TO THE POINT WHERE

Before he died Maxwell had completed translations of two works: Tobias Durchdenwald’s furiously political Where Has It Gone? (1978), a “rot in high places” novel, and  Berm (1982) by Roy X. Scheider (not to be confused with the American actor), a largely factual history of a land dispute between two families in Emsland. Both books offer, in their own ways, vivid portraits of contemporary German society, and we have only Maxwell to thank for their existence, as he was not paid a penny (or, as he liked to joke, “a pfennig”) for his labor, and in fact was consistently mocked by his American editor, Anne T. Harris, to the point where he sought counseling that failed to console him and led him to plan the desert sojourn that resulted in his untimely demise. Harris, also his ex-wife, did not cry at his funeral.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

ENTERTAINING

The dinner table was set with expectations and disappointments. Elodie ladled from the tureen into each bowl, careful to divide equally among her guests. Service was not a time to show favoritism. It was a time to show competence, precision even. Ronald, her sister's boyfriend, began to eat without waiting for the others. He was aggressive with his spoon. He took too much too fast and began to choke on a provocation. Small-Time James, her other sister's boyfriend, started to chant something about brickbats and how they should call him Big-Time James if they called him anything at all. Elodie took the tureen back into the kitchen and began to weep. It was so hard to be a hostess, she thought. It was so hard to be anything at all.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YOUNG CHILDREN RAN RECKLESS

She had been working since morning, and the night before that, if working was what it could be fairly called, sitting in the chair that had been her husband’s while he was alive, pulling up the top shell of the clam of the computer, and typing sentences, one first, then another one, counting them at first because it calmed her and then letting the counting fall away until they became numberless. That was when she forgot about the pains in her hips and back, forgot about the cracked back tooth that needed fixing, and when she remembered afternoons of sitting on a lounge chair while her young children ran reckless in the back yard, chattering happily, throwing balls and water balloons, screaming when a wasp’s nest was discovered, thinking about the night before or the night to come, when she would make dinner, serve said dinner, sit up late with her husband watching TV, wait until he dozed off, and then sneak across the street to find and be found by the neighbor, an older man with a mean aspect who the kids reacted to much the way they reacted to wasps. That man had died roughly a decade ago, and that was the death she truly mourned. Her husband, eh. He had been a good man, kind where it counted, and she had buried him with a curious lightness in her heart, a sense of a job well done.

@2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

HEARD THE CRACK

Ruth Burndt-Burkett remembered dearly her father, who was a gifted orator, a handsome devil, and, concomitant to those two qualities, an irresistible salesman. He sold custom glassware, tumblers into which the customer could etch up to four letters and a small illustration no larger than one in ch square, and she accompanied him on one of his trips, leaving Boston, working the hundred-miles radius, Hindale to West Mystic, Wellfleet. He called out the stops like a conductor and in a sense that was exactly what he was. He would pull up in front of a house, listening for any shattered jingling as they slowed, and then walk around and take his sample case out of the trunk. One sample was modeled on Ruth, who was at the time a simple Ruth Anne Burndt, and carried an RAB and then a small sketch of a pony. He had made one for her mother, too, MMB, the former Milly Minnard, and the sketch there was unaccountably of him, her father, holding up what she always remembered as a tube of lipstick alongside his grinning face. That glass had broken up around Casco Bay. He heard the crack back in the trunk, the second it happened, and opened both the trunk and the case with resignation. “It’s going to rain,” he said, wrapping the jagged pieces in a towel and heading for the garbage can. There was, she knew, a meteorology to the whole thing.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas