but his (sharply) pointed silences and Mrs. Scribendi’s allusions to the fiasco in Guppville are all we need.
“Allusions?” you ask. It’s not like Mrs. Scribendi to hold back, as you know, and she’s certainly said enough, but not a word will she add in the small kitchen where confidences are exchanged and explanations given. Interestingly, any “allusion” has been in the presence of Mr. Scribendi, very near the green glow of his banker’s lamp. He closes his eyes for the briefest of moments and continues editing; the neat red pen strokes are executed by a steady hand.
“Well, what does she say?” Of course you want to know, and I’ve been dithering.
“Oh, it’s nice to be surrounded by books again,” she’ll say. “And people who don’t act as if they’re characters in the quirkier ones.” Here she’ll giggle. “When a will is read, you just never know what to expect.” And, “My, a lion’s a BIG responsibility.”
I didn’t tell you about the lion. He’s friendly enough, doesn’t roar (yet) or swat (yet) or disembowel with gleaming fangs (yet). He drapes himself each day about the base of Mrs. Scribendi’s wooden stool and accepts her nylon stocking-footed caresses carelessly. He sleeps, he pants, he drinks noisily in the kitchen, and he eats all the butcher’s daily scraps, again, noisily. The butcher, Jane, has not been told the purpose of the purchase of the scraps. She thinks she knows. (She thinks the Scribendis are not doing well, having misinterpreted a news article about dot coms and auditors. She thinks auditors and editors are the same thing.) She thinks the Scribendis are turning the scraps into a sort of headcheese for economy. She has told others in town, but, as most of her surmising is so dead wrong, no one has paid the story mind. They do wonder a bit amongst themselves, outside the butcher’s shop, about the scraps (they assume this part, the buying of scraps part, of the story is true). No one has guessed a lion.
“No Flying Scribendis anymore when the papa has died,” Mrs. Scribendi offered on the day we met Tawno. She followed it with a meaningful, “Circus folk know what THEY don’t want to look after.”
Tawno is eyeing me. I’ll close here for now…
(August 2002)

I'm off, too. I doubt I'll run into the Scribendis. They have seedier places to see. It's not seedy in Timberlea. Salty.
It's always me going on, isn't it, and not a word do I allow edgewise from you. Maybe you'll be somewhere nice this week and how are we all to know in this great big office? I'll ask Mr. Scribendi about a guestbook when he gets back. If his eyes aren't haunted. If he hears any but the inner voice.
(July 2002)

Memo: The Scribendis are on holiday. Quill, the basset hound, is watching the office, and Pachanga, next door, is watching Quill. Sandy, from the NoStik temporary help agency will handle your inquiries.
The Scribendis, by now, not travellers by nature, will have become tired of the 401. They will be tired of stopping for coffee and gas at bright and gritty service centres. Tired of meeting in the parking lots forest green minivan-loads of grumpy and rumpled families yawning and pulling the inseams of their shorts into place. Mr. and Mrs. Scribendi do not wear shorts. Outer shorts.
They will be relieved when they come to the Guppville off ramp. Until then.
(July 2002)

Mr. and Mrs. Scribendi and the Sad Day

Mrs. Scribendi, in carefully pressed black suit and spotless black patent leather pumps, adjusted the black pillbox hat that hid, but not completely, her blonde curls, then bent to straighten her already perfectly straight stocking seams. What wasn’t perfect was her countenance. Mrs. Scribendi was very sad, and it showed. Oh dear, she had another tear to wipe.

Mr. Scribendi, also in severe black, relieved, but not brightened, by the snowy whiteness of his shirt, glanced at Jim’s empty desk before pulling the car keys from his pocket. He held in his other hand an 8 ½ by 11 sign by its string loop.

“Yes, we had better go,” Mrs. Scribendi agreed, in a soft voice, to her husband’s unspoken suggestion. Mrs. Scribendi preceded her husband out the door, and after he had locked up and hung the sign on the doorknob, the couple greeted their good neighbour, Pachanga, on the sidewalk.

“Oh, what shall we do without him.” Mrs. Scribendi was whispering and very near unseemly racked sobs. Pachanga looked down at the sidewalk. Mr. Scribendi did the same. Then, rallying, the three walked to the car and got in. All was quiet during the short drive to the funeral home.

The casket was closed. Jim had no family, but more friends than the Scribendis would have thought. There were, of course, his clickperson acquaintances, those folks who had always insisted upon talking to “Jim at Scribendi,” and a handful of colleagues from his newspaper days. His friends, mutual friends, actually, of Pachanga and Jim, from the design/editorial world were there, most notably Kathy and Mell. Kathy was to sing at the funeral and had brought her guitar. “He wanted Rise Again,” she whispered to Mell, seated close by. “It was in his papers. It’s odd, because he doesn’t have any children.”

“We don’t really know that for sure, though,” offered Mell. “We don’t know much about his life before Scribendi at all.” Kathy nodded, still worried lest the mourners think it was she who had chosen the “peppy dirge.”

Father Boggins took as his homily theme The Irony of Life and Death. And, oh, how appropriate. None could staunch the tears that flowed upon hearing that final sentence: “His life was editing; his death was editing.”

Jim, you see, hadn’t been hit by a bus. He wasn’t the victim of an auto accident. He wasn’t tragically struck down by dread disease. Jim had – oh, this is so hard – Jim had fallen asleep at his desk and onto his red pen late, late Monday evening. That seemingly innocent instrument (it didn’t seem so to authors, of course) had punctured his temple, and he finally, in his dying moments, followed the instructions of so many of his customers. “Bleed red,” they would choose from the order form suggestions. Jim bled red on a particularly hackneyed chapter of a particularly bad novel.

Mr. and Mrs. Scribendi returned home after the funeral lunch and removed the sign from the door. “Death in the Family,” it said. Indeed, it seemed so to the mourning Scribendis. Jim had been like a son. Life would not be the same. And neither would the website. Mr. Scribendi, sleepless in the wee hours of the next morning, removed the “bleed red” instruction choice from the now black-rimmed order form page.

(June 2002)

Mr. and Mrs. Scribendi and the Flying Scribendis

Jim was surprised. The package he had picked up for Mr. Scribendi at the post office that morning had looked like any other. Sure, the return address hadn’t been a publisher’s, but that, in itself, was not unusual. Often authors sent their work directly to Mr. Scribendi after getting the address from Mrs. Scribendi at the switchboard. The grains of glitter and – was that sawdust? – stuck to the underside of the packing tape had caused Jim briefly to raise an eyebrow, and he had noted that, although the handwriting was bad and the street name spelled Shurmun, the Scribendi name was perfectly, beautifully, almost magically executed.
But the surprise had come as Mrs. Scribendi opened the box. Jim noticed a slight pursing of the lips, a patting of that tight coil of hair at her nape and a glance downwards, as if to substantiate herself, before she took up the exacto-knife.
Sequins and satin spilled from the box; a glittering slipper dropped to Mrs. Scribendi’s hand-braided rug, immediately muting its colours.
Mrs. Scribendi, back straight, eyes closed, laid down the knife. She opened her eyes, drew the material, shiny reds and golds, from the box and found an envelope at the bottom. “Would you rather Jim left the room, dear?” were her first words.
Mr. Scribendi, seated, as always, at his desk, the green glow of the banker’s lamp casting heavy shadows under his eyes, shook his head. “No, Jim has work to do here. He won’t mind this.”
Jim smiled reassuringly at Mrs. Scribendi, realized he had temporarily forgotten all about work, and bent over his keyboard. He typed into his unfinished book review, “The reader who appreciates finely detailed historical information will be delighted; the reader who is merely looking for a cracking good tale will be no less pleased.” He read it over onscreen, rolled his eyes, and, in doing so, saw that Mrs. Scribendi had removed a letter from the envelope and was just about to read.
Our dearest boy:
Mr. Scribendi looked up.
We need you as never before. Dominico has broken his leg – yes, you warned that the Impossible Rubber Band Catch was impossible, we know – and mother is hysterical. You know so well that your decision to run away from the circus broke her heart. An editor! My son, my son, come back to us. Put on the costume. You know it suits you. Don’t listen to that wife of yours. Get her a costume, too, if you must. She can sell peanuts.
“Really!” Mrs. Scribendi put a hand to her forehead. The headache would be severe.
Come, son. The Flying Scribendis are lost without you.
Your loving father.
Mr. Scribendi rose from his wooden chair. He took both Mrs. Scribendi’s hands in his and looked into her eyes. She looked away. “No, dear. Please, no.” Her voice trailed off. Mr. Scribendi let go, turned and held up the costume, examining its saucer-sized buttons, its slim lamé trousers. He looked again at his wife, then carefully folded the material and packed it into the box. Mrs. Scribendi looked up, eyes shining. She opened a drawer and handed Mr. Scribendi the packing tape. He sealed the box. Was he smiling? Just a bit? Mrs. Scribendi had the black marker ready.
“RETURN TO SENDER,” she wrote.
Later that day, while Jim was out taking the package back to the post office, and while Mrs. Scribendi was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches for their lunch (extra pickles for her wonderful husband), Mr. Scribendi looked down at the rug. He quietly crossed the room and picked up the special trapeze artist’s shoe. It caught the light as he turned it this way and that. He continued to admire its flashing as he walked back to his desk. He tucked it away.
No one, not Mrs. Scribendi, nor Jim, nor their good friend next door, would come to suspect what lay in Mr. Scribendi’s bottom drawer.
(June 2002)