Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  Gets out of bed, thinks of taking the stick, leaves it. Goes into Olivia’s room. Covers are on her, she’s alseep, kisses her, strokes her head. Eva’s room. Asleep, covers off, puts her back on her stomach, covers over her, reaches down to kiss her. Mattress position in the crib so deep his lips can’t reach her, so he strokes her head, leaves his hand on her forehead. Goes through the apartment. Everything OK. Jumps when the cat walks into the living room, cat runs away. Goes back to bed, under the covers, holds the stick. “Denise?” No sound. Holds his breath. She’s breathing lightly, on her side, back to him. Lets go of the stick and snuggles up to her. She’s wearing a bathrobe. Pulls it above her waist, nothing on underneath, sticks his penis between her thighs and leaves it there. Doesn’t want to bother her. Really doesn’t. If he gets an erection he won’t do anything like press even closer to her, wiggle around a bit to show he’s interested in making love if she is. Kisses her shoulder through the robe, her neck. “Do you want me to get up and put the thing in?” she says. “I’m sorry. No. I thought you were asleep. I didn’t kiss you for that. Just as a goodnight.” “Oh?” “No, really.” “It might get rid of some of your tension.” “And yours, but better we just sleep. We haven’t got many hours left and the kids might get up again tonight.” “I don’t mind if you don’t. If I stop being involved in it it’ll only be because I’m too sleepy or still too nervous or something of before all of a sudden came back to me and took my mind off it, but you just go ahead.” “Same here then. OK.” “OK I should get up?” “Sure, if you really don’t mind and it’s not too much trouble. But I don’t want you to think I needed all that fighting and violence to incite it. I’m perfectly happy to go to sleep now holding you like this.” “How about if I put it in just in case?” and she gets out of bed and goes to the dresser.

  12

  _______

  Frog Wants Out

  In bed he says “I don’t want to go on with what I’m doing. I have to find something else.”

  “Become a plumber.”

  “What could I do? I should have been a cop. My dad actually said ‘If you can’t become a doctor or dentist, become a teacher or cop. Good money and your own hours in the first group, long paid vacations and early retirement in the second.’ As a cop I could have been semiretired by now or even three or four years ago.”

  “That’s just what you needed to have become. I’d be a widow or close. You could be lying beside me now with a bullet or part of one in your spine. I’d have to feed and dress you, wipe your backside every day for years. Maybe several times a day, because you’d be incontinent.”

  “I would tell you to get a divorce, take other men, remarry, move out.”

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  “You would after awhile. Or I’d have divorced you by now, got myself an apartment in some special building for handicapped cops. I wouldn’t let you come see me. I would probably let the kids come. But if I hadn’t got shot, because I would have been extra careful to avoid it—”

  “Not with your temperament and always sticking your nose and often your whole body in. You would have been shot two to three different times and the third time would have paralyzed or killed you. That’s the way I see it.”

  “What about being a wine grower? I think I’d like to be away from people and so totally occupied like that. In the hills, probably remote dry ones, so even while I’m sweating hard from all the work it wouldn’t be that humid and hot—the air wouldn’t. Good smells, sights, fresh wine, and all of it except the wine good for the kids too.”

  “You know nothing about wine growing. Vorticulture? Vinticulture? The kids would hate it, taking a bus to school for an hour each way, and so few playmates around.”

  “They’d love it there. Living in a house. Family very tight. Maybe pitching in with the work. Horses, sheep maybe, rabbits bounding around, lots of dogs.”

  “You’d complain about the dog crap all over. The work would be too tough. It’s too late to start out so late. It would take too much money.”

  “I could go to work for someone as an apprentice for a couple of years.”

  “And the money? It sounds nice, and you know I love growing things, but I’m sure it would be too rough on us all.”

  “Maybe I should have been a soldier. By now I’d be a major. I could even be retired by now—just takes twenty years for half or three-quarters pay. There’s a fellow in my class who was an officer. I told him ‘Christ, to be retired so young.’ He said he isn’t that young but I said ‘you’re around my age and that’s still pretty young. No major illnesses and none foreseen for a good fifteen years. You have twenty good working years left and maybe more because you won’t be working your butt off at a job for the next fifteen years.’ He said the last seven years in the army were unrelievedly boring. That he never would have gone in if he’d known about them. I said ‘Seven boring years for twenty to thirty years of retirement?’ Or at least fifteen years of retirement before he’d normally retire? I’d go through that. I should have joined the army. Even got into ROTC when I was in college, and started as an officer. I might even have ended up a colonel.”

  “You would have gone off to war. You would have been shot at, booby-trapped, lost your legs. We never would have met. I wouldn’t have liked most of what you thought and felt. If you had made it through the war or come out in one piece, you’d be involved with military science now, probably a little too gung-ho and rigid about most things, and you’d be deadly dull to me. Your student still talks like an officer, doesn’t he?”

  “Maybe talks like one but writes like a poet. Each paragraph seems scratched out by pen thirty times. Maybe he’s hiding behind it, all those long descriptions, flowery language and showy emotions and words. True, I probably would have had a different kind of wife. Fluffier hair, maybe a few blond streaks in it, or just shorter or more athletic-looking hair. Maybe not as intelligent or with much interest in literature, but nice, taking care of the kids, cooking, lots of housecleaning—things like that. Same kind of sex, I suppose, though truth is I think intellectuals generally have the best sex.”

  “She’d have smoked. You’d have hated that. Stubbing out her cigarette when she left it for a second, emptying her ashtrays ten times a day—I could see you. Because somehow I think all army wives smoke a lot.”

  “You’re probably right. The men too. And the hillbilly music and dumb TV shows and all that sports and pussy talk—I never could have slept in the same barracks with them. But what should I do about a different job?”

  “I’m telling you, become a plumber. They do very well. Take a few courses in it while you’re still teaching. Fifty dollars an hour they get.”

  “That’s what the plumbing contractor might charge when he sends one of his men over. But I’d say twenty-five an hour when they’re on their own.”

  “Thirty-five then, forty. And forty times seven or eight hours a day? You’d only have to work three weekdays a week. The other two you could do what you want.”

  “I should have stayed in news. But I knew after three years it wasn’t for me and would only get worse. All those mindless stories, half of them publicity pieces for the person or group or institution I was writing about. Nothing in depth. The editors said ‘Whataya think ya writing here, philosophy or literary crits? Cut and simplify, cut and simplify.’ And also embarrasing when I asked a fireman with smoke coming out of his nose and mouth how he feels. Or people at the airport, still waiting for the plane with their loved ones to arrive, the miracle to happen—That’s the story; dig into it; more they cry, better the copy’—when it hit some mountainside a couple of hours ago. Worst kind of writing, but it was stupid of me to quit. At least so early in it.”

  “You probably did the right thing. I don’t know what to say. Plumbing.”

  “Maybe I can become a cashier someplace. I’m not kidding. Something simple; nothing to interfere with thinking. Just sit behind a booth, give back change, do what cashiers do, ‘Don’t forget your
charge card; thank you.’ Waiters could fetch me coffee every so often. Effortless. Days would pass. I wouldn’t get dirty or exhausted. Years. Then Social Security. We’d have enough to live on from it, so long as you were working.”

  “In four years I’ll be able to go back to teaching full time. Then, though I wouldn’t be making nearly as much as you, you could quit or go part time.”

  “How about one of those guys who sits by office building entrances? In a uniform, usually, but no gun. Or fancy apartment house lobbies. A checker or weaponless guard. Gives out passes, sees that undesirables don’t enter. One does, no trouble—he just summons the real security force or the police. It’d be easy too. Nine to five. Four to twelve. Read a book. Two books a day. Go over or even rewrite by hand the work I really want to be doing. Or driving a truck. I see ads where they teach you how to drive one in a month and then get you a job. Those guys make good money. Women too. You can come with me sometimes, share the driving load if you also take the driving course. Or I’d teach you. But better you get your permit so they can pay us as a driving team. And the beds in those trucks often have a bed in them too.”

  “You mean in the truck’s cabin. The bed is the container part in back.”

  “Narrow beds but we’d be snug in them, see America, sleep under the stars or the smog. We could even take the kids sometimes, during their school breaks.”

  “You don’t like driving much. Six hours on the road kills you. Those drivers go fourteen hours, sometimes two days running with only four hours’ sleep. That’s what those beds are for.”

  “I’ve got to start doing something else though.”

  “What I said then. Plumbers call the shots. There’s always work for them. Set up your own business and collect the fifty to sixty dollars an hour for yourself. Sure, expenses and medical insurances. But four hundred a day. Say three-fifty. Only work two days a week and take three months off in the summer. You’d still earn more money and get more vacation time, or the same vacation time but no class preparation during it, than you do now and for about ten fewer work hours a week.”

  “What would happen if a toilet was really clogged? Needed a lot more than a snake. I’ve heard stories. Plumbers sticking their arms into pipes up to their shoulders. Not in the toilets so much but in the main basement pipe, with years of crap in it, leading to the sewer. Where nothing but a hand would unclog it. They have gloves on, and I guess they get used to it, but do they? Maybe that’s why they charge so much: to even it all out. No, it’s not for me. Why don’t I just open a little store? Buy one, rather, so when I get it it’s all there, goods on the shelves, the rest. At the most, work another year teaching, save up enough capital, I think it’s called, and open a general store in Maine or Vermont or some country or beach town where New Yorkers and Bostoners and Hartforders and so on vacation. So, three busy summer months, probably another busy month preparing for summer, and eight slow winter, fall and spring months. Lots of fresh air and smells, but in a community—not so remote or in the hills and a school relatively easy for the girls to get to—and our food costs, because of the store, drastically reduced. In fact, everything would be. Beer, wine, motor oil, combs—all at cost. Even gas if we get a pump. We could live in back of the store, or on top of it. We could get a store with a good rear view. Of water, or whatever. Or a frame store. I don’t know anything about framing but what would it take to learn? Again, apprentice myself out for nothing while doing my current job. I think I’d prefer a store like that. Better hours, nothing perishable. No problems with mice, roaches, raw garbage, credit, rats. Paints, printings, etcetera. Documents, cutting the glass, beveling the cardboard the documents or prints go inside. You know, that fastens the print—protects and supports it—to the glass but without the print touching the glass. For what would it cost to open such a store? Then turn it into an art gallery. Or a combination of the two—that’s how they do it. When you’re not selling art, you’re framing it.”

  “You want to get away from the kind of people who collect art and go to openings and such, don’t you? Besides, you’re not a salesman and haven’t the personality to become one, and to sell paintings and prints you’d have to be.”

  “I could become one. It’s part of our people’s heritage. It’s American also. Everybody in this country’s potentially one. All right, I’m not smooth and I don’t like pushing people into anything, but that’s not the salesman I’d be. I’d put the stuff on the tables and walls and would say ‘Here it is, there’s the price list, nothing’s negotiable. It’s as fair a price as I can make it without cheating the artist and breaking the gallery. Take as long as you like looking at things, come back anytime you like, have a cup of coffee or tea, herbal, decaf or regular; even some cookies.’ I’d keep a box of cookies around and maybe some fruit if it were cheap. No fruit—that’d create raw garbage again. And I’d read. I’d look oblivious and remote. Nothing on my face would express ‘sell.’ Or I’d talk to them if they wanted, and about whatever they wanted. All right. Let’s say my new kind of salesmanship didn’t work. So just a frame store. I could read while I’m waiting there for customers too. Read or make frames, and cut the matting, it’s called.”

  “Mats.”

  “Mats, matting, or both. But you mat them. That I know.”

  “The frame store’s not a bad idea. Whatever makes you happy. Sleep on it.”

  “But you know by now I have to do something. I can’t stand my work. Same thing for too many years. Little variations but not enough. I want to get away from it, from everything and all the people in it, except if they travel to our little country town and might possibly buy something in the frame store. Or just visit me in the store, because ‘no hard sell.’ I didn’t think my job was so bad, but every day for months it seems worse. Maybe it’d take too much capital to open a store. I know I couldn’t be a word processor.”

  “You mean a computer programmer.”

  “Yes, and one who also works on a word processor for someone. Don’t they do both? Because lots of my students do it or have gone on to it for a living.”

  “Could be.”

  “Too boring. It’d be like prison. Maybe I could be a prison guard. Not maximum security; something lighter. Lots of different people. It would always be interesting. Till retirement age, which I’d think with guards would be early. I’d be good to the prisoners. Wouldn’t wear a gun. Not even handcuffs or a club.”

  “Forget it. I wouldn’t let you. Maybe you want something with kids.”

  “Did it. Secondary school and lots of junior high school teaching. No knack or authority. Couldn’t get them quieted down or fired up about learning.”

  “Kindergarten age then. Just fun and games and the ABC’s.”

  “It’s much different now. Wordbooks. People expect big growth from kids in kindergarten.”

  “Nursery school. Learn to tinker on the piano. Simple stuff. ‘Old MacDonald.’”

  “I’d love to be a pianist. Classical. And compose. Just piano and little voice pieces. But that’s another lifetime.”

  “Also learn a repertoire of children’s songs and games. You have a nice personality for kids. You obviously like and respect them and most of the time they adore you.”