Vine

The sun peeked over the morning hills. Manny Panbroke's coffee maker was hissing and sputtering coffee into his cup. A fine, reassuring sound, he thought. Manny rustled the newspaper at the table, glancing over his shoulder at the kitchen door. Try to keep the sounds down, he thought. This was his time alone.

Manny checked the want ads first, though he was now retired. He skimmed the obits, then settled on the feature section. Archaeologists analyze artifacts uncovered while a basement was being dug. The house is number 88. On his street!

The find led to interesting conclusions about original inhabitants. A small village of about 23 to 30 individuals had foraged and hunted here between 1635 and 1654. Then there is no trace of them. They vanish.

Every morning after skimming the paper, he took his morning walk, coffee cup in hand. As the sun sparkled over the wet morning lawns and houses of Vine Street, the air was sweet. This morning there was a strong smell of purple grape.

“Like that cheap grape soda I drank when I was a boy.” he muttered.

He loved his morning walks, alone, without Lotte. The walks were a reinforcement of his world, a reaffirmation that all was right. Everything in the neighborhood was right, or so it seemed, early in the morning.

Every few years, Manny Panbroke's neighbors would put new siding on their little houses. Laying the new over the old, they did it whether needed or not. It was cheaper this way, laying right over the old. As a result, the walls could be up to three feet thick.

First came the original stucco or clapboard. Next red brick or aluminum. Later, California redwood, then white brick, followed by veneer, then stucco again, and so on.

The effect was deep-set windows and long, tunneled entrances. This made the houses look so much larger than they actually were.

Manny Panbroke’s house was no different. He kept up with his neighbors. His current siding was aluminum, gray aluminum with dark gray trim. To Manny, all was well and as it should be. Except...it wasn’t.

This was not a fancy neighborhood. It was a simple post-war settlement, where there had been only farmland on the edge of the big city.

One would have called it “down country” in those days after the War. Men came home from years of noise and abuse. They settled into the "dream".

A typical neighborhood. Laid out in straight lines over rolling hills. Each house had a yard. Each yard a child. Every life laid out in straight lines running off into the distant shadowy shapes. Shapes of more children to come, long workdays, and the faraway shadow of retirement, and funerals.

Number 52 was Manny Panbroke's house. He had installed new aluminum siding the year before. So now, like all the other houses on Vine Street, his walls were approaching three feet in thickness.

A ceramic cat climbed the shutters. The same ceramic cat was popular on other houses in the neighborhood. It climbed several porch posts and clapboards. People had forgotten the original purpose of these ceramic cats. The origin story is that the cats scared away a serious infestation of larks during the summer of 1950.

The cats did the job. Then, they became a feature of the neighborhood. There have not been larks for many decades. Ceramic cats, like pink flamingos in other towns, lend a certain whimsical comfort. They become familiar and so it is hard to do without them. Manny Panbroke realized he was particularly fond of ceramic cats.

This morning the lovely fragrance of purple grape permeated each breath he took. Manny loved it. And he loved this place. He admired it, even.

He admired the walls and hedges of Vine Street. It was so satisfying how everyone on the street took such good care of everything. How the retaining walls, here made of brown brick, there of curated stone, were always patched. He admired the economy of the maintenance.

Manny liked that the hedges were so old now. He could picture young couples planting them half a century earlier. Young couples, like Manny Panbroke and his wife, Lotte.

Fifty years ago, during the war, Lotte had worked at a munition factory for a time while Manny was away at war. With her hair tied back in a net, wearing overalls that showed her tight young shape, she was an inspiration. Lotte inspired many lusty thoughts. Especially in those young soldiers back home for R&R.

Manny Panbroke slogged through swamps in Brazil. He was looking for guerilla-saboteur-gun-runners. But they always turned out to be simple forest-dwelling natives trading monkey carcasses for machetes.

Meanwhile, back home, Lotte inspired the attentions of a series of young soldiers and sailors. As a result of her prodigious, and practiced, creativity, she developed a thirst for unlikely locations. She remained unrepentant of this time in her life. And found those memories useful while in her husband’s arms years later.

Manny Panbroke took his time, strolling with his coffee cup in hand. The sweet aroma of the coffee swirled and curled about with the musty odor of grape. He was thinking of the early days. Back when they began living in this neighborhood. While thinking, he found himself in front of number 22. It was a pale yellow bungalow with tight little windows under striped metal awnings. It housed, warehoused, one might say, one of two twins who Panbroke had watched grow up in the neighborhood.

The twins, when little girls, had been the beautiful darlings of Vine Street. Full of promise and charm, they were true beauties. When they reached adolescence, they each sprouted conspicuous black mustaches.

This event overshadowed everything else good in their lives. And changed everything for them thereafter. The one girl, after only a short time of unbearable humiliation, took action. She had her mustache removed by surgery. Beautiful and charming once again, she became quite a well-known local television spokesperson.

The other, refusing to give in to the temptation, believed that "they should accept me as I am!" But never accepting her own self, she holed up in her dead parents' house on Vine. She remains in bitter seclusion.

Manny always reviewed this little history whenever he passed number 22. He shook his head in sadness, yet he hoped to catch a glimpse of that famous mustache.

On his morning walks, Manny Panbroke would think about many such things. Like how no one on Vine Street ever got rid of a vehicle when it died. Backyards tended to fill up with flower-beds that started out as 1952 Chevy convertibles. Or they became dog-houses with aluminum siding applied to them. One could not recognize the car beneath. The vehicle behind number 43 was now a high-tech spa with a wooden deck around it.

But Manny Panbroke appreciated, even more, the little bungalows. They stood back and to the side of the tiny homes. These quaint dollhouse-like buildings began in the late forties as sheds. They stored carpentry tools when the houses were being built. Times prospered, and everyone could afford to buy a cheap Ford or Chevy or a jalopy from the thirties. So the sheds became garages. The dirt floors, packed hard and stained with black motor oil, were popular with cats.

The inside walls remained unfinished. Dark, rough wood and postwar 2 X 4's with the rafters exposed. The rafters stored old lumber and pieces of pipe, and lengths of molding that might be useful. The outside walls were asbestos shingles. The roofing nails poked through to the inside walls. The exposed nail points made excellent tacking points for spiders when laying out new webs.

The horizontal 2 X 4's of the inside walls ended up as ad hoc shelves. Over the years, they gathered a dusty collection of odds and ends. Oil cans, nail buckets made out of coffee cans, odd pieces of tin, cloth. Broken tools, rubber engine belts, and other useless things. These things might come in handy one day. They never came in handy. The next conversion of this little building found them in the trash bin.

This time, the building became a little guesthouse, or cabin, or mother-in-law house. The owners poured a concrete floor over the oily packed dirt. Bricks or aluminum siding hid the original asbestos shingle siding. Cute four-paned windows were set into the walls. The inside walls were then finished with a cheap fiberboard called Homasote. Painted a bedroom green.

Every house on Vine Street had some version of this little house to the back and the side, at the driveway's far end. The driveways fell into disuse and were often overgrown with grass. As time went on, everyone parked on the street. It had once been a sweet sight, looking down the street as it curved down over the hill. Now it looked more like a strip center parking lot.

Manny Panbroke had dug up the old concrete of his driveway. He planted grass. Lotte later dug it up and planted it as a rose garden. The rose garden had looked bright, sunny, and cheerful in front of the old garage, now cottage. The cottage filled up. Old pieces of wood, broken appliances, a tricycle. A tattered couch belonging to a dead cousin. A birdcage and several boxes of unopened birdseed. Manny Panbroke parked his car on the street like everyone else.

As he strolled along, he remembered the planting of each tree and hedge. He marveled at how they had grown so much. How some had even grown so old that workmen removed them.

Manny Panbroke stopped short in front of number 88. He had a sudden vision. A vivid picture of what it must have been like long before people had moved here from the city. He could see farmland. He mulled over the article in the morning's paper in his mind. He thought no—not farmland—forest, with deer and bear. And Indians! This was a place where no one would have lived. Only Indians. A place that needed taming; a beautiful place though, where it was peaceful. All full of bugs and the sweet smell of grape drink.

He shuddered, and his thoughts turned bleak. He pictured this same neighborhood years into the future. Long after the vague dreamlike vision of his own funeral had come and gone. It was clear to him. From where number 22 stood, where the sad twin lived, to where number 64 stood there would be a high-rise building. Acres of black asphalt shimmering in the August dog days would surround it. Suited people come and go. Young suited people who he did not know.

In his vision, he could see his own house. It had become a hair salon for several years. Then a string of other small businesses—-a barbershop, a pizza parlor, and finally a liquor store. The liquor store would be successful enough that the owners would tear down the house. They replace the house with a modern building with automatic doors and a parking lot. The asphalt of the parking lot would seal the playground of his own children. All their lost artifacts. Buried. Little toy cars, buttons, and popsicle sticks, awaiting some future archaeologist. Manny saw this vision with his whole being.

Manny Panbroke’s visions had always been disturbing to him. He did not like them, for he knew that they were true on an unconscious level. But on a conscious level, he dismissed these fleeting fantasies as soon as they arose. They broke through his life-long reverie. A lifetime of dismissing these visions and thoughts created a persistent feeling. It was an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right. He could never put his finger on it. It was as if something bad was about to happen or had happened. A feeling that he would lose control any second and say something or do something. Something wrong, inappropriate, or unforgivable. This made him ill at ease at all times and had always done so.

It was Sunday morning. Sunday mornings, Manny Panbroke made it his pleasure to mow the lawn while his wife Lotte went to church. He did this not so much because he wanted to mow the lawn but because he wanted to avoid church or, to be more specific, God. Not that he considered himself an atheist. Atheists were suspect, even unwholesome. This thought made him uneasy. He didn't know what he was. He knew he didn’t exactly believe in God. Certainly not in the God he had heard of as a child. Or the colorful one whose picture was on the mantle. Or the personal one that walked around the house arm-in-arm with Lotte. Not Him.

So, at his own church, the front lawn, he worshiped in his own way. He mowed the lawn at a diagonal and with an almost prayerful effort. This, he reasoned, justified his staying home. He covered himself in this way.

That Sunday morning, Lotte clattered down the steps in her high heels. She ran past the roaring lawnmower. Waving at Manny, she mouthed instructions over the din. He nodded and waved as if he had heard her. He half wondered who she was meeting at church or even if she went to church. Returning from the war, he had been subject to disturbing dreams of his wife. Suspicions. These visions, like all the others in his life, left him uneasy and dissatisfied. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she pulled away in the car. He went back to the diagonal lines.

But his concentration was now broken. And he complained to himself that nothing ever felt right. Nothing ever felt 100%. Now ruined, he could never get the diagonals right. Maybe next week. Angry now, he whipped his head around and stuck his nose up in the air, sniffing, annoyed.

“Grapes,” he snorted. “Smells like goddam grapes!”

When Lotte Panbroke returned mid-afternoon, she found Manny Panbroke somewhat dazed. He moved around the yard almost on tip-toes trying to get a line on where that grape smell was coming from. She joined him, intrigued by the odd seductive aroma. It brought forth memories of childhood. Its cheap, grapey smell reminded them both of grape soda. They thought of Saturday afternoons at the matinee movies. The smell of lollipops and gum, and of other hazy recollections of being small and wild. You had no real sense of time in those days, only the sense of one long day. Followed by one long day—interrupted by naps and meals and radio programs and drive-in movies.

They walked to the side of the house. Past the bed of long-dead rose bushes. Past the cottage with its cobwebs that caught memory and word and feeling. Words and feelings held suspended, waiting for someone, anyone, to open the door. Here, long ago, they had planted a small tree. It was gone now. Only a large stump remained. Atop the stump, a wrecked aluminum bird feeder and two gray clothespins weathering in the sun.

There, further back, was that row of twelve trees they had planted five years ago. They were now tall and leafy. The trees entwined themselves in the old wire fence that Panbroke had put up for the children. And for the dog some thirty years before that. Manny and Lotte Panbroke walked toward the trees. They were following the exotic fragrance of grape. Startled and amazed, they came face to face with a huge conical purple bloom. It bobbed at the end of a tendril, erect, erotic. Transfixed, they breathed in its fragrance as if thirsting after cold, quenching water.

Next to this bloom was another and yet and another. Draped over every tree and hedge in their backyard was a giant vine. Broad leaves and pencil-thick tendrils entwined about branch and pole, stump and limb. What Manny and Lotte at first saw as the leaves of their young trees were, in fact, the leaves of the vine. The surreptitious vine mingled and skulked amongst the tree branches.

Manny was sure the vine had not been there a week ago. Now it shrouded the trees. It slithered up the phone pole. It wound itself along the electric lines to the house. It dropped with ease to the sparkling asbestos shingles of the roof. There it curled about the chimney, sprouting the conical grape soda blooms at every joint. The vine's flowers fragranced the whole property. It was kind of a dreamy, cheap-sweet smell of childhood memories. Memories, which did not make Manny Panbroke feel any better. Though he would admit to a certain distracting fascination. It eased his uneasiness when he filled his lungs with it. He felt as if he were about to chant some great mystical incantation. It was as if something was about to happen as if he might say something... profound?

“Boy!” he spoke. “Smells good!”

The sound of his voice distilled that uneasy feeling again. And once again he felt as if something was not quite right with his life.

Over the next several weeks, Manny Panbroke observed the growth of the vine. It moved, day by day, through the neighborhood, always with stealth. It always blended into the trees, dropped down to encase a garage or a hedge in broad green bindings. He was not alarmed. It was one more thing in the neighborhood, another feature he noted. It was like noting the man in Number 16. 16 stayed inside every day until 3:35 p.m., when he would poke his eye out from the dark cave of his seclusion. Then, like clockwork, he would make his daily walk to the grocery store. There he purchased something that he always carried home in a small brown bag. Manny Panbroke saw these things.

So he saw the vine as it moved. To him, after all these weeks, it was as if the vine had always been there. It had been lurking in the background. The vine was one more thing to make him uneasy. He no longer paid any attention to the hedges or walls, bungalows, or ceramic cats when he took his morning walk. Now he only saw the vine. Day by day, the vine had enclosed the neighborhood. It was seducing everyone with its fragrance. It was sending everyone into self-indulgent bouts of nostalgia and regret. People stopped mowing their lawns.

Manny Panbroke spoke to his wife one night about the idea of traveling around the country in an RV. He talked in a distracted manner while the TV yammered on. About what a beautiful country this is and how he’d rather see America first before wasting money on Europe.

"This is a beautiful country...” he trailed off.

But he had never been out of the county, let alone the state. He had settled down after the war to a life of absolute predictability. It had been a life to which, his unconscious visions whispered, he was suited. In any case, Lotte wasn't listening to him, not that she ever did. She was distracted by her own nostalgia and regrets. He, of course, didn't have a clue how to go about traveling around America.

"Where do you begin?" he asked aloud of no one in particular.

Somewhere in his unconscious, he knew that the fact was, he was suited to this life. He realized he was, at last, comfortable with his lifelong feeling of uneasiness. Like an old friend, it was, after all, familiar.

And so it happened, one night, not long after he talked to his wife about R. V's., while they slept in their separate beds in the upstairs bedroom. The vine made its skulking way down the chimney, unused in thirty years. It wrapped itself around the banister. It inched along the new carpet and coiled itself around the bedpost. At last, and without disturbing anyone's sleep, it made its way into the body of Manny Panbroke.

When Lotte Panbroke awoke to find her husband dead, it was with a sense of relief.

“Alone...at last,” she whispered.

Manny Panbroke woke the next morning bobbing erect and erotic on a vine. In someone else's backyard, he oozed a very sickly sweet smell that reminded him of grape soda. He felt nothing in particular. No uneasiness. He never did figure out what made him feel that way.

Lotte Panbroke’s beauty and physical stamina had endured. It brought her through forty years of marriage. It served dozens of lovers, two children, several grandchildren. Most of all, it took her beyond the endless tedium of Manny Panbroke and Vine Street. Lotte had what it takes. And she knew it.

About five days after her late husband’s enthronement as a flower on a vine, she settled her business. She sold the house, glad to see the last of deep-set windows, ceramic cats, bungalows, and well-kept lawns. She broke the news to her pastor. She did it with a religious coldness that was the pure flowering of her newborn liberation. And as soon as it was decent...three weeks after Manny Panbroke’s death, she mounted her new motorcycle. And headed down that big highway.

End