But something human happens.
One day … Where’s my son going? Why’s he leaving? Edward? Connie, don’t go. Youth should have a perspective on its parents … Well, they’ve gone. I must have shamed them. Isn’t that the way with the young? They think the older generation is stodgy and then they’ve no patience with confession. Oh well, let them go. Where was I?
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: “One day—”
BERNIE PERK: Yes, that’s right. One day a woman came into my drugstore I’d never seen before. She was pretty, in her early or middle twenties perhaps, but very small. Not just short—though she was, extremely short; she couldn’t have been much more than five feet—but small. Dainty, you know? Maybe she wore a size six dress. I don’t know sizes. She could probably buy her clothes in the same department school girls do. What do they call that? Junior Miss? Anyway, she was very delicate. Tinier than Mary Odata. A nice face, sweet, a little old-fashioned perhaps, the sort of face you see in an old sepia photograph of your grandmother’s sister that died. A very pretty little woman.
I saw her looking around, going up and down the aisles. Every once in a while she would stoop down to peer in a low shelf. I have these big round mirrors in the corners to spy on shoplifters. I watched her in the mirrors. If I lost her in one mirror I picked her up again in another. A little doll going up and down the aisles in the convex glass.
I knew what was up. A woman knows where things are. It’s an instinct. Have you ever seen them in a supermarket? They understand how it’s organized. It has nothing to do with the fact that they shop more than men. A man goes into a grocery, he has to ask where the bread is. Not a woman: she knows where it’s supposed to be. Well, this woman is obviously confused. She’s looking for something which she knows is always in one place, whatever store she goes into. So I knew what was up: she was looking for the sanitary napkins.
Most places they keep them on the open shelves to spare the ladies embarrassment. I don’t spare anyone anything. I keep them behind the counter with me. I want to know what’s going on with their periods. They have to ask.
Finally she came over to me. “I don’t see the Kotex,” she says.
“This is the Kotex department,” I say, and reach under the counter for a box. “Will there be anything else? We have a terrific buy on Midol this week. Or some girls prefer the formula in this. I’ve been getting good reports; they tell me it’s very effective against cramps.” I hand her a tin of Monthleaze. “How are you fixed for breath sweetener?” I push a tube of Sour-Off across the counter to her.
She ignores my suggestions but picks up the box of Kotex and looks at it. “This is Junior,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I give her Regular.
“Don’t you have Super?”
“I thought this was for you,” I tell her, and give her the size she asks for.
A month later she came in again. “Super Kotex,” she said. I give her the box and don’t see her again for another month. This time when she comes in I hand her the Super and start to ring up the sale.
“I’d better take the tampon kind too,” she says. She examines the box I give her. “Is there anything larger than this?”
“This is the biggest,” I say, swallowing hard.
“All right.”
“Tell me,” I say, “are these for you?”
She blushes and doesn’t answer.
I hadn’t dared to think about it, though it had crossed my mind. Now I could think of nothing else. I forgot about the others. This girl inflamed me. Bernie burns. It was astonishing—a girl so small. My life centered on her center, on the prodigious size of her female parts.
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: Say “cunt.”
DICK GIBSON: Wait a minute—
BEHR-BLEIBTREAU: It’s all right. Say “cunt.”
BERNIE PERK: … Cunt. The size of her cunt. The disproportion was astonishing to me. Kotex and Tampax. For all I knew, she used the Kotex inside. I did know it. I conceived of her smallness now as the result of her largeness. It was as if her largeness there sapped size from the rest of her body, or that by some incredible compensation her petiteness lent dimension elsewhere. I don’t know. It was all I could think of. Bernie burns.
I had to know about her, at least find out who she was, whether she was married. I tried to recall if I had seen a wedding band, but who could think of fingers, who could think of hands? Bernie burns. Perk percolates.
That night I counted ahead twenty-eight days to figure when I might expect her again. The date fell on September 9, 1956.
She didn’t come—not then, not the next month.
Then, one afternoon, I saw her in the street. It was just after Thanksgiving, four or five days before her next period. I raised my hat. “Did you have a pleasant holiday?” I asked. My face was familiar to her but she couldn’t place me. I counted on this.
“So so.” The little darling didn’t want to embarrass me.
“I thought you might be going away for Thanksgiving,” I said.
She looked puzzled but still wanted to be polite. “My roommate went home but I stayed on in Hartford,” she said. “Actually she invited me to go with her but my boss wouldn’t give me Friday off.”
Ah. I thought, she has a roommate, she’s a working girl. Good.
“I’m very sorry,” I said, “but I find myself in a very embarrassing position. I don’t seem to be able to remember your name.”
“Oh,” she said, and laughed, “I can’t remember yours either. I know we’ve seen each other.”
“I’m Bernie Perk.”
“Yes. Of course. I’m Bea Dellaspero. I still don’t—”
“I don’t either. You see what happens? Here we are, two old friends and neither of us can—Wait a minute. I think I’ve got it. I’ve seen you in my store. I’m the druggist—Perk’s Drugs on Mutual.”
“Oh.” She must have remembered our last conversation for she became very quiet. We were standing outside a coffee shop, and when I invited her to have a cup with me she said she had to be going and hurried off.
Her number was in the phone book, and I called right from the coffee shop. If only her roommate’s in, I thought, crossing my fingers for luck.
“Where’s Bea? Is Bea there?”
“No.”
“Christ,” I said. “What’s her number at work? I’ve got to get her.”
I called the number the roommate gave me; it was a big insurance company. I told them I was doing a credit check on Bea Dellaspero and they connected me to personnel. Personnel was nice as pie. Bea was twenty-four years old, a typist in the claims department and a good credit risk.
It was something, but I couldn’t live on it. I had to get her to return to the store.
I conceived the idea of running a sale especially for Bea. My printer set up a sample handbill. Across the bottom I had him put in half a dozen simple coupons, with blank spaces where she could write in the names of the products she wanted to exchange them for. She could choose from a list of twenty items, on which I gave about a 90 percent discount. I sent the flier in an envelope to Bea’s address.
Normally I’m closed on Sunday, but that was the day I set aside for Bea’s sale. I opened up at ten o’clock, and I didn’t have to wait more than an hour. When she came in holding the pink flier we were alone in the store.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Fine, thank you.” She was still uneasy about me. “I got your advertisement.”
“I see it in your hand.”
“Oh. Yes.”
She went around the store picking up the items she wanted and brought them to the counter. When she gave me her coupons, I saw that she’d chosen products relating to a woman’s periods or to feminine hygiene. She’d had to: I’d rigged the list with men’s shaving equipment, pipe accessories, athletic supporters—things like that.
“What size would these be, madam?”
“Super.”
“Beg pardon, I didn’t hear you.”
; “Super.”
Super duper, I thought. I put the big boxes on the counter and added two bottles of douche from the shelf behind me. It won’t be enough, I thought. She had a pussy big as all outdoors. Imperial gallons wouldn’t be enough. “Let me know how you like the douche,” I said, “I’ve been getting some excellent reports.”
God, I was crazy. You know how it is when you’re smitten. Smitten? I was in love. Married twenty-three years and all of a sudden I was in love for the first time in my life. Whole bales of cotton I would have placed between her legs. Ah love, set me tasks! Send me for all the corks in Mediterranea, all styptic stymies would I fetch!
In love, did I say? In love? That’s wrong. In love I had been since Old MacDonald’s. In love is nothing, simple citizenship. Now I was of love, no mere citizen but a very governor of the place, a tenant become landlord. And who falls in love? Love’s an ascent, a rising—touch my hard-on—a soaring. Consider my body, all bald spots haired by imagination, my fats rendered and features firmed, tooth decay for God’s sake turned back to candy in my mouth. Heyday! Heyday! And all my feelings collateral to a teen-age boy’s!
So I had been in love and now was of it. Bernie burns, the pharmacist on fire. I did not so much forget the others as repudiate them; they were just more wives. Get this straight: love is adulterous, hard on the character. I cuckold those cuties, the Misses Odata and Locusmundi. Horns for Miss Hartford! Miss Moss is dross. Be my love, Bea my love!
I bagged Bea’s purchases, punched the register a few times to make it look good, and charged her fifty-seven cents for the ten dollars’ worth of stuff she’d bought.
“So cheap?”
“It’s my special get-acquainted offer,” I said. “Also I knocked off a few dollars because you mentioned the secret word.”
“I did? What was it?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
“You know, it’s really a terrific sale,” she said. “I’m surprised more people aren’t here to take advantage of it.”
“They’re coming by when church gets out.”
“I see.”
As she took the two bags in her thin arms and turned to go, it occurred to me that she might never come back to the store. I raced around the counter. I had no idea what I would do; all love’s stratagems and games whistled in my head.
“I’ll help you,” I said, taking one of her bags.
“I can manage.”
“No, I couldn’t think of it. A little thing like you? Let me have the other one as well.”
She refused to give it up. “I’m very capable,” she said. We were on the sidewalk. “You better go back. Your store’s open. Anyone could just walk off with all your stock.”
“They’re in church. Even the thieves. I’ll take you to your car.”
“I don’t have a car. I’m going to catch the bus at the corner.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
“It’s not necessary.”
“It isn’t safe.”
“They’re all in church.”
“Just the thieves, not the rapers.”
“But it’s the dead of winter. You don’t even have a coat. You’ll catch cold.”
“Not cold.”
“What?”
“Not cold. Bernie burns.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not cold. The pharmacist on fire.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m hale.” I jumped up and down with the bag in my arms. “See?” I said. “See how hale? I’m strong. I huff and I puff.” I hit myself in the chest with my fist. “Me? Me sick? There are things on my shelves to cure anything.”
Bea was becoming alarmed. I checked myself, and we stood quietly in the cold together waiting for the bus.
Finally I had to speak or burst. “‘There’s naught so sweet as love’s young dream,’” I said.
“What was that?”
“It’s a saying. It’s one of my favorite sayings.”
“Oh.”
“‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s another saying.”
“Do you see the bus coming?”
“‘Love makes the world go round.’”
“I’ve heard that one.”
“‘Love is smoke raised with the fume of sighs.’” The fume of size: super. “‘Take away love and earth is tomb.’ ‘Love indeed is anything, yet is nothing.’”
“I think I hear it coming. Are you sure you can’t see it?”
“‘Love is blind,’” I said gloomily. She had heard it; it lumbered toward us irresistibly. Soon it would be there and I would never see her again. She was very nervous and went into the street and began to signal while the bus was still three blocks off. I watched her performance disconsolately. “‘And yet I love her till I die,’” I murmured softly.
When the driver came abreast, Bea darted up the steps and I handed her bag to her. “Will I see you again?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Will I see you again? Promise when you’ve used up what you’ve bought you’ll come back.”
“Well, it’s so far,” she said. The driver closed the door.
“I deliver!” I shouted after her and waved and blew kisses off my fingertips.
DICK GIBSON: Remarkable!
BERNIE PERK: So’s love, so are lovers. Now I saw them.
DICK GIBSON: Saw whom?
BERNIE PERK: Why, lovers. For if love is bad for the character it’s good for it too. Now that I was of love, I was also of lovers. I looked around and saw that the whole world was in love. When a man came in to pick up penicillin for his wife—that was a love errand. I tried to cheer him. “She’ll be okay,” I told him. “The pills will work. She’ll come round. Her fever will break. Her sore throat will get better.” “Why are you telling me this?” he’d ask. “I like you,” I’d say. “‘All the world loves a lover.’”
For the first time I saw what my drugstore was all about. It was love’s way station. In free moments I would read the verses on my greeting cards, and my eyes would brim with tears. Or I would pore over the true confessions in my magazine racks. “Aye aye, oy oy,” I’d mutter, “too true this true confession.” I blessed the lipstick: “Kiss, kiss,” I droned over the little torpedoes. “Free the man in frogs and bogs. Telltales be gone, stay off shirt collars and pocket handkerchiefs.” All love was sacred. I pored over my customers’ photographs after they were developed. I held a magnifying glass over them—the ones of sweethearts holding hands in the national parks or on the steps of historic buildings, the posed wives on the beach, fathers waving goodbye, small in the distance, as they go up the steps into airplanes. People take the same pictures, did you know that? We are all brothers.
Love was everywhere, commoner than loneliness. I had never realized before what a terrific business I did in rubbers. And it isn’t even spring; no one’s on a blanket in the woods, or in a rowboat’s bottom, or on a hayride. I’m talking about the dead of winter, a high of twenty, a low of three. And you can count on the fingers of one hand the high-school kid’s pipedream purchase. My customers meant business. There were irons in these lovers’ fires. And connoisseurs they were, I tell you, prophylactic more tactic than safeguard, their condoms counters and confections. How sheer’s this thing, they’d want to know, or handle them, testing this one’s elasticity, that one’s friction. Or inquire after refinements, special merchandise, meticulous as fishermen browsing flies. Let’s see. They wanted: French Ticklers, Spanish Daggers, Swedish Surprises, The Chinese Net, The Texas Truss and Gypsy Outrage. They wanted petroleum jellies smooth as syrups.
And I, Pop, all love’s avuncular spirit, all smiles, rooting for them, smoothing their way where I could, apparently selfless— they must have thought me some good-sport widower who renewed his memories in their splashy passion—giving the aging Cupid’s fond green light. How could they suspect that
I learned from them, growing my convictions in their experience? Afterward, casually, I would debrief them. Reviewing the troops: Are Trojans better than Spartans? Cavaliers as good as Commandos? Is your Centurion up to your Cossack? What of the Mercenary? The Guerrilla? How does the Minuteman stand up against the State Trooper? In the end, it was too much for me to have to look on while every male in Hartford above the age of seventeen came in to buy my condoms.
Bea never came back—I had frightened her off with my wild talk at the bus stop—yet my love was keener than ever. I still kept up my gynecological charts on her, and celebrated twenty-eighth days like sad festivals. I dreamed of her huge vaginal landscape, her loins in terrible cramp. Bernie burns.
The Dick Gibson Show Page 24