Puttering About in a Small Land

by Philip K. Dick

  Snatching the key from her, Mrs. Watson said, “I will go in; I most assuredly will.”

  “Wait,” Virginia said. “I don’t want you to put your oar into this.” She took the key back, climbed the steps, and unlocked the front door. Tugging along her mother, she entered the house. The living room was dark and cool; the drapes at the window were drawn. The room seemed messy to her, and it smelled of wood. Why wood? she wondered, and then she remembered the fireplace. Oak logs had been stacked near it, and the logs gave off the smell. In the fireplace itself was a heap of newspapers and magazines to be burnt.

  From the hallway Liz appeared, her mouth open and her face elongated and stiff with fright. “I was out in the garden,” she said. “What do you want?” She had on the bottom part of a woolen bathing suit, and over it she had thrown a shirt. She was barefoot. The tails of the shirt hung down almost to her knees, and between the buttons Virginia saw her tanned, bulging skin. She had nothing on underneath the shirt; she had not even finished buttoning it. Her legs sparkled with perspiration.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Virginia said to Liz. “In fact I’m not.”

  “In where?” Liz said in a faint voice. She shook her head and tiny particles of lint dropped from her hair, onto her shirt.

  “Into your bedroom.”

  “How did you get into the house?” Liz said. “Wasn’t the door locked?” Standing in the hallway, she finished buttoning her shirt; she stuffed the tails into the trunks of her bathing suit. “I was in the garden,” she repeated. “What do you want? What’s the idea of breaking into my house?”

  Going past Liz, she went along the hall to the closed bedroom door. Opening the door she looked in.

  On the chair, Roger’s clothes were neatly piled, his coat and trousers and underpants, his tie and shirt and socks. His shoes had been placed at the foot of the bed. The bedcovers had been folded up and placed on the dresser. Roger lay on the bed, under the sheet. He had covered himself with it, so that only the top of his head and his eyes showed. He was watching her. Since he did not have his glasses—he had put them on the dresser—he could not make her out too clearly. Going closer, she saw that he was staring at her suit. He did not quite recognize her.

  She seated herself on the edge of the bed. And still he held onto the sheet, keeping it over him, as if he was afraid she would drag it off and see him.

  “Are you afraid I’m going to look at you?” she said. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  “Who’s with you?” Roger said.

  “My mother.” From the hall came the sound of her mother’s voice and then Liz’s voice. Virginia walked back to the door. “You want me to go outside while you dress?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Shall I shut the door?”

  Finally he said, “Yeah, shut it.”

  She shut the door. But still he remained in the bed, with the sheet held over him.

  In the bed, he tugged the sheet up and kept it in place; he held it with both hands, watching to see if she came any closer. She had discovered him, and he waited to hear what it would be. A dreadful thing, he thought, trembling on the bed and feeling the doom, the closeness. It was here. The years of waiting to be discovered, the locking of the door, the preparing and listening. The door flew apart; she burst in; she stood by the bed, high above him. Her suspicions—she had previously suspected—had brought her in, and he faced her with what he had done, unable to hide; here he was, alone, and it had happened exactly as he had always known it would.

  What a dirty thing, he thought. How could she stand to see him? Surely she would want to shut the door at once, go back out again. But the woman remained. Well, she seemed to say, I expected it. Now I have to decide what to do about it; I have to accept it and accept you as one doing it.

  Yes, he thought. I have done it; I do it; I am caught here doing it. Everyone else does it, but that makes no difference; you are right. Have mercy on me, he thought, watching her. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed of it. I wish I had never been born. How could I begin to practice such a thing? It will drive you crazy, and it has done that; it has driven me out of my mind so that I imagine various other things. But you have shocked me awake and out of that. Can’t you see that I am lying here dreamless, with nothing over me to protect me? So be kind to me. Don’t make it too terrible, the judgment with which I agree. Yes, he thought, I agree; I must be punished for a sin like this. But not too much. Leave me something.

  “I’ll turn my back,” she said. “While you dress.” She carried his clothes from the chair and put them on the bed next to him, where he could reach them.

  “Thanks,” he said, laying his hand on them.

  “You better get up,” she said.

  Trying to defend himself, he said, “Stephen does it too.”

  She shot him a look of impatience. I said the wrong thing, he thought, shrinking back.

  “Was that you in the green Imperial?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t realize you saw me.”

  “Christ,” he said, “you followed along after me. I just thought I was letting it get me. I saw a big car with a couple of dressed-up women in it, talking… I thought it was my imagination working on me.”

  Standing by the bed, she looked around the room; he saw her take it all in. So this is your place, her expression said. This is where you come, to this little room where you can lock the door and get at it in secret. But I interrupted you, and you had to break off.

  “I won’t do it again,” he said. She did not seem to hear him; she had folded her arms and walked in the direction of the windows overlooking the yard.

  Through the back windows of the bedroom, Virginia could see the garden. A glass door from the bedroom opened up onto it. Beyond the garden was another yard, and then a house, and telephone poles. He could have run out that way, she thought to herself. Why hadn’t he? Maybe he was too frightened.

  What an awful thing, she thought. To be trapped like this. To have people burst in…he lay in the bed naked and helpless, without even his glasses. But I had to do it, she said to herself. It was the right thing, for both of us.

  “Now listen to me,” she said. From the bed he gazed up at her, small and not in good health, not even able to make her out very clearly. “I guess I have to tell you what to do,” she said. “Don’t I? You don’t know enough to take care of yourself.”

  His lips turned down, like a wrinkle; showing his lower teeth he said, “Why’d you bring your mother?”

  “I wanted her to be a witness,” she said.

  “Are you going to divorce me?”

  “No,” she said, “I thought maybe Chic might want to have witnesses.”

  His eyes strained; his chin sank down and his lips moved. After an interval he said, “Does he know?”

  “No,” she said.

  He considered that, pushing it about in his mind, frowning and trembling.

  “I don’t want to harm him,” she said. “I don’t have any desire to break up his marriage. If he found out about you, he’d divorce Liz and he never would have another thing to do with you. He wouldn’t consider doing business with you.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m not going to tell him,” she said.

  Raising his head he peered up at her fearfully, but with a clumsy resentment.

  “I don’t want to ruin the plans for the partnership,” she said. With Chic Bonner as your partner, she thought to herself, you might amount to something. You might turn out to be something after all. And the store, too.

  Otherwise, she thought, you are a nervous little spindly man lying under a sheet without your glasses, and that is not enough for me. I must have more. I have given up my own life, my work, and I insist on getting something back that I can be proud of.

  I am not going to come out of this with nothing, she said to herself.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I want the store in my name.”

  He stared up at her, g
rinning with fear.

  “And when we sign the papers with Chic,” she said, “I want his side to be just in his name, not both of theirs. I don’t want Liz’s name to show up anywhere on the papers.” I want, she thought, to have what I deserve. “How does that sound to you?” she said.

  His grin lolled; his head fell first to one side and then the other.

  “All right,” she said. You have had what you wanted, she said to herself, and now you are getting what you deserve. You brought it on yourself. It is your own fault. “Put your clothes on,” she said sharply. “Get up out of that bed and get dressed.”

  His thumb tugged at the clothes, pulling at his shirt. Concentrating on the clothes he fooled with them; he sat up and bent forward, gathering them onto his lap, over and onto the sheet.

  “And as far as I’m concerned,” Virginia said, turning her back to him, not intending to watch, “you and she can do any darn thing you please. As long as you keep it quiet.”

  Without answering, he sorted among his clothes. She heard the rustle.

  Just don’t bother me with it, she thought to herself. Just don’t bring it into my life. I have my child, who is up at the school getting the kind of education he should have, and in a very short while I will have my work. And I do not want to be bothered; I do not have time.

  While he dressed, she wandered about the room. The top drawer of the bureau was partly open, and she pulled it out to see what was inside. A heap of colored scarves covered small boxes in which were earrings; next to the boxes was a glazed pottery knickknack, a red-nosed Irish face with top hat and bulging cravat, to be hung on the wall. Somebody probably gave it to her, she thought. A present. Stuck away, hidden in the drawer. Maybe he gave it to her. She opened the second drawer of the bureau; it was filled with underwear. The corner of a box attracted her attention, a flat box; she drew it out and found that it was a diaphragm and tube of spermicide.

  Stricken, she said. “Look—she’s not wearing it; it’s still in the drawer.” She turned to show it to him.

  “She has another,” Roger said. He stood by the bed in his trousers, slumped over, unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt. “Two sets.”

  “Oh,” Virginia said. One to fool Chic; one to leave in the drawer. And the other, she thought. To be worn all the day. Day and night, wherever she went. Just in case. She put the box back in the drawer and shut it up again. “What an awful way to live,” she said.

  He pretended to be concerned with his shirt.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” she said.

  No answer.

  “No, you’re not fastidious,” she said.

  Again no answer.

  “It would bother me,” she said.

  21

  On May 1, 1953, the new store opened. From six to ten o’clock in the evening an open house was held; gardenias were given away to the ladies, pictures of all children were taken without charge to the parents, coffee and a cookie were served to everybody. Each person who entered the L & B Appliance Mart received a ticket for the grand drawing at which television combinations, Mixmasters, electric irons, and Sunbeam shavers, would be awarded to the winners. For a week, searchlights parked at the curb split up the sky with streams of light, and on Saturday night several members of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team showed up and were put on display on the lighted stage, along with the ten-piece Western band hired for the opening.

  The new name, L & B Appliance Mart, had been chosen in order to give old John “Mac” Beth and his appliance center a run for his money. Both stores were in competition for the same market.

  The L & B Appliance Mart had a long front, and all of the front was window. The building had been a grocery store; Chic Bonner had got wind of its availability for next to nothing through his contacts in the retail grocery-sales world. Earl Gillick had brought his crew and set to work completely remodeling the building. The glass was tilted to avoid reflecting glare in the eyes of passersby. The sign was not mounted onto the building, as it would have been in the old days; instead it was the letters of the name cemented directly onto the wall, each letter separate from the next. At a corner where Gillick had cut a wide entrance, an upright neon sign had been erected according to the designs which Chic Bonner had drawn and which Virginia Lindahl had approved. The doors were double, solid glass except for the plastic and copper handles, and the mail slot in the center of the right door. The entrance was at a slight incline. The exterior color was a pale green; the interior colors were also pastels. The interior lighting—Roger Lindahl had picked out the units—were recessed fluorescents. The building was newly air-conditioned and heated, in winter, by pipes under the nylon tile floor which carried a flow of hot water back and forth. At the rear of the building, unseen by patrons, a raised concrete loading dock had been built to receive merchandise and to load the several store trucks. Warehousing was done at the store itself.

  By the summer of 1954, the gross intake had begun to pay off the cost of remodeling. The auditors could predict eventual amortization of the huge initial overhead.

  On a Wednesday morning, in October of 1954, Herb Tomford, the floor manager of L & B Appliance Mart, unlocked the glass doors with his key and entered the store. The window washer, outside, was hard at work, and Tomford waved at him. The window washer waved back.

  Good morning, Tomford said to himself.

  He put on the air-conditioning system and the overhead lights. I’m the first, today, he thought. Bully for me. Going upstairs to the office floor, he hung his topcoat in the closet. Then he drew a chair up to one of the desks and began to sort through the final tags from Tuesday. Neither of the owners had arrived, so he could not get into the safe to fill the registers. It always made him uncomfortable to be in the store before the money had been brought out; what if a customer appeared and tried to buy something? I can give him pennies, Tomford said to himself. Thousands of them. Returning to the main floor, he opened the first register and wound the tape so that it read properly. While he was involved in doing that, Mrs. L’s car came to a stop at the entrance of their parking lot, turned sharply, and entered the slot which she kept reserved for herself.

  Number one, Tomford said to himself. The lady herself. He slammed the register and walked across the store to the small appliance counter. There, among the shavers and toasters and irons, he opened and set that register.

  The lady who was his employer had left her parked car and was walking toward the front door of the store. Her coat flapped about her legs. How fast she goes, Tomford thought. She gets right across the parking lot; no time lost, there.

  “Good morning, Mrs. L,” he said, as the door swung open.

  “Good morning, Herb,” she said, pausing at the counter to lower part of her armload of papers.

  “Will Mr. B be coming in today?”

  She smiled at him with her absent, harried smile. “Why wouldn’t he be in? Oh. His hayfever.” Picking up the phone she dialed. “I’ll find out.”

  “Looks like a nice day,” Herb Tomford said.

  “Hello,” Mrs. L said. “Chic, are you coming into the store today?” A silence. “Dig them up,” she said. “If you’re sure that’s it. I’d pull them up. I hate them anyhow; they’re just weeds as far as I’m concerned.” A silence. “Okay. Good-bye.” Hanging up, she said, “He’ll be in around noon. He says now they think it’s the broom bushes he has down at the end of his lot.”

  “He said he thought that’s what it was,” Tomford said. “When the flowers came out originally.”

  Mrs. L put her coat away in the closet and then she opened the safe. “Here’s your money,” she said. “I’ll be upstairs until you need me.”

  The salesmen were beginning to straggle into the store. They worked on a commission and draw arrangement, and as fast as they entered the door they darted quick glances to see if anything was stirring. One of them lit a cigarette and stationed himself behind the front counter; another seated himself at his table of pamphlets and began to fill out
names in his prospect-book. A third, portly and dignified in his pin-stripe suit, folded his hands behind his back and placed himself near the doorway, in the vicinity of the display of television floor models. None of them exchanged more than a formal greeting with the others; each withdrew and prepared himself, according to his inclination. The last to enter made directly for the phone, laid out a pencil-written list, and began to make calls.

  After the salesmen had come in, the two repairmen appeared. They had been having breakfast together across the street. Without speaking to the salesmen they went directly back to the service department. At nine o’clock, the boy who drove the delivery truck came hurrying in, and after him came the outside repairman, driving the service truck, which he parked near the loading dock behind the store. The last to arrive was the bookkeeper, who climbed the stairs to the office and said good morning to Mrs. Lindahl. He then uncovered the adding machine and began his day of work.

  I guess I can go to the bathroom now, Herb Tomford said to himself. The fort is properly manned.

  “I’m going to the head,” he told one of the salesmen.

  “Right,” the salesman said.

  Taking the morning newspaper with him, Herb Tomford made his way to the bathroom and locked the door so that nobody could disturb him. After he had made himself comfortable he opened the newspaper and read the sports page and then the letters to the editor.

  While he was reading the newspaper, somebody came along and rattled the locked door of the bathroom.

  “Is that you in there?” Mrs. L called. “Herb?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t think you should be in there all the time. For what I need you for you ought to be out here.”

  Herb Tomford said, “For what I’m doing, Mrs. L, I got to be in here.” He folded up his newspaper and tossed it over into the corner. “I’ll be right out. What do you need me for?”

  “We have to take out a Magnavox TV in the next ten minutes. Fred’s setting it up right now.”