Staggerford (16 page)

“Hey,” I said, affirming and denying everything. I wanted to ask him to be best man at our wedding and godfather to our first child. Perhaps he would like to come and stay at our house for a few days when his writing wasn’t going well and he needed a change of scene. I wanted to suggest he dedicate his first collection of essays to Carla. “Hey,” I said
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We finished dinner with no mention of my drunkenness. My father and I left the table to lie down, he in the living room with Harry Wismer speaking to him from the Rose Bowl, and I in my bedroom with the shakes. Carla and my brother helped with the dishes, and when they were done I got up and suggested to Carla that we go for a walk. This was my first hangover and I was beginning to wonder how much of the damage was permanent. I wanted to try out my legs
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“Yes, we could do with a walk,” said Dale. “But first I want to show Carla my review. Come into my room, Carla.” Behind his back Carla smiled at me
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assuring me that she realized Dale was stuffy. She went into his room and read his review
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Finally when we stepped outside, away from the smell of duck, and I took a deep breath of the cold air all my faculties returned with a rush. I felt like running. Carla and I ran ahead of my brother and when we got to the corner we hid behind a garage. He reached the corner and turned in a circle, looking for us, the steam of his breath going this way and that. Then he hunched his coat up to his ears and walked home alone
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At Carla’s house her father was waiting for us. He stepped out on the porch and said, “Pruitt, we’ve set the date for your visit. Saturday, the first of April. Please come to dinner and plan to spend the evening.”

He shook my hand and went into the house. Carla kissed me and followed him. The sky was purple where the sun was going down
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In January I kissed Carla fourteen rimes. In February I could have hit thirty because she was taking a passionate turn. But we both got the flu. She recovered before I did and one night when I was still sick my brother took her to a choir concert in Minneapolis. It was my idea. I had two tickets to a sell-out, and with my temperature hovering around 101 I asked him to take my place. Choral music was one of the few interests Dale had in common with Carla and me. In spite of his stuffiness he wasn’t bad looking, and I knew Carla could put up with him for an evening in order to hear the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, which was on the program. It was Carla’s ambition to be a teacher of choral music. It was mine to be a composer. When Dale got home he woke me to say it had been a fabulous concert—two hundred voices and a full orchestra. Besides Beethoven, they performed Carla’s favorite section of Handel’s Israel in Egypt and something from Grieg. “Fabulous,” he said, and he began writing a review in his head, aloud, standing over my bed. Fabulous was his favorite word in those days
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In March I kissed Carla twenty times. Was she as happy with me as she had been in January? I was almost sure of it. With my income-tax refund I bought a sixty-dollar suit—a green wool double-breasted—and on
April first I wore it for the first time. It filled me with a strong sense of my masculinity. On the way to Carla’s house I swaggered. It was a warm evening full of puddles and robins and the squeak of tricycles, and it occurred to me that it was time to advance beyond the kissing stage of our courtship. I would see tonight what lay beyond
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The Carpenters kept their house so hot it dried out your nostrils the minute you stepped inside the front door. Carla gave me a peck on the cheek, sidestepped my hug, and led me into a long, austere living room where her father stood in a stained apron. He gripped my hand like a drowning man and said Minnesota could expect little change in temperature. Mrs. Carpenter entered the room from the other end and the three of us held our breath as she approached me with the kind of smile that makes your face tired if you hold it very long. She had been gaining weight steadily all winter and seemed to fill the room. She, too, wore an apron, but hers was freshly starched. “I feel I know you better than I do,” she told me, and I could sense Carla and her father breathe easier. The three of us spoke to her at once, wishing, I suppose, to congratulate her on her fine statement, and we created with the sudden noise of our voices the illusion of conviviality. But then we sat down in chairs too far apart to be convivial and fell silent. Mrs. Carpenter’s smile faded into an expression of absolute woe
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“Little change in the weather, “said Mr. Carpenter, “except the possibility of showers in the southwestern part of the state. And that doesn’t include us.”

“No,” I said. “And a good thing, too. The river is high.”

“Yes,” he said. “The river is high.”

Mrs. Carpenter cleared her throat. She said that as a girl she knew an old man who had a saying for every kind of weather imaginable. She paused, trying to imagine a kind of weather. “A saying for rain,” she said, and paused again. “A saying for …”

Mr. Carpenter was gentle with her. “A saying, Margaret? What do you mean, a saying?”

We waited, listening to the tick of a clock and the
faint whir of the furnace fan. Finally she gave her hands a quick toss in the air to indicate it was no use. She turned to the wall and moved her jaw, grinding her teeth. Carla said it was time to eat
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She and her mother brought to the table a huge capon on two platters. From one platter Mr. Carpenter served Carla and me and himself The other platter contained a monstrous drumstick and thigh, and Mrs. Carpenter set it down in front of herself, made the sign of the cross, and dug in. She began by cracking the joint apart with her hands and then she shredded the meat from the bones with an oversized fork, twisting and snapping the tendons like rubber bands. She ate nothing else and never glanced up, her attention entirely absorbed in the meat. She didn’t close her mouth when she chewed and Mr. Carpenter, to cover her smacking, spoke at length about the weather. Flash floods and sunspots. Blizzards. Fog along creek bottoms. Frost in May
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After dinner we took our coffee into the living room where Carla and I talked about school. The conversation sounded rehearsed, but it pleased Mr. Carpenter, who said yes and no whenever it seemed appropriate. Then Mrs. Carpenter made a sudden violent movement. She slammed her cup and saucer down on a table and cleared her throat and said I made her ass tired. She said I was nothing but a goddamn idiot and if I didn’t know what I was talking about why didn’t I keep my mouth shut. Carla and her father rushed me out the front door. “Thank you for coming,” he said, closing the door on my heels. Carla stood with me on the porch. She said her mother couldn’t help it, that her mother was ill. I was full of capon and imperturbable. In my green wool suit I was invincible. I said her mother was a great woman. I said I loved her mother and I loved her father and most of all I loved Carla and we would marry and have a houseful of children and feed them capon. We would surmount all difficulties. We would make the rough places plain
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The sky still held a warm rosy light, though the robins were asleep, and we stepped off the porch and went for a walk. In front of the Hub we talked to friends who sat on the curb and wanted to know what I was doing
in a suit. We went inside and the friends followed us and we talked for hours about the State Basketball Tournament. It was to be played in Minneapolis the following week and our team and coaches and cheerleaders, though not participating, had tickets. I was not on the team, though I had yearned all my life to play and did my best every year at tryouts. Carla, to my disappointment, was planning to go. I thought she might stay home because we were in love
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It was after eleven when I walked her home. There was a light in the garage and Carla said her father spent a lot of time out there in the evenings. I looked in the window and saw for the first time his woodworking shop. Along the far wall were his power tools—a jigsaw, a handsaw, a turning lathe—and piles of lumber. Near the door, under a reading lamp, Carla’s father was paging through a magazine. In a corner next to a potbellied stove was a sagging old couch where Carla said her father sometimes slept. We backed away and sat in a pile of old leaves and straw that had been raked off the rose bushes now that spring was here. We lay back and did some heavy breathing and rolling around, but try as I might we didn’t get much further than the kissing stage. I felt ground moisture soaking through my new suit and I remembered Sister Odilia’s warning in the first grade against sitting on the ground in any month whose name contained an
r.
This was only the first of April, but the nun of course had never been in love. Then Mr. Carpenter turned off the light in the garage and we lay still
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There was no moon and the yard was dark. He stepped outside, pulling the door shut, and walked to the alley, where we heard him urinate on the sand. Then he went into the house. I suggested we go into the garage. Carla said all right but only for a minute. We went in and left the light off and once I got my bearings I moved her toward the couch. I told her my suitcoat was wet, and I took it off and laid it on the bandsaw. I said my trousers were wet and she asked me what in the world I was doing and I said I was taking them off to dry. “For God’s sake, Miles, don’t be an idiot!” she said. I laid my trousers on the bandsaw and pulled her
toward the couch but she held back. I said I wanted to make her mine and she said that was fine but not now. I said if she was going to Minneapolis for three days of basketball I needed something to remember her by. She broke away and switched on the light. I’ve never been much to look at in my shorts—especially with my shoes on, for some reason—and I leaped at the switch and turned it off. I knew she was doing the right thing and I loved her for it, but I also loved her for other things, and I took her roughly by the arm and twisted it up behind her back to show her I meant business
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I’m not sure my desire was the entire reason for this. I may have been experimenting with her virtue, putting it to a sterner test. It was a stupid thing to do because she reached out with her free hand and turned on the bandsaw which jumped alive with a deafening scream. Then it began to choke on my suit tangled around the blade, and the noise subsided to a chugging growl as the electric motor shot out sparks and blew afuse. Then silence. I struggled to free my suit, tugging at it and asking Carla to turn on the light. She responded with something like a sob. Or was it a laugh? I heard her father come out of the house and I crouched behind the saw. He opened the garage door and tried the light switch but it didn’t work. “Who is it?” he said into the dark. I heard Carla sob again. “Carla?” He came in and pulled open a drawer and turned on a flashlight
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I could tell by the way the light jumped that I startled him
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“I was trying to get my suit out of the saw,” I said
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He pointed the light at my legs and my face. I tried to raise the saw blade but I couldn’t budge it. He took a wrench off the wall and while I held the light he dismantled the saw. My trousers came free first. The crotch was split open. To free my suitcoat he cut it to pieces with a tin snips. He cut off one sleeve at the shoulder and he cut off a lapel and he cut a square hole in the back
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It seemed to me he cut more than he had to, but I didn’t say anything. I handed him the flashlight, and while I dressed he flashed it around the garage. Carla
was gone. He went over to the couch and examined it closely
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“Well,” I said buttoning my one-armed suitcoat, “I guess I’ll be going.” He aimed the light at the open door
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Outside I turned and looked back into the beam and said, “I took my suit off to dry.”

He turned off the light and I groped my way out to the alley and headed home, holding up my trousers because my belt was cut in two
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With Mother and Father in bed and Dale busy typing, I was able to slip into my room unnoticed. Standing in front of the mirror, I lost all hope of having the suit mended. It hung on me in shreds. I put it in the box it came in and stashed it away in the closet. Later, when Mother asked me why I never wore it, I told her I had taken it back for a refund. I said there was an imperfection in the weave
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In school on Monday Carla didn’t speak to me. She looked like the Carla of grade eleven, thoughtful, unapproachable
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That night my brother called from college to say his review of The Crimson Pirate had been accepted by the American Quarterly Screen Review. I called Carla. It was the kind of news I needed to break the ice
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“Dale already called to tell me,” she said. “Isn’t it fabulous?”

Tuesday and Wednesday we spoke, but only about schoolwork
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Thursday morning the basketball team and coaches and cheerleaders packed themselves into four cars in front of the school as Harvey Polk and I watched from a lavatory window. A cold mist was falling out of a low sky
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“They say the city is wide open at tournament time,” said Harvey
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“That’s what I hear,” I said
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“They say at the Astoria Theater you can see five strippers, one right after the other, for sixty cents.”

“That’s what I hear, “I said. Carla was getting into a DeSoto with four players and a coach
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“They say the hotels are so crowded there’s guys and
girls in the same bed and nobody cares. My cousin was down there last year and he stayed three nights in three different hotels and never paid a cent. He just followed the crowd. He says you do things you’d never think of doing at home. He met girls from all over the state. Rochester girls are the best looking and Duluth girls will show you the best time, but you have to tell them you’re from Minneapolis before they’ll look at you. He says up to that time in his life he was nothing but a babe in the woods. He says if he ever has a daughter he’ll never let her go to the state tournament. He says everybody’s drunk.”