The World According To Garp (11 page)

So Helen Holm grew up in wrestling rooms, which are very safe for children—being padded everywhere, and always warm. Books had kept Helen from being bored, although Ernie Holm worried how long his daughter’s studiousness could continue to be nourished in a vacuum. Ernie was sure that the
genes
for being bored were in his daughter.

Thus he came to Steering. Thus Helen, who also wore glasses—as needfully as her father—was with him that day Jenny Fields walked into the wrestling room. Jenny didn’t notice Helen; few people noticed Helen, when Helen was fifteen. Helen, however, noticed Jenny right away; Helen was unlike her father in that she didn’t wrestle with the boys, or demonstrate moves and holds, and so she kept her glasses
on
.

Helen Holm was forever on the lookout for nurses because she was forever on the lookout for her disappeared mother, whom Ernie had made no attempt to find. With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer. But when Helen had been small, Ernie had indulged her with a speculative fable he no doubt liked to imagine himself—it was a story that had always intrigued Helen, too. “One day,” went the story, “you might see a pretty nurse, sort of looking like she doesn’t know where she is anymore, and she might look at you like she doesn’t know who
you
are, either—but she might look curious to find out.”

“And that will be my mom?” Helen used to ask her father.

“And that will be your mom!” Ernie used to say.

So when Helen Holm looked up from her book in the Steering wrestling room, she thought she saw her mother. Jenny Fields in her white uniform was forever appearing out of place; there on the crimson mats of the Steering School, she looked dark and healthy, strong-boned and handsome if not exactly pretty, and Helen Hohn must have thought that no other woman would have ventured into this soft-floored inferno where her father worked. Helen’s glasses fogged, she closed her book; in her anonymous gray sweat suit, which hid her gawky fifteen-year-old frame—her hard hips and her small breasts—she stood up awkwardly against the wrestling-room wall and waited for her father’s sign of recognition.

But Ernie Holm was still groping for his glasses; in a blur he saw the white figure—vaguely womanly, perhaps a nurse—and his heart paused at the possibility he had never really believed in: his wife’s return, her saying, “Oh, how I’ve missed you and our daughter!” What
other
nurse would enter his place of employment?

Helen saw her father’s fumbling, she took this to be the necessary sign. She stepped toward Jenny across the blood-warm mats, and Jenny thought: My God, that’s a
girl
! A pretty girl with glasses. What’s a pretty girl doing in a place like this?

“Mom?” the girl said to Jenny. “It’s
me
, Mom! It’s
Helen
,” she said, bursting into tears; she flung her slim arms around Jenny’s shoulders and pressed her wet face to Jenny’s throat.

“Jesus Christ!” said Jenny Fields, who was never a woman who liked to be touched. Still, she was a nurse and she must have felt Helen’s need; she did not shove the girl away from her, though she knew very well she was not Helen’s mother. Jenny Fields thought that having been a mother
once
was enough. She coolly patted the weeping girl’s back and looked imploringly at the wrestling coach, who had just found his glasses. “I’m not
your
mother, either,” Jenny said politely to him, because he was looking at her with the same brief relief in his face that Jenny had seen in the face of the pretty girl.

What Ernie Holm thought was that the resemblance went deeper than the uniform and the coincidence of a wrestling room in two nurses’ lives; but Jenny stopped short of being as pretty as Ernie’s runaway wife, and Ernie was reflecting that even fifteen years would not have made his wife as plain and merely handsome as Jenny. Still, Jenny looked all right to Ernie Holm, who smiled an unclear, apologetic smile that his wrestlers were familiar with, when they lost.

“My daughter thought you were her mother,” Ernie Holm said to Jenny. “She hasn’t seen her mother in quite a while.”

Obviously
, thought Jenny Fields. She felt the girl tense and spring out of her arms.

“That’s not your mom, darlin’,” Ernie Holm said to Helen, who retreated to the wrestling-room wall; she was a tough-minded girl, not at all in the habit of emotionally displaying herself—not even to her father.

“And did you think I was your
wife
?” Jenny asked Ernie, because it had looked to her, for a moment, that Ernie had mistaken her, too. She wondered how long a “while” Mrs. Holm had been missing.

“You fooled me, for a minute,” Ernie said, politely; he had a shy grin, which be used sparingly.

Helen crouched in a corner of the wrestling room, fiercely eyeing Jenny as if Jenny were deliberately responsible for her embarrassment. Jenny felt moved by the girl; it had been years since Garp had hugged her like that, and it was a feeling that even a very selective mother, like Jenny, remembered missing.

“What’s your name?” she asked Helen. “My name is Jenny Fields.”

It was a name Helen Holm knew, of course. She was the other mystery reader around the Steering School. Also, Helen had not previously given to anyone the feelings she reserved for a mother; even though it had been an accident that she’d flung those feelings around Jenny, Helen found it hard to call them back entirely. She had her father’s shy smile and she looked thankfully at Jenny; oddly, Helen felt she would like to hug Jenny again, but she restrained herself. There were wrestlers shuffling back into the room, gasping from the drinking fountain, where those who were cutting weight had only rinsed their mouths.

“No more practice,” Ernie Holm told them, waving them out of the room. “That’s it for today. Go run your laps!” Obediently, even relieved, they bobbed in the doorway of the crimson room; they picked up their headgear, their rubber sweat suits, their spools of tape. Ernie Holm waited for the room to clear, while his daughter and Jenny Fields waited for him to explain; at the very least, an explanation was in order, he felt, and there was nowhere Ernie felt as comfortable as he felt in a wrestling room. For him it was the natural place to tell someone a story, even a difficult story with no ending—and even to a stranger. So when his wrestlers had left to run their laps, Ernie very patiently began his father-and-daughter tale, the brief history of the nurse who left them, and of the Midwest they only recently had left. It was a story Jenny could appreciate, of course, because Jenny did not know an other single parent with a single child. And although she may have felt tempted to tell them
her
story—there being interesting similarities, and differences—Jenny merely repeated her standard version: the father of Garp was a soldier, and so forth. And who takes the time for weddings when there is a war? Though it was not the whole story, it clearly appealed to Helen and Ernie, who had met no one else in the Steering community as receptive and frank as Jenny.

There in the warm red wrestling room, on the soft mats, surrounded by those padded walls—in such an environment, sudden and inexplicable closeness is possible.

Of course Helen would remember that first hug her whole life; however her feelings for Jenny might change, and change back, from that moment in the wrestling room Jenny Fields was more of a mother to Helen than Helen had ever had. Jenny would also remember how it felt to be hugged like a mother, and would even note, in her autobiography, how a daughter’s hug was different from a son’s. It is at least ironic that her one experience for making such a pronouncement occurred that December day in the giant gymnasium erected to the memory of Miles Seabrook.

It is unfortunate if Ernie Holm felt any desire toward Jenny Fields, and if he imagined, even briefly, that here might be another woman with whom he might live his life. Because Jenny Fields was given to no such feelings; she thought only that Ernie was a nice, good man—perhaps, she hoped, he would be her friend. If he would be, he would be her first.

And it must have perplexed Ernie and Helen when Jenny asked if she could stay a moment, in the wrestling room, just by herself. What for? they must have wondered. Ernie then remembered to ask her why she had come.

“To sign my son up for wrestling,” Jenny said quickly. She hoped Garp would approve.

“Well, sure,” Ernie said. “And you’ll turn out the lights, and the heaters, when you leave? The door locks itself.”

Thus alone, Jenny turned off the lights and heard the great blow heaters hum down to stillness. There in the dark room, the door ajar, she took off her shoes and she paced the mat. Despite the apparent violence of this sport, she was thinking, “why do I feel so
safe
here? Is it him?” she wondered, but Ernie passed quickly through her mind—simply a small, neat, muscular man with glasses. If Jenny thought of men at all, and she never really did, she thought they were more tolerable when they were small and neat, and she preferred men
and
women to have muscles—to be strong. She enjoyed people with glasses the way only someone who doesn’t need to wear glasses can enjoy glasses on other people—can find them “nice.” But mostly it is this
room
, she thought—the red wrestling room, huge but contained, padded against pain, she imagined. She dropped thud! to her knees, just to hear the way the mats received her. She did a somersault and split her dress; then she sat on the mat and looked at the heavy boy who loomed in the doorway of the blackened room. It was Carlisle, the wrestler who’d lost his lunch; he had changed his equipment and come back for more punishment, and he peered across the dark crimson mats at the glowing white nurse who crouched like a she-bear in her cave.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I was just looking for someone to work out with.”

“Well, don’t look at
me
,” Jenny said. “Go run your laps!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Carlisle said, and he trotted off.

When she closed the door and it locked behind her, she realized she’d left her shoes inside. A janitor did not seem able to find the right key, but he lent her a large boy’s basketball shoes that had turned up in Lost and Found. Jenny trudged across the frozen slush to the infirmary, feeling that her first trip to the world of sports had left her more than a little changed.

In the annex, in his bed, Garp still coughed and coughed. “Wrestling!” he croaked. “Good God, Mother, are you trying to get me killed?”

“I think you’ll like the coach,” Jenny said. “I met him, and he’s a nice man. I met his daughter, too.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Garp groaned. “His
daughter
wrestles?”

“No, she reads a lot,” Jenny said, approvingly.

“Sounds exciting, Mom,” Garp said. “You realize that setting me up with the wrestling coach’s daughter may cost me my neck? Do you want that?”

But Jenny was innocent of such a scheme. She really had only been thinking about the wrestling room, and Ernie Holm; her feelings for Helen were entirely motherly, and when her crude young son suggested the possibility of matchmaking—of
his
taking an interest in young Helen Holm—Jenny was rather alarmed. She had not previously thought of the possibility of her son’s being interested in anyone, in that way—at least, she’d thought, he wouldn’t be interested for a long time. It was very disquieting to her and she could only say to him, “You’re only fifteen-years old. Remember that.”

“Well, how old is the daughter?” Garp asked. “And what’s her name?”

“Helen,” Jenny answered. “She’s only fifteen, too. And she wears
glasses
,” she added, hypocritically. After all, she knew what
she
thought of glasses; maybe Garp liked them, too. “They’re from
Iowa
,” she added, and felt she was being a more terrible snob than those hated dandies who thrived in the Steering School community.

“God,
wrestling
,” Garp groaned, again, and Jenny felt relieved that he had passed on from the subject of Helen. Jenny was embarrassed at herself for how much she clearly objected to the possibility. The girl
is
pretty, she thought—though not in an obvious way; and don’t young boys like only
obvious
girls? And would I prefer it if Garp were interested in one of those?

As for
those
kind of girls, Jenny had her eye on Cushie Percy—a little too saucy with her mouth, a little too slack about her appearance; and should a fifteen-year-old of Cushman Percy’s breeding be so
developed
already? Then Jenny hated herself for even thinking of the word
breeding
.

It had been a confusing day for her. She fell asleep, for once untroubled by her son’s coughing because it seemed that more serious troubles might lie ahead for him. Just when I was thinking we were home free! Jenny thought. She must discuss
boys
with someone—Ernie Holm, maybe; she hoped she’d been right about him.

She was right about the wrestling room, it turned out—and what intense comfort it gave to her Garp. The boy liked Ernie, too. In that first wrestling season at Steering, Garp worked hard and happily at learning his moves and his holds. Though he was soundly trounced by the varsity boys in his weight class, he never complained. He knew he had found his sport and his pastime; it would take the best of his energy until the writing came along. He loved the singleness of the combat, and the frightening confines of that circle inscribed on the mat; the terrific conditioning; the mental constancy of keeping his weight down. And in that first season at Steering, Jenny was relieved to note, Garp hardly mentioned Helen Holm, who sat in her glasses, in her gray sweat suit, reading. She occasionally looked up, when there was an unusually loud slam on the mat or a cry of pain.

It had been Helen who returned Jenny’s shoes to the infirmary annex, and Jenny embarrassed herself by not even asking the girl to come in. For a moment, they had seemed so close. But Garp had been in. Jenny did not want to introduce them. And besides—Garp had a cold.

One day, in the wrestling room, Garp sat beside Helen. He was conscious of a pimple on his neck and how much he was sweating. Her glasses looked so fogged, Garp doubted she could see what she was reading. “You sure read a lot,” he said to her.