“You don’t have to worry about any more rough stuff,” he said, following after her.
“What?” she said, from within one of the bathrooms, hers, which was off their bedroom and which the girls used occasionally.
“That was something I had to get out of my system,” he said, blocking the doorway as she started out of the bathroom.
Fay said, “Did the girls go outside?”
“Very possibly,” he said.
“Would you mind letting me past?” Her voice showed the strain she felt. And, he saw, she held her hand inside her shirt, against her chest. “I think you cracked a rib,” she said, breathing through her mouth. “I can hardly get my breath.” But her manner was calm. She had gotten complete control of herself; he saw that she was not afraid of him, only wary. That perfect wariness of hers… the quickness of her responses. But she had let him haul off and let fly — she hadn’t been wary enough. So, he thought, she’s not such a hot specimen after all. If she’s in such darn good physical shape — if those exercises she takes in the morning are worth doing — she should have been able to block my right. Of course, he thought, she’s pretty good at tennis and golf and ping pong… .so she’s okay. And she keeps her figure better than any of the other women up here… I’ll bet she’s got the best figure in the whole Marin County PTA.
While Fay found and comforted the children, he roamed about the house, looking for something to do. He carried a pasteboard carton of trash out to the incinerator and set fire to it. Then, taking a screwdriver from the workshop, he tightened up the large brass screws that held the strap to her new leather purse… .the screws came loose from time to time, dumping one end of her purse at odd moments. Anything else? he asked himself, pausing.
In the living room the radio had stopped playing classical music and had started on some dinner jazz. So he went to find another station. And then, while he tuned the dial, he began thinking about dinner. It occurred to him to go into the kitchen and see how things were going.
He found that he had interrupted her while she was making the salad. A half-opened can of anchovies lay on the sideboard, beside a head of lettuce, tomatoes, and a green pepper. On the electric range –a wall installation that he had supervised– a pot of water boiled. He turned the knob from hi to sim. Picking up a paring knife, he began to peel an avocado… Fay had never been good at peeling avocados — she was too impatient. He always did that job himself.
(four)
In the spring of 1958 my older brother Jack, who was living in Seville, California, and was then thirty-three, stole a can of chocolatecovered ants from a supermarket and was caught by the store manager and turned over to the police.
We drove down from Marin County, my husband and I, to make sure that he had gotten through it all right.
The police had let him go; the store hadn’t pressed charges, although they had made him sign a statement admitting that he had stolen the ants. Their idea was that he would never dare steal a can of ants from them again, since, if he were caught a second time, his signed statement would put him in the city jail. It was a horse-trading deal; he got to go home –which was all he would be thinking about, with his limited brain– and the store could count on his absence from then on — he would not even dare be seen in the store, or even rooting around the empty orange crates in the rear by the loading dock.
For several months Jack had rented a room on Oil Street near Tyler, which is in the colored district of Seville, although colored or not it is one of the few interesting parts of the town. There are little dried-up stores twenty to a block that set out on the sidewalk every morning a stack of bedsprings and galvanized iron tubs and hunting knives. Always, when we were in our teens, we used to imagine that every store was a front for something. The rent there is cheap, too, and with that loathesome little job of his at that crooked tire outfit, plus his expenses for clothes and going out with his pals, he has always had to live in such places.
We parked in a 25 cent an hour lot and jaywalked across the street, among the yellow busses, to the rooming house. It made Charley nervous to be down in such a district; he kept peering at his trousers to see if he had walked on anything — obviously psychological, because in his work he is always up to his ass in metal filings and sparks and grease. The pavement was covered with gum wrappers and spit and dog urine and old contraceptives, and Charley got that grim disapproving Protestant expression.
“Just make sure you wash your hands after we leave,” I said.
“Can you get venereal disease from lamp posts or mail boxes?” Charley asked me.
“You can if you have that sort of mind,” I said.
Upstairs in the damp, dark hall we rapped on Jack’s door. I had been there only once before, but I recognized his room by the great stain on the ceiling, probably from an ancient overflowed toilet.
“You suppose he thought they were a delicacy?” Charley asked me. “Or did he disapprove of a supermarket stocking ants?”
I said, “You know he’s always loved animals.”
From within the room we could hear stirrings, as if Jack had been in bed. The time was one-thirty in the afternoon. The door did not open, however, and presently the stirrings died down.
“It’s Fay,” I said, close to the door.
A pause, and then the door was unlocked.
The room was neat, as it of course would have to be if Jack were to live there. Everything was clean; all objects were stacked in order, where he could find them, and of course he had carried this to the shopping newses: he had a pile of them, opened and flattened, stacked by the window. He saved everything, especially tinfoil and string. The bed had been turned back, to air it, and he seated himself on the exposed sheets. Placing his hands on his knees he gazed up at us.
He had, because of this crisis, reverted to wearing the clothes that, as a child, he had worn around the house. Here again was the pair of brown corduroy slacks that our mother had picked out for him back in the early ‘forties. And he had on a blue cotton shirt — clean, but so repeatedly washed that it had turned white. The collar was almost nothing but threads and all the buttons were off it. He had fastened the front together with paperclips.
“You poop,” I said.
Roaming around, Charley said, “Why do you save all this junk?” He had come upon a table covered with small washed rocks.
“I got those because of the possibility of radioactive ores,” Jack said.
That meant that, even with his job, he still took his long walks. Sure enough, in his closet, under a heap of sweaters that had fallen from their hangers, a cardboard box of worn-out Army surplus boots had been carefully tied up with twine and marked in Jack’s crabbed handwriting. Every month or so, as a high school boy, he had worn out a pair of boots, those old-fashioned high topped boots with hooks on the tops.
To me this was more serious than the stealing, and I cleared a heap of Life magazines from a chair and seated myself, having decided to stay long enough for a real talk with him. Charley, naturally, remained standing to keep me aware that he wanted to go. Jack made him nervous. They did not know each other at all, but while Jack paid no attention to him, Charley always seemed to imagine that something to his disadvantage was going to happen. After he had met Jack for the first time he told me straightforwardly –Charley never could keep anything to himself– that my brother was the most screwed-up person he had ever met. When I asked him why he said that, he answered that he knew god damn well that Jack did not have to act the way he did; he acted like that because he wanted to. To me the distinction was meaningless, but Charley always set great store by such matters.
The long walks had begun in junior high school, back in the ‘thirties, before World War Two. We were living on a street named Garibaldi Street, and during the Spanish Civil War because of the feeling against the Italians the street name was changed to Cervantes Street. Jack soon got the notion that all the street names were going to be changed and for a while he seemed to be living among the new names –all ancient writers and poets, no doubt– but when no other street names were changed that mood passed. Anyhow it had made the world situation seem real to him for a month or so, and we thought of that as an improvement; up to then he had seemed unable to imagine either the war as an actual event or, for that matter, the real world itself in which that war was taking place. He had never been able to distinguish between what he read and what he actually experienced. To him, vividness was the criterion, and those nauseating accounts in the Sunday supplements about lost continents and jungle goddesses had always been more compelling and convincing than the daily headlines.