by David Miller
“Mr. Fletcher and myself are as much in love as the day we married,” said Mrs. Fletcher belligerently as Leota stuffed cotton into her ears.
“Mrs. Pike says it don’t last,” repeated Leota in a louder voice. “Now go git under the dryer. You can turn yourself on, can’t you? I’ll be back to comb you out. Durin’ lunch I promised to give Mrs. Pike a facial. You know – free. Her bein’ in the business, so to speak.”
“I bet she needs one,” said Mrs. Fletcher, letting the swing-door fly back against Leota. “Oh, pardon me.”
A week later, on time for her appointment, Mrs. Fletcher sank heavily into Leota’s chair after first removing a drug-store rental book, called Life Is Like That, from the seat. She stared in a discouraged way into the mirror.
“You can tell it when I’m sitting down, all right,” she said.
Leota seemed preoccupied and stood shaking out a lavender cloth. She began to pin it around Mrs. Fletcher’s neck in silence.
“I said you sure can tell it when I’m sitting straight on and coming at you this way,” Mrs. Fletcher said.
“Why, honey, naw you can’t,” said Leota gloomily. “Why, I’d never know. If somebody was to come up to me on the street and say, ‘Mrs. Fletcher is pregnant!’ I’d say, ‘Heck, she don’t look it to me.’ ”
“If a certain party hadn’t found it out and spread it around, it wouldn’t be too late even now,” said Mrs. Fletcher frostily, but Leota was almost choking her with the cloth, pinning it so tight, and she couldn’t speak clearly. She paddled her hands in the air until Leota wearily loosened her.
“Listen, honey, you’re just a virgin compared to Mrs. Montjoy,” Leota was going on, still absent-minded. She bent Mrs. Fletcher back in the chair and, sighing, tossed liquid from a teacup on to her head and dug both hands into her scalp. “You know Mrs. Montjoy – her husband’s that premature-grey-headed fella?”
“She’s in the Trojan Garden Club, is all I know,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
“Well, honey,” said Leota, but in a weary voice, “she come in here not the week before and not the day before she had her baby – she come in here the very selfsame day, I mean to tell you. Child, we was all plumb scared to death. There she was! Come for her shampoo an’ set. Why, Mrs. Fletcher, in an hour an’ twenty minutes she was layin’ up there in the Babtist Hospital with a seb’m-pound son. It was that close a shave. I declare, if I hadn’t been so tired I would of drank up a bottle of gin that night.”
“What gall,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “I never knew her at all well.”
“See, her husband was waitin’ outside in the car, and her bags was all packed an’ in the back seat, an’ she was all ready, ’cept she wanted her shampoo an’ set. An’ havin’ one pain right after another. Her husband kep’ comin’ in here, scared-like, but couldn’t do nothin’ with her a course. She yelled bloody murder, too, but she always yelled her head off when I give her a perm’nent.”
“She must of been crazy,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “How did she look?”
“Shoot!” said Leota.
“Well, I can guess,” said Mrs. Fletcher. “Awful.”
“Just wanted to look pretty while she was havin’ her baby, is all,” said Leota airily. “Course, we was glad to give the lady what she was after – that’s our motto – but I bet a hour later she wasn’t payin’ no mind to them little end curls. I bet she wasn’t thinkin’ about she ought to have on a net. It wouldn’t of done her no good if she had.”
“No, I don’t suppose it would,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
“Yeah man! She was a-yellin’. Just like when I give her perm’nent.”
“Her husband ought to make her behave. Don’t it seem that way to you?” asked Mrs. Fletcher. “He ought to put his foot down.”
“Ha,” said Leota. “A lot he could do. Maybe some women is soft.”
“Oh, you mistake me, I don’t mean for her to get soft – far from it! Women have to stand up for themselves, or there’s just no telling. But now you take me – I ask Mr. Fletcher’s advice now and then, and he appreciates it, especially on something important, like is it time for a permanent – not that I’ve told him about the baby. He says, ‘Why, dear, go ahead!’ Just ask their advice.”
“Huh! If I ever ast Fred’s advice we’d be floatin’ down the Yazoo River on a houseboat or somethin’ by this time,” said Leota. “I’m sick of Fred. I told him to go over to Vicksburg.”
“Is he going?” demanded Mrs. Fletcher.
“Sure. See, the fortune-teller – I went back and had my other palm read, since we’ve got to rent the room agin – said my lover was goin’ to work in Vicksburg, so I don’t know who she could mean, unless she meant Fred. And Fred ain’t workin’ here – that much is so.”
“Is he going to work in Vicksburg?’ asked Mrs. Fletcher. “And –”
“Sure. Lady Evangeline said so. Said the future is going to be brighter than the present. He don’t want to go, but I ain’t gonna put up with nothin’ like that. Lays around the house an’ bulls – did bull – with that good-for-nothin’ Mr. Pike. He says if he goes who’ll cook, but I says I never get to eat anyway – not meals. Billy Boy, take Mrs. Grover that Screen Secrets and leg it.”
Mrs. Fletcher heard stamping feet go out the door.
“Is that that Mrs. Pike’s little boy here again?” she asked, sitting up gingerly.
“Yeah, that’s still him.” Leota stuck out her tongue.
Mrs. Fletcher could hardly believe her eyes. “Well! How’s Mrs. Pike, your attractive new friend with the sharp eyes who spreads it around town that perfect strangers are pregnant?” she asked in a sweetened tone.
“Oh, Mizziz Pike.” Leota combed Mrs. Fletcher’s hair with heavy strokes.
“You act like you’re tired,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
“Tired? Feel like it’s four o’clock in the afternoon already,” said Leota. “I ain’t told you the awful luck we had, me and Fred? It’s the worst thing you ever heard of. Maybe you think Mrs. Pike’s got sharp eyes. Shoot, there’s a limit! Well, you know, we rented out our room to this Mr. and Mrs. Pike from New Orleans when Sal an’ Joe Fentress got mad at us ’cause they drank up some home-brew we had in the closet – Sal an’ Joe did. So, a week ago Sat’day Mr. and Mrs. Pike moved in. Well, I kinda fixed up the room, you know – put a sofa pillow on the couch and picked some ragged robbins and put in a vase, but they never did say they appreciated it. Anyway, then I put some old magazines on the table.”
“I think that was lovely,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
“Wait. So, come night ’fore last, Fred and this Mr. Pike, who Fred just took up with, was back from they said they was fishin’, bein’ as neither one of ’em has got a job to his name, and we was all settin’ around in their room. So Mrs. Pike was settin’ there, readin’ a old Startling G-Man Tales that was mine, mind you, I’d bought it myself, and all of a sudden she jumps! – into the air – you’d ’a’ thought she’d set on a spider – an’ says, ‘Canfield’ – ain’t that silly, that’s Mr. Pike – ‘Canfield, my God A’mighty,’ she says, ‘honey,’ she says, ‘we’re rich, and you won’t have to work.’ Not that he turned one hand anyway. Well, me and Fred rushes over to her, and Mr. Pike, too, and there she sets, pointin’ her finger at a photo in my copy of Startling G-Man. ‘See that man?’ yells Mrs. Pike. ‘Remember him, Canfield?’ ‘Never forget a face,’ says Mr. Pike. ‘It’s Mr. Petrie, that we stayed with him in the apartment next to ours in Toulouse Street in N.O. for six weeks. Mr. Petrie.’ ‘Well,’ says Mrs. Pike, like she can’t hold out one secont longer, ‘Mr. Petrie is wanted for five hundred dollars cash, for rapin’ four women in California, and I know where he is.’ ”
“Mercy!” said Mrs. Fletcher. “Where was he?”
At some time Leota had washed her hair and now she yanked her up by the back locks and sat her up.
“Know where he was?”
“I certainly don’t,” Mrs. Fletcher said. Her scalp hurt all over.
Leota fl
ung a towel around the top of her customer’s head. “Nowhere else but in that freak show! I saw him just as plain as Mrs. Pike. He was the petrified man!”
“Who would ever have thought that!” cried Mrs. Fletcher sympathetically.
“So Mr. Pike says, ‘Well whatta you know about that,’ an’ he looks real hard at the photo and whistles. And she starts dancin’ and singin’ about their good luck. She meant our bad luck! I made a point of tellin’ that fortune-teller the next time I saw her. I said, ‘Listen, that magazine was layin’ around the house for a month, and there was the freak show runnin’ night an’ day, not two steps away from my own beauty parlor, with Mr. Petrie just settin’ there waitin’. An’ it had to be Mr. and Mrs. Pike, almost perfect strangers.’ ”
“What gall,” said Mrs. Fletcher. She was only sitting there, wrapped in a turban, but she did not mind.
“Fortune-tellers don’t care. And Mrs. Pike, she goes around actin’ like she thinks she was Mrs. God,” said Leota. “So they’re goin’ to leave tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Pike. And in the meantime I got to keep that mean, bad little ole kid here, gettin’ under my feet ever’ minute of the day an’ talkin’ back too.”
“Have they gotten the five hundred dollars’ reward already?” asked Mrs. Fletcher.
“Well,” said Leota, “at first Mr. Pike didn’t want to do anything about it. Can you feature that? Said he kinda liked that ole bird and said he was real nice to ’em, lent ’em money or somethin’. But Mrs. Pike simply tole him he could just go to hell, and I can see her point. She says, ‘You ain’t worked a lick in six months, and here I make five hundred dollars in two seconts, and what thanks do I get for it? You go to hell, Canfield,’ she says. So,” Leota went on in a despondent voice, “they called up the cops and they caught the ole bird, all right, right there in the freak show where I saw him with my own eyes, thinkin’ he was petrified. He’s the one. Did it under his real name – Mr. Petrie. Four women in California, all in the month of August. So Mrs. Pike gits five hundred dollars. And my magazine, and right next door to my beauty parlor. I cried all night, but Fred said it wasn’t a bit of use and to go to sleep, because the whole thing was just a sort of coincidence – you know: can’t do nothin’ about it. He says it put him clean out of the notion of goin’ to Vicksburg for a few days till we rent out the room agin – no tellin’ who we’ll git this time.”
“But can you imagine anybody knowing this old man, that’s raped four women?” persisted Mrs. Fletcher, and she shuddered audibly. “Did Mrs. Pike speak to him when she met him in the freak show?”
Leota had begun to comb Mrs. Fletcher’s hair. “I says to her, I says, ‘I didn’t notice you fallin’ on his neck when he was the petrified man – don’t tell me you didn’t recognize your fine friend?’ And she says, ‘I didn’t recognize him with that white powder all over his face. He just looked familiar.’ Mrs. Pike says, ‘and lots of people look familiar.’ But she says that ole petrified man did put her in mind of somebody. She wondered who it was! Kep’ her awake, which man she’d ever knew it reminded her of. So when she seen the photo, it all come to her. Like a flash. Mr. Petrie. The way he’d turn his head and look at her when she took him in his breakfast.”
“Took him in his breakfast!” shrieked Mrs. Fletcher. “Listen – don’t tell me. I’d ’a’ felt something.”
“Four women. I guess those women didn’t have the faintest notion at the time they’d be worth a hunderd an’ twenty-five bucks a piece some day to Mrs. Pike. We ast her how old the fella was then, an’ she says he musta had one foot in the grave, at least. Can you beat it?”
“Not really petrified at all, of course,” said Mrs. Fletcher meditatively. She drew herself up. “I’d ’a’ felt something,” she said proudly.
“Shoot! I did feel somethin’,” said Leota. “I tole Fred when I got home I felt so funny. I said, ‘Fred, that ole petrified man sure did leave me with a funny feelin’.’ He says, ‘Funny-haha or funny-peculiar?’ and I says, ‘Funny-peculiar.’ ” She pointed her comb into the air emphatically.
“I’ll bet you did,” said Mrs. Fletcher.
They both heard a crackling noise.
Leota screamed, “Billy Boy! What you doin’ in my purse?”
“Aw, I’m just eatin’ these ole stale peanuts up,” said Billy Boy.
“You come here to me!” screamed Leota, recklessly flinging down the comb, which scattered a whole ashtray full of bobby pins and knocked down a row of Coca-Cola bottles. “This is the last straw!”
“I caught him! I caught him!” giggled Mrs. Fletcher. “I’ll hold him on my lap. You bad, bad boy, you! I guess I better learn how to spank little old bad boys,” she said.
Leota’s eleven o’clock customer pushed open the swing-door upon Leota paddling him heartily with the brush, while he gave angry but belittling screams which penetrated beyond the booth and filled the whole curious beauty parlor. From everywhere ladies began to gather round to watch the paddling. Billy Boy kicked both Leota and Mrs. Fletcher as hard as he could, Mrs. Fletcher with her new fixed smile.
Billy Boy stomped through the group of wild-haired ladies and went out the door, but flung back the words, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
THE SWIMMER
John Cheever
John Cheever (1912–1982) was awarded the National Book Award for his first novel in 1958, The Wapshot Chronicle, and the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Letters in 1965. His journals show he was a complicated man, but his stories breathe an elegance and simplicity that is rare to find. Hearing Richard Ford read, and talk, about another Cheever masterpiece “Reunion” on The New Yorker fiction podcast is almost essential.
It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’
This was at the edge of the Westerhazys’ pool. The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance – from the bow of an approaching ship – that it might have had a name. Lisbon. Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was a slender man – he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth – and while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his dining room. He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather. He had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure. It all seemed to flow into his chest. His own house stood in Bullet Park, eight miles to the south, where his four beautiful daughters would have had their lunch and might be playing tennis. Then it occurred to him that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water.
His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape. He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of him
self as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.
He took off a sweater that was hung over his shoulders and dove in. He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools. He swam a choppy crawl, breathing either with every stroke or every fourth stroke and counting somewhere well in the back of his mind the one-two one-two of a flutter kick. It was not a serviceable stroke for long distances but the domestication of swimming had saddled the sport with some customs and in his part of the world a crawl was customary. To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project. He hoisted himself up on the far curb – he never used the ladder – and started across the lawn. When Lucinda asked where he was going he said he was going to swim home.
The only maps and charts he had to go by were remembered or imaginary but these were clear enough. First there were the Grahams, the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups. He would cross Ditmar Street to the Bunkers and come, after a short portage, to the Levys, the Welchers, and the public pool in Lancaster. Then there were the Hallorans, the Sachses, the Biswangers, Shirley Adams, the Gilmartins, and the Clydes. The day was lovely, and that he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence. His heart was high and he ran across the grass. Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River.
He went through a hedge that separated the Westerhazys’ land from the Grahams’, walked under some flowering apple trees, passed the shed that housed their pump and filter, and came out at the Grahams’ pool. ‘Why, Neddy,’ Mrs Graham said, ‘what a marvelous surprise. I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.’ He saw then, like any explorer, that the hospitable customs and traditions of the natives would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach his destination. He did not want to mystify or seem rude to the Grahams nor did he have the time to linger there. He swam the length of their pool and joined them in the sun and was rescued, a few minutes later, by the arrival of two carloads of friends from Connecticut. During the uproarious reunions he was able to slip away. He went down by the front of the Grahams’ house, stepped over a thorny hedge, and crossed a vacant lot to the Hammers’. Mrs Hammer, looking up from her roses, saw him swim by although she wasn’t quite sure who it was. The Lears heard him splashing past the open windows of their living room. The Howlands and the Crosscups were away. After leaving the Howlands’ he crossed Ditmar Street and started for the Bunkers’, where he could hear, even at that distance, the noise of a party.