The Grasshopper King (14 page)

“I don't think he shakes hands,” I warned her. But her object was the checkerboard on the table. Higgs's black pieces remained in their victorious position; my jumped red ones were neatly stacked beside the board.

“You want to play?” she asked me.

“You play checkers?”

“I know
how
.”

She arranged the men in their zig-zag ranks. She seemed already to be considering her opening move.

“Why don't you play Professor Higgs?” I suggested. “I could use a break. And he's probably tired of me already.”

She looked at Higgs doubtfully. He dropped his eyes to the board, began to make his sound, and without hesitation moved a red checker one step into no-man's-land.

“See?” I said. “Everybody likes variety.”

Julia took one of Higgs's checkers early, then fell back to a grim defense of her king line. Now and then she muttered, “Good,
OK
.”

“He's got tricks in store,” I told her.

The two of them traded captures for a while, neither gaining any clear advantage of position. When Higgs's force was reduced to two and Julia's to three, Higgs stopped making his noise. Julia stood up from the table.

“What's going on?” I said, a little panicked. “Why didn't you finish?” I had been rather expecting a last-minute comeback.

“Look at the board,” she said. “He's got no way out. He resigned.”

I looked, considered, couldn't make out the hopelessness. But I trusted Higgs.

“Go again,” I said.

Higgs won the next game, and Julia took the one after that. Higgs responded with two commanding victories (“He's tricky,” I counseled) but in the sixth game, trying the same opening, he fell two men behind in the early going, and never recovered.

“Rubber match,” Julia said coolly, and began to set the checkers up again. She seemed to have forgotten her initial discomfort with Higgs, with the basement, with my job. As far as I could tell she didn't even know I was in the room.

But before the tiebreaker could start, Ellen came downstairs with lunch. Without ceremony she moved the checkerboard aside and laid in its place a platter of vegetable sticks, potato chips, and sandwiches: sliced turkey on rye, cut into quarters, a cellophane toothpick driven into each section. Next to the platter she set down a snack bowl filled with sesame sticks and cashews. The cellophane ribbons hung stiffly over our lunch like tiny flags.

“Ellen,” I said, trying not to sound shocked, “you didn't have to. We brought lunch.”

Julia stepped on my foot.

“But thank you—of course. It looks delicious.”

Ellen shrugged. “I had all this around.” Suddenly I realized she hadn't vacuumed all day. And Higgs had lost at checkers. . . . Dizzy, I ransacked my memory—were the planets all on one side of the sun today? Was the Mayan calendar about to flip?

No: so it had to be Julia.

The two of us set to eating. It really was good; I hadn't known it until that moment, but I was tired of egg salad. Ellen stood in the corner and watched us, rustling her feet unrhythmically, her eyes focused on some point well beyond the wall. It made me terribly nervous. I hurried through my lunch, swallowing half-chewed bites of sandwich, not pausing to lick the potato chip residue from my palate and the backs of my teeth.

“Oh,” Julia said.

“What?”

She glanced at Ellen. “Nothing. I had a chill.”

I followed Julia's eyes to the corner and the little crack there between the molding and the floor. “There's a grasshopper problem,” I explained.

“It's the water main,” Ellen said. “They bollixed up the survey or some such thing and built the house right over it. That's what draws them in. And there's always more when it rains.”

“That must be a nuisance,” Julia said.

Ellen—was it possible?—sighed. “We've tried everything,” she said. “But nothing.”

Once we'd finished eating, Julia offered brightly to help Ellen with the dishes, then, equally brightly, refused her demurrals. The two of them trooped up the stairs. Just before Julia climbed out of sight she turned, ducked so I could see her face, and blew me a kiss. I held up my hand to catch it, then, feeling foolish, brought it down. The kiss shattered against the wall behind Higgs's head—whatever that meant.

When I heard the water go on in the kitchen, I leaned over Higgs's table, palms planted where the checkerboard and lunch had been. He stared past my shoulder.

“Don't you see?” I said. “Your men are getting logjammed on the perimeter. You're letting her control the center squares. Keep playing like that and you don't have a chance.”

The next day, Ellen came down at eleven, as usual, with the vacuum cleaner. But this time she worked efficiently, covering the floor just once, not bothering to move the larger heaps of artifacts aside, and after ten minutes she snapped the power off. I looked up from my translation, startled by the sudden relative quiet.

“You're engaged?” she said.

“Not really. Did Julia say . . .”

She shrugged. “No. But maybe you were thinking about it.”

“We're in the planning stages,” I said, and dropped my eyes
ostentatiously back to the page. I knew Julia would have been annoyed with me. This is an offering, she would have told me. You have to respond.

“You ought to get her a ring,” Ellen said.

I looked down at my bare fingers. “My finances are a little uncertain right now.”

“I know how much they pay you.”

“Well,” I said, off-balance, “still. One doesn't want to . . .”

Why were we talking about this?

“Suit yourself,” she said. She sounded angry and I thought she would start vacuuming again. But instead she hoisted the machine with a grunt and marched upstairs.

She came down again, an hour later, empty-handed.

“The last one didn't have a girl,” she said.

That was her way of starting: no salutation, no preamble.

“No?” I said. I could hardly say I was surprised.

“He only cared about his work.”

“There's something to be said for that,” I said, feeling obscurely annoyed.

“Every man,” she said, “needs a woman by his side. That's the truth.”

I nodded.

“And when I say woman I mean anyone who'll stand by you. I'm open-minded.”

“Of course.”

She seemed satisfied that she'd gotten something across to me. But she didn't leave. I wished she would. I was a little afraid of Ellen for the same reason I was a little afraid of dogs. When the cards were down one couldn't rely on them to do what made sense. I was afraid that the language Ellen thought in was different, in subtle but crucial respects, from my own. I thought that the occasions on which I thought I understood her were unfortunate chances which would lead me, if I trusted them, to ruin.

“Well,” I announced, “I guess I'll get back to my story.”

“When I think of what would have happened to Stanley without me . . .” Ellen said. Both of us turned to look at Higgs. He was sitting as quietly as always, his eyes two ciphers, unintent. What
would
have happened to Higgs without Ellen? What calamity could she possibly think she had spared him?

Higgs dug two fingers into the snack bowl and rooted around, not looking down, until he found a sesame stick. He put the whole thing in his mouth, and forcefully, deliberately, chewed. A signal? If so, it was in a semaphore I did not yet understand.

I went to talk to my parents about marriage. I rode my bicycle along the empty upward-slanting avenues of the west side, my twilit childhood streets, and thought of what I'd told Ellen. Was it true? Were we in the planning stages? Were we, as certain hateful girls at school had put it, “engaged to be engaged”? Julia and I had spoken of it, of course, but only jokingly, in the way of manufacturing silly names for our offspring, or thinking of where we'd settle: Samarkand, Antarctica, the San Diego Zoo, no more real to us than the places we sank with our brainpower. In fact they were often the same places. Whenever I tried to consider it more seriously I shied away; it was like thinking about cancer, or the exhaustion of fossil fuels. I had a feeling that marriage—which seemed, on the face of it, like little more than a codification of the life we already led—concealed some secret, unknowable in advance, which would change everything. I didn't think it was necessarily something bad. But I hated surprises.

I could see the Grape Arbor coming from three blocks away, a hubbub of green and white light between two warehouses. My mother's idea had been to bring to Chandler City a little of that Edward Hopper equipoise they admired so much: twilight, cool neon, hardened faces seen through drapes of coffee-steam. With the mood of quiet desolation we'd had no trouble; but the neon had proved our downfall. My father, thorough as always, had ringed every window with it, and the door, and the rain-gutter. He'd planted grapevines,
too, at my mother's direction, and these—as if to make up for everything else my parents had ever set out to do—had flourished. They grew over the tops of the trellises and lay in tired ringlets on the roof. The lights, shining through them, took on a foreboding tint of jungle.

Inside, my mother sat alone at her window table, a great rectangular oven trough before her. Like many Jewish women of a certain age she was beginning to resemble Ayn Rand.

“Samuel,” she said, “try this.”

“What is it?”

“Something new. I burned it. Chicken tetrazzini.”

“What did you use for the chicken?”

“I used chicken.”

“You never use chicken.”

“Now he tells me,” she said tragically.

I sat down across from her. The substance in the tray gave off a doughy, acrid smell. It was the deep nuanceless green of a public swimming pool.

“Why's it green?” I asked her.

“It's cilantro paste.”

“I don't think you put cilantro in chicken tetrazzini.”

She crossed her arms, produced a snort. “Somebody's full of good advice tonight.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm somewhat harried.”

“Why? Julia leave you?”

“No,” I said crossly. “As a matter of fact I'm trying to decide whether we should get married.”

“Don't get mad, I was just guessing. She wants to marry you?”

“I don't exactly know.”

“You're my son and I love you,” she said, “but you recognize you're not much of a catch for her.” She dipped a spoon into the chicken tetrazzini and slid it between her lips. “Aagh,” she murmured. Slowly the tetrazzini closed over the spoon-hole and erased it.

“Mom.”

“I burned it,” she said.

“I don't think that's actually the point. Whether or not I'm a ‘catch.'”

“She's a very personable young woman. With potential.”

“I have potential.”

My mother reached out with one slightly greasy hand and swatted me lovingly on the side of the head. “Of course you do.”

“So you think yes,” I said.

“I think you're a lucky boy,” my mother said.

“I
know
. Where's Dad?”

I found I'd had enough of the restaurant, of the nauseous-making buzz of the neon and the enveloping smell of my mother's casserole, which may indeed have contained chicken but to which textured vegetable protein, my nostrils told me, was not a stranger.

“He's working late,” my mother said.

“I actually have to go,” I told her. “I'll let you take care of things here.”

There was only one customer in the restaurant, a spattered housepainter in his seventies, who was sitting by the door, gumming with all his power of concentration at a mouthful of mixed greens.

“I'm bored,” she said. “When you see him kick him in the ass for bringing me here.”

My mother had long since modified that part of our history. If my father wouldn't bother to correct her I didn't see why I should.

“Come on,” she said. “Stay. We'll play Scrabble.”

“I'll see you, Mom.” I stood to go. The old housepainter looked up; his eyes shimmied on either side of my face for a moment and then locked on.

“Be nice,” he said, “you've only got one.”

I hurtled out into the evening.

My father worked in a trailer even farther out of town than our restaurant. I set off uphill again, laboring, not letting myself slow until the
green-white reflected smear of the Grape Arbor had vanished from my handlebars and the casing of my front wheel. As I pressed toward the city limits, the cross streets gave over to foreigners. I passed Cambyses, Nabopolassar, Shih Huang Ti, Xerxes—the last red light, which I blew through like a ghost. The road turned to thin gravel that champed at my tires. In a few more minutes I passed through a chain-link gate and was there.