by Mary Robison
Phil said, “Turn it down, will you, princess?”
He pressed forward in the chair, but couldn’t seem to get started at what he wanted to say. He directed his small eyes at me and smiled without separating his lips. He beat his ledger tablet against his leg.
I said, “This is about the future, right?”
“Indeed,” he said.
He began slowly, but then he got a little wound up. He talked about schools, coaches, music lessons—flute or piano? He was wondering aloud about a dental insurance plan when Jackie came in carrying a plate of cake and a coffee cup, which he had pushed against his stomach. He was watching the coffee, moving one step at a time. He got seated on the rug and looked at Phil, who had kept on talking, and was now nodding at Jackie.
Phil said, “A lot of my life, as you know, has been spent kicking around, spinning my tires, and going from job to job, which was great, because I learned a hell of a lot about people. I found out about people involved in war—sick people, some of them, and healthy . . .”
“Red-headed people and non-redheads,” Jackie said.
Phil went on. “This business with my brother-in-law in Chicago, for example. That got me squared around and I did him a lot of good, though I won’t see a damn lot of money from it. But I did see how you make money,” he said. “You make money with people, princess. And people take to me. They like me. And if being liked isn’t the whole war, it sure as hell is one big battle in the campaign.”
“Boy, this is good for a mix,” Jackie interrupted. He pointed at the cake with his flatware.
Phil kept going. His speech was rushed and urgent-sounding. “I haven’t got a lot of what they call liquid assets,” he said. “But I can read people like you two would read a book, and anything I’d want to get serious about, my people-reading talent would make me a success.
“I’ve got some things lined up for now and some for later,” he said. “Step One, though, is a vet friend of mine who’s in shipping and receiving for a big auto-parts warehouse and who’s going to get me a job as a dispatcher, which I could easily handle. That position opens up in a month or two, when the guy they got now retires.”
“In a month or two,” Jackie said. He rose and changed the Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross record for a Duke Ellington. He put the needle down on “Cottontail,” then sat again behind his coffee cup and plate.
Phil stopped talking and stared at Jackie and then at the record player. “Weird,” Phil said. He sort of shook his head and then went on some more. “Step Two is an idea I’ve had for a long time and which I hope to activate through a contact of mine at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s so simple it’s genius. Dietary Popsicles. You got diet soda, which sells like mad, and you got fat people who suffer more than anyone else in the heat and who could eat a million of these Popsicles to cool down, and never gain an ounce. And it works. I know, because I put Tab and Fresca in my ice-cube trays, and they freeze and they still taste good.”
“I hope you don’t buy any of this,” Jackie said to me. He lifted his coffee cup, and its cork coaster stuck to the cup bottom.
“Naw, naw,” I said.
“You don’t?” Phil said, and looked puzzled.
Jackie and I waggled our heads in the negative.
“You say I lie?” Phil said.
“No, Phil,” Jackie said.
I sucked a breath. “It’s just that people, they don’t ever do what they don’t want to do. And they can’t ever be what they aren’t already.”
Jackie said, “The biggest favor you could do this baby, and its mom, is just to realize that.”
THE SAD THING WAS, IT HAD BEEN FUN LISTENING TO Phil. There was great authority in his delivery. For an instant there I had wanted to be him, or at least his age, and have his ideas.
Anyway, his manner became rather formal and unnaturally polite. He suddenly offered to leave because of the “weekend traffic.”
“All right,” Jackie and I said in unison.
Phil stood, put a hand on his head, and smoothed the hair there. I noticed for the first time that day that he had shaved off his beard. He was wearing his pointed boots, beltless slacks, and a canary-colored Ban-Lon shirt. I remembered that these were not clothes he got into on Saturdays, as my dad might have. They were the clothes Phil wore. He loaded up his utility box and put it under his arm, and then he shook hands with Jackie.
“Thank you for the baby presents,” I said.
Phil said, “I’ll be around, almost certainly, tomorrow, princess, with a lot more stuff.”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
We heard his car gunning off. Phil had tuned the engine to make a lot of noise.
Jackie paced for a minute or two, and then he said, “Thank God, thank God!”
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“All right, I will,” Jackie said. “Thank God you didn’t make Phil part of the family.”
“Halt,” I said. “Phil is very important to me. When he goes on like that, I don’t really mind.”
“Eleanor,” Jackie said, “he’s a wrong number. Something small and slimy that you throw back. God, what he says about your self-concept.”
“What does he say?”
“Nothing, except that you’re very, very bad off. I can’t explain it if you don’t already know.”
“The psychologist,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Jackie said. He started pacing again.
“Look, I know I’m not smart,” I said. “I don’t particularly want to be smart. That’s the whole difference between us—I don’t torture myself by going around with people who are smart.”
“That’s right. That’s terrific,” Jackie said before I hurried out of the room.
From my high bed, I had a side-window view of a corner of the big cathedral. The church looked black and threatening, but very meaningful, to me. I decided I’d never move out of The Augusta. Phil would probably continue to come by for a while. Maybe Jackie would stay. Mrs. Dixon would come by, and eventually maybe she and I would have a nice conversation—or a meal together. Or not. There’d be another Mrs. Dixon, surely, if mine tired out. There’d be another Phil.
Yours
ALLISON STRUGGLED AWAY FROM HER WHITE RENAULT, limping with the weight of the last of the pumpkins. She found Clark in the twilight on the twig-and-leaf-littered porch behind the house.
He wore a wool shawl. He was moving up and back in a padded glider, pushed by the ball of his slippered foot.
Allison lowered a big pumpkin, let it rest on the wide floor boards.
Clark was much older—seventy-eight to Allison’s thirty-five. They were married. They were both quite tall and looked something alike in their facial features. Allison wore a natural-hair wig. It was a thick blonde hood around her face. She was dressed in bright-dyed denims today. She wore durable clothes, usually, for she volunteered afternoons at a children’s day-care center.
She put one of the smaller pumpkins on Clark’s long lap. “Now, nothing surreal,” she told him. “Carve just a regular face. These are for kids.”
In the foyer, on the Hepplewhite desk, Allison found the maid’s chore list with its cross-offs, which included Clark’s supper. Allison went quickly through the day’s mail: a garish coupon packet, a bill from Jamestown Liquors, November’s pay-TV program guide, and the worst thing, the funniest, an already opened, extremely unkind letter from Clark’s relations up North. “You’re an old fool,” Allison read, and, “You’re being cruelly deceived.” There was a gift check for Clark enclosed, but it was uncashable, signed, as it was, “Jesus H. Christ.”
LATE, LATE INTO THIS NIGHT, ALLISON AND CLARK gutted and carved the pumpkins together, at an old table set on the back porch, over newspaper after soggy newspaper, with paring knives and with spoons and with a Swiss Army knife Clark used for exact shaping of tooth and eye and nostril. Clark had been a doctor, an internist, but also a Sunday waterc
olorist. His four pumpkins were expressive and artful. Their carved features were suited to the sizes and shapes of the pumpkins. Two looked ferocious and jagged. One registered surprise. The last was serene and beaming.
Allison’s four faces were less deftly drawn, with slits and areas of distortion. She had cut triangles for noses and eyes. The mouths she had made were just wedges—two turned up and two turned down.
By one in the morning they were finished. Clark, who had bent his long torso forward to work, moved back over to the glider and looked out sleepily at nothing. All the lights were out across the ravine.
Clark stayed. For the season and time, the Virginia night was warm. Most leaves had been blown away already, and the trees stood unbothered. The moon was round above them.
Allison cleaned up the mess.
“Your jack-o’-lanterns are much, much better than mine,” Clark said to her.
“Like hell,” Allison said.
“Look at me,” Clark said, and Allison did.
She was holding a squishy bundle of newspapers. The papers reeked sweetly with the smell of pumpkin guts.
“Yours are far better,” he said.
“You’re wrong. You’ll see when they’re lit,” Allison said.
She went inside, came back with yellow vigil candles. It took her a while to get each candle settled, and then to line up the results in a row on the porch railing. She went along and lit each candle and fixed the pumpkin lids over the little flames.
“See?” she said.
They sat together a moment and looked at the orange faces.
“We’re exhausted. It’s good-night time,” Allison said. “Don’t blow out the candles. I’ll put in new ones tomorrow.”
THAT NIGHT, IN THEIR BEDROOM, A FEW WEEKS EARLIER in her life than had been predicted, Allison began to die. “Don’t look at me if my wig comes off,” she told Clark. “Please.”
Her pulse cords were fluttering under his fingers. She raised her knees and kicked away the comforter. She said something to Clark about the garage being locked.
At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.
He was speaking into the phone now. He watched the jack-o’-lanterns. The jack-o’-lanterns watched him.
Falling Away
“COME ON, VAN, CAN’T YOU REMEMBER?” I SAID.
“I’m trying, but no. An image here and there, the shirt I got blood on, the taste—frightening!” said Van to me, but really more to our marriage counselor, Shirley Salizar.
“You weren’t wearing your glasses,” I said. “Certainly weren’t measuring your steps.”
“All true,” Van said.
Mrs. Salizar was letting the exchange play out. She looked drowsy this August early morning, a little dulled. Her eyes lately had been too much white in her tanned-up face, and there was today a burr caught on the hem of her navy sundress. Behind her, her fern plant had toppled and was spilling soil. She was forty-five, handsome if somewhat breastless. Petite.
I made small moans I hoped Shirley’d hear over the gurgle of the air conditioner. These were because Van was not explaining how a few nights before he had tripped on the kitchen landing, rumbled into our refrigerator, cracking his nose.
There was no desk in Shirley’s office, just chairs. She was, as usual, placed closer to Van than to me, and was roughly mimicking his sitting posture.
My secret low opinion of Shirley Salizar didn’t matter to me. I figured even a dolt could tell someone if he had something like a hole in the back of his sweater and didn’t know it.
So I kept talking into the rare chance for me to talk. I told Shirley. She made not even the occasional glance to Van for verification. She glared at me as if I were a liar.
She liked to call Van’s and my relationship “the patient.”
Van was the patient.
And I minded her and Van’s forming this little coalition against me. Just to stay a guest at their discussions, I had had to pretend I agreed I was “creator of the context” for what was wrong with Van, for his big symptom, which was that he was accident-prone. Very prone.
He had totaled our Nova, crashed on his bicycle, stumbled on the porch stoop, and once chipped the bone in his chin. He had dropped an outboard motor on his ankle—fractured the ankle. He had caught fire at our stove, over the coals of the hibachi, one time simply lighting his pipe.
“THIS LATEST SAVES YOU FROM HAVING TO HIT HIM in the nose,” Shirley said now. “Which may be the reason you’ve kept him so clumsy.”
My breath went out and I had trouble pulling in another.
“It is?” Van asked.
One chief reason we had chosen Shirley to help us with our young marriage was that her office was in a skinny two-story on the same lane as our house—very good for when we were out of a car or between cars.
“Enough,” I said, finally. “Enough of the two against one, and of puzzling over possible motives, as if there’s any mystery here.”
Shirley’s one first prescription, which she told us in our beginning session, was that Van should sometimes fake injuries— like, for example, by wearing unnecessary splints and bandages around me. That was for nothing, because in his few efforts at faking he always wore a look of pride.
Next, she wanted me to “compete” with Van to see if I could outdo him at having accidents. “Deprive the symptom of its message,” she said, but I could never get up for that.
“I want you to notice something about yourselves,” Shirley said now. This was her show of strength. She could be very seeing.
We looked ourselves over, held out our arms and hands, looked at each other.
“All right,” Van said.
I said, “What?”
“You match!” Shirley said, and yes we did, in that we both had on blazers, our shirts were both made of cotton, and both of us wore jeans. My blazer was red, though, and I had on a headband. I wore sandals. My toenails were polished. Van had no purse, of course. He had socks on with his Weejuns.
“Could be coincidence?” Van asked.
“It was unplanned,” I said. “We pulled on whatever we had clean.”
Shirley said that from now on Van was to pick out and buy his own clothes, and that he should start immediately, right after the session. She said he was to shop alone, and that anything he bought had to be expensive. “Buy things that look like you,” she said.
Van wanted to know what stores.
“Let me backtrack,” I said. “You say Van must do this. Why?”
I never got an answer, because Van was saying in low tones to Shirley, “I just wish it didn’t have to be right now, when I’m running kind of short on money.” He brought out his wallet and showed it to her. The wallet was stuffed out of shape, crammed with dollar bills. “These’d fool you,” he whispered. “But they’re just like receipts to me. I don’t even dare think of them as money. I have to hand them straight over to the oil distributors.
Van and his uncle were co-owners of two hurting Smithco filling stations; hurting partly because we lived in an area of very low populace, in Sketching—Pennsylvania not Connecticut— and too damned far from the turnpike.
I had a little money of my own. I said, “What if I were to lend Van the dough for these new clothes?”
“Van?” Shirley said, a first—a three-way exchange.
“That’d be nice of her?” Van said.
But Shirley’s look at me was a don’t-you-dare.
One main thing about Van, that made people care for him so, was that he was glamorous, rock-star cute.
IT WAS AROUND EIGHT THAT NIGHT, AND I HAD cruised over to pick up Van at the better station, the one on South Holland. I wa
s in his office there, which was just tacky windows, a plain floor, a calendar, a cash register, shelves of whatnot, a few fuming rags.
“Ready to go?” I said.
Van went no. He bought time by going out to put air into my tires. He tussled with the hose, shook the nozzle, pretended it was clogged or something. Tires didn’t need air.
Too amazingly, he hit his shin on a metal tumbler on the way back and came to me limping, clenching his fists. He backed up against the counter, hiked the leg of his brand-new slacks, rubbed the red egg that was blooming.
“Now are you ready?” I said.
“No!” Van said. He stared into the garage a second. His uncle was deep inside, we could see, on a box, having a Dreamsicle from the machine.
“Could you please beat it?” Van asked me.
“Of course not, silly. How would you get home?”
“I couldn’t care, it doesn’t matter,” Van said. “Couldn’t you just leave? I was doing okay until you came.”
There were no cars at the pumps, but I could tell Van wanted an excuse to get out of the office. He kept glancing back at the highway, trying to summon a customer. He looked good, as always, but he looked as if he itched.
“Let’s stand back a minute,” I said, karate-chopping the air. “Did Mrs. Salizar put you up to this, Van? This is the new thing, right? You’re to be rude to me. Because if she did, she’s going to be minus two patients. We’re not shelling out the fifty-five bucks for new ways to start fights.”
“I’m not fighting. But I still wish you’d go.”
“We are paying to get you fixed up,” I went on. “You. Because you might be in danger of really killing yourself with one of your accidents.”
Van started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. “You’re crying?” I said.
I couldn’t handle it at all. I asked him to stop. I said I’d yell for his uncle. Van wouldn’t stop, though. He couldn’t.
“I am leaving!” I said.
“LOOK AT THE PROCESS, NOT AT THE CONTENT,” Shirley’s tiny voice told me later over the telephone.