DONALD BARTHELME (1931-1989)
"Fragments are the only forms I trust," Donald Barthelme once said. Yet his brilliantly innovative short fictions have the unity of effect of completely imagined prose-poems; their curve is typically the logic of dream, selecting only the most significant of images and dropping out all else. Like the Surrealists Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and René Magritte, who exercised a powerful influence upon his work, Barthelme's art is frequently the art of startling juxtapositions and collage. "The School" is atypical Barthelme, risking sentiment, sweetness, sincerity, unmediated yearning.
Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia and raised and educated in Houston, where his father worked as an architect. A graduate of the University of Houston, Barthelme worked as a newspaper reporter and museum director, helped edit a journal of art and literature called Location, and began to publish short fiction in The New Yorker in the early 1960's. His major titles are Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Sixty Stories (1981)—short story collections; and Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975)—novels. The posthumous novel King Arthur was published in 1991.
The School
WELL, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how you know the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don't know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn't the best. We complained about it. So we've got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we've got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks. It was depressing.
It wouldn't have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that . . . you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren't too disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably . . . you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren't looking. Or maybe . . . well, I don't like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander . . . well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.
Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they're belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.
We weren't even supposed to have a puppy.
We weren't even supposed to have one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede's truck one day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then . . . And that's what it did. It wasn't supposed to be in the classroom at all, there's some kind of regulation about it, but you can't tell them they can't have a puppy when the puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and yap yap yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling "Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!" Then they'd laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don't mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet and all that. I don't know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn't had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I checked the supply closet each morning, routinely because I knew what was going to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program, all the kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate thing, the kid's name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something. The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn't have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think, nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was something wrong with the school. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the school, particularly, I've seen better and I've seen worse. It was just a run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning, and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this year, it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they're excavating for the new federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you know, at the edge of the excavation. There's a court case coming out of that, the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don't know what's true and what's not. It's been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt's father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his home.
One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don't know, I don't know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn't death, considered such a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don't like it.
I said, that's sound.
They said, it's a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I would not.
We've heard so much about it, they said, but we've never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the window.
They said, please, please make love with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn't be frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow. We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.
JOHN UPDIKE (1932- )
Though celebrated as the creator of "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero of the Rabbit quartet (Rabbit, Run, 1961; Rabbit Redux, 1971; Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; Rabbit at Rest, 1990), John Updike is equally admired as one of the finest practitioners of the short story in American literary history. His is an art of vigilance informed by compassion and humor; an art of both dissection and assimilation. This early story, with its oddly Magritte-like title, gives us a young hero already meditating upon mortality, even as he finds himself quickened to a renewal of an old, seemingly lost romance.
One of our most prodigiou
s and widely acclaimed writers, John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and, scarcely out of Harvard, began publishing stories in The New Yorker in the mid-1950's. Among his titles are the story collections The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Problems (1979), and Trust Me (1987); the novels The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), The Coup (1978), and Roger's Version (1986), in addition to the above named; the poetry collections Midpoint (1969) and Facing Nature (1985); the collections of essays and reviews Hugging the Shore (1983) and Odd Jobs (1991); and the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989).
The perfectly realized "The Persistence of Desire" is quintessential Updike; a moment's epiphany firmly grounded in a life, a recognizable world. Here is the very poetry of realism. John Updike is that rarity in our time—the writer's writer who has also achieved popular success.
The Persistence of Desire
PENNYPACKER'S office still smelled of linoleum, a clean, sad scent that seemed to lift from the checkerboard floor in squares of alternating intensity; this pattern had given Clyde as a boy a funny nervous feeling of intersection, and now he stood crisscrossed by a double sense of himself, his present identity extending down from Massachusetts to meet his disconsolate youth in Pennsylvania, projected upward from a distance of years. The enlarged, tinted photograph of a lake in the Canadian wilderness still covered one whole wall, and the walnut-stained chairs and benches continued their vague impersonation of the Shaker manner. The one new thing, set squarely on an orange end table, was a compact black clock constructed like a speedometer; it showed in Arabic numerals the present minute—1:28—and coiled invisibly in its works the two infinites of past and future. Clyde was early; the waiting room was empty. He sat down on a chair opposite the clock. Already it was 1:29, and while he watched, the digits slipped again; another drop into the brimming void. He glanced around for the comfort of a clock with a face and gracious, gradual hands. A stopped grandfather matched the other imitation antiques. He opened a magazine and immediately read, "Science reveals that the cells of the normal human body are replaced in toto every seven years."
The top half of a Dutch door at the other end of the room opened, and, framed in the square, Pennypacker's secretary turned the bright disc of her face toward him. "Mr. Behn?" she asked in a chiming voice. "Dr. Pennypacker will be back from lunch in a minute." She vanished backward into the maze of little rooms where Pennypacker, and eye, ear, nose, and throat man, had arranged his fabulous equipment. Through the bay window Clyde could see traffic, gayer in color than he remembered, hustle down Grand Avenue. On the sidewalk, haltered girls identical in all but name with girls he had known strolled past in twos and threes. Small town perennials, they moved rather mournfully under their burdens of bloom. In the opposite direction packs of the opposite sex carried baseball mitts.
Clyde became so lonely watching his old street that when, with a sucking exclamation, the door from the vestibule opened, he looked up gratefully, certain that the person, this being his home town, would be a friend. When he saw who it was, though every cell in his body had been replaced since he had last seen her, his hands jerked in his lap and blood bounded against his skin.
"Clyde Behn," she pronounced, with a matronly and patronizing yet frightened finality, as if he were a child and these words the moral of a story.
"Janet." He awkwardly rose from his chair and crouched, not so much in courtesy as to relieve the pressure on his heart.
"Whatever brings you back to these parts?" She was taking the pose that she was just anyone who once knew him.
He slumped back. "I'm always coming back. It's just you've never been here."
"Well, I've"—she seated herself on an orange bench and crossed her plump legs cockily—"been in Germany with my husband."
"He was in the Air Force."
"Yes." It startled her a little that he knew.
"And he's out now?" Clyde had never met him, but having now seen Janet again, he felt he knew him well—a slight, literal fellow, to judge from the shallowness of the marks he had left on her. He would wear eyebrow-style glasses, be a griper, have some not quite negotiable talent, like playing the clarinet or drawing political cartoons, and now be starting up a drab avenue of business. Selling insurance, most likely. Poor Janet, Clyde felt; except for the interval of himself—his splendid, perishable self—she would never see the light. Yet she had retained her beautiful calm, a sleepless tranquility marked by that pretty little blue puffiness below the eyes. And either she had grown slimmer or he had grown more tolerant of fat. Her thick ankles and the general obstinacy of her flesh used to goad him into being cruel.
"Yes." Her voice indicated that she had withdrawn; perhaps some ugliness of their last parting had recurred to her.
"I was 4-F." He was ashamed of this, and his confessing it, though she seemed unaware of the change, turned their talk inward. "A peacetime slacker," he went on, "what could be more ignoble?"
She was quiet a while, then asked, "How many children do you have?"
"Two. Age three and one. A girl and a boy; very symmetrical. Do you"—he blushed lightly, and brushed at his forehead to hide it—"have any?"
"No, we thought it wouldn't be fair, until we were more fixed. "
Now the quiet moment was his to hold; she had matched him failing for failing. She recrossed her legs, and in a quaint strained way smiled.
"I'm trying to remember," he admitted, "the last time we saw each other. I can't remember how we broke up."
"I can't either," she said. "It happened so often."
Clyde wondered if with that sarcasm she intended to fetch his eyes to the brink of tears of grief. Probably not; premeditation had never been much of a weapon for her, though she had tried to learn it from him.
He moved across the linoleum to sit on the bench beside her. "I can't tell you," he said, "how much, of all the people in this town, you were the one I wanted to see." It was foolish, but he had prepared it to say, in case he ever saw her again.
"Why?" This was more like her: blunt, pucker-lipped curiosity. He had forgotten it.
"Well, hell. Any number of reasons. I wanted to say something."
"What?"
"Well, that if I hurt you, it was stupidity, because I was young. I've often wondered since if I did, because it seems now that you were the only person outside my family whoever, actually, liked me."
"Did I?"
"If you think by doing nothing but asking monosyllabic questions you're making an effect, you're wrong."
She averted her face, leaving, in a sense, only her body—the pale, columnar breadth of arm, the freckled crescent of shoulder muscle under the cotton strap of her summer dress—with him. "You're the one who's making effects." It was such a wan, senseless thing to say to defend herself; Clyde, virtually paralyzed by so heavy an injection of love, touched her arm icily.
With a quickness that suggested she had foreseen this, she got up and went to the table by the bay window, where rows of overlapping magazines were laid. She bowed her head to their titles, the nape of her neck in shadow beneath a half-collapsed bun. She had always had trouble keeping her hair pinned.
Clyde was blushing intensely. "Is your husband working around here?"
"He's looking for work." That she kept her back turned while saying this gave him hope.
"Mr. Behn?" The petite secretary-nurse, switching like a pendulum, led him back through the sanctums and motioned for him to sit in a high hinged chair padded with black leather. Penny-packer's equipment had always made him nervous; tons of it were marshalled through the rooms. A complex tree of tubes and lenses leaned over his left shoulder, and by his right elbow a porcelain basin was cupped expectantly. An eye chart crisply stated gibberish. In time Pennypacker himself appeared: a tall, stooped man with mottled cheekbones and an air of suppressed anger.
"Now what's the trouble, Clyde?"
"It's nothing: I mean it's very little," Clyde began, laughing inappropriately. D
uring his adolescence he had developed a joking familiarity with his dentist and his regular doctor, but he had never become intimate with Pennypacker, who remained, what he had seemed at first, an aloof administrator of expensive humiliations. In the third grade he had made Clyde wear glasses. Later, he annually cleaned, with a shrill push of hot water, wax from Clyde's ears, and once had thrust two copper straws up Clyde's nostrils in a futile attempt to purge his sinuses. Clyde always felt unworthy of Pennypacker, felt himself a dirty conduit balking the smooth onward flow of the doctor's reputation and apparatus. He blushed to mention his latest trivial stoppage. "It's just that for over two months I've had this eyelid that twitters and it makes it difficult to think."
Pennypacker drew little circles with a pencil-sized flashlight in front of Clyde's right eye.
"It's the left lid," Clyde said, without daring to turn his head. "I went to a doctor up where I live, and he said it was like a rattle in the fender and there was nothing to do. He said it would go away, but it didn't and didn't, so I had my mother make an appointment for when I came down here to visit."
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories Page 65