The Collected Stories, page 34
I said to myself, What a day! I think I’ll run down to the store and pick up some comestibles. I actually thought that. Had I simply gone to the store without thinking, the word “comestible” would never have occurred to me. I would have imagined—hungry supper nighttime Jack greens cheese store walk street.
But I do like this language—wheat and chaff—with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say “comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it.
At the grocer’s I met an old friend who had continued his life as it had begun—in the avant-garde, but not selfishly. He had also organized guerrilla theater demonstrations and had never spoken ill of the people. Most artists do because they have very small audiences and are angry at those audiences for not enlarging themselves.
How can they do that? I’ve often asked. They have word of mouth, don’t they? most artists peevishly will reply.
Well, first my friend and I talked of the lettuce boycott. It was an old boycott. I told my friend (whose name was Jim) all about the silk-stocking boycott which coincided with the Japanese devastation of Manchuria and the disappearance of the Sixth Avenue El into Japanese factory furnaces to be returned a few years later—sometimes to the very same neighborhood—as shrapnel stuck in the bodies of some young New Yorkers of my generation.
Did that lead to Pearl Harbor? he asked respectfully. He was aware that I had witnessing information of events that had occurred when he was in grade school. That respect gave me all the advantage I needed to be aggressive and critical. I said, Jim, I have been wanting to tell you that I do not believe in the effectiveness of the way that you had the Vietnamese screaming at our last demonstration. I don’t think the meaning of our struggle has anything to do with all that racket.
You don’t understand Artaud, he said. I believe that the theater is the handmaiden of the revolution.
The valet, you mean.
He deferred to my correction by nodding his head. He accepts criticism gracefully, since he can always meet it with a smiling bumper of iron opinion.
You ought to know more about Artaud, he said.
You’re right. I should. But I’ve been awfully busy. Also, I may have once known a great deal about him. In the last few years, all the characters of literature run together in my head. Sometimes King Ubu appears right next to Mr. Sparsit—or Mrs. …
At this point the butcher said, What’ll you have, young lady?
I refused to tell him.
Jack, to whom, if you remember, I was telling this daylong story, muttered, Oh God, no! You didn’t do that again.
I did, I said. It’s an insult. You do not say to a woman of my age who looks my age, What’ll you have, young lady? I did not answer him. If you say that to someone like me, it really means, What do you want, you pathetic old hag?
Are you getting like that now too? he asked.
Look, Jack, I said, face facts. Let’s say the butcher meant no harm. Eddie, he’s not so bad. He spends two hours coming to New York from Jersey. Then he spends two hours going back. I’m sorry for his long journey. But I still mean it. He mustn’t say it anymore.
Eddie, I said, don’t talk like that or I won’t tell you what I want.
Whatever you say, honey, but what’ll you have?
Well, could you cut me up a couple of fryers?
Sure I will, he said.
I’ll have a pork butt, said Jim. By the way, you know we’re doing a show at City College this summer. Not in the auditorium—in the biology lab. It’s a new idea. We had to fight for it. It’s the most political thing we’ve done since Scavenging.
Did I hear you say City College? asked Eddie as he cut the little chicken’s leg out of its socket. Well, when I was a boy, a kid—what we called City College—you know it was C.C.N.Y. then, well, we called it Circumcised Citizens of New York.
Really, said Jim. He looked at me. Did I object? Was I offended?
The fact of male circumcision doesn’t insult me, I said. However, I understand that the clipping of clitorises of young girls continues in Morocco to this day.
Jim has a shy side. He took his pork butt and said goodbye.
I had begun to examine the chicken livers. Sometimes they are tanner than red, but I understand this is not too bad.
Suddenly Treadwell Thomas appeared at my side and embraced me. He’s a famous fussy gourmet, and I was glad that the butcher saw our affectionate hug. Thought up any good euphemisms lately? I asked.
Ha ha, he said. He still feels bad about his life in the Language Division of the Defense Department. A year or two ago Jack interviewed him for a magazine called The Social Ordure, which ran five quarterly issues before the first editor was hired away by the Times. It’s still a fine periodical.
Here’s part of the interview:
Mr. Thomas, what is the purpose of the Language Division?
Well, Jack, it was organized to discontinue the English language as a useful way to communicate exact facts. Of course, it’s not the first (or last) organization to have attempted this, but it’s had some success.
Mr. Thomas, is this an ironic statement made in the afterglow of your new idealism and the broad range of classified information it has made available to us?
Not at all, Jack. It wasn’t I who invented the expression “protective reaction.” And it was Eisenhower, not I, who thought up (while thousands of hydrogen bombs were being tucked into silos and submarines)—it was not I who invented “Atoms for Peace” and its code name, “Operation Wheaties.”
Could you give us at least one expression you invented to stultify or mitigate? (Jack, I screamed, “stultify” or “mitigate,” you caught the disease. Shut up, said Jack, and returned to the interview.)
Well? he asked.
Well, said Treadwell Thomas, I was asked to develop a word or series of words that could describe, denote any of the Latin American countries in a condition of change—something that would by its mere utterance neutralize or mock their revolutionary situation. After consultation, brainpicking, and the daydreaming that is appropriate to any act of creation, I came up with “revostate.” The word was slipped into conversations in Washington; one or two journalists were glad to use it. It was just lingo for a long time. But you have no doubt seen the monograph The Revostationary Peasant in Brazil Today. Even you pinkos use it. Not to mention Wasserman’s poetic article, “Rain Forest, Still Water, and the Culture of the Revostate,” which was actually featured in this journal.
Right on, Treadwell—as our black brothers joyfully said for a couple of years before handing that utterance on for our stultification or mitigation.
Still, it’s true Thomas could have gone as far as far happens to be in our time and generation, hundreds of ambitious jobless college students at the foot of his tongue on Senior Defense Department Recruiting Day, but apart from cooking a lot of fish he has chosen to guffaw quite often. Some people around here think that guffawing, the energetic cleansing of the nasal passage, is the basic wisdom of the East. Other people think that’s not true.
Which reminded me as we waited for the packaging of the meat, how’s Gussie?
Gus? Oh yeah, she’s into hydroponics. She’s got all this stuff standing around in tubs. We may never have to go shopping again.
Well, I laughed and laughed. I repeated the story to several others before the day was over. I mocked Gussie to Jack. I spoke of her mockingly to one or two strangers. And the fact is, she was already the wave of the future. I was ignorant. It wasn’t my ocean she was a wave in.
In fact, I am stuck here among my own ripples and tides. Don’t you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I’m sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world—and quickly—is immense.
Goodbye, Treadwell, I said sadly. I’ve got to get some greens.
The owner of our grocery was hosing down the vegetables. He made the lettuce look fresher than it was. Little drops of water stood on the broccoli heads among the green beady buds and were just the same size.
Orlando, I said, Jack was walking the dog last week at 2 a.m. and I was out at 7 a.m. and you were here both times.
That’s true, he said. I was.
Orlando, how can you do that, how can you get to work, how can you live? How can you see your kids and your wife?
I can’t, he said. Maybe once a week.
Are you all right?
Yes. He put down his hose and took my hand in his. You see, he said, this is wonderful work. This is food. I love all work that has to do with food. I’m lucky. He dropped my hand and patted a red cabbage. Look at me, I’m a small businessman. I got an A&P on one side, a Bohack on another, and a fancy International full of cheese and herring down the block. If I don’t put in sixteen hours a day I’m dead. But Mrs. A., just look at that rack, the beans, that corner with all the parsley and the arugula and the dill, it’s beautiful, right?
Oh yes, I said, I guess it is, but what I really love are the little bunches of watercress—the way you’ve lined the carrot bin with them.
Yeah, Mrs. A., you’re O.K. You got the idea. The beauty! he said, and went off to take three inferior strawberries out of a perfect box. A couple of years later—in the present, which I have not quite mentioned (but will)—we fought over Chilean plums. We parted. I was forced to shop in the reasonable supermarket among disinterested people with no credit asked and none offered. But at that particular moment we were at peace. That is, I owed him $275 and he allowed it.
O.K., said Jack, if you and Orlando are such pals, why aren’t all these strawberries ripe? He picked up a rather green eroded one. I invented an anthropological reply. Well, Orlando’s father is an old man. One of the jobs Orlando’s culture has provided for his father’s old age is the sorting of strawberries into pint and quart boxes. Just to be fair, he has to hide one or two greenish ones in each box.
I think I’ll go to bed, said Jack.
I was only extrapolating from his article in the third issue of The Social Ordure—”Food Merchandising, or Who Invented the Greedy Consumer.” I reminded him of this.
He said politely, Ah …
The day had been too long and I hadn’t said one word about the New Young Fathers or my meeting with Zagrowsky the Pharmacist. I thought we might discuss them at breakfast.
So we slept, his arms around me as sweetly as after the long day he had probably slept beside his former wife (and I as well beside my etc. etc. etc.). I was so comfortable; our good mattress and our nice feelings were such a cozy combination that I remembered a song my friend Ruthy had made up about ten years earlier to tease the time, the place, us:
oh, the marriage bed, the marriage bed
can you think of anything nicer
for days and nights of years and years
you lie beside your darling
your arms are hugging one another
your legs are twined together
until the dark and certain day
your lover comes to take you
away away away
At about 3 a.m. Jack cried out in terror. That’s O.K., kid, I said, you’re not the only one. Everybody’s mortal. I leaned all my softening strength against his skinny back. Then I dreamed the following in a kind of diorama of Technicolor abstraction—that the children had grown all the way up. One had moved to another neighborhood, the other to a distant country. That one was never to be seen again, the dream explained, because he had blown up a very bad bank, and in the dream I was the one who’d told him to do it. The dream continued; no—it circled itself, widening into my very old age. Then his disappearance made one of those typical spiraling descents influenced by film technique. Unreachable at the bottom, their childhood played war and made jokes.
I woke. Where’s the glass of water, I screamed. I want to tell you something, Jack.
What? What? What? He saw my wide-awake eyes. He sat up. What?
Jack, I want to have a baby.
Ha ha, he said. You can’t. Too late. A couple of years too late, he said, and fell asleep. Then he spoke. Besides, suppose it worked; I mean, suppose a miracle. The kid might be very smart, get a scholarship to M.I.T., and get caught up in problem solving and godalmighty it could invent something worse than anything us old dodos ever imagined. Then he fell asleep and snored.
I pulled the Old Testament out from under the bed where I keep most of my bedtime literature. I jammed an extra pillow under my neck and sat up almost straight in order to read the story of Abraham and Sarah with interlinear intelligence. There was a lot in what Jack said—he often makes a sensible or thought-provoking remark. Because you know how that old story ends—well! With those three monotheistic horsemen of perpetual bossdom and war: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Just the same, I said to softly snoring Jack, before all that popular badness wedged its way into the world, there was first the little baby Isaac. You know what I mean: looking at Sarah just like all our own old babies—remember the way they practiced their five little senses. Oh, Jack, that Isaac, Sarah’s boy—before he was old enough to be taken out by his father to get his throat cut, he must have just lain around smiling and making up diphthongs and listening, and the women sang songs to him and wrapped him up in such pretty rugs. Right?
In his sleep, which is as contentious as his waking, Jack said yes—but he should not have been allowed to throw all that sand at his brother.
You’re right, you’re right. I’m with you there, I said. Now all you have to do is be with me.
This Is a Story about My Friend George, the Toy Inventor
He is a man of foreign parentage who suffers waves of love, salty tears that crest in his eyes. The shores attacked by those waves are often his children. This isn’t a story about his children.
One day, George failed. He had had many successes, so the failure was not a life failure. It was the failure of a half year’s work and included, as failure often does, an important loss of income.
He had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.
This is what it looked like: Instead of hard metal balls which are propelled into a box with decorated flashing lights and illuminated athletes and planets, balls of blue water are shot into the box. The blue water breaks and scatters in tiny blue droplets of varying volume. The action is swift, the sky-blue droplets skitter and collect again on the magnetic white ground. There are resting places with numbers for scoring.
It is certainly beautiful and stands so far ahead of its time that we were not surprised to learn it had been rejected. After the rejection, George rented a couple of ordinary pinball machines (because he’s a serious person, an inventor, an artist) in order to try to understand his failure. He installed them in the boys’ attic room. The family played and investigated them for several weeks. Then, to his sorrow, he added understanding and amazement.
How could he have believed he was the one to improve on the pinball machine, that old invention of cumulative complication. He had offered only a small innovation.
Beauty! we said. Bringing all our political theory to bear on the matter, we suggested that there was money to be extracted—even from that—inside the opportunistic life of coopting capitalism.
No, George said, you don’t understand. The pinball machine—any pinball machine you play in any penny arcade—is so remarkable, so fine, so shrewdly threaded. It is already beautiful in necessity and sufficiency of wire, connection, possibility.
No, no, George said. The company was right. They gave me six months to make a better pinball machine. They were fair. What gall I had to think I could. No, they were fair. It’s as though I had expected to invent the violin.
Zagrowsky Tells
I was standing in the park under that tree. They call it the Hanging Elm. Once upon a time it made a big improvement on all kinds of hooligans. Nowadays if, once in a while … No. So this woman comes up to me, a woman minus a smile. I said to my grandson, Uh oh, Emanuel. Here comes a lady, she was once a beautiful customer of mine in the pharmacy I showed you.
Emanuel says, Grandpa, who?
She looks O.K. now, but not so hot. Well, what can you do, time takes a terrible toll off the ladies.
This is her idea of a hello: Iz, what are you doing with that black child? Then she says, Who is he? Why are you holding on to him like that? She gives me a look like God in judgment. You could see it in famous paintings. Then she says, Why are you yelling at that poor kid?
What yelling? A history lesson about the park. This is a tree in guidebooks. How are you by the way, Miss … Miss … I was embarrassed. I forgot her name absolutely.
Well, who is he? You got him pretty scared.
Me? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s my grandson. Say hello Emanuel, don’t put on an act.
Emanuel shoves his hand in my pocket to be a little more glued to me. Are you going to open your mouth sonny yes or no?
She says, Your grandson? Really, Iz, your grandson? What do you mean, your grandson?
Emanuel closes his eyes tight. Did you ever notice children get all mixed up? They don’t want to hear about something, they squinch up their eyes. Many children do this.
Now listen Emanuel, I want you to tell this lady who is the smartest boy in kindergarten.
