Exes by Max Winter

Author:Max Winter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Tampon incident: My knowledge of exactly what transpired that Indian-summery afternoon remains limited. (Events now known within an increasingly less tight but ever smaller circle as the other “other 9/11.”) So I will leave the reenvisioning of these events to Vivian Goddard (see her “Neoteny”).

. . . abandoned tenements that dead-ended near the foot of the Prospect Park wall: My grandpa Ike’s properties.* I know it’s hard now to imagine so forlorn a block on College Hill, but in some respects Providence has changed. On the surface, at least. The three triple-deckers sat side by each, shaded by the statue of the state founder, Roger Williams,** patting with his (own) foot-size hand the head of an invisible indigenous boy long since removed thanks to increased public sensitivity to scale and/or race. By this point, the houses had been sitting unoccupied for at least a decade. After some twenty-odd years of renting to students, Ike had decided enough was enough. “You should see these places in June! They’re worse than drug addicts, these college kids! Let that painted baboon Gorman clean up after ’em. I’m done.” While waiting for a fire or another RISD expansion, Ike focused instead on Mount Hope and Smith Hill, where he knew what to expect and what to look for.

*Shortly after Grandma Tillie’s death, Grandpa Ike sold his remaining tenements to his longtime property manager, Frank Luongo (see “Side by Each”), and moved to West Boca. “Look, I’m a Jew,” Ike told me. “What do I need from old houses and snow? We got the past in our guts and cold in our joints.” I didn’t respond, so he said, “I don’t have another funeral in me,” and that was the end of that.

**It marks what little remains of the great man’s remains. In preparation for the big reburial, Williams’s coffin was exhumed from the basement of his home and discovered to hold nothing but some dirt and the taproot of an apple tree. After much hand-wringing, these contents were moved, placed in a granite tomb, and buried beneath the above-mentioned statue. What became of the corpse no one can say, but many theories of varying plausibility abound, most of which cast aspersions on Anne Hutchinson, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for antinomian heresy and now all too often referred to as Roger Williams’s “witch girlfriend.”*

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