What Do Cowboys Like?

by Ann Tracy

  “All right, boys,” Viv said, in her best schoolmarm voice, “let’s get on to the problem. Tell us again, Fish.”

  I told them again. Marcus cracked up. “Once more,” he pleaded. I ignored him. I also ignored Jewell, who had turned into a chicken. Though Dwight’s eyes were dancing, he managed what seemed to be a sincere gaze of sympathy.

  “Chickens,” he croaked. “That’s too—too—”

  I began to laugh myself, and for some minutes all six of us sat and howled and wiped our eyes. I felt better afterwards, and even ordered a Coke.

  “Have a hamburger, Fish,” Dwight, recovered, said kindly. “I’ll pay.”

  I didn’t want a hamburger. I’d have to eat it, for Pete’s sake, chew it and swallow it and start it on its unspeakable trip through the gastro-intestinal system. Nothing to be doing in public, in my opinion, let alone in front of the people before whom I most wished to appear super-humanly perfect. But I was touched and I knew enough not to let slip by me something that leaned in the approximate direction of dating. While I hesitated, Dwight had begun to look a little sad. Were boys as uncomfortable as I, perchance?

  “Thanks, Dwight,” I said, smiling hard. “I’d love it. Well done.”

  Oh death and hell, would he think I meant “you asked nicely” well done instead of “cook it thoroughly” well done? I felt my face heating up yet again. The girls gave me a look that said, “Isn’t Fish cute; Dwight buys her a hamburger and she’s blushing.” Let them think it. The concept of couple was welcome from any direction.

  “All right, I’ll confess,” Marc said unexpectedly. “I’ve got some skeletons in my closet too.” We all looked at his lanky body and struggled to surpress allusions to bones. Our tact was rewarded by a droll, comprehending grin and a whisper across the booth: “When I’m home I have to babysit my twin nieces. I have to take them downtown in a stroller. They drool a lot.” His voice fell yet lower. “People think they’re mine,” he breathed.

  “Are they?” I whispered back before I thought.

  “No!” he howled, and pounded the table. “You think I’d do it with my own sister? I’m not telling you any more secrets.”

  “Vice is nice,” Jewell sang under his breath.

  “It’s all right, Marc,” Viv said. “You think that’s embarrassing—my folks used to send me out collecting when people owed on their bills. They figured nobody would turn down a kid. I used to hate that. Sabra, here,” she added, “told us just today that she had to raise a sheep.”

  Sabra looked as though she would have preferred to do the telling herself. “Well, Viv,” she said. “It was only a lamb,” she told the boys. “I didn’t have it long.”

  “Nice work, Bo Peep,” said Jewell, “but you haven’t heard gross yet. My old lady washed my underwear with a pair of red socks and turned it pink. She made me wear it, and I had to carry the flag for my scout troop and my pants fell down right in front of the post office. The kids called me Blush Butt for a year and a half.”

  Dwight had for some time been visibly struggling to divulge his own secret. We all gave him encouraging glances. “Well,” he said, looking down, “don’t ever tell anyone else, this is just for the circle, but my folks take in summer guests and they make my brother and sister and me sing for them. It used to be in our pajamas. I guess the other two don’t mind, but I could just die from it.” There was a sympathetic pause.

  “I guess I feel better,” I said. “Thanks. But why don’t they know? I mean, they do love us, don’t they? How can they do this stuff to us?”

  “What’s love got to do with anything?” Viv snapped. “It’s just the way it is.”

  “Power,” leered Marc.

  “They forget,” sighed Sabra.

  “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,” hummed Jewell.

  “But in any case,” said Dwight, “we may be able to hold off the great chicken invasion. I can’t promise, Fish, but I’ll try to stop it.”

  King Saul must have felt the same struggle of loony hope with common sense when David offered to take on Goliath. I went home happy.

  That night I took a notebook into the bathroom with me and wrote by hand while the water ran. No use in pressing matters. I tried to imagine that I was pre-type-writer. Me and Edgar Allan Poe.

  Fearful her thoughts—more fearful yet her dreams, her very imaginings—as Lucilla Shark leaned, nay drooped, across the black, the iron, the cold and enclosing fence whence no denizens issued out, the tenants of the grave. And why? Alas her dreams were haunted, her daylight hours made dark, by the image of that final prison so like, so very like, her own joyless and restricted life. Hemmed in on right and left, smothered as under feathers, too torpid and dulled with pain to rouse herself, she could scarce summon the spirit to beat on the padded lid of her existence.

  “Padded lid of her existence.” I chewed my eraser with glee. The tub was getting full. I’d have to hurry. My pencil flew over the dampening sheets.

  But at last a moment arrived—as moments so immemorially do—when light, when joy presented themselves to her fevered brain, for there—there—how shall we speak it, there arrived the love that seems to lay open the grave itself, the grave of the self. It was Brownell Flite, Brownell the kind, Brownell the witty, Brownell the longed for, whose incomparable footfall on the horizon, ah such a horizon, heralded a return to strength and sanity.

  “Ah, Brownell,” said Lucilla. “My only love.”

  Ah, Dwight.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I didn’t do any work on the novel for a few days after that, partly because I couldn’t get my mind off Dwight’s heroic offer or my suspense about whether he could really save me, and partly because I didn’t want to provoke an early attack of chickens before he could do whatever he had in mind. I moved the manuscript from the scarf drawer to the pajama drawer so I could keep it flat. I didn’t think that even my mother would be poking around my summer pajamas this late into the year. Once in a while before I went to sleep I’d sneak the pages out and reread the adventures of Lucilla Shark. She made me see bolder possibilities in myself.

  That talk in the restaurant had helped a lot. You always hear about teenage girlfriends telling each other everything they know, but in my experience that’s earlier, like about fourth grade, before you begin to worry that maybe you’re the only person in the world who has certain fears and shynesses. After that you play your cards pretty close to your chest; sometimes you even sit on them, for real safety. (Of course, maybe I was the only person who felt that way. There’s no end to anxiety.)

  One day about a week after that council of war, Dwight caught up with me as I was leaving school.

  “Let’s have your books,” he said, reaching out.

  My books. You bet. My hand, my heart, my lasting love. Just ask. Carrying my books, by the way, was no small gesture, because I always took most of them home, preferring to dream and doodle in study hall, when I could get away with it. He made the gesture as though it were a casual thing, but I felt myself stiff with significance as I paced beside him, thinking “Here I am, having my Books Carried Home by the boy I love.” This consciousness of occasion tied my tongue to some degree, though now and then I tried to say things designed to stir up his romantic inclinations, if any—“Pretty day”—“Nice clouds”—“Nice bare tree branches.” Fruitless ploys, as it turned out. He didn’t say much either. Was this love, the great chicken rout, or both?

  “You want to come in a while?” I ventured as we crunched up the driveway.

  “I guess I’ve got time,” he said.

  My mother was pleased to see us. She got out the cookie jar and a big bottle of Coke, and when Dwight said, “You’ll join us, won’t you, Mrs. Fisher?” she did. I could tell she liked him. This was the first time he’d actually been in our house, but she acted natural. Perhaps she even felt natural; she wasn’t in love with him. I didn’t mind her staying there. It made me less tense, and besides, what can happen at a kitchen table even if the family�
�s in the other room? A little finger touching at best, and we hadn’t progressed even to that stage of declaration. For me it was exciting enough seeing Dwight materialized in places where I’d only dreamed about him.

  My mother, by asking questions that I couldn’t and adults quite casually could, found out the following things:

  Dwight’s mother had been a teacher. (Mine too!)

  He had skipped a grade in school. (Me too!)

  He was the eldest child in his family. (Me too!)

  How could anybody have a clearer mandate from the great dating service in the sky? Okay, I know none of that looks like anything (He has two eyes and a nose. Me too!), but a fact attached to Dwight was a fact glorified. I was very far gone. I tried without staring to take in every detail of him as he sat there, and to imagine the secret workings of his mysterious internal engines. To think that a billion random chances had harmonized to make this prodigy! And he breathed, he talked, he drank Coke—what a miracle! I could have fallen down on the kitchen floor and worshiped him. Hard to be subtle about that, though. Hard to just slip off your chair and get in a quick genuflection, a fast forehead touch to the linoleum, a little lick at the soles of his white bucks, while pretending to tie your shoe. I sipped my Coke and basked instead.

  Meanwhile, we all, for our different reasons, had an ear towards the door, waiting for my father. Whenever the door knob rattled we jumped. The first time it was Herbie, who looked a little shy at the sight of Dwight but took three cookies on his way to the TV.

  The next time it was Grannie Hatch, from next door. I held my breath. She was really quite, quite mad, but my mother always let her wander in, often straight through the house and out the front door. “I’ll be old and crazy some day and won’t want people locking me out,” my mother would say. The reason I held my breath (aside from Grannie Hatch’s careless stance about personal hygiene) was that she always did one of two things—spoke in rhyme, or told the same joke. I wasn’t sure which one Dwight would take better.

  “Is there anything going on tonight?” she asked. It was the joke, then.

  “Not that I know of, Mrs. Hatch,” said my dutiful mother, playing straight man.

  “Over our heads at nine o’clock!” Grannie Hatch cackled, and was gone.

  There was a silence. “Well, it’s certainly over my head,” said Dwight at last. “What was that about? Or is it some kind of secret?”

  “Not a secret,” I said, laughing. “Just a sort of code because she’s told the same joke so often. ‘Over our heads at nine o’clock’ is code for the real punchline, which is ‘Oh yes there is, our nightgowns.’ Nightgowns going on—get it?”

  Amazing. I didn’t mind mentioning nightgowns to Dwight, not at all. Though of course any nightgown the old lady pulled over her demented head would be pretty modest. But with Dwight there, a bed was a piece of furniture and no more. Not that lying down beside Dwight wouldn’t be a fantastic thing to do. Or standing up. Or just sitting there.

  “You have interesting neighbors,” he said. “But seriously, I’ve seen her out hitchhiking. Doesn’t anybody take care of her?” You could see my mother thinking that he was one considerate guy, which of course I knew already. He was always the one of us who was worried about people’s feelings. He’d probably been that way since he could talk. I briefly imagined him as a short, courteous, bespectacled child, and cut off the vision when it began to turn into a flock of short, courteous, bookish children that Dwight and I might produce together.

  Grannie Hatch’s bizarre routine was good for conversation, though. We all three traded stories of eccentrics and madmen and snorted into our sodas. Mom and I had a fine collection of our own, and Dwight, who came from the coast, added some old skippers who would use nautical terms in all circumstances—“I’ve got a pain on my starboard side, Doctor”—and ludicrous tourists. Still we listened for my father, or at any rate Dwight and I did. If he didn’t come soon, Dwight would have to get back to the dorm for supper.

  After a while Dwight and I moved into the living room and Mom began to make rolls. I itched around the room, turning the television on and off, bringing Dwight things to look at, admiring his new watch and praying that its hands would move slowly. But my father did come at last and sat down in his usual chair, smiling warmly at my guest. I should say that although my father could embarrass me with kinky rules and projects, he never in any fashion misbehaved with any of my friends. With them he was generous, welcoming, deferential. I began to feel a creeping hope that Dwight (who by now was obviously here for the chicken project) might really do it.

  “Mr. Fisher,” Dwight said respectfully after Dad was settled into his chair, “your daughter tells me that she might be raising chickens.” I was astonished—what a bold, frontal attack! Was he really going to take Dad on? Maybe he did love me.

  “We have,” said my father, “been thinking about a few Plymouth Rocks.”

  “Plymouth Rocks are pretty nice hens, I guess,” Dwight said politely. (Was he faking it? Did he really know anything about Plymouth Rocks?) “Makes you think of the Puritans and all that.” (Nope, he didn’t.) “My father has a few Rhode Island Reds,” he went on somewhat wildly. “Makes you think of the McCarthy hearings.”

  My father laughed. “I don’t think your hens can be held against you.” Dwight was warming him up. Wow.

  “I guess it’s my grandmother who should have the Puritan chickens,” he went on. “Talk about your Puritan work ethic. She thinks work fixes everything that can go wrong with a person—hangnails, measles, nightmares.”

  Very brave, Dwight, very bold. My father, who believed precisely those things himself, was smiling a little more guardedly. Dwight got a grip on his shield and lance and rode forth yet again to save me. He looked as innocent and wide-eyed as Beaver Cleaver.

  “Did I ever tell you,” he said, turning to me, “about the time my grandmother made me raise cabbages?”

  “Cabbages?” I echoed, as though we’d rehearsed.

  “She thought that if I worked hard raising cabbages and then sold them and kept the money, why then I’d like to work and have pleasant associations with it.”

  “Not,” he added, “that I ever really minded working. I mean, at something that made sense.”

  “Didn’t the cabbages make sense?” I helped.

  “Not exactly,” he said, “because everyone in town had cabbages already. You might say that I learned about supply and demand, though. See, here I had raised these five hundred cabbages or so, and I could only sell about a dozen, and I think the neighbors just took those to be nice.”

  “What did you do with five hundred cabbages?” I couldn’t help asking, even though it might be a digression.

  “We stored them in the cellar in case there was a major cabbage shortage later. After they rotted, we shoveled them out for three days. What a mess!”

  “Of course,” he added, “Fish probably wouldn’t have such a bad problem with eggs, I’m sure she wouldn’t, even though I guess quite a few people around here keep chickens themselves. And five hundred eggs don’t take up as much room as five hundred, well maybe four hundred and eighty-eight cabbages, and you could keep them in the refrigerator—”

  “But I’ll tell one thing,” he announced, getting back on track with a triumphant note, “I really didn’t like to work nearly as well as I had before, when I got through with those cabbages. I mean, what had it all been for? I know my grandmother meant well and all, but I had to raise those cabbages just to humor her, and I was kind of bitter about it. I don’t think, do you, Mr. Fisher, that there’s much point in work that there isn’t any use for? Not that there wouldn’t be a use for those eggs, I don’t mean.”

  “Quite a story,” my father admitted. “I’ll have to give this matter some thought. You may have a point about market.”

  Holy cow! He’d really done it! David had brought down Goliath with a grin and a slingshot. I was dizzy with admiration, and I made myself one promise right then. If I eve
r got married, it would be to somebody who made me feel as protected as Dwight did. That, or I wouldn’t do it at all.

  We sailed through the kitchen to the back door on a wave of good feeling. When we were out of earshot I tried to speak, but it was hard to get words through my manic grin.

  “Dwight,” I said. “Dwight.”

  I reached out a tentative hand, to do what, I couldn’t have said, but Dwight took it and squeezed it, and I saw that it was for that.

  “It wasn’t anything,” he said, but he looked pleased. “I almost lost it there with the Rhode Island Reds,” he said.

  We began to laugh together. He dropped my hand and only our voices touched. Then he zipped up his jacket and was off down the driveway, my knight, in danger of a reprimand for lateness. But I thought he could stand up to that too.

  Before I could do justice to this chapter, I’d have to re-read The Idylls of the King.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Every time I talk about one thing—chickens, say, or Dwight—I’m neglecting all the other things that were still happening at the same time. The daily satisfactions and pride of being with Sabra and Viv, for instance. The slimy insinuations about the preferences of cowboys. But one day in November, not too long before Thanksgiving, these heretofore parallel lines met, even collided.

  It was a gray day with an edge to it, but for gloom and edginess it had nothing on me. I was sensitive as an unshelled turtle. Hormones, I guess. If people looked at me when they should have looked away, or looked away from me when they should have looked at me, I brimmed with tears and rage. Once, before afternoon classes even began, I had to shut myself in a toilet stall and flush the toilet while I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my blouse. Not even I knew what had set that off.

  Certainly it was nothing that Sabra and Viv had done, for they were being especially sweet to me, and a good thing too. For instance, they looked at my essay for English and told me I could really write. I felt good for a while then. The essay was a description of an accident I’d seen the summer before, with a whole lot of people flocking out in the night to look at it. I called it “Accidents Is Awful Things to Happen,” after my favorite line of overheard conversation. To me it meant both “they’re awful things when they happen” and “they sure do have a propensity for happening.” It would have been a bad day for anybody to tease me about the grammar in the title. Viv and Sabra didn’t. They knew sophistication when they saw it.