My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  ‘This line is all wrong,’ the teacher says. ‘They ought to make it eight across. Detour the pedestrians around through Orange Street. Move us through faster.’

  At her absurd logic I jump out of the confinement of my four touchers and say, ‘That wouldn’t move us any faster. People would take just as long at the petition windows as they do now.’

  The teacher swivels her head back toward me, and I believe I might prefer imagining her full face to seeing it. ‘I was talking to this young lady.’

  ‘I couldn’t help overhearing you. Forgive me, but to move us faster it would be necessary to increase the number of windows.’

  The teacher gives me such a teacherish look that I feel obliged to volunteer a bad-boy addition to what I have already said. ‘Besides, Orange Street is filled to capacity every morning as it is. You couldn’t force another body in it with a crowbar.’

  My impertinence gives the girl the beginnings of giggles of the involuntary sort children sometimes get in serious settings—at concerts, lectures, funerals. The teacher looks at her, at me, back at her. The girl laughs as apologetically as she can.

  Perhaps I should feel clever. Instead I decide I may be growing quarrelsome. I am conscious of the janitor still bristling on my right. I try to mollify the teacher. ‘I agree that the line is terribly slow.’

  ‘All waitlines are slow,’ she says, as if saying, ‘You believe the earth is flat.’

  The girl is bringing her laughter under control. She ends it with some sniffles much like those at the end of her weeping a short while ago. Is she subject to hysteria—the most serious failing of all in a crowd?

  No one needs to be told that waitlines are slow. We are allowed fifteen minutes at table for breakfast at the Marinson; it takes twenty-five minutes in the cafeteria line to get to the first food racks. We are allowed six minutes on the john; there is a twenty-minute wait in the shitline. There should be more petition windows, no doubt of that. There should be more of everything. But there is not more of everything. That is the first fact of existence.

  * * *

  —

  ‘MY WIFE,’ I whisper, was too damned judicious.’

  I remember, once, on a rest day, a sunny morning in May, when the dogwood was at its height—we sat over breakfast and discussed a choice: Should we take Jill to Judges’ Cave State Park, or should we stay in town and take a chance on a waitline at the public library? Doris considered. She didn’t list all the pros and cons out loud. It was more a case of, ‘Let’s see…,’ ‘Let me think about it a sec…,’ ‘Mmmm…’ An atmosphere of good sense, not rushing blindly into things. Many long silences. Many incomplete utterances—blurted fragments to convey some kind of mulling under the surface. Time passed. Very good. It was now too late to get on the line for the busses to Judges’ Cave. Relief all around; we were reduced to the single issue: library or no? Now there was some less sketchy discussion. We have taught Jill to read ourselves—have we pushed her too fast? Should we ease up awhile? There are few books suitable for ten-year-olds; mostly they bore Jill. Maybe she is getting pale from living in shadows; maybe she should see a bit more raw life. Our past experience with the library waitline has been discouraging…. Many considerations. We asked Jill to help us settle it. She sighed. Looked at the ceiling. Balanced views were further refined—until we looked at the clock and saw that it was now too late to get on the library line. Immense relief—a second decision made by default. We finally went for a walk and were all cranky—raw life.

  ‘Whatever there was to say on any subject, you could count on her response: “There’s another point of view, Sam.”’ I want to go on to say, You can guess what it was like when there was some really important issue to settle: Shall we ask for permission to have a baby? Weeks, months, literally years—we had the baby too late, our relationship was already…But I whisper no more about this problem which has caused me so much pain.

  The girl does not answer. It seems to me that she is laughing!

  I am embarrassed, and I blunder on. ‘That’s my side of it, anyway. I bet you’re going to say, “Maybe there’s another point of view, Sam.” Maybe you think I had a lot to do with her vacillation….’

  She really is laughing.

  ‘Going through all that has made me impulsive,’ I whisper. My impulse at this moment is to make a move of some kind in this girl’s direction. The warmth at the front of my body has begun to be focussed. I have a strong urge to break the law. The girl is laughing silently. I do not get any strong encouragement from this silent laughter. Would she report me?

  This possibility shocks me. I must get a grip on myself. I think of the janitor’s hostility—that will serve. I turn my eyes on him, and that is enough. He explodes.

  But just before he does, she says out loud, ‘I didn’t know your name was Sam!‘ She is laughing hard.

  * * *

  —

  HIS OUTBURST is all the more violent in that it is hissed in whispers.

  ‘Get out of the line.’

  This does the trick. My desire modulates swiftly into a reaction of anger mixed with alarm. My tumid flesh shrinks; I push out my chin.

  The girl has heard and has stopped laughing without sniffles.

  ‘Are you crazy? After waiting since five in the morning?’

  The janitor sprays me with spit as he tries to keep his next whisper even more hushed. ‘You can’t ask for more space. You’ll have us all in trouble. They’ll shut the petition windows. Or something much worse. I’m telling you, you better get out of this line before I get you out.’

  I try to be cool. ‘Anyone has a right to be in the line.’

  ‘Not to ask that. You have no right to spoil everyone else’s chances.’

  ‘How would I be spoiling your chances? You’re asking for food.’

  A torrent is loosed. He forgets to whisper. ‘You damn fool, you know why. Who cares about food? What kind of space do you think I have? When I had to put my wife away, the very day, I mean, Christ, two hours after I got back from Connecticut Valley, they cut me down to a single person’s space. I tell you I wasn’t home two hours—I was famished, just lying down trying to get my strength back—and here comes this twerp in a gray uniform from Allocations. He had two porters with him, and they carted my wife’s stuff and my stuff away right then—I had no comeback, he had a warrant all made out—to this single space that they’d just moved some other guy out of, three houses down Willow Street. Look, in the married-couple space we’d had, we were so tight you had to climb over things—you had to move the TV and the vacuum cleaner onto the bed if you wanted to use the table, and the other way around, you know, back and forth. God, we worked hard for things, a lot of years, it’s not so easy to give things up when they’ve come hard. So we had all our stuff piled up as it was. Well, when they put all our junk in a single space, it had to be really stacked. I can’t get at anything now. It isn’t any more, you know, moving things back and forth—it’s stacking and unstacking. The rocking chair has to be on top of the pile, it isn’t steady enough to pile anything on—it rocks. You know? I can’t get rid of anything. I hope she’ll get better. I miss her. I want her back. Let her throw stuff at me. If she comes back we’ll get space for two again—but not in any two hours, I’ll tell you that. I’ve seen people get married and have to make do with single space for six months waiting for what’s their everyday right.’

  The janitor is almost shouting. His face is close to mine, his great machete of a nose is swinging dangerously, his cheeks are hectic, his upper lip works like the foot of a sewing machine.

  * * *

  —

  OVER HER SHOULDER the teacher says to the janitor, ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Stop your bellyaching!’ the painter behind me, who has been doing nothing but bellyaching all morning, snaps. There has been a difference, of course: The painter has merely been impatient about the slo
wness of the line; the janitor has been touching on an unbearable subject.

  Others near us grumble.

  The janitor’s face is bleak. I can imagine that he is suffering sudden hunger pangs in the face of the hostility that he has, in the thoughtless single-mindedness of his tirade against me, drawn on himself. There is a rapt quality in his bleakness. He has perhaps a vision of a delicacy that will assuage his appetite—terrapin stew and corn bread come into my mind. Strange choice; once in my life have I eaten terrapin stew. Am I so hungry myself? Of course I am glad to have the janitor’s threats to me cut off, at least for the moment.

  * * *

  —

  THE IMMEDIATE use I make of his threats is to remind myself that I must be more than ever careful with the girl, who is less apt to turn me in, after all, than the janitor now is if he detects the slightest sign of impropriety on my part.

  I am a signaler in search of a code.

  I murmur close to her left ear, When I was ten I wanted more than anything on earth to have the power of flight. May I tell you a story? A girl named Deborah lived in the room next to ours, she was older than I, she must have been fourteen or fifteen. She visited us one afternoon, my mother was at home, and Deborah talked mostly with her. For a while Deborah lay down on the daybed I slept on at night. That night when I went to bed I did two things at once. One was that I lay on my stomach and prayed to God—I believed in Him only when it came to needing things—to please, please let me fly, and during my prayer I saw myself, arms outspread, soaring around the Knights of Columbus Tower and then higher, just above the shoulder of East Rock—I was in an ecstasy; the air was somehow thick, amber-colored, I sailed in a kind of twilight; I can’t describe to you the joy I felt….

  Then the other thing was that while I was praying and seeing myself above everything I was also kissing every square inch of the part of the bed where Deborah had put down her head for two minutes.’

  ‘God didn’t do you much good, did He?’

  ‘No, He didn’t. I got mad at Him.’

  ‘I never wanted anything like that,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m more of a realist.’

  Realist. I say to myself, That word does not describe a decipherer, does it? Could it be that this girl is not too bright? It takes a surprisingly long time to detect stupidity of certain sorts in a person. Drawing back, I murmur, ‘Deborah turned out to be quite ugly. I saw her a couple of days ago. She’s fat and disappointed-looking.’

  ‘I wanted to be a movie star. Did you ever see any of those old Marilyn Monroe pictures?’

  ‘That’s realistic?’

  She laughs. ‘Even realists dream sometimes.’

  Yes, I did once see several Monroe movies that were shown by a street film society I belonged to. Our society specialized in old pictures from that era, showing so much air space enveloping people, so much sheer chilling distance between characters. I remember the pictures well. Knock on Any Door. Niagara. Bus Stop. The Misfits. One saw Marilyn Monroe ripen from film to film, till finally the fruit in the bottle of air was bruised. Vision is the primary sense. Watching those films, I always wanted less distance between myself and Marilyn Monroe’s breasts. I am an American man-baby. I have no image yet of this girl’s breasts. She is a realist; in mentioning Marilyn Monroe she must have had something in mind. I incline my head to the left and over her shoulder, but without being offensive I cannot crane far enough, and anyway her breasts are hidden in the pleats of the bush jacket. It is strictly forbidden to reach one’s hands forward and around….

  ‘Yes, I saw her a few times—film society we used to have. I’ve seen her on the tube, too, years ago.’ But I am distracted by those pleats in the lottery man’s jacket. ‘I won a TV set in a lottery once,’ I whisper. ‘I took two tickets, a buck apiece.’

  ‘You’re just naturally lucky,’ she whispers.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘I just am.’

  Imagination is more important than reason; I do not really care if she is a bit dumb, as long as she is imaginative. We’ll see. Right now I am imagining something which requires no intelligence at all, something which is not permitted, even in imagination, to either man or woman while in accidental or formal etcetera…. But dimensions have been added to my daydream; I now feel more than mere lust…. What else? An explicit curiosity; sympathy; free-floating emotions—the diffusion of that generous pain in my chest.

  The grandmother’s glasses are turning my way. With such powers of magnification before her eyes, can she see this obsession growing in me? And I ask myself, Does it matter that it is this particular girl? Were I to be pressed up against any girl in a waitline, any moderately healthy young woman of an age not greater than mine, not much greater, anyway, would I be making the same explorations of her whole being, building helplessly toward the same obsessive focusing of my desire? I am appalled by something random in my nature that comes out in a crowd.

  * * *

  —

  ‘ONCE WHEN I worked for the travel agency,’ the grandmother says, ‘a man came in who said he wanted a ticket to Katmandu. I’d never even heard of such a place. He was an ornithologist. There was one kind of bird he’d been chasing for thirty years.’

  This old party is not too pleased with her position in the waitline. Her touchers lack sociability. The decrepit gent in the black suit in front of her is like my father in more than appearance: He is a hopeless conversationalist. He agrees with everything she says to him. I have seen him nodding to get rid of her nattering. I do not want to concern myself with the grandmothers other two touchers, but it is evident that they also are too tight-lipped for her taste. She seems to have a rather desperate hope that she can stir up a storm of talk in me. The price of my having tried to see the girl’s breasts over her left shoulder is going to be listening to this story of the ornithologist who wanted to go to Nepal.

  The point of the story, alas, seems only to be that those were the good old days when you never had to wait more than a month for a reservation to fly anywhere in the world.

  ‘What bird was he hoping to find?’

  ‘He told me, but I don’t remember.’

  I do not think she has seen into my heart, or trousers. She is not interested in the ornithologist’s splendid obsession, to say nothing of my workaday one.

  Having come to this conclusion, I am startled when suddenly she says, ‘You two get along pretty good, don’t you?’

  At this the girl’s head quickly turns left.

  I could not tell from the grandmother’s tone of voice how loaded her comment was. ‘What makes you think that?’ I ask her in a guarded voice.

  ‘All that whispering.’

  It seems best to tell the truth. ‘That’s just to have a conversation with one person. You and I are different. You like to talk to everybody. I like to talk to one person. That’s the only reason I’ve been whispering to this young lady.’

  ‘Why don’t you whisper to me?’ The huge eyes smile; behind the magnifying lenses I see the indistinct trembling of a quinquegenarian flirtatiousness. She can see what the girl cannot—my face. Is she attracted to it, and to me? This idea is awful. Once when I was fifteen and thought that I enfolded in my young package of flesh the entire range of human sexual and emotional energy, I worked a summer vacation as a delivery boy for the branch of Sears in Hamden—this was when families still had separate rooms—and one day I delivered an electric batter mixer to a rooming house on Edgehill Terrace, where a woman who must have been twenty years older than I was at home alone. It was hot and she had on just a light caftan zipped down the front, and holding me in conversation she suddenly opened the front of it and showed me her body. She came close to me. Excited, I fled. I was horrified by the idea that a woman that old would have rampant sexual desires—and capacities. If she was more or less twenty years my senior, she may have been, on that day, let’s say, thirty-seven. I am thirty-seven now. Whe
n I am fifty-seven, how long will the waitlines be? And what if I stand on one of them then, even more tightly packed than now, beside, or behind, an attractive woman of thirty-seven, or a beautiful girl of seventeen?

  I feel a bit low in spirits, but I force myself to joke with Robert’s grandmother. ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ I whisper to her. ‘You’d tell all.’

  * * *

  —

  THE GIRL has heard this, as I intended, and she laughs.

  The grandmother, however, does not laugh. She turns away. It seems I have hurt her feelings by my blunt statement that I wish to speak to only one person, and she is not that person. But she has a rubber core, she is soon bouncing into a new relationship off to her left, with a toucher of one of her touchers.

  The girl asks me in a very quiet murmur over her left shoulder, ‘How do you plan to justify your petition?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You mean you don’t go up to the petition windows with what you’re going to say all memorized?’

  ‘I’ve never been to the windows before.’

  ‘You’ve never entered a petition?’

  ‘Not for years—not since it was all in writing. I’ve been on this line the last five mornings, but I didn’t make it to the windows.’

  ‘You’ll make it this morning. This is really your first time?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘You must have led a charmed life!…I don’t like it. They call them windows, but you can’t see whatever it is on the other side. They have these bars and then glass. I suppose it’s the one-way-vision kind of glass that they use to watch experiments through—you know?—psychological experiments? The whoever with the voice can see you, but you can’t see him—or her. And yet the voice comes through as if there were nothing but air between you and him, or her. Weird! I remember, last time, I could overhear the conversations at the windows on either side—the windows are close together—and the voices from beyond the bars and the glass there sounded exactly like the one that was speaking to me. Thin, like a lawyer talking, in between man and woman. But it’s not mechanical. I don’t see how it could be. The questions are so rapid-fire, so searching, and they’re so responsive to whatever you say. The terrible thing is the speed with which the voice finds its way to the weakness of your argument. I can’t even remember now what the weakness of mine was, last time—you know, about moving closer to my job; in fact, I’m not sure it was weak. But the voice convinces you it is; it breaks down your belief in your own desires. And then it says, in the most offhand and unfeeling way, ‘Petition denied. Next!’ And you turn away, you feel like you’re going to choke—you feel as if you’d known all along that that would be the outcome, that what you’d asked for was bad for New Haven, bad for everyone, had been from the very start.’