Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  “I know,” said my father.

  “You know?”

  “Sure,” my father said. “This time next month it’ll be another fifty dollars. In two months maybe another hundred more. In three more months it could be double what I owe you now. If I don’t quit or you don’t fire me, sooner or later I could bankrupt this company. ”

  “Maybe I’d better fire you, then.”

  “Sure,” my father said, “or give me a territory that isn’t played out. Where the stores aren’t all boarded up and the town’s leading industry ain’t torn shoelaces or selling apples by the bite.”

  It’s the language of myth and risk and men sizing each other up. It’s steely-eyed-appraisal talk, I-like-the-cut-of-your-jib speech, and maybe that’s not the way it happened. But that was the way my father told it and it became The Story of How They Gave Him the Central Standard Time Zone—“I’ve got two; who’s got three? I’ve got two; who’s got three?”—of how he moved west and took up his manifest destiny in the Chicago office.

  This was the thirties and the beginning of my father’s itinerancy on the road—it’s the American metaphor—to his luck. (Automobiles he used, berths, compartments on trains, and once, during the war, he rode back to Chicago from Minneapolis in a caboose, and was possibly one of the first salesmen to use airplanes regularly. There were, I recall, preferred-customer cards from airlines in his wallets, and recall wallets, too, their fat leather smoothed to use, all his leathers, his luggage and dop kits.) Some golden age of the personal we shared through his stories, his actor’s resonances, all those anecdotes of self-dramatizing exigency, of strut and shuffle and leap and roll. In those days it was his America.

  Which he seemed to want to devour in long motor trips in the Oldsmobiles he drove on what wouldn’t yet have been the interstates—to New York, to California and Florida, comparative shopping the window displays in the jewelry and department stores when we stopped for lunch, what the window trimmers were up to in Pittsburgh, in Denver and Atlanta, whether brooches or necklaces were on the mannequins’ dresses. A luck defined by the good hotels we stopped at, by room service and gin rummy at a penny a point with pals—I remember those games, my father deliberately declining to cut the cards—trips to the track, the celebrities who stopped by the office—Durocher, Danny Kaye—cabanas rented poolside. And, down by the shore, an orchestra playing.

  It was all about entertaining his customers.

  It was all about plenty, I mean.

  Ordering meats and groceries over the phone, buying in absurd bulk, and my mother’s live-in help and the big, good-looking country girls to mind us, myself, my sister, Diane.

  In a way, it was all about buying wholesale. Not for the economy but for the edge it gave you, the distance a knowledge of the markup puts between you and other people.

  But, chiefly, something sporty about his dough—no one ever paid for his dinner; he picked up checks—something expansive and male, ostentatious as the sexually puffed throats of birds. Money performance, too.

  We closed our apartment in the summers and went east, and one time—this would have been the forties, the last year of the war—I was staying over in Manhattan with my dad. (Though we had a place in Jersey, my father came out only on weekends and spent the rest of the week in one of the hotels around Herald Square near Coro’s New York office—the Pennsylvania, the McAlpin, the Vanderbilt.) And this particular morning he was running late and said we would grab a quick breakfast at the Automat.

  I was following him in the cafeteria line and the girl behind the counter asked what he wanted.

  “Scrambled eggs,” he said. “And some bacon.”

  “Bacon is extra,” she said.

  I thought he was going to hit her. He slammed his tray down and started to yell, to call her names.

  “Goddamn you!” he shouted. “You stupid ass! Did I ask if bacon was extra? Do I look as if I can’t afford extra goddamn bacon? Who in the hell do you think you are?”

  “Take it easy, mister,” said someone behind us in line. “What do you want from her? She didn’t mean anything.”

  “You shut up,” my father warned him, “you shut up and mind your goddamn business!”

  And the fellow did, terrified of the crazy man ahead of him in line. Then my father shoved some bills onto the counter and pulled me away.

  I want to be careful here. What he did was terrible. He was something of a snob who didn’t much care for what he would never have called “the element” but who may have thought like that, who had by heart in his head some personalized complex periodic table of the four-flusher fraudulent. (The element, yes, who traded in pseudo elements, in fractions and grosses of the manqué, the plated silver and the short karat.) But that woman had hit him where he lived, had touched some still-raw, up-from-Hester Street vulnerability he must have favored like a game leg. It was awful to see, but today I am sorrier for my father than I am for the woman. He hated four-flushers—it was the worst thing he could call you—and the thought that that woman behind the counter suspected something like that in him drove him, I think, temporarily insane. If they’d understood, no jury in the world would even have been permitted to convict him.

  The other side of the coin is braver, his intact I’ve-got-two-who’s-got-three instincts.

  It was probably one of his milder heart attacks. He was to be discharged from the hospital that morning, and my mother drove down from the North Side to fetch him home.

  “How are you feeling?” his doctor asked.

  “Not bad. A little shaky. Pretty good.”

  “You’ll have to take it easy for a few weeks.”

  “Sure.”

  “Even after you go back to work I don’t think you should drive for a while.”

  “Hey,” my father said, “I know the drill.”

  When my mother brought the car around from the hospital lot he asked for the keys.

  “Phil,” said my mother, “you heard what he said.”

  “Come on, Tootsie. Give me the keys.”

  “But you’re not supp—”

  “Tootsie,” he said, “give me the damn car keys!”

  The drive on the Outer Drive from the South to the North Side was practically a straight shot. There was this one stoplight, on Oak Street, in the few-hundred-north block. My father was a good driver but he looked at you when he spoke and was as much the raconteur in a moving automobile as in a living room. He could turn anything into an anecdote, and he delighted in the voices, in the gestures. He was telling my mother a story and waving his arm about.

  “Phil,” she screamed, “the light!”

  “What? Oh,” he said, “yeah.”

  He continued to tell his story while waiting for the long light to change on Oak Street. Oldsmobiles in neutral have a tendency to creep. The impact wasn’t great but it infuriated the other driver. He came pouring out of his car like a dirge, like a requiem mass, a big, beefy six-footer. He pulled the car door open on the driver’s side and started to curse my father, who simply reached his hand into the inside pocket of his suit coat and held it there around an imaginary gun. He interrupted the big man’s angry obscenities.

  “Get back in your car,” my father told him quietly. “I’m counting to five. I’m not even bothering to count out loud.”

  The man held his arms up and backed off. Back in his car he ran the light. When it turned green again my father drove home.

  When I was either seven or eight I bought my father a plaster-of-Paris reproduction of the Statue of Liberty. It was more than a foot high and there was a cigarette lighter in the torch. He took it out of the paper cone in which it had been wrapped like a rose and wanted to know where the hell I’d gotten such crap.

  People, tender of the kiddy sensibilities, are appalled by his callousness and profess not to believe me when I tell them that I was grateful, at least after thinking it over. It was educational, a lesson in taste. I buy neither souvenirs nor novelty items. No pillows with ATLANTIC CITY
embroidered in satin have ever graced my sofas. No miniature outhouses are as frontlets between my eyes, nor is there anything like them on the lintels of my house or on my gates.

  And the first story I ever published was called “A Sound of Distant Thunder” and it was about a man who owns a small jewelry store on Roosevelt Road in Chicago. The neighborhood is changing, the store failing. When it came out I gave my father a copy of the magazine in which it appeared. He read the story while I was still in the room and when he finished he put it down and asked what the hell was wrong with me.

  “Wrong with me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “wrong with you. This guy has a little shop in a lousy neighborhood. They’re knocking his brains in. But a salesman calls on him and he gives him an order for a gross of earrings. A gross! Do you know what a gross is? It’s a dozen dozen. That’s a hundred goddamned forty-four pairs of earrings. What are you, a fool? How’s he going to move that much merchandise in that location?”

  But he was making less now. The salaries of the three men who traveled for him came out of his own pocket.

  A year ago my cousin Bert told me a story about my father’s life that I’d never heard. Often, when my father went to New York, he would visit his sister Jean. One night when Bert came home from law school, my father was in my aunt’s apartment. She’d given him some supper and he’d gone to the sofa to lie down. He was moaning and Jean asked if he was uncomfortable, if there was anything she could do. (It was the 1950s now, the decade of his heart attacks, four in seven years, and he would wake up coughing in the middle of the night, hawking, hacking, trying with those terrible percussives to bring up the poisons from his flooded chest; it was the fifties now, the decade of his pain and death.) “You work too hard, Phil. You’ll kill yourself, working so hard. Slow down; take it easy. So you make a little less money. Your health is what matters.”

  My father said something she couldn’t understand, and she leaned down to understand him better. “What, Phil? What’s that?”

  “My health,” he said scornfully, louder now, and Bert could hear him, too. “Listen,” he said, “if I have to live on ten thousand a year like some ribbon clerk I don’t want to live.”

  So, maybe, in the long run, it ain’t more blessed to give than receive; maybe picking up checks all ’round is not only hazardous to your health but disastrous to your character. But maybe he knew that and picked up the checks anyway, who behind his glass-jaw sensibilities only wanted another shot at that line, to be on it again, the roles reversed this time, what he really wanted only to call, “I’ve got three! I’ve got three! Who’s got two?”

  MY MIDDLE AGE

  His suits. My father’s suits. The power of my father dressed. His suits. Their ample lapels, their double-breasted plenitude, their fabrics like a gabardine energy, their sharkskin suppleness, their silk like a spit-and-polish swank. Trousers, he said, were to be worn above the waist, two inches, say, above the belly button, though he never wore his there. His rode his hips like holsters and gave off not an illusion of bagginess but some natty, rakish, sporty quality of excess, bolts, cloth to burn. Full at the calves and shins, just spilling over his shoetops, fabric seemed to roll over him like water. He stood in clothing like a man swaggering in the sea. In middle age the power of my father dressed. What I invoke is the fierce force of middle-aged men, the fabulous primacy and efficacy of their prime-time, bumped-up lives. I want to be clear. I’m middle-aged too now. And in some ways—not all—I never had it so good. The terror is gone. Bogeymen don’t scare me. I’m a bogeyman myself now and I know how we operate. With a smugness hard-fought-for, a carelessness and ease cultivated years. Like a game-show host for the immediate family.

  Put the worst face on it. You’re not reading this in an inflight magazine at 600 mph. You’re not upperly mobile. Your neckties, if you own any, are not of the season. Nor your suits or your coats. Your rainwear leaks, your shoes lace, and the last time you had a chain round your neck dog tags dangled from it: a raised initial for your religion, another for your blood type. They had your number.

  Put the worst face on it. You don’t have an expense account or bother with the long form. You don’t know what to give doormen; you don’t know how to tip. When the tornado comes to town, the floods and the tremors, your home’s overturned in the trailer park—there are broken eggs in the toilet bowl, coffee spilled on the bedsheets. Your daughter in Minnesota may have seen it on TV and you want to reassure her Mom’s fine, yourself. But for a moment, just for a moment, you hesitate and wonder if you shouldn’t wait for the cheap rates that come on at 5:00. (There’s an hour time difference in Minnesota. Are they an hour ahead or an hour behind? If they’re behind does the cheap rate apply? Does it have to be 5:00 in Minnesota to get the discount? Put the worst face on it. It doesn’t matter, and it sure as hell does.—Geez, woman this ain’t nobody’s birthday. Come on, call the girl!)

  The worst face, mind. No points for life savings, no points for a portfolio like a great hand in bridge. The worst face. No points for promotions, for kids in good colleges or a ship coming in.

  You’re this middle-aged failure with this middle-aged spirit, this balding, potbelly heart. Its pants turn down over its belt. Things have gone haywire. Scores, for example, standings. Teams are more important than they were when you were a kid. Now it actually hurts—why not? everything else does—when your ball club loses. This town ain’t seen a winner—winner?—it ain’t seen a contender since the last time the trailer overturned. Why couldn’t you have been born lucky and grown up in Dallas, Philadelphia, some honeyed, moneyed California of the heart where athletes give 104 percent in the Oldtimer’s Game? Once, just one lousy once before you die, you’d like to be there in the tavern when the televison crew comes, hold up a finger and scream, “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!” Because you’re looking to root, you’re settled in fanhood and the submergemanship of community, and somebody better come along soon who can put it all together. How do you think it feels to have to go on national TV every year and mumble for all the world to see, “We’re number five, we’re number eight.”

  The worst face, which is tough, a judgment call finally, for the fact is there are limits to the negative imagination. The head never performs without a safety net, and bad news and pain are always surprises. We fantasize upwards.

  But the worst face. For the sake of argument grant that, excepting bad health, things are as rotten as you care for them to be, that you’re middle-aged and vicissitude-prone, a failure.

  Now a better face. Failure or no—and this is the point—the chances are excellent that you never had it so good, either. You’re earning more as a failure in your middle years than ever before. You’re settled like an academic in tenure, your arrangements arranged, and it would take dynamite to blast you out of a rut that you came to think of years ago as a groove. If it’s going too far to say that you’re happy, surely it’s not stretching a thing to declare that you’re accustomed, used to it.

  Because you can get used to anything, even your life.

  Have you noticed the perversity of old people? How they insist on what appear to you to be small, pointless martyrdoms, how they almost invariably eschew comfort and small gains? This one attends a dentist who hasn’t kept up; that one will not eat French food. Their habits are not loyalties, they are superstitions, some customized mumbo jumbo of accommodation, set in their ways as children, warding off risk by never taking one and putting their faith in the locks and deadbolts of ritual and habituation.

  Middle age is nothing like that. It puts its faith in the law of averages, which is what it still has in common with youth. What it has in common with old age, of course, is the beginning of an unpleasant consciousness of the body. Aches and pains like echoes in reverse, the mimic noises of the bones and flesh without any apparent stimulus. What it does not have in common with either is a certain privileged smugness, almost brave, almost heroic, status by dint of staying power.

  If
one stands on ceremonies they are one’s own ceremonies.

  For myself I am no longer vain of my appearance. If I’m flabby—flabby? I’m gross, I’m gross with grocery—I consider what it would cost me to alter my stats. Hard work, exercise, the bad breath of diets, a will power in the service of some will not my own, some sleek and glossy Overwill, what strangers might like to look at, playing some other guy’s gig and force-feeding myself into youthful images so alien—I’m no newcomer to middle age, if I live and nothing happens, I’ll have had my fifty-first birthday in May—that I would probably feel comfortable only on Halloween. Your real dirty old man rarely looks his age. I’d as soon purchase a toupee or have my face lifted, my teeth capped, my shoes shined.

  For years my wife cut my hair, then stopped. Now I go to a shop called The Happening. I am always the oldest man there by fifteen to twenty years. That includes the hair stylists, as barbers call themselves these days. I’ll tell you the truth. Always, on the afternoons of these haircuts I find that I am depressed, out of sorts, vulnerable. The radio in The Happening is constantly tuned to a soft-rock FM station. Sirens and lorn love, all the torchy registers, all the two-bit griefs. Jane or Jan, girls in their late twenties—I can’t remember the names of these girls who cut my hair—call me by my first name, like car salesmen or cops writing tickets. They mean well to pretend I’m still in the game. It’s even sweet in a way. Certainly they don’t suspect how patronizing it sounds, but almost compulsively I want to explain something to them—for never very far from my thin bravery is my fat cowardice; it’s mistaken identity I fear—to apologize, to blurt out how I really need this haircut, honest, that the stuff gets in my eyes, tickles my neck. I hold my tongue, of course. When they ask how I want my hair cut I don’t know what to tell them. What can I say? I’m balding. To me a haircut is a kind of affectation. I shall have to work on this. It’s an imperfection in my middle-age stance, the real life that in real ways I’ve been working on for years.