Rocky & Helen, Part 1

Seriously
by Lucia Nevai

The local insurance agency was housed in a former ice cream stand at the edge of Highway 6 south of the hamlet of Dustin, New York. All four glass sides as well as the roof were angled slightly-intentionally, though the angles chosen looked dumb and unprofessional, as if a three-year-old had tried and failed to draw a square. It was my plan to get insurance there. First I needed something to insure.

I was turning the old feed store into an art gallery-on a shoestring, a loan from my sister. She was the successful one, a television producer in Los Angeles. Once again, she'd jumped at a chance to help me get established somewhere doing something. We were both worried about me. "Incorporate," she said. I did.

It took a while-I couldn't decide on a name. Being in love seemed to slow everything down. I kept sighing and daydreaming and thinking about the last time and looking forward to the next time. When I thought of a name, I ordered a sign. That took a while, too. A man had to design the letters, carve them in wood, then gild the whole thing. Next on my list was the floor.

The floor was worn and stained and buckled in places, but it was a beautiful floor, made of wide planks of red oak. I called up a couple of friends I'd met on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who did floors. I offered to trade them the work for a week in the country. We agreed that I would pay their bus fare up and back, cook for them, and put them up. They would sand, smooth, fill in the cracks, and coat the oak with three layers of polyurethane. We scheduled a week, then they didn't show. This happened twice. The second time, they didn't even call. I drove to Wickley to meet their bus and they didn't get off. I sat there at the bus stop after the bus was gone, looking at the iridescent phallic-shaped oil stain on the concrete in the loading zone.

Back at home, I went through the Yellow Pages. All the local floor guys were busy, too busy for months even to come by and give me an estimate. I dropped the floor project and decided to concentrate on insurance.

My sister told me to insure locally. She said the hometown agent considered you a traitor if you didn't, and if you did, he would really go to bat for you when there was a good-size claim. "Insure everything," my sister said. "I don't want you calling me up for another loan when some farmer walks in, trips over his own shoelaces, ends up in traction, and you get sued."

"Do you really think that's likely?" I said. It was the wrong moment to be sarcastic. A silence hummed in the wires between our coasts-her way of letting me know she was patiently reviewing past investments in me that had turned out badly-a car I wrecked, three years of college tuition, an apartment in New York City.

"Do your only sister a favor, Tamara," she said. "Take yourself seriously for once." I promised her I was serious. I would get insurance.

It was August and too hot to wear anything but shorts. I should have stayed in my cutoffs and flip-flops. I should have driven the three hundred yards down Highway 6 to the insurance agency, but I was new and out of place and I assumed I should look businesslike, so I put on a dress and I walked.

To enter the agency was to fill up the only available three square feet of floor space. The air conditioner was loudly generating ice-cold air, which had the unrefreshing effect of cooling the cigarette smoke produced by two apparently overworked agents, man and wife. Their steel desks had been pushed together in the center to form a work island. Around the perimeter were stacks of ancient cartons marked 1976 A-F and so on.

The woman, thin with gray hair, was entering data slowly on a word processor, a fresh cigarette busily burning in a huge chrome ashtray filled with butts. The man, stocky, though equally gray, toyed with his cigarette as he pored over a stack of mail. This was Rocky, no doubt. The little red and white sign at the north end of town read:

   BE SHUR, IN-SURE. SHURBERRY'S STATE FARM INSURANCE.

   ASK FOR "ROCKY."

"Excuse me," I said, after standing there for several minutes.

Rocky Shurberry checked his wristwatch, took a puff on his cigarette, coughed. Without looking up from the mail, he said in a deep whiskey voice, "Helen?" Helen punched in a few more numbers. She reached for the burning cigarette, brought it to her lips, and inhaled deeply, replacing it in the ashtray, bull's-eye, without taking her eyes from the computer screen. If they were both blind, I would have concluded that they were functioning at their optimum.

"Yes?" she said, finally breaking her concentration.

"Someone's here."

"I'm trying to finish this," she said.

"I'm processing the mail here," he said, shuffling through the stack of four or five items paper-clipped to their envelopes.

The telephone rang. Rocky went back to the mail, his brow in three even furrows. Helen leisurely removed a new cigarette from a leather-encased pack, lit it with the tip of the one in the ashtray, and stamped out the butt. The phone was on its fifth ring when she answered.

"Shurberry's State Farm," she said. "Could you hold, please?" She covered the receiver with her hand. "Rocky," she said. "I can't do everything. I've only got two arms and two legs. Now, do you want to take this call or help this girl?"

With an air of hopelessness, Rocky tossed the mail aside and reached for the phone. Helen removed her narrow-framed glasses and turned to face me at last. "Can I help you?" she asked, though the look on her face said, Can I hurt you?

"I want to get prices," I said, and read to Helen from the page of notes I'd taken on the phone with my sister, mentioning fire, theft, and full liability coverage, either as a floater or as a second separate policy. Helen's features became steadily more sober and pinched as I read. Rocky interrupted me.

"The Chuzzners," he said to her. "Do they have term?"

She swiveled in her chair to face him. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

"I'd get the file myself," he said, "but every time I go over to your side of the office, you snap at me for getting in your way and slowing you down and I don't know what all."

"Tell them to call back."

"It's an emergency," he said.

"I just hope this isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back," Helen muttered.

This elicited a companion mutter from Rocky, "I'm going to have to get a professional secretary in here," which silenced Helen, though something like hatred was expelled from her ears in palpable streaks.

"Provide the spelling," she ordered.

"Chuzzner. C-H-U-Z-"

"Write it down."

"Hold on, please," he told the party, laying the phone on the desk, lighting a cigarette. He fished around for a scrap of paper in his nearly empty wastebasket, taking time to read both sides of each scrap. The first piece he selected was too small for his large handwriting-he only got to the N. The second scrap was large enough both to contain the eight capital letters and to sail through the air, his solution when Helen would not reach for it.

Helen read the scrap. "Ask them the policy number," she said, studying the spelling.

Rocky asked. "They don't know," he reported.

"Tell them they should have the policy number written down by the telephone with all the other emergency numbers: fire, police, doctor, ek-cetra." While Rocky was relaying this information, Helen turned to me and said, "Do people really think we know their policy numbers by heart?"

Rocky began to cough. He held the receiver to his chest to muffle the sound and coughed in a long, loud, entirely personal interlude. Helen watched over the rims of her glasses as if she were timing him. Rocky got out a handkerchief, wiped the moisture from his lips, poked the wet, lumpy thing in a rear pocket. The voice on the line had risen in anger-I could hear it from where I was standing. "Tell them we can't locate the document presently," Helen said.

Rocky told them. "Never fails," he said, hanging up. "You try to help people and they turn on you."

Copyright © 2004 by Lucia Nevai

About the Author

Lucia Nevai's short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, the Iowa Review, New England Review, and other periodicals. She is the author of two collections of stories, Star Game, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Normal. Born in Iowa, Nevai now lives in upstate New York.