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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
December 3, 2006
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2006 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Untitled, 2005
© 2005 by Bud Grossmann
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WISCONSIN WELCOME
Late on a Monday afternoon in August of 2006, David Fischer, fifty-seven years of age and one inch shy of five feet seven inches tall, arrived alone, in a brand-new automobile, in the village of Fjord, Wisconsin, with a contract to buy an unoccupied house two blocks—or maybe not quite so far—from Fjord’s United States Post Office. Fischer had lived three decades and more in Honolulu, Hawaii, and, though he had relatives in Fjord and had visited many times, he had never noticed the tree-shaded, stone-clad, smallish home at the corner of High Street and Mills, until a day in May when he had run across its listing on the Web. He decided soon thereafter to make an offer. He dealt with a Wisconsin real estate agent entirely by telephone and electronic mail.
Fischer did not bring furniture when he moved. The things he treasured were mostly documents and books, photographs, hand tools, and kitchen items—things he could send at flat-rate prices in boxes of a manageable size. The agent had given Fischer’s uncle a key and permission to put the boxed belongings into the house before the closing of escrow. But time slipped away, and David Fischer did not send anything until just before his departure from Hawaii. When he began to label the boxes for mailing, he looked for his ten-digit Zip Code at the USPS Web site and found a warning notice, This is a non-deliverable address. Mail sent to this address will be returned. He conjectured that the real estate lady had asked the post office to put a hold on inbound mail, but Fischer had no time to deal with the matter then and there; instead he figured, fine, he’d just use the address of his parents’ nearby farm.
On Tuesday morning, Fischer, having spent the night at his parents’ home, drove to town and went into the post office, crossed the tiny lobby where a wall of brass-doored P.O. Boxes faced a wall with wanted posters and warnings against re-using lightly cancelled postage stamps, and entered a tinier room with an unattended counter. A breast-shaped bell of chrome was provided for summoning the staff, but Fischer did not tap its nipple; he waited instead until a post office lady, uniformed and wearing a badge that declared her name as Cynthia, came by and said, in a less than welcoming way, “Yes? What can I do for you?”
Fischer did not at that particular point take note of the fact, but the woman was taller than he, and in the way of Wisconsin women of a certain age in general, somewhat wider as well. He did take note of the badge, and greeted her with a smile and what he hoped would be a slight excess of charm. “Cynthia, good morning,” he said. “Do you go by ‘Cynthia’?” She nodded. “My name,” said Fischer, “is David C. Fischer. I will soon be moving into 203 High Street, and I would like to have the hold taken off the mail deliveries there.”
Cynthia replied, “We can’t deliver to that address. You’ll have to rent a P.O. Box.”
Fischer was surprised. “What do you mean you ‘can’t deliver’ to it? Don’t my aunties”—and he named two of them living within blocks of his new address—“get their mail delivered to their homes?”
“Jeanette, yes, but Francine, on your street, has a P.O. Box.” She explained something, incomprehensible to Fischer, about “not on a route” and said, “You’ll have to rent a P.O. Box if you want to get your mail. It will be twenty-six dollars. I need for you to fill out this form and show me two picture I.D.’s.”
The price sounded low to Fischer, but maybe he was thinking of safe deposit boxes. “Is that for six months? How much is a big P.O. Box, if you’ve got one?”
“Twenty-six dollars is for a year. For a regular box. We don’t have any big ones.”
Fischer looked into the lobby and saw rows and rows of teensy-tiny brass-and-glass doors and, down low on the wall, a cluster of larger doors. He suggested, “How about if you put me on a wait-list for a large box?”
“The large boxes don’t become available. I can give you a regular box, Box Number 307.”
“Three-oh-seven?” Fischer said, and he saw Cynthia had a list on the counter in front of her. “Three-oh-seven might be kind of hard for my friends to remember. May I choose another box, or do you have to give them out sequentially?” He had had a similar discussion, long ago, while getting license plates at a DMV.
“We like to give them out in order,” said Cynthia, wide-eyed, as if raising both her eyebrows in double judgment of a troublemaker. “But,” she said, “I see that you are kind of short, and three-oh-seven is on the top row. Maybe I could give you one not so far from the floor.”
“Oh,” Fischer said, at five-foot-six, “that would be great! What other boxes are available?”
“Well,” said Cynthia, evidently conceding she’d surrendered her chance to insist on sequential assignments, “what number were you thinking of?”
“Well, I don’t know. How about two-oh-three? My house number is two-oh-three. That would be a good number.”
“Two-oh-three is taken.”
“May I see that list?”
She turned the list so both of them could look it over, but Fischer liked the first number on the page. “Ohh! Look at that! One-oh-one! That’s a great number! May I have one-oh-one?”
“Ja, I suppose,” said Cynthia. “But, no, wait, that’s on the top row, too.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Fischer said, reaching for his wallet. “I can bring a stepstool.”
Cynthia did not smile, but Fischer felt sure she one day would. ♦
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