Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  I looked at his wife, she raised her shoulders, so I tiptoed down the steps after him. He was typing away at a long table. It was a dark room, a small window over the table but not much light coming through it, even on this sunny day, probably because the window was almost at ground level. A reproduction of a Giacometti drawing of a face was right below the window, or maybe it was an original—I’d ask him. A painting by a child was next to it. The painting was signed by his oldest daughter and said at the bottom of it “Daddy writing again,” and showed a man at a table with his hands over his ears and his mouth open as if shouting. There was no other furniture in the room except a file cabinet to the left of the table with a huge dictionary on it. On the table, besides the manual typewriter and at one end of it the typewriter’s plastic cover, was a thesaurus, writing reference manual, ream of erasable paper (sixteen-pound weight), box of second-sheet paper, two fountain pens, bottle of black ink, postage stamps of several denominations coiling out of a mug, lots of eraser pencils, all needing sharpening, letter and manuscript envelopes, mucilage, stapler, nailclipper, paperweights (sea-smoothed stones), architect’s lamp, wood box built to look like a little foot locker with probably lots of writing aids inside, pencil sharpener shaped like a duck. “Excuse me, I know I shouldn’t be disturbing you now, but may I have my letter back, please?”

  “No no, I’m through. It was very short—three pages—which could end up being thirty, but who knows? So thanks for indirectly helping me fill that void. I’d do almost anything for you now, except of course give that interview.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, sir. But if you are having so such fun at it, or think it can still be useful in some creative way—could you tear off my poems and give them to me?”

  He started to, read something from the letter that seemed to interest him, said “Hey this is good—I could never write or say anything like this, so lucid but literary. ‘Your style, then. It sounds so undecorated, conversational, unstylized, spoken, even reads at times like quote unquote bad writing or neglected conventional writing. Yet the reader is aware of your deliberately ignoring standard sentence structure, syntax, punctuation, etcetera. Can you comment further on how you compose or what this style says about the people, places and situations that you write about?’ I could if I was another writer. ‘Were’? And you don’t want it ‘situations you write about’ instead of with the ‘that’? But I’m done down here for now—got my first draft in. It must be an uncomfortable place also, with only one chair, for the person not writing,” and he covered the typewriter and went upstairs.

  I followed him, out to the backyard, he reading the letter as he walked. After we sat he read “Tour work seems to be influenced by European writing, the French writers of the sixties in particular. Is this true?’ Is the sun too hot for you? I always stay in the shade, but there’s room for both of us here.” I shook my head. “‘Can you talk about how the family or everyday life motivates your life, work, message?’ I wonder where everyone is. Usually you hear one of them. With the baby, you have to make sure she doesn’t wander through the gate to the street. Sweetheart?” he yelled.

  “They’re with me,” his wife said from the second-floor back window. “I thought you’d want to talk undisturbed.”

  “‘What writers should we be watching? Who have we overrated or ignored? Who are the characters you feel closest to, real or fictional? You seem drawn in your books to people with frenetic, almost neurotic tendencies, certain individuals with overactive imaginations, no?’ You know what I think?”

  “Certainly, if you want to answer.”

  “That you’d be much better off, if you don’t mind my saying so—and my wife will agree with you that I’ve got too big a mouth sometimes. But to give up this notion that interviews with artists of any kind are useful or important whatsoever. The best thing is just to do your work, put out the magazine with the most exciting stuff you can find for it, and also tend to your own poetry, if that’s what you do. So what I’m going to do now will be a service to you in the long run, believe me.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  He tore up the letter and threw the pieces behind him. “Now let’s have some fresh coffee, or even a glass of wine. What the hell, it’s Sunday, isn’t it?”

  “My poems,” I screamed.

  “Oops—I forgot. That was thoughtless of me.”

  “You did it deliberately.”

  “No, I told you—I don’t think lots of times,” and he got on the ground and gathered all the pieces the wind hadn’t blown away. “We can tape it back together,” he said, picking some pieces out of the bushes. “I know how you feel. It’s happened to me. Just losing a page or two, though nobody ripping them up in front of me.” He spread the pieces out on the table, but he’d torn them too finely. He saw I was sad and said “Look, I can drive you someplace—the train station or wherever you’re going. Washington, to see Stein-right? I’ll drive you there—leave you in front of his house; that’s how lousy I feel about this.”

  I didn’t want to be in a car with him that long, but I did want to get away from him and I had nothing to lose if he drove me to the station. I got all the pieces together, asked him for a plastic bag and put them inside. His daughters came with us. He said they love seeing the trains pulling in and out and to run around the big renovated station, and it’ll give his wife a little time to do her own work.

  We drove to the station. I said goodbye on the platform but refused to shake his hand. I took a seat, and while the train waited to go, he and his daughters waved at me. I opened a book and tried to concentrate on it, but I could still see this multiple flapping going on outside. The hell with him, I thought as the train left. He’s a complete fop, fake and fool and I don’t mind telling the world about it, not that anyone will be interested.

  18

  _______

  Frog’s Mom

  Weak, weak, it’s all so weak, and he rips it out and throws it into the trash pail. Done this before. Out it comes, into that or if bad aim onto the floor, tearing first, sometimes tearing up what’s been torn and throwing it back in, grabbing out pieces sometimes and tearing some more, often banging the table with his fist after, maybe stomping upstairs and pouring coffee from the thermos, or making fresh coffee even if there’s fairly fresh coffee in the thermos, yelling out to no one in particular “I’m going out for a few minutes,” taking a circular walk around the neighborhood, not looking at much because there isn’t much—bird in a tree, squirrel nibbling or digging up a nut, cat or dog in a window looking as if it wants to go out, someone jogging or opening a house or car door or walking a dog, letter carrier delivering mail, only occasionally something like a gardener transplanting pacysandra or a treeman fifty to a hundred feet up sawing off a limb or even some kids playing out front or swinging on a porch—drinking a half glass of wine, quarter glass, just a sip of sherry and maybe straight from the bottle, munching a celery stalk or carrot, peeling, without washing or peeling, even eating its thin tail string or the inch or so of the top, tearing off the skin of a navel, biting down hard on an apple, picking up a newspaper section and usually without reading or anything but a headline or caption putting it down. Now he just sits. Weak. That’s what it was. Piss, shit, fit for the trash. Bangs the table top. Just did it for fun. “What’s that?” Eva asks upstairs. “Daddy must have dropped something,” Denise says. “That’s Daddy mad,” Olivia says. “Daddy gets mad a lot.”

  Writes: “There once was a man. Was once. He was a big man. Thick neck, puffed-up pecks, six-feet-sex, puissant-plus.” Weak. Pulls it out. Turns it over to stick back in to type on. Something’s on the other side from another work he stopped. “‘Mrs. Simchik stinks,’ a boy said, and got whacked. ‘Don’t ever say the word—’” That was it. Doesn’t know what he planned to follow it. Couldn’t come up with anything, probably, besides the prose. Doesn’t know when he wrote it: last month, year; just ended up in the scrap pile. Weak. Weak. Throws it into the pail. New scrap pap
er in. “There was a woman. She was my mother. She’s, is. My old mother, mother of young. He went upstairs. Phoned her. I did. Went, up, phone, reached, dialed. ‘Mom, how are you?’ ‘Not feeling that great today, thank you for calling.’ ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ he said, What’s the matter? What’s up?’ for he heard it almost every time before, similar words, same tone, minor complaining, nothing good. ‘Well actually, now that you asked me, I’m dying. That’s what the report came back from with my doctor.’ How was he reacting when she said this? Shock, that’s all: ‘What! What!’ ‘I’m saying, that’s what Dr. Gladman said the report confirmed that came back from the lab. I’m not saying it well because it so upsets me. I took extensive tests. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to bother you. Your children, job, home, you’ve your own troubles. I had to work it out of him. Worm it out. I had to ask and ask and finally I said “What is it, it isn’t good, we both know that, I can feel it and you can see it and the tests and reports all prove it, isn’t that right? So tell me, I’m a good listener.”’ ‘You said this?’ I said. ‘Surely he said “No, you’re all wrong, Mrs. T.”’ ‘Surely he said yes, I was right. “Listen, Mrs. T.,” he said—he called me Rachel, actually, just as I sometimes call him Bill. Though he always calls me Rachel now. He’s very nice, very friendly. He said “If you want the truth, it doesn’t look good.”’ “This is terrible,’ I said; ‘what does one say? For one thing, that you go to someone else for another opinion, of course,’ and she said ‘I have,’ and we talked some more, I said I was coming right up to see her, called my older brother, he also hadn’t known, we’d meet at my mother’s, I took the train, three hours, cabbed to it, subway to her place from it, total of four hours, when I got there my brother answered the door and said he’d found her dead.”

  Weak, weak, but suggests what’s on his mind. Mother then. When? Long time ago, try; when he was a boy, start. “He throws something—a hammer—was aiming for the closet with the tool chest on the floor next to it, the closet next to the breakfront with the opened tool chest on the floor, the tool chest on the floor of the closet next to the breakfront, I threw a hammer at the tool chest on the floor of the opened foyer closet but it went through the breakfront next to it. My folks were away for the weekend in Old Saybrook. Gil Dobb’s the resort was called. Gil, they said, served two-pound lobsters for lunch, inch-and-a-half thick veal chops for dinner, grew and cut flowers which he put in vases on the dining room tables every meal, ironed the tablecloth himself sometimes so it was done right, sold antiques in his antique barn, was a fagele whose longtime companion was rarely seen on the grounds and never ate at Gil’s table in the dining room. They went there every fall for their anniversary and my mother always came back with some of Gil’s antiques (hand-painted plates to hang, converted kerosene lamps, chamber pots, soup tureens, creamers, something else she liked to collect whose name he forgets—Toby mugs), his father with a big basket each of apples and pears and a few dozen freshly laid eggs. I was scared they’d punish me, my mother especially (my father would probably just call me a stupid kid and say what I’d done was only to be expected), since the breakfront was originally her mother’s and had some prized objects in it, none broken and many bought from Gil. But when they got home around dinnertime Sunday night—” No, weak, but just see what comes out by finishing it. Shouldn’t take long. “They came home the next night. He was worried the whole day. He was told by his brothers to go straight up to her and say he broke it. He did. She still had her coat on, his father had just set down a basket of fruit and asked the boys to help him with the rest of the things in the car. But he quickly told her. ‘Mom, the breakfront, look at it, I broke it.’ She looked, got on one knee, put her hand through the place where the glass had been—a quarter-section of the breakfront, he doesn’t know who took the broken glass out before his parents got home—and waved and said ‘Yo-hoo, here I am, how’s my baby boy?’”

  Weak, uninteresting, ends up well for her though, but what else from then? She once took him and his sister Vera to see Santa Claus. This one’s stayed around; see where it leads. “Carla and George walked through a dimly lit corridor with their mother to get to the elevator to see Santa. Elves greeted them from behind reindeer and trees, some littler than he but with high grownup voices, one handed them each a wrapped present. An elf ran the elevator. It went straight up to Santaland, he thinks it was called. Christmasland. Toyland, it had to be.” The present was handed them right after they saw Santa. “They were the only ones in the elevator. It was decorated like a snowed-in log cabin. The elf hummed a tune to himself as the car rose. Was he instructed to or maybe even not to? This wasn’t in George’s mind then. A carol was being sung from somewhere in the car, but a different tune than the elf’s. He remembers his mother said this wasn’t just any old Santa they were going to but one they had to pay for. Hence the present. The corridor upstairs was also dimly lit and ended with a long line of waiting kids and their parents. They’d passed two other Santas in their rooms but were directed by an elf to this one. He doesn’t remember sitting on Santa’s lap. Santa wasn’t old, seemed if he stood up he’d be as tall as a circus giant, had no belly. An elf wanted to take a photo of him with Santa and then Clara and him with Santa but both times his mother said too expensive. The exit door from Santa’s room opened onto the toy department. He remembers being surprised by that. A guard stood on the toy department side to keep people from sneaking in.” So what? Has little to do with anything. One time in the same store though…

  “One time in the Thirty-fourth street Macy’s his mother told him to wait over here. What she did was buy a box of sanitary napkins. How’s he know? Because she had a shopping bag with something shaped like a box in it when she came back and he thought it was a surprise for him, just by the way she said ‘Wait for me here and don’t move from this spot no matter how long I’m away,’ as if she didn’t want him to see what she was buying for him, even if it wasn’t around Christmastime or his birthday and she said she was going to another counter on the first floor and there was nothing for children on that floor that he knew of or could see in that store. She was away a long time. He had nothing to do. He wanted to move to another spot, at least a few feet away—the perfume smells from the counter she put him next to were bothering him—but didn’t. A couple of times he thought maybe she forgot where she left him. It was the world’s biggest store he’d been told a few times, so she could have made a mistake in directions herself or come back to where she thought she’d left him and decided he was lost. Should he try to find her? Or maybe just yell out ‘Mommy’ till she came. She wouldn’t like that if she heard it and one of the guards they seemed to have all around on this floor might just grab him and throw him out of the store. Or just try to get home by himself? How would he do it? He didn’t have the fare for the subway or bus. He wouldn’t know how to get to his subway station or bus stop even if he did have the fare. But he knew the name of his station and it was in this borough, so maybe if he told someone it and was able to borrow the fare, he’d get there. Once out of the station he thinks he could find his way home, since it was only three blocks away along the avenue you come up into and then just a short walk down the street. Better to stay put though. If his mother thought he was lost she’d get the whole store to find him or call up his dad to have it done. But how he found out what was inside the box was that night he looked in the bag. It was still in the foyer coat closet. He couldn’t see any pictures or words on it that would make it seem like a present for him, so he asked his brother Alex what the box said. Alex looked at it, said ‘Kotex’ and that he thinks it’s something women use for their behinds or someplace but he doesn’t know what for. ‘Cleaning, probably.’” Nothing there either.

  “She was born on the lower East Side. Her father from her descriptions of him was a benevolent tyrant.” Weak, weak. “A dictatorial benevolist.” Forget it, besides wrong. “A disapproving wretch, egotist, let’s face it: a mean bastard who spent more time trimm
ing and waxing his Franz Josef mustache than with his kids.” She’d never. How does she describe him? “Everyone feared him.” “My mother sipped her drink, took a deep drag on her cigarette, said ‘Could you pour some more in it? I’ve been a good girl by nursing it for an hour, but now it’s all melted ice.’ Then ‘When my sisters and I saw him on the street we’d cross to the other side to avoid greeting him. Because whenever we did happen to meet him on the stairs coming up or turning a corner, he always criticized us. “Your hair’s uncombed, your button’s undone, retie your shoelaces and pull up your socks—you look like a slut.” He owned a liquor store-restaurant. Let’s face it—a gin mill. The Polish girls who worked for us—they all had names like Sophie and Anna and Christina—also cooked for the bar’s free-food counter. One time one of those big pots the food was cooking in…. One time a very big pot of stew, which when they were scoured and we were a little younger we also took baths in, fell off the stove on top of Aunt Rose. It scalded her whole body almost, till this day she won’t eat any hot meat dish like that or really any liquid that’s hot except tea. She had to be rushed to the hospital. What am I talking about?—the doctor came. I was the fastest one home at the time—I used to win all the athletic contests in grammar school, besides all the musical and intellectual ones too for girls—so I ran to get him.’” Weak, weak.

  “His mother did very well in school. When she graduated high school she told her father she wanted to be a doctor. He said ‘One doctor in the family’s enough.’ Her eldest brother was an intern then. ‘Women worked as secretaries or assistants or nurses or stayed home.’ She then wanted to be a lawyer. Her father said ‘One lawyer in the family’s enough.’ Her next eldest brother was in law school. ‘How many ambulances you think there are to chase? Besides, women don’t become lawyers unless they don’t want to have children and want to live only with women and smoke cigars and be like that.’ Then an architect. ‘I don’t want any architects in the family, not for my sons or my girls. For one thing, it’s no profession for a Jew. It’s all run by Gentiles and they’ll keep you standing there for years before they give you even a tent to design. For another reason, because I won’t let you try to do something stupid and useless like that where as a woman you’ll have double no chance. Maybe you got the brains for it—that I can’t say. But get a job that can carry you till you make a good marriage—that’s all you need. You want to continue reading—to improve yourself or because you like books—do it while nursing your children or watching them in the playground.’ She got an office job; evenings and on matinee days she danced in a big Broadway review. Some man she knew, and without telling her, had sent her photo to a beauty contest sponsored by a newspaper. ‘I think it was the whole city I represented,’ she said about it recently, ‘or maybe just Manhattan. In fact, first I was Miss Rockaway, then from that I became Miss Brooklyn, though I’d never stepped in that borough except to go to its beaches sometimes, and then Miss New York, so it had to be for the whole city and maybe even for the state. It was so long ago. I can’t look in the mirror most times when I think what a pretty face and shape I had then.’ ‘You’re still quite beautiful and you’ve kept your weight down,’ he said. ‘For my age, perhaps, but that counts for next to nothing. Maybe less than that, for people look at me, when I’ve done my face and hair right and I don’t have these rags on and what I’m wearing is basically black, and think “She must have been very beautiful once—a hundred years ago.” Anyway, I kept lots of photos but never clippings of those contests and shows, since I didn’t want my dad finding them and learning about me. He thought all beauty contestants and show people were goats and tramps. In a way he was right, besides too much liquor and taking whatever drugs we had then and some of the men playing with boys. But I was nothing but a good girl right to the time I married your father.” Weak, weak.