by James Thomas
FINGERS
When Ronald, Mr. Lacey’s son, came home from the war, he showered, put on a pair of new jeans and a new T-shirt, found his old high-school baseball cap and pulled it down snug over his forehead, then went outside and shot baskets. He shot baskets for about two weeks. One day Mr. Lacey said, “What about that money you saved up? What are you going to do with it?” Ronald shot baskets for a while longer, then went downtown and bought an old Hudson Hornet. He spent five days driving the Hudson back and forth through town, stopping for a root beer when he got thirsty. On the sixth day, when a tire went flat, Ronald locked the car and put his thumb in the air. The next day in the Atkins Museum in Kansas City, he bought a dozen picture postcards of Houdon’s bust of Benjamin Franklin, because with that bald top and that long hair in back that fell to his shoulders, Franklin looked like the queerest duck he’d ever seen. Also Franklin seemed peeved about something. Then Ronald took a bus to New York City. The ride was nothing to crow about—and for maybe three hundred miles a man next to him wanted to describe losing his prostate gland. In New York, Ronald found a room a stones throw from Yankee Stadium. He sent one of the Franklin cards to his father, saying only “Love, Ronald.” Then he sat looking out the window. On the fire escape was a piece of red balloon that the wind was trying to blow away. Finally the wind succeeded and Ronald was tired. He took off his clothes, climbed into bed, and began to count the fingers on his shooting hand.
NADINE AT 35: A SYNOPSIS
The brain cells slip away, one by one by one. One hundred thousand of them a day, departing. If she is very still and concentrates very hard she can feel it happen. One by one by one, the cells descending to her rump. It is an exodus, a relocation. A mass conservation. Her brain is escaping.
And so, she discovers, is her husband.
“All I need is a little time,” he says, his brown eyes wet and earnest as a cocker spaniels. “Kind of a vacation from marriage. A year or two to find myself.”
And she didn’t even know he was lost.
She bounces back quickly. “So go,” she says. “What the hell,” her vocabulary impoverished already by virtue of the missing cells. She figures she has lost over twelve billion to date, and counting, but is uneasy about numbers, so might be wrong.
“What the hell,” she says again, and helps him pack.
In retrospect she realizes that his defection might be related in cause to her word loss. He, too, is over thirty-five, and has, in fact, been losing cells for six months longer than she. His, at least, did not settle in his rump. She wonders exactly where they went, but cannot summon the energy to look for them. And she cannot ask him, for by the time she thinks of it he is halfway to California.
She sells the house and buys a car, gets a haircut, and prowls the bars. When she has the time. She cannot search for herself because, unlike her husband, she has yet to fully realize that she is lost. She would like to return to school, to become a nuclear engineer, or perhaps a dietitian. There is, however, a problem. Only two worn suits, a set of golf clubs, three monogrammed neckties, and a few billion brain cells were left behind by the vacating husband. The money he took.
So here she is, brain cells oozing out, slipping southward, with three children, a dog, two cats, and a goldfish. Hungry mouths. She does what any other right-thinking thirty-five-year-old American girl would do. She gets a job, subscribes to Ms., deletes the word girl, along with housewife and mankind, from her vocabulary, further limiting it, and decides to take a lover. As for the children, she has an extra key to the apartment made for each of them and tells them to fend for themselves. That is the American way.
Finding a lover is difficult. Lovers for thirty-five-year-old brain-diminished vocabulary-impoverished women are in short supply. Particularly for those with three children and miscellaneous pets, even if they do all fend for themselves. So she resigns herself to celibacy, broken by occasional chance encounters and bouts of masturbation. It is a not altogether satisfactory life, but it has its rewards.
She finds, to her surprise, that she enjoys working, and is good at her job. She is a teller at a savings and loan. So friendly is she, so helpful, and so accurate in tabulating the amount of money in her drawer at day’s end—never having to add a penny secretly or take away two—that in time she is promoted to New Accounts. She will go far, they tell her, and she knows they are right.
She makes more money now, and hires a housekeeper. The children and pets are fended for.
She controls the numbers of her life.
The second vice-president of the S&L invites her to dinner.
She accepts.
She is promoted to Business Loans.
The brain cells still escape, but she has no time to notice.
She has found herself without really looking.
And then one day the dog eats the goldfish and the cats get distemper. Her older boy steals a lace bra and the girl gets the measles. The younger boy sulks. The sink backs up in the bathroom and the housekeeper quits. She finds twelve gray hairs at her left temple and her life insurance lapses. Her husband always handled that sort of thing.
The second vice-president’s wife calls her a name that she wishes had been deleted from her vocabulary, and she realizes she is no longer thirty-five. Then her husband telephones from Oregon where he has been working on a lumber crew and drinking beer and sleeping around since he left California and tells her he is tired of his vacation and wants to come home. She feels the cells slipping, and her rump widens alarmingly.
“What the hell,” she says.
FEEDING THE HUNGRY
You’re bound to think I’m a liar: but I’ve never felt hungry. I don’t know what hunger means. As far back as I can remember I’ve never known what it was like. I eat, of course, but without appetite. I feel absolutely nothing, not even distaste. I just eat.
People often ask me, “How do you manage to eat, then?” I have to admit that I don’t know. What happens usually is that I’m sitting at a table and there’s a plateful of food in front of me. Since I’m rather absentminded I very soon forget about it. When I think about it again, the plate is empty. That’s what happens.
Does this mean that I eat under hypnosis, in some kind of dissociated state? Certainly not. I said that this is what usually happens. But not always. Sometimes I remember the plate of food in front of me. But that doesn’t stop me from emptying it all the same.
Naturally I’ve tried fasting. But that didn’t work. I got thinner and thinner. I gave up just in time. A little longer and I would have died of hunger without knowing it. This experience frightened me so much that I now eat all the time. That way I don’t worry. I’m tall and strong, and I have to keep the machine going. For other people, hunger provides a warning; since I am deprived of it I have to be doubly careful. As I said earlier, I’m absentminded. To forget would be fatal. I prefer to eat all the time: it’s safer. I realize too that when I don’t eat I become nervous and irritable, and don’t know what to do about it. Instead, I smoke too much and drink too much, which is bad.
In the street I am frequently accosted by gaunt men dressed in rags. They gaze at me with fever-bright eyes and stammer out, “We’re hungry!” I look at them with hatred. They eat only a crust of dry bread once a month, if that, but they enjoy it. “Hungry, are you!” I say to them nastily. “You’re lucky.”
Sobs rattle in their throats. Shudders rack them. Eventually they move off with slow, hesitant steps. As for me, I go into the first restaurant I see. Will the miracle occur? My heart beats fast as I swallow the first mouthful. A terrible despair overwhelms me. Nothing. Nothing at all. No appetite. I take my revenge by eating furiously, like someone drowning their sorrow in drink.
I leave the restaurant weighed down with food and hatred. For I’m becoming bitter. I’m beginning to detest other people, people who are hungry. I hate them. So they’re hungry, are they? I hope they die of hunger! I shan’t be sorry for them! After all, thinking about people who are hungry w
hile I’m eating is the only pleasure left to me.
Translated by Margaret Crosland and David LeVay
DISH NIGHT
Every Wednesday night was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked because she was there, week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and balls of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I’d walk her home. She’d hug the dish to her chest. The street lights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She’d talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it’s everyday and I know it,” she’d say, holding it at arm’s length. “They’re so modern and simple and something we’ll have a long time after we forget the movies.”
I forget just what happened then. We heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinée. They stopped the movie, and a man came out on stage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn’t finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn’t need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever, and we hadn’t known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe where she’d write to me on lined school paper and never failed to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.
This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafés. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a bit of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.
I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting in bowls as if we were moving the next day.
The green field is covered with these tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger along a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.
GRACE PERIOD
You notice first a difference in the quality of space. The sunlight is still golden through the dust hanging in the driveway, where your wife pulled out a few minutes ago in the Célica on a run to the mailbox, and the sky is still a regular blue, but it feels as if for an instant everything stretched just slightly, a few millimeters, then contracted again.
You shut off the electric hedge trimmers, thinking maybe vibration is affecting your inner ear. Then you are aware that the dog is whining from under the porch. On the other hand you don’t hear a single bird song. A semi shifts down with a long backrap of exhaust on the state highway a quarter mile away. A few inches above one horizon an invisible jet is drawing a thin white line across the sky.
You are about to turn the trimmers on again when you have the startling sense that the earth under your feet has taken on a charge. It is not quite a trembling, but something like the deep throb of a very large dynamo at a great distance. Simultaneously there is a fluctuation of light, a tiny pulse, coming from behind the hills. In a moment another, and then another. Again and more strongly you have the absurd sense that everything inflates for a moment, then shrinks.
Your heart strikes you in the chest then, and you think instantly aneurysm! You are 135 over 80, and should have had a checkup two months ago. But no, the dog is howling now, and he’s not alone. The neighbors’ black lab is also in full cry, and in the distance a dozen others have begun yammering.
You stride into the house, not hurrying but not dawdling either, and punch in the number of a friend who lives in the city on the other side of the hills, the county seat. After the tone dance a long pause, then a busy signal. You consider for a moment, then dial the local volunteer fire chief, whom you know. Also busy.
Stretching the twenty-foot cord, you peer out the window. This time the pulse is unmistakable, a definite brightening of the sky to the west, and along with it a timber somewhere in the house creaks. You punch the Sheriff. Busy. Highway Patrol. Busy. 911. Busy. A recorded voice erupts, strident and edged with static, telling you all circuits are busy.
You look outside again and now there is a faint shimmering in the air. On the windowsill outside, against the glass, a few flakes of ash have settled. KVTX. Busy. The Courier. Busy. On some inexplicable frantic whim you dial out of state, to your father-in-law (Where is your wife, she should have the mail by now?), who happens to be a professor of geology on a distinguished faculty. The ringing signal this time. Once. Twice. Three times. A click.
“Physical plant.”
Doctor Abendsachs, you babble, you wanted Doctor Abendsachs.
“This is physical plant, buddy. We can’t connect you here.”
What’s going on, you shout, what is happening with the atmosphere—
He doesn’t know. They are in a windowless basement. Everything fine there. It’s lunchtime and they are making up the weekly football pool.
It is snowing lightly now outside, on the driveway and lawn and garage. You can see your clippers propped pathetically against the hedge. Once more, at top speed, you punch your father-in-law’s number. Again a ringing. A click.
This time a recording tells you that all operators are busy and your call will be answered by the first available. The voice track ends and a burst of music begins. It is a large studio orchestra, heavy on violins, playing a version of “Hard Day’s Night.” At the point where the lyrics would be “sleeping like a log” the sound skips, wobbles, and skips again as if an old-fashioned needle has been bumped from a record groove.
You look out the window once more, as the house begins to shudder, and see that it is growing brighter and brighter and brighter.
THE HAIRCUT
I knew the moment he got on the plane that something wasn’t right, but what it was eluded me. He stood there in his khaki suit, tennis racket in hand, his teenage boys beaming on either side. I stood, our daughter in my arms, flanked by my parents. We faced one another the way I’d seen the British and French do in old Revolutionary War films.
What is wrong with this picture? I asked myself, recalling a test I’d often failed as a child. I was gullible, good at believing. (The dog belonged eating at the table, the wife could wear her husband’s hat.) I knew everyone was expecting me to greet this man from whom I’d been estranged, for this was our time of reconciliation, the time to make up for what had been. We had reached this decision together after living apart and on opposite coasts for a year.
We had been estranged since before the child was born. He couldn’t handle the additional responsibility, I clung more than I should. I had wanted a family, he still struggled to get beyond the one he already had. We had tried to separate and failed. I took a job in California, where I moved with my small child. He stayed on the East Coast. But we spoke every day on the phone. Each of us made several trips back and forth. I agreed to leave my West Coast job. He said he would try again.
Two months had passed since we had seen each other. I still felt annoyed with him for breaking our Valentine’s plans (a ski trip he’d promised the boys came up). I had gotten miffed over his not calling when he said he would. I hurt over disappointments, large and small, but now I had come with our daughter to my parents’ house in Florida, and he had come with the boys. It was to be a family vacation, our time to reconcile.
Look again, I told myself, still unable to decide what bothered me, what seemed wrong. His face looked handsome, almost tanned. His suit was neat and pressed. His eyes
were clear and bright, his shoes polished. His beard and hair were neat and trimmed.
I paused there. For if you spend five years of your life with someone, you pay attention to certain things. This is a man of quirks, little oddities you don’t forget. He won’t eat oatmeal if it has any lumps. He won’t wear a watch. When hurt, he recoils. He must play tennis every day. He has a way he hunches when he’s telling an untruth. And he won’t walk into a barbershop. In fact he prides himself in not having been in a barbershop in twenty-five years. I had cut his hair for the past five, his ex-wife had done the same for innumerable years before that. This man was a willing Samson to his Delilahs. Two months had passed since I’d seen him, yet his hair was neat and trim.