The World According to Garp

by John Winslow Irving

“You animal, Roberta,” Garp had hissed to her.

  The shoulder straps of the huge, hideous bra dug into his shoulders. But whenever Garp felt that a woman was staring at him, perhaps doubting his sex, he would simply turn himself sideways to her and show off. Thus eliminating any possible doubt, or so he hoped.

  He was less sure of the wig. A tousled whore's head of honey-blond hair, under which his own scalp itched.

  A pretty green silk scarf was at his throat.

  His dark face was powdered a sickly gray, but this concealed, Roberta said, his stubble of beard. His rather thin lips were cherry-colored, but he kept licking them and had smeared the lipstick at one corner of his mouth.

  “You look like you've just been kissed,” Roberta reassured him.

  Though Garp was cold, Roberta had not allowed him to wear his ski parka—it made his shoulders look too thick. And on Garp's feet was a towering pair of knee-high boots—a kind of cherry vinyl that matched, Roberta said, his lipstick. Garp had seen himself reflected in a storefront window and he'd told Roberta that he thought he looked like a teen-age prostitute.

  “An aging teen-age prostitute,” Roberta had corrected him.

  “A faggot parachutist,” Garp had said.

  “No, you look like a woman, Garp,” Roberta had assured him. “Not a woman with especially good taste, but a woman.”

  So Garp sat squirming in School of Nursing Hall. He twisted the itchy rope braids of his ridiculous purse, a scraggily hemp thing with an oriental design, barely big enough to hold his wallet. In her large, bursting shoulder bag, Roberta Muldoon had hidden Garp's real clothes—his other identity.

  “This is Manda Horton-Jones,” Roberta whispered, indicating a thin, hawk-nosed woman speaking nasally and with her rodential head pointed down; she read a stiff, prepared speech.

  Garp didn't know who Manda Horton-Jones was; he shrugged, enduring her. The speeches had ranged from strident, political calls for unity to disturbed, painful, personal reminiscences of Jenny Fields. The audience did not know whether to applaud or to pray—whether to voice approval or to nod grimly. The atmosphere was both one of mourning and one of urgent togetherness—with a strong sense of marching forth. Thinking about it, Garp supposed this was natural and fitting, both to his mother and to his dim perception of what the women's movement was.

  “This is Sally Devlin,” Roberta whispered. The woman now climbing to the speakers' platform looked pleasant and wise and vaguely familiar. Garp felt immediately the need to defend himself from her. He didn't mean it, but solely to goad Roberta, Garp whispered, “She has nice legs.”

  “Nicer than yours,” Roberta said, pinching his thigh painfully between her strong thumb and her long, pass-catching index finger—one of the fingers, Garp supposed, that had been broken so many times during Roberta's fling as a Philadelphia Eagle.

  Sally Devlin looked down on them with her soft, sad eyes as if she were silently scolding a classroom of children who were not paying attention—not even sitting still.

  “That senseless murder does not really merit all this,” she said, quietly. “But Jenny Fields simply helped so many individuals, she simply was so patient and generous with women who were having a bad time. Anyone who's ever been helped by someone else should feel terrible about what's happened to her.”

  Garp felt truly terrible, at that moment; he heard a combined sigh and sob of hundreds of women. Beside him, Roberta's broad shoulders shook against him. He felt a hand, perhaps of the woman sitting directly behind him, grip his own shoulder, cramped in the terrible turquoise jump suit. He wondered if he was about to be slapped for his offensive, inappropriate attire, but the hand just held on to his shoulder. Perhaps the woman needed support. At this moment, Garp knew, they all felt like sisters, didn't they?

  He looked up to see what Sally Devlin was saying, but his own eyes were teary and he could not see Ms. Devlin clearly. He could hear her, though: she was sobbing. Great heartfelt and heaving cries! She was trying to get back to her speech but her eyes couldn't find her place on the page; the page rattled against the microphone. Some very powerful-looking woman, whom Garp thought he had seen before—one of those bodyguard types he had often seen with his mother—tried to help Sally Devlin off the platform, but Ms. Devlin didn't want to leave.

  “I wasn't going to do this,” she said, still crying—meaning her sobs, her loss of control. “I had more to say,” she protested, but she could not get hold of her voice. “Damn it,” she said, with a dignity that moved Garp.

  The big tough-looking woman found herself alone at the microphone. The audience waited quietly. Garp felt a tremble, or maybe a tug, from the hand on his shoulder. Looking at Roberta's large hands, folded in her lap, Garp knew that the hand on his shoulder must be very small. The big tough-looking woman wanted to say something, and the audience waited. But they would wait forever to hear a word from her. Roberta knew her. Roberta stood up beside Garp and began to applaud the big, hard-looking woman's silence—her exasperating quiet in front of the microphone. Other people joined Roberta's applause—even Garp, though he had no idea why he was clapping.

  “She's an Ellen Jamesian,” Roberta whispered to him. “She can't say anything.” Yet the woman melted the audience with her pained, sorry face. She opened her mouth as if she were singing, but no sound came out. Garp imagined he could see the severed stump of her tongue. He remembered how his mother supported them—these crazies; Jenny was wonderful to every single one of them who came to her. But Jenny had finally admitted her disapproval of what they had done—perhaps only to Garp. “They're making victims of themselves,” Jenny had said, “and yet that's the same thing they're angry at men for doing to them. Why don't they just take a vow of silence, or never speak in a man's presence?” Jenny said. “It's not logical: to maim yourself to make a point.”

  But Garp, now touched by the mad woman in front of him, felt the whole history of the world's self-mutilation—though violent and illogical, it expressed, perhaps like nothing else, a terrible hurt. “I am really hurt,” said the woman's huge face, dissolving before him in his own swimmy tears.

  Then the little hand on his shoulder hurt him; he remembered himself—a man at a ritual for women—and he turned around to see the rather tired-looking young woman behind him. Her face was familiar, but he didn't recognize her.

  “I know you,” the young woman whispered to him. She did not sound happy that she knew him, either.

  Roberta had warned him not to open his mouth to anyone, not even to try to speak. He was prepared for handling that problem. He shook his head. He took a pad of paper out of the flap pocket, which was crushed against his mammoth, false bosom, and he snatched a pencil out of his absurd purse. The sharp, clawlike fingers of the woman bit into his shoulder, as if she were keeping him from running away.

  Hi! I'm an Ellen Jamesian,

  Garp scribbled on the pad; he tore the slip off and handed it to the young woman. She didn't take it.

  “Like hell you are,” she said. “You're T. S. Garp.”

  The word Garp bounced like the burp of an unknown animal into the silence of the suffering auditorium, still conducted by the quiet Ellen Jamesian on stage. Roberta Muldoon turned around and looked panic-stricken; she had never seen this particular young woman in her life.

  “I don't know who your big playmate is,” the young woman told Garp, “but you're T. S. Garp. I don't know where you got that dumb wig or those big tits, but I'd know you anywhere. You haven't changed a bit since you were fucking my sister—fucking her to death,” the young woman said. And Garp knew who his enemy was: the last and youngest of the Percy Family Horde. Bainbridge! Little Pooh Percy, who was wearing diapers as a preteen, and, for all Garp knew, might be wearing them still.

  Garp looked at her; Garp had bigger tits than she did. Pooh was asexually attired, her haircut was similar to a popular and unisexual style, her features were neither delicate nor coarse. Pooh wore a U.S. Army shirt with sergeant stripes and a campaign bu
tton for the woman who'd hoped to be the new governor of the State of New Hampshire. With a shock, Garp realized that the woman running for governor was Sally Devlin. He wondered if she'd won!

  “Hello, Pooh,” Garp said, and saw her wince—a hated nickname, obviously, and one she was never called anymore. “Bainbridge,” Garp muttered, but it was too late to make friends. It was years too late. It was too late from the night Garp had bitten off Bonkers' ear, had violated Cushie in the Steering School infirmary, had not ever really loved her—had not come to her wedding, and not to her funeral.

  Whatever grudge against Garp this was, or whatever loathing for men in general, Pooh Percy had her enemy at her mercy—at last.

  Roberta's big warm hand was at the small of Garp's back and her heavy voice urged him, “Get out of here, move fast, don't say a word.”

  “There's a man here!” Bainbridge Percy shouted to the grieving silence of School of Nursing Hall. That even brought a small sound—perhaps a grunt—from the troubled Ellen Jamesian on stage. “There's a man here!” Pooh screamed. “And he's T. S. Garp. Garp is here!” she cried.

  Roberta tried to lead him to the aisle. A tight end is chiefly a good blocker, secondarily a pass—receiver, but even the former Robert Muldoon could not quite move all these women.

  “Please,” Roberta said. “Excuse us, please. She was his mother—you must know that. Her only child.”

  My only mother! Garp thought, plowing against Roberta's back; he felt Pooh Percy's needlelike claws rake his face. She snatched his wig off; he snatched it back and clutched it to his big bosom, as if it mattered to him.

  “He fucked my sister to death!” Pooh Percy wailed. How this perception of Garp had convinced her, Garp would never know—but convinced of it Pooh clearly was. She climbed over the seat he had abandoned and moved in behind him and Roberta—who finally broke through, into the aisle.

  “She was my mother,” Garp said to a woman he was passing, a woman who looked like a potential mother herself. She was pregnant. In the woman's scornful face Garp saw reason and kindness; he also saw restraint and contempt.

  “Let him pass,” the pregnant woman murmured, but without much feeling.

  Others seemed more sympathetic. Someone cried out that he had a right to be there—but there were other things shouted, rather lacking sympathy of any kind.

  Farther up the aisle he felt his falsies punched; he put his hand out for Roberta and realized Roberta had (as they say in football) been taken out of the play. She was down. Several young women wearing navy pea coats appeared to be sitting on her. It occurred to Garp that they might think Roberta was also a man in drag; their discovery that Roberta was real could be painful.

  “Take off, Garp!” Roberta cried.

  “Yes, run, you little fucker!” one woman in a pea coat hissed.

  He ran.

  He was almost up to the milling women at the rear of the hall when someone's blow landed where it was aimed. He had not been hit in the balls since a wrestling practice at Steering—so many years ago, he realized he had forgotten the total incapacity that resulted. He covered himself and lay curled on one hip. They kept trying to rip his wig out of his hands. And his tiny purse. He held on as if this were some mugging. He felt a few shoes, a few slaps, and then the minty breath of an elderly woman breathing in his face.

  “Try to get up,” she said, gently. He saw she was a nurse. A real nurse. There was no fashionable heart sewn above her breast; there was just the little brass-and-blue nameplate—she was R. N. So-and-So.

  “My name is Dotty,” the nurse told him; she was at least sixty.

  “Hello,” Garp said. “Thank you, Dotty.”

  She took his arm and led him at a fast pace through the remaining mob. No one appeared to want to hurt him when he was with her. They let him go.

  “Do you have money for a cab?” the nurse named Dotty asked him when they were outside School of Nursing Hall.

  “Yes, I think so,” Garp said. He checked his horrid purse; his wallet was safely there. And his wig—tousled still further—was under his arm. Roberta had Garp's real clothes and Garp looked in vain for any sign of Roberta emerging from the first feminist funeral.

  “Put that wig on,” Dotty advised him, “or you'll be mistaken for one of those transvestites.” He struggled to put it on; she helped him. “People are really rough on transvestites,” Dotty added. She took several bobby pins from her own gray head of hair and fastened Garp's wig more decently in place.

  The scratch on his cheek, she told him, would stop bleeding very soon.

  On the steps of School of Nursing Hall, a tall black woman who looked like an even match for Roberta shook her fist at Garp but said not a word. Perhaps she was another Ellen Jamesian. A few other women were gathering there and Garp feared they might be thinking over the advisability of an open attack. Oddly at the fringe of their group, but seeming to have no connection with them, was a wraithlike girl, or barely grown-up child; she was a dirty blond-headed girl with piercing eyes the color of coffee-stained saucers—like a drug-user's eyes, or someone long involved in hard tears. Garp felt frozen by her stare, and frightened of her—as if she were really crazy, a kind of teen-age hit man for the women's movement, with a gun in her oversized purse. He clutched his own ratty bag, recalling that his wallet was at least full of credit cards; he had enough cash for a cab to the airport and the credit cards could get him a flight to Boston and the bosom, so to speak, of his remaining family. He wished he could relieve himself of his ostentatious tits, but there they were, as if he'd been born with them—and born, too, in this alternately tight and baggy jump suit. It was all he had and it would have to do. From the din escaping from School of Nursing Hall, Garp knew that Roberta was deep in the throes of debate—if not combat. Someone who had fainted, or had been mauled, was carried out; more police went in.

  “Your mother was a first-rate nurse and a woman who made every woman proud,” the nurse named Dotty told him. “I'll bet she was a good mother, too.”

  “She sure was,” Garp said.

  The nurse got him a cab; the last he saw of her, she was walking away from the curb, back toward School of Nursing Hall. The other women who'd seemed so threatening, on the steps outside the building, appeared to be not interested in molesting her. More police were arriving; to Garp looked for the strange saucer-eyed girl, but she was not among the other women.

  He asked the cabby who the new governor of New Hampshire was. Garp tried to conceal the depth of his voice, but the cabby, familiar with the eccentricities of his job, seemed unsurprised at both Garp's voice and Garp's appearance.

  “I was out of the country,” Garp said.

  “You didn't miss nothin', sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.”

  “Sally Devlin?” said Garp.

  “She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn't control herself. She was givin' this speech but she couldn't get through it, you know7

  “She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn't be no governor if she couldn't control herself no better than that.”

  And Garp saw the pattern of the woman's loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin's inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.

  Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people. “In my opinion,” the cabby said, “it took something like that shooting to show the people that the woman couldn't handle the job, you know?”

  “Shut up and drive,” Garp said.

  “Look, honey,” the cabby. said. “I don't have to put up with no abuse.”

  “You're an asshole and a moron,” Garp told him, “and if you don't drive me to the airport with your mouth shut, I'll tell a cop you tried to paw me all over.”

&nb
sp; The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.

  “If you don't slow down,” Garp said, “I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me.”

  “Fucking weirdo,” the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. “Fucking women,” the cabby said.

  “Fucking men,” said Garp, feeling—with mixed feelings—that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.

  At the airport they questioned Garp's American Express card and asked for further identification. Inevitably, they asked him about the initials T. S. The airline ticket-maker was clearly not in touch with the literary world—not to know who T. S. Garp was.

  He told the ticket-maker that T. was for Tillie, S. was for Sarah. “Tillie Sarah Garp?” the ticket-maker said. She was a young woman, and she clearly disapproved of Garp's oddly fetching but whorish appearance. “Nothing to check, and no carry-on luggage?” Garp was asked.

  “No, nothing,” he said.

  “You have a coat?” the stewardess asked him, also giving him a condescending appraisal.

  “No coat,” Garp said. The stewardess gave a start at the deepness of his voice. “No bags and nothing to hang up,” he said, smiling. He felt that all he had was breasts—the terrific knockers Roberta had made for him—and he walked slouched and stoop-shouldered to try to hold them back. There was no holding them back, though.

  As soon as he chose a seat, some man chose to sit beside him. Garp looked out the window. Passengers were still hurrying to his plane. Among them, he saw a wraithlike, dirty blond-haired girl. She had no coat and no carry-on luggage, either. Just that oversized pursebig enough for a bomb. Thickly, Garp sensed the Under Toad—a wriggle at his hip. He looked toward the aisle, so that he would notice where the girl chose to sit, but he looked into the leering face of the man who'd taken the aisle seat beside him.