“Something the matter?” his wife says, and he says “Oh, you know, just that heady all-consuming philosophical thinking pushing in again,” and she says “So tell me, I can stop to listen, seeing how you’ve stopped,” and he says “‘To listen’—that’s right, that’s what it is and why I stopped—no, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and all that baloney before about my having deep and demanding philosophical thoughts and also thoughts of big decisions and worries and remorse over how I’m treating the kids and the growing possibilities of disabling and painful illnesses—my teeth, I remember—well, they were all just that, baloney, is what I’m saying,” and she says “Why? How?” and rests her head on his thigh, and he says “What I mean is, it’s just not like me or in me to think philosophically—I mostly just go on and on and don’t stop to think, so I was evading your questions from not now but before, and of course also now, meaning just before,” and she says “Wait, I’m losing you,” and he says “I’m saying that if I do get a philosophical thought it’s usually by accident—I’m thinking of something practical, let’s say, and the philosophical thought just pops up, but it mostly usually comes from something like, if I get a pain in my stomach that wakes me up two consecutive nights and keeps me up, I think maybe I have pancreatic cancer—the one they can’t detect till it’s in an untreatable stage because it was hidden behind some other organs, and that might make me think of my mortality, of how I’d hate to go so fast and leave you and the kids while they’re so young and also the physical pain I’d have before they doped me up with morphine and the emotional pain it would bring the kids of their daddy dying and probably to you too,” and she says “Of course me, what do you think?” and he says “I know, but you could recover after a while—a year, half a year—and marry again, while with them they’ve lost their father permanently, there’s really no one to replace him if he goes when they’re so young—but what was I saying? And truth is, even that wasn’t a good example of a philosophical thought—it wasn’t even one. So maybe I never get philosophical thoughts, or I get them only rarely but never deep ones. But I was saying or was going to say that I didn’t have any philosophical thoughts before when I was sitting downstairs and told you I did, or thoughts of worry and remorse and so on, but only a rush of thoughts with pictures and scenes and the rest of it of kids I knew when I was between maybe five and fifteen. I don’t even know why the thoughts came, or why those particular kids, some of whom I haven’t thought of in maybe thirty years, though maybe the more erotic scenes—one was of seeing a girl’s vagina for the first time when I was four or five, or first time where I remembered it—came in simply because I was feeling amorous and wanted to make love, even if it took me a while to get up here, and so those excited me to it. Anyway, they won’t stop me anymore—I think enough time’s elapsed where I’m done with them for now—and we better get going again since we don’t have much more time,” and runs his hand over her shoulder and across her mouth, and she moves her face next to his and they resume making love.
He’s behind her, place he likes best, her buttocks up and his hands holding her hips, pretty close to the finish he guesses since it hardly ever takes him long when they’re like this, much as he’d like to keep going for her sake, though she was the one who said “Come behind me”—probably because they were so short of time and she was nowhere near done—something he often hopes she’ll suggest and he rarely initiates since she’s said it’s never the best position for her and she does it mostly because she knows how much he loves it. “Not that I’m saying it’s horrible,” she once said, “it’s just that I can’t see you and it’s rough on my elbows and knees and the pleasure isn’t the greatest so it’s simply not one of my favorites,” when he thinks of Bea Fields. Standing in front of an audience, hands cupped to her chest, eyes closed, face transported, moving her mouth as if singing. He liked to sing also and could tell her voice was beautiful with clean tones and a tremendous range though it seemed for her age a little artificial and too trained. Mr. Sisk, the music teacher, said a few times he’d like them to do a duet in front of the assembly, since they had the best voices in school, and he was glad it never got past an idea. She usually snubbed him, seemed to look down on all the boys, maybe because she knew how they felt about her and also because she thought they had no culture and she didn’t think much of their brains. She was homely, big thick glasses, large nose, piano legs they said, messy frizzy hair, big fat breasts before it seemed any of the other girls started to get theirs or only had buds, waist and hips like those women who wore bustles in old-fashioned westerns though she was only twelve or thirteen, ugly dresses and shoes, big lips, little teeth, whiny speaking voice, it was said she never studied for tests but she always ended up with top marks, he and a few others also tried out for Performing Arts but she was the only one to get in. At their graduation ceremony she sang a Negro spiritual, something from a popular operetta and La Bohème, and then, other than for once or twice in the neighborhood, he never saw her again.
He comes, keeps moving as long as he can, then she lies on her stomach and he collapses on top of her. They stay that way, side of face against side of face, her eye closed, probably the other one too, and she’s murmuring while he thinks of Gwynn. The best athlete for a girl he ever played with, and then she lost a leg below the knee because of some rare bone disease her first year in high school. Then she was in a wheelchair without the other leg and last time he saw her was when he was going to a movie alone, it was his first or second year in college, and she was in her chair in front of her apartment building a block from the theater, she must have been left there since it was a walk-up and she couldn’t have got downstairs herself, and he said “Gwynn?” though he knew it was her, and she said “Gordon Tannenbaum, or Mandelbaum?” and he said “Mandelbaum, though no difference,” and asked how she was and she said fine, doing okay, considering, she finally graduated high school with an equivalency diploma by having a slew of special-education teachers come to her home and that she was even planning to go to college, which she bet he was in now and he said he was, but also working, but that was good, her going to college, getting out and around and really exercising the brain, and he thought maybe she’d like to go to the movie with him, he could handle it, wheeling her there and back or she could do her own wheeling if that was the kind of wheelchair it was and she had the strength for it and preferred doing it, and then he’d just ring up her apartment and someone would come down for her and get her up however they do it and he’d even pay her way, treat her at the candy counter and everything, but said “Well, I’ll see ya,” and she said “It’s been nice talking, stop by again,” and he felt bad after he left, and looked back from the corner and saw her talking with an older woman but looking at him. She waved, he waved, he continued going but told himself he would stop by, maybe even phone for her to meet him downstairs or he’d come upstairs to help her down, and later heard, maybe a year after, she’d been sent to a hospital in the Midwest that specialized in her disease and that was the last he heard anything about her. He wonders if these people, the ones who didn’t die, ever think of him. His wife says from under him “You better fetch the kids,” and he says “Right, I forgot,” looks at the clock, gets up and wipes himself and dresses and quickly leaves.
BATTERED HEAD
He bangs his head against something when he’s exercising. He sees light, feels blood, goes into the bathroom—all this was done in the dark, just a little moonlight—turns on the light there and sees the cut. “How could I have been so stupid?” he thinks. “Unfamiliar house; we were here last summer for a month but our first night in it this one; why didn’t I turn on the lights?” He was exercising in the dining room, which has the stairway in it, and his daughter was sleeping or falling asleep upstairs with her door open because she was afraid to sleep with it closed and he didn’t want the light to wake her. He already has a paper towel to the cut, looks at it and at the cut in the mirror, still bleeding, presses harder, thi
nks he should get an ice pack on it to keep down the swelling, goes into the dining room to get to the kitchen but stops to see what he banged his head on. Stands on the spot where he thinks he was exercising. Must have been one of those two spindles or stems or whatever they are—just the top poles of the back of the dinner table chair on his left, that he hit his head on. The exercise was where he puts his hands on his hips—no, clasps them behind his neck and touches his left knee with his left elbow and then his right knee with his right elbow and does that ten times. It’s the first of a series of exercises he devised for himself years ago and has been doing every morning or late evening or sometimes at his office in the afternoon, if he has about ten minutes and the door’s closed and he hasn’t done it that morning and prefers getting it over with rather than doing it that night. He was only doing the first movement of the exercise when he banged his head. The cut seems dry, and he takes off the towel. Still bleeding, and now hurts, and he folds the towel over, presses a clean part to his head and goes to the bathroom for last year’s aspirins. This year’s he hasn’t unpacked yet.
Next morning his daughter says “Where’d you get that?” and he says “If I told you I got it exercising last night, you’d say I must have been drunk.” “Huh?” and he says “What I’m saying is I did get it exercising—doing this, which I won’t be able to do for a while with this head,” and shows her. “Oh Jesus, that hurt, and it’s still bleeding, I see, and I wasn’t drunk when I got it, sweetie. I was just unfamiliar with the terrain—this room, so what I thought was air was a chair, no po-tree intended.” She says “Well it looks ugly and you should put a Band-Aid on it,” and he thinks “She’ll be ashamed of it if I take her to camp as is, and she’ll be right.”
At camp the counselor he leaves her with says “What happened there?” pointing to the Band-Aid and Mercurochrome stain around it, and he says “If I told you I banged up my head exercising, you’d say,” but because his daughter’s there he should change the line, “that I’m either drunk saying that or was drunk when I got it. But I’m not, wasn’t not—either, neither. I got it in the most paradoxical way possible—like jogging, I mean dying of a heart attack jogging, you know what I mean?” and she nods, and he thinks she doesn’t know or has stopped listening. He should know whom he’s talking to, not go over or under or try to ram through their heads. And maybe his head’s been affected by the blow worse than he knows.
Says good-by to his daughter, kisses her lips, says he’ll be here 3:30 promptly or even a quarter hour before, “since all the campers do the last fifteen minutes is hang around in the sun waiting to be picked up. We’ll stop at the Hillside View Diner for a snack on the way home. You’ll have fun here, meet lots of girls. Don’t forget to take sailing, if you want, as your main morning activity for the month. I want her to,” he says to the counselor, “because I want her to teach me everything she learns.” “And we’ll try to teach her everything we know.” His daughter never says a word. Didn’t want to come. Said yesterday during the drive up “I’m not going to camp, just so you know.” Said it a few days ago, weeks ago, in February when he was filling out the application: “You say your money’s so hard-earned? Well I don’t care if you waste it and I won’t be guilty if you don’t get a refund.” She pulls her head away when he tries kissing the top. He says “Well, good-by, my dearie,” and walks to the car, turns around when he gets to it. She’s staring sadly at him, shoulders folded in, face saying “How can you leave me here?” Her glasses make her look even sadder. He knows the feeling. Painfully shy—they said it about him, he says it about her, but she’s even more that way than he was. The counselor sees her staring, puts her arm around her and walks her over to a group of girls, all with eyeglasses, and introduces her. They each say hello to her and resume their hand-slapping counting game. The counselor has a volleyball-size ball under her arm, throws it to one of the girls; the girl catches it, looks around what to do with it and the counselor says “Toss it to Debbie—the new girl.” “Here, Debbie, catch.” Deborah shakes her head, steps back, looks at him. “Play, play,” he mouths, and puts his hands up as if catching the ball, then throwing it forward and then from under his legs. She looks away, at no one now. Doesn’t like to play ball. Thinks she’s an awful athlete and clumsy runner. Likes reading books. Has always been tops in school. Likes to paint, draw, sculpt in clay, write stories and plays, make things. She has one good friend in the city; they don’t even see each other that much. She’s too shy to ask her over; waits till the friend asks if she can come over. He loves it when she’s having fun with another kid, running around with her, laughing, confiding, sitting on the same couch reading, being wild, playing games, but it’s so rare. What have we done to her? What’s he done, he means, since he wanted and got custody of her.
Leaves, works at home, couple of times his head aches and he takes aspirins and rests on the bed, every so often thinks he’s doing the wrong thing by forcing her to go to camp, “but then I want to work during the day so what am I supposed to do?” Intends getting back at 3:15 but wants to finish a page he worked on all day, so doesn’t get there till quarter of, and the roads were clear all the way. “Sorry I’m late; traffic; one Maine driver after the other in front of me. How was it?” “My lunch was almost boiling. You left it in the sun.” “Sweetheart, I left your bag in the shade behind a rock but the sun’s direction must have changed. Put it where you want next time. And sailing?” “We didn’t go out. Water was too choppy. Instead we played these rough games. Like red rover, which you can break your arm doing and which I think lots of them wanted to do, yours and their own. I sat out after a minute. I’m not going to make any friends or have a good time here. They all know one another from school and around. I’m the only one from the city.” “There must be more. Have you checked?” “No, but I’ve heard. I’m not going to camp tomorrow.” “You have to give it a try. I told you: after a week or so, if you still have some major grievances about it, we’ll have a serious discussion about your continuing it.” She sulks in the car. A counselor said good-by. A girl waved to her when they drove off. “Who was that girl who waved before?” he says. “She seemed to like you, and all the counselors too.” “I don’t know. She didn’t swim either, so we sat next to each other at the lake.” “Why didn’t you swim?” “I felt cold. And there are bloodsuckers in the water.” “Don’t worry about those. Chances are one in a thousand one will get on you, and if it does, little touch with a cigarette or sprinkle of salt and it falls off dead.” “Last summer a boy got one on his leg and it bled down to the ground.” “That’s the water mixing with the blood, making it seem like much more. But that girl before. Just by the way she waved, I’d say she wanted to be your friend.” “You can’t tell by one look. And she only talked about stupid TV shows you’d never let me watch and what a fun time next week’s Pirate’s Day is going to be. She’s like most of them here and last year. They’re nice but we don’t like the same things.” “Give them a chance. She might have brought up those shows just to—” But she’s turned away, doesn’t want to hear anything he says.
Next morning she screams when he tells her to get in the car to go to camp, cries when he leaves her, won’t look at him when he picks her up or do anything later but complain to him at home. Same thing the next two days but worse. It’s the freezing lake water, rough games, competitive sports, smelly outhouses, baby stuff they do in arts and crafts, a sort of open shed the girls have to undress in and which the boys are always peeking into, no drinking water anywhere so you have to lug around your heavy thermos everyplace or die of thirst, scavenger hunts that take hours in the woods or hot sun and turn out to mean nothing—either they disqualify half the things you find or the prize is a piece of old bubble gum.
She’s sullen most of the weekend. He works a couple of hours both mornings but they do a few things after that—go to the ocean, eat in a restaurant, climb halfway up a big hill but what the locals call a mountain, pick blueberries that aren’t ready yet
, but he can tell that camp on Monday’s usually on her mind. “All right,” he says at dinner Sunday night, “list everything that’s good and bad about camp, but be honest. First of all, from what I can see the girls are darn nice. One of them—Laurie or Lauren, I think—when we got to camp late Friday, ran up to you and said ‘Debbie, where were you? I missed you. I thought you weren’t coming today, and then you’d have missed the field trip to Goose Cove,’ and took your hand and you both walked happily away.” “I wasn’t happy. And except for the rougher boys, it’s not the kids at all.” She enumerates what she hates most about camp. When she gets to “Eight, the mosquitoes, I get so many bites, I itch all day even with the scallion you rub on,” he says “Listen, enough already, will you? You’re just trying to fortify your argument with anything you can think against camp. Next it’ll be horse flies, then poison ivy, then poisonous snakes you hear are around, though I don’t think there are any in all of Maine. I’m sorry, sweetie, but after everything you’ve said so far, I don’t buy your argument.” Tears appear; “I hate you, Daddy,” and she runs outside, minute later the kitchen door slams and she runs to her room. “All I’m asking,” he shouts, “is for you to give it another week and then decide; what the heck’s that?” Then thinks: How’s he supposed to take what she said to him? She was never that harsh before. Well, just a kid her age having a tantrum, not getting what she wants, thinking he’s not being completely fair, and maybe he isn’t, but the hell with it. Later he’ll call her in for dessert, act as if nothing happened, and she’ll be fine, or almost, and probably even apologize without his prompting.
Long Made Short Page 9