A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

  While my mother balances her drink—how she came to be served exclusively in this ridiculous and difficult container I do not know—my father and I make a drink for ourselves. The strong whiskey makes me dizzy, as if a wave of water has gone through the room. I am prepared, as at no time before, to deny completely all injunction, pressure to assume the family business, which topic is just beneath the surface of all our percent patter.

  Before, my refusal has been vague, I have managed simply to delay the event. Tonight I am possessed of this confident, sliding-away strength, and I am not going to delay, to put it off, I’m going to deny the inheritance because … because I no longer trust women my age. That is the thought that comes to me as we watch my mother totter her vase of high stuff to her orange face. Pine-Sol and Havana Carlisle’s legendary cigars (my father has lit a cigarillo) come to me. The entire life reaction series of human bondings and splittings has had something to do with my not taking the family business. It is the artificial center someone would have me assume.

  At that moment I thought of Mary and Wallace, and of my own mother and how she had changed from someone not like them to someone very much like them. I’ve liked my mother a whole lot more since she became daft, for where she is dotty and funny now, she was presumptuous and full of conviction before, and if one’s preferring a crippled mental state to the normal precedent, particularly his own mother’s, is perverse, then so be it. It is just another index of the magnitude of the effects of the series.

  I get ready to tell my father, “I refuse the business because I refuse these young twit broads full of purpose”—something actually that rational is on my tongue—when my mother says, out of the blue, to him, “You’d better get ready.”

  It startles me. Can she know? Can she perceive mental states now that hers is largely gone?

  “The beauty parlor isn’t open until 9:30,” my father says.

  “Then we’d better be ready.”

  My mother has an appointment at her beauty parlor every day of the week. They oblige her there, with, among other services, the application of her lipstick as she likes it, and when she emerges looking like Emmett Kelly with a blue Virginia Graham hairdo, they assure her how good she looks in condescending tones.

  “We’ll be ready,” I say.

  “Do you,” she says, turning to me, “have a license to meddle?”

  This is a bit of the old girl. These vodkas are having a restorative effect.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “It’s expired,” she says. To my father: “Your son’s got a meddling license.” She means, I think, to emphasize the your, to saddle him with me, but in missing the emphasis she indicts my sex, she invokes the daughter she never was able to have, and so you cannot know finally if the emphasis is misplaced or simply badly timed. She does this curious emphasis often.

  My father and I keep quiet waiting for her little tempest to pass, probably both now doubting the wisdom of allowing her the three towering cocktails.

  “I know what lips are,” she says, grinning, as if to acknowledge she has been naughty in this passing assault, “but what’s stick?” Thus she is restored, occupied by lipstick, one of her two or three central preoccupations (the beauty parlor, the high stuff) since her illness set in. In a moment she’ll be again deciding I’m handsome beyond all rational measure. By her flare-up, my father is spared my kook speech.

  When they retire I wander about the house: it is a blend of low ranch and tall Georgian, which means twenty small columns across the broad, split-level front, where once four tall columns would have been. The rooms are museum set pieces, matched collections of antiques assembled by my mother.

  In the kitchen I am surprised to find my father back down, having another drink, his face a brick-red hue and his lips aligned in a tall, narrow pursing, as if carefully stacked up for the sake of neatness. I get a beer.

  Without turning his head to look at me, he says, “You’re not doing anything.” Now the lips are pressed out into a grim line, a shade lighter than when they’d been in the warehouse position.

  “No, sir. For once you are correct.”

  He makes no move.

  “In fact,” I say, “I’m doing less than anything.” I have noticed that in my dealings with him I am invariably cast back into an adolescent kind of smartness, and he responds in kind by pretending to hear me out without listening, waiting to tell me where I went wrong.

  “You don’t need any more beer.” In our family, one is never accused of drinking to excess until the accuser is on the floor himself, from where he will utter his sudden call for temperance.

  “I’m going to wait up and talk to the yardmen.”

  He looks at me with true alarm.

  “What?”

  “Fuck with them.”

  “Those are good, steady boys.”

  I go out into my old room, a garage apartment designed to look from the outside like an old, detached Southern kitchen. It is set up for poker now—a beautiful felt table and chips on a lazy Susan and a fully stocked bar. I get a small cooler and pack it with beer and get a canvas deck chair and plan to set up camp for the night on the tennis court. You’re not doing anything. I thought, by God, to prove it.

  I walk the tennis court, cracking acorns on the deep green composition surface made nearly black by the shadows of the oaks. In the early morning, hours before my father takes my mother to the beauty parlor, but only a bit sooner than she begins to pester him to do so, two black men about fifty years old, whom my father without malice calls The Boys, will arrive to rake the yard. I wish The Boys would sweep the courts as well, sweep these acorns going off like firecrackers out here at three in the morning. I pop, I skid, I skate. I lose track of time, I think—perhaps out of drinking shape without Mary—because it is suddenly dawning and I see The Boys arrive and set up to rake, nearly invisible in their green uniforms in the fog, talking as low and gently as if they were fishing.

  As a child I thought The Boys were a constant two men and only now realize that they change over rapidly, supplied by a lawn service with access to an apparently inexhaustible supply of quiet, early-rising blacks. To my father I believe they are a constant team—The Boys.

  Suddenly my exact position—as reagent, binding surfactant—in the reaction series of life gets clearer. Since Wallace had echoed Mary, certainly since Tom “accidentally” appeared on my personal bus driver’s route in a town of his fond bestial memories, I could tell that the series was self-governing and rapidly moving to inexorable conclusions. But now I thought to look at the business bond by bond—to pull the test tube off my head and see things molecularly, as it were. I watched The Boys. Before my very unscientific eyes they were aligned with all the better fools—James and Ebert, of course, but if they did not suggest Wallace and Napoleon out there in a fog of low wages, I’d be damned, and I thought of Hazel and Bruce, and they, The Boys, were quite likely accomplished actors: they were not distracted by the self-centeredness of the Orphan and the other true fools. These are the thoughts you can have, drunk at five in the morning, skating on acorns on your private tennis court.

  But I saw that it was data, and it felt like nearly final data. I have seen the better scientists I know—Friedeman can do it—sense magically when enough experimentation has been done, when data are yet an uncollated mess and no rational measure could suggest quitting time. I had that feeling watching The Boys rake in the fog.

  I exploded acorns on the way toward them, and one of them saw me and stopped, looking at me as if I were a deer or something not seen in the last twenty years. I held my beer up to him in greeting.

  “You guys want a cold one?”

  “Naw.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Know.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Say know.”

  “Really, man. I’m the—”

  “Say I know iss all right. Old man himself making us the offer. Talk trash.”

  “He was?”


  He raked a small pile of leaves up.

  “In that case, I withdraw the offer.”

  “Better.”

  My silly little mood was ruined, but it was good to know you can’t rout fifty-year-old men just because other fifty-year-old men call them The Boys. I shook the yardman’s hand. He gave me the standard black limp, so limp you don’t see how it could be remotely attached to the muscular arm that extends it. I waved over my head to them as I left the yard. They were indifferent.

  A little sanity at six in the morning demonstrated by men raking leaves for life—by men in full possession of nothing—jotted down fine in the blurry data column I was filling.

  At ten we sat in the formal dining room at my mother’s request and had what she calls brunch. It is no different from breakfast, and the dining room is not used even for holidays now, but for my visits it is brunch in the dining room. Beyond these alterations of decorum, she ignores me.

  She is got up—suit, pearl choker, matching shoes and bag—to go to the beauty parlor. Between courses, served from the kitchen by the maid, she asks my father the time.

  “Don’t ask me again,” he finally says. He says this without anger, but it sets her off on a vengeful course anyway.

  She looks at me and catches me examining the design in the china. “That china’s expensive,” she says, looking then directly at my father.

  It is a reasonable cue for one to guard himself, set himself for a blow of the absurd. Her emphasis on china rather than expensive is a signal that what follows won’t be easy to track. But my father does not prepare for the blow, nor will he share a flicker of condescension with me.

  “This plate,” my mother says, slyly touching my father’s plate, “cost four hundred dollars.” She quickly jerks her finger back, as if the plate has suddenly gotten hot.

  She looks at her finger. Or pretends to. I notice that she actually looks at me while holding her finger in front of her face. She wants a sign, one hair of a reaction, to launch into finer, higher absurdity—to “have a fit,” in my father’s parlance. This is, I find, remarkable—she is perfectly and vigorously logical in the way she can scale into a tour de force of mindlessness. While the content of her fit will be nuts, the form will be logical, and it has made me wonder—my father apparently does not—if her sickness is not partly or part-time voluntary.

  She still looks at her finger. “We had the four hundred and we had to buy the plate.” This is a complex accusation. I’ve heard, as I say, its form before, and she means, I think, that even though we had the money, we were not old-family and therefore did not already own the china and had to buy it—with new money, thereby invalidating in certain senses our right to even have the heirloom china.

  She is saying, I think, that she was a country-club, new-millionaire’s wife who wasted herself in pursuit of a status that specifically could not be bought. If I throw her into the fool/true-fool gradient, she appears to be not unlike the Veteran—someone gave her a false center to pursue and she did and discovered finally it was hollow. She had a houseful of River Road furniture and no family name to match it. She has a houseful of dead fucking niggers. She was self-important until one day she discovered she was not important. This, I think, at table, at brunch—and who knows but that she is mocking even now—is what has unleveled her.

  On the sideboard I notice a postcard—out of place in the unused room—and lean to look at it; as I do, my mother says, “It’s for you.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Read it. Ladyfriend—but I don’t have a license to meddle.”

  The card is a photo of a romantic scene very much like the one of Mary in the Sunday supplement, and I see before anything else M.C.B. signed on the back.

  Muhv—

  Garden restored. Miss you more than like. Got sillymental in Fla. (about Stump—don’t tell Hoop) and messed up. Give call. Tunkie Friedeman gave address. Says he knows you’ll be back in the sun soon, ha ha. Said to tell you that. ? Drop by? Love—

  Friedeman? What in the world was going on? Tunkie Friedeman? Conspiracy theory entered my mind. This was no damned Brownian powder-blown drift. I felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.

  Then again, was it only that Mary and Friedeman knew each other and somehow discovered—did I tell Mary I worked for a Friedeman and she held her no-bio tongue? Yes. I told her I worked for a nut. She smiled. She knew him. But how did she know I’d come home? She didn’t. Chanced it. A small endothermic bonding 238 bondings down the thousandfold series that was evolving me unto some end.

  I recalled an early chemistry professor I had who seemed to have relied entirely upon his sense of smell in achieving his considerable academic station. On emeritus status, he was employed to interest freshmen in the magic of chemistry—almost the alchemy of chemistry—its colors, its aromatic delights, even its poetry. His chemistry was numberless, headache-free, earthy, approximate, elegant—a chemistry that seduced worried freshmen. You may call dicopper oxide, he’d say, cuprous oxide, and copper oxide, cupric. You may, as the English do, refer to al-you-minium. Bleach is sodium hypohalite. He’d waft a tube to his Old World nose, hold it to the light—glacial acetic acid (you may call it condensed vinegar), or another tube, product of a spuming reaction—sniff—why, it’s old methyl ethyl ketone. What’s that brown stuff in there? Some suspicious student would ask. That, the emeritus Nose Chemist would say, that is nothing, some trash.

  I felt then, with the postcard, as if that was the only kind of chemist I could reasonably be in this life chemistry—it would have to be by instinct and it would have to be relied on well. Mary’s card impressed me as not unlike unidentified brown precipitate in a reaction too complex to probe further in the particular. It was not trash, but it was finally distracting to know more about it. Mary and Tunkie Friedeman. Were they lovers? How far back could reactions in the life series be said to go?

  “What time is it? I’d better get ready. Are you ready?”

  “Dad, are you still selling the company?” He looks at me, happy not to have to answer her. “You still planning to sell?”

  “I have buyers,” he says.

  “Who’s running it?”

  “It’s on auto-pilot.” He doesn’t want to talk about it.

  “Would it still be good not to sell?”

  “Smart not to.”

  “Isn’t my appointment at eleven?” my mother says.

  “Mother,” he says, “the appointment is at noon. It’s always at noon.”

  “Are you ready?”

  He turns from her, stone-faced. Something happens to me. Before I can say it, my mother announces, “I have osteopsoriasis.”

  “Don’t sell,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Osteopsoriasis. It’s new.”

  “I’ll do it,” I say. “Give me a year.”

  “A year? Are you serious?”

  “He’s so handsome.”

  Very gravely, as if we have just signed a world armistice, he stands and rounds the corner of the table, his hand extended in an arc much wider than the catcher’s-mitt position ceremoniously toward me. We shake.

  “Mother,” he orders, “get in the car. You don’t want to be late.”

  “Not today,” she says. She fairly jogs out of the house.

  “I’ll have to drive her around for an hour.” He grins, the first I’ve seen. “Do we understand each other?” he says.

  “I think we do,” I say, not knowing yet why I’ve said what I’ve said.

  “Why are you in those clothes?”

  I persuade him to drop me off at the bus station—he suggests I take a plane—and we part on very good terms under the GO BIG RED marquee, his engine running and my mother primping in the rearview, smiling at herself.

  ON THE WAY TO Knoxville I considered the proper use of new utterance, its true relation, if any, to the formulations I have been borne along on. It seems now that new utterance is perhaps the linguistic equivalent of the kind of living that takes in
to account backward as well as forward motion. The maker of new utterance is taking a chance that he will not close the gap toward meaning, that he may in fact widen it, as the foolish living I’ve come to appreciate chances the same failure to advance and may indeed set one back. On the final bus home I regarded myself as a kind of Havana Carlisle willing to tell things anew—willing to wave my cigar about and be misinterpreted, if that was the cost.

  I immediately went to Friedeman’s office and with no delay found him.

  “Tunkie,” I said.

  He looked up from his desk, his face a wave of recognition and, I thought, put-on happy-to-see-you mirth. He solemnly stood and came around to me, extending both hands. He said, “My son, the fire is renewed?” His manner was altogether suggestive of a Benedict rather than a Tunkie.

  “I have a year in which to be consumed by it, Father.”

  He then looked at me with what I took to be real delight, and I think it was delight in my assuming a penitent’s role, which made to me altogether more sense about him. His Baptism was a polite mockery, a new utterance he played with.

  “What in hell are you doing in my brother’s clothes?”

  For a moment I was confused, thinking he was yet in the charade and referring to some ecclesiastical brother. Then: he did not mean, did he, Stump?

  “I’d know those clothes anywhere.”

  I sat down and we had a talk, the result of which was my concluding that there is room in this world for either a whole lot of coincidence or a whole lot of design, call it what you will. The short of it was that Tunkie and Stuart (Stump) Friedeman were wild men and Connie Baker a wild woman (they all called her Connie, as had Hoop; only I, her no-bio boy, had used the formal Mary) and they were in love and Stump “won.” At least he had for a time.

  Now, it would seem, Tunkie was the one to claim spoils, though I did not learn, or care to know, any of it. I was still, it seemed in his office, as now, on no-bio status, and I thought it certainly best he remain specifically so with respect to Mary and me.