The clerk shrugged. “We can try it again.” Patsy ran the card through the reading-strip once more. Again the message came back: Credit Refused.
“I don’t know what the matter is,” Patsy said. “This never happens.” The clerk gazed at her, the smallest ghost of a smile appearing on her face. “Well,” she said, “you could always pay in cash.”
Patsy took her wallet from her purse and opened it. There was no cash inside. Patsy felt herself suddenly reddening. Behind her, three people stood in the checkout line, watching her, shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Patsy seldom bothered with cash anymore except for small purchases like candy and breath mints and gum. But she thought she had stashed a few dollars in there. And where was the two-dollar bill she kept in her wallet permanently, for luck? Also missing, and anyway insufficient for pears and sparkling wine.
“I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the card,” Patsy said.
“Maybe you hit your limit and your credit ran out,” the blond girl said before reddening and putting her hand up in front of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
Patsy looked up at the ceiling and then at the floor. She felt nervous sweat on her back and under her arms, as this strange public humiliation continued. “I don’t suppose you offer credit,” she joked. She reached into the wallet and pulled out a quarter.
“No,” the clerk said, her ghost-smile now, just under the surface of things, turning to visible annoyance, her teeth beginning to show, an animal grimace.
“Do you have a public phone?” Patsy asked.
“Over there,” the clerk said, without gesturing. “Over there, by the doors.”
“Is it okay if I leave my groceries here?”
“Yeah, well—I’ll put them off to the side,” the clerk said. “But I can’t leave them there for long.”
“You won’t have to,” Patsy said. “I’m calling my husband.”
Waiting at the automatic doors for Saul and Emmy, Patsy thought of the enchanted carnal moments she and Saul had had when they first met and first made love as two sensual animals on fire with each other. That ended with the onset of marriage and routine and childbirth and child care and fatigue and day-to-day indifference. But, after all, this was what their marriage had come to: they depended almost blindly upon each other to get each other out of trouble; they were easing each other through this life. About Saul you could always say, He’s dependable. If he said that he’d be at Emmy’s day-care center at three in the afternoon, he would be there. He wouldn’t forget about Theo for a minute. If he said that he would pick up a friend at the airport, he would not forget the date. If you were in trouble, he would drop everything and get you out of trouble if he could; if you were itchy, he would make love to you, and if your back ached, he would rub it. He had once been an educator, until someone died. Now he was in search of an occupation. He was comfortably self-centered, though the caretaker side of him would never go away, and he was probably no woman’s fantasy of a mate, but, sitting near the automatic doors of the Valu-Rite, Patsy waited for him, and at the moment when he walked in, carrying Theo in a front-pack and Emmy on his shoulders, he smiled and waved at his wife, and she almost wept.
In the woods behind their house, a shrine had developed on the site where the ashes of Gordy Himmelman were said to be buried. An underclass of mourners skittered into the woods during the day and early evening and left behind their remembrances: packets of chewing gum, and a standing red-and-silver pinwheel that twirled when the wind caught it, and a carved yellow dog, and a few flowers here and there, and gold and blue ribbons; and a glass piggy bank with pennies inside it halfway up, as far as the pig’s tail, and more toys, including a battery-powered electric car, and several plastic figures of X-men, though the figures were mostly Wolverine, with his fingernails out, ready for combat; and more little flowers pasted onto the nearby trees, and a wooden cross with GORDY, WE MISS YOU written on it. It looked like a Mexican cemetery plot for a child, or a roadside shrine where someone had died in an accident, and day by day, week by week, the toys and decorations and flowers accumulated, and when Patsy walked out to visit it, as she did from time to time, she was at first horrified, then surprised, and then, finally, accustomed to the sudden involuntary appearance of her own tears. The tears had once belonged to Saul, but now they were hers, too.
After first thinking that he would make a good funeral director, a firstclass assistant to Binch, a man he had instantly taken a shine to, Saul told Patsy that the profession was, in fact, too much like being a doctor, though he suspected that the daily sight of corpses going in and out of the funeral home would calm his nerves and bring him spiritual quietude. There was something peaceful about a dead body, Saul informed Patsy. She listened to these opinions without comment.
Finally, at last, he had a good idea: he drove over to the Five Oaks News-Chronicle and offered his services as a columnist, three or four columns a week, to be titled “The Bloviator.” The features editor to whom he applied had never heard of the word and said that they certainly weren’t going to hire Saul as that, or as anything else.
Saul offered to write a sample column, full of excellent opinion. He would bloviate.
On the day Saul brought back his first column, the features editor was short on copy and ran the piece on spec, close to the editorial page, where he thought it wouldn’t attract much attention. The column that day was titled “Why Quit? A Manifesto,” and it caused a great deal of furor in Five Oaks, resulting in an increase in circulation and several angry letters.
The angry letters continued and peppered the editorial page—the anti-Semitic ones were discreetly screened—but the bloviator had apparently managed to help keep the newspaper’s circulation on the rise, and Saul was made a permanent fixture of Five Oaks discourse.
Behind the house the pinwheels and toys and flowers and signs began to fade and to grow sodden.
Saul is currently on a campaign to rid the city of WaldChem and its toxic chemical plant, and he has begun to write about factory-farms just outside of town with their relentless pollution of the groundwater.
Patsy sometimes is approached in the bank by people who ask if she is married to that jerk—one person used the word “scum”—who writes for the paper. She usually smiles and points to a laminated letter to the editor she has put up on the wall behind her desk. The print is so small that no one can read it without walking behind her desk, and no one ever does that unless she invites them to do so. When they do read it, they often find it puzzling that she would be proud of her husband’s having inspired such a letter.
To the editor:
I have been a resident of Five Oaks for forty-six years and have had to su fer a great deal of nonsense in my day but “Saul Bernstein’s” recent column on his own so-called “personal” view of zoning in the southeast corner of the city just about beats anything. Whatever gives this blowhard the confidence to criticize the fine businesspeople in the city who are all for growth and prosperity? You can’t have an omelet without a few eggs. This bloviator fellow—I believe his name as printed in the paper is a pseudonym—is an enemy to employment, to business, to profit, to life liberty and the persuit of happiness and I happen to believe that the oldstyle tar-and-feathers is too good for him. If he was in charge we would all be on welfare in a welfare state taking orders from Mr. Big, who would be him. He writes like he owns the secrets to the universe and I for one am fed up and am cancelling my subscription to the newspaper. I encourage other likeminded folks to do the same. No good society was ever made from the likes of him.
Yours sincerely,
Floyd Muscat
Patsy’s heart is gladdened every time she reads Floyd Muscat’s letter. It is always pleasing when a man finds his true vocation, as Saul has, and can inspire fervor in others.
Twenty-seven
One summer day, on his way home from his new job, Saul passed through a recently constructed residential neighb
orhood close to his own new home on Kingfisher Road. He and Patsy had moved again, for a bit more space. This particular location he was driving by now was where, years ago, he and Patsy had first lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. All the farmland surrounding it had been leveled and developed into a subdivision. He decided to motor around and snoop. He had about twenty minutes before he needed to get home, but he was curious about housing developments where no trees had yet been planted, how people lived in such places, without shadows, exposed to everything, saturated with sunlight and wide open to the elements.
About three blocks in, on the sidewalk, close to the curb, he saw a girl who seemed to be about ten years old sitting behind a card table, reading a book. Behind her, shadeless, on its narrow lot, the vinyl-sided, two-story house stood, stark with optimism and sanitation. The girl had light red hair in pigtails and a white dress cinched by a red patent-leather belt, and she wore patent-leather black shoes. She sat with her arms crossed, the book flattened on the table in front of her. Her face was not cute but defiant. On the table, along with the book, was a small cardboard box for cash, a lemonade pitcher, a few Dixie Cups, and some oddly shaped objects Saul couldn’t make out from his car. Next to the table, facing the street, was a large cardboard sign with block letters written in thick green ink.
LEMONADE AND OTHER THINGS BUY SOME
It had been a long day; Saul was thirsty and desired lemonade. It had always been his habit to stop for curbside children selling their wares. After parking the car and wiping his forehead with his sleeve, he approached the little girl’s stand while fingering the change in his pocket. He had several quarters. It would be enough, he thought.
“Good afternoon. I’d like some lemonade, please,” he said. As he advanced upon the table, he saw that the oddly shaped objects that he hadn’t been able to make out before were stones, plain stones from the ground.
The little girl glanced up from her book and examined him. “Okay. That’ll be one dollar fifty,” she said.
Saul reached into his wallet. “Well,” he said, “that’s a bit more than I expected. I only have three quarters. I do have a five-dollar bill, if you have change.”
“No,” the little girl said. “I don’t have change.” She seemed bored or obscurely dissatisfied with Saul. “I don’t have any change at all.” She lifted up the small cardboard box and then quickly dropped it. No coins clinked.
“Well, what else do you have for sale? I could buy five dollars’ worth of stuff.”
“These stones,” the little girl said. “I have some stones you can buy.” She pointed at the stones on the table. “I picked them out myself.”
“I don’t get it,” Saul said. “Why should I buy stones from you? I can get stones anywhere.”
“These stones,” the little girl said, “are magic.” She glanced up at him to see if he believed her. She had strange azure eyes. The eyes didn’t go with the hair, or with anything else about her.
“What do the stones do?”
“What do you want them to do?” she asked. She was a clever little girl.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Saul said. “Make me rich. Cure the common cold.”
“Well,” she said, “they can’t do that.” She pretended to go back to reading her book. She peered at the words and turned a page after slowly and rather sensually rubbing it between her thumb and index finger.
“If they can’t do that, then what can they do?”
“What do you want them to do?” she repeated.
“I just told you,” Saul said. He twisted around to see the title of the book she was reading. She had lifted it up as if for inspection. There was a horse on the cover. It was something called Heaven Is a Wind Swept Hill.
“No, I mean, what else do you want them to do?” she asked, without looking up.
“Help me find objects around the house that I’ve lost.”
“They can’t do that, either.”
“Name one thing that these stones can do, then,” Saul told her, irritated by the privileges the girl had assumed were hers just because she was a child. “Or I won’t buy any of your damn lemonade.”
“Don’t be so mean,” the girl said, glaring at him. “All right.” She sat up. “These stones can mend a broken heart.”
“Oh, right,” Saul said. “What do you know about broken hearts?”
“You think I’m just a little girl, don’t you?”
“Well, that’s the way it looks right now.”
“Actually,” the little girl said, “I’m actually a very old woman. I’m actually a witch. I’m ancient. I only look like a girl.”
“Have it your way,” Saul said. “So, how much are the stones? Their price, I mean.”
“I could sell you this one for four dollars.” She pointed at a gray, nondescript rock.
“That’s a lot of money for a rock. Do you have anything else for sale?”
“Yes,” the little girl said. “The number five.”
“Excuse me?”
The girl’s face had settled down into dailiness, and she looked bored again. She turned a page of her book with a self-satisfied flick of her hand. “I own all the rights to the number five,” she said smugly. “You can buy the rights from me if you want to use the number five this afternoon and tomorrow morning.”
“You’re crazy,” Saul said. The adjective just slipped out before he remembered that he shouldn’t say things like that to children.
“That’s what you think,” the girl said. “You’re the crazy one. I’m as sane as a sunbird.”
“My apologies. What happens if I use the number five without getting your permission? What then, little girl?” When he saw her expression of contempt, he added, “I’m just asking.”
“It won’t work,” she said. “You can try to use the number five, but it won’t work. It’ll be wrong. All your arithmetic will be false, and you’ll be mistaken, and you will fail.”
“That’s a new one. Where’d you get the rights to the number five?” Saul asked.
“They gave it to me,” she told him.
“Who’s this ‘they’?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you. That would be telling. They’re pretty scary.”
“I bet they are. Okay,” Saul said. “I think I see what’s going on here. So, I guess I’ll have one cup of your lemonade, please, and that rock, the one that mends broken hearts, and the use of the number five for this evening and tomorrow morning.”
“That’ll be seven dollars,” the little girl said.
“Seven dollars! Too much, I say,” said Saul. “Five dollars. Take it or leave it.” Maybe he would get a column out of this, an exposé of lemonade stands.
“Oh, all right,” the girl grumbled. She slapped her neck, as if a mosquito had bitten her there. She poured Saul his lemonade, handed him his rock, and dropped his five-dollar bill into the cardboard box. Saul took his first sip of the lemonade. It was wonderful, just the right combination of sweetness and sourness, the best lemonade he had had in a long time.
“Do you live around here?” he asked. “Here? In River Pines Estates?”
“Yeah.” She waited, as if in thought. “But I won’t tell you where.”
“Did you make this lemonade?” He took another sip. “It’s wonderful.”
“Thank you. My mom and I made it out of lemons,” she said, “plus the secret ingredient. Do you have children?” She was gazing at the Chevy.
“I have a daughter,” Saul said, “four years old, and a son. Theodore.”
“Who’s that in the car?”
Saul didn’t turn around to look. “Nobody. There’s nobody there.”
The little girl made a face at the car, a disagreeable and taunting expression, the way she’d look at any boy she didn’t know.
“Okay,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. She leaned back and closed her eyes in a deliberately languorous manner seemingly imitated from the paintings of Balthus. Saul, alarmed by this preadolescent display,
put the little girl’s stone in his pocket, finished his lemonade, gave her the Dixie Cup, and returned to the Chevy. Then he drove home, having turned the rearview mirror upward so that he wouldn’t be distracted by whatever might have been back there.
At home, later that evening, after singing to Theo and reading Emmy a story, he put the stone—surrounded by bubble wrap—into a mailing box, which he addressed to his mother, together with a note telling her to keep the enclosed on her dresser. Maybe he should return and buy one for his brother and another for Brenda Bagley. Yes, he would do that. Secretly he had admired the little girl, who had found her vocation— salesmanship that thrived on indifference, peddling worthless commodities, infused with auras, to strangers—and, gazing down the hallway to where Patsy was sitting with Theo asleep in her lap, he thought with gratitude of his own skills and gifts, such as they were.
Charles Baxter
SAUL and PATSY
Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of seven previous works of fiction, including the 2000 National Book Award finalist The Feast of Love.
Also by Charles Baxter
FICTION
The Feast of Love
Believers
Shadow Play
A Relative Stranger
First Light
Through the Safety Net
Harmony of the World
POETRY
Imaginary Paintings
ESSAYS
Burning Down the House
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2005
Copyright © 2003 by Charles Baxter
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
University of California Press: Excerpt from the poem “I Know a Man” from Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975. Copyright © 1982 by The Regents of the University of California. .
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