by Max Shulman
There was no mystery any more. “Safety in numbers,” I said.
“Precisely.”
I thought for a moment. “What’s to prevent somebody from getting Sally alone during the day when she’s at school—as I did this afternoon?”
“She only talked to you today because you had hurt yourself. If you hadn’t bumped your head, if you had just come up to her and tried to start a conversation, she would have walked away.”
I looked questioningly at Sally. She nodded affirmation.
“You mean,” I asked her father, “that Sally isn’t allowed to talk to men on campus?”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “As long as it’s casual—about schoolwork or things like that. But if the conversation takes a romantic turn, she leaves immediately. That’s one of the rules.”
“What if a man breaks the rules?”
“Then he is disqualified and Sally won’t see him any more.”
All the loopholes seemed to be closed. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Since Sally was sixteen. Two years.”
“And how much longer will it go on?” I asked the question nervously. I did not look forward to becoming a member of a convoy for Sally. Perhaps I could stand it for a short while, but if it dragged on for any length of time I feared my love for her would drive me mad. It would have been different if I were a stronger man; then if things became intolerable, I could truss her in a sack and carry her off to the tall timber. But with my meager physique that was not possible.
“How much longer it goes on depends on Sally,” replied her father. “The day she comes home and tells us that she is honestly in love with some young man—someone she has picked entirely on his merits and not out of sympathy—we will gladly suspend the rules. She’s old enough now to know her own mind—provided she is allowed to make it up freely.”
“Sally,” I said, turning to her, “I hope that when you finally do choose a man, you won’t make the mistake of picking an athlete. As everyone knows, they make notoriously bad husbands. Now a small, weak man, on the other hand—”
“Dobie,” interrupted Mr. Bean, quickly changing the subject, “what are you studying at school?”
“Journalism.”
“That sounds keen,” said Sally. “I’m taking home economics.”
“There now,” I cried, “is my idea of a perfect marriage—a journalist and a home economist. While he is out reporting, she is home economizing.”
“I hear somebody at the door,” said Mr. Bean gratefully.
“I’ll go,” said Sally. She returned in a moment with a male quartet. They said good evening to Mr. and Mrs. Bean and circled me warily. I noted with sinking heart that they were all great, strapping fellows. Sally made the introductions—Davy Ball, Georgie Packer, Bob Sindorf, Ellis Ford—and they squashed my puny hand in turn.
“Somebody’s missing,” said Sally. “Where’s Joe Bracken?”
“He said to tell you he’s not coming any more,” said Georgie. “He said it’s been grand but he’s decided to try to find a girl he can have all to himself.”
“I hope he does,” said Sally sincerely. “He’s a nice boy.”
She got her coat. I stepped forward to help her put it on, but I was flung into a corner by Bob. “My turn tonight,” he snarled.
“Well, let’s get going,” said Ellis. They threw a cordon around her and escorted her out of the house, I scampering around the edges like the odd pig in a litter.
A car stood outside. “Front going, back coming,” said Sally. They nodded. She got into the front seat between Davy and Ellis. The rest of us got in back. “I’ll sit in the back on the way home, Dobie,” she explained to me.
“Splendid,” I muttered.
The car pulled out from the curb. “I ran ninety-eight yards for a touchdown this afternoon,” said Davy.
“Oo, marvy,” said Sally.
“I shot twenty-four baskets last night,” said Ellis.
“That’s super,” said Sally.
“I tied the Olympic record for the hammer throw yesterday,” said Bob.
“Golly Moses,” said Sally.
“I pitched a no-hit game last summer,” said Georgie.
“Hey, groovy,” said Sally.
I cleared my throat. “I can float on my back,” I said.
“I’m hungry,” said Sally. “Will we be at the restaurant soon?”
“Here it is now,” said Davy.
We parked and went inside. Georgie pulled out Sally’s chair, Bob helped her off with her coat, Ellis handed her a menu, and Davy relayed her order to the waiter. When dinner came, Ellis passed her the salt, Davy passed her the pepper, Bob the rolls, and Georgie the butter.
I sat hunched over my calves’ liver, eating without tasting, crushed, defeated, hopeless. I was licked; I didn’t have a chance. All at once I could stand it no longer.
“Excuse me,” I said, rising. “I think I’ll go home. I don’t feel well.”
“Oh, you poor boy,” cried Sally, bounding from her chair and rushing over to me. “You poor, poor boy. What can I do to help?”
Suddenly hope was reborn. There was a way to get Sally. I went instantly into action. “It’s ptomaine,” I gasped and fell writhing to the floor.
“My baby,” shrieked Sally. “My poor baby.” She fell to her knees and stroked me wildly about the head and shoulders.
“I got it too,” yelled Georgie and hurled himself to the floor.
“Me too,” cried the others, and in a moment they were all thrashing about, groaning mightily, upsetting tables as they heaved their great bodies around the floor. Sally ran from one to the other. The manager followed her, wringing his hands. “Please, lady, make ’em stop,” he begged. “They’ll ruin my business.”
“You poor man,” said Sally, pausing in her rounds to stroke the manager.
“Ah, nuts,” I mumbled. I rose and brushed myself off. The others lay still, watching me intently.
“Are you better, poor boy?” asked Sally.
“I am if they are,” I replied with a nod toward the fallen four.
They picked themselves up. “Yeah, we’re all right now,” said Georgie.
“Thank heaven,” breathed Sally.
“Maybe you better go home, Dobie,” said Ellis.
“I’ll see you to the door,” said Bob, grasping me in a wristlock and hustling me out. He put me on the sidewalk and said, “You ever try that again and I’ll knock your head down into your rib cage.”
“Oh yeah?” I said when he had gone back into the restaurant.
I went to my room and beat the pillow until my little fists were red. Bilked, outwitted, bypassed. And nothing could be done about it. I pitched and tossed until dawn.
Calm came with the early morning light. I went over the problem slowly and rationally. One thing was obvious: I had no chance to win Sally in open competition with the other suitors. Not that she was an athlete worshiper; I felt sure that she would really prefer a man of my intellectual attainments. But how could I make an impression on her with all those huge, towering fellows blocking me off from her view? No, I was lost unless I could attack her vulnerable point—her tender heart.
But in order to do that effectively, I had to get her alone. If I tried appealing to her sympathy with the others around, the same thing would happen that happened last night—plus Bob would knock my head down into my rib cage. And the others were always around, except, of course, while Sally was at school during the day. But that was no good either. If I tried to talk to her on campus I had to—according to the rules—keep the conversation casual, discuss schoolwork or something innocuous.
For a moment I toyed with the idea of going around campus banging my head into statues on the chance that she would find me again. But I abandoned the idea shortly; I didn’t have the stamina for it.
Clearly I was licked. I was at the bottom of a black pit of despondency when I was suddenly exploded out by a great, brilliant, bursting idea.<
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What if Sally transferred from home economics to journalism? What if we were together all day long in classes? Sure, I would abide by the rules; I would confine the conversation to schoolwork. But we would be together all day—that was the important thing. She could not help but notice me, assess my true worth, and be impressed. Particularly in journalism. Remember, I had had years of newspaper experience. I knew the jargon, the techniques, the complicated ins-and-outs of reporting. Sally, still struggling with the A B Cs of journalism, would be awed at my professionalism, and the awe would inevitably ripen into love, and she would go home and tell her parents to suspend the rules, for she had found her man.
I leaped from my bed with a bellow of joy. There would be no trouble, I knew, in persuading Sally to transfer to journalism. Once I described the glamour and romance of the profession to her, how could she resist it?
I was waiting outside the home economics building when Sally arrived for her first class. “Good morning, Sally,” I cried cheerily.
“Good morning,” she said. “You know that we can’t talk about anything but schoolwork, don’t you, Dobie?”
“Of course. That’s exactly what I want to talk about. Sit down.” I drew her to the steps beside me. “Sally, have you ever thought of switching to journalism?”
“Why, no.”
“Well, you should. There’s a great future in it for women. Look at Inez Robb, Anne O’Hare McCormick, Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West. They travel all over the world, meet all kinds of people. Adventure! Intrigue! Excitement!”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” said Sally.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback, but only for a moment. “That’s all right. You don’t have to go anywhere. You can get to be a big newspaperwoman right here in this country. Look at Dorothy Kilgallen, May Craig, Elsie Robinson. Millions of readers! Big salaries! Prestige!”
“Gee, I’d be scared.”
“Nonsense. You’d love it. The roar of the press! The bustle of the city room! The smell of printer’s ink!”
“I’m allergic to printer’s ink.”
“Well, you don’t actually smell it. It’s just a figure of speech. Really, Sally, you’d love it. You get a press card and you can go through police lines, see fires and riots and all kinds of wonderful disasters.”
“Not me, Dobie. Disasters upset me.”
I was getting desperate. “You don’t have to cover disasters necessarily. You could be a society reporter, go to big fancy weddings.”
“I don’t like big weddings. I like little ones with just the families and maybe a few intimate friends and a tenor singing ‘I Love You Truly.’”
“That’s fine, Sally. You could go to little weddings. Thousands of ’em.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think little weddings should have strangers at them.”
“All right,” I said hoarsely. “Don’t go to weddings. Be a drama critic.”
“They’re mean.”
“Write editorials, then. Or sell ads. Or read copy. There’s a million things you could do on a newspaper.”
“I don’t think so, Dobie. I’m crazy about home economics and I want to stay with it.”
“Think it over,” I pleaded. “Won’t you at least think it over?”
“What for? I’m perfectly satisfied with home economics.”
Perspiration was cascading off my forehead. “How about trying journalism for just one semester? I’m sure you’ll love it.”
“I’m sure I won’t, Dobie.” She rose from the steps. “I’ve got to hurry to class now.”
I reached up and seized her hand. “You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to transfer to journalism?”
“Absolutely.”
“And that’s final?” I asked forlornly.
“And that’s final.” She freed her hand and went into the building.
There was only one other thing I could do. And I did it.
It worked fine. By the end of our freshman year we were going steady. We got engaged in our senior year and married the day after commencement. We’ve got a nice little restaurant in Minneapolis now—Dobie’s and Sally’s—and business is improving all the time. It’s not hard to understand why. Nobody else in town serves meals so attractive and nutritious at such a low price. Believe me, that stuff I learned in home economics comes in mighty handy.
Love of Two Chemists
I am sometimes asked, “How come you took chemistry?” and I reply, “How come Leander swam the Hellespont?” For the answer is the same: a woman.
A woman drove me to chemistry; nothing else. Certainly it was not my natural inclination. My natural inclination is not toward chemistry; it is, however, toward women.
It must not be thought that I am a rake. With me the pursuit of women is only part of a much larger plan—the pursuit of pleasure. I am a hedonist.
I became a practitioner of hedonism quite by chance a few years ago when I happened to run across the word in the dictionary. “Hedonism,” it said. “The doctrine that pleasure is the sole or chief good in life. The leading advocates of Hedonism in antiquity were the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics.”
I can’t tell you how happy I was to find this definition. I had long believed that pleasure was the sole or chief good in life, but this was the first time I knew that it was a doctrine. Many people, notably my father, had been calling me a bum and, to tell the truth, I had had to agree with them. But learning about the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics put everything in a new light. One would hardly call an Epicurean a bum, and surely not a Cyrenaic.
Bolstered by the knowledge that I was following an ancient and honorable doctrine, I plunged with renewed vigor into the pursuit of pleasure. When people, notably my father, still called me a bum, I would only smile inscrutably and say, “Ha! That’s all you know about it.”
So much for hedonism. Now to get back to the woman who drove me to chemistry. Her name was Helen Frith. She was sixteen years old, actually a little too young for me. I prefer women closer to my own age, which is eighteen. In view, however, of her extravagant development, I was willing to stretch a point. She stood five feet four inches tall in her dirty saddle shoes. Her weight, as nearly as I could decently ascertain, was 110 pounds. Her hair was the color of honey produced by real bees. Her eyes were a smoky gray. (I refer, of course, to the irises; the rest of the eyeball was white.) Her nose was short and symmetrical; her lips full, soft, and red. Her teeth were even and free from caries. Her skin was as good as skin gets. Her figure had no unsightly bulges, but several sightly ones.
I first encountered this phantom of delight during freshman registration. This was for me a time of confusion. I was supposed to be making out a program for my freshman year. I stood in a line with several hundred other freshmen, moving slowly toward the desk of the faculty adviser. When I reached the desk, I was to tell the adviser what courses I wanted to take and, with his assistance, make out my program. But I didn’t know what courses I wanted to take. Looking over the curriculum, I saw absolutely nothing that would appeal to a hedonist. Still, I had to take something. My father had been quite insistent on that point.
The line moved forward, and I began to grow panicky. A horrible vision of myself working in my father’s bakery popped into my mind. That was the dire punishment he had promised me if I did not make a success of college. In fact, he had wanted me to work in the bakery instead of going to college in the first place. It had taken many days of passionate oratory to change his mind.
And now I was getting closer and closer to the desk of the adviser, still without an inkling of what I wanted to take. I rummaged wildly through the catalogue of courses, but I finally gave it up in despair. Let the adviser advise me, I thought. That’s what he’s there for.
Mr. McCandless, the adviser, was a man in his early thirties. He had not been a teacher long enough to develop the deep hatred of students that characterize older members of the faculty. He greeted me with a pleasant smile and asked my name.
“Dobie Gillis,” I confessed.
“And what would you like to take?” he asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” I replied.
“What are you interested in chiefly?” he asked.
“Women,” I replied.
“Maybe you’d like to study gynecology,” he suggested.
“No,” I said, “I’m not that interested.”
“Well, how about history or economics?”
“Neh,” I said.
“Anthropology? Sociology? Psychology?”
“Neh.”
“How about the sciences—chemistry, maybe.”
“There is nothing that appeals to me quite so little as chemistry.”
Law, journalism, philosophy, physical education, geology, languages, zoology, archaeology, pharmacy, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and aeronautical engineering failed likewise to excite me.
“Look,” said Mr. McCandless hoarsely, “why don’t you just step aside and think for a few minutes while I take care of the other people in this line?”
So I stepped aside and the student behind me came up to the desk. The student behind me was the Helen Frith described above.
I am a man who under normal circumstances can keep his emotion perfectly concealed. But the first sight of Miss Helen Frith was by no means a normal circumstance. I felt my eyes bug, my jaw drop, and my kneecaps leap like hares. I tried vainly to compose myself. All I could do was to clutch the corner of the desk and blink rapidly at her.
Mr. McCandless looked at me with some nervousness, but Helen Frith seemed not to notice. “I am Helen Frith,” she said in a forthright soprano, “and I want to take chemistry.”
“Just a moment, miss,” said Mr. McCandless. He turned to me. “You all right, Gillis?”
I nodded dumbly.
“I,” continued Helen Frith, “want to be a great chemist and make simply marvelous discoveries. I want to find cures for diseases and also formulae that will increase crop yields, aid industry, eliminate pests, and make life richer and fuller for all the peoples of the earth.”
