Maggie Cobbler had four daughters: Peach, Apple, Cherry and Felicity. Felicity was the youngest by some years and when Maggie was pregnant with her, Peach, Apple and Cherry made known the wickedness and fundamental cruelty of visiting cute novelty names upon innocent girls by one day declaring to the principal and teachers of Laurelhurst Elementary School that they were henceforth to be known as Mary, Ann and Elizabeth, and by refusing to respond when called by their given names. Eventually the adults capitulated and so little Strawberry was stillborn, so to speak, and Felicity took her place in the world.

Felicity, the tall slender one, got married at 18 to a staff sergeant in the Air Force and went off to live on a base in West Germany. The three older girls, of normal height but not a bit slender, remained at home playing catch up with their 295 pound mother, who did her level best to meet them in the middle by dieting for a period of months until she had got down to 290. But heredity worked against the girls, who got only half Maggie’s DNA. Mary, the oldest, never managed to get past 260 lbs., while Ann and Elizabeth had all they could do to maintain 250 lbs.

They had not been popular at school. They tried to fit in. But as Elizabeth, née Cherry, once said, “I’m too fucking big to fit in anywhere.” An understandable conclusion, but the whole truth of their social isolation was that besides being huge, the three Cobbler sisters had two other traits almost guaranteed to amplify their isolation: they were smart and they were funny.

As everyone knows, it is unwise for girls, on the whole, to be both smart and funny. Or to be completely accurate, it’s unwise for them to let it show. And the Cobbler sisters certainly never tried to hide it or even just, for heaven’s sake to tone it down every once in a little while. Letting everyone see how smart you are is a little immodest in any girl and even more so in a girl who has reason to try to blend in and not stand out all the time and, to be perfectly frank, it’s rather unattractive, isn’t it? So in a sense, and this is really the sad part, they had only themselves to blame when each school year more or less passed them by in terms of friendships, clubs, outings, dances, sleep overs and of course dating.

Potential allies were overweight boys and the school’s loose network of weird kids. As for the overweight boys, most of them weren’t that overweight. And for the tiny handful who were, while the law of the jungle may say that phenotypes attract, the law of the blackboard jungle says that if it’s bad enough always being made fun of for being a fat slob, why make things even worse by being seen hanging out with a fat slob chick, which would just be a way of admitting that this is all you can ever hope to get, loser. The weird kids, while not comprising a defined group, nevertheless each independently calculated that either their own lives could not be bettered in any way by allying themselves with the ostracized, or that for once in their lives being able to make fun of someone else was a novel opportunity not to be missed.

The downside of being very bright is the risk that the cognitive task of dressing up your own prejudices and shortcomings as proof of your superiority over the stupid people is a relatively easy one and so you wind up getting stuck inside of your own head forever. The downside of being funny is that it can be used as such an effective way to keep a disappointing world at arm’s length that you never truly find anything in that world very funny.

The potential upsides of being both bright and funny are a little mysterious and even controversial because the two upsides manifest together so infrequently. A speculative characterization of the two in combination would describe a disciplined curiosity abetted by the ability to find unpleasant surprises intriguing. How it is that the young Cobbler sisters managed to navigate their lives into the safe harbor of some measure of wisdom and perspective is anyone’s guess. But here’s what it looked like when they got there.

There is a vintage comics and sports memorabilia store on the north side of Sandy Blvd. in the Hollywood district. It’s a store front with living quarters in back. It looks older than many of the other buildings on the same block that were built in the 1920’s. The front door is wood-framed glass with hand painted lettering: Three Sisters Comics and Sports Memorabilia. Below that is a hand-painted depiction of the three mountains in southern Oregon known as the Three Sisters. The girls have put on some weight, but if you’re a first-time customer and the name of the shop even registers in your mind, it may still take you a moment or two when you walk in and see the owners for the first time to get the little joke.

They have cast off the pseudonyms and reclaimed Peach, Apple and Cherry. Cherry is the memorabilia geek and the genius behind the store’s splendid inventory. She has a photographic memory complete with auto focus and f-stop adjustment and remembers every baseball card ever printed, every issue of Little Lulu and the price of everything, factored by condition. Give her a single detail of a Donald Duck story and she’ll tell you whether it was written and drawn by Carl Barks or one of the lesser lights and whether it appeared in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories or Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and for good measure tell you the year and whether the issue in question was published by Dell or Western. If you said to her, do you remember when Spidy got in trouble for kissing Mary Jane with his eyes open? she would finish the thought for you by reciting exactly the impending danger he spotted just because his eyes were open.

She has a regular correspondence with Gilbert Shelton and Bobby London and once slept with Lynda Barry, who is also smart and funny. When the girls purchased the store and the inventory was being assembled, Apple enrolled in a Fundamentals of Small Business course at Portland Community College and promptly dropped out after the first session, reasoning, as she explained to Peach and Cherry, that doing so was preferable to trying to stab herself in the heart with the nail scissors she carried in her purse, which the prospect of having to complete the course would surely have forced her to do. She researched the MBA curriculum at the Wharton School, bought the texts that seemed relevant directly from the publishers and after a few months of full time study hired a calligrapher to gin up an MBA diploma from the Institute of Home Made Self Improvement which she had beautifully framed and hung next to the store’s business license and the collection of post cards from Felicity in West Germany. It was not easy to find a green eye shade of the sort that accountants use, because accountants do not use them. But persistence eventually paid off. She likes wearing hers so much that sometimes she sleeps with it on.

And Peach holds court. Word about the shop has passed through enough mouths that many of the people in it at any given moment aren’t there to buy anything but are just hanging out, rummaging through the bins or sitting in chairs drinking tea from the Perpetual Pot on the counter next to the antique cash register, sipping from their own mugs that they bring in and hang from one of the many hooks on the wall. Peach sits in a big sturdy custom made rocking chair and does her knitting and can keep up several conversations at once without ever looking up from the needles and yarn. Every once in a while Maggie appears in the doorway leading to the rear living quarters. “Command performance!” announces Peach which is to say, you are commanded to stop talking and listen. Maggie then recites from memory a poem by Christina Rossetti or sometimes Swinburn.

Once, in the beginning, a teenaged mug-hanging regular asked if Maggie knew any poems that rhymed. Peach told him to pull his chair up to her, then swatted him on the back of the head with a rolled up issue of Knitting Now and said, “Today you’re going to learn some basic knit and purl stitches. There’s more to life than burying your head in a goddamn comic book.” An hour later she sent him home with needles and pink yarn and instructions not to come back without two 3-inch knitted squares for Peach to turn into baby booties for Felicity’s infant girl.

When Cathy Remy first walked into Three Sisters Comics and Sports Memorabilia and told the absolutely enormous woman restoring order to a thoroughly rummaged bin of old Betty and Veronicas that no, she wasn’t looking for anything specific but just window shopping, she had just recently moved into a new apartment on SE Hawthorn and so had no idea that the enormous woman’s even more enormous mother, at that moment in the back watching As The World Turns, was the source of the nightly seismic events emanating from the apartment directly above her own. She would not learn this until some time after Cherry had introduced her to Witch Hazel and Little Itch and she’d become a mug-hanging regular.

Which is when all Cathy’s worrying started. Not so much for the girls, who were forty-ish, but for Maggie who was officially elderly. Imagine an aquarium in your living room with a little pump that circulates the water to keep it oxygenated and all the fish happy. Now imagine that same pump trying to oxygenate the water in an aquarium which has been putting on a little water lately and is now the size of an olympic swimming pool. Maggie dieted constantly and, from time to time, seriously. But she was either a really bad dieter or she had the sort of body that if transported above the arctic circle would happily store energy as fat with great efficiency while each winter all the lean people around her would drop like hypothermic flies. Whatever the underlying cause, Cathy knew the cardiovascular odds greatly favored a when, not an if, and she knew just as well that there was probably nothing she’d ever be able to say or do by way of prevention for this woman who’d quickly become like a favorite aunt to her. It was in the wee hours one morning when the shaking in her room was easily a 6.0 on the Richter scale that she realized that Maggie faced a second life-threatening risk, but one that could be addressed with a little forethought.

The next morning, Cathy, still not caught up on sleep from her previous shift, was discovering that the hardest part about the conversation she was in the middle of was making it clear that being repeatedly awakened by deafening thunking from the apartment above, and then the next morning knocking on the building owners’ door to talk about it was not, despite the perfectly reasonable surmise by the owners, a complaint.

“Not at all a complaint,” she said. “I mean yes it woke me and I was pretty trashed from my last shift so, yeah, I was irritated at first. But it happens pretty regularly and I’m kind of used to it.”

Mrs. Frederick Horbart Mertz, Ethel Mae Mertz – Ethel to her tenants, friends and especially the judge of the court who had formalized hers and her husband’s name change and who received a Christmas card from them each year – cocked her head slightly and poured some more fresh brewed Lipton tea into Cathy’s cup which like Ethel’s rested on a large porcelain and cork coaster with Desilu spelled out twice in bright red script lettering around the rim – an original, not a replica, Ethel would never presume to point out unbidden unless a guest were first to offer a comment on it. Ethel then filled her own cup, dropped in two lumps of sugar with tiny silver-plated tongs then put the tea pot down on a large white doily on the round four legged Early American maple coffee table that sat in front of the couch at the edge of a huge round braided rug. She stirred her tea.

The couch they were sitting on was upholstered in light mustard yellow fabric with a pattern featuring lots of leaves and small branches and red hibiscus flowers, with round satin pillows placed at each end. A pleated skirt ran across the bottom of the couch, brushing the oak floor. On the wall behind the couch was a tall white display cabinet with several sets of Japanese porcelain figurines and next to that a set of three flat teal headed wooden ducks in full flight.

The opposite wall had framed silhouette portraits of Fred and Ethel’s two children flanking a large clock in the shape of a Sputnik satellite that sprouted twelve antennas tipped with big round numerals. Below the clock were two dark wooden cabinets. The first was four feet tall with double doors that swung out to reveal a small round glass screen, some dials and a tiny speaker.

The second cabinet was taller and looked like a junior juke box with a radio dial at the top, carved fluted flanks and a fabric covered speaker with carved walnut vertical mullions. There were two large windows on the living room’s exterior wall. Hanging on the wall between them was a set of three brass wall plates featuring raised scenes of English rural cottage life. On the floor below them was a low wide danish modern table with a record player and speakers. Another four upholstered wing back chairs used mainly for the ‘50’s TV Night gatherings were oriented toward the TV cabinet. A pair of TV trays on legs were folded up and laid against the wall next to the swinging door into the kitchen.

The room did not scream authentic-mid-50’s-in-every-single detail so much as it stated it matter-of-factly, and in a tone of voice meant to convey mild surprise that anyone would find the anachronism the least bit noteworthy. When they bought the building, Fred and Ethel took for their own the apartment in the southwest corner of the fourth and topmost floor. They could have chosen one on the opposite side of the building away from the traffic noise but Ethel liked looking out onto Hawthorne Street and Fred liked to keep an eye on the battleship gray ’53 Plymouth, always parked somewhere below. There were still car thieves out there who knew how to work a steering column gear shift lever.

Outside it was neither raining nor not raining. Threatening clouds were stacked up like gray woolen blankets but by now in the late morning the threat was getting hard to take seriously and all that came of it was a needlessly June day. As she looked out the window Cathy was glad to be inside a cozy living room sipping tea.

Ethel said, “So you’re not making a complaint and you’re not asking us to actually do anything about the noise? Am I understanding you?”

“That’s right. I mean, I love Maggie and God knows she can’t help it.”

“Well, no, I imagine she can’t, honey,” said Ethel, not entirely confident that she knew exactly what it was that couldn’t be helped.

“The reason I came up today was because of an emergency call I went on a couple of years back.”

Ethel said “Oh dear!” and waved her hand around in front of her face as if she were keeping a mosquito away.

“No details, no details, I promise.”

Ethel took a deep breath and looked skeptical.

“This emergency was an older lady about Maggie’s size and she lived in an apartment on the second floor. It was a very bad emergency and we had to get her out of there fast, as quick as we could. I mean, I started an IV and had her on oxygen and everything but there wasn’t a lot more I could do for her – she needed a doctor and an emergency room if she was going to live. And see, the thing was that it was just about impossible to move her – it was like moving a big sofa down a narrow hallway and around tight corners, worse even because she was heavier than a sofa. And the stairs were even worse – you know how you have to upend the sofa to move it around corners. And even with a truck full of big fire guys doing all the lifting it took us a long time to finally get her down to the street.”

Cathy took a sip of her tea. It was an unintentional caesura but fit her purpose well.

“That poor woman! Did she go back to living in her cramped apartment?”

Cathy shook her head. By the time we loaded her into the ambulance she’d stopped breathing. We tried to resuscitate her all the way the Emmanuel Hospital, but…” She shrugged her shoulders.

There had been no such patient. Cathy had hauled many a land whale down many a flight of stairs, but none of them had gone south on her during the trip. What she was describing to Ethel was simply the graphic details of her own nightmare of what it would be like to try to extract a Maggie having a heart attack or stroke from the apartment building.

Cathy set her tea cup down and looked at Ethel. “We can do something to keep that same thing from happening to Maggie. That’s what I got to thinking about when she woke me up last night. It will involve just a little bit of subterfuge. But it’s just the sort of subterfuge that Lucy and Ethel would get up to for the sake of a friend in need.”

“Well, I guess Ethel sometimes let Lucy talk her into subterfuge.” Ethel looked skeptical.

“For a friend. To save a life,” Cathy prompted.

Ethel smiled. “Yes, that.”

A few minutes later, Cathy was knocking on a door in the basement next to the laundry room and furnace, and relaying the request from Ethel to the young man who lived there that he accompany her tenant to the second floor apartment of Maggie Cobbler and take a series of measurements at the direction of said tenant utilizing the apartment key, tape measure and pencil and paper brought for the purpose.

It was Monday and Maggie would be at the shop. They let themselves in with Fred and Ethel’s master key and the young man stood in the entry way looking uncertain.

“Sorry you had to get dragged into this,” Cathy told him. “I think Ethel couldn’t quite picture a girl using this complicated tape measure all by herself.”

He leaned against the wall and looked around. “Yeah, I’ve heard that girls are no good with numbers. But it’s cool. I’ve got nothing going until work this afternoon. Might as well have nothing going while I’m hanging around up here. Since I’m the designated basement dweller, maybe I can get in some practice looking out windows.”

“Speaking of windows… Here, hold the end of the tape measure over there and let me get the width and height.” She pointed at the far end of the window overlooking the street. When she was done she said, “Now the one in her bedroom.”

“It’s going to have to be this one,” she muttered to herself while she walked back into the living room.

“Are you a repair person or something? I thought you lived here.” asked the young man.

“I do – directly below.” She stamped her foot and pointed at the floor. “That’s me. If you’re wondering why the measuring, I’m making sure that at least one of the windows that looks out on the street is big enough to fit Maggie strapped onto a wooden backboard which will be strapped onto a paramedic stretcher.”

“Why is she strapped on a stretcher?”

You’ve met Maggie Cobbler, right?”

“Aunt Sunshine has introduced me to everyone.”

“Then imagine Maggie having a heart attack or a stroke, because unless Mother Nature really really loves Maggie, she is going to have a heart attack or a stroke.

The young man considered this. “So she’s on a stretcher going out through this window?”

“Yes.”

“Through this big plate glass window that doesn’t open.”

“Yes. I mean, the fire department will have to break it out first. Of course. But you know, ask a truckie to break out a window and he won’t say no.”

“Well, who would? So why is the fire department going to be here?”

“To help move her down to the paramedic unit parked on the street. And you have to figure out a way to fit her onto a normal stretcher in the first place, which is already hard to picture, and then to lift her along with the stretcher, along with the cardiac monitor and oxygen tank – which is already getting up past 375 pounds and it’s an awkward 375 pounds because the stretcher is way too small for her and her body wants to slide off it. And then get her down those narrow stairs with the 90 degree turn at the landing, and you don’t need to measure it to know that it’s not going to fit and you’re going to have to stand it on end to get it around the corner, the way you would if you were moving a sofa, and it’s not just all the firemen lifting the four corners of the stretcher but the paramedic trying to keep the IV line from ripping out, and the whole thing just doesn’t work. I mean, it really doesn’t.”

“So you lower her out the window instead.”

“Lift her out. The fire department has a crane and basket. They break out the window, the crew in here hoists her into the basket and the crane lowers her down to the street where there’s another crew waiting to load her into the paramedic unit, and off we go. Now that I know the window’s big enough and that there’s good access from the street I can talk to the dispatchers so that when they get a call to this address they can dispatch the crane truck at the same time.”

“Pretty ambitious. Fred and Ethel OK with this plan?”

“Ethel’s gonna work on Fred. She isn’t crazy about it, but once I
explained it to her she didn’t see that there was any other choice.”

“Well, there’s one kind of obvious one.”

Cathy looked at him. “There is?”

“This apartment and your apartment below have got to have pretty much identical floor plans, right?. You could just switch apartments so Maggie’s on the first floor. Then when Maggie gets her heart attack they can just roll her down the hall and out the door.”

Cathy thought for a long time. “No one likes a know-it-all.”

The young man smiled. “Sure they do.”