by Jane Rule
“There’s a tv at home…”
“Well…” Roger said, leaving his dollar and maneuvering carefully out from under the long, thin tray.
Ordinarily, Roger would not have felt martyred by his own good sense. Ordinarily, if he controlled a mood on a walk like this, it was smugness at the thought of his good, intelligent wife, his three, lively, loving children, his well kept house, his roses. If they were tired sometimes, if they didn’t get away on a vacation, it wouldn’t be long; these were the investment years. He and Nancy looked on the bright side. Tonight the blazing car headlights he walked toward blinded him, and he was at first sullen and then angry because it was true: for him there was never any cake at all.
Instead of going directly to his room, Roger stopped in the office and asked for a local paper.
“Anything going on in town tonight?”
“Bingo at church and beer at the hotel,” the proprietor answered. “And a lousy movie.”
In the city there would be a concert or a foreign film or a play, not that Roger and Nancy went to any of those things. Like their vacation, they talked about going and stayed home. It was only seven-thirty. If he had taken his own car, he could start home now, but what would be the point of driving all night? He couldn’t sleep once he got there, the kids up, Nancy doing the morning vacuuming. Well, at least she didn’t have to spend her evenings in the forty-watt glow of a motel room. Her television set didn’t take quarters. Roger found a quarter for his and sat down in the cracked leatherette chair, designed for someone with three foot long thighs and an eight inch backbone and sold to every motel of this sort in the country. In the middle of the third commercial, there was a knock on the door.
“No luck,” Bert said without sign of great disappointment.
“Come watch the commercials,” Roger suggested politely.
“Let’s at least go out for a beer. Come on.”
“And waste my quarter?”
“No, I wouldn’t ask anyone to do that,” Bert said, flipping a quarter at Roger. “My treat.”
“You’ve finally found my price,” Roger said, and he got up out of the damaging chair, turned off the set and put his wallet back in his pocket.
Having agreed to go, Roger tried to look cheerful, but he could find nothing less depressing about the beer parlor than he had about the motel. It was too early for a crowd, yet the tables were already patterned with spilt beer and dirty ashtrays. At one end of the room a juke box worked at trying to obliterate the human silence. At the other, a television set offered the same commercials Roger had recently deserted.
“What I like about this town…” Bert began, but Roger couldn’t hear whatever rudeness followed.
They were on their third beer before the place began to fill up, a small crowd coming in from the movie, perhaps even a guilty few from gambling at the church. That would explain why the fat woman was carrying a pop-up toaster under her arm.
“You think she won it?” Bert asked. “No kidding? I’m going to ask her.”
Roger was mildly embarrassed by the idea, but he didn’t try to stop Bert who, after a few exchanges, was leading the fat woman and her husband back to the table.
“You were right,” Bert said.
“I’m just lucky,” the fat woman said. “Even won me a trip east once, and I got me the old man here in a poker game.”
Roger didn’t really try to follow the conversation after that, though he contributed to it occasionally. The fat woman was cheerful, and her husband was pleased with her. By the time the beer parlor closed, it seemed right that Roger and Bert go home with them to find out whether or not the toaster really worked.
Roger felt like a kid again as Bert blundered along dark roads following shouted and conflicting directions. Only when Bert brought the car to an ordered halt and they got out did Roger suddenly want to draw back, but he resisted the impulse guiltily, knowing himself to be a snob. The shack they went into was more orderly than the bottle-littered yard they had picked their way through, not clean of course, but there was a cheerful slovenliness about it. The bingo winner cleared dirty dishes from a table and set the new toaster down in the proud center. Then while her husband plugged the toaster into a swinging light bulb socket overhead, she looked for bread. Bert was setting out beer from a carton, and there was also a bottle of whisky which Roger had bought, not wanting to be less generous than the others.
They were all very serious about the toaster, and, when it performed, toast leaping into the air, bouncing onto the table and onto the floor, they were delighted. They drank to the church, to the lucky winner, to the toaster and to themselves.
“Got to get these young fellas girls,” the fat woman said. “Can’t have a party without girls.”
“Too late,” Roger protested. “Just get me some jam, that’s all.”
“Girls,” Bert said. “Why not?”
It was three in the morning when the next guest arrived, not two girls as had been hoped, but one, remarkably ugly, her hair still up in curlers, one child asleep in her arms, another trailing behind her in pajamas.
“You’re a sport, Sally,” the lucky fat woman shouted.
“Had to bring the kids,” Sally said.
“Never mind. Put them to bed in the other room.”
Roger was very drunk, but just as the deepest sleep couldn’t distract him from the need of one of his own children, he could not be indifferent now to what he saw. He stood up unsteadily about to make an indignant protest. At the sight of him, the independent child burst into tears.
“Oh, pack it up, Charlie,” Sally said. “Come on, get in here and get to bed.”
“I’ve had enough,” Roger said. “Would somebody please phone me a cab?”
“Now don’t worry,” the prize husband said, “Sal will do for the both of you.”
“He doesn’t go halves,” Bert said. “Call him a cab.”
“You don’t deserve a toaster,” Roger said with great dignity before he walked out of the shack and waited in Bert’s car until the cab arrived.
Five hundred miles is a long way to drive with a bad hangover, conscience and temper. Roger might have got some ease by feeling as angry and disgusted with Bert as he was with himself. In fact, before they met for a late attempt at breakfast, Roger was planning to take that ease, but Bert was in one of his wry, cheerful moods which made Roger’s righteous indignation look more like childish sulking. They had driven more than a hundred miles before Roger risked any moral unpleasantness.
“I keep thinking about those kids,” he said.
“Charlie went right off to sleep,” Bert said. “You didn’t really scare him.”
That was not the response Roger had expected. He looked around for what he had been about to say next and couldn’t find it.
“So you get a little stupid and you get a little ugly…so what? Everybody cuts out one time or another. I don’t mind. I just told her you had too much to drink. Nobody’s feelings were hurt. Forget it.”
Roger was too busy recovering from his indignation to follow this explanation at all well. He said, “You call that cake?”
“Are you kidding?” Bert asked. “Look, I’ve just said I don’t mind saving you from a dog, but let’s not pretend I like it, okay?”
“Why didn’t you leave when I did?”
“We couldn’t both leave, not after she’d got the kids up and come all the way over.”
Roger sat with that for several bitterly confusing moments. Bert was telling him he’d been rude. The idea, inconceivable to him, was shocking and simple. From Bert’s point of view, Roger had been unkind not only to his host and hostess and that incredibly ugly and irresponsible woman but to Bert.
“How much did it cost you?” Roger asked.
“Keep the quarter,” Bert said with a grin. “You had to pay for the cab.”
“I’m out about thirty bucks,” Roger said.
“Just get me some jam, you said,” Bert laughed.
Roger
laughed, too, but his head hurt, and so did his stomach as if he had suddenly been swung up-side-down. It was thirty dollars he had to account for, and he had not made a habit of lying to Nancy. An experience increasingly inexplicable to him would be a marriage-threatening disaster to Nancy. She had not agreed to share her life with the sort of man who got drunk with a fat woman, went home with her to try out her toaster, got a whore and two children out of bed at three in the morning and then left Bert to a gallantry Roger could still hardly conceive of. Nancy thought even Archie Bunker was sordid. No explanation, short of being robbed, would be creditable, given this months’s bills.
“We should have gone to the bingo game,” Roger said glumly.
“Would have cost ten more for the same evening eventually. All roads lead to Rome.”
All roads, for Roger, led to home. Even his apprehension did not get in the way of his relief to be out of Bert’s car and walking up his own well kept path into the quiet of his sleeping children and the welcome of his wife. He even looked forward to the litany of new domestic catastrophes to restore him to the sane, unlucky man he used to be.
“Oh, honey, you’ll never guess what I’m going to do,” Nancy said, her arms tight around him.
“What?” he asked.
“I felt so mean after you left. I thought it will be a minor miracle if he ever comes home again…”
“Oh, Nancy…” He began to protest on her behalf.
“I was talking to Alice, telling her about the hot water heater, the measles, me, and what it must feel like to be you. Anyway, we decided to do something. We’re going to have a garage sale.”
“What will you sell?” Roger asked, willing to forgive her anything, even his favorite fishing rod.
“Just junk around our houses. And in the process the basement will get cleared out and the shed and the store room, and even the hall closet. The kids can help,” she said, as she led him into the kitchen. “We baked you a cake. I’m so glad you’re home.”
Roger looked at the cake, a misshapen masterpiece of chocolate energy, and laughed.
“A piece of cake! A piece of cake!”
It was the first thing he’d been able to eat all day, and Nancy poured them both glasses of cold, sweet milk.
“How was your trip?”
The question gave him a twinge, and he did not say, you’ll never guess what I did.
“Awful,” he answered. “I blew an extra thirty dollars.”
“Never mind,” Nancy said. “We’ll get breathing room.”
She wasn’t even interested to know what had happened to that thirty dollars. He didn’t have to tell her. One day, when he was thirty-five or perhaps forty, he might tell her the story of the pop-up toaster and his asking for jam, and they would both laugh at the boy he’d been, even at thirty. Now he was a man, eating a second piece of cake under his nearly paid for roof, knowing he didn’t deserve his luck any more than that woman deserved her toaster.
A GOOD KID IN A TROUBLED WORLD
“I’D RATHER HAVE A do-it-yourself nervous breakdown anyway,” Cornelia said. “A kit for manic-depressives…”
“I think it’s too bad your mother doesn’t believe in psychiatrists,” Nigel said in his light, ominous voice.
“I think it’s too bad she doesn’t believe in liquor. If she did, I could afford all kinds of other things…”
“You don’t drink all that much,” Nigel said, helping himself to more gin. “It’s all the money Rick wants. Cornie, that boy…”
Nigel was an expert on boys, poor thing. Very different from being an expert with them. Cornelia often wondered why she put up with his long, dyspeptic lectures on the younger generation or his drinking bottles and bottles of her gin or his waspishness about the state of her wardrobe and her psyche. She was sorry for Nigel, and, in fact, he wasn’t bad company when he was in a gossipy or reminiscing mood. He occasionally took her out to dinner, which was all right in the winter time when he confronted the public with nothing more than crested blazers and polka dot cravats. In the summer time, the Bermuda shorts that girdled his gourmet belly were enough to keep her cooking for him even when he was in a generous mood.
“Not the sort of man to have around the house,” her mother said, just for something to be unpleasant about in the winter, but in the summer, when Rick was home from college, she would say, “He’s just another of those bad influences on the boy. It’s no wonder Rick locks himself up with a guitar and a room full of spiders.”
Cornelia had never been clever at finding good influences, either for herself or for Rick. Truthfully, his own father, if he had lived through the war, would not have been a psychologist’s choice, undomesticated genius of bizarre accidents, hilarious, baffled, more lovable than loving. He’d got himself killed for lack of a better solution, of that Cornelia was sure. She had been urgently unhappy about it, but unsurprised. And her life was not much changed by it, for marriage hadn’t been even a brief interruption of her mother’s domination. Middle class soldiers didn’t support their wives. His pay became her pension, that little margin between her real liquor bill and the one her mother was willing to pay, as a social necessity in a wicked world. Cornelia should have gone to work or married again or both. She was liberally educated, and she had skills, but not of the lucrative or socially acceptable sort. Plans to play the virginal professionally or open a blacksmith shop were treated not only by her mother but by her friends as whimsical.
“A woman’s place is with her child,” her mother said.
“Barf,” Cornelia answered, out of her mother’s hearing. The trouble was Cornelia loved her child and enjoyed being with him. Because declaring independence from her mother was tangled with declaring independence from him, she did not get around to it. Nor did she get around to finding another husband.
“Lucky fluke I got married at all,” she’d say, sprawled in a large chair.
Her friends were the sort to laugh at her rather than give her advice about hair style, make-up, clothes. So many of them were, in any case, suffering from marriage that they were glad of a place to come where it didn’t exist, where there was just dear, old Cornie, grumbling and raging about her mother or worrying with great energy and lack of direction about Rick.
“Aside from being nearly blind, knock-kneed and crazy, he’s not a bad little kid,” she’d say. “But I’ve got to teach him values, lasting values.”
That principle her mother and Cornelia agreed on, but they couldn’t agree on any value in particular, and that was a source of nearly as much nerve damaging conversation as the number and kinds of Cornelia’s bills. It always came back to the problem of good influences.
Cornelia had known a great many interesting people, even some talented and responsible ones, but those who did not become martyrs to conscience or of politics, tended to alcohol, jail, or suicide.
“It’s a troubled world,” Cornelia would try to explain, but even she had to admit that her corner of it sometimes seemed more troubled than others, dangerously troubled for a bright child with her short-circuiting nervous system. “Not a system at all, as far as I can figure out. We’re proof of the law of the random.”
She and Rick shared asthma and Scarlatti and an absorbed slovenliness, which included all their various projects and a number of unlikely pets, spiders being the most persistent variety. She tried to give him those other, more conscious things: a sense of compassion and duty toward minorities, some comprehension of the miraculous.
“Is this faith-in-man or faith-in-God day?” Rick would ask with tiresome irony, which discouraged her.
“Just because things don’t always work out…”
Like the time she sent him to Friendship Camp and he came home with a skull fracture. Or that week-end with the fake swami who sold her an overpriced Buddha and gave Rick a distinctly unsavory lecture about things of the spirit. And last Christmas vacation, she’d made a really bad mistake, just through scatty-mindedness, talking Rick into going on that civil rights
march.
“Isn’t there an easier way to go to jail?” he’d wanted to know.
Then he gave in and went in the middle of a late afternoon snow storm. She was awakened at four in the morning by a bitter and bitterly cold son.
“It wasn’t a civil rights march,” he said. “It was an historical reenactment of Washington’s march on the something-or-other. A bunch of history buffs.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have read it wrong in the paper.”
“Yeah, you must have.”
He was in bed with pneumonia on Christmas day. That’s why she’d gone ahead and bought the electric guitar to go along with the new microscope and the jeep. What else could she do after he’d said, “I’d burn my draft card for you if I could see well enough and breathe well enough to get one worth burning.”
“His father died in the last war,” Nigel said haughtily, making it sound like an accomplishment. “Patriotism…”
Cornelia didn’t count the number of times Nigel practiced that speech before he delivered it to Rick in June. Rick pointed out that he had no choice about serving his country, but it was too mild a comment to stem Nigel’s rhetoric. Rick’s greatest handicap was not his poor eyesight or his uncertain lungs but a weary good humor, which made him victim not only to all Cornelia’s friends, but to his grandmother and Cornelia as well. His only retaliation, if so strong a word could be used, came in occasional songs he wrote for his own and sometimes Cornelia’s entertainment. Things like, “Nobody ever called my granny Cornie,” which forced him into some disrespectful rhymes but never into malice.
“Spiders, my dear boy, are basic,” Nigel said, on another of his favorite topics. “Your obsession with them is an insult to your mother.”
“She doesn’t mind them.”
“Of course she does. She hates her own mother.”
“Poor, rich old Granny? Oh, no. It would be like trying to hate the bank or the stock exchange.”
“What’s so difficult about that?” Nigel demanded.
“Well, you have a point, but I don’t think Mother’s a socialist.”
