New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 6

by Grant Bailie

He received a call from a woman whose TV was getting interference from the neighbor’s cell phone. At least, she thought it was the neighbor’s cell phone. She could just make out a muffled voice that seemed familiar, and while she could not understand every word, the voice often seemed to be complaining about a barking dog that was very much like the barking dog that was a nuisance for the entire block.

On his screen, Robert saw that the woman’s name was Sarah Bennett, and Robert naturally thought of a Sarah Bennett he had known once, though the Sarah Bennett on the phone sounded to him to be a completely different person, and her birth date, also listed on his screen, made her several years older.

Robert imagined that Sarah Bennett was a very common name. The city alone probably contained a dozen or so of them, but while this Sarah Bennett talked his mind wandered back to the Sarah Bennett he himself had once known.

It was in fourth grade, when Robert was still only a few inches shorter than the general population of his age group, he had fallen in love with the Sarah Bennett he had known. She sat in front of him in homeroom and his affections had always been lazy — favoring the girl in the next seat or the girl in front of him in line or the girl with the locker closest to his.

Sarah wore pigtails and had a zebra-striped raincoat over her white blouse and plaid skirt uniform. She had matching zebra-striped rubber boots. In his memory of her now, she is always hanging the zebra-striped raincoat on a peg in the back of the classroom though it could not have rained that much in his youth.

Sarah seemed, in fourth grade, to Robert’s fourth grade mind and heart, to be the ideal of womanhood and bore in his mind a resemblance, even now, to a certain singer who had been popular then and who he had watched perform more than once on variety shows on the TV in his parent’s living room.

He dreamt of Sarah many nights back then. He can remember the dreams now more vividly than the girl. In his favorite dream terrorists had broken into the school. They had let everyone else go, but had taken him and Sarah hostage, tying them naked together to the furnace in the school boiler room. The terrorists wore ski masks and carried big guns — some of them even bazookas.

The terrorists found Mike Blackburn — who often stolen Robert’s lunch and hid it behind the radiator or beneath the teacher’s chair — crying behind some boxes, and they were going to shoot him there, but Robert told them to let him go, that he wasn’t worth the trouble for them, and the terrorists, impressed with Robert’s courage and compassion, let Mike Blackburn go. And then they made Robert and Sarah strip and tied them together — usually facing each other, but once or twice with her back to his front — then the terrorists tied them to the furnace.

Sarah had always been kind to him in the fourth grade, though never excessively so. When Mike Blackburn had taken his coat and hung it out of reach on a light fixture, she had not laughed as loudly as his other classmates and eventually had even told Mike Blackburn to give it back and to act his age, not his IQ.

In the fifth grade, Sarah Bennett began to grow, and by seventh grade she was the star of the girl’s basketball team. Robert would still pass her sometimes in the hallways of school and if they made eye contact — which became increasingly unlikely — she would smile.

The last time he saw her was at graduation, when Robert had felt himself drowning in a sea of blue robes. On the stage set up beneath the goalpost of the football field, she had received her diploma and a special award for athletic abilities and her work on the school Glee Committee. The applause was enthusiastic. When Robert had received his diploma and nothing more, and had shaken the hand of the school principal he had only met twice before, the applause had been merely polite, and he could pick from out of the sea of muted clapping the more boisterous noises of his own parents.

Then Mike Blackburn, class valedictorian, gave a speech in which he compared their years in high school to the pages of a scrapbook, a scrapbook they were now closing, but would write new chapters in with the future events of their life as they traveled down the winding and sometimes rocky road of adulthood. Even Robert, who had only been an average English student (he had not applied himself), could see the mixed metaphor in all of this. But everybody clapped and flashbulbs went off and caps flew into the air. And then everybody began looking for their caps because they had not really been given their diplomas at all but only a red, leatherette folder with a place for a diploma to go and they would get their real diplomas when they turned in their caps and gowns to Mrs. Whitehead in the booth at the other end of the field.

Robert remembered all this, with less detail perhaps, within the infinite space of a minute, while the Sarah Bennett of his current life went on about the problem with her reception, though the thrust of her conversation seemed now to be more about the half-heard conversations of her neighbor than the interference on her screen.

“And I think,” she was saying now, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That he might be cheating on his wife. Sometimes he’s talking to another woman. I can’t hear her voice clear at all, but you can tell by how he talks. All low and tender, like everything he says to her is a secret.”

Robert said: “Ms. Bennett, do you happen to have separate speaker units attached to your TV set? It’s more likely the interference is coming through there, which would not be a problem of the cable, but there are several suggestions I could make that might help the problem.”

There was a pause at the other end of the phone, followed by a sigh.

“Yes?” she said, and Robert proceeded to list a number of possible solutions. When he was finished she asked: “Is there a way to make the signal clearer?”

He told her there was not.

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