And stared openly at the mismatched couples: at the big, powerful girls next to undersized men and the men large as football players beside bloodless, scrawny women, at the couples widely discrepant in age in open attitudes of love and regard, handholding or clutching butts, the men’s fingers casually resting along breasts as if they lolled in water. Or their arms thrown abruptly across each other’s shoulders. Sending the smug signals of secret satisfactions, like the wealthy, perhaps, like people in drag.
And at a closely supervised group of the retarded, oddly ageless, the males in overalls, the females in loose, shapeless dresses and rolled stockings, clutching one another with their short fat fingers, their strange, pleased eyes fixed in their happy Smile Faces like raisins in cakes, beaming above their neglected teeth, beaming, beaming beneath their close-cropped hair on their broad, short skulls.
(Yet most were not defective, merely aging or old, or anyway beyond that thirty- or thirty-five-year grace period that seemed to come with most lives.)
Not even needing Colin now to direct their attention, to point things out. In it themselves now, raising their voices, like people outbidding each other in some hot contest, not even listening; or, if listening, then listening for the break in the other’s discourse, for that opportune moment when they could have their say, get in their licks; or, if listening, then listening not just for the other to finish but for some generalized cue, some more or less specific tag on which they could build, add, like players of dominoes, say, or card games that followed strict suit. But generally too excited even for that. Only half listening, really, less, fractionally, marginally, seeing how it was with them and concentrating only on the essence, pith, and gist of what they would say, thinking in a sort of deliberate and polite headlines but settling finally into a kind of conversation and still using the language of that other kingdom, the one they’d come from to get to this one.
“Lord love a duck!” said Janet Order. “Just clap eyes on these gaffers.”
“My word, Janet! They’re for it, I’d say so,” Rena Morgan agreed.
“Lamb turning to mutton.” Janet sighed.
“Fright fish.”
“Blood puddles.”
“Lawks!” said Benny Maxine. “Look at the bint with the healthy arse. I’m gone dead nuts on that fanny.”
“Ooh, it’s walloping big, ain’t it?” Tony Word said.
“If it ever let off it wouldn’t ’alf make a pongy pooh,” Benny asserted.
“Like Billy-O!” Tony said.
“Good gracious me!” said Lydia Conscience. “Say what you will, my heart goes out to the old biddy what looks like someone put her in the pudding club.”
“Yar, ain’t she dishy? There’s one in every village.”
Tony Word considered. “No,” he said. “She’s just put on the nose bag. It’s simply a case of your lumping, right grotty greedguts.”
“Only loads of grub then, you think?” Lydia asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Tony. “Oodles of inner man. Tub and tuck.”
“Jesus weeps!” said illiterate Noah Cloth, looking about, his gaze settling on the little group of the retarded. “He weeps for all the potty, pig-ignorant prats off their chumps, for all the slowcoach clots and dead-from-the-neck-up dimbos, and wonky, puddled coots and gits, goofs and goons, for all his chuckleheaded, loopy muggins and passengers past praying for.”
“Put a sock in it, old man,” Benny Maxine said softly.
“For all the nanas,” Noah said, crying now. “For all the bright specimens.”
“Many’s the nosh-up gone down that cake hole,” Tony Word said, his eye fixed on the fat woman Lydia Conscience had thought pregnant. “Many’s the porky pots of tram-stopper scoff and thundering stodge through that podge’s gob,” he said without appetite.
“She’s chesty,” Rena Morgan said, weeping, of a woman who coughed. “She should put by the gaspers.”
“She’s had her day,” said Janet Order.
“Coo! Who ain’t?” Rena, sobbing, wanted to know. “Which of us, hey? Which of them?”
“Are they all on the dream holiday then?” Charles Mudd- Gaddis asked.
“All, old son, and no mistake,” Lydia Conscience said wearily.
“A shame,” he said. “Letting themselves go like that. And them with their whole lives in front of them.”
And, at last, just rudely pointing. (They could have been mutes waving at entrées, aiming at desserts in a cafeteria line.) Whirling, indiscriminate, flailing about in some random “J’accuse” of the spontaneous. Whining, wailing, whimpering, weeping.
Because everything has a reasonable explanation. They lived in England’s cold climate. They came from a place where clothes made their men and their women. They were unaccustomed to sportswear, to shorts and the casual lightweights and washables of the near tropics. They were unaccustomed, that is, to the actual shapes of people and simply did not know that what they saw was just the ordinary let-hung-out wear and tear of years, of meals, of good times and comforts and all the body’s thoughtless kindnesses to itself. So that when Colin said what he said they believed him.
“I tell you,” he told them, “that’s you in a few years, never mind those three-score-and-ten you thought was your birthright. All that soured flesh, all those bitched and bollixed bodies. You see? You see what you thought you were missing?”
“Bodies,” Nedra Carp said. “Don’t tell me about bodies. I know about bodies.”
“I’ve got them!” Colin Bible shouted, bursting into the room he shared with Bale, with Mudd-Gaddis and Benny. “I’ve got their consents in my pocket!”
5
So Nedra Carp knew about bodies.
If nothing else, her duties as a nanny had given her expertise in that department. (Hadn’t she bathed and toweled dozens of children? Hadn’t she helped bathe and actually dress all those step- and less-than-step—“stair relation,” she called them — brothers and sisters of her early years?) And if her expertise was largely limited to the bodies of children, why, weren’t the bodies of children bodies in their purest form? Didn’t children wear the sharp, original shape of form itself? Hairless, without extrusion or eyesore, the blemish of sex? (She was no prude. She did not mean blemish. She only meant the body distracted from itself, allowed to drift from its intentions, from the air-and skin-tight condition of bone in its bearings: the baroque scroll and ornament of palimpsest flesh.) She had rub-a-dub-dubbed girls and boys for almost as long as she could remember and, seated on stools and chairs for leverage, drawn their bodies to her within the open V of her legs (and as little pederast as prude), vigorously scrubbing, rubbing, grooming them — for bed, for parties — as if they’d been poodles in shows, the texture of their skins and every inch and hollow of their bodies known to her even beneath the thick, rough nap of the towels and soft, slippery film and feel of the soap, discounting the misleading temperature of the water. Practicing on all that devolutionary line, her mitigated steps and halves (the two stepchildren, the stepbrother and stepsister, the half sister, the half brother, the three — what? — cousin sisters and her half brother’s sister, half brother and half sister and two stepsisters by the double widower, so that for the rest of her life she feels she stands — she doesn’t know where she stands — as much in sororal parentis as loco), the way some other little girl might play with dolls.