Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (21 page)

She was angry with him for collaborating with grammar. She would call it unconsciously installed authority. Then she would find other names for it.

“All right,” he said loudly, trying to make eye contact with someone in the room besides his mother, “let’s try some examples. Can anyone tell me what, if anything, is wrong with the following sentence? ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem.’ ”

The three sanitation workers, in the third row, began to laugh. Fenstad caught himself glowering and singled out the middle one.

“Yes, it is funny, isn’t it?”

The man in the middle smirked and looked at the floor. “I was just thinking of my unique problem.”

“Right,” Fenstad said. “But what’s wrong with saying, ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem’?”

“Solving it?” This was Mrs. Nelson, who sat by the window so that she could gaze at the tree outside, lit by a streetlight. All through class she looked at the tree as if it were a lover.

“Solving what?”

“Solving the problem you have. What is the problem?”

“That’s actually not what I’m getting at,” Fenstad said. “Although it’s a good
related
point. I’m asking what might be wrong logically with that sentence.”

“It depends,” Harold Ronson said. He worked in a service station and sometimes came to class wearing his work shirt with his name tag,
HAROLD
, stitched into it. “It depends on what your problem is. You haven’t told us your problem.”

“No,” Fenstad said, “my problem is
not
the problem.” He thought of Alice in Wonderland and felt, physically, as if he himself were getting small. “Let’s try this again. What might be wrong with saying that most people have a unique problem?”

“You shouldn’t be so critical,” Timothy Melville said. “You should look on the bright side, if possible.”

“What?”

“He’s right,” Mrs. Nelson said. “Most people have unique problems, but many people do their best to help themselves, such as taking night classes or working at meditation.”

“No doubt that’s true,” Fenstad said. “But why can’t most people have a unique problem?”

“Oh, I disagree,” Mrs. Nelson said, still looking at her tree. Fenstad glanced at it and saw that it was crested with snow. It
was
beautiful. No wonder she looked at it. “I believe that most people do have unique problems. They just shouldn’t talk about them all the time.”

“Can anyone,” Fenstad asked, looking at the back wall and hoping to see something there that was not wall, “can anyone give me an example of a unique problem?”

“Divorce,” Barb Kjellerud said. She sat near the door and knitted during class. She answered questions without looking up. “Divorce is unique.”

“No, it isn’t!” Fenstad said, failing in the crucial moment to control his voice. He and his mother exchanged glances. In his mother’s face for a split second was the history of her compassionate, ambivalent attention to him. “Divorce is not unique.” He waited to calm himself. “It’s everywhere. Now try again. Give me a unique problem.”

Silence. “This is a trick question,” Arlene Fisher said. “I’m sure it’s a trick question.”

“Not necessarily. Does anyone know what ‘unique’ means?”

“One of a kind,” York Follette said, gazing at Fenstad with dry amusement. Sometimes he took pity on Fenstad and helped him out of jams. Fenstad’s mother smiled and nodded.

“Right,” Fenstad crowed, racing toward the blackboard as if he were about to write something. “So let’s try again. Give me a unique problem.”

“You give
us
a unique problem,” one of the sanitation workers said. Fenstad didn’t know whether he’d been given a statement or a command. He decided to treat it as a command.

“All right,” he said. He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Maybe it
was
a trick question. He thought for ten seconds. Problem after problem presented itself to him. He thought of poverty, of the assaults on the earth, of the awful complexities of love. “I can’t think of one,” Fenstad said. His hands went into his pockets.

“That’s because problems aren’t personal,” Fenstad’s mother said from the back of the room. “They’re collective.” She waited while several students in the class sat up and nodded. “And people must work together on their solutions.” She talked for another two minutes, taking the subject out of logic and putting it neatly in politics, where she knew it belonged.

The snow had stopped by the time the class was over. Fenstad took his mother’s arm and escorted her to the car. After easing her down on the passenger side and starting the engine, he began to clear the front windshield. He didn’t have a scraper and had forgotten his gloves, so he was using his bare hands. When he brushed the snow away on his mother’s side, she looked out at him, surprised, a terribly aged Sleeping Beauty awakened against her will.

Once the car had warmed up, she was in a gruff mood and repositioned herself under the seat belt while making quiet but aggressive remarks. The sight of the new snow didn’t seem to calm her. “Logic,” she said at last. “That wasn’t logic. Those are just rhetorical tactics. It’s filler and drudgery.”

“I don’t want to discuss it now.”

“All right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”

They rode together in silence. Then she began to shake her head. “Don’t take me home,” she said. “I want to have a spot of tea somewhere before I go back. A nice place where they serve tea, all right?”

He parked outside an all-night restaurant with huge front plate-glass windows; it was called Country Bob’s. He held his mother’s elbow from the car to the door. At the door, looking back to make sure that he had turned off his headlights, he saw his tracks and his mother’s in the snow. His were separate footprints, but hers formed two long lines.

Inside, at the table, she sipped her tea and gazed at her son for a long time. “Thanks for the adventure, Harry. I do appreciate it. What’re you doing in class next week? Oh, I remember. How-to papers. That should be interesting.”

“Want to come?”

“Very much. I’ll keep quiet next time, if you want me to.”

Fenstad shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s fun having you along. You can say whatever you want. The students loved you. I knew you’d be a sensation, and you were. They’d probably rather have you teaching the class than me.”

He noticed that his mother was watching something going on behind him, and he turned around in the booth so that he could see what it was. At first all he saw was a woman, a young woman with long hair wet from snow and hanging in clumps, talking in the aisle to two young men, both of whom were nodding at her. Then she moved on to the next table. She spoke softly. Fenstad couldn’t hear her words, but he saw the solitary customer to whom she was speaking shake his head once, keeping his eyes down. Then the woman saw Fenstad and his mother. In a moment she was standing in front of them.

She wore two green plaid flannel shirts and a thin torn jacket. Like Fenstad, she wore no gloves. Her jeans were patched, and she gave off a strong smell, something like hay, Fenstad thought, mixed with tar and sweat. He looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing penny loafers with no socks. Coins, old pennies, were in both shoes; the leather was wet and cracked. He looked in the woman’s face. Under a hat that seemed to collapse on either side of her head, her face was thin and chalk-white except for the fatigue lines under her eyes. The eyes themselves were bright blue, beautiful, and crazy. To Fenstad, she looked desperate, percolating slightly with insanity, and he was about to say so to his mother when the woman bent down toward him and said, “Mister, can you spare any money?”

Involuntarily, Fenstad looked toward the kitchen, hoping that the manager would spot this person and take her away. When he looked
back again, his mother was taking her blue coat off, wriggling in the booth to free her arms from the sleeves. Stopping and starting again, she appeared to be stuck inside the coat; then she lifted herself up, trying to stand, and with a quick, quiet groan slipped the coat off. She reached down and folded the coat over and held it toward the woman. “Here,” she said. “Here’s my coat. Take it before my son stops me.”

“Mother, you can’t.” Fenstad reached forward to grab the coat, but his mother pulled it away from him.

When Fenstad looked back at the woman, her mouth was open, showing several gray teeth. Her hands were outstretched, and he understood, after a moment, that this was a posture of refusal, a gesture saying no, and that the woman wasn’t used to it and did it awkwardly. Fenstad’s mother was standing and trying to push the coat toward the woman, not toward her hands but lower, at waist level, and she was saying, “Here, here, here, here.” The sound, like a human birdcall, frightened Fenstad, and he stood up quickly, reached for his wallet, and removed the first two bills he could find, two twenties. He grabbed the woman’s chapped, ungloved left hand.

“Take these,” he said, putting the two bills in her icy palm, “for the love of God, and please go.”

He was close to her face. Tonight he would pray for her. For a moment the woman’s expression was vacant. His mother was still pushing the coat at her, and the woman was unsteadily bracing herself. The woman’s mouth was open, and her stagnant-water breath washed over him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re my little baby cousin.”

“Go away, please,” Fenstad said. He pushed at her. She turned, clutching his money. He reached around to put his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “Ma,” he said, “she’s gone now. Mother, sit down. I gave her money for a coat.” His mother fell down on her side of the booth, and her blue coat rolled over on the bench beside her, showing the label and the shiny inner lining. When he looked up, the woman who had been begging had disappeared, though he could still smell her odor, an essence of wretchedness.

“Excuse me, Harry,” his mother said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She rose and walked toward the front of the restaurant, turned a corner, and was out of sight. Fenstad sat and tried to collect himself. When the waiter came, a boy with an earring and red hair in a flattop, Fenstad just shook his head and said, “More tea.” He realized that his mother
hadn’t taken off her earmuffs, and the image of his mother in the ladies’ room with her earmuffs on gave him a fit of uneasiness. After getting up from the booth and following the path that his mother had taken, he stood outside the ladies’-room door and, when no one came in or out, he knocked. He waited for a decent interval. Still hearing no answer, he opened the door.

His mother was standing with her arms down on either side of the first sink. She was holding herself there, her eyes following the hot water as it poured from the tap around the bright porcelain sink down into the drain, and she looked furious. Fenstad touched her and she snapped toward him.

“Your logic!” she said.

He opened the door for her and helped her back to the booth. The second cup of tea had been served, and Fenstad’s mother sipped it in silence. They did not converse. When she had finished, she said, “All right. I do feel better now. Let’s go.”

At the curb in front of her apartment building he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Pick me up next Tuesday,” she said. “I want to go back to that class.” He nodded. He watched as she made her way past the security guard at the front desk; then he put his car into drive and started home.

That night he skated in the dark for an hour with his friend Susan, the pharmacist. She was an excellent skater; they had met on the ice. She kept late hours and, like Fenstad, enjoyed skating at night. She listened attentively to his story about his mother and the woman in the restaurant. To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn’t believe in giving advice, even when asked.

The following Tuesday, Fenstad’s mother was again in the back row next to York Follette. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was flickering, which gave the room, Fenstad thought, a sinister quality, like a debtors’ prison or a refuge for the homeless. He’d been thinking about such people for the entire week. For seven days now he had caught whiffs of the woman’s breath in the air, and one morning, Friday, he thought he caught a touch of the rotten-celery smell on his own breath, after a particularly difficult sales meeting.

Tonight was how-to night. The students were expected to stand at
the front of the class and read their papers, instructing their peers and answering questions if necessary. Starting off, and reading her paper in a frightened monotone, Mrs. Nelson told the class how to bake a cheese soufflé. Arlene Fisher’s paper was about mushroom hunting. Fenstad was put off by the introduction. “The advantage to mushrooms,” Arlene Fisher read, “is that they are delicious. The disadvantage to mushrooms is that they can make you sick, even die.” But then she explained how to recognize the common shaggymane by its cylindrical cap and dark tufts; she drew a model on the board. She warned the class against the
Clitocybe illudens
, the Jack-o’-Lantern. “Never eat a mushroom like this one or
any
mushroom that glows in the dark. Take heed!” she said, fixing her gaze on the class. Fenstad saw his mother taking rapid notes. Harold Ronson, the mechanic, reading his own prose painfully and slowly, told the class how to get rust spots out of their automobiles. Again Fenstad noticed his mother taking notes. York Follette told the class about the proper procedures for laying down attic insulation and how to know when enough was enough, so that a homeowner wouldn’t be robbed blind, as he put it, by the salesmen, in whose ranks he had once counted himself.

Barb Kjellerud had brought along a cassette player, and told the class that her hobby was ballroom dancing; she would instruct them in the basic waltz. She pushed the
PLAY
button on the tape machine, and “Tales from the Vienna Woods” came booming out. To the accompaniment of the music she read her paper, illustrating, as she went, how the steps were to be performed. She danced alone in front of them, doing so with flair. Her blond hair swayed as she danced, Fenstad noticed. She looked a bit like a contestant in a beauty contest who had too much personality to win. She explained to the men the necessity of leading. Someone had to lead, she said, and tradition had given this responsibility to the male. Fenstad heard his mother snicker.