Marveling, I said to her ear—and the pleasure I took in touching it with my talking lips!—“How do you know? A virgie like you were.”
“No woman was ever a virgin for that, for kids,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I’m not sleeping,” she said, and slept.
I lay there quietly while her breathing came up and down, cool and warm, holding my breath for her sleep and proud of her need for me despite the pride about her womanliness. I touched her legs under the blanket. The muscles were smooth and hanging slack in the firm flesh. She was at rest, then, and it was permitted to think of Grack in his dreamy high next door and of myself in my journey here by Joy’s side where she ached with sudden alterations and became what she had never been. What we had never been! The carnie is brave, yes: he is always in a strange place and puts up with it, finds the marks in it, gets his kicks from it, is with it and for it. But Grack next door also dwelled behind the other face of his bold venturing: he carried a small, dim, and locked world with him. Not only the secrecy of heroin and privacy of morphine, no! The privacy of expecting so little—cash, kicks, calliope music—and a guarantee down in advance that only success is possible. Bravery for oddity, cowardice for patterns, a meagerness of demand—was there ever a surprise in the funhouse for the electrician who set it up? The wheeze of air which blows the giggle-girls’ skirts above their bloomers is installed beside the same door at every fair: she always giggles, shows just the few cubic inches of pink thigh and/or panties, and then puts her hand to her bosom for pride in her quirk of nipples.
Dad had another way: cowardice for strangeness, bravery for his acceptance of the terrible repetitions of days. His life suddenly seemed heroic to me in its stubborn going-on, a gloomy heroism of day-after-day, a heroism of heavy breathing. Oh my poor dad who never saw how strange to repeat a life over and over! Ma must have taken a great deal from him by dying, and I must have punished him wickedly by borning, growing, claiming flesh and being. The thought that he never fled his day (up at the alarm) and never gave me up (fought patiently, fought) made me cherish him again even as I lay beside Joy, his daughter now, the mother of his grandchildren now, and she said in sleep, “Stay here, Bud, I’m listening.”
Someday soon—I gritted my teeth—I would dress Joy in clever Maternity Shoppe clothes and take her, jut-belly and all, her fine legs spindly under their burden, to meet Dad. (Yes, yes, if Grack left us in peace.) My shame at thoughts of murder would not stop me now. That was previous. That was accidents ago, efforts ago. The time was past when I stood on the stairs watching my pa—sullen, eyes swollen, sleepy—for him to admit just one mistake and to try something new in our lives. The carnie was all new! Pa all old! And now the carnie was as familiar as death and Pa unknown.
“Bud?”
“What, honey?”
“Sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“So’m I.”
Dad, don’t cry, don’t you cry, I would say. He would bawl, of course, and Joy would just whisper to me, He got that habit? and then would put her arms around him and rock him like an infant. Not yet rid of the baby fat herself, she wasn’t!
I thought of the rooster in the sign above the chicken shop where Dad bought the Sunday dinners which he cooked for himself on important holidays.
And then after dinner he read the paper with a flyswatter in his hand, looking up from Walter Lippmann to squash a beastie, until finally he fell asleep amid the bodies strewn terribly on the floor about his easy chair. Poor Dad! He only wanted his rest. The buzzing drove him wild—unsanitary, makes disease, he said. My father’s love of the tricks of earth had not survived my birth. Ma’s death had him wise to failure too early—no ripening through the long disaster of a life. He spit often into pieces of newspaper; I guess that said, I’m sorry, I meant to be different. Or maybe sinus trouble is only sinus trouble.
She was sleeping, my little girl Joy, the mother of my kid to come, and the fretlines eased slowly between her eyes. I slipped out of bed, heart ticking loudly for silence and not disturbing her. In our suitcase the two-dollar alarm clock ticked also, still packed from the last stop and running down between my socks and her sweater. I pulled the sheet up to Joy’s chin. She lay still.
The door was open next door and Grack had not moved. “Bud, thanks for coming,” he said. “I was thinking you here.”
“What’s up?” I smiled in the darkness and turned my head, although he couldn’t see anyway—had he put his finger to his eye to call me?
“I need you, Bud.”
“What for?”
“You’re planning on dropping me off.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re planning on taking me someplace, Windsor I guess, and just dropping me there. That’s all.”
“That isn’t what you want? To go home? Back to your mother, you said.”
“Yes, back to the Kiskeedees,”—and again, more briefly this time, that jerk and fit of death stiffened his face. Then he explained once more, “They call us Frenchies Kiskeedees because it’s qu’est-ce qu’il dit, qu’est-ce qu’il dit all the time. Don’t understand us. My mother spoke three words of English, learned to talk with my eyes from her. Listen, Bud, Ma was a mark … But you’re just going to drop me past Detroit?”
I figured ways to say it nicely. I thought of Joy, ill, bled, and still waiting. I said only, “Yes.”
He sat up abruptly. “No, you can’t do it! You have no right! You got to come with me, Bud. We’ll get with a traveling show together in Ontario, we’ll pull ’em in together, kid, and I’ll support my own habit myself.”
“No, Grack.”
“What do you mean no? No? You don’t have any right to talk to me like that. Wasn’t for me, you’d have a twenty-dollar habit by now or you’d be squirming in Lexington. Listen, kid, where’d—”
Listen, Grack, I was thinking, don’t be pa at me. It hardened me to have my gratitude used against me; I knew enough about it already, and guilt for failures, and owings and borrowings and obligations. You don’t even win slum like that, Grack.
“You’re not listening, god damn you!”
“True, Grack, I’m not. Talk sense at me and I’ll listen.”
“I’m sense! I took care of you!”
“True, Grack,”—and I spread my hands. What more taking care of him could I do? And yet the twitch in my legs as I looked was for following him, and the dry of my throat for hawing with him at a countstore in Ontario, and the ache of my arms for a burden taken up while all the other burdens were not put down. Forever. Could never be. O a man without schools and clubs and neighbors and hours, having to make his life himself, has too much to do! Once the carnie had been my hour, then I took Grack for friend, finally I wived myself—and that led me straight on to neighbors, schools, and a box with my name on it. Maybe I had the right to break mindlessly, like a cresting wave, against my father: but what monster can rebel against the child his own will has made?—I did not forget those stirrings and that new pleasure even as I met Grack’s harsh black gaze.
Grack watched.
Joy groaned and turned on our bed next door.
It seemed to me that I fled that evening from one scheming sleeper to the next, while each tried to master me in sleep. Grack lay with his finger to his eye, sallow, long on patience, furiously watching me as he watched the swarm of marks. He counted what was in my pockets. He figured how to get what was for the getting. It was no longer a question of being friends, although I could never forget those days in the mountains when he had waited and watched like a father to help me throw my habit, and held my forehead and thrown a bed over me when he had to. Now he only schemed.
“Once in the Rockies—remember, Bud?—you said you wanted to be with it.” He must have hurt badly to use this as part of the scheme. It could be used up. “You said you were wanting it, Bud.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You don’t mean it anymore?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So?�
��
I shook my head. “You told me you were sending me back. You said you were doing it, Grack, you said I was one going back for you. I just believed you was all. With it is someplace else now—”
“Ah!” And the tendoned lines of his face were making clefts of hardness again, pleasing me. It’s terrible when a skinny man sags there in loose flesh at the chin and spongy under the eyes and dugs at the breast and a loose flat belly. He understood me all the way where he could never follow or lead. “You want to be a good little lad in a good job in a nice city. I know you now, Bud. She really tipped the bally on you. You want to be Joy’s good little husband.”
“Yes, Grack.”
“I see you now.”
That was all I said: “Yes.”
“You do? You do? You wag your head?” His craw was jumping and he took pleasure in speechifying: “Well then you’re nothing but another dumb-ass mark in the crowd, Buddy. Well I’ll be blasted.”
But you can say yes to the truth and like it and then not be pleased at all by the way your friend says it. His mouth twisted in little cleaning gestures over his teeth. He wiped and licked his lips. He was searching for the words to talk me down (not necessary, Grack) and his hand flew furiously, flew happily to his eye. I said:
“Sleep it off now, Grack. I remember what it was to be like you. Cover up, don’t catch a cold.”
And again I crossed the little space of concrete to the cabin where Joy slept. I bounced between these two solid walls, played by the sleeping combatants, and grew a will and a skill of topspin as I bounced. Crossing through the night’s wet chill, I thought of that other battling sleeper, my father, and of the one quiet sleeper which Joy bore. But first of my father, perhaps because I had hurt and meant to hurt Grack, as I had hurt and meant to hurt that father who loved me.
“Who? Who?” Joy turned in her sleep, troubled, as I entered.
“Sh-h, just Bud.”
She had uncovered herself and lay in the rinsed window light like a child in uneasy dreams. The ache and kinking of her legs had pushed up her pajamas; there were soiled little-girl knees, an active child’s knees even now with our two-inch baby tucked above them. I pulled the blanket back under her chin, dropped my clothes, and crawled in beside her. Thick with sleep, her voice said, “You keep me warm, Bud. Someday we’ll have a kitchen, too—”
“To write letters in. I’ll take you out to swell restaurants for eating, kid.”
But Grack was right that I did want that kitchen for eating.
28. America is voyages. We were American
NEXT morning the weather changed to burnt apple time, the Maryland fields crackling under the lip of frost on each leaf, good for blood and appetite. Joy’s eyes played sharply over me, past the crisis, tomboy again, with no paleness but a dusky deep color at her fine cheeks. Grack too, he awakened refreshed by our conversation followed by sleep, and the bugskin of his habit let him free of scratching for a while.
He was trimming his nails when I went to wake him. “Let’s put some miles between us,” he said cheerfully. “I mean on the road. Let’s go. Want to drive awhile before breakfast?”
I asked Joy. “Sure, good thing,” she said.
It was our habit to undo a few miles before the first eating, clop-clopping our lips awake, rolling the eyes clean, stretching and deep-breathing until the right diner with the right coffee presented itself. These sharp first-of-the-morning minutes were the best between the three of us.
We did a few quiet days across Pennsylvania and then up through Ohio toward Cleveland, stilled by this medium country, fat farms and slow-moving people slowed down not by malaria or pellagra or mortgages but by their deliberations, pious and plump, sure of their soil. In Pennsylvania there were brick churches and steeples. In Ohio we saw colleges in every small town. The kids I might have been pleased me, and so did the bleating sheep that Joy had escaped being. We would stop for our dinner in a Campusburger Shoppe—jukebox playing “the popular classics,” hands a-holding while the eyes tried not to notice, all the suburban children out for their few years without husband, without wife, and the parents not watching.
And how well we came to know that this outing doesn’t end easily! There were imperfect moments between Joy and me, of course, as there always are. There were also still worse times, stricken by poverty, poor especially with my own failures in the past. In such hours, Joy struck out at me and blamed me for fixing her this way: “My bosoms hurt bad again tonight.”
“Say breasts, please,”—exasperated with the word and with her complaining.
“They hurt anyway. How would you know anything about it except what to say?”
“All right, I suppose you were just waiting for us to be alone so you could say you hurt, so you could say bosoms, so you could say this and that—”
“Yes, yes, that’s right, I was just waiting to whine at you, you know it your way, that’s all I wanted from you.…” And tears.
While my heart turned, I perversely tried to think of what they say about Woman’s Tears—making them merely female, not my Joy’s. I held her, saying, “Joy, Joy, I know it’s hard for you. I know, honey.”
And then, before she could be eased, my meanness had its reward. That rattatat would quiver in my legs as I held her, a wanting to escape these schemes about a wife, and I would recognize once more my old companion: the shameful dream of evasion. And words would come to speak for my impatience: “Why don’t you try to sleep then if you’re tired.” Or: “Let’s go for a walk,”—when I knew that what she needed of me was to sit and hold her on my knees awhile.
“I’m in my slip, I don’t want to get dressed. You can go for a walk if you want to, it’s all right.”
“Okay, okay.…”
“Aren’t you going?”
“No.”
“Go ahead.”
“No, no!”
And I sat in silence, holding her but my silence of the no-saying kind, until she thought of something else she needed to do and we moved apart.
But it was not like this often. Yes, we had this no to learn out of our marriage, but most of our being together, even from the ignorant beginning, was as I said of it: “Joy, Joy, we love each other so much.”
At first all I wanted was to be human like a few other people. It sometimes seemed that to be married was already to be more than human.
As we drew in toward Cleveland, where Grack had a friend, his skinny haleness seemed to flow back. Eating, he showed huge jaw muscles, talking muscles, biting in his sleep muscles. He ate with immense muscular chewing and grins and winks while we watched the college kids squirt from straws and play in chocolate. Grack liked to tap Joy’s wrists and put his finger to his eye for me to listen. We were near Hiram College, I think it was—a main street, a campus, the kids in white woolen socks and very white teeth for making friends:
“Bob, this is Doris—this nice-looking doll.”
“Pleased to meet you, doll.”
“Doris likes to go for joyrides, Bob.”
“Want to drive around the stadium, doll?”
From our booth Grack, Joy, and I watched them. It bothered me that Doris, the simple townie, did not answer Bob. They must have understood each other. Grack grinned and felt good and had another sandwich. He slipped his finger to the wart and asked me, “This what you like, Bud?”
“College? Little late now.”
“Answer my question—this what you like?”
“It’s okay for them, but it isn’t either the carnie or this. That’s not the choice. I got a wife already, my Joy, for instance,”—and I pulled her to me across the bench. She slid easily. I made her sit that way with me, the two of us facing Grack.
“Boy,” Grack said, “you don’t answer me straight no more no way.” He wagged his head and sucked at a tooth. He reached across the table and patted Joy’s hand. She did not remove it, and this bothered me; but it was for my sake that she held so still. We had to get Grack through to get through with him. He
wagged his head and grinned at both of us, holding and patting Joy’s hand in his own two, saying, “Bud, tell you what. I been thinking. You ought to go into politics.”
Polly-ticks was how he said it.
I laughed at the notion, from countstore to county clerk! “Why not?”
He stroked Joy’s palm and she rested quiet. “Settle down, make a name someplace, you got a pretty little wife to help you—run for an office.”
“Why not?” Politics is to make out as best you can with what you have—all my life’s practice was politics. He was putting the nasty carnie ribbing to me now, sheriffs and cops and the dumbest, meanest, most larcenous marks they are, but I thought only, Why not? He was telling me that he could stroke Joy’s hand and be nasty to me without our turning on him because we wanted no trouble, because we had plans, because we were waiting to be rid of him. That was his idea of politics. He stroked her palm now while I watched and Doll went out for that ride.
“Politics!” Grack said, glittering with the joke of it on our way to Cleveland and Detroit and dropping him forever in Canada.
“Sure enough, Grack. Let’s pay up and get moving.”
When we all slipped back again into the Dodge, I noticed that Joy’s breasts were slightly irregular, like a lift of bird-wings, one slanting higher than the other. Grack jammed himself in too damn tight next to her.
Patience! his jerk of body said. You just wait me out, patient Bud my friend, even when I rub up against your Joy.
Thus up through Ohio to Cleveland, that great sprawled-out city with the Cuyahoga River its worm at the center. Grack had a friend with a motel just off the skidrow of town, where the carnies stayed when they sometimes passed through. The prop on this busy corner was with it and for it, an ex-carnie who had sunk his gain in the G. Washington Motel for the girls and boys. “Old Itch Scardini,” Grack called him, “needs to drink some vegetable water for the stomach.” He made a quiet living joining out the odds, the odd lads with the odd lassies to come out even. He would know where Grack could get a little recreation for his habit, where we could rest and jolly up a bit before that last stretch into Detroit to Windsor and goodbye, Grack.
Man Who Was Not With It Page 21