Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

I did not eat much the winter of my last year in high school. I read compulsively and rarely slept. I didn’t know what I felt when my classmate Ginger Graham died three months after coming to school one day with a bump on the underside of her chin, several months before we were to hear which of the Seven Sisters had accepted or rejected us, and two days after my father hurled a heavy crystal glass across the living room of our penthouse over East 73rd Street, shattering the windowpane in a thousand pieces, and marking one of his last nights in what had been, for all these years, our home.

Miraculously, the heavy tumbler in which he drank Scotch and water, then Scotch and Scotch, bounced back into the room and landed on the grand piano no one played.

It was early 1972, and my parents were good Democrats who opposed the war in Vietnam, supported civil rights, and hated Richard Nixon. It was not politics that pulled them apart, but the political moment—the previous decade of protest, war, burning cities, burning bras—that gave my father the idea that marriage did not have to be a lifetime obligation. And the fact that I, the youngest of three children, was about to leave home. Why couldn’t we all just leave?—that must have been his thinking.

“Are you out of your mind?” my mother shrieked from the armchair that held her, a few beats after the crescendo, once we could see that the drinking glass had boomeranged back to the living room.

“No more than usual.” He did not shriek in return. No need to; evidence of his feelings was everywhere. Bits of glass covered the surfaces like confetti. The air was hushed, electric, and frigid. Cold air blew in through the jagged hole in the pane, and the wind threatened to dislodge even more pieces of glass.

It was her way to shriek and his to respond in dulcet tones, an effort of many years, to make her sound like a madwoman. It didn’t work that night. I felt a sliver of something on my cheekbone, and I could see that my mother was afraid to move. For one thing, she would have to cross my father’s path and feel, from close up, how much distance there was between them.

“Anybody want a refill,” my father said, “besides me?”

She didn’t look up. When he disappeared into the kitchen, she turned to me, her expression as flat and hopeless as I had ever seen it. In 1972 she was a pretty 47-year-old woman—I’m startled by her loveliness in the snapshots I see now, the bright brown eyes and soft smile, her abiding kindness laced with deep despair—but to me that night, she was old and haggard.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Since you’ve got shoes on, would you go to my closet and get my slippers and a pair of socks? I’m afraid to get up.”

When I returned, my father had a broom, a dustpan, and a brown paper bag. He wasn’t a liberated man doing his share of the cleaning, nothing like that—more like he’d made a mess building a cabinet or drilling a hole in the wall, and it was part of the project to tidy up afterward. But to do it properly, he’d need a vacuum cleaner, even I knew that—and he wouldn’t go that far. That was women’s work.

He had chosen the apartment for the view of Manhattan’s skyline that unfurled and glistened through the oversize windows that circled the living and dining rooms and that he hired someone to clean every two weeks. Through them, he could see from high above what he had come to conquer all those years before.

Now he was all out of dreams, out of rage, expectations, and money too. And it was impossible to see the skyline through the web of broken glass.

My mother put on her slippers as my father picked up what he could with his fingers, and I stood watching until I saw that I could retreat to my room, crack open the window to smoke a cigarette, and read a book of letters from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. They were mostly written when she was at Vassar, and she was so alienated from her frequently soused father that when they arrived, she’d check them for money and news and toss them into a drawer—“these gorgeous letters,” she says decades later, full of regret at not having been a better daughter. I blew smoke rings out into the cold, keeping the tip of the cigarette in the night air. They knew I smoked, but the rule was that I couldn’t do it in the apartment. It was the only thing they agreed on anymore, maybe the only rule left in our household.

We’d moved to the city when I was 8 and my brothers were 11 and 12. The first year, my father ordered Christmas catalogs from Tiffany and Harry Winston, and we played a game with them well into the spring. One of us would cover the prices of things with our hands, and the others would guess how much they cost. He was schooling us in the ways of the rich for future reference.

It wasn’t until my last year of high school that I learned he usually had more credit than money and now had very little of either. He had made bad investments in real estate. He drank too much and made deals with people like himself. That winter a check that was supposed to come any day now did not come, and we ate a lot of spaghetti and were not allowed to charge anything at Bloomingdale’s.

He ate, when he ate with us at all, in a trance, and did not speak unless asked a question. But there must have been someone he liked, because he spent many nights out and returned as I left for school in the morning. We met sometimes at the front door of the apartment and maneuvered around each other silently.

The doorman on duty in the mornings had begun to say “Good morning” to me in a full, somber voice and dash to open the door, which he knew annoyed me. He must have thought I needed caretaking, and I suppose I did, but I wouldn’t know it for many years.

That winter was also the season of my floor-length navy-blue cashmere coat, which I’d bought for $3 in a thrift store and loved to feel billow around my ankles as I charged through the city. When the hem fell and I mended it with safety pins, my mother said I couldn’t leave the house unless it was sewn. My father said, “Since when are we so poor you have to buy your clothes in a thrift store?”

I wasn’t a fighter like my brother Daniel, but a peacekeeper. If I’d been combative, I’d have zinged back a barb: “Since when? All you ever do is complain that you don’t have any money.” Enter pandemonium.

Paris in the Twenties The Saturday Evening Post

I was never what you’d call a good friend of Drew Claringbold. We were acquaintances mostly, occasional golfing buddies. Like most members of the Duffin’s Bay Golf & Country Club, what I knew best about him was his swing. His superb swing. When I was a teenager hanging out at the club and looking for caddy jobs, I would inevitably wander over to the practice tee if Claringbold was there hitting balls. On rare occasions, I’d be the only spectator present, but most of the time there’d be at least six or seven golfers watching him hit a wonderful low draw, his magnificent high fade, punch shots, slow risers, lobs. He could work the ball just about any way he wanted. I’m sure we all thought if we observed him long and hard enough, we’d walk away with the magic formula that would make our swings as fluid as his. In my case, it never happened, and let’s leave it at that.

Drew Claringbold was simply the best golfer at the Duffin’s Bay Golf & Country Club. It may not sound like much, but consider that he was 11 times the club champion, four times runner-up, and five times its senior champion. The belief around the clubhouse was that if his game was clicking, the tournament was pretty much settled before he reached the back nine. What prevented Claringbold from winning every year was consistency. Claringbold, so blessed with a swing for the ages, was also cursed with an uncertain putting stroke. He wasn’t a bad putter, just an unpredictable one.

When he was rolling the ball smoothly, confidently, he was unbeatable, and those who were with him the day he set the course record of 60 (on a par 72), swore up and down they had never seen a player putt it better. Claringbold fired at the flag all day and only a few unlucky bounces kept him from being inside eight feet on every hole. On the rare occasions he was 20 feet or more away, he holed each putt as if it were a tap in.

“Yeah, it was a pretty good day out there,” was all Claringbold said afterward as he bought drinks for his three playing partners and a few hangers-on who had walked with him from about the 14th hole, when word reached the clubhouse that he was on a birdie tear.

But that was just one magnificent day in a long, spectacular career.

None of the Duffin’s Bay old-timers could remember a time when Claringbold didn’t have that swing. Those in the know, and with a few connections, said Claringbold’s swing rivaled Ben Hogan’s. That both had tapped into some great golfing secret that only a select few had ever done. Among the stories I heard at Duffin’s 19th hole was that Claringbold had played with the great Hogan a few times and had never lost by more than a couple of strokes. One story floating around was that he even beat the grand master one autumn day in a friendly match in Texas some 50 years ago. Claringbold never confirmed it, but a faint smile would escape his lips when anyone ever brought it up.

He was a lawyer by trade and a damn good one according to most. I saw him try a couple of cases and recall the grace with which he walked around the courtroom, his lithe figure moved first to the witness, then back to his desk, then over to the jury. He showed intense concentration as he pored over his notes or deconstructed a story that didn’t quite fit the scenario. The demands of his profession, however, never got in the way of squeezing in his four or five rounds a week. Such are the perks of the small-town lawyer.

Once, when I still had the callowness and bravery of someone shy of 20, I asked Claringbold, with deepest respect in my voice, why he hadn’t pursued a professional golfing career. He looked at me quizzically, as if no one had ever posed the question, and then stared out toward one of the fairways for what seemed like such a long time that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. But I stayed patient and imagined he was replaying some great shot in his mind before giving an answer. Finally, he looked back at me and with a shrug and said, “I guess I loved the law more.”

Then he walked away, head bent and shoulders slouched, as if he regretted his answer and his life choice.

Despite his accomplishments on the links, and the awe he inspired in all of us Duffin’s Bay golf groupies, there was one nemesis to Claringbold’s game, besides the aforementioned putting. To the astonishment of everyone, Claringbold had never been able to birdie the 10th hole. According to sources better than I, he had birdied every other hole countless times and eagled about half of them. But the 10th remained unattainable.

What made this remarkable was that the opening hole of the closing nine was far from being the club’s toughest. Running almost straight for 465 yards to a fairly generous green, the 10th was the type of hole that needed two solid, but not spectacular, shots, followed by a good putt for birdie. A few poplars, spruce, and maples hugged the right side to separate it from the par-5 first hole, and a couple of shallow bunkers protected the green on either side. But beyond a few bushes at the back, there was nothing too challenging for a good golfer, let alone a great one, to overcome.

Still, Claringbold couldn’t birdie it.

Even when he was playing his best, he could only summon par. There was no explaining it really. His woods and irons were so true that he rarely missed the green in two swings. But somehow he could never get it down from there. Twenty feet, 12 feet, eight feet, five feet. Regardless of how far his ball was from the hole, his putter would desert him. Once when I was older and playing with him, he stuck his second shot 18 inches from the flag. I didn’t dare say anything in case it jinxed him, but I could barely contain the thought that I’d be there when he finally birdied the 10th. But when he hit his putt, the stroke was just slightly fast and the ball lipped out.

“Damn this hole,” he said, in what was probably the strongest language he had ever used.

In later years, when he had retired from law, Claringbold would spend almost all his days at Duffin’s Bay. On some evenings just before the sun would set, he’d head for the 10th hole just to play it and nothing else. Sometimes he’d hit a couple of balls to increase the odds. Drew knew that a birdie under such circumstances wouldn’t count, but he had to prove to himself it could be done. Even with the rules of golf loosened, he couldn’t notch the elusive bird.

It was strange and unexplainable. Here was a guy who routinely birdied, and a few times eagled, the par-4 seventh, easily the toughest hole on the course—a landing area that was maybe 25 yards wide and 250 yards uphill from the small tee. Hit it too far left or right and you were in the woods. Hit it short of the landing area, as most of us did, and you were fighting a blind, uphill second shot at best, or else enduring the slow agony of watching your ball roll downhill to a flat spot that was maybe 100 yards from the tee.

We all cursed the seventh.

Once, when I was caddying for Claringbold, he smacked a lovely drive on the seventh. It pierced the slight wind and landed at what looked to be 275 yards dead center. When we got there no ball was seen. I walked around in circles for several minutes and finally noticed a 7-iron someone must have forgotten lying on the fairway at about the 270-yard mark. Acting on a hunch, I headed into the woods on the right, and there was his ball, dead behind a couple of birch trees in thick grass. No shot.

Incredibly bad luck. Claringbold grunted disapproval, but otherwise seemed unfazed. He looked at his shot, saw that he couldn’t go straight for the green, and asked me to walk across to the left woods to “keep an eye on this one.” I’m sure what happened next was planned. He took a 4-wood from his bag; made a short, punchy swing; and popped the ball almost straight left, watched it carom a tree near where I was standing, and saw it bounce on the green. One putt, 18 feet, for his third stroke.

He didn’t say anything until the eighth tee where he pulled out his card and pencil (he didn’t like caddies keeping his score) and muttered “routine birdie.” We all cracked up. He then took out the 7-iron we’d found on the seventh, teed his ball about 180 yards from the par-3 flag, and swung. Knocked it in for an ace before he tossed the club in the garbage can.

Geez, the guy was amazing. Except at the 10th.

When he was in his late 70s, Claringbold was in a minor car accident, which reduced some of his mobility. He still had the swing, but age and injury had reduced its power. He played occasionally for a year or two after, but he was eventually relegated to sitting in the clubhouse to watch others play the game he loved and excelled at. Ironically–he’d say unfortunately–the main clubhouse window overlooked the 10th tee.

Every so often I’d see him staring out that window and shaking his head. “I could birdie that hole,” I heard him once mutter. “I could.”

One evening in late summer, I walked off the ninth into the clubhouse and saw him finishing up his dinner. He looked up and smiled.

“How’s the score today?” he asked.

“Not bad today, Drew. I’m five over.”

“Pretty good… for you.” And he chuckled. “You going to fit in the back nine?”

“Naahhh, not enough time.”

He stood up, slowly. “Come on, a group just went off. You could do it.”

He stared at me, not saying anything, but something made me say what I hadn’t even considered for the past couple of years. “Tell you what. I’ll play the 10th and come back on the 18th if you come with me.”

“Sure,” he said, without hesitation.

“And play, too.”

That stopped him momentarily. He looked first at me, then the 10th hole, then back at me. There was just a hint of a smile. “Of course, my clubs aren’t here. They’re in the trunk of my car.” Who knows why he kept them there, long after his playing days were over.

“Really? Well, give me the keys and I’ll get them for you.”

Claringbold seemed to be doing everything in slow motion, even talking. “All right,” he said quietly. “Yeah, let’s do it. I’ll meet you on the tee.”

He moved sluggishly in an awkward shuffle, but didn’t change his mind. I went to get his clubs and took my time, knowing it would take him awhile to reach the 10th. When I got there, he was sitting on a bench, pale and weak looking.

“You sure you’re up for this, Drew?”

He coughed violently for a moment, and then stood up. “Yes, yes, I’m all right. Damn congestion, that’s all. Hand me the driver, please.”

Something about golf invigorates a person. Perhaps it’s the notion of being outside with nature, breathing the air, the quiet hum of a summer evening. But as he took his club, he appeared to shake off 20 years of age, standing tall once again and looking as if he had never left the game. Watching him take his backswing was like seeing him again through 18-year-old eyes. For a man in his condition, he simply smoked it. It landed about 220 yards out and rolled another 25 dead center.

“Not bad for an old geezer,” he said.

For one of the few times in my life, I outdrove him, but at that point I didn’t care. I was getting one more chance to play with Drew Claringbold, and he was still showing me a thing or two. He had his clubs on a pull cart, but was breathing hard when we reached his ball. He waved off any suggestion that we stop and rest. “I’m feeling OK,” he said, but the words came out languidly between breaths. He was sitting about 220 yards from the flag, and I suspect that the drive took so much out of him that there was no chance he could go for the green. Claringbold thought otherwise. “Hand me the driver again, please. I think I’ve got a pretty good lie.”

There are those that’ll tell you they were there the day Drew Claringbold hit his second shot with a driver on the 10th. They’ll rhyme off details about the wind conditions, the lie, the grace of his swing—even what he was wearing that evening. But I know it was just the two of us out there in the middle of the fairway, the sun low on the horizon. When the club connected with the ball, I followed its flight, knowing he’d hit a good one. It just sailed, and for a moment, I had the feeling it might never come down. But a sound nearby interrupted, and I looked back to where he had been standing.

I like to think that before he crumpled in a heap some 245 yards out on the 10th fairway, Drew Claringbold, before he drew in his last breath, had also watched that sweet second shot of his. I like to think he looked intently as it hit the front of the green, took a couple of bounces, and started rolling. And I also like to think that the expression on his face, as he lay there on the ground, was one of pleasure rather than some final grimace of pain more likely to accompany a sudden heart attack. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that throughout his long, marvelous golfing life, Drew Claringbold, the finest man I ever had the chance to play the game with, never birdied the 10th hole at the Duffin’s Bay Golf and Country Club. But I’ll never forget the last shot he hit and how it rolled smoothly toward the hole, before dropping into the cup.

For an eagle.

The Last Sweet Shot of Drew Claringbold The Saturday Evening Post

“What’s wrong?” Warren asked. “Too old and crummy?”

“Huh?”

“This tricycle.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“What are you staring at?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, turning away.

Another time, Lena happened to spot a hunched figure on a corner waiting for a traffic light, and once again a lost memory began to emerge. No way! Inevitably aged, with glasses and half as much hair, but otherwise no mistaking him. Little Miller! She rolled past slowly, confirmed the sighting, and that evening after dinner, when she and Warren fell into their nightly routine of kitchen clean up, said, “Today I saw a weird guy I used to know. Did I ever tell you about Little Miller?”

Warren, a man who liked to eat large drifts of peanut butter on toast and drive around listening to tapes he’d made with his brother when they were fifteen and had a band called “Mr. Peabody” said, “You’ve hardly told me anything. Who was he?”

The children screamed and fought. But she didn’t have to run to them immediately, did she? Better if they worked it out themselves, and so she began to explain.

The house with fruit trees and flowers had started as hers and Tom’s (her only boyfriend before Warren). They found it together, amazed by their luck. They were juniors, but having a life together off campus was all they cared about. They bought a set of china at the Goodwill and became known for their lavish dinner parties, until their budget gave out. No choice but to rent out the back bedroom they’d been using as a dumping ground. After dozens of calls came in, they settled on Yori, a Grateful Dead-loving free spirit with a Smith Barney account.

Soon Yori was joining them for meals, and before long, Yori’s friend Miller was hanging around most of the time, too.

Miller was a cipher. He was as small as a child, but looked old like a troll if you peered into his eyes. He wasn’t affiliated with the University. Yori said he’d met him downtown at a free concert. He said Miller was down on his luck and that he wanted to help him out for awhile. Miller clearly didn’t mind, happily playing the sidekick, laughing at Yori’s jokes, wearing his cast offs and accompanying him around town in the hand-me-down Volvo from Yori’s parents. Lena both felt sorry for Little Miller and disliked him. It was annoying he was always there waiting for his next meal, and his only possession was a dirty little backpack filled with crummy little things.

Even worse, he had started sleeping in the corner of the living room every night, emitting a slightly fungal smell. The house that she and Tom had loved so much had been invaded. Finally the day came when Lena and Tom asked Yori if he’d stop bringing Little Miller around so much, and to their surprise, Yori didn’t mind at all, as if looking for an excuse to get rid of him. That evening, while Lena and Tom were at a poetry reading at the bookstore, Yori delivered the blow. And when they returned home, Little Miller was finally out of their lives.

But so was Lena’s jewelry! And other things as well. Lots of things. Her stereo. Her clock. Some books. Even a small framed watercolor of an emu.

Furious that he’d been kicked out of the house, Little Miller had clearly gone on a rampage, looting and pillaging. They pounded on Yori’s bedroom door, and found him hanging upside down on the anti-gravity table he’d gotten from his parents for his birthday, listening to the Dead on headphones.

“What the hell happened?” Tom said.

“Did the deed,” Yori replied. “He was cool about it.”

“Are you sure he was cool?” Lena cried. “A lot of our stuff is gone.”

“He ripped us off!” Tom said.

Yori loosened his ankle straps and did a flip off the table. “Miller wouldn’t do that. Miller?”

Lena didn’t like to be accusing her housemate’s friend of stealing, but it wasn’t hard to imagine the little troll swiping a few things for revenge. He could sell the stuff at the flea market, make ends meet for a few days more.

“Why did we ever get a housemate anyway,” Lena cried that night. All her favorite necklaces, rings, and bracelets were gone, things she’d been given by friends and family over the years.

Next morning, as they sipped their first cups of coffee, there came a knock at the back door. To their amazement, Little Miller stood on the stoop. The nerve!

“Hey, I came by to get my sweater,” he said.

“Did you take our stuff?” Lena accused.

“What stuff?”

“You know! All the stuff, everything!”

“I didn’t take anybody’s stuff. I just want my sweater.”

Tom appeared behind her. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Hey man, my sweater!”

By now Little Miller had worked his way into their living room, but Tom was blocking him. “Give us back our stuff or get out.”

Little Miller tried to dart past him, but Tom was much bigger and he pushed Little Miller roughly.

“This is uncool!” Little Miller yelled.

“I said get out.” Tom shoved Miller so hard, Miller fell backwards. Then Tom lunged at him, and tore off Miller’s little knapsack.

Tom yelled, “Open it! See if anything’s in there!”

Lena didn’t like seeing Little Miller struggling on the ground and didn’t want to paw through his backpack, either. When she failed to respond, Tom grabbed the grimy pouch and shook it out onto the floor. A few t-shirts, an orange, some pens, some underwear, and a bag of potato chips fell out.

Illustrations by Owen Freeman.

“You jerk!” Miller gathered up his belongings and tried to stuff them back in. “I hate you guys!” He looked as if he might cry. But to Lena’s surprise, Tom still had no mercy. He began to kick Miller. He kicked his arm. He kicked him in the side. And when Miller stood up to put on his pack, Tom pushed him back out the door, sending him flat on the ground.

“You’re going to be sorry!” cried Miller.

“God! Did you have to be so mean to him?” she said.

“He stole our stuff!”

“So what!” Lena said.

“What do you mean, so what?”

Though they had been together almost three years, Lena and Tom didn’t last long after that episode. Lena was haunted by the way Tom had behaved. When they broke up, she even told him it was partly because of Little Miller.

Funny thing, because a year later, Lena ran into Tom at a Chinese restaurant downtown. He was with his new girlfriend, but he swaggered over to say hello anyway. He said, “Hey, by the way, remember that TA we used to have over for dinner sometimes, Richard, from Philosophy? Remember his spacey girlfriend Sunshine? Remember how we thought she was just using him? Turns out, Sunshine is the one who stole our stuff. She and some other guy. Richard found your emu picture in a box of junk in his garage, so you can get it from him sometime. What do you think about that?”
Lena gasped, “Poor Little Miller!”

The children were quiet now, and Lena was decidedly more relaxed. “So anyway,” she said, “I always felt like the whole thing happened for a reason. That Little Miller was a good luck figure for me.”

“Good god, why?” Warren said.

“Well, because if I hadn’t seen Tom attack him like that, I might not have realized how violent Tom was before it was too late.”

“Oh, so that’s the only reason you didn’t spend your life with Tom?”

“I doubt it, but who knows.”

“But,” Warren said, “maybe if there hadn’t been a Little Miller, Tom would never have reacted that way to anything.”

Lena shook her head. “No. It was just a matter of time.”

Warren said, quite irritably, “Who knows. If Little Miller was hanging around here, I’d probably attack him too.”

“You’d talk to him, you’d tell him to leave. Sure. But you wouldn’t go crazy like that. I know you wouldn’t.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Warren hissed.

“Evie needs a bath,” he sighed.

After that, a peculiar thing began to occur. Lena began to see Little Miller all over the place. Morning, noon, and night, in all different parts of town, she spotted him shuffling down the street with his backpack. Uncanny. It was as if a whole army of them had been unleashed, pacing the boundaries of her world.

There wasn’t much to complain about in Lena’s California town. The weather was clement year round. A little foggy sometimes in summer, and in the fall an occasional wind whipped in from the sea. Storms in winter. Nothing exceptional. Nothing except earthquakes rattling china cabinets and knocking down a chimney here and there. Nothing was perfect. How could she complain about a season of Little Millers?

“It’s weird, I keep seeing that Little Miller guy,” she told Warren one evening during their kitchen routine.

“I thought he was your good luck charm,” Warren said.

“Now I’m starting to feel like he’s some kind of curse.”

“Should I go beat him up?” Warren said, scouring a frying pan.

Warren was a good husband. She couldn’t complain about him, either. He did his own laundry and the children adored him. Nothing was wrong. Yet sometimes, Lena thought back to the days when she’d left this town and worked on the east coast at a distinguished magazine. It was the time of her life—she knew it even then. Sometimes she’d even think, “This is the time of my life.” Staff editor by age 24, bringing home manuscripts in her backpack every night on the T, discussing them the next day with the brilliant editor who was her boss and considered one of the great minds of his time. Lena had her own office at the magazine. It had high ceilings and beautiful moldings and a view from the old brownstone to the swan boats in the Public Garden. By now she would have risen up the masthead and would be spending summers out on Nantucket or the Cape. Her mind would be firing on all cylinders like a Mercedes-Benz engine purring over the Simplon. Full steam ahead.

Meanwhile, Warren often spent an hour driving home from the supermarket, circling around the neighborhood, just to listen to his old tapes. He always claimed the lines in the store were long, but Lena knew what he was really doing. She’d seen him once, barreling down the road, howling his head off with the windows up. Why did he have to listen to Mr. Peabody secretly? Looking back was a guilty pleasure, it seemed.

“It seems fairly certain you had lots of adventures before you decided on me,” Warren grunted, drying his hands.

“We’ve had lots of adventures too,” Lena said.

“Have we?”

“Of course!”

“Name one,” Warren said.

“What about having children and living in this house?”

“I suppose picking out grout and tiles and carpet squares is pretty adventurous,” he said.

She’d met him freshman year. Back then she thought of him as too straight-laced for her. The rest of her friends were sitting around listening to loud music and wearing hippie clothes. Warren wore plaid shirts with pens in the pocket.

Whenever he saw her standing at the bus stop, he’d pull over and offer her a ride into town. He had an old Datsun with ripped seats and a rattling dashboard. Wires hung from beneath it and tickled her legs. The heater was on all the time. If you let go of the wheel it took a nosedive off the road.

One Friday night she knocked on his door, her pupils wide and black as tiddlywinks.

“It’s Friday, Warren!” She could see he was studying with a hot gooseneck lamp on his desk.

“I have a mid-term Monday,” he shrugged. “How about you?”

“Well, there’s a party downtown if you feel like going.”

“Hmm. Okay,” he said, as if agreeing to a journey he would not complete for some time. “I could use a break.”

They lurched down the hill from the college. The air was so warm they had the windows down, and the sky was bright with stars and a moon nearly full, and when they reached the party people were putting eggs in the microwave and watching them explode. There was an apparatus in the living room you could hang upside down on to stretch your spine, and people were trying that, while others were dancing, and yet others were giving foot massages and smoking loosely rolled cigarettes of marijuana in the hall. Tom had invited her, and introduced her to his friends. After awhile she noticed Warren standing outside, his back to the party, perfectly still. Warren was strange, she thought. He didn’t care if he seemed like an oddball. He didn’t care if she saw him outside, standing alone.

In a while she came out to check on him.

“Shhh,” Warren said.

“What?”

On the moonlit lawn sat an opossum with brindled fur and a harlequin-shaped face, and it hissed at them, showing its pointy teeth.

“Wow,” Lena said.

The opossum hissed again.

“It’s stuffy inside,” Warren said.

“And it smells like rotten eggs,” she added.

“Do you want to stay?” He pulled his keys from his pocket. She assumed he wanted to get back to study, so she let him go. And it was the night she and Tom got together. But Warren had made a sound investment, and they stayed in touch over the next few years. One thing led to another. When he visited her in Boston, no longer did Warren seem square. He had become a nice looking man. He called it the opossum party—I didn’t want to go home and study, he told her. Didn’t you know? She hadn’t seen that at all.

One night, scrubbing chocolate out of a baking dish, Lena said, “So want to hear the latest chapter of the Little Miller story?”

“Okay, if I must.”

Yes, she had spotted Little Miller again, tiptoeing down the sidewalk like a mouse. This time, she pulled over and jumped out of her car and stood waiting as he approached.

“Hello there!”

He stopped in his tracks and peeled off his dark glasses.

“You’re Miller, aren’t you?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name is Lena. We knew each other a long time ago. Remember Yori?”

“Yori,” said Little Miller. “The clown?”

“Yori was a clown?”

“Yori the clown was a clown,” Little Miller said.

Lena said, “I was thinking of the Yori who lived in the house over on Cayuga Street. Who liked the Grateful Dead. I was his housemate. Remember? We used to eat together a lot?”

He squinted. “I meet a lot of people.”

“Remember when I accused you of stealing my stuff?”

Little Miller pursed his lips. “Don’t think I want to do business with you, ma’am.”

“Remember my boyfriend Tom, grabbing your backpack and shaking it out?”

Little Miller began to move on. “You’re stuck in the dismal past, lady.”

“We found out later you didn’t do it,” Lena called after him. “See, I’m trying to tell you I’m really sorry!”

He kept walking. How could she make him understand how much she’d thought about it all this time?
“You know, I was so mad at Tom for the way he treated you, we broke up,” Lena cried.

“Truth is,” Little Miller turned, “some bad things happened to me and I got mixed up with some really bad people, which is regretful, but people took advantage of me. Lots of them! Then I decided to draw the line. Now life is peaceful. Very serene. Beautiful. I’m blessed. God bless you.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Lena. “Anyway, I made you some brownies. Here.” She uncovered the plate she was holding. Wrapped in Saran, it was heaped with thick, chocolaty squares.

“What’s in ’em, rat poison?”

“Mostly just butter and cocoa,” Lena replied.

She took a few steps his way. He took a few towards her.

“Here,” she said, and bit into one herself. “Yum.”

With unexpected speed he advanced and latched onto the plate. He peeled open the Saran and neatly stuffed an entire brownie into his mouth. “Excellent,” he said, choking it down. “Bliss to you.”

“You did that?” Warren nearly shrieked. “Today?”

“Yep,” Lena said.

“You should have told me first. I probably would have said no. He’s obviously a mental case!”

“Warren,” Lena said, “if you said no, I would have done it anyway.”

“You would have? Don’t my feelings count?”

“What’s with you? I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

“I can’t believe you approached some borderline personality on the street with a delicious dessert. He’ll probably start stalking you.”

“God, Warren. You’re so sterile!”

Warren did the pots and pans for a while in silence, his elbows jerking wildly.

“He might have attacked you,” he said, after awhile.

“Warren, I’m the one who attacked him, remember?”

The children were watching a documentary about gorillas, gentle ones. There was static in the air, and Warren dried his hands.

“Then does this lift the curse? Are we free of Little Miller?”

“I think we are,” she said.

“You know, I’ve had a few adventures in this town.” He lifted the garbage pail towards the door.

“I’m sure you have.”

“Once I stole a birdbath. From the chancellor’s house.”

“A birdbath?” Most mischievous, most unlike him. “Why?”

The past flickered in his smile. “Someone wanted it. I had my reasons.”

“Tell me!” she cried.

“Never assume you have a man pegged,” he admonished, tripping out into the night.

The Little Miller Attack The Saturday Evening Post