A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (14 page)

For an hour we shot into the box Tom's array of
suburban grapeshot; marbles, slugs, rocks, fishing weights, ball
bearings, a wild thing that looked like a lead pecan cluster.

"
This should be in the Olympics," Tom said.

"
Are there any rats?" I asked.

"
Rats?" Tom asked, as if he had forgotten
our previous time with the slingshot. "No. No rats. None in
town." There was a momentary drop in Tom's goofy mirth, a kind
of amnesiac stare I was not familiar with. "Tom," Elaine
said.

It was not clear what had happened, what Elaine
meant, what Tom had provoked. Tom put the box containing all the
grapeshot away. Elaine showed me a guest room, appointed in all
details, towels to alarm clock, and retired. I got the entirely
unsupportable impression that she was wondering what Tom had ever
seen in me and felt, so accused, that I couldn't blame her.

Tom and I stayed up in the kitchen. I had given no
explanation for my arrival and had expected to have to. Tom was
usually downright nosy about school and how well or badly folk were
doing.
Flunked out
was
a phrase he liked to repeat until it was ludicrous. Telling him I
quit Friedeman would ordinarily produce his largest ear-to-ear,
incredulous smile. But he was not curious. We sat and listened to
Elaine closing doors.

Tom looked down the hall. I thought of our once
having wadded up my tent out on the fire escape and firing the
slingshot down the long reach of the apartment hall past the Orphan's
and Veteran's doors, prepared to tell anyone who challenged us we
were humoring the Veteran with a dead fucking nigger cannon. I
thought Tom was just possibly calculating for a long-hall setup. He
remained still.

"
Tom, no
rats
?"

"Paul White tapirs?" The old glee. Paul
White was our landlord. "Are tapirs really
rodents
?
How could they be? I'd like to see the
teeth
."
This was the old Tom.

"
I can't
imagine
rodents that large," I said.

"
Me either."

He studied the hall. "No rats." Again I
thought I saw a change, a little dark flash.

I got up and got a GO BIG RED commemorative half-pint
out of my bag. To my surprise Tom did not decline it. He is legendary
for sustained and exclusive consumption of soft drinks.

"
They take those kids to live filmings of Sesame
Street," he said. "Make them listen to NPR. Had their
birthday announced from Lake Wobegon. No nitrates. No cereal."

I recalled his card to me:

Remember Elaine? (Good girl.) I married her. Sold
tent. Sold Mustang. It was a good car.

And then enthusiasm about a "ghoul mouse,"
as I recall.

We sat there, listening to appliances and other
subtle noises of a house settling for the night, passing the
half-pint. I told Tom about the kid chopping onions who couldn't take
it. I told him about all the fools I'd seen who were smarter than
you'd think because they were not letting their lives become
constructs of what was expected of them. I felt like the polyester
preacher and shut up. I'm not sure Tom understood me, and I'm certain
that wasn't his fault. Perhaps I wasn't even speaking to the central
causes of his depression. But it looked like he wasn't all fired up
about living the life good-girl Elaine had cooked up for them.

We heard one more firm door closing in the back of
the house, a final not loud sound that somehow communicates lost
patience on the part of those going to bed with those not. It didn't
look like any fun to me. I thought of all the careless fun I'd been
having with women who offered no closing-door crap, of old Dr.
Eminence in Love with Polanski, who had presumably set this whole
reaction series to rolling.

"
You still going to Norway?" Tom asked. It
was frankly unbelievable--as if we were thought-for-thought with each
other.

"
No. As they say in Brooklyn, das out."

"
Sort of thought so."

"
Why?"

"
It never was going to work."

"Why Not?"

"
Don't know." He probably thought he did,
but wasn't going to speculate. I think we were both coming to the
conclusion that we didn't know each other at all beyond the slingshot
lunacy.

"
What about you?" I said.

"
What?"

"
You and--"

"
It'll work."

"
How do you know?"

"
I'll make it."

"
You'll make it or you'll make it work?"

"Make it work."

"
You'd better get an extra bedroom for Fenster."

"
Or an
extra house!
"
Like that, he was restored, grinning openly at the prospect of
Fenster's alter-life beside his, I suppose. I'm sure he could see
getting Fenster's lights turned on, getting his credit established.
Fenster could shoot his slingshot late at night. Fenster would have
rats. Fenster Ludge would raise
tapirs
.

In the reaction-series-of-life scheme of things,
Fenster would care for his untowardness as much as for his
self-actualizing assets and towardness. Fenster could take a step
backward or to the side now and again. Fenster Ludge would be a
dallying kind of dude.

Tom got up and left the room and returned with a
giant trophy that had a tiny car on its top. He set it on the table.

"
I won the Soap Box Derby," he said.

"
Come on."

"
For years I thought I was sliced bread."

I looked at the trophy. Something about it looked
real. He
had
won the
damned Soap Box Derby.

"
My God, son."

"
The Soap Box Derby is nothing but going
downhill with amateurs." Tom intoned this with a note of
bitterness that convinced me I did not know him at
all.

"What the hell is it
supposed
to be, Tom?"

"
No, the thing is--" He made a gesture in
the air, as if to indicate the entire environs--walls, wife, nieces,
the stars above.

"
Okay, Tom."

* * *

Sometime in the night I got up and ran into Elaine
coming out of the bathroom. We did one of those side-to-side
unsuccessful evasions people do in the same path--she did not smile.
She looked down, holding her robe at the throat, and finally passed.
Again I got the impression she was in thorough contempt of me,
though, in fact, she was simply a tired woman in a bathrobe trying to
get by a strange man in her house at 3 a.m. The sensation of her
disapproval was strong enough, however, that I wanted to ask her what
was the matter right there in the bad hall light. I decided finally
that while she had good reason to turn her nose up, she had no way of
knowing it, so she was either supernaturally perceptive of character
or flatly impolite, and I did not need worry about her. I hardly even
knew about Tom and me well enough to be worried about me and his
wife.

The bathroom was a Southern Living model with
terry-cloth bibs and caps on the commode and an army of toiletries
neatly marshaled into plastic trays and racks. I spotted a pink box
of bubble bath and had a kooky urge to take one, but did not--I did
not want to be to my neck in suds if Elaine attacked.

* * *

In the morning I had a conversation on the lawn with
the girls as they waited to be taken somewhere. As if in response to
their no-nitrate upbringing, they had begun, it looked, to get
prematurely surly. They were little adults. I thought to try new
utterance on them.

"Monsters, girls."

"
Monsters what?"

"
I think they're the thing."

They gave each other looks which contained concealed
exasperation, quick passing glances designed to betray nothing. These
were remarkable six-year-old women.

"
I
am
a monster," one of them said. The other looked off, as if
commenting without speaking, silently approving the sentiment. She
would have pulled on a cigarette were they older and not no-nitrate.
She is
, her idle look
said.
We are
. I
wondered what they meant: could they possibly mean they knew they
were premature not-children and thus monstrous?

"
What do you mean?"

At this moment Elaine bounded out of the house with a
picnic basket, binoculars, a bird book, and headed for the family
car.

"
You'd better skip over there and help her,"
the other girl said to the monster, and the monster did just that,
brightly.

They were taking the girls to an "interpretive
center" at a wildlife refuge and I declined Elaine's stiff
invitation to go along. I declined Tom's somewhat sheepish invitation
to ride with them to the bus station. Tom looked like he'd been
thrashed.

"
This is the bus station, Tom," I said,
exacting from him no goofy mirth. He stood there near the car of
loading women. I shook his hand and they left. I walked through the
polite suburb and found a larger street and then a larger street and
the true bus station, and worked on placing Tom and the monsters into
the fool/true-fool gradient all the way to Lafayette. As I have it,
Tom is perhaps the worst victim to date, intelligent enough, unlike
the Orphan, to have accepted someone else's notions of living
correctly and to have applied considerable industry toward that end
before sensing it was all downhill and all advised by amateurs. The
girls were smart; bucking at an early age, wanting potato chips
badly. They were duplicitous. "You'd better skip over there."
They could run the fish camp, they could soothe the Veteran, they
could act in any of Mary's plays. I could have kissed those little
monsters, and I was certain that with due cover they'd have let me.
One would have kissed while the other stood by smoking her imaginary
cigarette, with a kind of jaw-out, hip-slung petulance, trying to
locate something she knew they were not to find. They were as mad for
Saturday cartoons and dangerous toys as was the Veteran for his
phantom, and they were just beginning to show signs of denial.

A true scientist could run a control, a failed one
makes these speculations and, where no experiments can be had, makes
these statements stridently, I suppose. So, mark my words: the little
girls are tiny, early Veterans. They are being ruined by unwanted,
forced purpose that seeks to free them of lateral waste. They are, as
they say, monsters.

    
E
very
time I go home, I think suddenly how much more sense I had as a
child, and that the years growing up in the house I am about to enter
robbed me of that wit, as evidenced by my voluntary arrival of the
moment. My father and I have developed a greeting which seems to
acknowledge this solemn loss; whether I'm back from a month or a year
away, " he stands, extends his hand not very far toward me,
broadly opened to receive the handshake, rather like a catcher's mitt
held close to the body; and as we shake, meeting with elbows bent in
order to retain leverage should we decide to Indian-wrestle, and
gripping each other harder than desperate salesmen who squeeze rubber
balls in their sleep, he will say, "Hey, bud." That seems
to sum it all up neatly. You've lost your marbles, he says; I know, I
gave the feeble things to you.

And you've lost your marbles, I squeeze back to him;
I know, look how few you gave me.

We grin, not at each other but at the floor,
departing from salesman's form.

While the notion of marbles is afoot, I look around
for my mother. "She's not down yet," my father says.

He hands me a beer and we sit.

"
What's going on?"

"
Nothing."

This is code: Are you still wasting your life? Yes.
The silent ghost that is my mother appears at the foot of the stairs,
extending around the doorjamb a preposterously tall, narrow glass
that suggests a flared vase. My father looks at the glass and waits,
as I'm sure he would not do in my absence, for her to explain
herself. Even though the glass is empty, she has trouble balancing
it, because she holds it at the narrow base, the only place her tiny,
bony hand can grip it. It leads her, like an animal going for drink,
into the kitchen.