by John Irving
The aforementioned "stamina" was a word Helen let slide away, because she feared for Garp that he had given up his. He certainly had the ability, and the passion; but she felt he'd also taken a narrow path--he'd been misdirected--and only stamina would let him grow back in all the other ways.
It saddened her. For the time being, Helen kept thinking, she would content herself with whatever Garp got passionate about--the wrestling, even the Ellen Jamesians. Because, Helen believed, energy begets energy--and sooner or later, she thought, he would write again.
So Helen did not interfere too vehemently when Garp got excited about the essay Ellen James showed him. The essay was: "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," by Ellen James. It was powerful and touching and it moved Garp to tears. It recounted her rape, her difficulty with it, her parents' difficulty with it; it made what the Ellen Jamesians did seem like a shallow, wholly political imitation of a very private trauma. Ellen James said that the Ellen Jamesians had only prolonged her anguish; they had made her into a very public casualty. Of course, Garp was susceptible to being moved by public casualties.
And of course, to be fair, the better of the Ellen Jamesians had meant to publicize the general dread that so brutally menaced women and girls. For many of the Ellen Jamesians, the imitation of the horrible untonguing had not been "wholly political." It had been a most personal identification. In some cases, of course, Ellen Jamesians were women who had also been raped; what they meant was that they felt as if their tongues were gone. In a world of men, they felt as if they had been shut up forever.
That the organization was full of crazies, no one would deny. Not even some Ellen Jamesians would have denied that. It was generally true that they were an inflammatory political group of feminist extremists who often detracted from the extreme seriousness of other women, and other feminists, around them. But Ellen James' attack on them was as inconsiderate of the occasional individuals among the Ellen Jamesians as the action of the group had been inconsiderate of Ellen James--not really thinking how an eleven-year-old girl would have preferred to get over her horror more privately.
Everyone in America knew how Ellen James had lost her tongue, except the younger generation, just now growing up, who often confused Ellen with the Ellen Jamesians; this was a most painful confusion for Ellen, because it meant that she was suspected of having done it to herself.
"It was a necessary rage for her to have," Helen said to Garp, about Ellen's essay. "I'm sure she needed to write it, and it's done her a world of good to say all this. I've told her that."
"I've told her she should publish it," Garp said.
"No," Helen said. "I really don't think so. What good does it do?"
"What good?" Garp asked. "Well, it's the truth. And it will be good for Ellen."
"And for you?" Helen asked, knowing that he wanted a kind of public humiliation of the Ellen Jamesians.
"Okay," he said, "okay, okay. But she's right, goddamnit. Those nuts ought to hear it from the original source."
"But why?" said Helen. "For whose good?"
"Good, good," Garp muttered, though in his heart he must have known that Helen was right. He told Ellen she should file her essay. Ellen wouldn't communicate with either Garp or Helen for a week.
It was not until John Wolf called Garp that either Garp or Helen realized Ellen had sent the essay to John Wolf.
"What am I suppose to do with it?" he asked.
"God, send it back," Helen said.
"No, damn it," Garp said. "Ask Ellen what she wants you to do with it."
"Old Pontius Pilate, washing his hands," Helen said to Garp.
"What do you want to do with it?" Garp asked John Wolf.
"Me?" John Wolf said. "It means nothing to me. But I'm sure it's publishable. I mean, it's very well written."
"That's not why it's publishable," Helen said, "and you know it."
"Well, no," John Wolf said. "But it's also nice that it's well said."
Ellen told John Wolf she wanted it published. Helen tried to talk her out of it. Garp refused to get involved.
"You are involved," Helen told him, "and by saying nothing, you know you'll get what you want: that painful attack published. That's what you want."
So Garp spoke to Ellen James. He tried to be enthusiastic in his reasoning to her--why she shouldn't publicly say all those things. These women were sick, sad, confused, tortured, abused by others, and now self-abused--but what point was there in criticizing them? Everyone would forget them in another five years. They'll hand out their notes and people will say, "What's an Ellen Jamesian? You mean you can't talk? You got no tongue?"
Ellen looked sullen and determined.
I won't forget them!
she wrote Garp.
Not in 5 years, not in 50 years will I ever forget them;
I will remember them the way I remember my tongue.
Garp admired how the girl liked to use the good old semicolon. He said softly, "I think it's better not to publish this, Ellen."
Will you be angry with me if I do?
she asked.
He admitted he would not be angry.
And Helen?
"Helen will only be angry with me," Garp said.
"You make people too angry," Helen told him, in bed. "You get them all wound up. You inflame. You should lay off. You should do your own work, Garp. Just your own work. You used to say politics were stupid, and they meant nothing to you. You were right. They are stupid, they do mean nothing. You're doing this because it's easier than sitting down and making something up, from scratch. And you know it. You're building bookshelves all over the house, and finishing floors, and fucking around in the garden, for Christ's sake.
"Did I marry a handyman? Did I ever expect you to be a crusader?
"You should be writing the books and letting other people make the shelves. And you know I'm right, Garp."
"You're right," he said.
He tried to remember what had enabled him to imagine that first sentence of "The Pension Grillparzer."
"My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau."
Where had it come from? He tried to think of sentences like it. What he got was a sentence like this: "The boy was five years old; he had a cough that seemed deeper than his small, bony chest." What he got was memory, and that made muck. He had no pure imagination anymore.
In the wrestling room, he worked out three straight days with the heavyweight. To punish himself?
"More fucking around in the garden, so to speak," said Helen.
Then he announced he had a mission, a trip to make for the Fields Foundation. To North Mountain, New Hampshire. To determine if a Fields Foundation Fellowship would be wasted on a woman named Truckenmiller.
"More fucking around in the garden," Helen said. "More bookshelves. More politics. More crusades. That's the kind of thing people do who can't write."
But he was gone; he was out of the house when John Wolf called to say that a very well read and much seen magazine was going to publish "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," by Ellen James.
John Wolf's voice over the phone had the cold, unseen, quick flick of the tongue of old You-Know-Who--the Under Toad, that's who, Helen thought. But she didn't know why; not yet.
She told Ellen James the news. Helen forgave Ellen, immediately, and even allowed herself to be excited with her. They took a drive to the shore with Duncan and little Jenny. They bought lobsters--Ellen's favorite--and enough scallops for Garp, who was not crazy about lobster.
Champagne!
Ellen wrote in the car.
Does champagne go with lobster and scallops?
"Of course," Helen said. "It can." They bought champagne. They stopped at Dog's Head Harbor and invited Roberta to dinner.
"When will Dad be back?" Duncan asked.
"I don't know where North Mountain, New Hampshire, is," Helen said, "but he said he'd be back in time to eat with us."
That's what he told me, too,
said Ellen James
.
* * *
--
Nanette's Beauty Salon in North Mountain, New Hampshire, was really the kitchen of Mrs. Kenny Truckenmiller, whose first name was Harriet.
"Are you Nanette?" Garp asked her timidly, from the outside steps, frosted with salt and crunchy with melting slush.
"There ain't no Nanette," she told him. "I'm Harriet Truckenmiller." Behind her, in the dark kitchen, a large dog strained and snarled; Mrs. Truckenmiller kept the dog from getting to Garp by thrusting her long hip back against the lunging beast. Her pale, scarred ankle wedged open the kitchen door. Her slippers were blue; in her long robe, her figure was lost, but Garp could see she was tall--and that she had been taking a bath.
"Uh, do you do men's hair?" he asked her.
"No," she said.
"But would you?" Garp asked her. "I don't trust barbers."
Harriet Truckenmiller looked suspiciously at Garp's black knit ski hat, which was pulled down over his ears and concealed all his hair but the thick tufts that touched his shoulders from the back of his short neck.
"I can't see your hair," she said. He took the stocking hat off, his hair wild with static electricity and tangled in the cold wind.
"I don't want just a haircut," Garp said, neutrally, eyeing the woman's sad, drawn face and the soft wrinkles beside her gray eyes. Her own hair, a washed-out blond, was in curlers.
"You don't have no appointment," Harriet Truckenmiller said.
The woman was no whore, he could plainly see. She was tired and frightened of him.
"What exactly do you want done to your hair, anyway?" she asked him.
"Just a trim," Garp mumbled, "but I like a slight curl in it."
"A curl?" said Harriet Truckenmiller, trying to imagine this from Garp's crown of very straight hair. "Like a permanent, you mean?" she asked.
"Well," he said, running his hand sheepishly through the snarls. "Whatever you can do with it, you know?"
Harriet Truckenmiller shrugged. "I have to get dressed," she said. The dog, devious and strong, thrust most of his stout body between her legs and jammed his broad, grimacing face into the opening between the storm and the main door. Garp tensed for the attack, but Harriet Truckenmiller brought her big knee up sharply and staggered the animal with a blow to its muzzle. She twisted her hand into the loose skin of its neck; the dog moaned and melted into the kitchen behind her.
The frozen yard, Garp saw, was a mosaic of the dog's huge turds captured in ice. There were also three cars in the yard; Garp doubted if any of them ran. There was a woodpile, but no one had stacked it. There was a TV antenna, which at one time might have been on the roof; now it leaned against the beige aluminum siding of the house, its wires running like a spider web out a cracked window.
Mrs. Truckenmiller stepped back and opened the door for Garp. In the kitchen he felt his eyes dry from the heat of the wood stove; the room smelled of baking cookies and hair rinse--in fact, the kitchen seemed divided between the functions of a kitchen and the paraphernalia of Harriet's business. A pink sink with a shampoo hose; cans of stewed tomatoes; a three-way mirror framed with stage lights; a wooden rack with spices and meat tenderizer; the rows of ointments, lotions, and goo. And a steel stool over which a hair dryer hung suspended from a steel rod--like an original invention of an electric chair.
The dog was gone, and so was Harriet Truckenmiller; she had slipped away to dress herself, and her surly companion appeared to have gone with her. Garp combed his hair; he looked in the mirror as if he were trying to remember himself. He was about to be altered and rendered unrecognizable to all, he imagined.
Then the door to the outside opened and a big man in a hunting coat with a hunter's red cap walked in; he had an enormous armload of wood, which he carried to the wood box by the stove. The dog, who all along had been crouched under the sink--inches away from Garp's trembling knees--moved quickly to intercept the man. The dog slunk quietly, not even growling; the man was known here.
"Go lie down, you damn fool," he said, and the dog did as it was told.
"Is that you, Dickie?" called Harriet Truckenmiller, from somewhere in another part of the house.
"Who else was you expectin'?" he shouted; then he turned and saw Garp in front of the mirror.
"Hello," Garp said. The big man called Dickie stared. He was perhaps fifty; his huge red face looked scraped by ice, and Garp recognized immediately, from his familiarity with Duncan's expressions, that the man had a glass eye.
"'Lo," Dickie said.
"I got a customer!" Harriet called.
"I see you do," said Dickie. Garp nervously touched his hair, as if he could suggest to Dickie how important his hair was to him--to have come all the way to North Mountain, New Hampshire, and Nanette's Beauty Salon, for what must have appeared to Dickie to be the simple need of a haircut.
"He wants a curl!" called Harriet. Dickie kept his red cap on, though Garp could plainly see that the man was bald.
"I don't know what you really want, fella," Dickie whispered to Garp, "but a curl is all you get. You hear?"
"I don't trust barbers," Garp said.
"I don't trust you," Dickie said.
"Dickie, he hasn't done anything," Harriet Truckenmiller said. She was dressed in rather tight turquoise slacks, which reminded Garp of his discarded jump suit, and a print blouse full of flowers that never grow in New Hampshire. Her hair was tied back with a scarf of unmatching plants, and she had done her face, but not overdone it; she looked "nice," like somebody's mother who bothered to keep herself up. She was, Garp guessed, a few years younger than Dickie, but just a few.
"He don't want no curl, Harriet," Dickie said. "What's he want to have his hair played with for, huh?"
"He don't trust barbers," Harriet Truckenmiller said. For a brief moment Garp wondered if Dickie were a barber; he didn't think so.
"I really don't mean any disrespect," Garp said. He had seen all he needed to see; he wanted to go tell the Fields Foundation to give Harriet Truckenmiller all the money she needed. "If this makes anyone uncomfortable," Garp said, "I'll just forget it." He reached for his parka, which he'd put on an empty chair, but the big dog had the parka pinned down on the floor.
"Please, you can stay," Mrs. Truckenmiller said. "Dickie's just lookin' after me." Dickie looked ashamed of himself; he stood with one mighty boot on top of the other.
"I brung you some dry wood," he said to Harriet. "I guess I shoulda knocked." He pouted by the stove.
"Don't, Dickie," Harriet said to him, and she kissed him fondly on his big pink cheek.
He left the kitchen with one last glare for Garp.
"Hope you get a good haircut," Dickie said.
"Thank you," said Garp. When he spoke, the dog shook his parka.
"Here, stop that," Harriet told the dog; she put Garp's parka back on the chair. "You can go if you want to," Harriet said, "but Dickie won't bother you. He's just lookin' after me."
"Your husband?" Garp asked, though he doubted it.
"My husband was Kenny Truckenmiller," Harriet said. "Everybody knows that, and no matter who you are, you know who he was."
"Yes," Garp said.
"Dickie's my brother. He just worries about me," Harriet said. "Some guys have been messin' around, since Kenny's gone." She sat at the bright counter of mirrors, beside Garp, and leaned her long, veiny hands on her turquoise thighs. She sighed. She did not look at Garp when she spoke. "I don't know what you heard, and I don't care," she said. "I do hair--just hair. If you really want somethin' done to your hair, I'll do it. But that's all I do," Harriet said. "No matter what anybody told you, I don't mess around. Just hair."
"Just hair," Garp said. "I just want my hair done, that's all."
"That's good," she said, still not looking at him.
There were little photographs stuck under the molding and framed against the mirrors. One was a wedding picture of young Harriet Truckenmiller and her grinning husband, Kenny. They were awkwardly maiming a cake.
>
Another photograph was of a pregnant Harriet Truckenmiller holding a young baby; there was another child, maybe Walt's age, leaning his cheek against her hip. Harriet looked tired but not daunted. And there was a photograph of Dickie; he was standing next to Kenny Truckenmiller, and they were both standing next to a gutted deer, hung upside-down from the branch of a tree. The tree was in the front yard of Nanette's Beauty Salon. Garp recognized that photograph quickly; he had seen it in a national magazine after Jenny's assassination. The photograph apparently demonstrated to the simple-minded that Kenny Truckenmiller was a born-and-raised killer: besides shooting Jenny Fields, he had at one time shot a deer.
"Why Nanette?" Garp asked Harriet later, when he dared look only at her patient fingers and not at her unhappy face--and not at his hair.
"I thought it sounded sort of French," Harriet said, but she knew he was from somewhere in the outside world--outside North Mountain, New Hampshire--and she laughed at herself.
"Well, it does," Garp said, laughing with her. "Sort of," he added, and they both laughed in a friendly way.
When he was ready to go, she wiped the slobber of the dog off his parka with a sponge. "Aren't you even going to look at it?" she asked him. She meant the hairdo; he took a breath and confronted himself in the three-way mirror. His hair, he thought, was beautiful! It was his same old hair, the same color, even the same length, but it seemed to fit his head for the first time in his life. His hair clung to his skull, yet it was still light and fluffy; a slight wave in it made his broken nose and his squat neck appear less severe. Garp seemed to himself to fit his own face in a way he had never thought possible. This was the first beauty salon he had ever been to, of course. In fact, Jenny had cut his hair until he married Helen, and Helen had cut his hair after that; he had never even been to a barber.
"It's lovely," he said; his missing ear remained artfully hidden.
"Oh, go on," Harriet said, giving him a pleasant little shove--but, he would tell the Fields Foundation, not a suggestive shove; not at all. He wanted to tell her then that he was Jenny Fields' son, but he knew that his motive for doing so would have been wholly selfish--to have been personally responsible for moving someone.
"It is unfair to take advantage of anyone's emotional vulnerability," wrote the polemical Jenny Fields. Thus Garp's new creed: capitalize not on the emotions of others. "Thank you and good-bye," he said to Mrs. Truckenmiller.