by Lee Martin
She had her arms crossed on the table, her chin on her hands. She nodded, and she looked so glum Mr. Dees almost called their lesson to an end. He imagined that she’d rather still be with Rene, that she’d rather be doing anything than learning about fractions.
But he had a job to do, so he went ahead and explained how to add 1/4 and 3/4 to return to the whole number, 1. “You add the numerators. One plus three. See?”
“I know how to add,” Katie said with a dramatic sigh.
“Of course you do,” he told her, determined to stay patient and cheery. “But I want to make sure that you really understand.”
“I said I did, didn’t I?”
“All right. Show me.” He wanted to win her over. He wanted to convince her that learning mathematics could be fun. “Let’s say you have four of something, four . . . oh, I don’t know . . . four children. Let’s say their names are Laura and Mary and Carrie and Almanzo.”
She raised her head. “From the Little House books?”
“That’s right. And let’s say one of them wanders away from the others, gets lost in the woods perhaps.”
“Lost?” Her eyes opened wide. She was interested now. Mr. Dees congratulated himself on having the good sense to turn the math problem into a story. Katie, he could tell, was a girl who understood narrative, mystery. A girl with curiosity. Someone who wanted to know what happened next. “Which one?” she asked. “Which one of them got lost?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Dees said. “It could be any one of them, any one at all. You just have to pick one.”
Right away, he recalled the game Katie and Rene had been playing and the anguish it had caused them. He knew he had made a mistake. Katie’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Pick one?” she said. Her chin started to quiver. “I have to pick one?”
Mr. Dees tried to erase his error. “Tell you what. I’ll pick one.”
But that only made matters worse. “Who?” Katie was even more worried now. “Who has to be the one who gets lost?”
Mr. Dees could see that any answer he gave would be the wrong one because Katie couldn’t bear to think of any of the four children lost in the woods. “Maybe we should forget the children,” he said. “We could do the problem with something else. Dogs or cats or zebras.”
Katie’s voice shook. “A dog? Lost? Like Lassie? Lost?”
Then the tears were coming, and she jumped up from her chair and ran into the house, leaving Mr. Dees alone, cursing himself for how foolish he had been. He hadn’t meant to hurt her at all, but that’s what he had done. He had convinced himself that he knew what it was like to want the best for someone like Katie, but now he had done this stupid thing, and it made him realize how clumsy he was when it came to dealing with people.
He didn’t know what to do, whether to wait on the patio, or knock on the door so he could apologize, or just slink away, a lost dog starved and alone. He put the cap on his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirt pocket. He closed his writing tablet.
The door behind him opened, and he heard Junior Mackey say his name. “Henry,” he said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What did you say to my girl?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“Christ, she could barely talk. Henry, she came running in bawling her head off.”
Mr. Dees was angry, disgusted with himself for bringing up the Little House children. How had he even managed to recall their names? Why hadn’t he seen that the very mention of them would upset Katie? He was also irritated with her for being so sensitive. But wasn’t that what he loved most about her? The stories of those children had broken her heart, she had told Rene, and he had ached for a child like Katie who could take in the miseries of people, could feel them as if they were her own.
“We were doing our work,” he said, and then, though he was furious, he told Junior Mackey in a calm voice what he had said to Katie and why it had disturbed her so. “I was wrong,” he said. “I miscalculated.”
“Good God,” said Junior Mackey. “Don’t you know a thing about kids?”
Mr. Dees was standing up now. He buttoned his coat, smoothed his tie, tugged at his shirt cuffs. He stepped toward Junior Mackey, his gaze level. He took off his glasses, folded the temples, and slipped them into his breast pocket. Later, he would think how silly that was; it was what he had seen high school boys do before a fistfight. Did he really think that he and Junior Mackey would come to blows?
“I was wrong,” he said. “Sometimes people make mistakes. If you’d rather I didn’t teach your daughter, then say so, and I’ll go home and not come back. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust me.”
He never raised his voice. He never stomped a foot or shook a fist. He didn’t have to. He narrowed his eyes and said what was on his mind, and because no one, particularly Junior Mackey, was accustomed to hearing him talk with such force, his words, quiet as they were, had weight.
Gilley stepped out onto the patio, golf club in hand. He saw his father and Mr. Dees, and something about the way they were standing told him he should turn around and go back into the house. He saw his father take a step back from Mr. Dees. He rubbed a hand over his head.
“A misunderstanding,” he said. “That’s all. Come back tomorrow and we’ll give this another try.”
Gilley stood there and watched Mr. Dees walk across the yard to the street. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he wasn’t in a hurry. He took his time, and Junior stood there, watching him go.
“Something wrong?” Gilley said.
Junior brushed past him on his way into the house. “You don’t know anything,” he said. “That man’s got backbone. You’re a kid.”
Gilley was accustomed to his father’s moods—the way he could fall quiet, go inside himself—but this was something different. This was hostility. This was a remark meant to belittle, and Gilley didn’t know what to do with it. All he knew was that something had shifted between them. Ever so slightly, something had turned. He would feel it all through that evening, the slap of those words: You’re a kid. Even at the supper table, when his father, back in good spirits, would tell the joke about the horse who walked into the bar and the bartender who said, “So, tell me. Why the long face?” Gilley, laughing, would feel something catch inside him, and he would wonder what it was about him that his father had found to scorn.
Then one afternoon, a few days later, when he was in the display window at Penney’s, slipping a sleeveless summer blouse onto a mannequin, he suddenly sensed that someone was watching him. When he turned toward the sidewalk, there was his father. Their eyes met, and his father immediately looked away, turned on his heel, and walked on up the street, his arms swinging with purpose, as if he couldn’t move fast enough from the sight of his son dressing that mannequin, his fingers nimbly buttoning the blouse, smoothing out the collar.
Gilley felt the distance spreading between them, and though he couldn’t name its source, he knew that somehow he had disappointed his father.
They never spoke directly about that afternoon, but that evening, when Gilley got home, his father asked him whether he’d been working hard, and he told him yes.
“Let me tell you what real work is,” his father said, and Gilley knew then that their trouble had come about because he had refused to work at Mackey Glass. “Of course, you’re probably not interested in hearing it. You’re probably too pretty for that.”
Gilley lay awake a long time that night, hearing those words again—too pretty—and the way his father sneered when he said them and then stalked off to his office and closed the door. Immediately, in his heart of hearts, Gilley knew that it was so. Not that he was on the other side of the street when it came to the baby-oh-baby between boys and girls—not that—but because he was more finicky than a seventeen-year-old boy should be, overly concerned with trifles; the slightest details gave him concern, and he would work and rework them until everything was just the way he wanted it. He was, as he often heard Katie say about Rene Cherry, a fusspot, or
, as his father had suggested, a pretty boy.
He thought of all the nights he spent in the backyard working on his chip shots, going through the mechanics of his swing, bringing the club back, pausing to see how his weight was distributed, repeating a single motion until he was satisfied that his body had memorized it. He practiced the same obsession with his wardrobe, taking time to press creases into the legs of his blue jeans, choosing colored socks to match the shirts that he wore. These summer days, when he dressed for work, he stood in front of the mirror, knotting and reknotting his tie until it pleased him.
There was, he realized now, something womanly about him. That’s what his father had seen that afternoon when he watched him buttoning that sleeveless blouse. He had tugged at its hem, smoothed its collar, then stepped back and done it all again to make sure that the blouse hung just so on the mannequin. It was that meticulous attention to detail that served him well on his job. No one did a window like him, his boss had told him, and when it came to folding shirts, well, he was a natural.
But there was a flip side to his fastidiousness. He saw that now. It was a nose-in-the-air way of moving through the world. In every smoothed wrinkle, every perfected motion, there was an air of moral judgment, though he didn’t intend it. There were people, he implied, who lived sloppy lives, and then there were people like him.
His father, who made his living from glass—relied on a mix of sand and soda ash and limestone melted in furnaces where the heat could get as high as 3,600 degrees—had seen as much that afternoon at Penney’s. He had seen that his son was a prig, and he wondered—surely he did, Gilley thought—how a boy like that would ever be of any use to him.
So that was how Gilley found himself, a few days later, saying to Mr. Dees, “All right. I guess. Sure.”
Mr. Dees had come into Penney’s late in the afternoon—the dead time in summer, the time when Gilley folded the shirts mothers had picked through earlier, unfurling them, holding them up to their sons’ chests, then leaving them discarded in wads. He folded the shirts and then the trousers, stacking them according to size. He used a feather duster to clean the display shoes. The store manager had stepped over to the Coach House for coffee the way he always did that time of day, and the girl at the cash register was
filing her nails while she sang along with the radio. WTHO had started its Top Fifty Countdown, and the woman who worked in Ladies’ Apparel called over to the girl. “Turn it up, sweets. Let’s live a little.”
The question Mr. Dees asked took Gilley by surprise. He wanted to know whether it would be all right—“whether it would be permissible,” he said—to take home a few lightweight jackets, maybe three or four, so he could see which one might suit him.
“Mine has a rip.” He turned his shoulder so Gilley could see the iron-on patch. “See? I’ve tried to mend it, but now I’m thinking I need new. It’s embarrassing, yes? To wear torn clothes.”
It was a cool day. Gilley could see the branches rising and falling on the trees across the street on the courthouse lawn. All morning, women had come in with scarves on their heads and they smelled of the cool air, and some of them—the country women—of coal smoke. They had lit fires, they told him. That’s how cold it was. “Feels like March,” more than one of them said.
Mr. Dees’s request was, to say the least, unusual. “You could try them on here.” Gilley pointed to the tri-panel mirror outside the fitting room. “I’ll be glad to help you.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Dees said. “I couldn’t do that.”
“It’s the way people usually do it.”
“I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror.” Mr. Dees bowed his head. “And three of them? I couldn’t bear to see so many of me and from so many angles. Like I was sneaking up on myself. At home, I have someone who will help me. Someone I trust.” He raised his head and looked Gilley straight in the eye. “Please.”
Gilley took in Mr. Dees’s meek look, and he thought of the way his father had called him pretty and then left him to wish the word gone.
“You must be a size forty,” Gilley said. “A forty long. Just look at your arms.”
Ordinarily, he would have refused such an unreasonable request. Imagine. Someone wanting to take home jackets. But today, when he was mulling over the ways men could choose to live their lives, it felt proper and right, a good fit—geez, what would his father think now?—for him to say yes.
At the rack of poplin jackets, he picked out a green one and a yellow one and a red-and-blue plaid.
“I can pay for them.” Mr. Dees reached into the pocket of his trousers and took out a roll of bills. “All three of them. Then tomorrow, when I bring back the two I’ve decided against, you can give me a refund.”
Gilley shook his head. He was practically dizzy with what he was about to do. “Keep the money,” he said. “I know you’ll be back.”
He asked Mr. Dees to follow him to the rear of the store, and there the two of them slipped through the stockroom—past the cardboard boxes full of shirts and blouses and trousers and skirts, past the racks of hangers, past the shelves where the layaway items waited to be claimed—to the alley door. When Gilley pushed it open light came flooding in, along with the cool air and the sound of a mower running on the courthouse lawn and the smell of the freshly cut grass. Gilley loved that smell. He loved the chill in the air, the wind rising, and how sharp the day had become.
“Thank you.” Mr. Dees hugged the jackets to his chest. “Thank you very much for understanding.”
“Come back tomorrow,” Gilley told him. “Same time. I’ll be waiting. Knock on the door and I’ll let you in.”
It happened that way. Gilley let him take the jackets, without a dime put down as security, and the next day, when the store manager was once again at the Coach House, the knock came. Gilley opened the alley door and there was Mr. Dees.
“I’ve chosen the plaid,” he said. “Usually I choose blue, but my friend convinced me. The plaid. What do you think?”
Gilley was relieved. He had the two jackets back, and already Mr. Dees was reaching into his trousers pocket to pay for the one he had chosen. What a wad of bills he took out. He snapped off a twenty with a flick of his wrist.
“I think it suits you,” he told Mr. Dees.
Mr. Dees pressed the twenty into Gilley’s hand, squeezing. “I’ve never worn plaid before.” A tremor of a smile came to Mr. Dees’s lips. “Who would have thought?” he said. “Plaid.” He refused the few dollars change owed him from his twenty, telling Gilley to please keep it for himself. “A good-looking boy like you,” he said. “A popular boy. I’m sure you can find something to spend it on.”
“You won’t tell, will you?” Gilley said. “What I did? If my boss found out . . .”
“I won’t tell. You can trust me.” Mr. Dees put his finger to his lips. “Our secret.” Then he turned and disappeared down the alley.
Nothing had changed on planet Earth. Gilley knew that. In fact, that evening he would sit down with his father while he was watching Walter Cronkite give the news on television, and he would think, What did it matter, what he had done for Mr. Dees? What difference had it made to the whole, big world spinning on beneath them? What had it mattered to the 236 people dead from flooding in Rapid City, South Dakota; or the 118 who had lost their lives in Hurricane Agnes; and when he thought of the 62,000 people starving to death because of the drought in West Africa, not to mention the casualties in Vietnam . . . how important was the fact that he had played fast and loose with J. C. Penney merchandise and come away clean? What difference at all did small favors between people make?
Still, he couldn’t stop the crazy, giddy-assed feeling coming over him even as he sat in the glow of blue light coming from the console television and heard Walter Cronkite naming the world’s mayhem and disaster. He knew he was grinning like an idiot.
“What’s so hilarious?” his father asked, and he told him, nothing. Not a thing. Just something funny that had happened at work.
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THE CARNIVAL came to town: a merry-go-round, a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Ferris wheel. The police blocked off the streets around the courthouse square—High, Thirteenth, Taylor, Fourteenth—and the carnival set up shop. The downtown merchants carried tables and racks of sale items out onto the sidewalks and kept their stores open until ten o’clock: Minnie’s Discount, Volk’s Clothiers, Helene’s Dress Shop, Bogan’s Shoe Store, Sherman’s Five and Dime, J. C. Penney, where Gilley stood in the twilight, listening to the calliope music coming from the merry-go-round, watching the painted horses slide up and down on their silver poles.
People on the Tilt-A-Whirl were screaming as the cars spun them around. A boy and a girl at the top of the Ferris wheel kissed while their gondola swayed. Their silhouettes were dim against the darkening sky. Barkers called out: “Take a chance. A little luck, a little skill. Everyone’s a winner.” Katie and Rene Cherry came running up to Gilley, their mouths sticky with blue cotton candy. The air smelled of it—that burned sugar smell—and there was popcorn and corn dogs and saltwater taffy.
“Gilley, Gilley, Gilley,” Katie said, all out of breath. “Oh, Gilley. Look what we won.”
It was a rubber snake. Katie shook it at him.
“Doesn’t it look real?” Rene asked.
“Oh, it really does,” said Gilley.
“We picked up a duck,” Katie told him. He knew the game, a stream of plastic ducks floating on water, idiotic looks on their painted faces, just bobbing along, la-di-da. Some of them had lucky numbers painted on their undersides. Pick up a winner; take home a prize. “We picked up a duck,” Katie said, “and we won.”
She shook the snake in Rene’s face, and both of them screamed and went running back into the crowd.
A man stepped up on the sidewalk, a stocky man with a sunburned face. He turned and watched Katie and Rene as they ran past him. Then he turned to Gilley. He pointed his finger at him. “Bub,” he said, “I want to shake your hand.” He was wearing a white painter’s cap, and black-framed eyeglasses with flecks of gray on the lenses. Something had splattered up and hardened. He grabbed Gilley’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re all right,” he said. “You’re an ace.”