A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell

by Padgett Powell

  "Tom, no rats?"

  "Paul White tapirs?" The old glee. Paul White was our landlord. "Are tapirs really rodents? How could they be? I'd like to see the teeth." This was the old Tom.

  "I can't imagine rodents that large," I said.

  "Me either."

  He studied the hall. "No rats." Again I thought I saw a change, a little dark flash.

  I got up and got a GO BIG RED commemorative half-pint out of my bag. To my surprise Tom did not decline it. He is legendary for sustained and exclusive consumption of soft drinks.

  "They take those kids to live filmings of Sesame Street," he said. "Make them listen to NPR. Had their birthday announced from Lake Wobegon. No nitrates. No cereal."

  I recalled his card to me:

  Remember Elaine? (Good girl.) I married her. Sold tent. Sold Mustang. It was a good car.

  And then enthusiasm about a "ghoul mouse," as I recall.

  We sat there, listening to appliances and other subtle noises of a house settling for the night, passing the half-pint. I told Tom about the kid chopping onions who couldn't take it. I told him about all the fools I'd seen who were smarter than you'd think because they were not letting their lives become constructs of what was expected of them. I felt like the polyester preacher and shut up. I'm not sure Tom understood me, and I'm certain that wasn't his fault. Perhaps I wasn't even speaking to the central causes of his depression. But it looked like he wasn't all fired up about living the life good-girl Elaine had cooked up for them.

  We heard one more firm door closing in the back of the house, a final not loud sound that somehow communicates lost patience on the part of those going to bed with those not. It didn't look like any fun to me. I thought of all the careless fun I'd been having with women who offered no closing-door crap, of old Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski, who had presumably set this whole reaction series to rolling.

  "You still going to Norway?" Tom asked. It was frankly unbelievable--as if we were thought-for-thought with each other.

  "No. As they say in Brooklyn, das out."

  "Sort of thought so."

  "Why?"

  "It never was going to work."

  "Why Not?"

  "Don't know." He probably thought he did, but wasn't going to speculate. I think we were both coming to the conclusion that we didn't know each other at all beyond the slingshot lunacy.

  "What about you?" I said.

  "What?"

  "You and--"

  "It'll work."

  "How do you know?"

  "I'll make it."

  "You'll make it or you'll make it work?"

  "Make it work."

  "You'd better get an extra bedroom for Fenster."

  "Or an extra house!" Like that, he was restored, grinning openly at the prospect of Fenster's alter-life beside his, I suppose. I'm sure he could see getting Fenster's lights turned on, getting his credit established. Fenster could shoot his slingshot late at night. Fenster would have rats. Fenster Ludge would raise tapirs.

  In the reaction-series-of-life scheme of things, Fenster would care for his untowardness as much as for his self-actualizing assets and towardness. Fenster could take a step backward or to the side now and again. Fenster Ludge would be a dallying kind of dude.

  Tom got up and left the room and returned with a giant trophy that had a tiny car on its top. He set it on the table.

  "I won the Soap Box Derby," he said.

  "Come on."

  "For years I thought I was sliced bread."

  I looked at the trophy. Something about it looked real. He had won the damned Soap Box Derby.

  "My God, son."

  "The Soap Box Derby is nothing but going downhill with amateurs." Tom intoned this with a note of bitterness that convinced me I did not know him at

  all.

  "What the hell is it supposed to be, Tom?"

  "No, the thing is--" He made a gesture in the air, as if to indicate the entire environs--walls, wife, nieces, the stars above.

  "Okay, Tom."

  * * *

  Sometime in the night I got up and ran into Elaine coming out of the bathroom. We did one of those side-to-side unsuccessful evasions people do in the same path--she did not smile. She looked down, holding her robe at the throat, and finally passed. Again I got the impression she was in thorough contempt of me, though, in fact, she was simply a tired woman in a bathrobe trying to get by a strange man in her house at 3 a.m. The sensation of her disapproval was strong enough, however, that I wanted to ask her what was the matter right there in the bad hall light. I decided finally that while she had good reason to turn her nose up, she had no way of knowing it, so she was either supernaturally perceptive of character or flatly impolite, and I did not need worry about her. I hardly even knew about Tom and me well enough to be worried about me and his

  wife.

  The bathroom was a Southern Living model with terry-cloth bibs and caps on the commode and an army of toiletries neatly marshaled into plastic trays and racks. I spotted a pink box of bubble bath and had a kooky urge to take one, but did not--I did not want to be to my neck in suds if Elaine attacked.

  * * *

  In the morning I had a conversation on the lawn with the girls as they waited to be taken somewhere. As if in response to their no-nitrate upbringing, they had begun, it looked, to get prematurely surly. They were little adults. I thought to try new utterance on them.

  "Monsters, girls."

  "Monsters what?"

  "I think they're the thing."

  They gave each other looks which contained concealed exasperation, quick passing glances designed to betray nothing. These were remarkable six-year-old women.

  "I am a monster," one of them said. The other looked off, as if commenting without speaking, silently approving the sentiment. She would have pulled on a cigarette were they older and not no-nitrate. She is, her idle look said. We are. I wondered what they meant: could they possibly mean they knew they were premature not-children and thus monstrous?

  "What do you mean?"

  At this moment Elaine bounded out of the house with a picnic basket, binoculars, a bird book, and headed for the family car.

  "You'd better skip over there and help her," the other girl said to the monster, and the monster did just that, brightly.

  They were taking the girls to an "interpretive center" at a wildlife refuge and I declined Elaine's stiff invitation to go along. I declined Tom's somewhat sheepish invitation to ride with them to the bus station. Tom looked like he'd been thrashed.

  "This is the bus station, Tom," I said, exacting from him no goofy mirth. He stood there near the car of loading women. I shook his hand and they left. I walked through the polite suburb and found a larger street and then a larger street and the true bus station, and worked on placing Tom and the monsters into the fool/true-fool gradient all the way to Lafayette. As I have it, Tom is perhaps the worst victim to date, intelligent enough, unlike the Orphan, to have accepted someone else's notions of living correctly and to have applied considerable industry toward that end before sensing it was all downhill and all advised by amateurs. The girls were smart; bucking at an early age, wanting potato chips badly. They were duplicitous. "You'd better skip over there." They could run the fish camp, they could soothe the Veteran, they could act in any of Mary's plays. I could have kissed those little monsters, and I was certain that with due cover they'd have let me. One would have kissed while the other stood by smoking her imaginary cigarette, with a kind of jaw-out, hip-slung petulance, trying to locate something she knew they were not to find. They were as mad for Saturday cartoons and dangerous toys as was the Veteran for his phantom, and they were just beginning to show signs of denial.

  A true scientist could run a control, a failed one makes these speculations and, where no experiments can be had, makes these statements stridently, I suppose. So, mark my words: the little girls are tiny, early Veterans. They are being ruined by unwanted, forced purpose that seeks to free them of
lateral waste. They are, as they say, monsters.

  Every time I go home, I think suddenly how much more sense I had as a child, and that the years growing up in the house I am about to enter robbed me of that wit, as evidenced by my voluntary arrival of the moment. My father and I have developed a greeting which seems to acknowledge this solemn loss; whether I'm back from a month or a year away, " he stands, extends his hand not very far toward me, broadly opened to receive the handshake, rather like a catcher's mitt held close to the body; and as we shake, meeting with elbows bent in order to retain leverage should we decide to Indian-wrestle, and gripping each other harder than desperate salesmen who squeeze rubber balls in their sleep, he will say, "Hey, bud." That seems to sum it all up neatly. You've lost your marbles, he says; I know, I gave the feeble things to you.

  And you've lost your marbles, I squeeze back to him; I know, look how few you gave me.

  We grin, not at each other but at the floor, departing from salesman's form.

  While the notion of marbles is afoot, I look around for my mother. "She's not down yet," my father says.

  He hands me a beer and we sit.

  "What's going on?"

  "Nothing."

  This is code: Are you still wasting your life? Yes. The silent ghost that is my mother appears at the foot of the stairs, extending around the doorjamb a preposterously tall, narrow glass that suggests a flared vase. My father looks at the glass and waits, as I'm sure he would not do in my absence, for her to explain herself. Even though the glass is empty, she has trouble balancing it, because she holds it at the narrow base, the only place her tiny, bony hand can grip it. It leads her, like an animal going for drink, into the kitchen.

  "More juice?" she says.

  "I think you've had enough."

  "He's so handsome," she says, about me, whom she has recognized only partly: I am her handsome son, she knows, but I am not yet her son come to visit.

  "I thought, just another," she says. "Since . . ."

  Here she has begun to recognize my visit: since my handsome son has come to see me. She now sits and pats the chair next to her, where I go and sit. She holds my face as I take her glass. "He's so handsome." We kiss, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect of a home visit, because since her trouble began she has applied lipstick around, not on, her lips, in a wide ovoid tour of her face suggestive all at once of Emmett Kelly and blackface minstrels and topographical contour maps. She has gone in for odd shades of orange lipstick since this novel application began; it gives her the look of an aging peach.

  "Maybe some of the high stuff, too," she says to my father, who is filling her vase with orange juice. He hesitates. He looks at me, as if to say he is a better keeper than giving her another drink would suggest, and I give him a little why not shrug, to suggest I know he's a better keeper, and so we agree on her drinking and he adds some vodka. Frankly I have never seen why she shouldn't have all she wants; it only changes her physical dexterity, and that not much. I do not even know the official diagnosis, though I know there is one. My father maintains simply that she is "sick." "Premature senility" seemed to suffice in the beginning, but today I am sure there are more specific names, if not more specific treatment.

  She sits back with her foot-high drink, the only glass she will have, and my father and I let her concentrate on it before we start our tape.

  "How's school?"

  "Fine. I'm not in it, though, exactly."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I got fed up."

  He hands me another beer. I hand it back. "I'm in training."

  "For what?"

  "Life."

  "Good luck."

  Now that I have indicated I may not become a professor, the only natural end, in his mind, of a higher degree, he is ready to allow some merit accrue to the profession which was altogether lacking while he thought me pursuing it.

  "In the Depression, professors were the only guys with work. They had good jobs."

  "I'm sure." We are close to the end and best part of the tape, and I can't stand it, so I jump his lines.

  "Life is fifty-one percent, like you say."

  "You're damned straight? His emphasis delivers the meaning: again, he means I am not straight.

  Generally these conversations--or this conversation, it does not vary--amount to a slow but surefooted indictment of whatever I am doing, and they are a bit irritating because before now I have always been more or less applying myself in ways more or less indicated, I felt, by a natural pursuit of self-aggrandizing going up in the world. But tonight, for the first time, his accusations are correct, though he doesn't know it, and because they are correct, our little play is not irritating.

  "What I've been doing," I say, "--and I will have that beer--is women in squalid quarters who are all about Mom's age. Been fun." My father apparently senses an extraordinary turn, which a taunt like my revelation finally is, and surprises my mother with yet another towering drink, which she bites down on like a snake volunteering venom into a toxin funnel.

  "Mmm," she says. "High stuff, too."

  He shakes his head with a small laugh, and he realizes we are not going to fight because I'm not going to defend, I'm going to attack.

  "Fifty-one percent, I think, is better at about nineteen. I'm playing nineteen. I have a friend up the road chasing armadillos with a Geiger counter. He's hitting ninety-five percent."

  My father compresses his lips, pushes them out a bit. This speech is about his credo--the speculator's hustler's credo--of life and business. If you win fifty-one percent, you're in the black. The presence of the credo is the subterranean suggestion, ever present, that I take over the oil-pipe business.

  "He's so handsome." We look at her, at each other.

  "You're right," he says--to me, about Tom's ninety-five percent, not my looks. He is not sincere.

  While my mother balances her drink--how she came to be served exclusively in this ridiculous and difficult container I do not know--my father and I make a drink for ourselves. The strong whiskey makes me dizzy, as if a wave of water has gone through the room. I am prepared, as at no time before, to deny completely all injunction, pressure to assume the family business, which topic is just beneath the surface of all our percent patter.

  Before, my refusal has been vague, I have managed simply to delay the event. Tonight I am possessed of this confident, sliding-away strength, and I am not going to delay, to put it off, I'm going to deny the inheritance because . . . because I no longer trust women my age. That is the thought that comes to me as we watch my mother totter her vase of high stuff to her orange face. Pine-Sol and Havana Carlisle's legendary cigars (my father has lit a cigarillo) come to me. The entire life reaction series of human bondings and splittings has had something to do with my not taking the family business. It is the artificial center someone would have me assume.

  At that moment I thought of Mary and Wallace, and of my own mother and how she had changed from someone not like them to someone very much like them. I've liked my mother a whole lot more since she became daft, for where she is dotty and funny now, she was presumptuous and full of conviction before, and if one's preferring a crippled mental state to the normal precedent, particularly his own mother's, is perverse, then so be it. It is just another index of the magnitude of the effects of the series.

  I get ready to tell my father, "I refuse the business because I refuse these young twit broads full of purpose"--something actually that rational is on my tongue--when my mother says, out of the blue, to him,

  "You'd better get ready."

  It startles me. Can she know? Can she perceive mental states now that hers is largely gone?

  "The beauty parlor isn't open until 9:30," my father says.

  "Then we'd better be ready."

  My mother has an appointment at her beauty parlor every day of the week. They oblige her there, with, among other services, the application of her lipstick as she likes it, and when she emerges looking like Emmett Kelly
with a blue Virginia Graham hairdo, they assure her how good she looks in condescending tones.

  "We'll be ready," I say.

  "Do you," she says, turning to me, "have a license to meddle?"

  This is a bit of the old girl. These vodkas are having a restorative effect.

  "Yes," I say.

  "It's expired," she says. To my father; "Your son's got a meddling license." She means, I think, to emphasize the your, to saddle him with me, but in missing the emphasis she indicts my sex, she invokes the daughter she never was able to have, and so you cannot know finally if the emphasis is misplaced or simply badly timed. She does this curious emphasis often.

  My father and I keep quiet waiting for her little tempest to pass, probably both now doubting the wisdom of allowing her the three towering cocktails. "I know what lips are," she says, grinning, as if to acknowledge she has been naughty in this passing assault, "but what's stick?" Thus she is restored, occupied by lipstick, one of her two or three central preoccupations (the beauty parlor, the high stuff) since her illness set in. In a moment she'll be again deciding I'm handsome beyond all rational measure. By her flare-up, my father is spared my kook speech. When they retire I wander about the house; it is a blend of low ranch and tall Georgian, which means twenty small columns across the broad, split-level front, where once four tall columns would have been. The rooms are museum set pieces, matched collections of antiques assembled by my mother.

  In the kitchen I am surprised to find my father back down, having another drink, his face a brick-red hue and his lips aligned in a tall, narrow pursing, as if carefully stacked up for the sake of neatness. I get a beer.

  Without turning his head to look at me, he says, "You're not doing anything? Now the lips are pressed out into a grim line, a shade lighter than when they'd been in the warehouse position.

  "No, sir. For once you are correct."

  He makes no move.

  "In fact," I say, "I'm doing less than anything." I have noticed that in my dealings with him I am invariably cast back into an adolescent kind of smartness, and he responds in kind by pretending to hear me out without listening, waiting to tell me where I went wrong.