George Mills (45 page)

“Is everything settled then?” Herb asks.

“Nothing’s settled,” Ruth Oliver says bitterly. “Not a damn thing.”

“The pizzas?” George says again.

“Screw the pizzas,” Herb says. “You don’t think I gave them my real name, do you? A medium and two
large?
What’s the matter with you? You lost? Ain’t you from around here?”

“I don’t
know
if I’m from around here,” George Mills says miserably.

“Herb’s the only one with a car,” Louise tells him.

George looks up. “What about the Olivers?”

“In the shop,” Charles Oliver says.

“Ray?”

“Bernadette’s folks went out tonight,” Ray says.

He is beginning to understand. “Pete McGee has a car,” he says.

Ray nods, Bernadette does.

“Pete McGee has a car but he doesn’t like to lend it.”

“Pete’s okay. It isn’t broken in yet.”

“And he certainly wouldn’t let
me
drive it. A total stranger.”

“Probably not.”

“So I was going to drive Sue’s car?”

“Not exactly.”

“No,” George says, “that’s right. Not exactly.” It’s like being a little drunk, he thinks. There’s just that edge. Or no. It’s like having the one bottle to their three advantage, the glass-and-a-half to four ratio that accounted for his inspiration in the bars while he was pumping change into the jukebox and his science into their heads and all the while listening to what the song was saying about their lives. “Because you thought all along that I’d have one, a twenty-seven-year-old guy like me. But it was all right even when I didn’t. Because the more the merrier. There’d be six in one car and five in the other. That’s when I was going to drive Sue’s car. We were going to make the switch at Crown’s, and Sue would drive Pete McGee’s like a good sport. Crown’s was just the staging area. The only thing I don’t really understand is Sue. No. Wait. Sure I do. Sue’s spoken for, right? I mean she’s here tonight but she’s spoken for. The guy’s in the army or off somewhere making his fortune until he can send for her, and they’ve exchanged pledges, oaths.”

“He’s in Texas,” Sue says. “He’s stationed in Texas.”

“But just because you’re promised and can’t have a good time yourself, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang around those who can. It might even be good for you.”

“He’s with
his
buddies,” Sue says.

“Sure,” George Mills says, “sure he is. It was the cars,” he says. “It was the cars, it was the cramped quarters. It was the necking in the cars.” He stops and looks at them. “But you’re married,” he says helplessly. “Ruth’s pregnant. Louise tells me Bernadette’s in her fourth month. Herb is Ellen Rose’s fiancé. Why do you need this stuff? School’s out for you people. You graduated high school. Your diploma hangs on the wall with the prom bids, or’s shoved in the drawer with your underwear.”

The men look shamefaced. They stare at the buffed tops of their dancing shoes. Ellen Rose picks absently at her corsage. Bernadette and Ruth seem suddenly tired. Only Louise and Carol’s energies seem unimpaired, Sue the grass widow’s.

“Bernadette’s folks are out tonight. Oh,” George Mills says, “oh.”

Because only now, years after he’s moved into it, does he comprehend the stability of the neighborhood. He perceives with horror and the communicated shame of the wives and husbands what he’s gotten into here, the force fields of wired intimacy he has somehow penetrated. Discovering, he feels discovered. Like a child rolling Easter eggs on trespassed pitch. He’s not from around here, but it’s as if he’s never lived anywhere else. If he intuits their customs it is done joylessly, with no pride in his cleverness. He has the solution now, of course. To invite them home with him, to open his apartment to their terrible honed occasion, to fetch them pizzas, White Castles, imperial gallons of Crown’s ice cream, the syrups and sweet, auxiliary garnish of their ceremonial cravings.

He was right. He was always right. His logic is a Jacob’s ladder of successive vista, a nexus of predicative data. The foot bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone, and so on up through all the bones and glands of need and time and loneliness.

Bernadette’s folks are out, they’ve taken the car. But their house has aunts in it, uncles, the busted survivors of their youth.

Because they’re only alone with their kind, he thinks. Charles’ and Ruth’s baby was conceived in an automobile, Bernadette’s and Ray’s was. I’m sure of it, he thinks. He thinks I’m positive. Sue was driving, he thinks, a godmother and good sport fiddling with her radio dial and hearing their tongues in each other’s heads in the back seat and thinking of Texas.

I
haven’t
the patience he thinks. It isn’t just time. It isn’t just effort. There are too many virgins to deal with.

But Louise is smiling at him. They damned near all are.

[Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom.]

Stan David calls for a Relative Dance with cut-in privileges for anyone of any generation so long as he is blood or connected by marriage. Only George and Louise and a handful of others sit this one out, and soon the room is rocking as parents, sons, wives, sisters, cousins, husbands, in-laws, daughters and brothers seek each other out on the dark, crowded dance floor of the Delgado Ballroom.

He is twenty-seven years old, an age when many scientists have already done their best work. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, he can’t give it a name, but, in the spiraling life on the packed floor, George Mills has a vision, and can just make out the shape of a perfect DNA molecule.

7

O
ne morning when George Mills entered Mrs. Glazer’s room in the small, private hospital in Juarez to which she had been admitted, the tout, Father Merchant, was already there.

Mrs. Glazer was asleep or unconscious in the hospital bed, her breathing so light it seemed a stage of rest different in kind from anything he had yet witnessed. It was so deep a state of relaxation that it appeared to Mills as if she had just received good news of the highest order. She might just have closed her eyes for a minute. She might have been meditating, or in a trance, or drowned.

George placed his package on the nightstand and sat down.

It was not really her apparent contentment that had caught George up, or the presence of the tout, or even the extraordinarily tidy, shipshape condition of her room. (Which he noticed. Mrs. Glazer had not been a particularly fastidious patient. She wadded Kleenex and dropped it on her bed, the carpet. Though she did not smoke, her ashtrays were always full——with pins, with sputum, with bits of string. And though she had not gotten dressed in a week, underwear caught in the chest of drawers, stockings lay over chairs, dresses were askew on hangers or visible in the open closet. Sections of the El Paso newspaper, though she barely glanced at it, were everywhere, under the bed, beside the toilet, on top of the television set. There were the peels of tangerines and oranges, fragments of lunch and—he had no idea where these came from—husks of dry chewing gum. The telephone cord was unaccountably tangled, the tuning knob on the radio twisted above or below the frequencies printed on the dial. The faucets dripped. Motel soap lay in the bottom of the basin or wrapped in damp washcloths on the surface of the writing desk or even in the peels of the fruit. It often took Mills the better part of an hour merely to straighten the mess and, by the time he was done, Mrs. Glazer, practically immobile in her wide double bed, had somehow begun the room’s piecemeal derangement. It was the same sloven story in the back seat of their rental car.) Today her hospital room seemed immaculate, almost alphabetically arranged.

But it wasn’t the condition of the room, or Father Merchant, or Mrs. Glazer’s strangely exalted sleep which had startled Mills. It was the current magazines, the box of candy, the potted plant and mint bestsellers on her nightstand.

“What’s happened?” Mills asked Father Merchant.

The tout shrugged.

“There’s something you don’t know?” Mills said. “There’s still some circumstance in this world of which you’re ignorant?”

“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”

“Where’d she get that candy? What’s that stuff?”

“Gif’s,” the tout said. “Everywhere the ill are made offerin’s. Meals. Throughout the worl’ presents een sick rooms are an
el grande
part of the gross national produc’. Even disease ees good for business.”

“Do you know who brought them?”

“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”

“Has her husband come?”

“Sam’s in San Louis,” Father Merchant said, “an’ won’ arrive till later. He have an meetin’
muy importante.
The chairman of the philosophy departments have receive
el
offer
fantastico
from the Universidad de Alabama. Eef Walter leavin’ they don’ no good logician have. Blauer can’t thin’ straight. They are approach Gutstein een Hawaii.
Mucho dinero tambien.
Personal I feel he don’ come.
Es verdad,
cos’ of livin’ chipper in Midwes’ than the islan’s.
Todos
he do to sale his
casa
in Waikiki an replace eet on the mainland two as
grande
he ahead.
Pero
money’s no
el problemo.
Eet’s Grace. She have art’ritis. I don’ thin’ she lookin’ forward to no bad winter.
There is nothing I do not know!
”

“Hold it down, will you!” George hissed. “You’ll wake her. She needs the sleep.”

“She’s going to die,” Father Merchant replied. “She needs all the wakefulness she can get. You should go home, George. You should go back to your wife. Laglichio has work for you. You have been too much with this woman.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Glazer said, “it’s you, Mills. Did Father Merchant tell you? Mary’s come with my brother.”

“Mary?”

“I thought it would be best,” Father Merchant said.

“
You
did?
You
did?” George Mills said.

“Please, Mills,” Mrs. Glazer said, “they’ll be back soon. We don’t want a scene.”

And, before he could make one, a girl he recognized and a man he didn’t, appeared in the doorway. Mary was even larger than the big girl who had reluctantly admitted him to the house just over a month before. The man was in his mid-fifties and deeply tanned. He wore a tropical-weight suit of a light pearl gray with large, dark brown buttons on the jacket.

“You must be Mills,” the brother said. “I’m Harry Claunch. I want you to return my sister’s rental car this afternoon. You may borrow mine when you pick my brother-in-law up this evening.”

“Yes, sir,” Mills said.

“Did you rest, Judith?”

“I feel fine, Harry. Button your blouse please, Mary.”

“What’s in the bag?” Mary said.

“Oh,” George Mills said, “I’m sorry, that’s mine.”

“Pi-uuu, it stinks,” Mary said. “What is it anyway? Oh, it’s
shrimp.
Mommy, look, did you ever
see
so many shrimp?” She took one of the boiled, cleaned shrimps and bit into it as though it were a chocolate.

“You’re eating Mills’s lunch, Mary,” the brother said.

“There’s so
many.
Oh, is this your lunch?”

“That’s all right, Miss.”

“He calls me Miss.”

“There’s good protein in shrimp,” Father Merchant said.

Mary put the shrimp down and took up her mother’s TV remote control panel. She flipped rapidly from station to station.

“Mary,
please,
” her mother said, “people are trying to have a conversation.”

“Oh, it’s ‘Bugs Bunny’ in Spanish!” She turned to Father Merchant. “Do you get ‘The Flintstones’ in Spanish?”

“Three o’clock. Channel 2.”

“They get ‘The Flintstones’ in Spanish. Do you get Johnny Carson in Spanish? ‘Laverne and Shirley’?”

“Turn that off. Button your blouse.”

“Mom, it’s so
hot.
”

“Would you like to go for a swim?” her uncle asked. “Do you want Mills to drive you back to the hotel?”

“Could I Mom? Could I?”

“Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Glazer said mournfully, “you didn’t bring a bathing suit, did you? Did you bring a bathing suit to Mexico? You did, didn’t you?”

“You never opened my candy,” Mary said.

“Your mother doesn’t feel like any candy, honey,” her uncle said. “But
you
open it. Pass it around.”

“I’ll take one, Mary,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Which? A caramel or a nut? Here’s a chocolate-covered cherry. Which do you want?”

“Have the chocolate straw,
señora.
No no, the
dark
chocolate.”

The child sat on the side of her mother’s bed and kissed her. She put her arms about Mrs. Glazer and hugged her roughly.

“Mary,” her Uncle Harry said, “let Mother rest for a bit.”

“I want my hair brushed,” Mary said. “I want Mom to brush my hair.”

“Mary!” her uncle said.

“That’s all right, Harry, I want to.”

“I shouldn’t have brought her,” Harry told Father Merchant.

“If you want me to brush your hair I wish you’d button your blouse.”

“Mommy thinks my boobs are too big.”

“You have a lovely figure,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“Milly’s periods have started,” Mary said. “She says they didn’t but they did. I saw her underwear. She says she has an infection. That child.”

“There,” her mother said weakly.

“A hundred strokes,” Mary said. “That wasn’t even fifteen even.”

“Mommy’s so tired, sweetheart,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“It didn’t even feel good,” Mary said.

“Mommy’s weak, sweetheart,” Mrs. Glazer said.

“It wasn’t even fourteen, it wasn’t even nine,” she said, and started to cry.

“Take her swimming,” Father Merchant said.

Mills looked at Mrs. Glazer’s brother.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Why don’t you?”

“You think I don’t know what’s going on,” Mary said.

“Of course you do, darling,” Mrs. Glazer said. “Of course you do, sweetheart.”

“I know what’s going on,” Mary said. “I read your chart, I know your temperature.”

The rule at Harry Claunch’s hotel was that guests were not allowed in the pool area unless they were in suitable bathing attire. Mills told them he was not a guest, only Harry Claunch’s servant, only Mary’s babysitter, but they would not waive their rule for him, so he had to buy a suit in one of the hotel shops. At Mary’s insistence he even agreed to let her pick it out for him. A yellow bikini.