The Collected Stories, page 3
“No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, as a matter of fact. Stem to stern,” he said, winking at Lizzy, “I’m O.K. … By the way,” he continued, “could you folks put me up? I wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
“The floor?” expostulated Mother. “Are you out of your mind? A soldier of the Republic. My God! We have a cot. You know … an army cot. Set it up and sleep the sleep of the just, Corporal.”
“Oh, goodness”—Grandma yawned—”talking about bed—Marvine, your dad must be home by now. I’d better be getting back.”
Browny decided in a courteous way to take Lizzy and Grandma home. By the time he returned, Mother and Joanna had wrapped their lonesome arms around each other and gone to sleep.
I sneakily watched him from behind the drapes scrubbing himself down without consideration for his skin. Then, shining and naked, he crawled between the sheets in totality.
I unshod myself and tiptoed into the kitchen. I poured him a cold beer. I came straight to him and sat down by his side. “Here’s a nice beer, Browny. I thought you might be hot after such a long walk.”
“Why, thanks, Alice Palace Pudding and Pie, I happen to be pretty damn hot. You’re a real pal.”
He heaved himself up and got that beer into his gut in one gulp. I looked at him down to his belly button. He put the empty glass on the floor and grinned at me. He burped into my face for a joke and then I had to speak the truth. “Oh, Browny,” I said, “I just love you so.” I threw my arms around his middle and leaned my face into the golden hairs of his chest.
“Hey, pudding, take it easy. I like you too. You’re a doll.”
Then I kissed him right on the mouth.
“Josephine, who the hell taught you that?”
“I taught myself. I practiced on my wrist. See?”
“Josephine!” he said again. “Josephine, you’re a liar. You’re one hell of a liar!”
After that his affection increased, and he hugged me too and kissed me right on the mouth.
“Well,” I kidded, “who taught you that? Lizzy?”
“Shut up,” he said, and the more he loved me the less he allowed of conversation.
I lay down beside him, and I was really surprised the way a man is transformed by his feelings. He loved me all over myself, and to show I understood his meaning I whispered: “Browny, what do you want? Browny, do you want to do it?”
Well! He jumped out of bed then and flapped the sheet around his shoulders and groaned, “Oh, Christ … Oh,” he said, “I could be arrested. I could be picked up by M.P.’s and spend the rest of my life in jail.” He looked at me. “For godsakes button your shirt. Your mother’ll wake up in a minute.”
“Browny, what’s the matter?”
“You’re a child and you’re too damn smart for your own good. Don’t you understand? This could ruin my whole life.”
“But, Browny …”
“The trouble I could get into! I could be busted. You’re a baby. It’s a joke. A person could marry a baby like you, but it’s criminal to lay a hand on your shoulder. That’s funny, ha-ha-ha.”
“Oh, Browny, I would love to be married to you.”
He sat down at the edge of the cot and drew me to his lap. “Gee, what a funny kid you are. You really like me so much?”
“I love you. I’d be a first-class wife, Browny—do you realize I take care of this whole house? When Mother isn’t working, she spends her whole time mulling over Daddy. I’m the one who does Joanna’s hair every day. I iron her dresses. I could even have a baby for you, Browny, I know just how to—”
“No! Oh no. Don’t let anyone ever talk you into that. Not till you’re eighteen. You ought to stay tidy as a doll and not strain your skin at least till you’re eighteen.”
“Browny, don’t you get lonesome in that camp? I mean if Lizzy isn’t around and I’m not around … Don’t you think I have a nice figure?”
“Oh, I guess …” He laughed, and put his hand warmly under my shirt. “It’s pretty damn nice, considering it ain’t even quite done.”
I couldn’t hold my desire down, and I kissed him again right into his talking mouth and smack against his teeth. “Oh, Browny, I would take care of you.”
“O.K., O.K.,” he said, pushing me kindly away. “O.K., now listen, go to sleep before we really cook up a stew. Go to sleep. You’re a sweet kid. Sleep it off. You ain’t even begun to see how wide the world is. It’s a surprise even to a man like me.”
“But my mind is settled.”
“Go to sleep, go sleep,” he said, still holding my hand and patting it. “You look almost like Lizzy now.”
“Oh, but I’m different. I know exactly what I want.”
“Go to sleep, little girl,” he said for the last time. I took his hand and kissed each brown fingertip and then ran into my room and took all my clothes off and, as bare as my lonesome soul, I slept.
The next day was Saturday and I was glad. Mother is a waitress all weekend at the Paris Coffee House, where she has been learning French from the waiters ever since Daddy disappeared. She’s lucky because she really loves her work; she’s crazy about the customers, the coffee, the décor, and is only miserable when she gets home.
I gave her breakfast on the front porch at about 10 a.m. and Joanna walked her to the bus. “Cook the corporal some of those frozen sausages,” she called out in her middle range.
I hoped he’d wake up so we could start some more love, but instead Lizzy stepped over our sagging threshold. “Came over to fix Browny some breakfast,” she said efficiently.
“Oh?” I looked her childlike in the eye. “I think I ought to do it, Aunty Liz, because he and I are probably getting married. Don’t you think I ought to in that case?”
“What? Say that slowly, Josephine.”
“You heard me, Aunty Liz.”
She flopped in a dirndl heap on the stairs. “I don’t even feel old enough to get married and I’ve been seventeen since Christmas time. Did he really ask you?”
“We’ve been talking about it,” I said, and that was true. “I’m in love with him, Lizzy.” Tears prevented my vision.
“Oh, love … I’ve been in love twelve times since I was your age.”
“Not me, I’ve settled on Browny. I’m going to get a job and send him to college after his draft is over … He’s very smart.”
“Oh, smart … everybody’s smart.”
“No, they are not.”
When she left I kissed Browny on both eyes, like the Sleeping Beauty, and he stretched and woke up in a conflagration of hunger.
“Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast,” he bellowed.
I fed him and he said, “Wow, the guys would really laugh, me thiefin’ the cradle this way.”
“Don’t feel like that. I make a good impression on people, Browny. There’ve been lots of men more grown than you who’ve made a fuss over me.”
“Ha-ha,” he remarked.
I made him quit that kind of laughing and started him on some kisses, and we had a cheerful morning.
“Browny,” I said at lunch, “I’m going to tell Mother we’re getting married.”
“Don’t she have enough troubles of her own?”
“No, no,” I said. “She’s all for love. She’s crazy about it.”
“Well, think about it a minute, baby face. After all, I might get shipped out to some troubled area and be knocked over by a crazy native. You read about something like that every day. Anyway, wouldn’t it be fun to have a real secret engagement for a while? How about it?”
“Not me,” I said, remembering everything I’d ever heard from Liz about the opportunism of men, how they will sometimes dedicate with seeming goodwill thirty days and nights, sleeping and waking, of truth and deceit to the achievement of a moment’s pleasure. “Secret engagement! Some might agree to a plan like that, but not me.”
Then I knew he liked me, because he walked around the table and played with the curls of my home permanent a minute and whispered, “The guys would really laugh, but I get a big bang out of you.”
Then I wasn’t sure he liked me, because he looked at his watch and asked it: “Where the hell is Lizzy?”
I had to do the shopping and put off some local merchants in a muddle of innocence, which is my main Saturday chore. I ran all the way. It didn’t take very long, but as I rattled up the stairs and into the hall, I heard the thumping tail of a conversation. Browny was saying, “It’s your fault, Liz.”
“I couldn’t care less,” she said. “I suppose you get something out of playing around with a child.”
“Oh no, you don’t get it at all …”
“I can’t say I want it.”
“Goddamnit,” said Browny, “you don’t listen to a person. I think you stink.”
“Really?” Turning to go, she smashed the screen door in my face and jammed my instep with the heel of her lavender pump.
“Tell your mother we will,” Browny yelled when he saw me. “She stinks, that Liz, goddamnit. Tell your mother tonight.”
I did my best during that passing afternoon to make Browny more friendly. I sat on his lap and he drank beer and tickled me. I laughed, arid pretty soon I understood the game and how it had to have variety and ran shrieking from him till he could catch me in a comfortable place, the living-room sofa or my own bedroom.
“You’re O.K.,” he said. “You are. I’m crazy about you, Josephine. You’re a lot of fun.”
So that night at 9:15 when Mother came home I made her some iced tea and cornered her in the kitchen and locked the door. “I want to tell you something about me and Corporal Brownstar. Don’t say a word, Mother. We’re going to be married.”
“What?” she said. “Married?” she screeched. “Are you crazy? You can’t even get a job without working papers yet. You can’t even get working papers. You’re a baby. Are you kidding me? You’re my little fish. You’re not fourteen yet.”
“Well, I decided we could wait until next month when I will be fourteen. Then, I decided, we can get married.”
“You can’t, my God! Nobody gets married at fourteen, nobody, nobody. I don’t know a soul.”
“Oh, Mother, people do, you always see them in the paper. The worst that could happen is it would get in the paper.”
“But I didn’t realize you had much to do with him. Isn’t he Lizzy’s? That’s not nice—to take him away from her. That’s a rotten sneaky trick. You’re a sneak. Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?”
“Well, she doesn’t want to get married and I do. And it’s essential to Browny to get married. He’s a very clean-living boy, and when his furlough’s over he doesn’t want to go back to those camp followers and other people’s wives. You have to appreciate that in him, Mother—it’s a quality.”
“You’re a baby,” she droned. “You’re my slippery little fish.”
Browny rattled the kitchen doorknob ten minutes too early.
“Oh, come in,” I said, disgusted.
“How’s stuff? Everything settled? What do you say, Marvine?”
“I say shove it, Corporal! What’s wrong with Lizzy? You and she were really beautiful together. You looked like twin stars in the summer sky. Now I realize I don’t like your looks much. Who’s your mother and father? I never even heard much about them. For all I know, you got an uncle in Alcatraz. And your teeth are in terrible shape. I thought the army takes care of things like that. You just don’t look so hot to me.”
“No reason to be personal, Marvine.”
“But she’s a baby. What if she becomes pregnant and bubbles up her entire constitution? This isn’t India. Did you ever read what happened to the insides of those Indian child brides?”
“Oh, he’s very gentle, Mother.”
“What?” she said, construing the worst.
That conference persisted for about two hours. We drank a couple of pitcherfuls of raspberry Kool-Aid we’d been saving for Joanna’s twelfth birthday party the next day. No one had a dime, and we couldn’t find Grandma.
Later on, decently before midnight. Lizzy showed up. She had a lieutenant (j.g.) with her and she introduced him around as Sid. She didn’t introduce him to Browny, because she has stated time and time again that officers and enlisted men ought not to mix socially. As soon as the lieutenant took Mother’s hand in greeting, I could see he was astonished. He began to perspire visibly in long welts down his back and in the gabardine armpits of his summer uniform. Mother was in one of those sullen, indolent moods which really put a fire under some men. She was just beady to think of my stubborn decision and how my life contained the roots of excitement.
“France is where I belong,” she murmured to him. “Paris, Marseilles, places like that, where men like women and don’t chase little girls.”
“I have a lot of sympathy with the Gallic temperament and I do like a real woman,” he said hopefully.
“Sympathy is not enough.” Her voice rose to the requirements of her natural disposition. “Empathy is what I need. The empathy of a true friend is what I have lived without for years.”
“Oh yes, I feel all that, empathy too.” He fell deeply into his heart, from which he could scarcely be heard … “I like a woman who’s had some contact with life, cradled little ones, felt the pangs of birth, known the death of loved ones …”
“… and of love,” she added sadly. “That’s unusual in a young good-looking man.”
“Yet that’s my particular preference.”
Lizzy, Browny, and I borrowed a dollar from him while he sat in idyllic stupor and we wandered out for some ice cream. We took Joanna because we were sorry to have drunk up her whole party. When we returned with a bottle of black-raspberry soda, no one was in sight. “I’m beginning to feel like a procurer,” said Lizzy.
That’s how come Mother finally said yes. Her moral turpitude took such a lively turn that she gave us money for a Wassermann. She called Dr. Gilmar and told him to be gentle with the needles. “It’s my own little girl, Doctor. Little Josie that you pulled right out of me yourself. She’s so headstrong. Oh, Doctor, remember me and Charles? She’s a rough little customer, just like me.”
Due to the results of this test, which is a law, and despite Browny’s disbelief, we could not get married. Grandma, always philosophical with the advantage of years, said that young men sowing wild oats were often nipped in the bud, so to speak, and that modern science would soon unite us. Ha-ha-ha, I laugh in recollection.
Mother never even noticed. It passed her by completely, because of large events in her own life. When Browny left for camp drowned in penicillin and damp with chagrin, she gave him a giant jar of Loft’s Sour Balls and a can of walnut rum tobacco.
Then she went ahead with her own life. Without any of the disenchantment Browny and I had suffered, the lieutenant and Mother got married. We were content, all of us, though it’s common knowledge that she has never been divorced from Daddy. The name next to hers on the marriage license is Sidney LaValle, Jr., Lieut, (j.g.), U.S.N. An earlier, curlier generation of LaValles came to Michigan from Quebec, and Sid has a couple of usable idioms in Mother’s favorite tongue.
I have received one card from Browny. It shows an aerial view of Joplin, Mo. It says: “Hi, kid, chin up, love, Browny. P.S. Health improved.”
Living as I do on a turnpike of discouragement, I am glad to hear the incessant happy noises in the next room. I enjoyed hugging with Browny’s body, though I don’t believe I was more to him than a hope for civilian success. Joanna has moved in with me. Though she grinds her teeth well into daylight, I am grateful for her company. Since I have been engaged, she looks up to me. She is a real cuddly girl.
The Pale Pink Roast
Pale green greeted him, grubby buds for nut trees. Packed with lunch, Peter strode into the park. He kicked aside the disappointed acorns and endowed a grand admiring grin to two young girls.
Anna saw him straddling the daffodils, a rosy man in about the third flush of youth. He got into Judy’s eye too. Acquisitive and quick, she screamed, “There’s Daddy!”
Well, that’s who he was, mouth open, addled by visions. He was unsettled by a collusion of charm, a conspiracy of curly hairdos and shiny faces. A year ago, in plain view, Anna had begun to decline into withering years, just as he swelled to the maximum of manhood, spitting pipe smoke, patched with tweed, an advertisement of a lover who startled men and detained the ladies.
Now Judy leaped over the back of a bench and lunged into his arms. “Oh, Peter dear,” she whispered, “I didn’t even know you were going to meet us.”
“God, you’re getting big, kiddo. Where’s your teeth?” he asked. He hugged her tightly, a fifty-pound sack of his very own. “Say, Judy, I’m glad you still have a pussycat’s sniffy nose and a pussycat’s soft white fur.”
“I do not,” she giggled.
“Oh yes,” he said. He dropped her to her springy hind legs but held on to one smooth front paw. “But you’d better keep your claws in or I’ll drop you right into the Hudson River.”
“Aw, Peter,” said Judy, “quit it.”
Peter changed the subject and turned to Anna. “You don’t look half bad, you know.”
“Thank you,” she replied politely, “neither do you.”
“Look at me, I’m a real outdoorski these days.”
She allowed thirty seconds of silence, into which he turned, singing like a summer bird, “We danced around the Maypole, the Maypole, the Maypole …
“Well, when’d you get in?” he asked.
“About a week ago.”
“You never called.”
“Yes, I did, Peter. I called you at least twenty-seven times. You’re never home. Petey must be in love somewhere, I said to myself.”
“What is this thing,” he sang in tune, “called love?”
“Peter, I want you to do me a favor,” she started again. “Peter, could you take Judy for the weekend? We’ve just moved to this new place and I have a lot of work to do. I just don’t want her in my hair. Peter?”
“Ah, that’s why you called.”
“Oh, for godsakes,” Anna said. “I really called to ask you to become my lover. That’s the real reason.”
