Can't and Won't: Stories (10 page)

Then one of them, an old woman, noticed me and came into the audience where I was sitting—she had, it seems, taken a sudden liking to me. She said some things to me—affectionate things, as far as I could tell. Then she tried to kiss me. The audience watched in surprise. For a quarter of an hour I stayed there in my seat listening to her long declaration of love. I asked the manager several times what she was saying, but he couldn’t translate any of it.

Though he claimed they knew a little English, they didn’t seem to understand a word, because after the show at last came to an end—to my relief—I asked them a few questions and they couldn’t answer. I was glad to leave that dismal place and go back out into the snow, though I had lost my boots somewhere.

What is it that makes me so attractive to cretins, madmen, idiots, and savages? Do those poor creatures sense a kind of sympathy in me? Do they feel some sort of bond between us? It is
infallible.
It happened with the cretins of Valais, the madmen of Cairo, the monks of Upper Egypt—they all persecuted me with their declarations of love!

Later, I heard that after this exhibition of savages, their manager abandoned them. They had been in Rouen for nearly two months by then, first on the boulevard Beauvoisin, then in the Grande-Rue, where I saw them. When he left, they were living in a shabby little hotel in the rue de la Vicomté. Their only recourse was to take their case to the English consul—I don’t know how they made themselves understood. But the consul paid their debts—400 francs to the hotel—and then put them on the train for Paris. They had an engagement there—it was to be their Paris debut.

Letter to a Peppermint Candy Company

Dear Manufacturer of “Old Fashioned Chewy Peps,”

Last Christmas when my husband and I stopped in at an upscale country store that caters to weekenders as well as locals and has a lunchroom off to the side, and which is run by a couple who bicker constantly and snap at their help, after we had had lunch and were browsing, before we left, among the displays of packaged and freshly prepared gourmet foods, we were attracted to the festive bright red canister (what you call the “tin”) of your “Old Fashioned Chewy Peps” peppermints. I love peppermints, and when I read the ingredients list on your can and saw that these were made without preservatives or artificial flavors or colors, I decided to buy the peppermints, since it is hard to find pure candies. I did not ask the price of the can, because although I realized that in that particular store it would be expensive, I was willing to be a bit extravagant since Christmas was coming. When I went to pay, though, I was shocked at the price, which was $15 for the canister of peppermints, net weight 13 ounces (369 grams). After a moment of hesitation, I bought it anyway, partly out of embarrassment in front of the impatient and unsmiling young woman at the cash register and partly because I did not want to give up those peppermints. When we got home, I read your tongue-in-cheek warning on the can about letting the peppermint soften in one’s mouth before biting down. You said: “Your teeth will thank you!” Well, it is quite true that the peppermints appear soft but then have an iron grip when one bites down. When I did eventually eat one, I chewed cautiously and with great difficulty. The candy was quite awkward to hold in my mouth, since it kept sticking to one tooth or another. I will say right away, though, that the taste was excellent. What I am writing to you about is not the taste or the difficulty of chewing the mints but the quantity of mints in the canister. When I first opened it, before I ate any of the peppermints, I noticed that it did not seem to be very tightly packed with candies. They filled it to the top, but loosely. I looked at the ingredients list again. I saw that you reported a serving size of 6 pieces and then specified that there were “about” 12
¹
/
₃
servings per tin. I did the math and calculated that the tin should contain “about” 74 pieces. Frankly, I did not think there were 74 pieces of candy inside. After I pointed this out to my family, we decided to place bets on how many candies there were and then count them. My bet was 64 pieces. My husband, being more trusting of your claims, bet that there were 70. My son, being a teenager and more daring, bet that there were only 50 pieces. Well, I counted them out there on the dining table and who do you think won the bet? I’m sorry to say it was my son. There were only 51 pieces in the can (or tin)! I must say, I could understand it if there were 70 or even 66 pieces, but 51 pieces is only two-thirds, approximately, of the number of pieces you claim are in the tin. I don’t really understand why you would make such a false claim. I have just now, out of curiosity, done a calculation to see if your claim as to the net weight of the peppermints is also exaggerated. You claim that each piece weighs about 5 grams, and you claim a net weight of 369 grams. Yet that would also yield 74 pieces, rounding up, and since there were not 74 pieces but 51, the net weight of the peppermints would have been closer to 255 grams. I cannot verify this estimate by weighing the candies because by now we have eaten them all. They were delicious, but we are feeling shortchanged, or should I say … cheated? Can you please explain this discrepancy?

Yours sincerely.

P.S. This also makes my purchase even more extravagant. 13 ounces at $15 would have been about $18/pound; 8 ounces at $15 is $30/pound!

Her Geography: Illinois

She knows she is in Chicago.

But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.

IV

Ödön von Horváth Out Walking

Ödön von Horváth was once walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered, at some distance from the path, the skeleton of a man. The man had evidently been a hiker, since he was still wearing a knapsack. Von Horváth opened the knapsack, which looked almost as good as new. In it, he found a sweater and other clothing; a small bag of what had once been food; a diary; and a picture postcard of the Bavarian Alps, ready to send, that read, “Having a wonderful time.”

On the Train

We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners. We frown.

Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich onto my newspaper. Bad habits.

I would not report this if I were the one picking my nose. I look again and he is still at it.

As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.

The Problem of the Vacuum Cleaner

A priest is about to come visit us—or maybe it is two priests.

But the maid has left the vacuum cleaner in the hall, directly in front of the front door.

I have asked her twice to take it away, but she will not.

I
certainly will not.

One of the priests, I know, is the Rector of Patagonia.

The Seals

I know we’re supposed to be happy on this day. How odd that is. When you’re very young, you’re usually happy, at least you’re ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there’s less to be happy about. Also, you start losing people—your family. Ours weren’t necessarily easy, but they were ours, the hand we were dealt. There were five of us, actually, like a poker hand—I never thought of that before.

We’re beyond the river and into New Jersey now, we’ll be in Philadelphia in about an hour, we pulled out of the station on time.

I’m thinking especially about her—older than me and older than our brother, and so often responsible for us, always the most responsible, at least till we were all grown up. By the time I was grown up, she already had her first child. Actually, by the time I was twenty-one, she had both of them.

Most of the time I don’t think about her, because I don’t like to feel sad. Her broad cheeks, soft skin, lovely features, large eyes, her light complexion, blond hair, colored but natural, with a little gray in it. She always looked a little tired, a little sad, when she paused in a conversation, when she rested for a moment, and especially in a photograph. I’ve searched and searched for a photo in which she doesn’t look tired or sad, but I can find only one.

They said she looked young, and peaceful, in her coma, day after day. It went on and on—no one knew exactly when it would end. My brother told me she had a glow over her face, a damp sheen—she was sweating lightly. The plan was to let her breathe on her own, with a little oxygen, until she stopped breathing. I never saw her in the coma, I never saw her at the end. I’m sorry about that now. I thought I should stay with our mother and wait it out here, holding her hand, till the phone call came. At least that’s what I told myself. The phone call came in the middle of the night. My mother and I both got out of bed, and then stood there together in the dark living room, the only light coming from outside, from the streetlamps.

I miss her so much. Maybe you miss someone even more when you can’t figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then she left home.

I think she left right after she was done with college. She moved away to the city. I would have been about seven. I have some memories of her in that house, before she moved away. I remember her playing music in the living room, I remember her standing by the piano, bent a little forward, her lips pursed around the mouthpiece of her clarinet, her eyes on the sheet music. She played very well then. There were always little family dramas about the reeds she needed for the mouthpiece of her clarinet. Years later, miles away from there, when I was visiting her, she would bring out the clarinet again, not having played it in a long time, and we would try to play something together, we would work our way, hit or miss, through something. You could sometimes hear the full, round tones that she had learned how to make, and her perfect sense of the shape of a line of music, but the muscles of her lips had weakened and sometimes she lost control. The instrument would squeak or remain silent. Playing, she would force the air into the mouthpiece, pressing hard, and then, when there was a rest, she would lower the instrument for a moment, expel the air in a rush, and then take a quick breath before starting to play again.

I remember where the piano was in our house, just inside the archway into that long, low-ceilinged room shadowed by pine trees outside the front windows, with sun coming in the side windows, on the open side, from the sunny yard, where the rosebushes grew against the house and the beds of iris lay out in the middle of the lawn, but I don’t remember her there on this holiday. Maybe she didn’t come home for that. She was too far away to come back very often. We didn’t have a lot of money, so there probably wasn’t much for train fares. And maybe she didn’t want to come back very often. I wouldn’t have understood that then. I told our mother I would give up all the few dollars I had saved if it would bring her home again for a visit. I was very serious about this, I thought it would help, but our mother just smiled.

I missed her so much. When she still lived at home she often looked after us, my brother and me. On the day I was born, on that hot summer afternoon, she was the one who stayed with my brother. They were dropped off at the county fair. She led him around the rides and booths for hours and hours, both of them hot and thirsty and tired, in that flat basin of fairground where years later we watched the fireworks. My father and mother were miles away, across town, at the hospital on the top of the hill.

When I was ten, the rest of us moved, too, to the same city, so for a few years we all lived close by. She would come over to our apartment and stay for a while, but I don’t think she came very often, and I don’t really understand why not. I don’t remember family meals together with her, I don’t remember excursions in the city together. At the apartment, she would listen carefully when I practiced the piano. She would tell me when I played a wrong note, but sometimes she was wrong about that. She taught me my first word in French: she made me say it over and over till I had the pronunciation just right. Our mother is gone now, too, so I can’t ask her why we didn’t see her more often.

There won’t be any more animal-themed presents from her. There won’t be any more presents from her at all.

Why those animal-themed presents? Why did she want to remind me of animals? She once gave me a mobile made of china penguins—why? Another time, a seagull of balsa wood that hung on strings and bobbed its wings up and down in the breeze. Another time, a dish towel with badgers on it. I still have that. Why badgers?

*   *   *

Trenton Makes, the World Takes—out the window. How many advertising slogans will I stare at out the window today? Now there are poles falling over into the water with all their wires still strung on them—what happened to them, and why were they left there?

It’s always the ones without families who get asked to work on this day. I could have claimed that I was spending it with my brother, but he’s in Mexico.

Four hours, a little more. I’ll be there around dinnertime. I’ll eat in the hotel restaurant, if there is one. That’s always the easiest. The food is never really very good, but the people are friendly. They have to be, it’s part of their job. Friendly sometimes meaning they’ll turn the music down for me. Or they’ll say they can’t, but smile.

*   *   *

Was a love of animals something we shared? She must have liked them or she wouldn’t have sent me those presents. I can’t remember how she was with animals. I try to remember her different moods: so often worried, sometimes more relaxed and smiling (at the table, after a drink of wine), sometimes laughing at a joke, sometimes playful (years ago, with her children), at those times filled with sudden physical energy, lunging at someone across the lawn, under the bay tree, in the walled garden that her husband cared for so patiently.