For a week and a half he had turned her quirky little proposal over in his mind, wondering just what in the hell he was suppose to do to bring in his half of the seven hundred and fifty dollars (and probably more like three-quarters of it, the way it’ll turn out, he thought) on the next twenty or so weekends. He was a little old to be mowing lawns for quarters. And Mary had gotten a look—a smug sort of look—that gave him the idea that she had either landed something or was landing something. Better get on your track shoes, Bart, he thought, and had to laugh out loud at himself.
Pretty fine days, weren’t they, Freddy? he asked himself now as Forrest Tucker and “F Troop” gave way to a cereal commercial where an animated rabbit preached that “Trix are for kids.” They were, Georgie. They were fucking
great
days.
One day he had been unlocking his car after work, and he had happened to look at the big industrial smokestack behind dry-cleaning, and it came to him.
He had put the keys back in his pocket and went in to talk to Don Tarkington. Don leaned back in his chair, looked at him from under shaggy eyebrows that were even then turning white (as were the hairs which bushed out of his ears and curled from his nostrils), hands steepled on his chest.
“Paint the stack,” Don said.
He nodded.
“Weekends.”
He nodded again.
“Flat fee—three hundred dollars.”
And again.
“You’re crazy.”
He burst out laughing.
Don smiled a little. “You got a dope habit, Bart?”
“No,” he said. “But I’ve got a little thing on with Mary.”
“A bet?” The shaggy eyebrows went up half a mile.
“More gentlemanly than that. A wager, I guess you’d call it. Anyway, Don, the stack needs the paint, and I need the three hundred dollars. What do you say? A painting contractor would charge you four and a quarter.”
“You checked.”
“I checked.”
“You crazy bastard,” Don said, and burst out laughing. “You’ll probably kill yourself.”
“Yeah, I probably will,” he said, and began laughing himself (and here, eighteen years later, as the Trix rabbit gave way to the evening news, he sat grinning like a fool).
And that was how, one weekend after the Fourth of July, he found himself on a shaky scaffolding eighty feet in the air, a paintbrush in his hand and his ass wagging in the wind. Once a sudden afternoon thunderstorm had come up, snapped one of the ropes which held up the scaffolding as easily as you might snap a piece of twine holding a package, and he almost did fall. The safety rope around his waist had held and he had lowered himself to the roof, heart thudding like a drum, sure that no power on earth would get him back up there—not for a lousy table-model TV. But he had gone back. Not for the TV, but for Mary. For the look of the lamplight on her small, uptilted breasts, for the dare-you grin on her lips and in her eyes—her dark eyes which could sometimes turn so light or darken even more, into summer thunderheads.
By early September he had finished the stack; it stood cleanly white against the sky, a chalk mark on a blueboard, slim and bright. He looked at it with some pride as he scrubbed his spattered forearms with paint thinner.
Don Tarkington paid him by check. “Not a bad job,” was his only comment, “considering the jackass that did it.”
He picked up another fifty dollars paneling the walls of Henry Chalmers’ new family room—in those days, Henry had been the plant foreman—and painting Ralph Tremont’s aging Chris-Craft. When December 18 rolled around, he and Mary sat down at their small dining room table like adversary but oddly friendly gunslingers, and he put three hundred and ninety dollars in cash in front of her—he had banked the money and there had been some interest.
She put four hundred and sixteen dollars with it. She took it from her apron pocket. It made a much bigger wad than his, because most of it was ones and fives.
He gasped at it and then said, “What the Christ did you
do,
Mary?”
Smiling, she said: “I made twenty-six dresses, hemmed up forty-nine dresses, hemmed down sixty-four dresses; I made thirty-one skirts; I crocheted three samplers; I hooked four rugs, one of latch-hook style; I made five sweaters, two afghans and one complete set of table linen; I embroidered sixty-three handkerchiefs; twelve sets of towels and twelve sets of pillowcases, and I can see all the monograms in my sleep.”
Laughing, she held out her hands, and for the first time he really noticed the thick pads of calluses on the tips of the fingers, like the calluses a guitar player eventually builds up.
“Oh Christ, Mary,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Christ, look at your hands.”
“My hands are fine,” she said, and her eyes darkened and danced. “And you looked very cute up there on the smokestack, Bart. I thought once I’d buy a slingshot and see if I couldn’t hit you in the butt—”
Roaring, he had jumped up and chased her through the living room and into the bedroom. Where we spent the rest of the afternoon, as I recall it, Freddy old man.
They discovered that they not only had enough for a table model TV, but that for another forty dollars they actually could have a console model. RCA had jumped the model year, the proprietor of John’s TV downtown told them (John’s was already buried under the 784 extension of course, long gone, along with the Grand and everything else), and was going for broke. He would be happy to let them have it, and for just ten dollars a week—
“No,” Mary said.
John looked pained. “Lady, it’s only four weeks. You’re hardly signing your life away on easy credit terms.”
“Just a minute,” Mary said, and led him outside into the pre-Christmas cold where carols tangled in each other up and down the street.
“Mary,” he said, “he’s right. It’s not as if—”
“The first thing we buy on credit ought to be our own house, Bart,” she said. That faint line appeared between her eyes. “Now listen—”
They went back inside. “Will you hold it for us?” he asked John.
“I guess so—for a while. But this is my busy season, Mr. Dawes. How long?”
“Just over the weekend,” he said. “I’ll be in Monday night.”
They had spent that weekend in the country, bundled up against the cold and the snow which threatened but did not fall. They drove slowly up and down back roads, giggling like kids, a six-pack on the seat for him and a bottle of wine for Mary, and they saved the beer bottles and picked up more, bags of beer bottles, bags of soda bottles, each one of the small ones worth two cents, the big ones worth a nickle. It had been one hell of a weekend, Bart thought now—Mary’s hair had been long, flowing out behind her over that imitation-leather coat of hers, the color flaming in her cheeks. He could see her now, walking up a ditch filled with fallen autumn leaves, kicking through them with her boots, producing a noise like a steady low forest fire ... then the click of a bottle and she raised it up in triumph, waggled it at him from across the road, grinning like a kid.
They don’t have returnable bottles anymore, either, Georgie. The gospel these days is no deposit, no return. Use it up and throw it out.
That Monday, after work, they had turned in thirty-one dollars’ worth of bottles, visiting four different supermarkets to spread the wealth around. They had arrived at John’s ten minutes before the store closed.
“I’m nine bucks short,” he told John.
John wrote PAID across the bill of sale that had been taped to the RCA console. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Dawes,” he said. “Let me get my dolly and I’ll help you out with it.”
They got it home, and an excited Dick Keller from the first floor helped him carry it up, and that night they had watched TV until the national anthem had come on the last operating channel and then they had made love in front of the test pattern, both of them with raging headaches from eyestrain.
TV had rarely looked so good since.
Mary came in and saw him looking at the TV, his empty scotch-rocks glass in his hand.
“Your dinner’s ready, Bart,” she said. “You want it in here?”
He looked at her, wondering exactly when he had seen the dare-you grin on her lips for the last time ... exactly when the little line between her eyes had begun to be there all the time, like a wrinkle, a scar, a tattoo proclaiming age.
You wonder about some things, he thought, that you’d never in God’s world want to know. Now why the hell is that?
“Bart?”
“Let’s eat in the dining room,” he said. He got up and snapped the TV off.
“All right.”
They sat down. He looked at the meal in the aluminum tray. Six little compartments, and something that looked pressed in each one. The meat had gravy on it. It was his impression that the meats in TV dinners
always
had gravy on them. TV dinnermeat would look naked without gravy, he thought, and then he remembered his thought about Lome Greene for absolutely no reason at all:
Boy, I’ll snatch you bald-headed.
It didn’t amuse him this time. Somehow it scared him.
“What were you sbiling about in the living roob, Bart?” Mary asked. Her eyes were red from her cold, and her nose had a chapped, raw look.
“I don’t remember,” he said, and for the moment he thought:
I’ll just scream now, I think. For lost things. For your grin, Mary. Pardon me while I just throw back my head and scream for the grin that’s never there on your face anymore. Okay?
“You looked very habby,” she said.
Against his will—it was a secret thing, and tonight he felt he needed his secret things, tonight his feelings felt as raw as Mary’s nose looked—against his will he said: “I was thinking of the time we went out picking up bottles to finish paying for that TV. The RCA console.”
“Oh, that,” Mary said, and then sneezed into her hankie over her TV dinner.
He ran into Jack Hobart at the Stop ‘n’ Shop. Jack’s cart was full of frozen foods, heat-and-serve canned products, and a lot of beer.
“Jack!” he said. “What are you doing way over here?”
Jack smiled a little. “I haven’t got used to the other store yet, so ... I thought . . .”
“Where’s Ellen?”
“She had to fly back to Cleveland,” he said. “Her mother died.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry Jack. Wasn’t that sudden?”
Shoppers were moving all around them under the cold overhead lights. Muzak came down from hidden speakers, old standards that you could never quite recognize. A woman with a full cart passed them, dragging a screaming three-year-old in a blue parka with snot on the sleeves.
“Yeah, it was,” Jack Hobart said. He smiled meaninglessly and looked down into his cart. There was a large yellow bag there that said:
KITTY-PAN KITTY LITTER
Use It, Throw It Away!
Sanitary!
“Yeah, it was. She’d been feeling punk, thank you, but she thought it might have been a, you know, sort of leftover from change of life. It was cancer. They opened her up, took a look, and sewed her right back up. Three weeks later she was dead. Hell of a hard thing for Ellen. I mean, she’s only twenty years younger.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So she’s out in Cleveland for a little while.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other and grinned shamefacedly over the fact of death.
“How is it?” he asked. “Out there in Northside?”
“Well, I’ll tell you the truth, Bart. Nobody seems very friendly.”
“No?”
“You know Ellen works down at the bank?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, a lot of the girls used to have a car pool—I used to let Ellen have the car every Thursday. That was her part. There’s a pool out in Northside into the city, but all the women who use it are part of some club that Ellen can’t join unless she’s been there at least a year.”
“That sounds pretty damn close to discrimination, Jack.”
“Fuck them,” Jack said angrily. “Ellen wouldn’t join their goddam club if they crawled up the street on their hands and knees. I got her her own car. A used Buick. She loves it. Should have done it two years ago.”
“How’s the house?”
“It’s fine,” Jack said, and sighed. “The electricity’s high, though. You should see our bill. That’s no good for people with a kid in college.”
They shuffled. Now that Jack’s anger had passed, the shamefaced grin was back on his face. He realized that Jack was almost pathetically glad to see someone from the neighborhood and was prolonging the moment. He had a sudden vision of Jack knocking around in the new house, the sound from the TV filling the rooms with phantom company, his wife a thousand miles away seeing her mother into the ground.
“Listen, why don’t you come back to the house?” he asked. “We’ll have a couple of six-packs and listen to Howard Cosell explain everything that’s wrong with the NFL.”
“Hey, that’d be great.”
“Just let me call Mary after we check out.”
He called Mary and Mary said okay. She said she would put some frozen pastries in the oven and then go to bed so she wouldn’t give Jack her cold.
“How does he like it out there?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess. Mare, Ellen’s mother died. She’s out in Cleveland for the funeral. Cancer.”
“Oh,
no.”
“So I thought Jack might like the company, you know—”
“Sure, of course.” She paused. “Did you tell hib we bight be neighbors before log?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t tell him that.”
“You ought to. It bight cheer hib ub.”
“Sure. Good-bye, Mary.”
“Bye.”
“Take some aspirin before you go to bed.”
“I will.”
“Bye.”
“Bye, George.” She hung up.
He looked at the phone, chilled. She only called him that when she was very pleased with him. Fred-and-George had been Charlie’s game originally.