Mystery Man
Rather than stay at Grandma Ida's house, the Steelman family reserved rooms at a nearby Holiday Inn when they traveled back east for the old woman's funeral. After the first afternoon viewing, twenty-four-year-old Jeannine and her parents stopped at a diner for an early dinner on their way back to the hotel.
"I'm not that hungry," Gail, her mother, claimed as she examined the menu. "I'll just have a side salad."
"You ought to eat something more," Armand Steelman cautioned his wife. "I know you're grieving, but you need to keep up your strength."
"It's not that. My body is still running on California time. It tells me it's too early to eat a big meal."
Born and raised in New Jersey, Gail had grown up in Grandma Ida's house. Two years after getting married, she moved west when her husband took a job in California. Once Jeannine was born, the family made yearly pilgrimages back east at Christmastime so that the little girl could spend time with her grandparents. Ever since Grandpa died, eleven years earlier, the Steelmans had tried to talk the old woman into selling her home and moving in with them, but Grandma Ida would not leave New Jersey.
"I suppose it will be up to us to sell her house," Gail said, stabbing a tomato with the tines of her salad fork.
"We'll have to hire someone to go in and clean the place out first," Armand declared. "Your mother had a lot of stuff she acquired over the years."
It was a nice way of saying that his mother-in-law was a borderline hoarder. Her house was filled with collectibles, books, framed family photographs, holiday decorations and various household items.
"I can't even imagine what they'll find in her attic," his wife said with a shudder. "I swear, my mother never threw anything out! But who can we get for the job? Are there people who specialize in organizing and running yard sales? Maybe someone will sell all her old stuff on eBay for a percentage of the sale."
"Or I can stay here and do it," Jeannine offered.
"You?" her mother asked with surprise.
"Yes. School will be out for the summer, so my job won't be affected. And since Duke and I broke up, we won't be taking that trip to Hawaii that we planned."
There were no tears with that admission. No sign of the heartbreak she felt when her college sweetheart left her for another woman. She had come to terms with those emotions and was ready to move on with her life. What better way to do that than to spend time in New Jersey?
"I can use a change of scenery," she continued. "Besides, I never got to know my grandparents well. Maybe I can learn more about them this way."
Since Jeannine was currently living in the apartment above her parents' garage, there was no need for her to return to California to see to her living arrangements. Gail would take care of her daughter's cat and collect her mail while she was away.
"It's settled then. After I drive the two of you to Newark Airport, I'll check out of the Holiday Inn and move into Grandma Ida's house."
Three days later, she did just that. When she opened the front door and stepped over the threshold, it was like entering a museum. Her grandparent may have been a chronic collector, but at least she kept a clean house. There were no piles of junk, no clutter. Everything was neat and orderly.
After putting her few belongings into the dresser in the guest room, she went to the kitchen and opened the bottle of wine she had purchased on the drive from the hotel. After two sips, she headed toward the dining room with a pen and notepad and began making an inventory. She started with the china cabinet. On the top half, on display behind the glass doors, her grandmother kept a collection of porcelain and china figurines by Capodimonte, Goebel, Limoges, Lladro, Meissen and Royal Doulton. The lower half of the cabinet contained Ida's "good china," the dishware she reserved for holidays and special occasions. There were two complete sets: one made by Lenox to be used January through November and the other by Spode, which was reserved for the month of December. Jeannine always loved those Christmas tree dishes.
I don't want to get rid of these, she thought, making a mental note to pack them up with extreme care and ship them back to California.
By the time she completed her list of all the items in the dining room, the bottle of wine was half empty.
I think I'll call it a night, she decided, as she replaced the stopper and put the bottle on the door of the refrigerator. If I want to start tackling the attic tomorrow, I'll need a good night's sleep tonight.
* * *
"Ugh, it's hot up here," Jeannine complained after ascending the staircase and opening the attic door.
When she turned on the overhead light, her mouth fell open.
"Oh, my god! Look at all this stuff! It will take me all summer to go through this."
Never one to shrink from a challenge, no matter how daunting, she grabbed the nearest box and took it downstairs to the dining room. From its light weight, she correctly assumed its contents: clothing. Tears came to her eyes as she removed Grandma Ida's winter sweaters.
She was wearing this the last time I saw her, she thought when she came across a red cardigan with six Scottish terriers in Christmas attire embroidered on it.
Although "ugly" sweaters were popular around the holidays, Jeannine did not think they would be big sellers on eBay during the summer months. She, therefore, taped up the box and wrote GOOD WILL in large letters across the top with a thick black marker. Then she put the box on the back porch where it would eventually be picked up with everything else that would be donated to charity.
"One down," she said, heading for the attic stairs again. "About a million more to go."
There were several more cardboard cartons filled with winter and autumn clothes, including a collection of Halloween sweatshirts, all of which were sent to the back porch. Then the boxes got heavier. Thankfully, she was physically fit. There were cartons full of Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween decorations, some of which had seen better days.
Grandma Ida probably had some of these things for years and was unable to part with them.
Other people, however, would not see the sentimental value in a porcelain Santa Claus with a crack in its hat or a ceramic ghost with a large chip in its base. Jeannine systematically separated the good items from the trash. Rather than spend her entire summer photographing every item, listing it on eBay and then shipping it off to the highest bidder, she would hold a yard sale first. Whatever did not sell, she would then list on eBay. If it failed to sell there, she would pass it on to Good Will to be sold at their thrift store.
By late afternoon, having gone through the contents of roughly three dozen cartons of her grandmother's belongings, she took a frozen dinner out of the freezer and popped it in the microwave. She imagined at some point, she would need to go to ShopRite and buy a few bags of groceries, but she would finish whatever was in the kitchen first. Once she had satisfied her hunger, she filled the bathtub with hot, soapy water, poured herself a large glass of wine, leaned back and relaxed. After watching a movie on HBO—thankfully, no one had called the cable company and cancelled her grandmother's service—she went upstairs to bed.
The next day was a repeat of the previous one. The only difference was that rather than winter clothes and holiday decorations, the boxes contained household items that her grandmother rarely used. There were several small appliances: an ice cream maker, a hot dog roller, a tabletop electric grill and a waffle iron. A set of nonstick pots and pans that had never been removed from the box, which Ida had purchased at a fraction of its cost at a going-out-of-business sale, was waiting to be given as a gift should she receive an invitation to a wedding shower.
I'm sure all these things will sell at the yard sale.
Jeannine soon developed a pattern. Up the stairs. Grab a box. Down the stairs. Empty the box. Then repeat. There were more cartons of holiday decorations, including leprechauns for St. Patrick's Day and rabbits for Easter.
Grandma Ida loved her holidays.
Up and down the stairs. Boxes, boxes and more boxes. As she worked her way to the rear of the attic, she found objects from the past: vinyl records, eight-track tapes, scrapbooks, photo albums, vintage toys, baby clothes, her mother's prom dress, her grandmother's wedding gown.
It was near the middle of July when she finally saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
"There are fewer than two dozen boxes left in the attic," she told her mother over the phone as she put a frozen pizza into the oven. "I ought to be able to go through them all tomorrow."
"Your father wants to know if you found Jimmy Hoffa yet," Gail teased.
"No, but I think I came across Judge Crater."
"When do you think you'll come home?"
"I suppose that depends on how everything goes at the yard sale. That will determine how much time I have to spend trying to sell the rest of the stuff on eBay."
"Let me know when you're having the sale. I can take a few days off from work, fly to Jersey and help you set it up."
"Thanks, Mom. Not only could I use the help, but I'd love to see you. I miss you and Dad—and my cat."
And so, the pattern continued. Another dinner. Another hot bath. Another movie on HBO.
The following day started out like all the others. After a cup of coffee, she ascended the attic stairs into what seemed like an oven. She quickly grabbed a box and returned to the comfort of the air-conditioned main floor of the house.
Then, just after two o'clock in the afternoon, Jeannine, perspiring from her brief trip to the stifling attic, cut through several layers of packing tape that sealed a large cardboard carton. From the amount of tape her grandmother had used, she assumed the contents were either fragile or valuable, perhaps both. When she at last opened it up. she was surprised to find a suitcase inside.
Why go through the trouble of packing a suitcase in a box? she wondered. And it's locked. I wonder where Grandma Ida kept the key.
Wanting to finish her task before dinner, she put the suitcase to the side and went back to the attic for the next box. An hour and a half later, the last carton came down the stairs to the dining room.
"I'm done!" she exclaimed in triumph after sorting through a box of magazines from the Fifties and Sixties.
The list of items she wanted to sell had grown to over thirty pages. Over the next four days, she would add ten more as she cleaned out the kitchen, basement, bathrooms and bedroom.
"Now, all I have to do is decide how much to charge for everything," she announced when she updated her mother on the progress she was making.
"Price them high because people will invariably offer you less. They all go to yard sales prepared to haggle."
"Thanks for the advice. Oh, by the way, I don't suppose you would know where Grandma Ida would keep a key to a suitcase."
"Your grandmother never locked her suitcases. My father always scolded her for being too trusting."
"Well, I found a locked suitcase in the attic the other day, and I want to know what's inside."
"I suppose you'll just have to break the lock then."
After ending the call with her mother, Jeannine went to the kitchen junk drawer where her grandmother kept a hammer and screwdriver for minor household repairs. Ten minutes later, she opened the lid of the suitcase. Inside was a thick cardboard box, also wrapped with several layers of packing tape. She made her way through the tape with a box cutter, only to discover the top of the box had been glued shut.
This reminds me of a nesting doll. When am I finally going to see what's inside?
She carefully cut through the cardboard, not wanting to damage what was beneath it.
"Really?" she laughed when she saw a child's board game inside. "All this tape and glue and locks for a Mystery Date game?"
Despite its age, the box seemed to be in pristine condition, as though it had just come down from a toy store shelf.
I wonder if all the pieces are here.
She raised the lid of the game box.
POP!
One of the bulbs in the dining room chandelier went out. Since there were four others, she still had plenty of light to see by, so she proceeded to examine the contents of the box. Everything seemed to be there: the playing board, the four game pieces, the outfit cards, the single wooden die and the plastic door.
This game is in mint condition.
Jeannine vaguely remembered playing an updated version of the game when she was a little girl. The object was that the players had to acquire three cards to make an outfit for a specific type of date: a formal dance, a day at the beach, bowling or skiing. Once they had a complete outfit, they had to open the door, hoping to find the man similarly dressed. A fifth young man, named "the dud," was a disheveled loser. If a player opened the door to the dud, she had to discard her three matching cards and start assembling another outfit.
Just for the hell of it, Jeannine reached over and opened the door.
With my luck, she mused, thinking of her failed romance with Duke, I'll probably get the dud!
When she opened the small plastic door, there was no dud, nor was there a young man dressed for a formal dance, a day at the beach, an afternoon on the ski trails or a night at the bowling alley.
"A doctor?" she said with surprise when she saw the handsome man dressed in scrubs and a wearing a stethoscope around his neck.
Surely, back when the game was originally made, marrying a doctor was every American mother's hope for her daughter. But a doctor was never one of the options in the game.
POP!
Another light bulb went out. A moment later, she heard a knock on the door. As she crossed the room to open it, the remaining bulbs went out, and the room was plunged in darkness. The last thing Jeannine remembered before waking up in the hospital hours later was tripping over Grandma Ida's old suitcase.
* * *
Jeannine's eyes fluttered open. She was lying in a hospital bed, and her head hurt like hell.
"You're awake," a pretty young nurse said as she entered the room.
"Yes, I ...."
The patient abruptly stopped speaking when she got a good look at her caregiver. Was she dreaming? This was no modern woman but a throwback from the Fifties or the pre-Beatles Sixties. The "flip" hairstyle, the old-fashioned, pressed, white nurse's uniform and the white starched cap were all glaring anachronisms.
"What's happened to me?" she asked.
"You have a concussion. You fell and hit your head," the nurse replied.
"How did I get here?"
"An ambulance brought you."
"But who found me? I was alone in my grandmother's house."
"I'm afraid I don't know."
"How did ...?"
Jeannine's question died on her lips when the attending physician walked into her room.
"I'm Dr. Brett," he said.
"It's you!" the patient exclaimed. "How can that be?"
"I work here at the hospital."
"I know that, but how did your picture get in my grandmother's Mystery Date game?"
"You're confused," he said, shining a small light into his patient's eyes. "Nothing to worry about. It's common to be disoriented when you first regain consciousness."
"I'm not disoriented. I was at my grandmother's house, examining one of her old board games: Mystery Date. I opened the door, and there you were."
"Mystery Date, huh?" Kenneth Brett laughed. "I got that game for my niece last Christmas."
"My little sister has one, too," the nurse added. "She often makes me play it with her. I always seem to get the dud."
"I don't understand any of this!" Jeannine cried, clearly agitated. "Who found me? Who called the ambulance? Why is this nurse dressed like a character from an old Fifties TV show? And how did your picture wind up ..."
Jeannine felt a sharp stab in her arm and realized the doctor had given her a shot.
"What are you doing?"
"Giving you something to calm you down."
Whatever was in the hypodermic needle acted quickly. Within moments, Jeannine's head leaned back on the pillow, and she fell asleep. When she came to several hours later, the pain had subsided. Neither the doctor nor the nurse was there.
Maybe they don't really exist. Maybe I dreamed them.
She looked around the room. It was clear where she was, but nothing indicated when she was. She was no expert on hospital furnishings, but the bed, visitor's chair and utility table seemed to be timeless. There was a phone on the nightstand beside her bed.
It's got a rotary dial, she thought, the fear immediately returning. I'm sure all hospitals switched over to push-button models decades ago.
Then she noticed there was no flatscreen television on the wall. In fact, there was no TV in the room at all.
"Please, dear God! Don't let this be happening."
"You're awake," the nurse said, as she re-entered the room, still dressed like a character from an old black-and-white episode of General Hospital.
"Where's the TV?" Jeannine asked.
"TV? This is a hospital room, not a hotel room."
"What happened to my purse?"
"You didn't have one with you when the ambulance brought you in."
"But my insurance card is in my wallet, and so is my driver's license. How did I get admitted to the hospital without identification?"
"You can straighten all that out with the woman from administration once you've been discharged."
"But I need my iPhone."
"Your what? the nurse asked with a look of confusion on her pretty young face.
"My cell phone."
"What's that?"
Jeannine finally summoned the courage to ask the question that plagued her.
"What's today's date?"
"July 18."
"What year?"
"Why, it's 1960, of course."
"I need to talk to the doctor."
"Dr. Brett is making his rounds. He'll be in to see you shortly."
When the nurse left the room after checking the patient's vital signs and noting the information on her chart, Jeannine got out of bed and walked to the window.
"No!" she moaned when she looked down at the parking lot.
Not a single car there had rolled off the assembly line later than 1960!
* * *
"I tell you, Doctor," the patient cried when the physician returned, "there's something seriously wrong with me! Yesterday, I lived in the year 2021, yet your nurse tells me I'm now living in 1960."
"Now, now, Miss Steelman," Dr. Brett answered, "I'm the medical man here. I know what I'm doing."
He may have been an extremely good-looking young man—quite a catch, by anyone's standards—but his condescending attitude annoyed Jeannine.
"Can't you run an EEG or do an MRI or something?"
"An MR-what?" he laughed, amused by her question.
"What am I saying?" the patient mumbled to herself. "They probably haven't been invented yet."
"You hit your head and sustained a concussion. That's all. I kept you in the hospital overnight for observation, but I'm going to send you home now."
"Look. I don't know how any of this happened, but you can't send me out into a world that existed long before I was born!"
Dr. Brett looked at his watch.
"I'll be going off duty in twenty minutes. I'll fill out the necessary papers to have you released, and then I'll drive you home."
Home? she wondered. Where is that?
It was a word she associated with San Francisco, not New Jersey, and with the twenty-first century, not the mid-twentieth.
The same nurse—was she the only one that worked on that floor?—opened the closet and took out a pair of pedal pushers and a short-sleeved, button-down blouse.
"You can get dressed now."
"Those aren't my clothes."
"You were wearing them when you were brought in yesterday."
To borrow a phrase from Lewis Carroll, things were getting "curiouser and curiouser." Jeannine decided to just go with the flow—for now—and hope that whatever was playing tricks with her mind would soon stop. When she was dressed, the nurse returned with a wheelchair.
"I can walk," she insisted.
"Sorry, but it's against hospital regulations."
Dr. Brett was waiting at the door. Behind him was a 1958 Ford Thunderbird.
"No seat belts," she said when Kenneth opened the passenger door for her.
"They were an option that didn't come with this particular model."
Optional seat belts: another anachronism. Such safety restraints were mandatory in her time.
As the handsome doctor drove along the New Jersey roads to Grandma Ida's house—odd, he never asked his patient where she lived; perhaps he got the address from her records—Jeannine stared with a mixture of wonder and horror at the buildings they passed. Many would no longer be standing in 2021. Some would be renovated over the next sixty years. Only a handful would look the same.
When the Thunderbird pulled up in front of Ida's house, there was no rental car in the driveway.
"What happened to the Subaru?" Jeannine asked herself.
"Subaru?" Kenneth echoed, as he got out of his car and walked around the front of it to open the passenger door. "Is that some type of shrubbery?"
"No. It's a Japanese car. I rented one to use while I'm staying in Jersey."
"I know a Japanese automaker called Toyota tried to introduce a car in America, but I never heard of a company called Subaru."
"Wait. You will. Someday, in your lifetime, American highways will be glutted with Toyotas, Subarus, Hondas and Nissans."
"You certainly have quite an imagination!" Kenneth laughed. "I'll bet you read a lot of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov novels. It seems to me you ought to be reading Harlequin Romances instead."
Having walked Jeannine to her grandmother's door, he turned the doorknob and opened it.
"I guess I forgot to lock it," she mumbled.
"Why lock your door? This is New Jersey, not New York."
I forgot, she mused. I'm not in Kansas anymore.
"Everything is different," she said as she stepped across the threshold. "Wall-to-wall carpeting, all this retro furniture. And what happened to the boxes?"
Her eyes then went to the dining room table, one different from the one that had been there yesterday.
"The Mystery Date game is gone. I was half-hoping that if I opened the door on that game, everything would go back to normal."
"Why don't you sit down?" Kenneth asked. "You need to rest."
Jeannine slumped down on the couch and started to cry.
"I wish to God I could just wake up."
Dr. Brett sat down beside her and tried to comfort her.
"There, there, now. Everything will be all right."
The distraught young woman pushed him away.
"You're not real," she sobbed. "You're nothing but a figment of my imagination. A character in my nightmare brought to life by that damned game!"
"There's no need to talk like that. Women shouldn't use such language. It's unladylike."
"Are you serious? I can talk any way I want."
Something inside Jeannine's mind snapped, and she treated the shocked young doctor to a number of expletives that would make a sailor blush.
"Shut your filthy mouth!" Kenneth yelled, deeply offended not only by her foul language but by her insolent behavior toward him; women in his time knew their place.
"No. I won't, and you can't make me," she screamed with defiance.
The argument soon progressed from mere words to physical actions. In an attempt to calm his overwrought patient, Dr. Brett slapped her across the face. It was a gesture often seen in old movies; one meant to bring a hysterical woman to her senses. However, it had the opposite effect on Jeannine Steelman.
"Why, you macho shithead!" she cried and began to pommel him with her fists. "You Mystery Date dud!"
The violence escalated. In all fairness to Kenneth Brett, Jeannine became the aggressor. The doctor acted in self-defense. In the midst of the slapping, pushing and shoving, the teacher from San Francisco was knocked off balance, lost her footing and fell, hitting her head on the glass-topped, pine coffee table. Her vision blurred momentarily. When she was again able to see clearly, the doctor was gone. She was sprawled on the floor, lying amidst mountains of cardboard boxes.
"I'm back!"
The light bulbs in the dining room chandelier were glowing again. Although reeling from the injury to her head, she made her way to the table. She quickly gathered up the contents of the game—the cards, the board, the die and the playing pieces—and returned them to the box. Then she carried it to the kitchen, put it into her grandmother's sink and set it on fire.
* * *
As Gail Steelman turned toward her husband, her cell phone slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Her face was ashen, and her eyes were brimming with tears.
"What is it?" Armand asked. "What's wrong?"
"That was the police, calling from New Jersey. My mother's house caught fire and burned to the ground."
"Is Jeannine all right?"
Gail could only shake her head. Her immense grief would not allow her to say the words.
* * *
Ten-year-old Rory Linley ran through the door, toting a shopping bag of items she and her mother had purchased at the church's annual rummage sale.
"Can we play now?" she asked excitedly, removing the game from the bag.
"I ought to start cooking dinner," her mother said, looking at the kitchen clock, "but maybe I have time for one quick game."
Coretta Linley was delighted that her daughter had found an interest in something other than playing video games on her iPad.
"I want to be the blue girl," Rory said, selecting her playing piece.
"I'll be red."
Mother and daughter were playing for ten minutes before Coretta collected the three pink cards for the formal date (the gown, the evening wrap and the bag and shoes) and landed on the space marked OPEN THE DOOR.
When she revealed her date behind the door, the bulb in the kitchen light went out.
"A policeman?" she said, confused. "I don't ...."
Moments later, Rory found herself sitting alone at the kitchen table, wondering what had happened to her mother and what she would tell her father when he got home from work.
Mystery Date game (by Marvin Glass and Henry Stan) was manufactured by the Milton Bradley Company.
I haven't played Mystery Date since the time I opened the door and found Salem was my date. (Frankly, I'd rather get the dud!)
