The World According To Garp (70 page)

“Thank you,” said Garp. When he spoke, the dog shook his parka.

“Here, stop that,” Harriet told the dog; she put Garp’s parka back on the chair. “You can go if you want to,” Harriet said, “but Dickie won’t bother you. He’s just lookin’ after me.”

“Your husband?” Garp asked, though he doubted it. “My husband was Kenny Truckenmiller,” Harriet said. “Everybody knows that, and no matter who you are, you know who
he
was.”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“Dickie’s my brother. He just worries about me,” Harriet said. “Some guys have been messin’ around, since Kenny’s gone.” She sat at the bright counter of mirrors, beside Garp, and leaned her long, veiny hands on her turquoise thighs. She sighed. She did not look at Garp when she spoke. “I don’t know what you heard, and I don’t care,” she said. “I do
hair
—
just
hair. If you really want somethin’ done to your hair, I’ll do it. But that’s all I do,” Harriet said. “No matter what anybody told you, I don’t mess around. Just hair.”

“Just hair,” Garp said. “I just want my hair done, that’s all.”

“That’s good,” she said, still not looking at him.

There were little photographs stuck under the molding and framed against the mirrors. One was a wedding picture of young Harriet Truckenmiller and her grinning husband, Kenny. They were awkwardly maiming a cake.

Another photograph was of a pregnant Harriet Truckenmiller holding a young baby; there was another child, maybe Walt’s age, leaning his cheek against her hip. Harriet looked tired but not daunted. And there was a photograph of Dickie; he was standing next to Kenny Truckenmiller, and they were both standing next to a gutted deer, hung upside-down from the branch of a tree. The tree was in the front yard of
NANETTE’S
BEAUTY
SALON
. Garp recognized that photograph quickly; he had seen it in a national magazine after Jenny’s assassination. The photograph apparently demonstrated to the simple-minded that Kenny Truckemniller was a born-and-raised killer: besides shooting Jenny Fields, he had at one time shot a deer.

“Why
Nanette?
” Garp asked Harriet later, when he dared look only at her patient fingers and not at her unhappy face—and not at his hair.

“I thought it sounded sort of French,” Harriet said, but she knew he was from somewhere in the outside world—outside North Mountain, New Hampshire—and she laughed at herself.

“Well, it
does
,” Garp said, laughing with her. “Sort of,” he added, and they both laughed in a friendly way.

When he was ready to go, she wiped the slobber of the dog off his parka with a sponge. “Aren’t you even going to look at it?” she asked him. She meant the hairdo; he took a breath and confronted himself in the three-way mirror. His hair, he thought, was beautiful! It was his same old hair, the same color, even the same length, but it seemed to fit his head for the first time in his life. His hair clung to his skull, yet it was still light and fluffy; a slight wave in it made his broken nose and his squat neck appear less severe. Garp seemed to himself to fit his own face in a way he had never thought possible. This was the first beauty salon he had ever been to, of course. In fact, Jenny had cut his hair until he married Helen, and Helen had cut his hair after that; he had never even been to a barber.

“It’s lovely,” he said; his missing ear remained artfully hidden. “Oh, go on,” Harriet said, giving him a pleasant little shove—but, he would tell the Fields Foundation,
not
a suggestive shove; not at all. He wanted to tell her then that he was Jenny Fields’ son, but he knew that his motive for doing so would have been wholly selfish—to have been personally responsible for moving someone.

“It is unfair to take advantage of anyone’s emotional vulnerability,” wrote the polemical Jenny Fields. Thus Garp’s new creed: capitalize not on the emotions of others. “Thank you and good-bye,” he said to Mrs. Truckenmiller.

Outside, Dickie wielded a splitting ax in the woodpile. He did it very well. He stopped splitting when Garp appeared. “Good-bye,” Garp called to him, but Dickie walked over to Garp—with the ax.

“Let’s get a look at the hairdo,” Dickie said.

Garp stood still while Dickie examined him.

“You were a friend of Kenny Truckenmiller’s?” Garp asked.

“Yup,” Dickie said. “I was his only friend. I introduced him to Harriet,” Dickie said. Garp nodded. Dickie eyed the new hairdo.

“It’s tragic,” Garp said; he meant everything that had happened.

“It ain’t bad,” Dickie said; he meant Garp’s hair.

“Jenny Fields was my mother,” Garp said, because he wanted someone to know, and he felt certain he was taking no emotional advantage of Dickie.

“You didn’t tell
her
that, did you?” Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.

“No, no,” Garp said.

“That’s good,” Dickie said. “She don’t want to hear nothin’ like that.”

“I didn’t think so,” Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly.

“Your sister is a very nice woman,” Garp added.

“She
is
, she is,” Dickie said, nodding fiercely.

“Well, so long,” Garp said. But Dickie touched him lightly with the handle of the ax.

“I was one of them who shot him,” Dickie said. “You know that?”

“You shot Kenny?” Garp said.

“I was
one
of them who did,” Dickie said. “Kenny was crazy. Somebody had to shoot him.”

“I’m very sorry,” Garp said. Dickie shrugged.

“I liked the guy,” Dickie said. “But he got crazy at Harriet, and he got crazy at your mother. He wouldn’t ever have got well, you know,” Dickie said. “He just got sick about women. He got sick for good. You could tell he wasn’t ever going to get over it.”

“A terrible thing,” said Garp.

“So long,” Dickie said; he turned back to his woodpile. Garp turned toward his car, across the frozen turds that dotted the yard. “Your hair looks good!” Dickie called to him. The remark seemed sincere. Dickie was splitting logs again when Garp waved to him from the driver’s seat of his car. In the window of
NANETTE’S
BEAUTY
SALON
Harriet Truckenmiller waved to Garp: it was not a wave meant to encourage him, or anything, he was quite sure. He drove back through the village of North Mountain—he drank a cup of coffee in the one diner, he got gas at the one gas station. Everyone looked at his pretty hair. In every mirror,
Garp
looked at his pretty hair! Then he drove home, arriving in time for the celebration: Ellen’s first publication.

If it made him as uneasy as the news had made Helen, he did not admit it. He sat through the lobster, the scallops, and the champagne, waiting for Helen or Duncan to comment on his hair. It was only when he was doing the dishes that Ellen James handed him a soggy note.

You had your hair done?

He nodded, irritably.

“I don’t like it,” Helen told him, in bed.

“I think it’s terrific,” Garp said.

“It’s not like you,” Helen said; she was doing her best to muss it up. “It looks like the hair on a corpse,” she said in the darkness.

“A corpse!” Garp said. “Jesus.”

“A body prepared by an undertaker,” said Helen, almost frantically running her hands through his hair. “Every little hair in place,” she said. “It’s too perfect. You don’t look alive!” she said. Then she cried and cried and Garp held her and whispered to her—trying to find out what the matter was.

Garp did not share her sense of the Under Toad—not this time—and he talked and talked to her, and made love to her. Finally, she fell asleep.

The essay by Ellen James, “Why I’m Not an Ellen Jamesian,” appeared to engender no immediate fuss. It takes a while for most Letters to the Editor to be printed.

There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men—the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on
her
side.

“People will always make sides,” Garp said, “—of everything.”

There was not a written word from a single Ellen Jamesian.

Garp’s first Steering wrestling team produced an 8-2 season as it approached its final dual meet with its arch rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team’s strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath—sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering’s first family—when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.

Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen’s bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine’s editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.

Thus the Ellen Jamesians had
that
to get their teeth into: Ellen James, poor child, had been brainwashed into her antifeminist stance by the male villain, Garp. The betrayer of his mother! The smirking capitalizer on women’s-movement politics! In the various letters, Garp’s relationship with Ellen James was referred to as “seductive,” “slimy,” and “underhanded.”

I’m sorry!

Ellen wrote.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Nothing’s your fault,” Garp assured her.

I’m not an antifeminist!

“Of course you’re not,” Garp told her.

They make everything so black and white.

“Of course they do,” said Garp.

That’s why I hate them. They force you to be like them—or else you’re their enemy.

“Yes, yes,” Garp said.

I wish I could talk.

And then she dissolved, crying on Garp’s shoulder, her wordless, angry blubber rousing Helen from the far-off reading room of the great house, driving Duncan from the darkroom, and waking baby Jenny from her nap.

So, foolishly, Garp decided to take them on, these grown-up crazies, these devout fanatics who—even when their chosen symbol rejected them—insisted they knew more about Ellen James than Ellen James knew about herself.

“Ellen James is
not
a symbol,” Garp wrote. “She is a rape victim who was raped and dismembered before she was old enough to make up her own mind about sex and men.” Thus he began; he went on and on. And, of course, they published it—liking any fuel to any fire. It was also the first published piece of
anything
by T. S. Garp since the famous novel,
The World According to Bensenhaver
.

Actually, it was the second. In a little magazine, shortly after Jenny’s death, Garp published his first and only poem. It was a strange poem; it was about condoms.

Garp felt his life was marred by condoms—man’s device to spare himself and others the consequences of his lust. Our lifetime, Garp felt, was stalked by condoms—condoms in the parking lots in the early mornings, condoms discovered by children in the playing sand of the beaches, condoms used for messages (one to his mother, on the door knob of their tiny wing apartment in the infirmary annex). Condoms unflushed down the dormitory toilets of the Steering School. Condoms lying slick and cocky in public urinals. Once a condom delivered with the Sunday paper. Once a condom in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. And once a condom on the stick-shift shaft of the old Volvo; someone had used the car overnight, but not for driving.

Condoms found Garp the way ants found sugar. He traveled miles, he changed continents, and there—in the bidet of the otherwise spotless but unfamiliar hotel room…there—in the back seat of the taxi, like the removed eye of a large fish …there—eyeing him, from the bottom of his shoe, where he picked it up, somewhere. From
everywhere
condoms came to him and vilely surprised him.

Condoms and Garp went way back. They were somehow joined at the beginning. How often he recalled his first condom shock, the condoms in the cannon’s mouth!

It was a fair poem, but almost no one read it because it was gross. Many more people read his essay on Ellen James vs. the Ellen Jamesians. That was news; that was a contemporary event. Sadly, Garp knew, that is more interesting than art.

Helen begged him not to be baited, not to get involved. Even Ellen James told him that it was her fight; she did not ask for his support.

“More fucking around in the garden,” Helen warned. “More bookshelves.”

But he wrote angrily and well; he said more firmly what Ellen James had meant. He spoke with eloquence for those serious women who suffered, by association, “the radical self-damage” of the Ellen Jamesians—”the kind of shit that gives feminism a bad name.” He could not resist putting them down, and though he did it well, Helen rightly asked, “For
whom?
Who is serious who doesn’t already
know
the Ellen Jamesians are crazy? No, Garp, you’ve done this for
them
—not for Ellen, either. You’ve done it for the fucking Ellen Jamesians! You’ve done it to
get
to them. And why? Jesus, in another year no one would have remembered them—or why they did what they did. They were a
fashion
, a stupid fashion, but you couldn’t just let them pass by.
Why?
”

But he was sullen about it, with the predictable attitude of someone who has been
right
—at all costs. And, therefore, wonders if he was wrong. It was a feeling that isolated him from everyone—even from Ellen. She was ready to be quits with it, she was sorry she had started it.

“But
they
started it,” Garp insisted.

Not really. The first man who raped someone, and tried to hurt her so she couldn’t tell—he started it,

said Ellen James.

“Okay,” Garp said. “Okay, okay.” The girl’s sad truth hurt him. Hadn’t he only wanted to defend her?