“He’s cute.”
They both laughed again.
“God Almighty,” Cleveland said.
“Do I leave, try to take him, or what?”
“Just leave. I will, too. He’ll get up on his own self.”
Mrs. Elliot said, “You’ve been … correct.”
Cleveland looked at her and said nothing.
Mr. Elliot after that was his own master. He was in control. He was prescribed some medicine designed to address polar-brain disorder, which one doctor said he had, and some other medicine to block beta waves, which another doctor, laughing at the first, said he had too many of. He took the one medicine, then the other, then both, then neither, and went back to beer.
When he moved back in, which he did in a straight line from the linoleum floor of Cleveland’s kitchen, saying to Mrs. Elliot only “Whew. Rough night,” and nothing of the week he’d been gone before that, writing his novel and burning it, both before and after it was on the page, he delivered himself of a speech.
“I will be a good husband,” he said. “And observe these rudiments of good-husband behavior. I will—” He stopped and said, “Here,” taking from his jacket—which he noticed at that moment he had never seen before, how remarkably well it fit, and it appeared to be well made—a note. He handed the note to Mrs. Elliot. It said, in pencil:
I WILL NOT
wash dishes
“ diapers
vacuum house
sweep “
mind baby
feed “
clean “ ’s ass
give dinner parties
go to “ “
entertain in-laws
visit “
tolerate “
talk on
phone with “
receive mail at this address
Mrs. Elliot read the list and walked to him and kissed Mr. Elliot, which he did not expect.
“Be as bad as you can be, honey,” she said to him. “It won’t amount to much.” He could feel and taste her lipstick.
Mr. Elliot’s astonishment was not as large or long-lasting as he felt it should have been. His first thought: All women are whores! Mrs. Elliot in that little nick of time had left the room and was coming back through it with one arm full of baby and one arm full of laundry. She smiled on her way through.
The smile was a guileless, almost radiant, but finally just naturally pleasant expression on the face which was the most beautiful face he had ever seen at close range to conceal the worst past he had ever fathomed at long range. What was she?
Am I out of … bounds? Am I in the ball game?
Thoughts like these were not common to Mr. Elliot. “None of us knows what the ball game is” was a notion that he commonly embraced. Yet the idea that the game was known but somehow not to him was a strange and unhappy, feral thought with tusks on it.
He wouldn’t clean the baby’s ass or talk to her parents and she could say it didn’t amount to much? He suddenly had one of his visions of her: She was dancing naked in a cage in a club in a Navy area in Jacksonville. Gyrating did not quite do her salacious whirling and spine-whipping justice. He got a grip on the kitchen counter and waited for the seizure to pass and hoped nothing blew out. He was afraid to feel the jacket for pills. He was afraid of the pills. He was afraid of about everything in these visions except the floor immediately beneath his feet, which in this case was kitchen linoleum that also scared him because of his having inexplicably waked up on some of it that morning.
He calmed himself. These visions, if you wanted to call them that, were what informed him of his wife’s nasty sexual past. He did not know where they came from. That is to say, his wife had not told them to him, nor had anyone else. Which did not reduce their claim on him a bit, or their … mythical truth. They were like the Harpies, as if he were … whoever the old fart was they snatched the food from. Every time he saw his wife as an angel, as way better than something good enough to eat, these things came from the sky screeching No you don’t and fouling the air and somehow instilling in the prospect of his beautiful wife an odor utterly rancid. And while you could not say where these Harpies came from, or ascribe any reason why they were coming as you starved to death, you also could not say they were not, in important senses, real.
In his kitchen, his wife humming in the laundry room, Mr. Elliot was still recovering from the naked-dancing vision. He tried reasoning some more. He had disappeared for a week, he gave her his list, she kissed him and started laundry. All right. There was something domestically pliable or reliable enough in her that belied her having danced naked in a cage. Or argued for it. Only someone who had weathered—or enjoyed—the pawing (and?) of the denizens of, say, the Comic Book Club, sailors off ships, would find his own trials amounting to not much.
Mr. Elliot groaned audibly in the kitchen. He could not cry. He was beyond that. He started tapping his foot.
He was hearing, from the laundry room, Mrs. Elliot, who was humming and singing, somewhat, a song, to the rhythm of the washing machine. Her voice was not good, but at any rate she was not so much singing as talking the lyrics, as if trying to recall them.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Somebody gonna buy me a diamond ring.
Mr. Elliot was further stricken, if that were possible. Was she mocking him? How had she come up with this business of a bird in a cage—the only way you could have a mockingbird—and why a mockingbird just as he had had his attack of seeing her in a cage? Had she sent the Harpies of go-go? The myth surfaced: He was King Phineus, blind at a stone table, reaching for roast lamb and stuffed vine leaves and getting flapped in the face by leering, stinking birds.
“What’s that song, dear?” he asked.
“What song?”
“You were singing.”
“I was singing?”
Ho! She did not have the courage to kill him openly and cleanly. She was doing more capework. Mr. Elliot walked into the laundry room with violence—which he had never effected and only once himself been a minor victim of—uppermost in his mind. He hummed the tune, as menacingly as he could.
Mrs. Elliot, smiling at him, picked the tune up and hummed herself. Mr. Elliot, who thought he should hit her, wanted suddenly to kiss her, badly.
“Oh that,” Mrs. Elliot said. “You know what? I can’t figure the sense of having a mockingbird in there. It seems to mock the sentimentality of the song itself, doesn’t it? Is that possible? Could it be that sophisticated?”
Could she? was all Mr. Elliot could think. Enough to send the caged woman, the caged bird, the mockery … she looked delicious! She was taking his hand. She put it with hers into the open washing machine, down into the hot suds and clothes, and their hands swung together in the reversing half-circle motion.
Then Mrs. Elliot held his hand—not simply in there, but held it as if they were holding hands. As if, remove the washing machine, they were new to each other and at the movies.
“I knew a boy did this with his feet once and the thing went into spin,” Mrs. Elliot was saying. Mr. Elliot had a dreamlike look on his face, so she waited before telling the story.
Mrs. Elliot thought of the woman Cleveland, who was real. She looked at the cute lout whose hand she was holding, who was determined to be real, who did not know that if she held his hand long enough where it was he’d lose his arm. Maybe Cleveland could explain the mockingbird business. She was pretty sure the song was Motown.
“What happened?” Mr. Elliot asked.
“It went into spin, broke everything below his waist.” Mr. Elliot eased his hand out of the tub.
Mr. Elliot had a grateful and self-pitying look on his face as if he was about to blubber. But this was not his emotion. He was confused, confused and happy, happy and confused and happy. He wanted to sing the song, too, but Mrs. Elliot, who had the baby asleep in one arm and Mr. Elliot with the other, was taking them both to bed.
The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping
>
MRS. SCHUPING LIVED ON a moribund estate that had once been grand enough in trees alone that a shipbuilder scouting live oaks in the eighteenth century had bought the tract for wood to make warships for the British Navy. Oak of that sort, when fitted and shipped into six-inch walls, would not merely withstand or absorb cannonballs but repel them a good way toward their source. Mrs. Schuping did not know this, but she knew she had big old trees, and she patted their flanks when she strolled the grounds.
The house had died. So slatternly, so ratty was it that Mrs. Schuping was afraid to enter it again once she had worked up the courage to go out of it, which was more dangerous. She had been hit by boards twice while leaving the house but never when going in.
There was no such thing as falling-down insurance, an actuarial nicety that flabbergasted and enraged Mrs. Schuping. Falling down was what really plagued houses, therefore that was what you could not protect them from by lottery.
She called herself Mrs. Schuping arbitrarily. She had no husband nor had she ever found in the least logical the idea of having one man whom you so designated. Wholly preposterous.
She had a good toaster. It was a four-slice commercial stainless square job, missing its push-down knobs, so that you had to depress the naked notched metal thingies to lower the bread. It looked like you’d need a rag to protect your hand, but you did not. Perhaps if you were hustling breakfasts in a good diner you might, but not slowly, at home. Life was winnowing for Mrs. Schuping.
When she bought the house, she had found a huge collection of opera records, of which she knew nothing except that they sounded ridiculous. This collection she played dutifully, over and over, until it was memorized, until it could not be said that she was ignorant of opera. When she had mastered the collection, she wondered why, and she sailed the records, one by one, into the swamp behind the rotting house. She winnowed the collection of opera records until it was a collection of cardboard boxes, and eventually used those to set her first swamp fire.
Setting the swamp on fire was not a winnowing of her life, but it did winnow the swamp. The burnings seemed to her rather naughty and frivolous, and surprisingly agreeable to look at and to smell. She took an un-adult pleasure in them, along with an adult fear that she might be somehow breaking the law even though the swamp was hers.
The second time she set the mangy tangled tract on fire the sheriff showed up, and she became sure it was the case that you could not burn your own swamp. The sheriff, whom she had not met before, confirmed her anxiety with his opening remark.
“Your swamp is on fire,” he said, standing about fifteen feet off her right shoulder and slightly behind her.
She turned to him and said, not knowing what in hell else she might, “Yes it is.”
The sheriff stood there regarding first her and then the swamp and the fire, which gave his face a jack-o’-lantern-orange sheen, and said again, “The swamp is on fire.” The emphasis was meant to confirm his sympathies with having fires, and upon establishing that bond he walked briskly to Mrs. Schuping’s side and planted his feet and crossed his arms and cocked back to watch the fire with her in an attitude that suggested he would be content to watch for a good long while. When he breathed, his belt and holster creaked.
Mrs. Schuping could not tell if his affection for the fire was genuine or a trap of the infamous misdirectional-innocuous-talk type of country police.
So she said two things. “Sheriff, I set my opera-collection boxes on fire; I confess they were in the swamp.” Then, “Sheriff, I do not need a man.”
The sheriff looked at the fire, followed it up into the high parts, where it licked at the grapevines climbing on the tupelo gums. It was a hot yellow heat in the slack black-ass muddy gloom of a nothing swamp that needed it. He had been taking pure aesthetic enjoyment from the thing until Mrs. Schuping said what she said, which reminded him that they were not free to enjoy this mayhem and that he had to undo her concern with his presence. Concern with his presence was—more than his actual presence—his job ordinarily; it was how he made his living. This was the hardest thing about being sheriff: you could not go off duty. A city cop could. They even provided locker rooms and showers for them; and he imagined laundry and dry-cleaning takeout services for the uniforms. But a sheriff was the sheriff, and he was always, always up to something. That is why he had had to talk like a fool to this woman to get her to let him watch her fire with her. How else excuse standing in front of five burning acres and saying “on fire”? But it had not worked. And this man thing.
“Mizz Shoop, I just—”
“It’s Schuping,” Mrs. Schuping said.
“Yes’m. I know. I just like to call you Shoop, though.”
With this the sheriff again squared off, with a sigh, to watch the fire, whatever he had been about to say cut off by Mrs. Schuping’s correcting him. He hoped he had begun the dismantling of her concerns with his presence, both legal and sexual. He was aware that he had not done much toward either end, but he did not want to babble while watching a good fire. Unless she asked him off the property, he’d hold his ground.
Mrs. Schuping was content, having posted her nolo contendere on the fire and her no desire on the man, to let him stand there and breathe and creak if he wanted to. She had been a little hard on the sheriff, she thought. It was the legal part that worried her into overstating the sexual part. Not overstating, misstating: she did not need a man, but wanting was another question. And if all you had to do to get a big creaking booger like this one was set your back yard on fire, she was all for it.
Four months later the sheriff and Mrs. Schuping had their second date. He saw the smoke from the interstate, where he was parked behind the Starvin’ Marvin billboard at such a ridiculous pitch that takeoff was nearly vertical and he resisted blasting off for speeders unless provoked entirely. What had been provoking him entirely lately was college kids with their feet out the windows of BMWs, headed for Dade County, Florida, with their socks on. That was making him strike, lift-off or no liftoff. He wondered what it was like for a bass. How some lures got by and some did not. For him it was pink socks. In the absence of pink socks, there was smoke over the Fork Swamp.
Mrs. Schuping looked even more fire-lovely than she had at the first fire. This time she saw him before he spoke.
“There won’t be a problem with the permit,” the sheriff said, instead of the idiocies of last time. There was no problem with the permit because there was no permit, but he thought this was a good way to address those concerns of hers.
The sheriff had lost a little weight. Mrs. Schuping had been on intellectual winnowing excursions, and she saw as a matter of vector analogy the trajectory of the sheriff toward her and the swale of her sexual self. He had a swag or a sway—something—of gut that suggested, even if a bit cartoonishly, a lion. This big fat tub could get on top of her, she thought, with no identifiable emotion, looking at the crisp, shrieking, blistering fire she had set with no more ado than a Bic lighter jammed opened and a pot she didn’t want anymore full of gasoline.
The sheriff took a slow survey of the fire, which was magnificent, and loyal—her little swamp was neatly set on a fork of creeks so that the fire could not get away—and turning back he caught a glance of Mrs. Schuping’s profile as she watched the fire and, he thought, him a little, and down a bit he saw her breasts, rather sticking out and firm-looking in the dusky, motley, scrabbled light. Bound up in a sweater and what looked like a salmon-colored bra, through the swamp smoke stinging your eyes, on a forty-year-old woman they could take your breath away. He made to go.
“Good cool fire, Mizz Shoop,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got to go.”
“You’re leaving, Sheriff?”
“It’s business, purely business.”
To the sheriff she seemed relaxed, legally, and there is nothing like a big Ford pawhoooorn exit—a little air, a little air and a little time.
Mrs. Schuping had been through every consciousness and semiconsciousness and unconsc
iousness and raised-and lowered-consciousness program contributing to every good conscience and bad conscience and middle struggling conscience there is. But now she was a woman in a house so falling apart the children had taken it off the haunted register, and she was boiling an egg on a low blue flame. Outside were the large, dark, low-armed oaks.
Also outside, beyond the oaks, were the smoldering ignoble trees. The white, acrid, thin smoke drifting up their charred trunks was ugly. The swamp had powers of recovery that were astounding, though. It was this magical resilience that confirmed Mrs. Schuping as an avid swamp burner. When the swamp came back hairier than it had been before the burning, thicker and nastier, she found the argument for necessary periodic burning, which was of course a principle in good forestry. She was not a pyromaniac, she was a land steward. The trees stood out there fuming and hissing and steaming. Her life continued to winnow.
Beyond the disassembly of her opera holdings, Mrs. Schuping had gradually let go of her once prodigious reading. She had read in all topical lay matters. She had taught herself calculus, and could read Scientific American without skipping the math. She taught herself to weld and briefly tried to sculpt in metal. She gave this up after discovering that all she wanted to sculpt, ever, was a metal sphere, and she could not do it.
She had dallied similarly in hydroponics, artificial intelligence, military science, and dress designing. She had read along Great Book lines and found them mostly a yawn, except for the Great Pornography Books, for which there seemed to be no modern equivalent. She had stopped going out to concerts and movies, etc., which she had done specifically to improve herself, because it got to where after every trip on the long drive back to the ruined estate she wondered what was so damned given about improving oneself. The opposite idea seemed at least as tenable. As her tires got worse, it seemed even more tenable, and she began to embrace the idea of winnowing: travel less, do less, it is more. She found a grocery that still delivered, and she picked up her box of groceries on the front porch—as far as the boys would go.
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