by John Irving
And so he was left alone with his first accurate view of the world—the whole world, albeit unrealistically flat against a blackboard. After a while he found Maine; he regarded how small it was. After a while he found South Carolina; he stared into South Carolina for a long time, as if the exact whereabouts of Mr. Rose and the other migrants would materialize. He had heard all the talk about Germany, which was easier to find than Maine. He was surprised at the size of England; Charles Dickens had given him the impression of something much bigger.
And the ocean that seemed so vast when you looked at it off Ray Kendall’s dock—why the oceans of the world were even more vast than he’d imagined. Yet St. Cloud’s, which loomed so large in Homer’s life, could not be located on the map of Maine. He was using the geography teacher’s magnifying glass when he suddenly realized that the entire class of Senior Biology had filled the seats behind him. Mr. Hood was regarding him strangely.
“Looking for your rabbit, Homer?” Mr. Hood asked. The class enjoyed this joke enormously, and Homer realized he had—at least for that day—lost the opportunity to rid himself of Bucky.
“Look at it this way,” Bucky whispered to him, near the end of class. “If Debra Pettigrew had two twats, she might let you in one of them. You see the advantages?”
Unfortunately, the idea of paired vaginas troubled Homer throughout his Friday evening date with Debra Pettigrew. There was a Fred Astaire movie in Bath, but that was almost an hour-long drive, each way, and what did Homer Wells know or care about dancing? He had declined several invitations to attend Debra’s dancing class with her; if she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer thought she could go with someone who was in her dancing class. And it was getting too cold simply to drive down to the beach and park there. Olive was generous about letting Homer use the van. Soon there would be gas rationing, and a welcome end, in Homer’s opinion, to all this restless driving.
He drove Debra Pettigrew out to the carnival site at Cape Kenneth. In the moonlight, the abandoned, unlighted Ferris wheel stood out like scaffolding for the world’s first rocket launch, or like the bones of some species from dinosaur times. Homer tried to tell Debra about the knife work of Mr. Rose, but she had her heart set on Fred Astaire; he knew better than to waste a good story on her when she was sulking. They drove to the Cape Kenneth drive-in, which was “closed for the season”; they appeared to be reviewing the scenes of a romance that had happened to other people—and not just last summer, but to another generation.
“I don’t know what you’ve got against dancing,” Debra said.
“I don’t know, either,” said Homer Wells.
It was still early when he drove Debra to her winter home in Kenneth Corners; the same ferocious dogs of the summer were there, with their coats grown thicker, with their hot breath icing on their muzzles. There had been talk between Debra and Homer, earlier, about using the summer house on Drinkwater Lake for some kind of party; the house would be unheated, and they would have to keep the lights off, or someone might report a breaking and entering; but despite these discomforts, surely there was a thrill in being unchaperoned. Why? wondered Homer Wells. He knew he still wouldn’t get to Debra Pettigrew—even if she had two vaginas. With the dull Friday evening they had spent together, and with the dogs’ breath crystallizing on the driver’s-side window of the van, there was no talk about such a tempting party this night.
“So what are we doing tomorrow night?” Debra asked, sighing.
Homer watched a dog gnaw at his side-view mirror.
“Well, I was going to see Candy—she’s home from Camden,” Homer said. “I haven’t seen her on a weekend all fall, and Wally did ask me to look after her.”
“You’re going to see her without Wally?” Debra asked.
“Right,” Homer said. The van was so snub-nosed that the dogs could hurl themselves directly against the windshield without having to clamber over the hood. A big dog’s paws raked one of the windshield wipers away from the windshield, releasing it with a crack; it looked bent; it wouldn’t quite touch the surface of the glass anymore.
“You’re going to see her alone,” Debra said.
“Or with her dad,” Homer said.
“Sure,” said Debra Pettigrew, getting out of the van. She left the door open a little too long. A dog with the spade-shaped head of a Doberman charged the open door; it was half in the van, its heavy chest heaving against the passenger-side seat, its frosty muzzle drooling on the gearshift box, when Debra grabbed it by the ear and yanked it back, yelping, out of the van.
“So long,” said Homer Wells softly—after the door had slammed, after he had wiped the dog’s frothy slobber off the gearshift knob.
He drove by Kendall’s Lobster Pound twice, but there was nothing to tell him whether Candy was home. On the weekends when she came home, she took the train; then Ray drove her back, on Sunday. I’ll call her tomorrow—Saturday—Homer thought.
When Candy said that she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer had no objections. “I always wanted to see him,” he said. Bath, after all, was less than an hour away.
On the bridge across the Kennebec River, they could see several big ships in the water and several more in dry dock; the Bath shipyards were sprawled along the shore—a rhythmic hammering and other metal sounds audible even on a Saturday. They were much too early for the movie. They were looking for an Italian restaurant that Ray had told them about—if it was still there; Raymond Kendall hadn’t been in Bath in years.
In 194_, especially to an outsider, the city seemed dominated by the shipyards, and by the ships that stood taller than the shipyard buildings, and by the bridge that spanned the Kennebec River. Bath was a workingman’s town, as Melony soon discovered.
She found a job in the shipyards and began her winter employment on an assembly line, working with other women—and with an occasional, handicapped man—on the second floor of a factory specializing in movable parts. The movable part to which Melony would devote her energies for the first month of her employment was a hexagonal-shaped sprocket that looked like half a ham, split open lengthwise; Melony did not know the whereabouts of the assembly line that dealt with the other half of the ham. The sprocket arrived on the conveyor belt in front of her, pausing there for exactly forty-five seconds before it was moved on and replaced by a new sprocket. The joint of the sprocket was packed with grease; you could stick your finger in the grease, past the second knuckle. The job was to insert six ball bearings into the grease-packed joint; you pushed each ball bearing into the grease until you felt it hit the bottom; all six fit perfectly. The trick was to get only one hand greasy; a clean hand had an easier time handling the clean ball bearings, which were the size of marbles. The other part of the job was making sure that the six ball bearings were perfect—perfectly round, perfectly smooth; no dents, no jagged metal scraps stuck to them. The odds were that one out of every two hundred ball bearings had something wrong with it; at the end of the day, you turned in the bad ball bearings. If you had a day with no bad ball bearings, the foreman told you that you weren’t looking each ball bearing over carefully enough.
You could sit or stand, and Melony tried both positions, alternating them through the day. The belt was too high to make sitting comfortable and too low to make standing any better. Your back hurt in one place when you stood and in another place when you sat. Not only did Melony not know who did what, where, to the other half of the sprocket; she also didn’t know what the sprocket was for. What’s more, she didn’t care.
After two weeks, she had the routine down pat: between twenty-six and twenty-eight seconds to insert the ball bearings and never more than ten seconds to pick six perfect ball bearings. She learned to keep a nest of ball bearings in her lap (when she sat) and in an ashtray (she didn’t smoke) when she stood; that way she always had a ball bearing handy in case she dropped one. She had a twelve-to-fourteen-second rest between sprockets, during which time she could look at the person on her left and at the p
erson on her right, and shut her eyes and count to three or sometimes five. She observed that there were two styles of labor on the line. Some of the workers picked their six perfect ball bearings immediately upon finishing a sprocket; the others waited for the new sprocket to arrive first. Melony found faults with both styles.
The woman next to Melony put it this way: “Some of us are pickers, some are stickers,” she said.
“I’m not either, or I’m both,” Melony said.
“Well, I think you’ll have an easier time of it, dearie, if you make up your mind,” the woman said. Her name was Doris. She had three children; one side of her face was still pretty, but the other was marred by a mole with whiskers in it. In the twelve or fourteen seconds that Doris had between sprockets, she smoked.
On the other side of Melony was an elderly man in a wheelchair. His problem was that he could not pick up the ball bearings that he dropped, and some of them got caught in his lap blanket or in the wheelchair apparatus, which caused him to rattle when he wheeled himself off for his coffee break or for lunch. His name was Walter.
Three or four times a day, Walter would shout, “Fucking ball bearings!”
Some days, when someone was sick, the assembly line was reassembled and Melony was not pinned between Walter and Doris. Sometimes she got to be next to Troy, who was blind. He felt the ball bearings for perfection and daintily poked them into the thick and unseen grease. He was a little older than Melony, but he had always worked in the shipyards; he’d been blinded in a welding accident, and the shipyards owed him a job for life.
“At least I’ve got security,” he would say, three or four times a day.
Some days Melony was put next to a girl about her age, a feisty little chick called Lorna.
“There’s worse jobs,” Lorna said one day.
“Name one,” said Melony.
“Blowing bulldogs,” Lorna said.
“I don’t know about that,” Melony said. “I’ll bet every bulldog is different.”
“Then how come every man is the same?” Lorna asked. Melony decided that she liked Lorna.
Lorna had been married when she was seventeen—“to an older man,” she’d said—but it hadn’t worked out. He was a garage mechanic, “about twenty-one,” Lorna said. “He just married me ’cause I was the first person he slept with,” Lorna told Melony.
Melony told Lorna that she’d been separated from her boyfriend by “a rich girl who came between us”; Lorna agreed that this was “the worst.”
“But I figure one of two things has happened,” Melony said. “Either he still hasn’t fucked her, because she hasn’t let him, and so he’s figured out what he’s missing. Or else she’s let him fuck her—in which case, he’s figured out what he’s missing.”
“Ha! That’s right,” Lorna said. She appeared to like Melony.
“I got some friends,” she told Melony. “We eat pizza, go to movies, you know.” Melony nodded; she had done none of those things. Lorna was as thin as Melony was thick, she showed as much bone as Melony showed flesh; Lorna was pale and blond, whereas Melony was dark and darker; Lorna looked frail and she coughed a lot, whereas Melony looked almost as strong as she was and her lungs were a set of engines. Yet the women felt they belonged together.
When they requested that they be put next to each other on the assembly line, their request was denied. Friendships, especially talkative ones, were considered counterproductive on the line. Thus Melony was allowed to work alongside Lorna only when the line was reassembled on a sick day. Melony was made to endure the crackpot homilies of Doris and the lost ball bearings of Wheelchair Walter, as everyone called him. But the enforced separation from Lorna on the work line only made Melony feel stronger in her attachment; the attachment was mutual. That Saturday they put in for overtime together, and they worked side by side through the afternoon.
At about the time that Candy and Homer Wells were crossing the bridge over the Kennebec and driving into downtown Bath, Lorna dropped a ball bearing down the cleavage of Melony’s work shirt. It was their way of getting each other’s attention.
“There’s a Fred Astaire movie in town,” Lorna said, snapping her chewing gum. “You wanna see it?”
Although her voice lacked the studied heartiness of Dr. Larch’s, Mrs. Grogan did her best to inspire a welcome response to her announcement to the girls’ division. “Let us be happy for Mary Agnes Cork,” she said; there was general sniveling, but Mrs. Grogan pressed on. “Mary Agnes Cork has found a family. Good night, Mary Agnes!”
There were stifled moans, the sound of someone gagging in her pillow, and a few of the usual, wracking sobs.
“Let us be happy for Mary Agnes Cork!” Mrs. Grogan pleaded.
“Fuck you,” someone said in the darkness.
“It hurts me to hear you say that,” Mrs. Grogan said. “How that hurts us all. Good night, Mary Agnes!” Mrs. Grogan called.
“Good night, Mary Agnes,” one of the smaller ones said.
“Be careful, Mary Agnes!” someone blubbered.
Goodness, yes! thought Mrs. Grogan, the tears running down her cheeks. Yes, be careful.
Larch had assured Mrs. Grogan that the adoptive family was especially good for an older girl like Mary Agnes. They were a young couple who bought and sold and restored antiques; they were too active in their business to look after a small child, but they had lots of energy to share with an older child on the weekends and in the evenings. The young wife had been very close to a kid sister; she was “devoted to girl talk,” she told Dr. Larch. (Apparently, the kid sister had married a foreigner and was now living abroad.)
And Wilbur Larch had a good feeling for Bath; he’d always maintained a friendly correspondence with the pathologist at Bath Hospital; good old Clara had come from there. And so it seemed perfectly fine to him that Mary Agnes Cork had gone to Bath.
Mary Agnes was attached to her own name, and so they allowed her to keep it, not just the Mary Agnes but the Cork, too. After all, they were Callahans; a Cork went with a Callahan, didn’t it? It sounded a little modern for Mrs. Grogan’s tastes, although she allowed herself to be pleased at the thought that she’d named someone for keeps.
Ted and Patty Callahan wanted Mary Agnes Cork to view them as friends. The first friendly thing the young couple did was to take Mary Agnes to her first movie. They were a robust couple, and in their opinion they lived near enough to the movie theater in Bath to walk; it was a long walk, during which Ted and Patty demonstrated some of the basic differences between a fox-trot and a waltz. The December sidewalk was sloppy, but Ted and Patty wanted to prepare Mary Agnes for some of the dazzle of Fred Astaire.
Off the Kennebec a damp, chilling wind was blowing and Mary Agnes felt her collarbone ache; when she tried to join the Callahans at dancing, the old injury felt loose; then it throbbed; then it grew numb. The sidewalk was so slippery, she nearly fell—catching her balance on the fender of a dirty green van. Patty brushed her coat off for her. People were outside the movie house, buying tickets in the failing light. On the sliding panel door of the van, Mary Agnes Cork recognized the apple monogram—the W.W., and the OCEAN VIEW. She had first seen this emblem on a Cadillac—there had been a kind of hunger line; she remembered that beautiful girl standing aloof and that beautiful boy passing out the food. They’re here! Mary Agnes thought, the beautiful people who took Homer Wells away! Maybe Homer was still with them. Mary Agnes began to look around.
Homer and Candy had not had much luck finding the Italian restaurant that Ray had recommended; they’d found two or three Italian restaurants, each one serving pizza and submarine sandwiches and beer, and each one so overrun with workers from the shipyards that there was no place to sit. They’d eaten some pizza in the van and had arrived at the movie early.
When Homer Wells opened his wallet in front of the ticket booth, he realized that he’d never opened his wallet outdoors—in a winter wind—before. He put his back to the wind, but still the loose bills flapped; Candy
cupped her hands on either side of his wallet, as if she were protecting a flame in danger of going out, and that was how she was in a position to catch her own, treasured clump of pubic hair when it blew free from Homer’s wallet and caught on the cuff of her coat. They both grabbed for it (Homer letting the wallet fall), but Candy was quicker. Some of the fine, blond hairs may have escaped in the wind, but Candy seized the clump tightly—Homer’s hand closing immediately on hers.
They stepped away from the ticket booth; a small line moved into the theater past them. Candy continued to hold her pubic hair tightly, and Homer would not let her hand go—he would not let her open her hand to examine what she held; there was no need for that. Candy knew what she held in her hand; she knew it as much from Homer’s expression as from the clump of pubic hair itself.
“I’d like to take a walk,” she whispered.
“Right,” said Homer Wells, not letting go of her hand. They turned away from the theater and walked downhill to the Kennebec. Candy faced the river and leaned against Homer Wells.
“Perhaps you’re a collector,” she said, as quietly as she could speak and still be heard over the river. “Perhaps you’re a pubic hair collector,” she said. “You certainly were in a position to be.”
“No,” he said.
“This is pubic hair,” she said, wriggling her tightly clenched fist in his hand. “And it’s mine, right?”
“Right,” said Homer Wells.
“Only mine?” Candy asked. “You kept only mine?”
“Right,” Homer said.
“Why?” Candy asked. “Don’t lie.”
He had never said the words: I am in love with you. He was unprepared for the struggle involved in saying them. No doubt he misunderstood the unfamiliar weight he felt upon his heart—he must have associated the constriction of that big muscle in his chest with Dr. Larch’s recent news; what he felt was only love, but what he thought he felt was his pulmonary valve stenosis. He let go of Candy’s hand and put both his hands to his chest. He had seen the sternum shears at work—he knew the autopsy procedure—but never had it been so hard and painful to breathe.