Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  Mr. Custard lapsed into a brief silence, mentally replaying with satisfaction his speech. Up ahead, an orange glow rose above the black pines and the blue highway—and for a moment his heart kicked excitedly. Then he realized it was just a town.

  “Are all you ladies hungry? You all eat lately?”

  The skinny one made a sound suggesting that she would never do such a thing, while the chubby one in the back, eager to accommodate, said that she was ravenous, but could wait.

  Mr. Custard was not hungry himself. He never got hungry, really. He ate to pass the time or to make it with waitresses. At the moment he was tired of driving and felt the need to stretch his legs.

  He knew the town. Hadn’t he been here just last night? He grappled with the temptation to pull in again at Rosie’s Roadhouse. He liked retracing his steps, enjoyed being recognized. These returns lent his days a harmony that he found almost irresistible, as he supposed the great poet Shakespeare must have found a rhyme irresistible. But as much as he would have enjoyed a scene with the platinum-blonde waitress, whose dog and books were in the back seat of his car, he could not see any way to turn that reunion to his simultaneous advantage with the girls. He was open to experience and welcomed complications for their entertainment value, but he understood in an abstract way that many people did not.

  Sometimes the impossibility of doing everything at once gave him an almost physical pang of frustration. He had a poor memory and was averse to foresight, so to a great extent his life was circumscribed by last night’s and this night’s sleep. This confinement gave him leave to enjoy himself as best he could, but it also deprived him of the joys of anticipation and reminiscence. The future was whatever at that moment he wanted, and the past was whatever he said it was. The present was all that really existed. Whatever he wasn’t doing right now could never be done.

  “A joy postponed,” he muttered, “is a joy forgone.”

  “Who said that?” asked the one called Slim.

  “Shakespeare,” said Mr. Custard. He always attributed anything epigrammatic to Shakespeare—or sometimes, lately, to Freud, whom he respectfully called “Dr. Freud.”

  He pulled up under a neon sign that buzzed polyphonically, like a horde of mosquitoes. “Here we are!” he cried, smacking the steering wheel. The skinny one hugged herself and looked out the windshield skeptically, so he improvised an explanation for his enthusiasm: “Best goddamn steak sandwich in a fifty-mile radius.”

  They got out of the car and Mr. Custard sniffed the air.

  “This here dog …” began Slim, holding her door open uncertainly.

  “That’s a good dog,” said Mr. Custard automatically. The waitress last night had yelled “Bad dog!” every time it jumped up on Mr. Custard. For some reason, dogs loved him. As a joke, he’d stolen this one and rechristened it Good Dog, but since then he had not given it much thought. Animals bored him.

  “Slim’s a vegetarian,” said Missy, working extra syllables into the strange word.

  “I am not,” said Slim, slamming the car door and hurrying after them. “I mean, not anymore. I eat meat sometimes.”

  A waitress came forward with three menus.

  “We want … a booth,” said Mr. Custard with tentative zeal, as if choosing his favorite of many favorite colors. “By the window. We won’t need those,” he said, waving away the menus as they were seated, the girls across from him. “Three steak sandwiches.”

  “We don’t got steak sandwich,” said the waitress.

  “You all got steak?” asked Mr. Custard, by no means dismayed.

  “It’s on the menu,” said the waitress, with a meaningful glance at the menus.

  “You all got toast?”

  “It’s on the menu too.”

  “You all got gravy?”

  She sighed wistfully, thinking of other, better-paying jobs. “Ten cents extra with your choice of tater.”

  But Mr. Custard abruptly abandoned his leading questions and asked the girls what they wanted. They were unable to resist the urge to pick up and peruse the menus.

  “I’ll come back for all your orders.”

  “Hold on a second, sister,” said Mr. Custard. “What’s the special?”

  She looked at him distantly. “There ain’t no special. It’s all special.”

  Mr. Custard had a rich, fruity, irresistible laugh that seemed to touch several notes at once, like a chord strummed on a guitar. The waitress and the girls were swept up into his laughter as into a street dance.

  “It’s all special. I like that.” He put his elbows on the table. “Tell me though now: What’s good?”

  The waitress whistled and seemed to shrink a couple of inches. “I don’t know if I’m the one to ask.”

  “You don’t eat here?”

  “Can’t afford to.”

  Mr. Custard placed his hands palm-down on the table, closed his eyes, and said, “They charge you?”

  “Not even a discount.”

  “But you work here!”

  She gave him a look like she felt a little sorry for anyone so naive.

  Mr. Custard tried a different tack. He whispered, “How’s the cook?”

  “Aw, Clem’s all right. Clean and all. Not like some of them.”

  “What’s safe?” asked Mr. Custard.

  She stared blankly out the window for a few seconds, then decided to give his question some thought. “The chicken wings come frozen in a big box,” she offered at last.

  “Then we’ll have the wings,” said Mr. Custard grandiosely, to please her.

  “Three?”

  The skinny one grunted. The chubby one looked up from her menu and asked, “You got french fries?”

  The waitress scribbled on her pad with a pencil.

  “And bring us some bread,” said Mr. Custard.

  “Just bread?”

  “For an appetizer.”

  “Something to drink?”

  “Yes. Water. Coffee. No, beer. You ladies want something to drink? These ladies are nineteen and twenty,” added Mr. Custard with subdued pride.

  “Naw,” said the skinny one.

  “No thank you,” said the chubby one.

  The waitress carried their order to the kitchen as though it were a disagreeable burden. Mr. Custard, who did not believe he had quite won her over, felt a strong urge to follow her. Instead, he pulled on his fingers till each of his knuckles popped, then looked at the girls slyly, as if he’d just performed a cartwheel.

  “Hot in here, ain’t it?” he sighed.

  The waitress dropped their drinks and a bowl of bread onto the table.

  “I heard you had some excitement round here the other day ago,” said Mr. Custard.

  “Who told you that?” She looked prepared to search out the source and set them straight.

  “No one. I was just passing through. I’m a salesman,” he explained.

  “Well there ain’t no excitement round here since I was born,” said the waitress, and stalked off.

  The girls looked at him quizzically. He smiled, unruffled. So they’d discovered he was a salesman as well as a psychologist. So what?

  He stood and stretched, lifting his arms and twisting from side to side like he was wringing out a rag. “Excuse me,” he winked, “nature calls.” He made a friendly circuit of the entire room before exiting through the hallway that led to the toilets. He’d never had to piss so bad in all his life.

  Missy had never met a psychologist before. The men she knew in Delyle, the men who’d been coming up to talk to her in Soda’s like they were renewing an old acquaintance since she was twelve, were all loggers and mechanics and mill workers. They all had the same cagey, distrustful, seagull strut, as if whatever direction they happened to be walking was just the long way round to what they really meant to get at. They all looked at you with the same beady, sideways squint, as if you were a bear too stupid to realize they had a shotgun behind their back.

  Mr. Custard, on the other hand, had an honest gaze; he
saw only what he looked at, and then he saw it completely. He had a face like a hatchet: pointed, probing, and sharp. His profile was normal, all his features in the right proportions (though perhaps his nose was a bit longer than most), but when looked at straight on, his head was shockingly narrow. His gaze, however, more than the shape of his head, gave her the impression of a hatchet. He swung his eyes about like a woodsman swinging an axe, lodging it to the hilt in one object after another. Whoosh-chop, he sank his gaze into her; whoosh-chop, into Slim; whoosh-chop, into the waitress. His eyes were a luminous light brown, with fanning rays of grey and blue. She had never seen such clear, such finely detailed eyes. They seemed to be in sharper focus than the rest of his face.

  The girls sat there, each staring straight ahead, startled by the silence that Mr. Custard had left in his wake, like the ringing in one’s ears after a loud noise. Deprived of its object and focus, the competitive animosity that had been growing between them was suddenly laid bare, and neither would look at or acknowledge it.

  Missy was convinced that Slim’s inane friendliness was an assault on her own policy of laconic aloofness. In her experience with men, she’d found that acting cold and uninterested—even if she was genuinely cold and uninterested—was the most effective way to inflame their ardor. She believed that this tactic was succeeding with Mr. Custard and that Slim was only making a fool of herself, but she resented the distraction of Slim’s stupid, stubborn presence, which prevented him from proceeding in the usual manner.

  In the car, listening to him talk, Missy had felt a strong urge to abandon her policy and tell him everything. Here was a man who understood people. Here was a man she could talk to! The only thing stopping her was Slim. Anything she might have said would have sounded ridiculous in front of her friend. Why, thought Missy miserably, had she brought her along?

  Slim would never have dared to run away if Missy hadn’t done it first. Indeed, Slim seemed compelled to mimic Missy’s every act and attitude. At first she had found this flattering, but lately it had begun to annoy her that Slim had no personality, no substance of her own. To be reflected in an empty mirror was no honor.

  The most aggravating of all Slim’s homages was her affectation of hating Mrs. Ludlow, her grandmother. If Missy hated her own mother it was for good reason: because Maude didn’t give a howling damn about her. Screaming at you was only a habit of hers. She’d screamed at Mike and Ted, too, and it had about as much to do with anything you’d done or said as with the weather. Missy only played hooky or stayed out all night to give her mother’s shrieking condemnations an occasional justification. Slim, on the other hand, played hooky and stayed out all night to get a rise out of her grandmother, whom she then despised for chastising her. And she seemed to despise her praise as much as her criticism. Once, Mrs. Ludlow had been telling Missy a story about Slim as a kid. “She was such a clever girl,” she was saying, when Slim sprang up from the table and grabbed a lumpen clay ashtray that she had made for Mrs. Ludlow when she was six or seven. (Missy had made just such an ashtray herself, though she could not remember what had become of it.) “Why do you even keep this hideous thing?,” Slim had screamed. “You don’t even smoke!” Then she’d smashed it on the floor and stomped out of the room like she was stepping on the devil’s face. A week or so later Missy noticed that the ashtray was back in place on its shelf: Mrs. Ludlow had glued it back together.

  The waitress brought three plates of wings, two of them balanced on the inside of her arm, and a basket of french fries.

  “Your friend, he all right?” she asked, as if it wasn’t any of her business.

  Missy made a sound of indifference. Slim said, “He just went to the, you know—nature calls.”

  When the waitress had gone, Slim moved around to the other side of the booth and looked out the window.

  “His car’s gone,” she said.

  Missy refused even to be surprised. With a minute mental adjustment, she corrected her mistake and accepted that Mr. Custard was, in fact, after all, no different from any of the men in Delyle.

  “He said he was a salesman,” she murmured, poking at a chicken wing. It was red, pimply, and slimy, and she could imagine it being torn off a real chicken.

  “He said he was writing a book,” said Slim. “But the books he had—” She shook her head. “A Dictionary of English Surnames, that was one.”

  “That T-shirt,” said Missy. “My uncle Lewis had one. A blue one, but the same coconuts and trees on it and things.”

  Slim nodded. “That dog,” she said.

  Missy pursed her lips in agreement. “Nobody calls their dog ‘Good Dog.’”

  Slim held up a french fry, peered at it skeptically, then laid it back among the others.

  “We can’t pay for this,” said Missy suddenly, as it occurred to her.

  “We got no money,” Slim agreed.

  “Shitfire,” said Missy.

  “Holy coyote,” said Slim.

  “Eat the rich and shit the poor,” they drawled in unison.

  The girls’ eyes met briefly, then glanced away.

  With both hands, Missy lifted Mr. Custard’s untouched glass of beer to her lips. It tasted sour and grainy—not at all what she had expected. She masked her surprise with a grimace of satisfaction.

  “Helps me think,” she confided, sliding the glass back to its original position.

  Slim nodded and pulled the glass to herself. She sniffed it a little before sipping, Missy thought, but otherwise betrayed no lack of familiarity with the beverage.

  They drank the beer surreptitiously, watching out for the waitress and returning the glass to the same spot after each swallow. Missy felt that, in some small way, justice was being done: if they had eaten the food they had ordered, it would be stealing; but drinking Mr. Custard’s beer was making him the thief, which was just what he deserved.

  A family of three came in, turning their bewildered heads in every direction as if trying to figure out where the food was. The waitress led them to a table.

  “When she takes that order,” Missy whispered.

  “She’ll have her back to us,” Slim finished.

  The waitress hung back, looking their way occasionally. Then the man with his family beckoned.

  “Now,” Missy mouthed.

  The door chimed incriminatingly, but no one shouted at them to stop; and then they were outside and running, first from nervousness and fear, then for pleasure. Missy felt that all the blood in her body had gone to her head and was churning around in her brain like water in a washing machine. Behind her, Slim let out a whoop that echoed down the silent street.

  The sky had gone from blue to purple and black. The town was even smaller and dingier than Delyle. On one side of the road was a line of dusty shops, all dark and closed; on the other was a sparse copse of pines. A car turned onto the road, its headlights stretching the girls’ shadows out from their feet, and they slowed to a brisk, skipping walk as it passed. Missy felt like laughing, but she funneled the impulse down into her limbs, swinging her arms and kicking her feet as she walked.

  Soon the cold of the night had pinched off even this lingering energy. She put on her coat and hugged herself, trying to hold on to the warm glow from the beer and the triumph of their escape. She had begun to recognize, as an abstract proposition, that they were stranded here, in the middle of nowhere, with the cold of night settling in, without a ride or any money or any hope of finding a place to sleep, when Slim drew up short and grabbed her arm.

  “That’s his car.”

  It was parked, roughly speaking, in front of another diner. The girls approached without hesitation, as if it were their own. Indeed, Missy felt an impulse to throw open the door and crawl inside and wait for Mr. Custard as if nothing had happened. At first sight of the car, she had felt simple relief; but as this hardly seemed adequate in the circumstances, she clenched her teeth and tried to feel angry.

  “We should cut his tires,” she said experimentally.
/>   “We should … steal his dog,” said Slim, scratching at her eczema.

  The dog, still in back, lifted its head as their shadows passed over the windows.

  Grinning and shivering, they stared at the diner, which gave off a provokingly warm and soft light.

  Missy articulated a new grunt, one comprised of promise, threat, and resolve.

  “C’mon,” she said.

  They strode side by side across the parking lot; but when they reached the entrance, Missy held the door for Slim, who was left no choice but to go first.

  The wind picked up and across the road the pines shuffled restlessly. In the car, the dog cracked its lips in a squeaking yawn, then fussily laid its head back on the seat.