The Woodpecker

25 January 2014

“There was a school shooting at your cousin Virginia’s college yesterday.” Lilith Coleman licked her finger and flipped to the next page of the New York Times with such nonchalance that she might as well have just made an observation about the weather outside.

“Is that so.” Suzette raised her coffee cup full of hot chocolate to her mouth without looking up and parted her lips. Suzette, who was days away from her thirty-second birthday, tried as best as she could to mimic her mother’s blasé countenance and glanced casually out the window at the fresh flurries. She knew very well just what her mother was up to trying to get a rise out of her. She delicately rested her pointed jaw against the back of her hand as if the news were an absolute bore.

            “Uh-huh.”

            It was a Saturday morning so Suzette had the day off of work. She held a job at the neighborhood dentist's office as a receptionist. “What’ll we do today,” she turned to Lilith and directed the question at her in the form of an uninterested declarative statement.

            “I don’t know.” Lilith put down the paper and sauntered into the family room where she lifted the most recent New Yorker from the top of a weighty tower stacked neatly and chronologically on the coffee table. She sat with the grace of a duchess, with a back vertically sloped at a straight right angle and her legs crossed gently at the ankles. With her unoccupied hand she scooped up Dolly, the family’s nineteen-year-old Persian cat, and ran her bony hand over her fur with the tender-hearted affection of a new mother stroking the back of her infant’s head, soft and fuzzy and reminiscent of a ripened peach.

            In one fluid motion Suzette rose from her chair, pivoted around on the balls of her feet in the direction of the staircase, and trudged heavily up to the second floor with the posture of a fishhook, mentally preparing herself for another weekend of solitude. She flopped down supine with a satisfying thud onto her bed and panned with her eyes the room in which she had spent the last three decades of her life. Over the years it had witnessed its fair share of changes"the coming and going of various band posters; the cyclical placement and replacement of photographs in picture frames, usually featuring a friend or two at a special event and rarely (if ever) a beau; the re-organization (and sometimes determined disposal) of childhood knick-knacks and trinkets, all landmarks of different family vacations, different milestones, different anticlimactic memories.

            A rhythmic knocking from the outside, resonant and full, punctuated the silence hanging in the centrally heated air. It would come in consistent patterns of nine, pause for a few moments of relief, and resume again at full volume. This went on for a good three or four minutes before the source of the noise got discouraged and relented.  

           

            A gentle rapping on the bedroom door awoke Suzette from her dreamless slumber an hour later.

            “Only me.” Richard Coleman stood limply with a wary closed-lipped grin on his face. Standing at five foot ten and one hundred and thirty pounds he hardly occupied any space in the doorframe and held himself up by a frail hand poised on the wall. He reminded Suzette distinctly of Picasso’s L'acteur.  “Hi, Dad.”

            “What do you say we go out for breakfast?” His voice tentatively rose in pitch on the last syllable of “breakfast.” This suggestion was the first such olive branch her father--a slight man characterized by his reticence and taciturn nature--had extended to her in the past twenty or so years. They were not on antagonistic terms, nor were they estranged from each other; for in order to be estranged two people must first have, at some point, been close.

            Suzette raised one eyebrow in quasi-disbelief and from her throat escaped an “mm” noise.

            “Oh, great,” Richard cocked his head to one side and clasped his hands together. His smile was stiff and harsh, but, Suzette knew, sincere. His pale and drooping eyes, ever-evading direct contact, had always had a gaze vacant but intense--simultaneously deep and distant. They were hollow as two thumbprints indented in clay.

            “Oh"no, Dad, I wasn’t saying ‘Yes.’ I was just saying ‘Mm.’” There was no immediate response. “I just don’t think I’m really up for it today.” Through a feigned yawn she moaned, “I’m tired.”

His face didn’t waver but she could see the light fall from behind his eyes.

“O.K., sweetie, that’s all right!” he frantically spat with the corners of his mouth, though quivering, still locked in place. Suzette rolled over onto her stomach and extended her limbs out to all four corners of the room before letting them go limp. Sprawled out like a doll neglected by its pre-pubescent owner.  

            Richard turned to leave, paused, and ducked his head back in. “Are you sure?” he asked with unsteady eyebrows slanted upwards.

            Suzette lifted her head half an inch off the pillow and opened one eye. “Yeah, Dad. I’m sure.”

 

            By six o’clock Monday morning a substantial amount of snow had accumulated. Suzette and Lilith sat opposite one another at the breakfast table, as they did every morning, in an implicit agreement of quietude. Suzette aggressively charged a spoonful of cereal into her mouth and Lilith raised a wedge of grapefruit to her face and took a birdlike bite. Neither slurped nor audibly chewed.

            Outside the kitchen the knocking sound began again. Suzette sharply lurched forward in her seat in unsuspecting alarm and took in a swift inhale of air. She peered up from behind her spoon at her mother who had not so much as flinched.

            “Ma.”

            “Hm.”

            “What’s that sound outside? That knocking.”

            Lilith lowered the paper but kept her eyes downcast. “What knocking?” was the unruffled reply.

            “You know, Ma. That little pounding noise against the house from outside.”

            Lilith furrowed her brow ever so slightly and pursed her thin lips. “It’s probably just a woodpecker,” she concluded after some speculation.

            “A woodpecker?” Suzette raised her voice in frustration. “What on Earth would a woodpecker be doing out in the winter? And don’t they drill holes in wood to look for bugs? You know, to eat?”

            “Mm.”

            “Well? They’re not going to get very far looking for food in the side of a house,” she persisted, leaning forward a bit. “Why doesn’t he go look in a tree or someplace that would make sense?”

            Lilith licked her finger and turned to the next page of the Times.

            “Doesn’t he know he’s not going to find anything to eat in the side of our house? I mean, we’ve got plenty of food in the house. Why don’t we just put some bread outside on the deck for him or something so he doesn’t have to go to all that trouble, trying to drill a hole in the side of our house?”

            “I don’t think he would take it if you handed it to him on a silver platter,” Lilith’s wry voice was muffled behind the thick newspaper she now held back up in front of her face.

            “And why not!” Suzette demanded, her cheeks flushing.

            Lilith let out a breathy sigh and laid the paper down on the table. She smoothed it out with her manicured fingers and coolly explained, “Because they’re woodpeckers. They peck through wood to find food. He doesn’t give a damn whether or not he’s going to find any food in the side of our house because he doesn’t know there won’t be any. But that’s what they do. They look for food, in the wood, and peck millions and millions of little holes until they find it. He doesn’t want any bread you just outright hand to him. Wouldn’t go near it if you begged him to.”

            Suzette stared. “Please, Suzette, don’t look so…bewildered.”

            Suzette silently excused herself from the table and bounded up the stairs two at a time to get dressed for work. Lilith soon followed, lightly lifting her feet onto each stair with the posture of a medieval queen ascending to her tower. On weekdays the long-retired woman--who’d never actually worked since before the birth of her only daughter--volunteered at the animal shelter in the next town over.

 

            Once back at the office Suzette fell comfortably into the routine of a day’s work, swiftly dismissing the woodpeckers from her mind almost entirely. She found her clerical duties most soothing and took pride in the efficiency with which she answered telephone calls and pristinely logged appointments in the datebook without so much as a single erasure mark soiling the pages.

            At half past one an extravagantly dressed woman with her hair skinned back entered the frosted glass door with a toddler traipsing close behind. She checked in at the desk with Suzette as a Joyce Ramsey.

            Joyce Ramsey let her fur coat slide off her shoulders and down her back in one fell swoop and hung it lovingly on the coatrack. She took a seat in the joint waiting room and crossed her long, shapely legs. Her daughter, barely as tall as Joyce Ramsey’s knees, tugged insistently on her mother’s sheer black stockings. Joyce Ramsey patted the child’s head gingerly--or perhaps it was more dismissively--with one hand and leafed absently through an old New Yorker with the other.

            Suzette asked if Joyce Ramsey would please excuse her for a moment while she used the ladies’ room. Once safely tucked away behind the single restroom door, she lied down on the floor and pressed her cheek against the cold sleek tile. She breathed deeply, almost hyperventilating, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Suzette hoisted herself up by her tiny wrists--her most (and only) elegant feature--and stared numbly into the mirror hanging above the white porcelain sink. She looked intently into a pair of cloudy blue irises and pinhole pupils and slowly scanned the rest of her face with unadulterated contempt: a heart-shaped head with rounded cheeks and a full forehead and a bulbous nose most ungracefully thrown in the center; a deep-set philtrum drawing the eyes to a pair of lizard-like lips and, even worse, a small dark mole placed strategically on the left side. An overall expressionless visage left on its own, but easily transformed into a portrait of anguish or fury or tenderness with just the slightest adjustment of eyebrow angle or mouth shape.

            By the time Suzette returned to her desk the dentist had already admitted Joyce Ramsey and her tagalong daughter into his room. They left soon thereafter as proudly as they’d marched in, the woman strutting seemingly with a great purpose and the girl waddling along clumsily planting one foot in front of the other.

 

            Hours passed before the telephone rang again. It was nearly five o’clock and the blaring sound rudely awoke Suzette from a wonderful daydream she had been wistfully entertaining. She monotonously recited the office’s prescribed telephone greeting: “Dr. Carrey’s office, this is Suzette speaking, how can I help you.”

            “Suzette.” It was the stern voice of Lilith, sterile in tone and devoid of any discernable feeling. “I need you to come home now. There’s been an accident.” Her voice lacked any trace of fear or even urgency.

            “What…kind of accident?” Suzette slowly drew the words from her lips and narrowed her eyes. A prolonged silence came from the other end until,

            “It’s your father. He’s killed himself.”

            Suzette felt her extremities freeze over and her insides go frigid. A minute or so passed before feeling was restored to her body and she asked patiently, “Why didn’t you call an ambulance? Or the police? Or…”

            “Please, Suzie.” Her mother hadn’t referred to her as Suzie since she had graduated the fifth grade, and sounded more like she was trying to reason with her than she was pleading for help. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

 

            When Suzette burst through the door she could detect the scent of bleach permeating the air. Her first instinct was to race up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom, where she knew Richard kept the handgun in the case of an intruder.

His body lied neatly face-down on the hardwood floor, the mutilated head still oozing in a steady, temperate, river-like flow. The headboard had been splattered with blood so dark that it was almost black and so thick that it reminded her of the visible brush strokes of Starry Night. The bed, however, had been stripped sometime in the hours between Lilith and Suzette’s respective arrivals back home.

            “Suzie? That you?” her mother called up from the kitchen in an energetic and rather singsong voice. Suzette flew wildly down the stairs, rounding the corners with the agility of an Olympic gymnast.

            There in the kitchen Lilith stood laboring over the sink, which had been filled about halfway with bleach and warm water now turned a pale pink. Lilith was furiously fussing with a pile of luxurious cream colored fabric, scrubbing with her rubber-gloved hands like a prairie woman nobly scouring her children’s clothes in the washtub. When she heard her daughter’s flat footsteps approach nearer she glimpsed over her right shoulder, her face contorted in a twist of genuine concern. “Oh! Suzie. Look!” She let out a heavy sigh of aggravation and her eyes quizzically darted up to meet her daughter’s gaze. “These were my best sheets. Do you think they’ll come out all right in the wash?”

Author's Note

my first short story

Reviews

[Chris]

Cooper caught the flaws... and gave a valid cut and paste warning. The problem with realistic characters is the need to dislike the mean-spirited ones. And sometimes the mind even accounts for the aftermath of shock... in the fictional behaviors.

[Delmar Cooper]

Dear Ms. Murrray,
Thank you for sharing "The Woodpecker." It is an excellent story, well written and could be a textbook example of showing instead of telling. The descriptions of the characters are revealing in an unobtrusive way. There are no wasted words, as there should be no waste in a short story. All the events in the story converge in a straightfoward linear manner to the ending. Bravo.

Ther are a few details I will mention to you. When cutting and pasting, especially from Word the system they have here will convert dashes to quotation marks. I see three instances of this that detract from your story. Is the word "school" needed in the sentence about the shooting at the cousin's college, or is it redundant? Should "dentist office" be that or is "dentist's office perferable?" In two places you use the verb "lied" is that the correct verb usage in those instances?

Thank you again,
Cooper