A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (15 page)

"
More juice?" she says.

"
I think you've had enough."

"
He's so
handsome,"
she says, about me, whom she has recognized only partly: I am her
handsome son, she knows, but I am not yet her son come to visit.

"
I thought, just another," she says. "Since
. . ."

Here she has begun to recognize my visit: since my
handsome son has come to see me. She now sits and pats the chair next
to her, where I go and sit. She holds my face as I take her glass.
"He's so handsome." We kiss, which is perhaps the most
difficult aspect of a home visit, because since her trouble began she
has applied lipstick around, not on, her lips, in a wide ovoid tour
of her face suggestive all at once of Emmett Kelly and blackface
minstrels and topographical contour maps. She has gone in for odd
shades of orange lipstick since this novel application began; it
gives her the look of an aging peach.

"
Maybe some of the high stuff, too," she
says to my father, who is filling her vase with orange juice. He
hesitates. He looks at me, as if to say he is a better keeper than
giving her another drink would suggest, and I give him a little why
not shrug, to suggest I know he's a better keeper, and so we agree on
her drinking and he adds some vodka. Frankly I have never seen why
she shouldn't have all she wants; it only changes her physical
dexterity, and that not much. I do not even know the official
diagnosis, though I know there is one. My father maintains simply
that she is "sick." "Premature senility" seemed
to suffice in the beginning, but today I am sure there are more
specific names, if not more specific treatment.

She sits back with her foot-high drink, the only
glass she will have, and my father and I let her concentrate on it
before we start our tape.

"
How's school?"

"
Fine. I'm not in it, though, exactly."

"
What do you mean?"

"
I got fed up."

He hands me another beer. I hand it back. "I'm
in training."

"
For what?"

"
Life."

"Good luck."

Now that I have indicated I may not become a
professor, the only natural end, in his mind, of a higher degree, he
is ready to allow some merit accrue to the profession which was
altogether lacking while he thought me pursuing it.

"
In the Depression, professors were the only
guys with work. They had good jobs."

"
I'm sure." We are close to the end and
best part of the tape, and I can't stand it, so I jump his lines.

"
Life is fifty-one percent, like you say."

"
You're damned straight? His emphasis delivers
the meaning: again, he means I am not straight.

Generally these conversations--or this conversation,
it does not vary--amount to a slow but surefooted indictment of
whatever I am doing, and they are a bit irritating because before now
I have always been more or less applying myself in ways more or less
indicated, I felt, by a natural pursuit of self-aggrandizing going up
in the world. But tonight, for the first time, his accusations are
correct, though he doesn't know it, and because they are correct, our
little play is not irritating.

"
What I've been doing," I say, "--and
I will have that beer--is women in squalid quarters who are all about
Mom's age. Been fun." My father apparently senses an
extraordinary turn, which a taunt like my revelation finally is, and
surprises my mother with yet another towering drink, which she bites
down on like a snake volunteering venom into a toxin funnel.

"
Mmm," she says. "High stuff, too."

He shakes his head with a small laugh, and he
realizes we are not going to fight because I'm not going to defend,
I'm going to attack.

"
Fifty-one percent, I think, is better at about
nineteen. I'm playing nineteen. I have a friend up the road chasing
armadillos with a Geiger counter. He's hitting ninety-five percent."

My father compresses his lips, pushes them out a bit.
This speech is about his credo--the speculator's hustler's credo--of
life and business. If you win fifty-one percent, you're in the black.
The presence of the credo is the subterranean suggestion, ever
present, that I take over the oil-pipe business.

"
He's so
handsome."
We look at her, at each other.

"
You're right," he says--to me, about Tom's
ninety-five percent, not my looks. He is not sincere.

While my mother balances her drink--how she came to
be served exclusively in this ridiculous and difficult container I do
not know--my father and I make a drink for ourselves. The strong
whiskey makes me dizzy, as if a wave of water has gone through the
room. I am prepared, as at no time before, to deny completely all
injunction, pressure to assume the family business, which topic is
just beneath the surface of all our percent patter.

Before, my refusal has been vague, I have managed
simply to delay the event. Tonight I am possessed of this confident,
sliding-away strength, and I am not going to delay, to put it off,
I'm going to deny the inheritance because . . . because I no longer
trust women my age. That is the thought that comes to me as we watch
my mother totter her vase of high stuff to her orange face. Pine-Sol
and Havana Carlisle's legendary cigars (my father has lit a
cigarillo) come to me. The entire life reaction series of human
bondings and splittings has had something to do with my not taking
the family business. It is the artificial center someone would have
me assume.

At that moment I thought of Mary and Wallace, and of
my own mother and how she had changed from someone not like them to
someone very much like them. I've liked my mother a whole lot more
since she became daft, for where she is dotty and funny now, she was
presumptuous and full of conviction before, and if one's preferring a
crippled mental state to the normal precedent, particularly his own
mother's, is perverse, then so be it. It is just another index of the
magnitude of the effects of the series.

I get ready to tell my father, "I refuse the
business because I refuse these young twit broads full of
purpose"--something actually that rational is on my tongue--when
my mother says, out of the blue, to him,

"
You'd better get ready."

It startles me. Can she know? Can she perceive mental
states now that hers is largely gone?

"
The beauty parlor isn't open until 9:30,"
my father says.

"Then we'd better be ready."

My mother has an appointment at her beauty parlor
every day of the week. They oblige her there, with, among other
services, the application of her lipstick as she likes it, and when
she emerges looking like Emmett Kelly with a blue Virginia Graham
hairdo, they assure her how good she looks in condescending tones.

"
We'll be ready," I say.

"
Do you," she says, turning to me, "have
a license to meddle?"

This is a bit of the old girl. These vodkas are
having a restorative effect.

"
Yes," I say.

"
It's
expired
,"
she says. To my father; "Your son's got a meddling license."
She means, I think, to emphasize the
your
,
to saddle him with me, but in missing the emphasis she indicts my
sex, she invokes the daughter she never was able to have, and so you
cannot know finally if the emphasis is misplaced or simply badly
timed. She does this curious emphasis often.
 
My
father and I keep quiet waiting for her little tempest to pass,
probably both now doubting the wisdom of allowing her the three
towering cocktails. "I know what lips are," she says,
grinning, as if to acknowledge she has been naughty in this passing
assault, "but what's stick?" Thus she is restored, occupied
by lipstick, one of her two or three central preoccupations (the
beauty parlor, the high stuff) since her illness set in. In a moment
she'll be again deciding I'm handsome beyond all rational measure. By
her flare-up, my father is spared my kook speech. When they retire I
wander about the house; it is a blend of low ranch and tall Georgian,
which means twenty small columns across the broad, split-level front,
where once four tall columns would have been. The rooms are museum
set pieces, matched collections of antiques assembled by my mother.

In the kitchen I am surprised to find my father back
down, having another drink, his face a brick-red hue and his lips
aligned in a tall, narrow pursing, as if carefully stacked up for the
sake of neatness. I get a beer.

Without turning his head to look at me, he says,
"You're not doing anything? Now the lips are pressed out into a
grim line, a shade lighter than when they'd been in the warehouse
position.

"
No, sir. For once you are correct."

He makes no move.

"
In fact," I say, "I'm doing less than
anything." I have noticed that in my dealings with him I am
invariably cast back into an adolescent kind of smartness, and he
responds in kind by pretending to hear me out without listening,
waiting to tell me where I went wrong.

"
You don't need any more beer." In our
family, one is never accused of drinking to excess until the accuser
is on the floor himself, from where he will utter his sudden call for
temperance.

"
I'm going to wait up and talk to the yardmen."

He looks at me with true alarm.

"
What?"

"
Fuck with them."

"
Those are good, steady boys."

I go out into my old room, a garage apartment
designed to look from the outside like an old, detached Southern
kitchen. It is set up for poker now--a beautiful felt table and chips
on a lazy Susan and a fully stocked bar. I get a small cooler and
pack it with beer and get a canvas deck chair and plan to set up camp
for the night on the tennis court. You're not doing anything. I
thought, by God, to prove it.

I walk the tennis court, cracking acorns on the deep
green composition surface made nearly black by the shadows of the
oaks. In the early morning, hours before my father takes my mother to
the beauty parlor, but only a bit sooner than she begins to pester
him to do so, two black men about fifty years old, whom my father
without malice calls The Boys, will arrive to rake the yard. I wish
The Boys would sweep the courts as well, sweep these acorns going off
like firecrackers out here at three in the morning. I pop, I skid, I
skate. I lose track of time, I think--perhaps out of drinking shape
without Mary--because it is suddenly dawning and I see The Boys
arrive and set up to rake, nearly invisible in their green uniforms
in the fog, talking as low and gently as if they were fishing.

As a child I thought The Boys were a constant two men
and only now realize that they change over rapidly, supplied by a
lawn service with access to an apparently inexhaustible supply of
quiet, early-rising blacks. To my father I believe they are a
constant team--The Boys.

Suddenly my exact position--as reagent, binding
surfactant--in the reaction series of life gets clearer. Since
Wallace had echoed Mary, certainly since Tom "accidentally"
appeared on my personal bus driver's route in a town of his fond
bestial memories, I could tell that the series was self-governing and
rapidly moving to inexorable conclusions. But now I thought to look
at the business bond by bond--to pull the test tube off my head and
see things molecularly, as it were. I watched The Boys. Before my
very unscientific eyes they were aligned with all the better
fools--James and Ebert, of course, but if they did not suggest
Wallace and Napoleon out there in a fog of low wages, I'd be damned,
and I thought of Hazel and Bruce, and they, The Boys, were quite
likely accomplished actors; they were not distracted by the
self-centeredness of the Orphan and the other true fools. These are
the thoughts you can have, drunk at Eve in the morning, skating on
acorns on your private tennis court.

But I saw that it was data, and it felt like nearly
final data. I have seen the better scientists I know--Friedeman can
do it----sense magically when enough experimentation has been done,
when data are yet an uncollated mess and no rational measure could
suggest quitting time. I had that feeling watching The Boys rake in
the fog.
 
I exploded acorns on the
way toward them, and one of them saw me and stopped, looking at me as
if I were a deer or something not seen in the last twenty years. I
held my beer up to him in greeting.

"
You guys want a cold one?"

"
Naw."

"
It's all right."

"
Know."

"
Yes, it is."

"
Say
know
."

"Really, man. I'm the--"

"
Say I
know
iss all right. Old man himself making is the offer. Talk trash."

"He was?"

He raked a small pile of leaves up.

"
In that case, I withdraw the offer."