After Bathing at Baxters

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After Bathing at Baxter's

Stories

D. J. Taylor

RACHEL'S

Contents

After Bathing at Baxter's

Dreams of Leaving

Summer People

Taking an Interest

The Survivor

Final Payments

Three Stories from Cook County:

i) At Brackus's

ii) La Grange

iii) Disturbance at the Heron House

Seeing London

Looking for Lewis and Clark

Saturday Night at the Jenks Motel

McKechnie's Diner, 9 A.M.

Cuts

Fantasy Finals

Vivat Rex

Flights

Essex Dogs

Acknowledgements

About the Author

After Bathing at Baxter's

For quite a long time – longer in fact than either of them could remember – Susy and Mom had canvassed the possibility of an extended summer vacation. Late at night in the apartment, Mom listlessly fanning the dead air, Sunday mornings coming back from church along the side of the freeway, over long, slatternly turn-of-the-year breakfasts their conversation turned inevitably on the single topic. Sometimes, Susy thought, Saturday afternoons mostly when she lay on her bed smoking and contemplating the rigours of the past week, it was only this activity that gave their lives any purpose, that without the brightly coloured travel brochures, the timetables advising coach journeys to Des Moines and Kansas, life here in Tara City was bereft of meaning. Mom incubated similar ideas, seldom expressed. ‘Nothing keepin' us here,' she had once remarked, with uncharacteristic acumen, and then more pointedly, ‘Ain't as if ya had a career or anything'. It wasn't. Susy had rather resented the stricture about careers (there had followed an argument on who the fuck did Mom think paid the rent?) but she appreciated the distrust of milieu. Lulu Sinde, who had married a local dentist, reckoned she had put down roots in Tara. ‘Yeah. Like in fuckin' concrete,' Susy had retorted, half jokingly. ‘Like I was born here,' Lulu had said, dimly aware that her husband's decision to run for mayor demanded a certain patriotism. Susy had not said anything. Driving back down the freeway, past the first strew of advertising hoardings and the neon sign that read WELCOME TO TARA CITY, she had said a great deal.

Mom and Susy were not people who did things in a hurry. Last time the apartment needed painting it had taken a year for them to decide on the appropriate shade. The installation of a central heating system (two radiators and an immersion – shit, this was Tara) trailed thirty months of low-spirited bickering. It was not to be expected that such a momentous step as removal would be entered into without a period of procrastination. Three years back when they had been on the point of vacationing in Florida Mom had recollected that coach journeys disagreed with her and in any case what was the point in going two thousand miles just so that you could lie in the sun? The picturesque leaflets of Tampa Bay and the virid swamps were consigned to the trashcan. Eighteen months back Mom had floated the idea of staying with Aunt Berkmann in Tucson, had sought and obtained Aunt Berkmann's approval, had even, with unusual foresight, made arrangements for letting the apartment. Two days after that the fast-food chain owner to whom Aunt Berkmann acted as personal assistant decided to go to Europe. It was, Aunt Berkmann's letter explained, ‘too good an opportunity to miss'. The episode had annoyed Mom considerably. ‘And she fifteen years older'n him,' she had remarked, both appalled and envious. Yet Susy thought she detected relief behind the bluster. It was possible to speculate that the late-night poring over guide books, the posters of shimmering Californian beaches, were merely an elaborate piece of camouflage.

While Mom vacillated, stuck metaphorical toes in water and pulled them out, Susy found her sense of purpose continually resuscitated. Just walking down the main street did that. Tara City had only one function as a population centre. It was a place you moved out of. Doctors fresh out of medical school who thought they fancied a year or two seeing the sights of the mid-west stayed a month and then applied for hospital jobs back east. Ranchers whose social pretensions advised the purchase of a town house took one look at Tara and thanked God they were hoosyar boys from the flatlands. Curiously, this revulsion rubbed off even on casual visitors. The bikers who sneaked in off the freeway and cruised the streets looking for dope and tail saw within a few minutes that they wouldn't find it in Tara. Licence, even of the home-grown variety, was scarcely encouraged by the row of gloomy bars, the run-down amusement arcade and the single enervated cathouse that made shift as civic amenities. The local weirdos and bomber boys went east if they wanted diversion, to Denver and Castle Rock. There was too much respectability, and too much decay. Reagan-voting, gun-toting, its cinema screens cleared of anything that might cause offence to tender sensibilities, its library shelves relieved of the weight of tomes immoral or unAmerican, its streets populated by Godfearing rednecks just itching to pump lead into the asses of Jews, queers and liberals, Tara City nevertheless harboured more subtle depravities. The niggers were moving in; longhairs, Ricans – ‘yaller trash' Mom, trained in Southern schools of prejudice, would murmur whenever an Hispanic loped silently towards them down the street. At night the apartment block resounded to the thud of hectic jungle jive. Mom cried a little every time she walked past Trapido's and saw the Ricans clustering round the green baize tables, monitored the nigger kids drinking Seven-Up on car bonnets. Pa had taken his beer in Trapido's every day for twenty years, back in the days when the buck occasionally stopped and (as Pa used to say) you could still buy something with it. Distant days, of which Susy preserved only a few recollections: swimming in Tara Greek with Artie Tripp, watching the hippy convoys heading west, coming back across the railway line, Artie Tripp saying as they blundered through the dusky scrub that in ten years they could get married and what did Susy think of that?

Artie Tripp, Susy had decided – a reflection prompted by a decade's marginal straying inside her consciousness – was a paradigm of what Tara did to you. Artie Tripp, Susy thought as they sat in McKechnie's Coffee Piazza,
had been talking that shit for eight years
. Susy remembered a sixteen-year-old Artie Tripp who had stolen rubbers off his father and driven the latter's Ford Pontiac with negligent abandon, an eighteen-year-old Artie Tripp who featured as the shit-hot quarterback angling for a football scholarship, a twenty-year-old Artie Tripp who had talked about evading the draft and heading off East, looked across the table at a twenty-five-year-old Artie Tripp who had spent the last nine years working the forecourt of his father's gas station. ‘Yeah,' Artie Tripp was saying, as he shovelled ice-cream through mild, uncombative jaws, ‘I told him how it was, you know, politely, that you know I oughta think of changing things. I really gave it to him,' Artie Tripp went on, giving a swift, nervous little grin, spoon halfway from his plate. Susy gazed out of the window at the clotted high-summer streets, wanting to say
like fuck you did Artie Tripp
, wishing that Artie Tripp had turned out different. As he approached maturity a strain of nervousness, hitherto unobserved, had proved to be the principal feature of his character. ‘Hell,' he said, as a blob of ice-cream flicked airily on to the sleeve of the blue sports jacket he wore on afternoons off from the gas station. Susy watched dispassionately. ‘So I guess,' Artie Tripp went on, still dabbing gingerly at the vermilion stain, ‘I'll be heading East soon. Pa's promised to give me a start, like with money and stuff.' Yeah, like with twenty dollars and you can kiss my ass, Susy thought. She said: ‘That'll be nice Artie. Guess I can come and see you sometimes.' ‘Reckon you can,' said Artie Tripp, showing his teeth as they walked into the molten sunshine. Five years ago, or even three years ago, the remark would have been enough. As it was, when Artie Tripp half an hour later drove her back to the apartment block she said: ‘You can keep y'fuckin' hands off. OK?' Crestfallen yet resigned, Artie Tripp had backed away. Curiously, Susy found that this craven acceptance of her decision only increased her contempt. What else, she wondered, could you expect from a man who had spent nine years tending his father's gas station, or for that matter from Tara City?

But then it did not do, Susy thought, to condemn. By condemning others, implicitly you condemned yourself. Arid, airless mornings in the flat, Mom making interminable phone calls to Larry Vosper, Susy leafing through expensive designer magazines, lodged this fact irrevocably in her consciousness. Larry Vosper was a fat, elderly cowboy run to seed who owned a ranch twenty miles west of Tara. This, however, was not the only thing that Susy had against Larry Vosper. There was the fact that he was five foot six and wore built-up high-heeled boots, the fact that his first action when Mom opened the door was to hand her a bunch of carnations and holler: ‘How's my best girl?', the fact that after supper he went to sleep in front of baseball games on the TV. Larry Vosper, in short, did not have a great deal going for him. One thing Larry Vosper did have going for him was that Mom rather liked him. ‘When ya get to my age,' she had once remarked, ‘ya'd settle for a lot worse than Larry Vosper.' Susy, eyeing the quarter-inch of foundation, the miracles of corsetry stemming a tide of adipose tissue, could believe it.