But when she heard the Ford in the driveway she felt very small and scared. She hastily got in bed and feigned sleep, not knowing what to expect. Perhaps Jim would have figured it out; perhaps he would beat her. Instead, he took a bath and ignored her for an hour, reading. She got bored with feigning sleep and finally had to feign that he had awakened her. Jim was glad. He hugged her. He had not figured out anything.
“Thrown any more dishpans?” he asked, and in time he came to think of the incident rather proudly, as a sign that she was a woman of passionate temperament.
Next morning her relief turned to annoyance that he could so blithely miss what seemed to her so clear. She decided it could only be because he took her so for granted that he assumed there could never be anything to figure out. She didn’t like that at all, and in a bitter mood, feeling that men were basically only impediments to life, she sat down and wrote Hank a note.
Dear Hank,
I might have known. Jim told me about you and her—Miss Clark. How dare you not tell me about your sordid past? I feel vicious toward you now; I broke my favorite glass because of you. If you ever come near me again I’ll hit you twice as hard as I did the first time. The best thing you can do is stay away.
Hostilely,
Patsy
P.S. If you have anything to say for yourself write me c/o the Whitneys, this address. They are gone until April and I take care of their mail.
Apparently, though, the note didn’t represent her true mood. By the next day she regretted mailing it. It seemed to her that she had severed all connections, without really needing to. She felt completely alone—only the baby was a hopeful prospect. Jim loved her but didn’t need her or understand her; Hank had at least needed her, despite that she was cowardly and pregnant. She still missed him as much as she had before she heard about Clara.
In four days she got an answer and opened it nervously, quailing at the thought of all the things he could say to her in perfect justice.
Dear Patsy,
My work crew has moved to Childress, and chill is the word for it, all right. It was 12 degrees this morning, and windy.
I know I should have told you about Clara. You could have been upset at my place and wouldn’t have broken your glass. It was such an unemotional thing that it didn’t seem important to mention it. Maybe I was just scared to. You were hard enough to get near, as it was. My feelings were a big mess, that whole time, and still are. About the clearest thing is that I love you and wish I was back. I feel very unconnected, out here, and hope you get over being hostile. There wasn’t much to Clara and me. If you do get over it write me. I’ll be back in Portales early next week.
Love,
Hank
The letter left her slightly shaky, brief though it was. She got her coat and walked to the park and sat swinging. The wind was cold and made her think of him, far to the north, where it was even colder. She could visualize him—his hair, his eyes, his hands. She read the letter again and felt terribly grateful to him for not taking the chance to say the obvious mean things to her. She wrote three long replies, but didn’t mail them. They didn’t convey what she felt. It was very frustrating trying to write him. For the first time in her life words really failed her. Language wouldn’t receive her feelings, somehow. One afternoon she realized she wanted to touch him and had been trying to make her letter the equivalent of a touch. She gave up and wrote a quick letter and mailed it.
Dear Hank,
I’m not very hostile any more. I miss you. I don’t understand why you love me—I’m not very good to you.
I did tell you not to go away. You have nobody but yourself to blame for that. I’ve felt fairly sinful since you left, but by the time you return, if you do, I’ll be a matron and will have risen above it all, I guess. I wish I could have made it a little more glorious for you, but I couldn’t.
Couldn’t you get a job in Portales, in a nice warm library? I don’t like the thought of you freezing on the trackless plain.
Write me any time before April.
Patsy
It happened that the rodeo was in town, and the next afternoon, having nothing to do, she called Emma and suggested they take the boys to the livestock show. She felt they might enjoy looking at animals.
“Tommy’s got tonsillitis,” Emma said. “Fever a hundred and three. I’ll gladly let you have Teddy, but he might be too much for you.”
Patsy could hear screams in the background and felt in a quandary. Emma’s company was really what she sought, but she decided that motherhood was imminent enough that she ought to have some practice, so she agreed to take Teddy.
He had had his hair cut the day before and no longer looked like a midget rock singer. The prospect of the stock show put him in a bright conversational mood, most of the conversation being about his haircut. Once Patsy had to stop abruptly at a light and sent him rolling onto the floorboards. It didn’t hurt him but it dampened his mood a bit and shook his confidence in Patsy’s driving. After that he sat sucking his thumb until they were parked.
They accidentally entered the show barn by the wrong door and found themselves amid the hogs and sheep. It was past the middle of the afternoon and the barns had had time to accumulate almost a day’s worth of mess. The sheep and swine were crowded into rattly aluminum pens, and the whole area smelled of lamb’s wool and sheepshit. Two huge Rambouillet rams were snorting at each other, only a few insubstantial fences between them. Teddy was abashed by it all and hid his face against her leg.
They went on to the pigs and he recovered some of his nerve. They saw a huge whory-looking sow with six irritable little piglets bumping around her ankles. The sow’s udders dragged on the straw and the little pigs kept lunging underneath her, trying to keep her still long enough that they could feed. Both Patsy and Teddy were fascinated and stood watching for several minutes. Teddy bent down and looked through the lowest gap in the fence, facing the little pigs on their own level, but when one of them stuck his snout out at him he straightened up and held out his hand to Patsy. They made their way out of the sheep section as delicately as possible, skirting yellow puddles and lamb turds. The barns were full of adolescents in blue Future Farmers of America jackets, many with prize ribbons pinned to their lapels.
The cattle exhibits were cleaner and much airier. The aisles were wider and huge rotating fans kept the air circulating. They stopped and watched, again mutually fascinated, as a young Hereford steer was primped up for his contest. His tail had been in a hairnet, but it was taken out, combed into an amazing puff, and sprayed with hair spray. It looked, Patsy thought meanly, not unlike the bouffant hairdos of the cowgirls who kept passing. The steer was combed and oiled until he shone; he stood chewing his cud while four men bustled about him. One was parting the hair along the steer’s neck. He had a rat-tailed comb and a bottle of Vitalis and Patsy couldn’t help giggling. When she did, Teddy giggled loudly, in support of her, as it were. The four men stopped simultaneously and looked at them.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t making fun. It’s just that your steer reminds me of Louis the Fourteenth.”
At that the men looked relieved, if still a little puzzled, “Uh, no, ma’am,” one of them said. “This one here was sired by Larry Domino. One Sixty-one.”
It was Patsy’s turn to feel blank, but not so blank as to linger. They stopped again in front of a demonstration booth containing an automatic milking machine. Teddy was bored but Patsy was fascinated. There was a diagram of the whole milk-making process, beginning with a cow eating a bite of grass and ending with a dull-looking youngster sitting at a dull-looking supper table drinking a glass of milk. Patsy was wearing a bulky gray sweater and a dark skirt. Her hair was swept back loosely and held by a yellow headband. The attendant at the booth welcomed her heartily.
“They don’t make a better milking machine than this,” he said. “You-all got Jerseys or Holsteins?”
“We don’t got,” Patsy said, allowing Teddy to drag her
to the bulls. Her impulsive reference to Louis the Fourteenth had not been so inept, either; the bulls were definitely treated like grand seigneurs. Each had his own spacious neatly ordered stall, filled thigh-high with fresh clean soft-looking hay—the sort of hay to be rolled in, if one were to be rolled in the hay. Some of the more important bulls even had individual body servants, in most cases a Negro boy who slept on a blanket in the stall and saw to the animal’s every need. “Um,” Teddy said in fascination, as one of the huge Santa Gertrudis began to shit. As soon as the droppings ceased falling an attendant with a pitchfork immediately scooped up hay and excrement and carried it to a disposal barrel. The Hereford and Angus bulls had a squat, debauched look about them; it was hard to imagine one raising himself onto a cow for carnal purposes, and even harder to imagine a cow that could bear the weight. The Brahmas she thought magnificent, sleek, and restive and not nearly so domestic in appearance as the other bulls.
Teddy demanded popcorn and she got him some. She was feeling tired and was thinking what a long way it was to the car. The parking lot of the Astrodome stretched on and on, like the West. As they were passing the horse stalls, Teddy munching his popcorn, Patsy saw a familiar blond girl holding an Appaloosa and reaching up to do something with its bridle. The horse was holding its head just high enough that she had to strain and she suddenly lost her temper and gave the reins a jerk.
“Sprinkles, damn you!” she said.
“My goodness,” Patsy said. “You’ve recovered.”
Boots was astonished. “Patsy!” she said. Teddy had been a few feet behind and at that point caught up. He offered Patsy a piece of wet popcorn that he had tried and found not to his taste. Boots looked unchanged: Levi’s, old scuffed boots, and a man’s shirt. “Is that yours?” she said, looking with amazement at Teddy.
“Urn,” Teddy said positively, catching Patsy’s hand.
Boots quickly made friends with him—their approach to life was very similar. She lifted him up on the Appaloosa and let him ride the horse to its stall. Patsy followed nervously, hoping he wouldn’t fall off and crack his skull on the concrete. That wouldn’t sit well with Emma. Fortunately, he didn’t. Pete was at the stall when they got there.
“How do?” he said, as if they had seen each other yesterday. He knelt down to shake hands with Teddy, but Teddy gave him an odd suspicious look and clutched his popcorn to his bosom. Patsy was for a moment at a loss for words, for Pete looked years older than she remembered him. His sandy hair had thinned still more, and he was fatter in the face and looked tired. When he went over to help Boots with her horse Patsy noticed he was limping.
“Don’t tell me you broke your hip too?” she said.
“Naw. Little sprain. I been having to compete lately, trying to get the hospital bills paid. I’m too old to be riding broncs, I guess. I never was much good at it.”
“You’re good enough,” Boots said. “Let’s go to the motel.”
Patsy and Teddy followed them. Pete drove a secondhand station wagon, Boots still had the T-bird. The motel was a third-rate establishment called the Primrose Courts. Emma had sent a spare diaper along, assuming Teddy might need one, and Patsy took it in with her. Teddy looked at her a little sullenly when he saw it.
“Our home away from home,” Pete said.
“It’s crummy,” Boots said. “We should have got a clean stall in the stock barns. If I ever break my hip again we might as well kill ourselves.”
Pete scooped Teddy up and sat him on a saddle that had been rolled against one wall. Teddy started to cry but every one grinned at him and he decided not to and was soon playing merrily on the saddle. Patsy was as appalled by the motel room as she had been by the Tatums’ trailer house. The walls were peeling, the bed was unmade, there was a pile of dirty clothes in one corner—Levi’s, shirts, bras—somehow giving the room a bad tone, of sour-smelling lower-class intimacy. Pete got himself and Boots beers out of an ice chest near the bed. Besides the smell of beer and dirty clothes there was also the smell of medicine in the room—several bottles stood on the bedside table. “Dope for my aches and pains,” Pete said.
“If he competes for six more weeks I can get a job somewhere giving rubdowns,” Boots said. “Boy, am I getting good at it.”
“I think it’s insane,” Patsy said. “There’s got to be something safer than rodeo. Couldn’t you buy a ranch or something?”
She regretted saying it, for it was obvious that no one who stayed in such a motel could buy a ranch. But the Tatums were not offended. Boots even laughed. “We can’t even buy a steak, much less a ranch,” she said.
Teddy noticed that Pete was drinking beer, a beverage for which he had a taste. He got off the saddle and came over. Pete held out the can and Teddy licked a little of the foam from around the opening. Patsy decided it was time to diaper him and swooped him up from behind and plopped him on the bed. Teddy looked at her hostilely but made no resistance while she took the sopping diaper off. Pete gave her a newspaper to put it on. “All this room needs is a few wet diapers,” he said.
Patsy felt a little self-conscious folding the diaper. Teddy was docilely sucking his finger, but just as she got it folded and reached for his ankles to raise him up and slip it under him he adroitly rolled himself away and scooted to the head of the bed, where he sat looking at her with quiet poise, as if to say, “Your move.”
Patsy knelt and gave him a sorrowing, appealing look, trying to coax him with her expression, but Teddy’s heart had turned to stone. He held his ground until Patsy tried to grab him and then rolled off the bed and deposited himself in Boots’s lap. She giggled and Teddy giggled too, but Boots proved a treacherous ally. She carried him to Patsy, who deposited him firmly on his back in the vicinity of the diaper. “No more nonsense,” she said. Teddy lay quite still for a second and then flipped onto his stomach. When Patsy flipped him back he began to struggle in earnest. She kept hold of his ankles but made little progress with the diaper. Every time she got close he would arch his back or knock the diaper away with his behind.
“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “Please be reasonable. Lie still.”
Teddy was growing red in the face from his efforts to flip onto his stomach again. The look he gave her was far from reasonable. Patsy had not expected him to be so strong. She got one side of the diaper pinned but could not get the other. “What’s got into you, damn it?” she said. “You used to be my friend.”
Pete came to her aid. “If you don’t quit that wiggling I’m going to sit on you,” he said, pointing a finger at Teddy. Teddy took it to heart and stopped wiggling immediately. Once diapered, he recovered his affection for Patsy and sat on her lap.
They chatted for a bit, and Patsy found that she was growing depressed. It was the crampedness, uncertainty, and untidiness of the Tatums’ life that depressed her. She liked them despite it. They had an openness with her that she liked, just as the Hortons did. It was an ever better openness than it had been, because before there had been that small thorn pricking them all, that sense that she and Pete were edging toward each other in some way. That was gone. Boots was bright and cheerful, despite the room and their financial troubles, and the two of them seemed married in a way that they hadn’t the summer before. They had become each other’s sustenance, and it would have been hard to imagine them apart.
Still, she felt awkward with them, and it was because she pitied them and was afraid they would notice it. And it was mostly pity for Pete; his life seemed so tiring, so cluttered, so full of worry. Some of the springiness he had had the summer before was gone. He didn’t move like he had. For a few minutes they allowed the ebullient Teddy to dominate the scene and then Patsy got up to go, the newspaper with the soggy diaper in it in one hand. The Tatums followed her out to the car—it seemed she had only known them in the vicinity of cars. Someone was always leaving, or being left. They looked at the gray sky while Teddy gathered a handful of gravel; they looked at the white Astrodome, not far away.
“Please b
e careful with those broncs,” she said to Pete. “I wish you could find some other way to make money.”
“Daddy’s offered him a used-car lot to run,” Boots said. “I guess when we get tired of rodeoing we’ll take him up.”
“I couldn’t sell money, much less cars,” Pete said, opening Patsy’s door for her.
She waved, they waved, and Teddy waved at length. They drove home in the thickening four-thirty traffic, Patsy a little sad. She liked the Tatums and knew they liked her, and yet it was odd that they should even know one another. For a few minutes, poking along in the traffic, she felt very isolated. She knew almost no one who was really her companion in experience. Perhaps no one but Jim. Even Emma, whom she loved, was different from her. Emma would understand Boots and Pete better than she did, understand staying in cheap motels and having no money and not very good clothes. Hank would understand it too. He was even related to Pete Tatum in some remote way. Even the Duffins had been poor once; Lee had told Jim about them living over a lumberyard in Indiana when they were first married. She felt herself still but a child compared to them all. She didn’t have to ride broncs to pay hospital bills. She wouldn’t have to feed her child hamburger three times a week, as Emma did. She had never been in a really tight corner of any kind. Neither had Jim. He was talking, finally, of selling the Ford and buying them two new cars, a sports car for himself and a sober station wagon for Patsy, the young matron-to-be. The Ford had been wheezing too much of late. Jim had completely abandoned his poverty pose. He was buying too many books to be able to maintain it successfully.
Moving On Page 43
