Brett and Claudia
by Josie Eanes
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Josie Eanes is a graduating senior at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is majoring in English and minoring in Nonfiction Writing and Viola Studies. Her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, JMWW, and The Oakland Arts Review. She is the managing editor of Equinox Literary Magazine and an editorial intern for the independent literary press Braddock Avenue Books. After a year of reading, writing, and having as many adventures as possible, she hopes to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing.
The pair of wine glasses were nothing out of the ordinary at first glance. Customers fell for their illusion of normalcy, picking them up, admiring them, and then after further observation, setting them back where they had been for years, between a green glass olive tray and a particularly eye-catching vase, shaped like a clown-doll. Six years ago, they were the newest addition to Booth Two, the second stall to the right in an antiques warehouse that contained one hundred and twenty-seven vendors. But time passed, dust gathered, hundreds if not thousands of people wandered through and seized hundreds if not thousands of their own lost things, but never the wine glasses.
They used to belong to Brett and Claudia, it said so, embossed right into the glass. Brett and Claudia Brenner, both born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, their final years spent in a nice countryside retirement village on the outskirts of Little Rock. When Claudia first heard of Brett, she laughed to herself. Brett Brenner! Might as well be Clark Kent with a silly name like that. She imagined a man who was timid with glasses, furtive, and mysterious, no one ever really knowing what he was up to. But it wasn’t further from the truth. Brett was the type of man so loud and so bright, that everyone always knew – or heard – what he was up to. Broad-chested, wide-eyed, and ready to greet the world head-on, and that was all it took for Claudia.
At first they didn’t have much in common. Their dates were always disappointing. Claudia sprained her wrist bowling, while Brett made three strikes in a row. Claudia scanned the paintings at the museum intently, while Brett complained to no one in particular that abstract art was ridiculous.
“Even an idiot like me could shit on a canvas and make a million bucks” he had said, a comment that prompted Claudia to pull him out of the gallery with the forcefulness of an angry mother. They thought about calling it off, they really did, but gave it one last try, to see if one more date would somehow solve the clash of two very different, yet equally strong personalities.
A wine-tasting, chosen by Claudia for its elegance, agreed upon by Brett for its possibility of intoxication and the social lubricant it provided. It was arranged by the bridge club, open only to members like Claudia, and took place on a plantation-turned-vineyard just outside of town, far enough away that they had to drive. Claudia suggested borrowing her father’s car, he didn’t mind if they muddied it up, but Brett insisted on driving her in his shiny, new F100. And so they were off, taking the streets of downtown Jackson until they were no longer paved, until mud caked the outside of the car, until the wheels of his Ford could no longer make it out of the trenches its tires made in the wet and shifting ground.
The two of them got out, paced, looked the vehicle up and down, and then at each other. Claudia resisted the ‘I told you so’ urge by being silent, and Brett, beyond embarrassment and disappointed that he, Brett Brenner, the booming voice of Jackson, couldn’t keep a girl, was thankful.
“We could walk?” he suggested.
“It is beautiful out,” Claudia said, her eyes scanning the sky.
And for the first time, since… Well, he couldn’t quite remember when. When was the last time he had looked at the sky, the Kudzu covered trees, heard the swallow whine, and basked in the everyday beauty of his home, in the city he had spent his whole life in? When was the last time someone had shown him? Perhaps his mother, instructing the less broad-shouldered, but still so very wide-eyed Brett to ‘hush up’ for a second and look.
“Look at that bird, Brett. It’s got a snake in its beak.”
But Brett didn’t look, instead fixing his gaze on the woman in front of him, Claudia, her face still tilted to the sky.
Brett and Claudia never made it to the wine-tasting, they didn’t even make it that far outside of Jackson. They wandered the dirt backroads, pointing things out to each other like children, until the sun began to set and they hitch-hiked back to town. The wine glasses were Brett’s idea, a gift to Claudia for their twentieth anniversary, and a reminder to himself of the moment he fell in love with her. He worked in sales (“They have no choice but to buy what you’re selling, just to get you to hush up!” Claudia used to say) and she taught high school English until they moved to the retirement village, down-sizing as much as the elderly could, bringing their wine glasses with them. Truthfully they drank more beer than wine, but they were always placed at the front of the cabinet, the glass one so they could be on display for the occasional guest, but mainly themselves.
Claudia died first, peacefully in her sleep, as she always said she would. She took pride in never touching a cigarette, only eating red meat out of politeness to the chef, and walking with her husband every morning, an activity Brett thought was responsible for reaching old age himself. And it paid off; no cancer, no hip bone breakage, no dementia, nothing. Or maybe it was just genetics, but Brett liked to think Claudia did something right, and was rewarded for it. It wasn’t by Brett’s hand that the glasses ended up in the flea market in Little Rock. It was where all of the lost things went after estate sales or thrift stores couldn’t sell them. And years after Brett passed, there the two glasses sat, in Booth Two – the legacy of Brett and Claudia.