"I can't imagine rodents that large," I said.
"Me either."
He studied the hall. "No rats." Again I thought I saw a change, a little dark flash.
I got up and got a GO BIG RED commemorative half-pint out of my bag. To my surprise Tom did not decline it. He is legendary for sustained and exclusive consumption of soft drinks.
"They take those kids to live filmings of Sesame Street," he said. "Make them listen to NPR. Had their birthday announced from Lake Wobegon. No nitrates. No cereal."
I recalled his card to me:
Remember Elaine? (Good girl.) I married her. Sold tent. Sold Mustang. It was a good car.
And then enthusiasm about a "ghoul mouse," as I recall.
We sat there, listening to appliances and other subtle noises of a house settling for the night, passing the half-pint. I told Tom about the kid chopping onions who couldn't take it. I told him about all the fools I'd seen who were smarter than you'd think because they were not letting their lives become constructs of what was expected of them. I felt like the polyester preacher and shut up. I'm not sure Tom understood me, and I'm certain that wasn't his fault. Perhaps I wasn't even speaking to the central causes of his depression. But it looked like he wasn't all fired up about living the life good-girl Elaine had cooked up for them.
We heard one more firm door closing in the back of the house, a final not loud sound that somehow communicates lost patience on the part of those going to bed with those not. It didn't look like any fun to me. I thought of all the careless fun I'd been having with women who offered no closing-door crap, of old Dr. Eminence in Love with Polanski, who had presumably set this whole reaction series to rolling.
"You still going to Norway?" Tom asked. It was frankly unbelievable-as if we were thought-for-thought with each other.
"No. As they say in Brooklyn, das out."
"Sort of thought so."
"Why?"
"It never was going to work."
"Why Not?"
"Don't know." He probably thought he did, but wasn't going to speculate. I think we were both coming to the conclusion that we didn't know each other at all beyond the slingshot lunacy.
"What about you?" I said.
"What?"
"You and-"
"It'll work."
"How do you know?"
"I'll make it."
"You'll make it or you'll make it work?"
"Make it work."
"You'd better get an extra bedroom for Fenster."
"Or an extra house!" Like that, he was restored, grinning openly at the prospect of Fenster's alter-life beside his, I suppose. I'm sure he could see getting Fenster's lights turned on, getting his credit established. Fenster could shoot his slingshot late at night. Fenster would have rats. Fenster Ludge would raise tapirs.
In the reaction-series-of-life scheme of things, Fenster would care for his untowardness as much as for his self-actualizing assets and towardness. Fenster could take a step backward or to the side now and again. Fenster Ludge would be a dallying kind of dude.
Tom got up and left the room and returned with a giant trophy that had a tiny car on its top. He set it on the table.
"I won the Soap Box Derby," he said.
"Come on."
"For years I thought I was sliced bread."
I looked at the trophy. Something about it looked real. He had won the damned Soap Box Derby.
"My God, son."
"The Soap Box Derby is nothing but going downhill with amateurs." Tom intoned this with a note of bitterness that convinced me I did not know him at
all.
"What the hell is it supposed to be, Tom?"
"No, the thing is-" He made a gesture in the air, as if to indicate the entire environs-walls, wife, nieces, the stars above.
"Okay, Tom."
* * *
Sometime in the night I got up and ran into Elaine coming out of the bathroom. We did one of those side-to-side unsuccessful evasions people do in the same path-she did not smile. She looked down, holding her robe at the throat, and finally passed. Again I got the impression she was in thorough contempt of me, though, in fact, she was simply a tired woman in a bathrobe trying to get by a strange man in her house at 3 a.m. The sensation of her disapproval was strong enough, however, that I wanted to ask her what was the matter right there in the bad hall light. I decided finally that while she had good reason to turn her nose up, she had no way of knowing it, so she was either supernaturally perceptive of character or flatly impolite, and I did not need worry about her. I hardly even knew about Tom and me well enough to be worried about me and his
wife.
The bathroom was a Southern Living model with terry-cloth bibs and caps on the commode and an army of toiletries neatly marshaled into plastic trays and racks. I spotted a pink box of bubble bath and had a kooky urge to take one, but did not-I did not want to be to my neck in suds if Elaine attacked.
* * *
In the morning I had a conversation on the lawn with the girls as they waited to be taken somewhere. As if in response to their no-nitrate upbringing, they had begun, it looked, to get prematurely surly. They were little adults. I thought to try new utterance on them.
"Monsters, girls."
"Monsters what?"
"I think they're the thing."
They gave each other looks which contained concealed exasperation, quick passing glances designed to betray nothing. These were remarkable six-year-old women.
"I am a monster," one of them said. The other looked off, as if commenting without speaking, silently approving the sentiment. She would have pulled on a cigarette were they older and not no-nitrate. She is, her idle look said. We are. I wondered what they meant: could they possibly mean they knew they were premature not-children and thus monstrous?
"What do you mean?"
At this moment Elaine bounded out of the house with a picnic basket, binoculars, a bird book, and headed for the family car.
"You'd better skip over there and help her," the other girl said to the monster, and the monster did just that, brightly.
They were taking the girls to an "interpretive center" at a wildlife refuge and I declined Elaine's stiff invitation to go along. I declined Tom's somewhat sheepish invitation to ride with them to the bus station. Tom looked like he'd been thrashed.
"This is the bus station, Tom," I said, exacting from him no goofy mirth. He stood there near the car of loading women. I shook his hand and they left. I walked through the polite suburb and found a larger street and then a larger street and the true bus station, and worked on placing Tom and the monsters into the fool/true-fool gradient all the way to Lafayette. As I have it, Tom is perhaps the worst victim to date, intelligent enough, unlike the Orphan, to have accepted someone else's notions of living correctly and to have applied considerable industry toward that end before sensing it was all downhill and all advised by amateurs. The girls were smart; bucking at an early age, wanting potato chips badly. They were duplicitous. "You'd better skip over there." They could run the fish camp, they could soothe the Veteran, they could act in any of Mary's plays. I could have kissed those little monsters, and I was certain that with due cover they'd have let me. One would have kissed while the other stood by smoking her imaginary cigarette, with a kind of jaw-out, hip-slung petulance, trying to locate something she knew they were not to find. They were as mad for Saturday cartoons and dangerous toys as was the Veteran for his phantom, and they were just beginning to show signs of denial.
A true scientist could run a control, a failed one makes these speculations and, where no experiments can be had, makes these statements stridently, I suppose. So, mark my words: the little girls are tiny, early Veterans. They are being ruined by unwanted, forced purpose that seeks to free them of lateral waste. They are, as they say, monsters.