During her lunch break Leslie Carter visited the park where two hundred feet away a middle-aged man was talking to a gray squirrel. The squirrel sat up alertly on its haunches, arms outstretched, and every so often the man tossed him a peanut from a paper bag. The rodent efficiently stripped away the outer shell and munched on the succulent kernel as the lunatic blathered away incoherently.
Leslie settled back comfortably on her own bench. The black woman had nothing to fear. The older, gray-haired man, who looked to be in his late fifties, paid no attention to any of the other visitors. He seldom raised his voice except when driving home an impassioned point. His only focus was the solicitous squirrel.
But today was different. A light, persistent breeze was blowing in an easterly direction, carrying the man’s pedantic monologue across the two-hundred foot void, allowing the woman to hear pretty much everything being said.
“So, where did we leave off yesterday,” the man asked, “before the torrential downpour interrupted our conversation?”
Interrupted our conversation… Leslie noted that the term ‘conversation’ tacitly implied a reciprocal and reasonably balanced give-and-take between both parties in the dialogue. Did he realize he was talking to a gray squirrel? The black woman removed a sandwich from a small bag and splayed the wrapping across her lap to reveal a corned beef sandwich with sauerkraut and kosher dill pickle.
“I was telling you how I lost my job and ended up on a twenty-year treadmill to nowhere.” The man stared pensively at the animal. “Or perhaps you’d prefer something more sanguine?”
The squirrel shook his head vigorously from side to side and cut loose with a series of high-pitched squeals.
“The software company where I worked designed business payroll programs.” The crazy man tossed the squirrel another peanut, which he deftly caught and deposited in his right cheek for safekeeping. “An employer filled in the number of hours worked for each person in his company. The software calculated deductions, gross and net pay.”
The squirrel took a step closer, crooked its silver-gray head to one side and appeared to be listening intently as a small girl accompanied by her mother approached from the main entrance. “Mommy, that man is talking to the furry squirrel!”
The woman steered her child in a wide arc away from the paved path. “That’s none of our business,” she replied tersely.
“Does the squirrel understand what he’s saying?”
“Of course not!” the mother insisted. “Animals can’t talk or reason.”
“But every time the man says something the squirrel responds. It’s like a real conversation.”
Chirrup. Chirrup. Chirrup. Chirrup. Chirrup. Just as the young child noted, the squirrel erupted in a series of barks, grunts, bird-like chirpings and unintelligible chitter-chatter following each of the man’s comments, creating the outlandish and utterly implausible impression of meaningful dialogue.
“Dear god!” The flustered mother yanked the child off at a sharp angle and hurried out of sight beyond a grove of weeping willows.
“A year and a half ago I discovered a flaw in the software program,” the crazy man picked up the thread of his narrative. “Insufficient memory in one of the design modules caused the computer to seize up and stop working.” “The program was rendered obsolete after only a few years usage and the customer obligated to purchase an upgrade… a new and improved version.”
“I spoke to my supervisor about the problem,” the man continued his soliloquy, “and suggested increasing the storage capacity by several gigabytes.” “He said that my request was not unreasonable and would look into the matter.” The squirrel smacked his paws together, a repetitive gesture, as though he was applauding the upper echelon, corporate decision. “But nothing came of my request. One day six months later, in a fit of exasperation, I told the supervisor how I felt… that the unnecessary upgrade was nothing more than planned obsolescence - legalized extortion that forced unwitting customers to shell out money for products they didn’t really need.”
“The supervisor fired me on the spot. No notice. No severance package. No nothing!”
“What did I learn from the experience?” The squirrel blinked several times in rapid succession then, crouching to one side, scratched his left ear with a hind leg before settling back down in an earnest, listening mode. “Earning a modest living is for chumps, dopes, deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Consumerism cannibalizes its own. Expedient self-interest is its own justification.”
The squirrel interrupted with a high-pitched squeal, suggesting that he perfectly understood the speaker’s quandary. The shrill howl set Leslie’s nerves on edge.
Sipping from a bottle of mango fruit juice, Leslie gawked at the despondent lunatic, whose hands were flailing desolately in the air. He was carrying on an energetic and dispassionate conversation with a rodent and yet a certain crystalline logic was embedded in his rather one-sided tirade. The squirrel, who had been holding a peanut in its right paw for the longest time, seemed far too engrossed in the subject matter to crack open the nut.
The young man suddenly leaned forward, placing his lips alongside the rodent’s left ear. “Couldn’t find work for the longest time and finally settled on a series of mindless, entry-level positions… Janitor in a paint factory, short-order chef, clerk in a shoe store.” “After losing the job, I had no appetites for working with computers. I took to drink and, when the unemployment checks eventually ran out, my wife left me. I became a recluse, misanthrope, misogynist… well maybe not a misogynist but I wasn’t doing all that well with women either.”
The squirrel hadn’t budged an inch despite the man’s proximity. He still clutched the uneaten nut in front of a bristly nose. “Five years I stumble-bumbled from one pathetic mishap to another – a veritable job gypsy – and what did I take away from the soul-numbing ordeal?
Like a sailboat in a turbulent windstorm, Leslie felt her body list in the direction of the impassioned confession. She folded the remains of the corned beef sandwich in its wrapper and placed the refuse in the bag with the empty juice bottle. “A consumer society cannibalizes its own. It devours everything in its path with carnivorous glee.”
As if on cue, the squirrel cut loose with a high-pitched tittering. The black woman shook her head, an involuntary, reflexive gesture, trying to clear her brain. Was the feral creature agreeing with the lunatic or offering a dissenting opinion? The man finally fell silent. A brief moment passed. The squirrel spun about on its heels and hopped away in an erratic zigzag fashion. Reaching a wide oak tree near a shallow pond, the critter scurried up the trunk, disappearing among the leafy branches.
“Excuse me.” Leslie approached and stood in front of the man with hands on hips. “You understand that a squirrel hasn’t the ability to understand human speech?” Her words emerged more as a question than bona fide statement of fact.
“Of course not!” He sounded offended. “It’s got a brain the size of a pea and lives by instinct rather than reason.”
“Then why talk to it?”
“If I commiserate with rodents, it’s a victimless crime.” He cracked a bittersweet, self-effacing smile. “Catholics attend church. They sit in a confessional and recount their sins. I come here and vent to a gray squirrel, who coincidentally is an excellent listener.”
Leslie lumbered off in the direction of the entrance to the park but abruptly pulled up and returned to where the man, clutching the half-eaten bag of peanuts, was sitting. “I’m Leslie Carter. I own a kosher delicatessen over by the library.”
“You don’t look Jewish.”
“It’s a long story,” she observed dismissively, thrusting a hand in front of his chest.
He took the hand and pumped it up and down energetically. “Jason McDougal… I’m clerking over at the Dairy Mart.”
“That’s two blocks down from my place.” He shook his head in the affirmative.
Was it the disgruntled, former software programmer or the quirky squirrel that intrigued her? Leslie couldn’t be sure. The woman intended to return to the park the following day, but the October weather was unsettled with the rumblings of thunder eventually giving way to a steady pitter-patter of warm, late-summer rain. The weekend arrived and with it a number of familial obligations and it wasn’t until the middle of the following week when she found herself back on the bench, but the disaffected Jason McDougal was nowhere to be found. Leslie unwrapped her lunch revealing an aromatic slice of brisket wedged between thick slabs of dark rye with a thousand island dressing.
“Well, hello there!” She had just begun nibbling at the crust when the squirrel resurfaced and picked its way to the further bench. “Your friend’s not here today and, unfortunately, I haven’t any nuts.” Five minutes passed. The squirrel continued to bide his time waiting for Jason McDougal. Finally the animal came to where Leslie was sitting. “I don’t suppose you’d care for this spicy meat.” Ten minutes later, the black woman had finished her lunch, emptied the juice container and stowed the wrappings in a velour tote bag. The squirrel continued to linger, sitting back on its haunches with the paws clasped together in a prayerful gesture.
Chitter. Chitter. Chitter. Chitter. Chitter. When Leslie slung the bag over her shoulder and made a motion to stand, the squirrel stepped closer and expectantly tilted his head to one side. “You want me to bare my soul? Emotional diarrhea was never my forte. I’m more the stoic, grin-and-bear-it type.”
Chit. Chit. Chit. Chit. Chit...
Leslie blew out her cheeks and groaned loudly. “Leslie Carter… I’m sixty-eight, Afro-of American and owner of a kosher delicatessen in a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon community.” She brushed a strand of kinky hair out of her eyes. By way of warning, the woman added, “You really want to hear this?”
The squirrel inched closer, wiggled its nose and fixed the woman with a decidedly kindhearted expression. Leslie glanced over her shoulder and then swept the grassy knoll with her walnut-colored eyes from right to left. The park was empty. “Forty years ago I was living on Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester, Massachusetts.”
“Jew Hill Avenue… that’s what we called it, because of all the Russian and Polish Jews that resettled there following the Second World War.” “During high school I took a job in a kosher delicatessen. Max’s Deli… the owner was this balding Lithuanian Jew. With hairy ears and a pushed-in nose, Max Mendlebaum stood barely an inch over five feet in his birthday suit.”
“Six months I split my time between scrubbing dishes, waiting tables and food prep behind the counter.” “The clientele, mostly Eastern European Jews, spoke a hodgepodge of guttural German, Yiddish, Russian and – when all else failed – butchered English.”
The squirrel made a series of birdlike incantations before allowing Leslie to continue. “From the 1950’s Jewish immigrants flooded the area, but by 1960 more than half of the ninety thousand residents deserted Boston – a mass exodus, white flight, call it what you will – heading south to the middle-class suburban communities of Canton, Milton, Randolph and Sharon. Low-income blacks were flooding north from the Deep South in search of jobs and a better life. But along with their good will and best intentions, they brought broken families, drugs and gang violence as part of the new order.”
One day in her third year working at the deli, Leslie approached the owner. “Try this.” She handed him a platter of silver-dollar size pancakes along with a dollop of sour cream laced with chopped scallions.
“Whatchoo got dere?”
“Potato latkes… a new and improved recipe.”
The squat Jew stared at the platter with a dour expression. “No gut!”
“And why not?”
“It’s the wrong texture.” He screwed his features up in a disgruntled grimace. “You have to shred the potatoes and onions not run them through a goddamn food processer.”
“Yes, I realize it’s not traditional,” Leslie countered, “but just taste.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Just try… one little latke.” Leslie would not be denied.
Max seized a diminutive pancake between a thumb and forefinger, mashed it into the sour cream and tossed the morsel into his mouth. “Not bad!” He grabbed a second helping.
“There’s a distinct advantage to feeding the vegetables through a blender, since the preparer doesn’t waste time forming individual patties.” Leslie paused just long enough to insure that she had his full attention. “You drop the batter into the hot oil from a large spoon or measuring cup. It saves both time and manpower.”
“You put in the eggs?” the owner pressed.
“Yes, of course.”
“The flour, salt, pepper, baking powder?”
“Just like the original recipe.”
Max Mendlebaum thoughtfully rubbed a stubbly chin. “Tomorrow we add a new item to the menu… Leslie’s silver-dollar latkes.”
On another occasion, Leslie pulled the owner aside. “The mixer doesn’t work.”
“You check the fuse box?”
“Yeah, nothing’s blown.”
With a pair of pliers, Max loosened several bolts on the metal housing and lifted the lid. An acrid odor permeated the air. “Drive belt snapped.” He extricated the broken belt and handed it to Leslie. “Take this down to the hardware store on Christopher Street and have them match up a replacement.”
“Why not just call a mechanic?
“Meshuganah!” The roly-poly Jewish man balled his hand into a fist and rapped the knuckles gently on the girl’s forehead. “A mechanic might not get here until late afternoon and what would we do for bread and sandwich rolls in the meantime?”
When Leslie returned a half hour later, Max said “Good! Now go fix the broken machine.”
“I’m not a mechanic.”
“Before the belt broke, you were a deli worker.” the man handed her an adjustable wrench and slotted screwdriver. “Now you’re a mechanic.”
Back in the kitchen Leslie lifted the cover on the commercial mixer and nestled the new rubber belt over the larger of two wheels, but the band fell far short of its mate. “Now what?”
“Loosen the bold on the chrome housing,” Max instructed, indicating a thick nut centered in the spindle. The girl made two turns with the wrench and the wheel began to wobble unsteadily. Pushing forward, she eased the band over the smaller wheel and, while Max held the unit firmly in place, secured the bolt hand-tight.
“Moment of truth!” The owner flipped the switch and the mixing paddle began revolving in typical fashion.
“Next time a belt breaks, what you gonna do?”
“Leslie grinned embarrassedly. “Not call the owner.”
Eleven years into her job at Max’s Deli the owner took her aside one day.
“You heard what happened yesterday?” Leslie, who was slicing meats, stopped what she was doing and looked up. “Rabbi Zelermyer… they threw acid on him.” Max morosely rubbed his eyes with an undulating gesture. “The farshtinkener bums… gut far nuttin’ hoodlums. The cops got em.”
The tacit understanding was that the youths who brutalized Rabbi Zelermyer, were black, but the owner was too discrete to say so. “What’s gonna happen now?”
“Nuttin’,” Max grunted hoarsely. “The rabbi don’t want no trouble wid your kind. Things are bad enough as they are.” The older man paced back and forth with his stubby hands in his pockets. Finally he said, “The deli’s been robbed three times this year alone and it ain’t even summer. Enough is enough! I’m retiring… end of the month.” My wife and I… we put a down payment on a condo in Coral Gables. I’m gonna sit on the beach and watch the pelicans and pretty goils. Dat’s what I’m gonna do.”
“What about the business?” Leslie asked.
“Want a kosher deli? It’s yours. I’ll sell it to you for a dollar… one crummy buck!” When there was no immediate response, Max added, “Take the commercial cooking equipment, furnishings and inventory. Relocate to a safer community on the South Shore and reopen under a new name.”
She shook her head violently. “A Jewish delicatessen run by a black woman.” Leslie was thinking out loud.
Ten years you been wid me,” he countered. “You know the business inside-out… better than all the other employees taken together.” “And anyway,” he blustered indignantly, “gut food is colorblind.”
The day after Max so cavalierly offered her the business for a crummy buck, Leslie stopped by the Franklin Park Zoo. A plaque at the entrance explained how Franklin Park, previously known as West Roxbury Park, was renamed in honor of the Boston-born patriot, Benjamin Franklin, who in his will wished that a portion of his estate be given to a worthy cause, one that would provide rural scenery, a woodland preserve and recreation areas.
Leslie sometimes visited the Long Crouch Woods, the location of the historic Bear Dens, where she could better collect her thoughts. Once the focus of the zoo, the Bear Dens was designed in 1912 and were planned to house a small collection of domestic animals. The original grounds featured a grand staircase leading to a large courtyard, framed by several large bear cages, one of which featured a detailed stone sculpture of bears and the city of Boston crest.
Plans to expand the Long Crouch Woods never came to fruition. As the grounds deteriorated, the Park Department neglected many of the most basic needs and the Bears Den became too expensive to maintain. Now, as Leslie sat on a moldy wall, the grounds were littered with piles of trash and empty liquor bottles. She viewed the crumbling bear sculpture as emblematic of the surrounding community. The tarnished structure was a stark metaphor for how not to live one’s life.
A few months back, Leslie visited a neighborhood friend who moved thirty miles south to Quincy to distance herself from the ever-growing blight and petty crime. The suburban community was clean and vibrant. Young blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians were darting in and out of trendy shops and modern office buildings. If Leslie relocated Max’s Deli to such a stylish location, she would need to rebrand the restaurant. The Quincy clientele would demand a more sophisticated atmosphere in order to satisfy their yuppie palettes.
Leslie’s Eatery! Drop the Deli. Tweak the menu.
Leslie glanced up a second time at the eroding sculpture – a pair of massive bears rearing up on their hind legs on either side of the Boston crest. She had just entered kindergarten when her parents brought her to the Bears Den. The magnificent, sand-colored structure filled the six year-old girl with unutterable wonder. Now, the crumbling structure reminded her of a desecrated plot in a paupers’ burial ground.
Up and down the length of Hancock Street modern buildings with elaborate facades and condominiums were replacing dilapidated, turn-of-the-century wooden structures. Gentrification – that was the new normal. Leslie’s Eatery would keep all the traditional foods – the quality meats, cheeses and specialty items that branded the restaurant as a cut above the competition. The potato and apple kugels, lox and cream cheese spreads, meat and cheese stuffed bakes knishes, chopped liver and so on – she would change nothing! For customers with more conventional tastes, they could offer burgers and hotdogs.
Early in life Leslie Carter found her calling. She was a cook. Herbs and spices were her passion. Pungent and exotic flavorings came as natural to her as nuanced words to a poet. Max Mendlebaum, the most unlikely of mentors, had passed the torch and there was no going back.
And yet, Leslie felt cut adrift, a solitary island unto herself. She was a twenty-seven year-old black woman working in a Jewish delicatessen. When she cooked up a tray of sweet fragrantly pungent knishes stuffed with ground meat, sauerkraut, onions, cheese or kasha, she experienced a bliss bordering on the mystical. But it placed her in another paradigm or parallel universe.
A coffee-colored black woman pushed a baby stroller around a bend in the road heading toward the Bears Den. Decked out in a maroon colored dashiki trimmed with an eggshell lace, the woman, whose hair was done up in cornrow braids, was strikingly pretty. “Leslie Carter,” the mulatto called out when the twosome were fifty feet away.
Leslie stared at the woman uncertainly. “Angela Simons… I sing in the chorus at the Mount Zion Church with your mother.”
“Oh, yes. I remember.” Leslie approached and peered into the carriage. Every bit as pretty as the mother, the infant stared back at her with a dreamy-eyed innocence.”
“I attended high school with your brother, Waldo. How’s he doing these days?”
“Waldo got a job at a gas station in Cleveland Circle. Started out pumping gas, but now he does brake jobs, tune ups and front end alignments.”
“Mechanics,” the woman observed with a shrewd grin, “never go hungry.”
After Angela Simons and her lovely daughter departed Leslie remembered how, the day before her fifteenth birthday, Waldo, brought his adolescent, kid sister to a Black Panther rally in Copley Square across from the Boston Public Library. Leslie vaguely remembered raising a clenched fist and chanting “Power to the People!” until her voice became hoarse. A week later she took the job at Max’s Deli and shortly after that Waldo was hired in Cleveland circle. Now the Black Panthers were little more than a distant memory for both siblings.
Back at the deli it was the mid-afternoon lull. Business had petered away to a handful of customers and the dinner crowd wouldn’t straggle in for another couple hours. After taking inventory of meats and cheeses in the refrigerated display case, Leslie phoned her supplier with the order and around six left the assistant manager to close up.
Upon reaching home she filled the bathtub, poured a generous scoop of Calgon bath beads into the steamy water and watched as the frothy bubbles multiplied. Leslie lit a scented candle, dimmed the lights and lowered her weary body into the soothing water. Middle aged was accompanied by a myriad of transitory aches and pains. A minimalist at heart, scented bubble baths were one of the few luxuries she treasured.
When the water rose above her chest, Leslie shut the spigot, lay back luxuriating and stretched her limbs. What had she learned from her visits to the park? Among other things, the crazy man who talked to squirrels wasn’t necessarily nuts.
Déjà vu. When she was processing payroll the week before Thanksgiving, a message cropped up on the computer screen.
‘Warning!
A data cache has reached maximum capacity.
Please upgrade your software package!
Leslie contacted the company and spoke to a technician, who offered a hundred and fifty-dollar fix for the problem. “What’s the alternative?”
“Well you might be okay for a while if you don’t add additional staff,” he replied glibly, “but at some point the program will reach overload.”
“Overload,” Leslie repeated. “That certainly doesn’t sound encouraging.”
“Which is why, as a courtesy, we’re notifying all our valued customers.”
The smart aleck was talking ragtime, but what recourse did she have? The company had her over a barrel. If the software seized up and the computer went down, no one got paid. Leslie could write checks by hand, but then, how could she figure state and federal taxes, benefits and other deductions? It was just like the would-be whistleblower, Jason McDougal, in his impassioned diatribe suggested – big business sodomized the public on a daily basis. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.
Leslie fished her wallet out of her purse. “Can I pay over the phone?”
“We accept all major credit cards.” The technician was smooth as silk.
The water temperature had dropped a few degrees.
With her right toe Leslie deftly flicked the hot water on and positioned a moist washcloth over her eyes. All in all, the owner of Leslie’s Eaterie had nothing to complain about. She had loyal, dependable help plus an ever-burgeoning throng of enthusiastic customers.
The middle-aged woman blew a frothy heap of bubbles away from her face as a fleeting image of her mentor flitted across her brain. What was that silly nickname Max Mendlebaum called Leslie all the way back to her teenage years?
Shayna punim… yes that was it!
One day she cornered him near the soda dispenser. “That weird term, shyna punim… what’s it mean?”
The owner kissed her on either cheek then rubbed the wetness away with the heel of his hand. “It’s a Yiddish term. The first word is German, the second Hebrew. Shayna punim… pretty face.” He chuckled in a rhythmic bass, as though at some private joke. “It takes two languages to describe a girl as precious as you.” He smiled mischievously. “Now ain’t that something!”
The Lithuanian Jew loved her like a daughter. Not that he ever said as much. But from an early age, Leslie was clever at reading body language. Her female intuition was spot on. From the day the mixing machine broke and he sent the girl to the hardware store, Max Mendlebaum was grooming her to take over the business. And that was a full three years before he retired to Florida.
The suds in the tepid bathwater had all but dissipated. Leslie reached for a bar of lavender soap, slathered her limbs and torso then made a mental note to tell the squirrel about the semantic derivation of the Yiddish term, shayna punim, the evils of corporations that hawked computer software programs and the circuitous route her life had taken. Only now was the woman beginning to understand Jason’s twisted logic. You confided your sacred, inner most secrets – what resided in your primordial heart-of-hearts - to a scruffy squirrel, because most humans lacked the innate capacity to understand anything out of the commonplace. A squirrel, on the other hand, proved a dispassionate sounding board. He reflected the elemental truth regarding the randomness of the human condition.
Later that evening Leslie drove cross-town to the Dairy Mart and eased her Toyota alongside a gas pump. “Twenty dollars… regular.” Leslie slid the money across the counter. Jason, who was loading a roll of lottery tickets onto a spindle, looked up. “You’re the woman from the park.”
“Could we speak a moment?” Leslie asked self-consciously
Another clerk was helping a customer at separate register. Jason spoke briefly to the man and came out to join her at the pump. “You didn’t visit the park today.”
“One of the day clerks called out on short notice and I had to work a double shift.”
When the gas flow shut off, Leslie removed the nozzle and replaced the cap. “I had a lengthy, rather one-sided conversation with our mutual friend.” She told Jason in graphic detail about Blue Hill Avenue and its colorful denizens.
“Between my harangue last week and yours today,” Jason’s features dissolved in a wry smile, “it’s a wonder the squirrel didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown.”
“Or seek less dysfunctional companionship.”
Jason grabbed a squeegee from a plastic pail and began cleaning the car’s windshield. “My manager just got transferred to a store in New Hampshire, and they bumped the assistant manager up to fill his position.”
“That’s nice.”
He flipped the tool a hundred and eighty degrees and began clearing away the dirty water. “I’m taking over for the assistant.”
“A promotion?”
Jason grinned a second time. “Better pay and benefits.” He returned the squeegee to the rack. “I know what I said the other day about the evils of consumerism, but it sure feels nice to get ahead and see a little daylight.” A steady stream of customers began trickling into the Dairy Mart, and he made a motion to leave.
“I was wondering,” Leslie blurted the words in a disjointed heap, “if we could share.”
“Share what?”
“The squirrel with the cropped ear.”
Jason considered the odd request. “I could go every other day.”
“Or better yet, we could sit together on the same bench.”
“This is all new to me… uncharted territory.”
Unable to decipher his intent, the black woman pursed her lips and stepped closer. “Are you referring to me or the rodent?”
“Both.”
