by Tom Robbins
As tired as she is, Sissy has a single flame-edged longing—to get on the road and hoist her thumbs in the wind. However, she is buttoned into an expensive linen dress, is hemmed in by four persuasive people and is held by fine threads of curiosity and sympathy to this Gentleman's Quarterly parody of an Indian who curds up with mucus every time he tries to speak to her. So she employs the Great Secret to turn her predicament into an educational, if not entertaining, experience.
Julian's apartment is second floor front. It's neat and clean, with waxed hardwood floors, a wall of exposed brick, a white piano, books and paintings everywhere. There is a blue velour sofa upon which Julian is made to lie. While Howard mixes Scotch and sodas, Rupert fills a syringe from a vial of aminophylline he has taken from its place behind a gelatin salad mold in the refrigerator. He gives Julian an injection.
“There, that ought to beat them bronchial buggers into submission,” he says to Julian. Then, to Sissy, “I was a medic in the Army. I really should have become a doctor. Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers, as it were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society . . .”
“Too bad you don't have a pill for bullshit.” Carla smiles as if she were joking, but she'd said it tartly. Rupert glares and takes a big bite of Scotch.
“Where do you live, Miss Hankshaw,” asks Howard, trying, perhaps, to change the subject.
“I'm staying with the Countess.”
“I know,” says Howard, “but where do you reside when you aren't visiting New York?”
“I don't.”
“You don't?”
“Well, no, I don't reside anywhere in particular. I just keep moving.”
Everyone looks a bit astonished, including the recumbent Julian.
“A traveler, eh?” says Howard.
“You might say that,” says Sissy, “although I don't think of it as traveling.”
“How do you think of it?” asks Carla.
“As moving.”
“Oh,” says Carla.
“How . . . unusual,” says Marie.
“Mmmmm,” mumbles Howard.
Rupert bites into his Scotch again. Julian issues a watery wheeze.
The silence that follows is soon broken by Carla. “Rupert, before you get too engrossed in your research on Scotch as a cure for aging, don't you think you'd better phone Elaine's and cancel our dinner reservations? We'll never get in again if we just don't show up.”
“What would we do without you, Carla? Without our little efficiency expert, Carla, everything would just go to hell. Carla is thinking about running for mayor next year, aren't you Carla?”
“Up yours, Herr Doktor Book Salesman. Will the demands of your medical practice allow you to call Elaine's or shall I?”
“Oh let me do it,” pipes Marie. The short, vivacious brunette lifts herself out of her platform shoes and glides in stocking feet to the telephone.
“Speaking of running for office,” says Howard pleasantly. “Does anybody think McGovern has a chance?”
“Do you mean a chance to be canonized or a chance to be assassinated?” asks Rupert.
“If Rupert needs a bullshit pill then Hubert Humphrey needs two,” says Carla. “And that might be McGovern's role. If he can turn off Humphrey's fountain of corn then McGovern has done the sensibility of America a great favor, even if he forces his party to nominate a jingoist creep like Scoop Jackson in Miami Beach.”
Like many of their liberal counterparts, the friends of Julian Gitche are disillusioned with politics, but also like their counterparts they have failed to discover an alternative to politics in which to place their faith, channel their humanism or indulge their penchant for conflict and speculation. Thus, the conversation around the red patient on the blue sofa drifts to the upcoming national political conventions. When Marie returns from phoning the restaurant, she joins in.
Sissy leaves her chair and wanders about the apartment. Its full bookshelves remind her of public libraries in which she has napped. Wandering, she holds her thumbs close to her side, lest she nudge an antique, totter an objet d'art, smear a picture glass or agitate the pet poodle. She is intrigued but suffers no illusions; she knows she is in an alien environment.
Eventually her explorations lead her into the bedroom, where there is a covered birdcage of Florentine design. She wishes its inhabitants were not sleeping, for she “has a way” with birds. She recalls Boy, the runaway parakeet who for a time was the sole exception to her rule to go always alone. Boy's owners had clipped his wings, but once Sissy taught him how, he hitchhiked as well as some birds fly. That Boy is a cinch to go down in the Parakeet Hall of Fame.
Hoping to hear a cheep that might indicate insomnia in the cage, Sissy sits upon the double bed. Gradually, she reclines. “No Indian blankets,” she notes. “No Indian blankets.” And that is the last thought she has before she blacks out.
Two hours pass before she is awakened—by a sound softer than a cheep. It is the sound of buttons passing through buttonholes. Buttons that have not breathed freely in three days are sighing with relief, their yokes lifted, their nooses loosened. One by one, button necks are freed from the trap that is the fate of most buttons the way that compromises are the fate of most men. Soon Sissy cannot only hear button liberation; she can feel it.
Someone is undressing her.
And it is not Julian Gitche.
24.
"WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?" asked Sissy, in a voice webby with sleep.
“Oh, Rupert and Carla had a little hassle and went home,” said Howard.
“Julian fell asleep on the couch; we covered him up,” said Marie.
“We thought that we should make you comfortable, too,” said Howard.
“Yes, dear,” said Marie. “We've been watching you here sleeping and you looked so sweet. We thought we should help you get comfy for the night.”
Sissy thought that quite considerate of the Barths. They were a couple as amicable as they were handsome. She did wonder, however, why they were both in their underwear.
Between the two of them, they had her out of her dress in no time.
“There, isn't that better?” inquired Marie.
“Yes, thanks,” said Sissy. She did feel more comfortable, but she also felt as if she should apologize for not having on a brassiere. Bra hooks can test the most agile of thumbs, as many a frustrated boy will testify, and Sissy had been unable to wear that garment whose name in French means, enigmatically, “arm protector,” since she had left her mama. Light seeping in from a crack in the bathroom door gave a strawberry sheen to her gumdrop-shaped nipples. She hoped she wasn't embarrassing these nice people.
Oh my goodness, she must have been, for in a second Marie slipped out of her own brassiere—in an effort, obviously, to make Sissy feel less conspicuous.
Marie moved her bare bosom close to Sissy's. The two sets of nipples stiffened in formal greeting, like diplomats from small nations. “Mine are fuller but yours are more perfectly shaped,” observed Marie. She leaned closer. The envoys exchanged state secrets.
“Highly debatable,” said Howard. “I'll wager they're the exact same size.” Judiciously, in the spirit of fair play that characterizes his profession, he cupped his left hand about a Marie breast and his right about one of Sissy's.
He weighed them in his palms, squeezed them the way an honest grocer squeezes excess water from a lettuce, let his spread fingers sample their circumference. “Hmmm. Yours are larger, Marie, but Miss Hankshaw's—Sissy's—are more firm. You'd think they would have started to droop; I mean, from not wearing a bra.”
“Howard! Watch your manners. You've made her blush. Here, Sissy, let me compare.” Marie seized S
issy's free breast, quickly, like a monkey picking a fruit, rolling it about in her hungry little fingers, rubbing it against her chin and cheeks.
Now, Sissy became more awake. Consciousness returned and when it unpacked its bags, there was suspicion in them. She shouldn't be staying, uninvited, in the bedroom of an ill man with whom she'd scarcely spoken. She ought to get back to the Countess's. Did Mr. and Mrs. Barth have her best interests at heart? She had been so relieved to get out of that dress that she hadn't considered hanky-panky. She wondered if this friendly couple could be up to something?
Her question was answered by a hand—she was not sure whose—creeping into her panties. She tried to turn away from its probings, but her cunt, without her knowledge or permission, had grown quite slippery, and a finger fell into it almost as if by accident.
Lowered steadily, like a flag at sunset, her panties were soon below her knees. She thought she felt a second finger slish into her pussy, but before that could be confirmed, still another finger muscled up her asshole . . . and . . . ohhh. It was like her early days as a hitchhiker. It was nostalgic; it was disgusting; it was . . . ohhh.
Philosophers, poets, painters and scholars, debate all you want on the nature of beauty!
Tropical plums. Wine in a rowboat. Clouds, babies and Buddhas, resembling one another. Bicycle bells. Honeysuckle. Parachutes. Shooting stars seen through lace curtains. A silver radio that attracts butterflies; a déjà that just won't quit vuing. Han-shan wrote, after a moment of ecstasy, “This place is finer than the place I live!”
Across Sissy's lips passed Marie's tongue, then Howard's tongue, then Marie's titty, then Howard's . . . then Howard's . . . Howard's . . . !!! One by one, like apartments in a new high-rise, orifices were being filled.
Anima mixed with animus. It was Marie who was climbing her, sliding around on her, pulling down her own panties with a wild hand. Marie nuzzled Sissy's calves, then her thighs. Marie's mouth, oozing hot saliva, apparently had a destination. But before it could be reached, Howard entered his wife from the rear.
Ah, sir penis, that old show-stopper! Chalk up another stolen scene for the one-eyed matinée idol. Marie could not suck for groaning.
Like a disc jockey from Paradise, Howard flipped Marie over and played her B side. Every now and again, he reached for Sissy, attempting to include her, but certain laws of physics insisted on being obeyed. Over and over, Marie called Sissy's name, but her eyes were half-closed and her caresses blind and scattered.
The Barths were really going at it. It would tax a day's output at the Countess's factory to quell the spreading funk in that room. Marie was kind of yowling, sounding so much like a cat that the poodle in the kitchen began to grrr. God knows what the birds in their cage were thinking.
“So this is what it's like,” thought Sissy. Fascinated, she propped herself up on her elbows to observe. Often she had imagined the act, but she was never entirely sure she imagined it correctly, not even after that evening of embracing Kerouac in a Colorado corn field. “So this is what it's really like.” The Great Secret could be returned to its bottle. Perceptual transformations were no longer necessary. This truly was educational.
In truth, Sissy found it more interesting than the canoe races at LaConner, Washington, more interesting than the San Andreas Fault, or Niagara Falls, or Bonnie and Clyde State Park, or Tapioca State Pudding—of course, Sissy never was one for sightseeing. She even found it more interesting than the Tobacco Festival, although not so much a challenge to the wiles of her thumbs.
Before the performance was over, however, and to Howard and Marie's dismay, Sissy debedded on a particularly high bounce and walked out. She pattered to the living room couch and crawled under the cover with Julian. There she stayed three days.
25.
THEY HAD A LOT TO TALK ABOUT.
Julian was still in his formal trousers, cummerbund attached, while Sissy was nude as she had ever been, and was smeared, besides, with those feminine juices, both her own and Marie's, that gave the Countess nose trouble—but the sofa-mates refused to let those differences stand in their way; they had a lot to talk about and there were larger differences than dress.
It would seem that Julian Gitche had dealt with the world by combining pigment with water in varying viscosities and making it spread, leak, splash, pour, spray, soak or fold onto a chosen paper format in selected tones, hues, volumes, shapes and lines. Sissy Hankshaw had dealt with the world by hitchhiking with a dedication, perspective and style such as the world had never seen. It was as befuddling to Sissy that an Indian would spend his life painting genteel watercolors in a bourgeois milieu as it was mind-wrenching to Julian that a bright, pretty, if slightly afflicted, young woman with a promising modeling career would spend hers endlessly hitchhiking.
“You have a romantic concept of Indians,” said Julian. “They are people, like any other; a people whose time has passed. I see no virtue in wallowing in the past, especially a past that was more often miserable than not. I am a Mohawk Indian in the same sense that Spiro Agnew is a Greek: a descendant, nothing more. And believe me, the Mohawk never approximated the glory that was Greece. My grandfather was one of the first Mohawks to work as a steel-rigger in New York City; you know Mohawks are used extensively on sky-scraper construction because they have no fear of height. My dad helped build the Empire State Building. Later, he founded his own steeplejack service, and despite prejudices against him by the unions and so forth for being an uppity redskin, he made a great deal of money. Enough to send me to Yale. I have a masters degree in fine arts and fairly good connections in Manhattan art circles. Primitive cultures, Indian or otherwise, hold a minimum of attraction for me. I cherish the firm order of symmetry that marks Western civilization off from the more heterogeneous, random societies in an imperfect world.”
In the limited space of the sofa, Sissy turned over, dinging one of her Howard-and-Marie accentuated nipples against one of Julian's shirt studs. “I don't know anything about this order and symmetry business. I'm a high school dropout from a race—the Poor White Trash race—that has done nothing for ten centuries but pick up rocks, hoe weeds, sweat in factories and march off to war whenever told to; and each generation has begot a smaller potato patch. But I've spent some time in libraries, not all of it asleep, and I have learned this: every civilized culture in history has discriminated against its abnormal members. 'Schizophrenia' is a civilized Western term, and so are 'witch' and 'misfit'—terms used to rationalize the cruel and unusual punishments doled out to extraordinary people. Yet the American Indian tribes, as you ought to know, treated their freaks as special beings. Their schizoids were recognized as having a gift, the power of visions, and were revered for it. The physically deformed were also regarded as favorites of the Great Spirit, welcome reliefs to the monotony of anatomical regularity, and everybody loved them, enjoyed them and paid them favor. In that ancient Greece that you find so glorious, somebody like me would have been killed at birth.”
“Now, Sissy, you're being overly sensitive and defensive. You saw how you were treated last night by my highly civilized friends. Why, not one of us even looked at your . . . your . . . your . . . thumbs.”
“Exactly my point,” said Sissy.
And so that argument went. The other one went something like this.
“Aside from everything else, Sissy, I fail to see how you've even survived. My God! A girl, alone, on the roads, for years. And not killed or injured or outraged or taken sick.”
“Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You'd be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.”
“Okay, that may well be true. But what an enterprise! Hitchhiking. Bumming rides. I think of hitchhiking I think of college kids, servicemen and penniless hippies. I think of punks in oily denims and maniacs with butcher knives hidden in their wad of rumpled belongings . . .”
“I've been told that I loo
ked like an angel beside the highway.”
“Oh, I'm sure you are a beautiful exception to the rule. But why? Why bother? You've traveled your whole life without destination. You move but you have no direction.”
“What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?”
“There's an orderly pattern, some ultimate purpose in the movements of Nature. You've been constantly on the move for nearly twelve years. Tell me one thing that you've proven.”
“I've proven that people aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.”
“Aimless . . .”
“Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've found something.”
“What is it that you've found?”
“Hitchhiking.”
That stopped Julian for a while, but on the second day, long after Howard and Marie had tiptoed out of his apartment, he returned to the subject. He could not appreciate Sissy's accomplishments. So what if she had once flagged down thirty-four cars in succession without a miss? What merit in the feat of crossing Texas blindfolded in cyclone season with a parakeet on her thumb? He viewed such deeds as pathetically, sophomorically, wanton. He shook his unpainted and featherless head sadly when he considered the police record (arrests for vagrancy, illegal solicitation of rides and, ironically, suspicion of prostitution) of an essentially respectable woman.
So effectively did he chide her about it that a vaguely guilty gloom arrived in her eyes, its cold feet shuffling in the dampness there. He wrung sniffles out of her, and when she was appropriately unhappy, he comforted her. He held her tightly in protective arms, built a castle around her, dug a moat, raised the drawbridge. Only her mama had ever held her like that, cooing in her ear. He petted her with poodle-petting hands, so soft they could get splinters from eating with chopsticks. He cuddled her as if she were an infant. He insulated her bare wires. And she, Sissy, who had slept in the excesses of every season, uncared for and without a care, snuggled down deeply in Julian's paternal tenderness and let herself be coddled.