When Alvin came in to work on the Friday following his performance, he was the center of attention for a few minutes and an aura of celebrity floated around him. But Alvin told a sad tale. There were only five people in the audience at his performance. Four were fellow comedians, and the fifth was Alvin’s friend Ira, who talked throughout his monologues.
Alvin was eloquent about his failure. He described the room, his friend the owner, his friend Ira. He talked for five minutes. The boss, who had been listening with the others, grew restless and distracted and told Alvin there was work waiting for him. Alvin raised a hand in concession and went into the typesetting room. The production people returned to their stools and bent over their pages. Our machines began rumbling. The boss hurried upstairs.
Then Alvin stopped typing. His pupils were dilated and he looked particularly remote. He stood up and walked out. He said to the production room at large: “Listen: I have work to do. But I haven’t started yet. I would like to perform for you first.”
Most of the production people smiled because they liked Alvin.
“Now I’m going to impersonate a chicken,” he said.
He climbed up on a stool and started flapping his arms and clucking. The room was quiet. The production people perched on their long-legged stools like a flock of resting egrets and stared at this bald chicken. When there was no applause, Alvin shrugged and climbed down and said, “Now I’m going to impersonate a duck,” and waddled across the room with his knees bent and toes turned in. The production people glanced around the room at one another. Their looks darted and hopped like sparrows. They gave Alvin a spattering of applause. Then he said, “Now I’m going to do a pigeon.” He shook his shoulders and jerked his head forward and back as he strutted in the circular patterns of a courting pigeon. He managed to convey something of the ostentation of a male pigeon. Abruptly he stopped and said to his audience, “Well, don’t you have any work to do? What are you sitting around for? All this should have been done yesterday!” The little hair he had was poking straight out from his head as though he were full of electricity. He swallowed his saliva. “That’s all we are,” he said. “A bunch of dumb birds.”
The smiles faded from the faces of his audience. The weariness of that leafless late December, our fear of our weakened government, our dread of its repressive spirit, descended on us once again.
Into the abrupt silence came the chiming of a church-bell across the street. The production manager by reflex checked his watch. Alvin’s body sagged. He turned and walked into our tiny room. The back of his head had its own expression of defeat.
For a moment everyone stared at him in amazement. He sat slumped over his machine, solitary, flooded by fluorescent light, exhausted by his performance. He had not been very funny, in fact he was a poor actor, and yet something about his act had been impressive: his grim determination, the violence of his feelings. One by one the production people went back to work: paper rustled, scissors clattered on the stone tabletop, murmurs passed back and forth over the sound of the radio. I sat down at my machine and Alvin looked up at me from under his heavy lids. His look carried all the hurt, the humiliation, the mockery of the past few months. He said without smiling, “They think I’m nothing. They can think what they like. I have my plans.”
Special
We know we are very special. Yet we keep trying to find out in what way: not this way, not that way, then what way?
Selfish
The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt you don’t mind so much because you yourself are all right. But it won’t work if you are just a little selfish. You must be very selfish. This is the way it happens. If you are just a little selfish, you take some trouble over them, you pay some attention to them, they have clean clothes most of the time, a fresh haircut fairly often, though not all the supplies they need for school, or not when they need them; you enjoy them, you laugh at their jokes, though you have little patience when they are naughty, they annoy you when you have work to do, and when they are very naughty you become very angry; you understand some of what they should have, in their lives, you know some of what they are doing, with their friends, you ask questions, though not very many, and not beyond a certain point, because there is so little time; then the trouble begins and you don’t notice signs of it because you are so busy: they steal, and you wonder how that thing came into the house; they show you what they have stolen, and when you ask questions, they lie; when they lie, you believe them, every time, because they seem so candid and it would take so long to find out the truth. Well, if you have been selfish, this is what sometimes happens, and if you have not been selfish enough, then later, when they are in serious trouble, you will suffer, though even as you suffer you will continue, from long habit, to be selfish, saying, I am so distraught, My life has ended, How can I go on? So if you are going to be selfish at all, you must be more selfish than that, so selfish that although you are sorry they’re in trouble, sincerely and deeply sorry, as you will tell your friends and acquaintances and the rest of the family, you will be privately relieved, glad, even delighted, that it isn’t happening to you.
My Husband and I
My husband and I are Siamese twins. We are joined at the forehead. Our mother feeds us. When we are moved to copulate we join lower down as well forming a loop like a certain espaliered tree. Time passes. I separate from my husband below and give birth to twins who are not joined together as we are. They squirm on the ground. Our mother cares for them. They are most often asymmetrical with each other, even in sleep when they lie still. Awake, they stay near each other, as though elastic bands held them, and near us and near our mother. At night the bond is even stronger and we snap together and lie in a heap, my husband’s hard muscles, against my soft muscles, against our mother’s stringy old muscles, and our babies’ feather muscles, our arms around one another like so many snakes, and distant thumping music in the fields behind us.
Spring Spleen
I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly.
Soon they will hide the neighbor and her screaming child.
Her Damage
On the counter lay a pile of plastic packets of duck sauce, soy sauce, and mustard from their Chinese dinner. In her anger she was provoked by the smooth, slippery little bodies and slammed her fist down among them. Two or three exploded. She could not see through her tears. Her bathrobe cuff was drenched in mustard, and the next morning he discovered a spatter of soy sauce, or maybe duck sauce, over the ceiling, two windows, and one wall. She cleaned it off the windows, but it wouldn’t come off the ceiling, where it had stained through the white paint, and then when she was done trying to get it off she saw that the drops of detergent and water falling on the wood floor had spotted the finish.
A few days later, carrying the baby, she stepped into a hole in the dining room floor in the old house where a plank had been removed because of termites. She bruised her arm badly, though the baby was not hurt. Then she stopped up the coffee maker with coffee grounds so that it overflowed onto the counter and floor when it went on in the morning. She sprayed the side of her face with the spray attachment at the sink. She burned her hand feeding the wood stove. The baby rolled off the side of their bed and fell onto the floor. She took the baby out for a walk late in the afternoon when the temperature was below freezing, its face turned red, and it started screaming with pain. This was the holiday season.