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Up From The Sandbox
by
Harry Buschman
From The Westlake Village Collection.
Al and Edie Sampson lived at 12 Whippoorwill Way. Lloyd and Katherine Pomerance
lived at number 14. The two couples were incompatible neighbors from the day
they moved in. Al worked for the telephone company and Lloyd was an up and
coming executive with an investment brokerage house in the city.
Al was an ex-dogface who found himself up to his armpits in the waters off Omaha
Beach when the LSI's refused to move in any closer. Lloyd, a college graduate,
spent the war at sea aboard the heavy cruiser Wichita. Al marches in every
Memorial Day parade in a uniform that must be let out every year. Lloyd attends
the annual Wichita officers dinner in Annapolis in a tuxedo.
The two families moved in to the newly formed community of Westlake Village
within a day or two of each other. Their tentative hellos quickly faded when
they realized they had nothing in common. Lloyd, already distraught at the age
of thirty two, left for work at six thirty every morning in a suit and a silk
tie, carrying a slender attaché case. He was never home before dark. Al was
picked up by the driver of a telephone utility truck who blew his horn in the
street outside 12 Whippoorwill Way promptly at 8:30 every morning. He wore work
clothes and a yellow safety helmet. He was rarely seen without a Budweiser in
his hand; breakfast, in fact, was the only meal at the Sampson house that did
not involve beer. Lloyd would mix himself a double Beefeater Martini with a
twist before dinner .... the drink of Wall Street lions. He often remarked to
Katherine with scorn that bottles were meant to be poured from, not drunk from.
Edie and Al fell in love at the Feast of St. Gennaro just before the war. It was
the first time for both, and in a blinding moment of creative ecstasy, little
Willie was conceived. Al would measure every event in his later life by that
first union with Edie and the devil's throw of the dice at Omaha Beach.
Lloyd and Katherine met at the chamber music summer series of concerts at
Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Their hands touched and their fingers intertwined
during the slow movement of the Brahms Clarinet Trio in A. The insistent Gypsy
rhythms of the final movement contributed in large part to the conception of
Stacey. Unlike the Sampsons, their union was not a watershed moment for either
of them.
Throughout the years, the incomes of the two couples were remarkably similar.
Katherine got her beaver coat before Edie got her mink, but the Sampsons got a
color television set long before the Pomerances did. Three piece suits do not
always translate into the quality of life. During the soft summer nights with
the windows open to the sound of cricket and cicada, one could stand on the
sidewalk outside 12 and 14 Whippoorwill Way and feel the pounding boom of hard
rock coming from one, and by straining a bit, the plaintive whimper of Julie
Andrews might be heard from the other.
Lloyd and Katherine's preschool daughter was Stacey -- all golden curls and pink
lace panties. If you are familiar with Barbie dolls you know Barbie was frozen
in time at the age of twenty. Picture, if you can, what Barbie may have looked
like at the age of three. Without a doubt she would have been the spitting image
of Stacey Pomerance.
Al and Edie's preschool son was Willie. At the age of three, Willie was the
color of dirt and smelled of cat pee. He often played alone, chained to a
sandbox his father made for him. He shared the box with many neighborhood cats,
including mine. If you bury your nose in a cat's fur, you will not smell cat.
Cat's are too fastidious for that. But if you got within ten feet of Willie, you
could smell cat.
The smell of cat was never objectionable to Edie or Al Sampson. Both of them
came from large Irish families in South Brooklyn and leaving your children to
fend for themselves outdoors seemed natural to them. Keeping Willie fed and
hosing him down occasionally was about as far as they went.
"Willie cat pee!" Stacey would call from her upstairs bedroom window or standing
on tiptoe with her friends looking over the cyclone fence her father had built
to separate the Pomerances from the Sampsons.
Other kids walking by the Sampsons house would pick up the chant. "Willie cat
pee! .... Willie cat pee!"
Willie would smile back at them, soaking up the attention as thoroughly as he
did the smell of cat. He would have preferred company. He would have shared his
shovel and dump truck with Stacey or any of the other children passing by, but
their mothers had warned them repeatedly, "I want you to stay out of that
sandbox .... understand?"
>From time to time Edie would look out the back window to check on Willie in the
sandbox. He'd stay out there all day in the summer, even have his lunch out
there. If it started to rain she would bring him in. He would call to Stacey to
come and play with him but she would have none of it. Her refusal didn't bother
Willie. He would rather play in the sand than anything. His fondness for sand
ran counter to his father's dread of it. To Al, the sight of sand and the feel
of it between his fingers and toes always brought back that horrible morning of
June in 1944.
When he and Edie would take Willie to the beach, Willie thought he'd died and
gone to Heaven. He'd have to be carried, kicking and screaming back to the car
when it was time to go home. Al would be miserable all day, and for the
thousandth time he would fight the battle of D-Day and relate to Edie in the
minutest detail, the story she heard a thousand times before.
Stacey rarely went to the beach. With skin so delicate, and hair so fair she was
far better off in the shade of a patio umbrella -- dressing and undressing her
dolls. She had her father's complexion, his blue eyes and his absolutely
colorless hair. She inherited her mother's beautiful jet black eyebrows, thick,
perfectly formed, and capable of a wide range of expression. Lloyd's eyebrows
were white, like the rest of him. Stacey instinctively knew she was an exquisite
blend of the best her mother and father had to offer, and planned even at the
age of four, to expect a lifetime of adulation. She spent a large part of her
day before her mother's full length mirror practicing her smile and a mincing
walk that she knew would some day drive men wild.
Very few people are perfect. Most of us are saddled with imperfections. Stacey
had only one ... she was stupid, and under the most ideal conditions would never
be more than a beautiful bubble-headed blonde. At the age of four, however,
stupidity is difficult to assess, therefore Lloyd and Katherine were blissfully
serene in the expectation that their doll-like daughter would graduate from
Princeton at the age of eighteen ... summa cum laude, with a train of tenured
professors begging for her hand.
They had to settle for Murray Feldman, the bald headed china buyer for Cosmic
Imports. Although it seems to boggle the imagination, Stacey seemed to grow
dumber as she grew older. Murray summed it up well during his courtship of her
when she poutingly accused him, "All you want is my body!"
He replied, "Sure, why, what else you got?" In all honesty even Stacey was
forced to agree.
By the age of four, Willie, with sand in his pants could write his name and
address in a squiggly hand with a ball point pen. He could dial his own phone
number. He could operate the remote control of the television set. He could turn
off the gas to the oven when his mother forgot to. He could show you his
birthday on the calendar. In short, he was mentally on a par with his father,
and unless something came along to stop him, he was well on the road to becoming
a genius. Al and Edie would look at each other in amazement as each day revealed
a new facet of Willie's development. Using his father's credit card, he ordered
the Encyclopedia Britannica over the phone at the age of eight. At ten he broke
his way into Fleet Bank's depositor records using the high school computer.
When Stacey once asked him for help with her algebra homework, he could have
told her to pound salt. It would have helped to repay the many injustices she
had heaped on him as he sat alone in his sandbox. But he didn't; he simply
explained that it wouldn't do any good. "Forget it Stace .... you're a turd-head,
get used to it." Though both of them were the same age, Willie finished
undergraduate work at Penn State six months after Stacey got out of Westlake
Village High.
Stacey left our employment at the Westlake Village "Guardian" to work in china
at Cosmic Imports, (that's china with a small "c," like in cups and saucers).
She left an emptiness at the paper that Lucas Crosby and I found impossible to
fill. even though we had no difficulty adding her duties to our own. When the
phone rang Lucas or I would answer it, (we hadn't thought of doing that before).
Lucas's wife did what little typing there was to do at night after supper.
Intelligence aside, efficiency aside, wit aside, some people leave an emptiness.
Stacey took beauty with her when she left the "Guardian," and to elderly
newspaper men, beauty's every bit as important as brains.
With a rare show of tenderness, Lucas sighed, "Jesus, I'm gonna miss that
broad."
No one will ever say that about Willie.
©Harry Buschman 1998
(1670)
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