Urban Planning

Eleanor could see immediately that it was impossible. The box spring was not going to fit up the stairs. It was a queen size and it was just too big. She had an excellent sense of spatial relations, which generally annoyed people. She could fill grocery bags or moving vans with the same gratuitous perfection, fitting an end table or a box of pancake mix into the last little jig saw gap that no one cared about but her. It was the same with parking. She had a trivial genius for it that made David crazy. Whenever she tried to help him, he would turn icy and polite. Finally he’d say, “You do it then” and get out of the car. So she did it, but he never paid attention and he never improved. To learn something from her would be a defeat. Blaming her was better. Anything unpleasant made more sense to David if it was someone’s fault. She thought about those primitive tribes she had read about in Sociology class at college, where the king was celebrated if the crops were good, and killed when the crops were bad. That was David’s kind of world.

“I’m sure we can do this,” he was saying now, squinting up the stairs in the dim hallway light. It was a brilliant, sparkling early November afternoon outside. But not in here. The stuffy, overheated passageway felt like midnight in August. Eleanor yawned. The two moving men shifted from foot to foot awaiting orders.

“It’s not going to fit, David,” she said again.

He stared at her in the gloom. “You’re a quitter,” he said. “All we have to do is get it up to that first landing. Then we can flatten it out so it goes over the banister and just swing it around. What do you say, guys?”

The moving man, who seemed to be in charge, his name was Ted, nodded.

“Worth a try,” he said.

So they tried it. Eleanor could tell the corner of the box spring was going to snag on the bottom edge of the next landing, but she said nothing. Ten minutes later she was wedged against the wall with the plastic corner guard of the box spring pushing into her solar plexus. She could scarcely breathe and she could feel an asthma attack coming on. The hall was very musty.

“Just lift your corner!,” David was yelling at the other moving man. ‘It’s gotta go higher!”

“It won’t go any higher, David,” Eleanor said quietly. “It’s stuck.”

He made them try again anyway, but the cumbersome piece of furniture was simply too wide for the gap between the upper landing and the wall.

“David,” she began again.

“Fine! You win. Take it down, guys.”

They eased the box spring down the stairs and stood panting in the corridor.

“If we could just get rid of this banister,” David said. He sounded serious.

“We can’t do that, David. It’s not our house.”

“Obviously. I’m just saying -- wait a second. Okay, I’ve got it. What we have to do is -- we have to take it up vertically. What d’ya say guys? You think that would work? We just walk it straight up the stairs. It should go around that corner no problem.”

Why couldn’t he see that it was too tall? It seemed so obvious.

“Maybe we should measure first,” Eleanor suggested.

“No need to. I can tell it’s gonna work. Just look at it. We’re golden!”

That was one of David’s favorite phrases. He had gotten it from some old movie. It sounded tinny and false, particularly now, when his plan wasn’t going to work and they weren’t golden at all. She tried to think of a mineral depressing enough to describe this moment. Bauxite, perhaps. “We’re bauxite!” had a certain ring to it.

“C’mon,” he was saying to the moving men. Let’s give it a shot.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Driscoll.”

So they tried it. But there wasn’t enough clearance and the bed got stuck on the lower edge of the next landing. They tilted it, but it hit the spindles of the railing and blocked the stairs diagonally. It was jammed there and it took fifteen minutes to get it back down.

Eleanor was exhausted.

“This isn’t going to work,” she said.

“Yes it is. We’re going to make it work and I’m counting on you to help.”

“But, David – “
“I’m so goddamn sick of your constant negativity! All you see is the problem. That’s the difference between us, Ellie. I see solutions. I solve problems. You just make them worse.”

Ted glanced at her – a small, sympathetic shrug. She would have thanked him but she despised the way David said “Thank you!” when someone agreed with him, as if he had finally found an ally in a world of idiots.

“So it’s my fault that the bed is too big for the stairs?”

“That’s not the point. The point is that winners keep looking for a solution when the losers give up.”

“David. It’s not a question of attitude or opinion. The bed won’t fit. It’s a fact. Don’t take my word for it. Measure it yourself.”

She recalled the day last Spring when they had gone to see Dr. Abromowitz -- standing on the street outside his office, arguing. David had wanted a second opinion; this was it. Medical evidence proved the problem had nothing to do with her. He couldn’t believe it. He wanted a third opinion. “These guys are all friends, they all went to medical school together, they’re not going to make themselves look bad. They’re in cahoots with each other!”

She couldn’t help it – she’d started laughing. “Cahoots? What are you talking about? No one uses that word. No one knows what it means. What is a cahoot, anyway?”

He had turned sulky. He never liked her jokes. “I don’t know,” he had muttered. “But they’re in it. All of them.”

It was just like architecture school. She had taken two jobs so that he could give up contracting and do his graduate work. But she had never much liked the buildings he designed. So she was ‘unsupportive’ and ‘cold’. He had abruptly decided to study engineering instead but he eventually dropped out of that program. Now she was still working two jobs and he was writing a book on twentieth century urban planning. “The big picture of how a complex, heterogeneous city fits together,” was the way he’d described the project to her.

Urban planning. She had to laugh -- he couldn’t even organize a box spring on a stairway.

“What’s so funny?,” he was saying.

She glanced up at him, red-faced and sweaty in his Red Sox t-shirt, leaning against the jammed box spring.

“I’m going outside for a few minutes,” she said. “I need some air.”

“Don’t take too long. We’re gonna try to bring it in through the basement and up the back stairs.”

The back stairs were even tighter than the front ones. It was as if he was suggesting they put a piano into his Volkswagen bug. She didn’t say anything. She was tired of ruining his day.

Outside it was bright and windy and cold. There was a tang of wood smoke on the air. There was traffic. People were busy. She walked toward the corner enjoying the captured moment of solitude. It was the way she felt in the bathroom sometimes, taking five minutes off from her life; the sad sanctuary of a closed door. David never followed her into the bathroom.

She stuck her hands in her pockets and wished she’d grabbed her coat. She winced in the sunlight. The frigid glare was merciless. It was noon and there were no shadows anywhere.

A line of cars was waiting at the red light. When she got to the corner she heard the woman and her elderly father in the first car arguing.

“ -- I’ve made the appointment and you have to go,” the woman was saying.

“It’s out of the question.”

“You’re sick. You need medicine. You need a doctor to write the prescription. I don’t see why you –- “

“They’re all quacks! I’ve never trusted any of ‘em. When I was discharged from the United States army in 1945 some pill pusher told me to stop smoking.”

“He was right.”

“The hell with him.”

“Doctor Braden thinks you should stop smoking, too, Dad. He’s told you over and over that you –- “

“I’m sixty six years old and he can kiss my ass.”

“Dad – “

“You’re on his side, Debs. You’re all in cahoots with each other. You and that doctor and those bastards at the VA hospital and that bitch from the Medicare office and all the rest of em. Why can’t you just leave an old man alone?”

Eleanor smiled. She had an urge to walk over and interrupt their argument. Maybe this old guy knew what a cahoot was. And she really wanted to know.

The old man finished his cigarette flicked it into the street and rolled up his window. Eleanor couldn’t hear them anymore but the light had changed anyway. The car stalled and the woman couldn’t get it started again. People started honking. It revved and revved and shuddered to silence; then again. Eleanor thought – she’s going to flood it. Then it happened. The car wouldn’t turn over. It just wheezed into silence. There was more honking now. Someone tried to cut around the line of cars and almost had a head-on collision.

The side door opened and the old man climbed out, slamming it behind him. He was heavy set in a blue suit. He had a full head of hair but it was silver. His nose looked like it had been broken and his face had the lop-sided look of a recovered stroke victim. He stumbled at the curb and someone tried to help him. He slapped the woman away just as his daughter climbed out of the car. She was overweight also, in unflattering slacks and a gray cardigan.

“Dad -- !”

“I’m walking.”

“But you can’t -- the Doctor said -- Dad -- !”

He turned away. She shut her door came around the front of the car to follow him. The light was still green. The blaring of horns was continuous now. The noise stopped her. She was poised for a moment between her father’s vanishing back and her empty car. She took a few more steps.

“Dad -- ?”

But he was out of ear shot.

She walked back to the car. She tried both doors but she had locked herself out. It was an older model Buick. You couldn’t lock the driver side door without the key on the newer models. But that didn’t do her much good. She yanked on the door and screamed “Shit shit shit shit SHIT.” She started pounding on the roof of the car, and finally she just put her head in her arms across it. The light turned red.

Eleanor stared at the scene. She wanted to help but there was nothing she could do. And she had to wonder -- how many times had this woman’s Dad done this to her? Browbeating her in some argument when she was trying to help him and then leaving her to fend for herself with a locked car, in traffic. It was a perfect little metaphor. But of course she couldn’t see it. People just didn’t.

Eleanor glanced at her watch. She had been gone almost ten minutes. David would assume she’d been smoking, though she hadn’t. If there was ever a perfect time for a cigarette, she thought ruefully. She considered going back, but the thought of starting another round of that same insane argument, one she was bound to lose even with the laws of physics on her side, made her stop in the middle of the sidewalk, as if she’d forgotten something.

Maybe it was something small like an address scribbled on an envelope; maybe it was something huge, like her basic human volition, the simple proprietorship of her own life. For a moment she admired the stubborn old man, stumping away down the street, ignoring everyone.

She could do the same. She could just walk away. Would it look weak? Would it look like quitting? Did she really care how it looked, what David would say, the little dismissive cough David’s father would make when he heard the news, the sigh of vindicated contempt from David’s mother? It wasn’t like she was ever going to win them over anyway. Maybe with a grandson. She shuddered at the thought: David barking instructions during the labor, maneuvering the baby down the birth canal.

She thought about his apartment – their apartment. What did she have there? Clothes, some books, those lovely Calphalon sauce pans. Her files were at her office, and so was her laptop; she’d been working late the last few weeks. There was her Lexmark printer; and she’d paid for the Ikea couch in the living room. But that was all: nothing she really cared about, nothing essential – just a lot of junk, just – accumulation.

She took out a cigarette, lit it and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Then she turned and started walking, away from the cramped stairwell and the jammed box-spring and her waiting fiancée, into the sunny fall afternoon, and the bright conspiratorial streets of Boston, never once looking back.