White People

by Allan Gurganus

  I pictured Huey and Dewey in high pines, blinking. I worried what dull local sparrows would do to such bright birds, hotshots from the Mall pet store. Still, I decided that being free sure beat my finches’ chances of hanging around here, starving.

  Talk about relief. I started coughing from it, I don’t know why. Then I sat down on the couch and cried. I felt something slippery underneath me. I wore my khaki shorts, nothing else, it was late August. I stood and studied what’d been written on couch cushions in lipstick, all caked. Words were hard to read on nappy brown cloth. You could barely make out ‘I will do what Robby wants. What Sandy needs worst. So help me Dog.’

  I thought of her. I wanted to fight for her but I knew that, strong as the lady was, she did pretty much what she liked. She wouldn’t be needing me. I sat again. I pulled my shorts down. Then I felt cool stripes get printed over my brown legs and white butt. Lipstick, parts of red words stuck onto my skin—’wi’ from ’will,’ the whole word ‘help.’ I stretched out full length. My birds didn’t hop from perch to perch or nibble at their birdie toy. Just me now. My place felt still as any church. Something had changed. I touched myself, and—for the first time, with my bottom all sweetened by lipstick—I got real results.

  Was right after this, I traded in my model cars, swapped every single comic for one magazine. It showed two sailors and twin sisters in a hotel, doing stuff. During the five last pictures, a dark bellboy joined in. Was then that my collection really started. The End, I guess. The rest is just being an adult.”

  BARKER SAT QUIET. I finally asked what’d happened to his grandfather. How about Robby and the den mother?

  “In jail. My granddad died. Of a broken heart, Mom said. Robby moved. He never was one to stay any place too long. One day he didn’t show up at Sunoco and that was it. Mrs…. the lady, she’s still right here in Falls, still a real leader. Not two days back, I ran into her at the Mall, collecting canned goods to end World Hunger. We had a nice chat. Her son’s a lawyer in Marietta, Georgia now. She looks about the same, really—I love the way she looks, always have. Now when we talk, I can tell she’s partly being nice to me because I never left town or went to college and she secretly thinks I’m not too swift. But since I kept her secret, I feel like we’re even. I just smile back. I figure, whatever makes people kind to you is fine. She can see there’s something extra going on but she can’t name it. It just makes her grin and want to give me little things. It’s one of ten trillion ways you can love somebody. We do, love each other. I’m sure.—Nobody ever knew about Robby. She got away with it. More power to her. Still leads the Youth Choir. Last year they won the Southeast Chorus prize, young people’s division. They give concerts all over. Her husband loves her. She said winning the prize was the most fulfilling moment of her life. I wondered. I guess everybody does some one wild thing now and then. They should. It’s what you’ll have to coast on when you’re old. You know?” I nodded. He sat here, still.

  “Probably not much of a story.” Barker shrugged. “But, back then it was sure something, to see all that right off the bat, your first time out. I remember being so shocked to know that—men want to. And women. I’d figured that only one person at a time would need it, and they’d have to knock down the other person and force them to, every time. But when I saw that, no, everybody wants to do it, and how there are no rules in it—I couldn’t look straight at a grown-up for days. I’d see that my mom’s slacks had zippers in them, I’d nearabout die. I walked around town, hands stuffed deep in my pockets. My head was hanging and I acted like I was in mourning for something. But, hey, I was really just waking up.—What got me onto all that? You about ready for a movie, Dave? Boy, I haven’t talked so much in months. It’s what you get for asking, I guess.” He laughed.

  I thanked Barker for his story. I told him it made sense to me.

  “Well, thanks for saying so anyhow.”

  HE STARTED fidgeting with the projector. I watched. I knew him better now. I felt so much for him. I wanted to save him. I couldn’t breathe correctly.

  “Here goes.” He toasted his newest film then snapped on the large and somehow sinister antique machine.

  The movie showed a girl at home reading an illustrated manual, hand in dress, getting herself animated. She made a phone call; you saw the actor answering and, even in a silent film, even given this flimsy premise, you had to find his acting absolutely awful. Barker informed me it was a Swedish movie; they usually started with the girl phoning. “Sometimes it’s one guy she calls, sometimes about six. But always the telephones. I don’t know why. It’s like they just got phones over there and are still proud of them or something.” I laughed. What a nice funny thing to say. By now, even the gin and iced tea (with lemon and sugar) tasted like a great idea.

  He sat upright beside me. The projector made its placid motorboat racket. Our couch seemed a kind of quilted raft. Movie light was mostly pink; ivy filtered sun to a thin green. Across Barker’s neutral white shirt, these tints carried on a silent contest. One room away, the crockpot leaked a bit, hissing. Hallway smelled of stew meat, the need for maid service, back issues, laundry in arrears, one young man’s agreeable curried musk. From a corner of my vision, I felt somewhat observed. Cats’ eyes. To heck with caution. Let them look!

  Barker kept elbows propped on knees, tensed, staring up at the screen, jaw gone slack. In profile against windows’ leaf-spotted light, he appeared honest, boyish, wide open. He unbuttoned his top collar button.

  I HEARD cars pass, my fellow Rotarians, algebra teachers from my school system. Nobody would understand us being here, beginning to maybe do a thing like this. Even if I went public, dedicated an entire Board of Education meeting to the topic, after three hours of intelligent confession, with charts and flannel boards and slide projections, I knew that when lights snapped back on I’d look around from face to face, I’d see they still sat wondering your most basic question:

  Why, Dave, why?

  I no longer noticed what was happening on screen. Barker’s face, lit by rosy movie light, kept changing. It moved me so. One minute: drowsy courtesy, next a sharp manly smile. I set my glass down on a Florida-shaped coaster. Now, slow, I reached toward the back of his neck—extra-nervous, sure—but that’s part of it, you know? My arm wobbled, fear of being really belted, blackmailed, worse. I chose to touch his dark hair, cool as metal.

  “Come on,” he huffed forward, clear of my hand. He kept gazing at the film, not me. Barker grumbled, “The guy she phoned, he hasn’t even got to her house yet, man.”

  I saw he had a system. I figured I could wait to understand it.

  I FELT he was my decent kid brother. Our folks had died; I would help him even more now. We’d rent industrial-strength vacuum cleaners. We’d purge this mansion of dinge, yank down tattered maroon draperies, let daylight in. I pictured us, stripped to the waists, painting every upstairs room off-white, our shoulders flecked with droplets, the hair on our chests flecked with droplets.

  I’d drive Barker and his Wedgwood to a place where I’m known, Old Mall Antiques. I bet we’d get fifteen to nineteen hundred bucks. Barker would act amazed. In front of the dealer, he’d say, “For that junk?” and, laughing, I’d have to shush him. With my encouragement, he’d spend some of the bonus on clothes. We’d donate three generations of National Geographics to a nearby orphanage, if there are any orphanages anymore and nearby. I’d scour Barker’s kitchen, defrost the fridge. Slowly, he would find new shape and meaning in his days. He’d commence reading again—nonporn, recent worthy hardbacks. We’d discuss these.

  He’d turn up at Little League games, sitting off to one side. Sensing my gratitude at having him high in the bleachers, he’d understand we couldn’t speak. But whenever one of my sons did something at bat or out in center field (a pop-up, a body block of a line drive), I would feel Barker nodding approval as he perched there alone; I’d turn just long enough to see a young bachelor mumbling to himself, shaking his head Yes, glad for my boys.
<
br />   After office hours, once a week, I’d drive over, knock, then walk right in, calling, “Barker? Me.”

  No answer. Maybe he’s napping in a big simple upstairs room, one startling with fresh paint. Six cats stand guard around his bed, two old Persians and their offspring, less Persian, thinner, spottier. Four of them pad over and rub against my pant cuffs; by now they know me.

  I settle on the edge of a single bed, I look down at him. Barker’s dark hair has fallen against the pillow like an open wing. Bare-chested, the texture of his poreless skin looks finer than the sheets. Under a blue blanket, he sleeps, exhausted from all the cleaning, from renewing his library card, from the fatigue of clothes shopping. I look hard at him; I hear rush-hour traffic crest then pass its peak. Light in here gets ruddier.

  A vein in his neck beats like a clock, only liquid.

  —I’m balanced at the pillow end of someone’s bed. I’m watching somebody decent sleep.—If the law considers this so wicked—then why does it feel like my only innocent activity? Barker wakes. The sun is setting. His face does five things at once: sees somebody here, gets scared, recognizes me, grins a good blurry grin, says just, “You.”

  (THEY DON’T WANT a person to be tender. They could lock me up for everything I love about myself, for everything I love.)

  HERE ON THE COUCH, Barker shifted, “Look now, Dave. Uh oh, she hears him knocking. See her hop right up? Okay, walking to the door. It’s him, all right. He’s dressed for winter. That’s because they’re in Sweden, right, Dave?”

  I agreed, with feeling. Then I noted Barker taking the pen caddy from his pocket, placing it on the table before him. Next, with an ancient kind of patience, Barker’s torso twisted inches toward me; he lifted my hand, pulled my whole arm up and around and held it by the wrist, hovering in air before his front side as if waiting for some cue. Then Barker, clutching the tender back part of my hand, sighed, “Um-kay. Now they’re really starting to.” And he lowered my whole willing palm—down, down onto it.

  I touched something fully familiar to me, yet wholly new.

  HE BUCKED with that first famous jolt of human contact after too long, too long alone without. His spine slackened but the head shivered to one side, righted itself, eager to keep the film in sight. I heard six cats go racing down long hallways, then come thumping back, relaxed enough to play with me, a stranger, in their house. Praise.

  Barker’s voice, all gulpy: “I think … this movie’s going to be a real good one, Dave. Right up there on my Ten Favorites list. And, you know? …”He almost ceased looking at the screen, he nearly turned his eyes my way instead. And the compliment stirred me. “You know? You’re a regular fellow, Dave. I feel like I can trust you. You seem like … one real nice guy.”

  Through my breathing, I could hear him, breathing, losing breath, breathing, losing breath.

  “Thank you, Barker. Coming from you, that means a lot.”

  EVERY TRUE PLEASURE is a secret.

  1986

  It Had Wings

  For Bruce Saylor and Constance Beavon

  FIND A LITTLE yellow side street house. Put an older woman in it. Dress her in that tatty favorite robe, pull her slippers up before the sink, have her doing dishes, gazing nowhere—at her own backyard. Gazing everywhere. Something falls outside, loud. One damp thwunk into new grass. A meteor? She herself (retired from selling formal clothes at Wanamaker’s, she herself—a widow and the mother of three scattered sons, she herself alone at home a lot these days) goes onto tiptoe, leans across a sinkful of suds, sees—out near her picnic table, something nude, white, overly-long. It keeps shivering. Both wings seem damaged.

  “No way,” she says. It appears human. Yes, it is a male one. It’s face up and, you can tell, it is extremely male (uncircumcised). This old woman, pushing eighty, a history of aches, uses, fun—now presses one damp hand across her eyes. Blaming strain, the luster of new cataracts, she looks again. Still, it rests there on a bright air mattress of its own wings. Outer feathers are tough quills, broad at bottom as rowboat oars. The whole left wing bends far under. It looks hurt.

  The widow, sighing, takes up her blue willow mug of heated milk. Shaking her head, muttering, she carries it out back. She moves so slow because: arthritis. It criticizes every step. It asks about the mug she holds, Do you really need this?

  SHE STOOPS, creaky, beside what can only be a young angel, unconscious. Quick, she checks overhead, ready for what?—some TV news crew in a helicopter? She sees only a sky of the usual size, a Tuesday sky stretched between weekends. She allows herself to touch this thing’s white forehead. She gets a mild electric shock. Then, odd, her tickled finger joints stop aching. They’ve hurt so long. A practical person, she quickly cures her other hand. The angel grunts but sounds pleased. His temperature’s a hundred and fifty, easy—but for him, this seems somehow normal. “Poor thing,” she says, and—careful—pulls his heavy curly head into her lap. The head hums like a phone knocked off its cradle. She scans for neighbors, hoping they’ll come out, wishing they wouldn’t, both.

  “Look, will warm milk help?” She pours some down him. Her wrist brushes angel skin. Which pulls the way an ice tray begs whatever touches it. A thirty-year pain leaves her, enters him. Even her liver spots are lightening. He grunts with pleasure, soaking up all of it. Bold, she presses her worst hip deep into crackling feathers. The hip has been half numb since a silly fall last February. All stiffness leaves her. He goes, “Unhh.” Her griefs seem to fatten him like vitamins. Bolder, she whispers private woes: the Medicare cuts, the sons too casual by half, the daughters-in-law not bad but not so great. These woes seem ended. “Nobody’ll believe. Still, tell me some of it.” She tilts nearer. Both his eyes stay shut but his voice, like clicks from a million crickets pooled, goes, “We’re just another army. We all look alike—we didn’t, before. It’s not what you expect. We miss this other. Don’t count on the next. Notice things here. We are just another army.”

  “Oh,” she says.

  Nodding, she feels limber now, sure as any girl of twenty. Admiring her unspeckled hands, she helps him rise. Wings serve as handles. Kneeling on damp ground, she watches him go staggering toward her barbecue pit. Awkward for an athlete, really awkward for an angel, the poor thing climbs up there, wobbly. Standing, he is handsome, but as a vase is handsome. When he turns this way, she sees his eyes. They’re silver, each reflects her: a speck, pink, on green green grass.

  She now fears he plans to take her up, as thanks. She presses both palms flat to dirt, says, “The house is finally paid off.—Not just yet,” and smiles.

  Suddenly he’s infinitely infinitely more so. Silvery. Raw. Gleaming like a sunny monument, a clock. Each wing puffs, independent. Feathers sort and shuffle like three hundred packs of playing cards. Out flings either arm; knees dip low. Then up and off he shoves, one solemn grunt. Machete swipes cross her backyard, breezes cool her upturned face. Six feet overhead, he falters, whips in makeshift circles, manages to hold aloft, then go shrub-high, gutter-high. He avoids a messy tangle of phone lines now rocking from the wind of him. “Go, go,” the widow, grinning, points the way. “Do. Yeah, good.” He signals back at her, open-mouthed and left down here. First a glinting man-shaped kite, next an oblong of aluminum in sun. Now a new moon shrunk to decent star, one fleck, fleck’s memory: usual Tuesday sky.

  She kneels, panting, happier and frisky. She is hungry but must first rush over and tell Lydia next door. Then she pictures Lydia’s worry lines bunching. Lydia will maybe phone the missing sons: “Come right home. Your Mom’s inventing … company.”

  Maybe other angels have dropped into other Elm Street backyards? Behind fences, did neighbors help earlier hurt ones? Folks keep so much of the best stuff quiet, don’t they.

  Palms on knees, she stands, wirier. This retired saleswoman was the formal-gowns adviser to ten mayors’ wives. She spent sixty years of nine-to-five on her feet. Scuffing indoors, now staring down at terry slippers, she decides, “Got to wash these next w
eek.” Can a person who’s just sighted her first angel already be mulling about laundry? Yes. The world is like that.

  From her sink, she sees her own blue willow mug out there in the grass. It rests in muddy ruts where the falling body struck so hard. A neighbor’s collie keeps barking. (It saw!) Okay. This happened. “So,” she says.

  And plunges hands into dishwater, still warm. Heat usually helps her achy joints feel agile. But fingers don’t even hurt now. Her bad hip doesn’t pinch one bit. And yet, sad, they all will. By suppertime, they will again remind her what usual suffering means. To her nimble underwater hands, the widow, staring straight ahead, announces, “I helped. He flew off stronger. I really egged him on. Like anybody would’ve, really. Still, it was me. I’m not just somebody in a house. I’m not just somebody alone in a house. I’m not just somebody else alone in a house.”

  Feeling more herself, she finishes the breakfast dishes. In time for lunch. This old woman should be famous for all she has been through—today’s angel, her years in sales, the sons and friends—she should be famous for her life. She knows things, she has seen so much. She’s not famous.

  Still, the lady keeps gazing past her kitchen café curtains, she keeps studying her own small tidy yard. An anchor fence, the picnic table, a barbecue pit, new Bermuda grass. Hands braced on her sink’s cool edge, she tips nearer a bright window.

  She seems to be expecting something, expecting something decent. Her kitchen clock is ticking. That dog still barks to calm itself. And she keeps staring out: nowhere, everywhere. Spots on her hands are darkening again. And yet, she whispers, “I’m right here, ready. Ready for more.”

  Can you guess why this old woman’s chin is lifted? Why does she breathe as if to show exactly how it’s done? Why should both her shoulders, usually quite bent, brace so square just now?