The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  I lit her cigarette for her. She took a long puff, and exhaled, thank God, through her mouth. I could never abide ladies who exhale through their noses. She extended her pack of Kents to me and raised her eyebrows, but I shook my head. I quit smoking at about the same time I quit dating her.

  The conversation collapsed again, and I labored mightily to think of something other than the usual banalities about what-all-have-you-been-up-to-since-I-saw-you-last? Finally—wonder of wonders—she broke the silence herself: “What are you doing in Little Rock—or, I should say, what were you doing in Little Rock?”

  “I am just a bird of passage,” I said.

  She grinned. “So now that you’ve left your droppings all over this poor nest, you have to fly off and find a clean one?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I owned. Was she trying to insult me? She never talked so saucy before.

  “Why are you leaving, really?”

  “This town,” I said, as if those two words, inflected ominously, explained it all, and they did.

  “Oh,” she said, nodding her head. But after a moment of thought she asked, “What’s wrong with this town?”

  “My dear,” I patiently replied, “It would take me all night to tell you, and anyway you should know, you’ve lived here longer than I have.”

  “Please don’t my-dear me,” she said, slightly peevish. “My question was rhetorical, I suppose. I know more about what’s wrong with this town than you do.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I granted.

  She was not listening any longer. She was studying my face. I could feel her eyes gamboling about on the landscape of my countenance like a pair of ants exploring a dunghill. “You know, you haven’t changed at all,” she offered, unsolicitedly.

  “Not much, I guess. But you’ve changed quite a bit. Except for my good memory of little details, I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  “Changed how?” she wondered.

  “Prettier. Of course, you were always pretty, but now you’re stunning.” Her beauty was not the sweet, blooming, cherry-cheeked kind of prettiness that decorates the front page of the Gazette’s Society section; rather, a fragile beauty such as one might encounter in late Gothic German art—the jet-black hair and the whitest skin I ever saw. Arkansas prettiness is baroque, but Margaret’s was medieval. And I knew there was something fastidious, nearly compulsive about it: I visualized the long hours she spent ironing her clothes and creaming her face and shaping her hair and plucking her eyebrows.

  “Thank you,” she responded to my compliment.

  “You’re welcome,” I said and then the conversation died again for a while. We ordered another round of beer. Eventually I discovered that we were making idle small-talk about the movie we had seen. Yes, she admitted, Shirley MacLaine was her favorite actress. Yes, I admitted, Robert Mitchum was my favorite actor. We analyzed the plot: as she saw it, the fellow Jerry (Mitchum) had to go to New York and to Gittel in order to discover that Omaha was his real home. I asked her if she would like to go to New York. Not especially, she said, after a long, meditative pause. Why not? I asked. Because it would only make her realize how much she belonged to Little Rock. I was surprised and I said so: Do you mean you really like it here? She answered: I didn’t say that. Then what do you mean? I asked. Maybe, she said, I only mean that I would like to like it. Oh, I said, and the conversation died yet once more.

  At a loss for a better gambit, I resorted finally to the old cliché: “What all have you been doing lately?”

  She shrugged. “Just boondoggling,” she said. “Just dillydallying and fiddlefaddling. Nothing exciting or worthwhile or even interesting.”

  I eyed her with suspicion. “You don’t call being the leading lady of a new Slater play very interesting?”

  “Oh, you’ve been reading the papers,” she said.

  “With surprise,” I said. “I never knew you were interested in the theater. How did you happen to get the top role in the play?” You of all people, who cannot even emote to me successfully, much less to an auditorium full of people.

  She smiled. “There are only two parts in the whole play,” she explained. “And I’m only doing it as a favor for an old friend of yours.”

  “An old friend of mine?” I said. “Who?”

  She grinned. “Doyle Hawkins.”

  I was sorely perplexed. “Dall? Sergeant Hawkins of the Police? Explain, please.”

  She glanced at the clock. “It’s a long, long story and I wouldn’t have time to finish it before your train leaves.” But I pressed her for a synopsis at least and she gave me a few details: she had run across Dall by accident not so long ago, and she had not been in a very pretty mood, and he had tried, in his awkward way, to cheer her up, and eventually the idea occurred to him that she ought to be involved in something, as a diversion, because she had lost her job, which was selling shoes, so he suggested that she join the Little Rock Haymakers group as a stagehand or wardrobe mistress or something, just to have something to do. Because of his insistence, she had told him that she would join the group just as a favor to him, and when she did, almost by accident she was given the part in the play.

  I recalled that there had been only one class in high school which Dall and Margaret had both taken, an art class, and his only awareness of her seemed to be that he was, if anything, a little jealous of her at one time because she was taking up so much of my companionship, which he probably thought belonged rightfully to him. Now here I was in the strange situation of learning that my ex-girl friend and ex-pal had been consorting with one another, and I wondered why.

  “Was that in the line of duty for him?” I asked her.

  “In a way,” she said.

  “How?”

  Her gestures indicated that it was something she would rather not discuss. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “He’s a very conscientious policeman, and I guess he thought he could…could, well, save me, or something, I don’t know.”

  “You were despondent?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Not suicidal or anything, I hope?”

  She didn’t answer. In the silence that followed, I pondered an assortment of conjectures: somebody had jilted her, her life was a mess, stalwart Dall to the rescue. A mysterious girl. I regretted that I could not remain long enough to learn what the facts were. There was only about half an hour until train time.

  The little café we were sitting in was quiet; two brakemen from the MoPac yards were having coffee at the counter; the other tables were vacant. It was a dreary, stuffy place existing in that tasteless manner which was thought modern in the war years but now was as outmoded as a second-hand top-heavy Hudson. On the wall above my lady’s beautiful dark hair was a sign in faded day-glow: No Credit. Again she was not looking at me; her jaws were working as if she were trying to crush a stubborn piece of hard candy or to force a raspberry seed out from between two teeth. These motions transformed the lower half of her face, and although they were performed with a ladylike grace they disturbed me, as a certain nervous tic of a lunatic might do. I asked her what the blue blazes she was doing. She said she was writing a letter on the roof of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. I asked her if she often wrote such letters. Now and then, she said. Whom was this one addressed to? I discreetly inquired. To me, she said. Why was she writing me a letter on the roof of her mouth? I asked. Wouldn’t it be awfully hard to read under such circumstances? Didn’t I ever have odd little compulsions? she wanted to know. Didn’t I ever knock wood, or go out of my way to avoid cracks in the sidewalk, or trace designs on the carpet with my toe, or stick out my tongue at old ladies? Not that I could remember, I said. Oh well, she said, and stopped writing her letter.

  “Margaret—” I began, and she looked up at me again, but there was a great frog in my throat.

  We had never done much talking in our courting days, probably because she was so inordinately shy, so difficult to talk to. Perhaps
the reason I talked too much to Pamela, confessed too much of myself, exhibited my soul to her, was in reaction against the few years I had dated Margaret in near-silence. It was not that we didn’t have anything to talk about. We just didn’t know how. There were times when she would get all moody about something (sex? me? her own shortcomings? what?) and I would ask her what was the matter, but she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me. I would plead, “Come on, Margaret, tell me what’s wrong. Is it something I did? Something I said? Just tell me, and I’ll do something about it. I’ll never know if you won’t tell me. Please tell me.” But she would clam up tighter than ever, and I never knew what the deuce was bothering her. That, too, was why I had relinquished her.

  Yet I felt the minutes slipping away from me, I could picture the train already approaching the town at eighty miles an hour from the southwest, I felt this last fragment of the past seeping through my fingers, and perhaps that was why there was a sudden, untypical desperation in my voice. Talk to me, Margaret,” I suddenly pled, leaning forward over the table and clutching her arm. Talk to me!”—my voice almost wheedling now—“I’ve been home two days now and nobody has talked to to me, and now I’m leaving, and nobody has said a word to me.”

  Her mouth did something—not exactly a smirk, but close to it. Then after a moment she tonelessly replied, “I’ve been here twenty-seven years now and nobody has talked to me.”

  I leaned back in my chair and regarded her from more distance. “Except Dall?” I said.

  “Except him,” she said. Then her face softened, was almost benign. “What shall I talk to you about?” she asked.

  “You,” I said. “I never understood you. I never knew what you were all about. It hurts me when I can’t figure people out.”

  Her gaze turned in on itself—or back upon all the times, ten or eleven years ago, when I had failed to fathom her. “I guess you thought I was crazy sometimes, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Frankly, yes…sometimes.”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Why do you think so?”

  There’s no one reason, nothing encompassing. On the whole I guess I give most people the impression of being simply an aloof snob, but there are just a lot of little things—fragments from my childhood and so forth—which pop up to bother me ever so often and remind me what a sorry wreck of a mind I accumulated over the years.”

  “Like what?” I asked, pleased beyond words to hear her talking at last. I don’t think she ever spoke more than twenty consecutive words to me before.

  “Like this,” she said, holding up a few salted peanuts for my inspection. I had bought her a bag of the things because she had said she liked something salty with her beer. “Watch,” she said. She popped the peanuts into her mouth and swallowed them whole.

  “What did you do that for?” I asked.

  “When I was a little girl,” she explained, “I had the weird notion—I don’t know why—that I had a set of beautiful teeth, perfectly formed molars and incisors and bicuspids and all, right down inside of my fat tummy, and that therefore it was not necessary for me to chew my food before swallowing it, because the other set of choppers down below would take care of it. So I gulped all of my food down with nary a nick from my mouth-teeth.”

  “Gee,” I said.

  “Every night at bedtime I would swallow a great big gooey gob of toothpaste so that my tummy-teeth could stay all white and shiny.”

  “Horrors,” I said.

  “You’d think I might at least have realized that it wasn’t necessary for them to be white and shiny so long as they weren’t visible. But that simple piece of cogitation never got through to me. It required about three years of cramps, colic, gas, and plain old constipation to make me realize that either my extra teeth weren’t functioning properly, or else I never had any in the first place.”

  “My goodness,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you hate yourself if you had been guilty of that kind of stupidity?” she asked.

  “I certainly would!” I agreed.

  “But that isn’t all,” she said and paused, and I had the happy feeling that she was winding herself up for a good confession. “That’s only a random example, picked out of the air like a peanut picked from a bag. The list of my mistakes—my errors and faults and crimes—would read like a Concise Encyclopedia of Human Numskullery in one heavy, thumb-indexed volume. When I was six years old, I realized how poor we were—that was when Mother had to go back to work as a waitress again—and I set myself up on the front sidewalk to solicit nickels and dimes from all passers-by, and I had collected almost two dollars before my mother discovered what I was doing, just in time to prevent me from accepting the invitation of a generous old gentleman who was offering me a whole dollar if I would get in his car and go for a bye-bye with him. When I was seven, I developed an incorrigible grudge against the cranky old widow who lived alone in the nasty house next door—I can’t even remember what I had against her—and began a campaign to part her from her frail senses: I would sneak into her stale old rooms when she wasn’t looking and set all of her clocks two hours ahead or behind, I would remove pages from her calendars, I would steal her morning paper off her porch before she could get to it, and replace it with a six- or seven-year-old paper retrieved from our attic, I would do the same with her copies of Life magazine, spiriting them out of her mailbox as soon as the postman had turned his back and substituting issues from a year or two earlier, and I was never caught, never discovered. One day she moved away. So I never had the satisfaction of knowing what lasting effect my campaign had on her, but one afternoon not long before she moved she called to me as I was passing her house and asked me how old I was, and when I told her she said, ‘Now that’s odd. Here I’ve been thinking you were only three,’ so I asked her how old she was and she said she wasn’t sure. Well. When I was eight, I entered a period of hostility toward the colored race, particularly toward the ugly, slimy Negro men who came twice a week in the Sanitation truck to collect our garbage, and I would sit in the window of my upstairs room and look down at them passing beneath me up our driveway, and they were so ugly I had to do something to them, so I would pee into a tin can and pour it down on them as they passed below, and that went on for about three weeks before one of them got up enough nerve to tell my mother, but of course she didn’t believe him and she threatened to report him to his superiors, but I quit anyway because I felt sorry for him the way my mother was cursing him and intimidating him.”

  She paused for breath, and, seeing the way my face must have looked—quizzical, surprised, yet smiling with delight withal—she blushed, her superwhite skin pinkening. Then, apologetically, she said, “You asked me to talk. You asked me to.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Please go on.”

  She gave me a skeptical look, shrugged, and went on. “When I was nine, I almost caused the death of little Karl Schnitzer, a boy at school whose great-grandfather had been Austrian and therefore made it seem likely to me that Karl was a Nazi, and that was ’44, the hottest part of the war, and I knew Karl’s father had a plaster statue of the German eagle down in the basement of his grocery store, which proved they were Nazis and convinced me that Karl should die, just in time to keep him from growing up and becoming another Goebbels. I thought it should be a school project in which everybody participated, but I wasn’t very popular myself and didn’t have enough leadership qualities to talk anybody else into it, although I tried, so I had to do it all by myself: I caught him after school one day and dragged him off into a vacant lot and tied him up and set fire to him with a bunch of newspapers, but when he started burning he started crying, so I put him out, flagellating him with my coat, and he was all right, only a few slight burns, red places on his face and hands, but all I can remember of Karl to this day is the way his clothes—his corduroy knickers and his wool mackinaw—stank as they singed. When I was ten, my mother determined that my ‘spiritual growth,’ as she put it, was not all it might have been, and she f
orced me into a strict regimen of church participation, so that I had to attend everything that happened at the church—twice on Sunday, once on Tuesday, once on Wednesday night, once on Saturday afternoon, everything except the Monday night Men’s Bible Class—for six solid months, until I was so fed up with the subject that I told my mother I was never going again, and if she made me go I would sit in the front row reading comic books, and if she came and took away the comic books I would stand on my head and if she spanked me I would scream and tear the hymnals and if she took me home I would run away and if she found me and brought me back I would lock myself up in my room, but I would never, no never, open the Bible ever again, and I never did, except once at junior college when I wrote an essay on “St. Paul as a Pink Poputchik” or fellow traveler. When I was eleven, my mother sent me away to live for a year with my aunt and uncle—her brother Hollis—in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I liked it better than Little Rock and even made a couple of friends, which was bad in a way, because one night my father showed up and said he was going to take me off to New York and Uncle Hollis got in a fight with him, so Father said, okay, let’s ask her what she wants to do, so he said to me, ‘Margie, do you want to stay here with your Uncle Hollis or would you rather go to New York with me?’ and because I had made some friends in Bowling Green and didn’t want to give them up I said I would stay with Uncle Hollis, so my father went away without even kissing me good-bye and I never saw him again, he died in New York less than a year after that. So when I was twelve, my mother brought me back to Little Rock and I told her I was never going to speak to her again because of whatever she had done to my father, and I managed for at least three months not to say a word to her, and it broke her heart, and she was never quite the same afterward, and she has been taking it out on me ever since.”

  Margaret stopped again, hung her head, and lapsed into a silence which lasted until I put my hand on her arm and she looked up and, seeing the smile on my face, smiled herself, but weakly, and asked me if I wanted her to quit now or if I wanted her to keep babbling on like that. I told her she was at the age of twelve and had fifteen more years to go and I honestly wanted to hear about them.