‘I just don’t know if I should do this or not,’ said Mrs. Purcell as she moved slowly about the room. ‘I just don’t know.’ She was speaking more to herself than to the boy.

The boy was standing near the door and beginning to feel a little uneasy. He couldn’t understand the woman’s sudden uncertainty. Just minutes before, downstairs, she’d been breathlessly exuberant, telling him that she’d been looking for someone to help her re-arrange her bedroom furniture for some time. She had even hugged the boy in a spontaneous spurt of gratitude.

‘I just don’t know,’ Mrs. Purcell repeated, seating herself in an armchair in a corner of the room.

The boy altered his position slightly, not wanting to stiffen up, should the necessity of a quick exit from this dark room arise. He knew, as did everyone in the neighborhood, that Mrs. Purcell was somewhat unbalanced in the head. He was quickly learning that such abnormality is enjoyable to talk about in the third person or to view from afar, but not so much fun when proximity is involved.

‘How old are you, Tommy?’ Mrs. Purcell asked, lifting her heavily made-up eyes to his, their first such contact since they’d entered the room.’

‘Thirteen and a half,’ the boy answered, wondering why she’d asked.

The woman had tilted her head, was fingering the ends of her long, black hair. Although her eyes were still directed at him, she spoke again in the manner of speaking to herself: ‘are you old enough?’.

The question relieved the boy greatly, as he received it to be an explanation of her strange behavior. ‘Sure I am,’ he assured spiritedly. ‘I’ve moved furniture plenty of times. I’m quite strong for my age. My grandmother says I’m physically pre….go….shus. I think that’s how she puts it.’

‘Yes, that’s how one would put it,’ said Mrs. Purcell, running her eyes slowly along the boy’s body.

‘To tell the truth,’ the boy admitted, somewhat embarrassed, ‘I don’t really know what pre…..go….shus means.’

‘It means being more advanced than others your age.’

The boy beamed with pleasure. ‘Well, I surely am physically pre…..go….shus, Mrs. Purcell, and that’s all that counts when doing something like moving furniture, right?’

The woman’s eyes widened strangely, as if the boy had brought up a totally irrelevant subject. She then lowered her eyes to the floor, releasing her hair. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘I assure you that I can handle it, Mrs. Purcell,’ the boy said quickly, his words propelled by his desire to keep the five dollars she’d given him earlier, money that had induced him to risk her abnormality, money he would feel obligated to return if he did nothing to earn it. ‘If you’re worried about damaging the furniture, don’t be; I’m pre….go…shusly careful too.’

‘I’m sure you are, Tommy,’ said Mrs. Purcell, not lifting her eyes from the floor. ‘I just don’t know if I could live with it or not.’ She still seemed self-conversational.

The boy studied her with incredulity. He had never before heard from an adult such a statement of stupidity. ‘Well, if you don’t like it, ma’am, we can always put it back the way it is.’

Mrs. Purcell looked at him. ‘No, Tommy, it would be an irreversible act.’

A recollection raced through the boy’s mind, a remembrance of a friend’s retarded cousin who couldn’t comprehend the simplest of things. Remembering and connecting, he felt pity, to a cautious degree, for Mrs. Purcell. ‘It wouldn’t be irreversible,’ he said, moving to one of the two shuttered windows and removing a potted flower from the window’s sill. ‘See,’ he explained, carrying the flower to a dresser’s cluttered top. He then pointed back to the window. ‘If you’d prefer the plant in its original place, we’d simply return it.’ He returned the plant with exaggerated, elucidating strides to the sill. ‘It’s not irreversible at all.’

‘Tommy, we’re not talking about the same thing,’ said Mrs. Purcell, again lowering her eyes to the floor.

The boy again thought of his friend’s cousin. ‘The plant was just an example,’ he said slowly, as if speaking to the very cousin. ‘Furniture would be handled in the same way.’

‘I understand that, Tommy,’ said Mrs. Purcell with a trace of annoyance in her voice.

‘Well, if you understand that it’s not irreversible; if you think I’m physically pre….go….shus; it you think I’m careful, why don’t we start re-arranging.’

Mrs. Purcell seemed not to have heard him. ‘I’m a lonely woman, Tommy,’ she said quietly, her dark eyes again on him, but in a way that made the boy feel as if he hadn’t been in the room. ‘Do you know what loneliness can do to a woman? Do you know what thoughts are created by loneliness?’

The boy didn’t know what to say to this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. He felt uncomfortable again. He remembered his mother’s once connecting loneliness to Mrs. Purcell’s strange behavior. The connection had escaped him, and his mother hadn’t bothered to apprehend it. ‘No, I don’t,’ he answered, having no other choice of words.

Mrs. Purcell rose slowly from the chair and moved tentatively to a sliding-door closet. The boy watched apprehensively as she vacillated, as if some final decisive battle raged upon her mind’s battlefield. Finally, some surrender taking place, she removed a cardboard box from an upper shelf and placed it on the unmade bed. ‘Loneliness does this to a person,’ she said.

‘If we’re going to re-arrange the furniture, we’d better get started. I’ve got to be going home soon.’ The boy spoke with forced vivacity, trying to conceal his ongrowing anxiety.

Mrs. Purcell paid him no mind. She had seated herself on the bed and was going through the box, which contained a great number of magazines. She at last found the one she’d been looking for. There was both resignation and resolve upon her face, and something suggesting stimulation. She returned the box to the closet, leaving the one on the bed, face-down.

‘I’ve got something to do in the kitchen,’ she said, re-closing the closet door. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes. When I return, we’ll begin re-arranging.’ she pointed to the magazine on the bed as she was leaving the room. ‘I’d like the room to look something like the one on page 86.’

The boy listened to her descending footsteps and then moved to the bed and the magazine, grateful that at last they would begin work. The sooner he could get out of the house, the better.

He’d expected the type of magazine that his mother read, one whose cover showed a multi-colored garden or a beautiful home or a pretty, young girl holding a baby; but what the cover of Mrs. Purcell’s magazine showed staggered him. It was a picture of a woman sitting on a stool, completely nude. Her legs were spread widely apart. She was leaning forward, her hands clasped to the front of the seat. Her arms were pulled in against her bosom, bulging her breasts. Her mouth was open, revealing a good amount of her tongue. There was a small, heart-shaped tattoo on her left cheek. Facial make-up was heavily applied, much like Mrs. Purcell’s.

His eyes glued to the cover, the boy seated himself on the bed. He knew that this was the type of picture he was forbidden to look at, but he found himself unable to remove his eyes. There was something about the woman that piqued his curiosity, something that touched him somewhere in his stomach. He studied her for some time, until he heard Mrs. Purcell’s returning footsteps on the stairs. On hearing, he quickly made his way to page 86.

‘I’ll be with you in one minute,’ Mrs. Purcell said from the doorway.

The boy looked at her. ‘Okay,’ he said, as normally as he possibly could in this world of abnormality.

‘You studying page 86?’ she asked.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered.

‘Study it closely,’ she said, leaving.

The look that had been on Mrs. Purcell’s face troubled the boy. It was a look of knowledge, a knowledge of what he’d been doing. Would she possibly tell his mother, who would of course tell his father? No way, he consoled himself. Mrs. Purcell, after all, had given him the magazine! However, she had put the thing face-down, told him to go directly to page 86. The detour had been his entirely. Oh well, time would tell, or wouldn’t, the unpredictable bastard! He turned quickly to page 86.

It was a picture of a dimly lit room, a bedroom. The furniture was very similar in design to Mrs. Purcell’s. Then the boy noticed another similarity which staggered him almost as much as the cover of the magazine had: the furniture in the room in the picture was arranged in the identical way that Mrs. Purcell’s was!

The boy rose quickly from the bed. He’d decided that he had to get out of the house, that five dollars wasn’t worth putting up with a crazy woman. He took the money out of his pocket and threw it onto the bed, next to the open magazine. He was about to move to a window {he didn’t want to chance a hallway encounter with Mrs. Purcell} when he noticed something else in the picture of the bedroom, something he’d somehow missed earlier. There was a woman sitting on the floor of the room, against one of the walls. She was wearing what appeared to the boy to be a black, two-piece bathing suit, covered by a dark yet see-through tee-shirt. Her mouth, like that of the cover girl, was open, revealing her tongue. In the dimness of the picture’s room, the woman reminded the boy a lot of Mrs. Purcell, a resemblance that sent the boy flying to the window.

‘Where are you going, Tommy?’ Mrs. Purcell asked when she returned to the room.

The boy had raised the window, had one foot on the sill. His back was to her in mid-exit. ‘I’ve got to b…b…be going,’ he stammered.

‘Why, Tommy?’

‘I just got to.’ In a small place somewhere in his confused head, he’d asked himself the same three-lettered question, in a barely audible mind-voice. In his over-riding state of impatience to leave the room, however, he hadn’t waited for an answer. It probably would have had some kinship with that weird stomach feeling he’d had shortly before when he’d been looking at that cover girl.

‘Didn’t you look over page 86?’ Mrs. Purcell’s voice was different now than it had been. Before it had seemed to the boy that she had been talking right through him, as if he hadn’t even been there, now she spoke directly to him; and there was a hypnotic element to it. The voice appealed, puzzled and petrified.

‘Yes, ma’am, I did; and I got to be going.’

‘Well, if you must, please use the front door.’ Suddenly, the overhead light switched off, making the room darker, almost 86-ish. ‘Tommy?’

The boy was now trembling uncontrollably. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘It’s not polite to talk to someone with your back turned.’

The boy inhaled deeply, exhaled and turned. As he had kind of expected, Mrs. Purcell was attired in the same way that the woman on page 86 was. She was even sitting in the same position. Her tongue was likewise revealed.

The boy moved cautiously to the door, a foot or two to Mrs. Purcell’s left. He gripped the door’s knob {she’d closed the door on her return}. As he turned it, Mrs. Purcell suddenly reached up and grabbed him. He shrieked involuntarily.

‘Let’s get started, Tommy,’ she said, her voice indicating how feverish she now was to begin. ‘Let’s get started.’

The boy ripped his wrist free from her. “I’ve got to be going,” he repeated, this time without stammer but every bit as panicky.

He got to the knob again, and Mrs. Purcell grabbed him again, in a different place.

"Let's get started," she re-pleaded.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the boy thought again of his friend's retarded cousin, with something just east of envy.


To this day, the room remains arranged as it was that late afternoon. Mrs. Purcell remains the unchallenged neighborhood loony. The boy, of course, is now a man.




THE END

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