by John Irving
"No more practice," Ernie Holm told them, waving them out of the room. "That's it for today. Go run your laps!" Obediently, even relieved, they bobbed in the doorway of the crimson room; they picked up their headgear, their rubber sweat suits, their spools of tape. Ernie Holm waited for the room to clear, while his daughter and Jenny Fields waited for him to explain; at the very least, an explanation was in order, he felt, and there was nowhere Ernie felt as comfortable as he felt in a wrestling room. For him it was the natural place to tell someone a story, even a difficult story with no ending--and even to a stranger. So when his wrestlers had left to run their laps, Ernie very patiently began his father-and-daughter tale, the brief history of the nurse who left them, and of the Midwest they only recently had left. It was a story Jenny could appreciate, of course, because Jenny did not know another single parent with a single child. And although she may have felt tempted to tell them her story--there being interesting similarities, and differences--Jenny merely repeated her standard version: the father of Garp was a soldier, and so forth. And who takes the time for weddings when there is a war? Though it was not the whole story, it clearly appealed to Helen and Ernie, who had met no one else in the Steering community as receptive and frank as Jenny.
There in the warm red wrestling room, on the soft mats, surrounded by those padded walls--in such an environment, sudden and inexplicable closeness is possible.
Of course Helen would remember that first hug her whole life; however her feelings for Jenny might change, and change back, from that moment in the wrestling room Jenny Fields was more of a mother to Helen than Helen had ever had. Jenny would also remember how it felt to be hugged like a mother, and would even note, in her autobiography, how a daughter's hug was different from a son's. It is at least ironic that her one experience for making such a pronouncement occurred that December day in the giant gymnasium erected to the memory of Miles Seabrook.
It is unfortunate if Ernie Holm felt any desire toward Jenny Fields, and if he imagined, even briefly, that here might be another woman with whom he might live his life. Because Jenny Fields was given to no such feelings; she thought only that Ernie was a nice, good man--perhaps, she hoped, he would be her friend. If he would be, he would be her first.
And it must have perplexed Ernie and Helen when Jenny asked if she could stay a moment, in the wrestling room, just by herself. What for? they must have wondered. Ernie then remembered to ask her why she had come.
"To sign my son up for wrestling," Jenny said quickly. She hoped Garp would approve.
"Well, sure," Ernie said. "And you'll turn out the lights, and the heaters, when you leave? The door locks itself."
Thus alone, Jenny turned off the lights and heard the great blow heaters hum down to stillness. There in the dark room, the door ajar, she took off her shoes and she paced the mat. Despite the apparent violence of this sport, she was thinking, why do I feel so safe here? Is it him? she wondered, but Ernie passed quickly through her mind--simply a small, neat, muscular man with glasses. If Jenny thought of men at all, and she never really did, she thought they were more tolerable when they were small and neat, and she preferred men and women to have muscles--to be strong. She enjoyed people with glasses the way only someone who doesn't need to wear glasses can enjoy glasses on other people--can find them "nice." But mostly it is this room, she thought--the red wrestling room, huge but contained, padded against pain, she imagined. She dropped thud! to her knees, just to hear the way the mats received her. She did a somersault and split her dress; then she sat on the mat and looked at the heavy boy who loomed in the doorway of the blackened room. It was Carlisle, the wrestler who'd lost his lunch; he had changed his equipment and come back for more punishment, and he peered across the dark crimson mats at the glowing white nurse who crouched like a she-bear in her cave.
"Excuse me, ma'am," he said. "I was just looking for someone to work out with."
"Well, don't look at me," Jenny said. "Go run your laps!"
"Yes, ma'am," Carlisle said, and he trotted off.
When she closed the door and it locked behind her, she realized she'd left her shoes inside. A janitor did not seem able to find the right key, but he lent her a large boy's basketball shoes that had turned up in Lost and Found. Jenny trudged across the frozen slush to the infirmary, feeling that her first trip to the world of sports had left her more than a little changed.
In the annex, in his bed, Garp still coughed and coughed. "Wrestling!" he croaked. "Good God, Mother, are you trying to get me killed?"
"I think you'll like the coach," Jenny said. "I met him, and he's a nice man. I met his daughter, too."
"Oh, Jesus," Garp groaned. "His daughter wrestles?"
"No, she reads a lot," Jenny said, approvingly.
"Sounds exciting, Mom," Garp said. "You realize that setting me up with the wrestling coach's daughter may cost me my neck? Do you want that?"
But Jenny was innocent of such a scheme. She really had only been thinking about the wrestling room, and Ernie Holm; her feelings for Helen were entirely motherly, and when her crude young son suggested the possibility of matchmaking--of his taking an interest in young Helen Holm--Jenny was rather alarmed. She had not previously thought of the possibility of her son's being interested in anyone, in that way--at least, she'd thought, he wouldn't be interested for a long time. It was very disquieting to her and she could only say to him, "You're only fifteen years old. Remember that."
"Well, how old is the daughter?" Garp asked. "And what's her name?"
"Helen," Jenny answered. "She's only fifteen, too. And she wears glasses," she added, hypocritically. After all, she knew what she thought of glasses; maybe Garp liked them, too. "They're from Iowa," she added, and felt she was being a more terrible snob than those hated dandies who thrived in the Steering School community.
"God, wrestling," Garp groaned, again, and Jenny felt relieved that he had passed on from the subject of Helen. Jenny was embarrassed at herself for how much she clearly objected to the possibility. The girl is pretty, she thought--though not in an obvious way; and don't young boys like only obvious girls? And would I prefer it if Garp were interested in one of those?
As for those kinds of girls, Jenny had her eye on Cushie Percy--a little too saucy with her mouth, a little too slack about her appearance; and should a fifteen-year-old of Cushman Percy's breeding be so developed already? Then Jenny hated herself for even thinking of the word breeding.
It had been a confusing day for her. She fell asleep, for once untroubled by her son's coughing because it seemed that more serious troubles might lie ahead for him. Just when I was thinking we were home free! Jenny thought. She must discuss boys with someone--Ernie Holm, maybe; she hoped she'd been right about him.
She was right about the wrestling room, it turned out--and what intense comfort it gave to her Garp. The boy liked Ernie, too. In that first wrestling season at Steering, Garp worked hard and happily at learning his moves and his holds. Though he was soundly trounced by the varsity boys in his weight class, he never complained. He knew he had found his sport and his pastime; it would take the best of his energy until the writing came along. He loved the singleness of the combat, and the frightening confines of that circle inscribed on the mat; the terrific conditioning; the mental constancy of keeping his weight down. And in that first season at Steering, Jenny was relieved to note, Garp hardly mentioned Helen Holm, who sat in her glasses, in her gray sweat suit, reading. She occasionally looked up, when there was an unusually loud slam on the mat or a cry of pain.
It had been Helen who returned Jenny's shoes to the infirmary annex, and Jenny embarrassed herself by not even asking the girl to come in. For a moment, they had seemed so close. But Garp had been in. Jenny did not want to introduce them. And besides--Garp had a cold.
* * *
--
One day, in the wrestling room, Garp sat beside Helen. He was conscious of a pimple on his neck and how much he was sweating. Her glasses looked so fogg
ed, Garp doubted she could see what she was reading. "You sure read a lot," he said to her.
"Not as much as your mother," Helen said, not looking at him.
Two months later Garp said to Helen, "Maybe you'll wreck your eyes, reading in a hot place like this." She looked at him, her glasses very clear this time and magnifying her eyes in a way that startled him.
"I've already got wrecked eyes," she said. "I was born with ruined eyes." But to Garp they looked like very nice eyes; so nice, in fact, that he could think of nothing further to say to her.
Then the wrestling season was over. Garp got a junior varsity letter and signed up for track and field events, his listless choice for a spring sport. His condition from the wrestling season was good enough so that he ran the mile; he was the third-best miler on the Steering team, but he would never get any better. At the end of a mile, Garp felt he was just getting started. ("A novelist, even then--though I didn't know it," Garp would write, years later.) He also threw the javelin, but not far.
The javelin throwers at Steering practiced behind the football stadium, where they spent much of their time spearing frogs. The upper, freshwater reaches of the Steering River ran behind Seabrook Stadium; many javelins were lost there, and many frogs were slain. Spring is no good, thought Garp, who was restless, who missed wrestling; if he couldn't have wrestling, at least let the summer come, he thought, and he would run long-distance on the road to the beach at Dog's Head Harbor.
One day, in the top row of empty Seabrook Stadium, he saw Helen Holm alone with a book. He climbed up the stadium stairs to her, clicking his javelin against the cement so that she wouldn't be startled by seeing him so suddenly beside her. She wasn't startled. She had been watching him and the other javelin throwers for weeks.
"Killed enough little animals for today?" Helen asked him. "Hunting something else?"
"From the very beginning," Garp wrote, "Helen knew how to get the words in."
"With all the reading you do, I think you're going to be a writer," Garp told Helen; he was trying to be casual, but he guiltily hid the point of his javelin with his foot.
"No chance," Helen said. She had no doubt about it.
"Well, maybe you'll marry a writer," Garp said to her. She looked up at him, her face very serious, her new prescription sunglasses better suited to her wide cheekbones than her last pair that always slid down her nose.
"If I marry anybody, I'll marry a writer," Helen said. "But I doubt I'll marry anybody."
Garp had been trying to joke; Helen's seriousness made him nervous. He said, "Well, I'm sure you won't marry a wrestler."
"You can be very sure," Helen said. Perhaps young Garp could not conceal his pain, because Helen added, "Unless it's a wrestler who's also a writer."
"But a writer first and foremost," Garp guessed.
"Yes, a real writer," Helen said, mysteriously--but ready to define what she meant by that. Garp didn't dare ask her. He let her go back to her book.
It was a long walk down the stadium stairs, dragging his javelin behind him. Will she ever wear anything but that gray sweat suit? he wondered. Garp wrote later that he first discovered he had an imagination while trying to imagine Helen Holm's body. "With her always in that damn sweat suit," he wrote, "I had to imagine her body; there was no other way to see it." Garp imagined that Helen had a very good body--and nowhere in his writing does he say he was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing.
It was that afternoon in the empty stadium, with frog gore on the point of his javelin, when Helen Holm provoked his imagination and T. S. Garp decided he was going to be a writer. A real writer, as Helen had said.
4
GRADUATION
T . S. Garp wrote a short story every month he was at Steering, from the end of his freshman year until his graduation, but it wasn't until his junior year that he showed anything he wrote to Helen. After her first year as a spectator at Steering, Helen was sent to Talbot Academy for girls, and Garp saw her only on occasional weekends. She would sometimes attend the home wrestling meets. It was after one such match that Garp saw her and asked her to wait for him until he'd showered; he had something in his locker he wanted to give her.
"Oh boy," Helen said. "Your old elbow pads?"
She didn't come to the wrestling room anymore, even if she was home from Talbot on a long vacation. She wore dark green knee socks and a gray flannel skirt, with pleats; often her sweater, always a dark and solid color, matched her knee socks, and always her long dark hair was up, twirled in a braid on top of her head, or complexly pinned. She had a wide mouth with very thin lips and she never wore lipstick. Garp knew that she always smelled nice, but he never touched her. He did not imagine that anyone did; she was as slender and nearly as tall as a young tree--she was taller than Garp by two inches or more--and she had sharp, almost painful-looking bones in her face, although her eyes behind her glasses were always soft and large, and a rich honey-brown.
"Your old wrestling shoes?" Helen asked him, inquiring of the large-sized, lumpy envelope that was sealed.
"It's something to read," Garp said.
"I've got plenty to read," Helen said.
"It's something I wrote," Garp told her.
"Oh boy," Helen said.
"You don't have to read it now," Garp told her. "You can take it back to school and write me a letter."
"I've got plenty to write," Helen said. "I've got papers due all the time."
"Then we can talk about it, later," Garp said. "Are you going to be here for Easter?"
"Yes, but I have a date," Helen said.
"Oh boy," said Garp. But when he reached to take back his story, the knuckles of her long hand were very white and she would not let go of the package.
In the 133-pound class, his junior year, Garp finished the season with a won-lost record of 12-1, losing only in the finals of the New England championships. In his senior year, he would win everything--captain the team, be voted Most Valuable Wrestler, and take the New England title. His team would represent the beginning of an almost twenty-year dominance of New England wrestling by Ernie Holm's Steering teams. In this part of the country, Ernie had what he called an Iowa advantage. When Ernie was gone, Steering wrestling would go downhill. And perhaps because Garp was the first of many Steering stars, he was always special to Ernie Holm.
Helen couldn't have cared less. She was glad when her father's wrestlers won, because that made her father happy. But in Garp's senior year, when he captained the Steering team, Helen never attended a single match. She did return his story, though--in the mail from Talbot, with this letter.
Dear Garp,
This story shows promise, although I do think, at this point, you are more of a wrestler than a writer. There is a care taken with the language, and a feeling for people, but the situation seems rather contrived and the ending of this story is pretty juvenile. I do appreciate you showing it to me, though.
Yours,
Helen
There would be other rejection letters in Garp's writing career, of course, but none would mean as much to him as this one. Helen had actually been kind. The story Garp gave her was about two young lovers who are murdered in a cemetery by the girl's father, who thinks they are grave robbers. After this unfortunate error, the lovers are buried side by side; for some completely unknown reason, their graves are promptly robbed. It is not certain what becomes of the father--not to mention the grave robber.
Jenny told Garp that his first efforts at writing were rather unreal, but Garp was encouraged by his English teacher--the closest thing Steering had to a writer-in-residence, a frail man with a stutter whose name was Tinch. He had very bad breath, remindful to Garp of the dog breath of Bonkers--a closed room of dead geraniums. But what Tinch said, though odorous, was kind. He applauded Garp's imagination, and he taught Garp, once and for all, good old grammar and a love of exact language. Tinch was called Stench by the Steering boys of Garp's day, and messages were constantly left for him about his halito
sis. Mouthwash deposited on his desk. Toothbrushes in the campus mail.
It was after one such message--a package of spearmint breath fresheners taped to the map of Literary England--that Tinch asked his composition class if they thought he had bad breath. The class sat as still as moss, but Tinch singled out young Garp, his favorite, his most trusted, and he asked him directly, "Would you say, Garp, that my b-b-breath was bad?"
Truth moved in and out of the open windows on this spring day of Garp's senior year. Garp was known for his humorless honesty, his wrestling, his English composition. His other grades were indifferent to poor. From an early age, Garp later claimed, he sought perfection and did not spread himself thin. His test scores, for general aptitude, showed that he wasn't very apt at anything; he was no natural. This came as no surprise to Garp, who shared with his mother a belief that nothing came naturally. But when a reviewer, after Garp's second novel, called Garp "a born writer," Garp had a fit of mischief. He sent a copy of the review to the testing people in Princeton, New Jersey, with a note suggesting that they double-check their previous ratings. Then he sent a copy of his test scores to the reviewer, with a note that said: "Thank you very much, but I wasn't 'born' anything." In Garp's opinion, he was no more a "born" writer than he was a born nurse or a born ball turret gunner.
"G-G-Garp?" stuttered Mr. Tinch, bending close to the boy--who smelled the terrible truth in Senior Honors English Composition. Garp knew he would win the annual creative writing prize. The sole judge was always Tinch. And if he could just pass third-year math, which he was taking for the second time, he would respectably graduate and make his mother very happy.