by Warren Adler
“We know what we have to do,” Beth said, punching in a number on her cell phone.
Steve nodded and they left the apartment. They waited briefly and a limousine arrived. It took them back to the cemetery where they revisited their mother’s grave. Both kneeled and they dug into the soft earth with their hands, burying the box.
“It was only right,” Beth said as they rode back to the city in the limousine.
“They always held hands,” Steve said. “Right to the end.”
The Polka Dot Dress
Originally published in Which Grain Will Grow, 1950
I went to Manhattan to look for a job. I just got on the subway and went to Manhattan. On 42nd Street all the people were rushing about. They looked as if they knew where they were headed. I had no idea where to go. I didn’t even know where to look for a job. But I said to myself, “Jack,” I said (Jack isn’t my real name, but I call myself Jack because it is a nice-sounding name), “Jack, you have got to get a job. Look, everybody has a job. They have some place to go. They bring home money every week to support themselves with. Don’t you feel ashamed because you haven’t got a job?”
I am a writer. I didn’t feel ashamed, so I went to Central Park. It was spring, the rich green grass glistening with dew, and the caterpillars and false noses were dropping like raindrops from the trees. It was warm, and I walked with my hands in my pockets and my jacket swung over my shoulder. I thought it made me look real tough, and I like to look real tough, even when I’m out of a job and have only ten cents in my pocket.
I saw a pretty girl sunning herself on a bench. She was wearing a blue polka-dot dress. I wanted to sit down beside her and talk to her, but I was afraid, so instead I walked past her tough and swaggering, and I wished that I had a pretty girl in a blue polka-dot dress walking with her hand in mine.
The sun was shining brightly, and when I looked at the grass I wanted to take off my shoes and run barefoot or maybe just lie down and go to sleep with the caterpillars and false noses falling on my face.
Near the zoo I heard two fat old ladies talking. They both had nice pleasant old faces; they looked like grandmothers. They were looking at some bums sleeping on the grass.
“Can’t those riff-raff read signs?” one old lady said.
“It distinctly says ‘Keep Off’,” the other one said.
“I’d like to call a policeman and have them chased,” the first one said.
“Me too,” the other one said, looking for a policeman.
I was very glad that there were no policemen around to chase the sleeping tramps off the grass.
When I heard a lion roar just then, I knew I was very close to the zoo. I walked faster now that I had some place to go. I would be a mighty happy fellow, I thought, if I could walk with a pretty girl in a blue polka-dot dress with her hand in mine.
I went up to the lion’s cage. He was sprawled out in the sun with his paws in front of him and roaring. A woman behind me said that it seems silly for a lion to roar for no reason at all. I walked to the next cage and saw the lioness scratching at the bars. Then I knew why the lion was roaring. It seems a shame, I thought, and I went back to the lion’s cage and looked sympathetically into his sleepy brown eyes, and I know this is crazy, but I think he looked back sympathetically at me.
I went to the monkey house and saw a man give a cigar to a chimpanzee named Jimmy.
“Is that allowed?” I asked the man.
He didn’t answer, but instead he lit the chimpanzee’s cigar. The chimpanzee puffed the cigar and climbed to the top of the cage. He inhaled and blew the smoke out through his nose. A few people gathered around and looked up and laughed at him. I laughed because he looked like my father.
“He looks just like a man,” a little boy said.
“He seems to be having a lot of fun,” his mother said.
I no longer cared whether it was allowed or not.
After the monkeys, I watched the seals splashing around in the cool green water. One of them was sleeping on a stone slab.
“What a life!” a man behind me said. “Sit around and take a sunbath and then jump into the water and go for a swim.”
“It’s not who you are; it’s what you are,” I said.
I laughed and walked out of the zoo, still wishing that I had a pretty girl in a blue polka-dot dress walking with her hand in mine. On the Mall a little boy with a sunburnt nose spoke to me. He was holding a balloon that was in the shape of an elephant.
“Look! I got an elephant!” he said.
“That’s a mighty nice elephant,” I said.
“It can go up to the sky,” he said, lifting his arm way up in the air.
I remembered an old nursery rhyme that my mother used to recite to me:
I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high he reached the sky
And never came down till the Fourth of July.
The little boy laughed and ran back to his mother. I took my shoes off and sat on a rock near the lake. People were rowing. Across the lake I saw a boy and a girl. They were sitting real close, her red hair blowing over his face. I wished that I could make love to some pretty girl in a blue polka-dot dress. I wished that I could kiss her cherry red lips and rub her nose with mine and let her hair blow over my face. I wished that we could go rowing and put our toes in the water over the back of the boat. I wished that we could sit on the grass and say nonsensical things. I wished that I could recite “Jabberwocky” into her ear while she kissed my neck:
’Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
I was sitting under a tree, and the caterpillars and false noses were falling all over me. I put on a false nose. A little girl who saw me do it said to her mother, “Isn’t that silly?” I knew it was silly and I even said to myself, “Jack, you’re silly,” but I didn’t care.
There were no clouds in the sky and the sun made glistening spangles on the ripples of the lake. I watched them until my eyes began to hurt. A man from the park department with a long thin face was doing some hoeing near where I sat.
“Do you like your job?” I said.
“I like it this time of year,” he told me.
“It must be fun,” I said.
“Not in the wintertime,” he answered.
“I’d like to get a job like that,” I said.
“A young feller like you can get a better job than this. A young feller like you can get a good job, good pay, good future.”
“I’m not interested in things like that,” I said. “I’m a writer.”
“Why aren’t you home writing?” he said. He was a very smart man.
“I’m looking for a job,” I said.
“You sure are looking,” he said laughing. “You sure are looking!”
“What was your ambition when you were a boy?” I asked.
“I wanted to see the darkies pick cotton in Louisiana. I wanted to see the sun come up over the black hills of Dakota. I wanted to see the moon shine down on the Great Salt Lake. I wanted to see the men singing songs on top of railroad trains. I wanted to see men pick grapes in California and husk corn in Iowa and thresh wheat in Indiana.”
“Did you see all these things?” I asked.
“Sure did! I was a hobo for thirty years.”
“I’d like to be a hobo, especially in the springtime,” I said.
“That’s the best time,” the man said. I knew he was thinking about the time when he was a young man.
“What do you write about?” the man asked.
“I write about girls with blue polka-dot dresses and old ladies who chase bums off the grass and lions and monkeys and seals and little boys with toy balloon elephants and old men who used to be hobos.”
“You’re a funny kid,”
the man said.
I walked near the sailboat pond and sat down on a bench. I thought about the whole country and then about the whole world and then about the universe.
“It’s not so big, Jack,” I said to myself.
Two young men sat down next to me. They took sandwiches out of a brown paper bag and began to eat. The sandwiches smelled like tuna fish. One young man had sad eyes, and I knew he was a philosopher.
“Sure is good to get out of that stuffy smelly office,” he said.
“Sure is,” the other one said.
“Some day I’m going out for lunch and then I’m going to take my tuna fish sandwich and throw it into this pond and never go back to that smelly office. Then I’m going to marry a rich girl and buy an estate and sit on my estate and get sun-tanned all day long. Then at night I’m going to do nothing but make love to my wife and thank God for her having all that money.”
“The grass always looks greener on the other side,” the other one said.
I looked out over the pond where a little sailboat was gracefully swaying on the crest of the wind. An old man with a long stick was following it along the shore.
“Some beaut!” a little boy said. He had a pleasant high-pitched voice. I wished I were a little boy or an old man having fun near a sailboat pond. But I was a young man and what would make me happy would be to make love on the grass to a pretty girl in a polka-dot dress. I was sorry that I was afraid to speak to the girl in the blue polka-dot dress sunning herself on a bench.
It began to get late. The sun dipped quietly behind the large trees and the children began to disappear from the park. I had started out to get a job. I did not know what kind of a job. I know now. I went home and wrote about Central Park, and when I went to bed I had a dream. And in my dream I was making love to a pretty girl in a blue polka-dot dress.
The Other People
Originally published in 1950 American Vanguard, 1950
You felt your wife pinching and prodding you to wake up, and when you opened your eyes you could see her face, scaly and flabby, with the lips all colorless from using lipstick, and her cheeks dabbed with remnants of rouge that were nearly worn off on the side of her face that she slept on. The clock on the bureau was ten minutes fast, so you knew that you had a few minutes to lie around and stretch the sleep from your weary bones, but you had to be careful not to doze off again, although you certainly did feel like doing it. It was better to talk, so you talked in a hoarse sleep-wracked voice to your wife, while you watched her crawl out of her pink silk nightgown with the rip near the right hip; you saw all the curves and the folds, the ripples and the waves of her spreading form that you knew so well. Every few moments you would look at the clock where the minutes seemed to tick by slower than usual, and you wished that they would go faster, even though you really wanted to stay in bed. Soon you just couldn’t stay in bed any longer or else you would be late for work, so you threw the red-checked quilt off you and crept on to the floor which was pretty cold for October. When the cold water hit your face you winced, but it revived your senses and made you feel pretty good. A quick shower, a shave, a sweet toothbrush, and a hair comb, and you were as presentable as you could be with chronic red eyes and a broken nose.
There was a half of a grapefruit waiting for you on the kitchen table and the sound of the percolator and the smell of coffee made it feel like Sunday morning, although it was but Wednesday.
Her hair thatched loosely together, your wife bustled about the stove. You saw that she wasn’t deriving any pleasure from making that coffee; her flabby face reflected feelings of disturbance, of discomfort, of pain. And after you left the house she would go back to bed and wish that she could sleep alone all the time, but now she didn’t really care for she felt icy inside and had a headache and was worried about her change of life. She wouldn’t even wait until you finished your breakfast before she went back to bed.
The coffee, made too fast, was weak and tasteless, so you just ate a piece of toast after your grapefruit and washed it down with water. You looked at the clock and saw that it was getting late; now it seemed as if the minutes were ticking faster than usual. Bending over the soiled bed, you kissed your wife on her dry scaly cheek. She wouldn’t move and you would smell, while in the realm of her vapors, all the stinks and odors that were your very own, but were hers now because she had received them from you in the blood flow of creation. All the rotten stinks and smells and slops were hers, and they were yours too, but she lived in them; she had nothing else, while you mingled with the vapors of the outside, and lived in a thousand other stinks and smells and odors which you absorbed and brought back to her and she kept them and nurtured them and they permeated her, and she couldn’t escape from them.
In the street you joined the parade of people walking to the station with the sunbeams dancing through the nooks of fences and walls and ashcans. Nobody noticed the sun, it was just there, bright and warm and friendly. The people marched, out of step, but with one goal in sight and that was the subway station where a dark metal thing would open its jaws and swallow people and people, and would vomit them out again at other stops along the line. You walked with the rest of them just as you did every other weekday morning in the year, except when you got your two weeks’ vacation with pay and then you went away from city and subways et al. and got yourself a sunburn which lasted for at least two weeks more, then it left you and everything was the same as ever.
A big hell-like hold, open, and with stairs leading down greeted the morning paraders who poured and poured into its never-filling space. You felt in your pocket for change and found four pennies and a dollar bill. An old graying Negro stood in the change booth and slid you the change for your dollar. Through the creaking turnstiles then past the reeking dirty toilet rooms and down the darkened steps spotted with spittle; past a newsstand where you bought the morning paper. The parade continued, and you were one of the marchers, jostling, jogging, reeling in time with the tempo of humanity; forever moving in the circles of beating pulses. People huddled together near where the doors would open and talked or read or looked at the tracks and at the people who were far more interesting than anything else. For these were the corpuscles of the city blood beating through its veins.
You heard rumblings from the darkness and knew it was the dark black thing approaching to receive the people that stood waiting on the dirty platform. Everybody heard the sound and huddled close together. You found yourself pressed against a pole with vulgar ditties and foul language written all over it with pencil and black crayons and all sorts of people jammed you up against it. The black thing rattled into the station and its heart stopped beating as it opened its jaws and people flowed into it. Pushing and pressing and heaving they wrapped themselves around one another until there was no room for even the foul air to intrude. Some people never got on, but stood on the platforms, their eyes gaping at the compressed mass of flesh and bones trying to fit into the mouth of the dark black thing.
Your hands were stuck in a human vise and you found that it was impossible to read your paper. An old man with withered yellow flesh and rotting insides that produced a foul nauseating breath stood looking at you with sick weary eyes that said many things that had been said many times before by other sick and weary eyes. A young woman whose skin was still tight and fresh and who bore the unseen marks of having just come from the closeness of her lover’s arms and could still taste the moisture of his breath on her lips stood packed against a young, embarrassed lad with horn-rimmed spectacles. He was embarrassed because he could feel the roundness of her tired breasts beneath her dress and was afraid that she would create a scene that would humiliate him. A man whose hair was spotted with gray tried looking about him disinterestedly, but his great sad eyes betrayed the troubles that wore him down and thwarted his life.
As the dark black thing jogged along, the mass moved with the rhythms of its gyrations. The fans were going, but t
he foul air kept circulating back and forth, weaving its way amongst the people. A man who had spent the evening before pouring alcohol into his guts now made the car stink with the rumblings of his stomach. Everybody breathed in the filthy odor but no one said a word, although you could see the signs of discomfort in all the faces. Next to you stood a young woman who reminded you of your wife because she had flabby cheeks. She was breathing heavily and her breath was none too sweet because she was three months pregnant and had pains in her stomach but continued to go to work because she had to make enough money to pay for the hospital bills. With each swerve of the train, she got paler and paler and every few moments she would well up and purse her lips as if she were going to regurgitate. Through the side of your eye you could see that she was going through some sort of pain but after a while you didn’t look and only hoped that she wouldn’t throw up or if she did she would turn her head the other way.
The smell of a thick musty perfume would suddenly fill your nostrils and then disappear on the wings of the drafts and breezes that flew through the air. After a while it wasn’t the odors that really annoyed you but rather the tightness in your cramped limbs that made them ache and smart, like a prisoner in shackles yearning to be free. Occasionally you would steal a glance at the suffering woman rammed against the small of your back. You were hoping that you weren’t hurting her and even strained against the crowd that pushed you toward her.
You knew that all the people locked in that dark black thing, racing through the veins and arteries of the city, were thinking the same things that you were thinking or had thought or would be thinking—that the pain and the discomfort must be endured and that it would soon be over and then the sun would kiss your bodies again and you would forget the pain. Yet it was always the same thing. It wasn’t you, but the other people that made the annoyance, it was the other people that caused the hardships and the pain, the crowded places, it was the other people that caused the wars and made the laws, and spread disease and destroyed, and pilfered and smelled, and spat, and took the rent, and raised the prices and hurt little children and old folk. It was the other people that suppressed you, and stifled you, and bore down upon you until you were chained and imprisoned, and you found yourself crushed together with the groups of the other people until you became the very thing that had destroyed you—the other people.