All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories

by E. L. Doctorow

  She goes out and walks around to the back, an open field white in the sun. There is a pitted aluminum straight ladder leaning against a windowsill in the second floor. She climbs the ladder. The window is punched out and she climbs through the frame and stands in a light and airy bedroom. A hemisphere of ice hangs from the ceiling. It looks like the bottom of the moon. She stands at the window and sees at the edge of the field a man in an orange jacket and red hat. She wonders if he can see her from this distance. He raises a rifle to his shoulder and a moment later she hears an odd smack as if someone has hit the siding of the house with an open palm. She does not move. The hunter lowers his rifle and steps back into the woods at the edge of the field.

  THAT EVENING the young teacher calls the town physician to ask for something to take. What seems to be the trouble? the doctor says. She conceives of a self-deprecating answer, sounding confident and assertive, even managing a small laugh. He says he will call the druggist and prescribe Valiums, two-milligram so that she won’t be made drowsy by them. She walks down to Main Street, where the druggist opens his door and without turning on the store light leads her to the prescription counter in the rear. The druggist puts his hand into a large jar and comes up with a handful of tablets, and feeds the Valium one by one, from his thumb and forefinger, into a vial.

  She goes to the movie theater on Main Street and pays her admission. The theater bears the same name as the town. She sits in the dark and swallows a handful of tabs. She cannot discern the picture. The screen is white. Then what she sees forming on the white screen is the town in its blanket of snow, the clapboard houses on the hill, the frozen river, the wind blowing snow along the streets. She sees the children coming out of their doors with their schoolbooks and walking down their steps to the street. She sees her life exactly as it is outside the movie theater.

  Later she walks through the downtown. The only thing open is the State News. Several men stand thumbing the magazines. She turns down Mechanic Street and walks past the tool-and-die company and crosses the railroad tracks to the bridge. She begins to run. In the middle of the bridge the wind is a force and she feels it wants to press her through the railing into the river. She runs bent over, feeling as if she is pushing through something, as if it is only giving way to her by tearing.

  Across the bridge the road turns sharply left and at the curve, at the foot of a hill of pine trees, is a brown house with a neon sign in the window: THE RAPIDS. She climbs up the porch steps into the Rapids, and looking neither left nor right, walks to the back, where she finds the ladies’ room. When she comes out she sits in one of the varnished plywood booths and stares at the table. After a while a man in an apron comes over and she orders a beer. Only then does she look up. The light is dim. A couple of elderly men are at the bar. But alone down at the end, established with his glass and a pack of cigarettes, is the new bus driver with the long blond hair, and he is smiling at her.

  HE HAS JOINED HER. For a while nothing is said. He raises his arm and turns in his seat to look toward the bar. He turns his head to look back at her. You want another, he says. She shakes her head no but doesn’t say thank you. She digs in her coat pocket and puts a wrinkled dollar beside her bottle. He holds up one finger.

  You from around here? he says.

  From the eastern part of the state, she says.

  I’m from Valdese, he says. Down on Sixteen.

  Oh, yes.

  I know you’re their teacher, he says. I’m their driver.

  He wears a wool shirt and a denim jacket and jeans. It is what he wears in his bus. He would not own a coat. There is something on a chain around his neck but it is hidden under the shirt. Blond beard stubble lies sparsely on his chin and along the line of his jaw. His cheeks are smooth. He is smiling. One of his front teeth is chipped.

  What do you do to get to be a teacher?

  You go to college. She sighs: What do you do to be a driver?

  It’s a county job, he says. You need a chauffeur’s license and a clean record.

  What is a dirty record?

  Why, if you been arrested, you know? If you have any kind of record. Or if you got a bad service discharge.

  She waits.

  I had a teacher once in the third grade, he says. I believe she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I believe now she was no more’n a girl. Like you. But she was very proud and she had a way of tossing her head and walking that made me wish to be a better student.

  She laughs.

  He picks up her beer bottle and feigns reproach and holds up his arm to the bartender and signals for two.

  It is very easy, she says, to make them fall in love with you. Boys or girls, it’s very easy.

  And to herself she admits that she tries to do it, to make them love her, she takes on a grace she doesn’t really have at any other time. She moves like a dancer, she touches them and brushes against them. She is outgoing and shows no terror, and the mystery of her is created in their regard.

  Do you have sisters? she says.

  Two. How’d you know that?

  They’re older than you?

  One older, one younger.

  What do they do?

  Work in the office of the lumber mill down there.

  She says: I would trust a man who had sisters.

  He tilts his head back and takes a long pull at his beer bottle, and she watches his Adam’s apple rise and fall, and the sparse blond stubble on his throat move like reeds lying on the water.

  Later they come out of the Rapids and he leads her to his pickup. He is rather short. She climbs in and notices his work-boots when he comes up into the cab from the other side. They’re clean good boots, new yellow leather. He has trouble starting the engine.

  What are you doing here at night if you live in Valdese? she says.

  Waiting for you. He laughs and the engine turns over.

  They drive slowly across the bridge, and across the tracks. Following her instructions, he goes to the end of the main street and turns up into the hills and brings her to her house. He pulls up in the yard by the side door.

  It is a small house and it looks dark and cold. He switches off the engine and the headlights and leans across her lap and presses the button of the glove compartment. He says: Happens I got me some party wine right here. He removes a flat bottle in a brown bag and slams the door, and as he moves back, his arm brushes her thigh.

  She stares through the windshield. She says: Stupid goddamn mill hand. Making his play with the teacher. Look at that, with his party wine in a sack. I can’t believe it.

  She jumps down from the cab, runs around the truck, and up the back steps into her kitchen. She slams the door. There is silence. She waits in the kitchen, not moving, in the dark, standing behind the table, facing the door.

  She hears nothing but her own breathing.

  All at once the back door is flooded with light, the white curtain on the door glass becomes a white screen, and then the light fades, and she hears the pickup backing out to the street. She is panting and now her rage breaks, and she is crying.

  She stands alone in her dark kitchen crying, a bitter scent coming off her body, a smell of burning, which offends her. She heats water on the stove and takes it up to her bath.

  ON MONDAY MORNING the teacher waits for her children at the front door of the school. When the bus turns into the drive, she steps back and stands inside the door. She can see the open door of the bus but she cannot see if he is trying to see her.

  She is very animated this morning. This is a special day, children, she announces, and she astonishes them by singing them a song while she accompanies herself on the autoharp. She lets them strum the autoharp while she presses the chords. Look, she says to each one, you are making music.

  At eleven the photographer arrives. He is a man with a potbelly and a black string tie. I don’t get these school calls till spring, he says.

  This is a special occasion, the teacher says. We want a picture of ourselv
es now. Don’t we, children?

  They watch intently as he sets up his tripod and camera. He has a black valise with brass latches that snap as he opens them. Inside are cables and floodlamps.

  Used to be classes of kids, he says. Now look at what’s left of you. Heat this whole building for one room.

  By the time he is ready, the young teacher has pushed the benches to the blackboard and grouped the children in two rows, the taller ones sitting on the benches, the shorter ones sitting in front of them on the floor, cross-legged. She herself stands at one side. There are fifteen children staring at the camera and their smiling teacher holding her hands in front of her, like an opera singer.

  The photographer looks at the scene and frowns. Why, these children ain’t fixed up for their picture.

  What do you mean?

  Why, they ain’t got on their ties and their new shoes. You got girls here wearing trousers.

  Just take it, she says.

  They don’t look right. Their hair ain’t combed, these boys here.

  Take us as we are, the teacher says. She steps suddenly out of line and with a furious motion removes the barrette fastening her hair and shakes her head until her hair falls to her shoulders. The children are startled. She kneels down on the floor in front of them, facing the camera, and pulls two of them into her arms. She brings all of them around her with an urgent opening and closing of her hands, and they gather about her. One girl begins to cry.

  She pulls them in around her, feeling their bodies, the thin bones of their arms, their small shoulders, their legs, their behinds.

  Take it, she says in a fierce whisper. Take it as we are. We are looking at you. Take it.

  WHAT I’VE NOTICED: HOW FAST THEY PUT UP THESE BUILDINGS. Cart away the rubble, square off the excavation, lay in the steel, and up she goes. Concrete floor slabs and, at night, work lamps hanging like stars. After a flag tops things off as if they were all sailing somewhere, they load in the elevator, do the wiring, the plumbing, they tack on the granite facing and set in the windows through which you see they’ve walled in the apartments, and before you know it there’s a canopy to the curb, a doorman, and upstairs just across the street from my window, a fully furnished bedroom and a naked girl dancing.

  Another thing: how people in the street are pulled along by little dogs on the leash. Usually a little short-legged dog keeping the leash taut so you know who’s in charge. He sniffs out the place to do what he does, does it, and then he’s ready to go on, leaving his two-legged body servant to pick it up. They are royalty, these dogs, they stop to nose one another, they wag their coiffed tails, they’re on their outing, with their shiny coats and curled ears and glittering eyes and the leash a band of leather, taut as a spinal cord, as if this is one creature, oddly shaped, with four short legs and a brain in front, and two tall legs and no brain in back.

  And when it rains in this city? It might be just a few drops, but out floop the umbrellas. People holding these things that are like hats on pikes. It is funny, the simple cartoon logic of it. But when it really rains, wind and rain together, the umbrellas blow out, and that’s even funnier, people lifted off their feet.

  You can bet they don’t avail themselves of umbrellas on the meadows of Mongolia.

  TO AVOID THE BENT old ladies and their carts of groceries and their walkers and canes and black women helpers taking up three-quarters of the sidewalk, I run in the street. I mean cars are less of a problem. In typical traffic they are standing still as I run past the horns blowing their dissonant mass protest, and so I wear my earmuffs and I’m fine.

  But I run, really, because I don’t know what else to do. I have not believed in where I am for a long time. I mean why, outside of every movie theater I run past, are people standing on line waiting to get in? What or who has persuaded them? And the movie theaters themselves with their filmed stories that I am supposed to worry over? Sitting in the dark and worrying over actors acting out stories? And the need to buy popcorn before you do this? To buy popcorn in movie theaters like you light votive candles in cathedrals? The obligation to eat popcorn that you don’t eat at any other time while watching moving pictures that you have to worry over is a peculiar, anthropological custom for which I have no reasonable explanation.

  I don’t belong here. I am outside this realm. If I were inside this realm, I wouldn’t feel this way. I wouldn’t remark on these things. Why do girls see an apartment in a new building as the occasion to dance naked? And the people on leashes holding umbrellas over their heads. And the cars that can’t move, bleating their mass dissonance as if they were Mongolian sheep?

  And how can I help thinking everybody I see on the sidewalk is as friendless and alone as I am, that we are total anonymities, talking importantly on our cell phones as we walk along like actors in movies that everyone has to worry over.

  OF COURSE ON A closer look we can be told apart. I am a trim, sinewy fellow, I am that way from running. I run. I don’t know what else to do by way of filling my lungs with carcinogenic particulate. I could climb up the stairs of the apartment building across the street and knock on the door of the naked girl dancing, but I don’t. I run over to the park and then run with the other runners around the reservoir.

  This fellow with the T-shirt that says THE PROGRAM IS RUNNING! sometimes comes up and lopes along beside me. I never know when he’ll appear. Sometimes there are two or three of them with that logo on their T-shirts like they can’t just run, it has to be a cool team thing so that everyone else can feel left out. You run pretty good, the fellow says with an ungrammatical smirk, and with no effort at all he glides past me and bounds away. At such times I feel that my feet are not hitting the ground, but pedaling air.

  And then the female runners who run in pairs with their shoulders back and their chins up: they don’t have names printed on them, they are like long-legged birds stepping along in their tights and with their sweaters tied by the sleeves at their waists and rippling like little flags over their backsides.

  YOU MAY ASK TO WHOM I think I’m talking. Suppose, for instance, you are one of those thin, undocumented Chinese men on balloon-tire bicycles delivering takeout. You would find me just as I find everything else, which is to say not quite right. I mean I am not yet characteristically impassively sad. I do not ride along on balloon tires delivering Chinese food to apartments where naked girls dance and little dogs with curly coats and glittering eyes will eat the leftovers. So even I, in my incomprehensible talking, can be seen as one more aspect of this weird realm.

  In Mongolia the air is clean and cold and you see the stars at night, you actually see them. The shepherds look almost Chinese, with their herds of sheep and goats and with camels and yaks for their regal transportation. No cell phones here. You do not see shepherds walking along with cell phones at their ears past doormen giving them the once-over. They are strong men with sturdy builds and they know the kingdom of earth with its yaks and camels and goats and wild horses is their dominion. They accept the responsibility. They would not run just for the sake of running. If they had a reservoir they would not run around it, they would drop on their knees to see the night sky of stars in the water unless it froze opaque at night like everything does on the steppe. In which case they would see the moonlight inside the ice.

  YOU MAY ASK HOW I pass the time when I’m not running. Alone, is my answer—as alone as when I am running. My only company is the grammarian who lives with me in my brain. If you ask me with whom am I talking, I am talking always to him or her. So I say to whom. So I don’t say lay down, I say lie down. I say would have and will not have. I don’t say you and me aren’t getting anywhere, I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere. I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere is an idiom. I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere may also be something of a metaphor, but is not a synecdoche or a metonym. When I run, too, I am not getting anywhere since I have no destination other than returning to my window across the street from the naked girl dancing. She and I are not g
etting anywhere either.

  OTHER THAN TO THE grammarian I am never sure to whom I will be talking. I speed-dial my cell phone. I get you. You may ask to whom do I think I’m talking. I say I’m talking to you. And who may that be, you say. And then I recognize who it is, it is my mother.

  You have all the time in the world, she says.

  Until what?

  Until something happens, Mother says.

  What can happen?

  If we knew, she says, and breaks the connection. I speed-dial her again and get the same assurance that I have all the time in the world on her answering machine. Now can you appreciate why I run? (To whomever I think I’m talking?)

  I AM ALWAYS GLAD to have weather, though it is difficult to run past the construction sites with the cranes in the street, and past the cars with their horns of mass dissonance and their windshield wipers clacking and their headlights lighting up the rain. I am competing for the lanes between the cars with the Chinese takeout men on their balloon-tire bikes. I try the sidewalk, but the old ladies with walkers and shopping carts and their angry black women helpers are everywhere with their umbrellas threatening to poke out my eyes. And the little dogs wearing booties now, jumping around and trying to bite off the booties that keep their paws dry and so twisting up their leashes as to make the old ladies trip and fall and runners like me leap over them as if we are in an obstacle race.