The Broom of the System (51 page)

“Roughage roughage roughage
roughage,”
said Concarnadine Beadsman.

“What’s with this roughage stuff?” Lenore said. “How come she keeps saying ‘roughage’?”

“We have noted that as the autumn begins to cut into the heat that infallibly and understandably drove so many of the J-ward residents into themselves, the residents begin as it were to come around, to begin to rediscover the rewards of communication,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Recall that Concamadine said absolutely nothing all summer. Now we hear words for the sake of words. Explanation? A nurse probably remarked that it would be good for Concarnadine to eat her salad, for the roughage it contained, and Concarnadine fastened on the word, more than likely. Of course you know that here at the Shaker Heights facility we like to encourage regularity through the consumption of fiber, not through harsh chemicals.”

“Roughage.”

“Except she probably doesn’t have any idea what the word stands for,” Lenore said.

“Doubtless. Although Lenore did have ‘roughage’ in the J-ward lexicons. Shall I hunt around for one?”

“And why that word to get fixated on?” Lenore said. “Concarnadine never used to care what she ate. She even ate Stonecipheco stuff, a lot of the time, when it was around the house. She was a weird eater. One time I was little, and we went over for Christmas, and Gramma C. and Grandaddy had had a fight, and Gramma C. didn’t eat all day; she just stayed in the basement, throwing darts at a poster of Jayne Mansfield.”

Concamadine Beadsman smiled.

Mr. Bloemker leaned over the bed toward Lenore. His eyes had a way of attracting sunlight and turning weird colors behind his glasses.

“Ms. Beadsman, may I bounce a theory off you, bearing on matters we’ve previously discussed?”

“Let me finish this story. You can tell by her smile she likes it.”

“Roughage.”

“Merely this. Has it not occurred to you that a sense of shall we say social history is strongest among the young, not the old?”

“ ‘Then Billy Mink did a very foolish thing; he lost his temper completely. He called Reddy Fox bad names. But he did not dare try to take the big pickerel away from Reddy, for Reddy is much bigger than he. Finally he worked himself into such a rage that he ran off, leaving his pile of fish behind.’ ”

“That as people age, accumulate more and more private experience, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored. Does this account seem reasonable?”

“ ‘Reddy Fox and Little Joe Otter took care not to touch Billy Mink’s fish, but Reddy divided his big pile with Little Joe Otter. Then they, too, started for home, Reddy carrying the big pickerel.’ ”

“Roughage.”

“Any thoughts on this? I am of course extrapolating on some of the issues we tackled when last we met face to face. Of course I feel the insight holds particularly true of Midwestemers, who stand in such an ambiguous geographical and cultural relation to certain other less occluded parts of the country that the very objective events and states of affairs that are proper objects of a social awareness must pass in transit to the awarenesses of the residents here through the filters both of subjectively colored memory and geographical ambivalence. Hence perhaps the extreme complication we can see all around us at the Shaker Heights facility.”

Behind Concamadine’s lovely red lip and the bottom row of her even teeth Lenore could see a clear lake of saliva accumulating, growing, lapping with each breath at the backs of the teeth and beginning to shine at the corners of Concamadine’s mouth as her jaw still hung low.

“ ‘Late that night, when he had recovered his temper, Billy Mink began to grow hungry. The more he thought of his fish, the hungrier he grew.’ ”

“Any thoughts at all, then?”

“Not really.”

“Roughagegegege.”

“Oh, dear.”

“She just got too much saliva in her mouth, is all.” Lenore reached for some Kleenex from the bedside table. “Just a little too much saliva.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

“Mr. Blumker?” At the doorway was Neil Obstat, Jr., knocking faintly at the thin pretend-wood paneling, staring at Lenore, who was bent over a smiling beautiful gray-haired figure in a cotton bathrobe and wool socks, with a handful of sopped Kleenex. “Hello,” he said. “Hi, Lenore.”

“Hi.”

“How are you today?”

“Roughage,” said Concarnadine, wiggling her toes.

“You can swallow, you know, Gramma C. You can just swallow your saliva, you know.”

“How’s your Mom, there?” said Obstat.

“Perhaps we’ll just step outside and let you finish reading to Concamadine,” Mr. Bloemker said, his finger tracing the outline of his beard.

Lenore put the wet Kleenex in Mr. Bloemker’s outstretched hand and bent to the book again. She heard the tissues drop into Concamadine’s metal wastebasket with a heavy sound as Mr. Bloemker went for the door where Obstat was standing.

“Mr. Blumker I’m Neil Obstat, Jr., of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products,” Lenore heard Obstat say. She could tell he was still looking at her from the back.

“Bloemker, actually ... ,” Lenore heard. “Just step out a bit ... hall.” There were sounds.

“ ‘Finally he could stand it no longer and started for the Big River to see what had become of his fish.’ ”

Lenore could remember that at Shaker School one time Neil Obstat had been given a wedgie in the boys’ locker room by Ed Creamer and Jesus Geralamo and the whole sinister crew, and had been left by Creamer hanging by his underwear from a coat-hook in the hall outside the locker rooms, in full view of Lenore and Karen Daughenbaugh and Karen Baum and all the rest of the girls in seventh-hour P.E. who were on the way to the bus, and that a janitor had had to lift Obstat down, and that Karen Baum had said she’d been able to see just about Neil Obstat’s whole butt.

“ ‘He reached the strip of beach where he had so foolishly left them just in time to see the last striped perch disappear down the long throat of Mr. Night Heron.’ ”

“Roughage.” Concamadine was foraging for something in her mouth with a finger. Lenore looked back down at the book.

“Membrane, Concamadine,” Lenore said, trying to make her voice deep. “I say to you ‘membrane.’ ”

“Roughage.”

LaVache Beadsman had said, years ago, that Lenore hated Concamadine because Concarnadine looked like her. True, Concarnadine’s hair was long and full and curled down all over the shoulders of her pink bathrobe, where Lenore’s was of course shorter and brown and hung in two large curls to meet in points below her chin. But Concamadine’s actual face was Lenore’s face, too, more or less, the less being a dust of wrinkles at the comers of Concamadine’s eyes and two deep smile-furrows from the corners of her mouth down into her jaw.

“Lenore hates Concamadine because Concarnadine looks like her,” LaVache had said to John, in the east wing, while Lenore read by the window and listened. “Lenore identifies with her in some deep and scary way.”

“Then are we invited to extend the same reasoning to your relationship with Dad?” John had said with a laugh. “Since we all know that you’re basically just Dad’s image in a tiny little mirror.”

LaVache had moved in, brandishing the leg. And Lenore had watched Miss Malig, current in her fingers, iodine in her eyes, descend, restore order.

“Oh, Lenore.”

Lenore looked up from the book. “Pardon?”

“Roughage roughage.” The bathrobe was now up over her knees, knees that looked to be covered with the kind of gray skin usually found at the backs of elbows.

Obstat’s voice was in the hall. Lenore could hear the wet sound of Mr. Bloemker doing something to his own face. Protruding from the edge of the frame of the door, she could see, was the bottom of Mr. Bloemker’s brown sportcoat. The floor of the doorway looked dusted with a faint black that trailed out into the hall. Lenore wished Concamadine’s room were cleaner.

“ ‘And this is how it happened that Billy Mink went dinnerless to bed. But he had learned three things, had Billy, and he never forgot them—that wit is often better than skill; that it is not only mean but is very foolish to sneer at another; and that to lose one’s temper is the most foolish thing in the world.’ ”

Lenore watched steam chug out of Concamadine’s humidifier and turn pale yellow in the light of the glass wall. The steam made her think of another room.

“What should we do, Gramma C. ?”

Concamadine smiled beautifully and plucked at the papery skin on the backs of her hands. Lenore watched her roll her head back and forth at the ceiling, for joy.

10 September

 

Shall we begin, then. Calves. Posture. Scent. Sounds amid fields of light.

One. Calves. Shall we discuss the persistent habit the light of the sun had of reflecting off Mindy Metalman’s calves. Thus then the calves themselves. An erotic surface being neither dull nor hard. A dull surface equalling no reflection; a hard surface equalling a vulgar, glinting spangle.

But a reflection from soft, smooth—perfectly shaved smooth—perfectly clean suburban skin. Light off the shins of her calves as said calves projected their curves from chairs, or scissored the air above clogs that made solid sounds in the sidewalk ... or yes go ahead hung over the edge of the country club pool, pressing, so that the flesh of the calf behind swelled out and made the reflection two ovals of light.

I pull a new red-eyed Vance Vigorous from the pool, and as we enter into com-dog negotiations there is Mindy Metalman, in a deck chair, sipping something cold through a straw, and there is the light of the Scarsdale sun, reflecting from her smooth shins, and I am elsewhere as Vance shrinks on the deck.

Heavy of necktie, I rise from the plume over baby Vance’s crib to see Mindy Metalman, and yes perhaps two or three incidental neighborhood children around her, for decoration, doing her Circe dance around Rex Metalman’s sprinkler. And yes there is the light, reflected from her legs through the water, and the light comes out and breaks the mist of the sprinkler into color, and the mist and the light settle into the wet grass and the light remains and affects the air around it; I see it even much later as I sip something from my den window and watch Rex on his knees in the trampled, sprinkled, misted lawn, straightening each precious bent blade with tweezers. And in the breeze of late afternoon my own chaotic blades vibrate in sympathy.

From my den window, here, is to be seen Mindy Metalman, at her own window, seated on her desk, legs up and calves demurely thrust curving over the sill of the open pane, shaving in the sun. She sees me across the fence and laughs. Fresh air does absolutely everything good, doesn’t it? And here the blade moves down, too slowly by far to be taken seriously by me, for whom the whole process is a rite entirely other, but at any rate each furrow of foam in the curving field is replaced by an expanse of soft shaved gold, in the light.

Calves, light, legs, light, everything will be all right.

Two. Posture. Am invited by Rex Metalman to a cotillion for his daughter, Melinda Susan Metalman. (Was it a real cotillion? Why can’t I remember?) Am invited by Rex Metalman to some Puberty-Rite function for his daughter.

Said function consisting of row after row, group after group, whole nations of tired, nervous, bad-postured girls in immoderate pink gowns. Thin, heads thrust out, hands resting on one another’s shoulders, lips moving just inside one another’s ears. I squint a bit over my third or fourth something and am in a tinkling, frosted swamp, a cold pond of candy flamingos, flowers of snow, slowly hardening under a varied crystal sun. Then the girls change and become for a while vaguely reptilian, heads out like turtles, vaguely amphibian, seeming ever to scan for threat or reward—pimples to be seen at some of the comers of some of the mouths.

Yes and of course the key here is except for Mindy Metalman, who was in a white gown, with a carnation of pink sugar, and her hair pulled up in a tight bun, but with a burst of a black curl here, and there, and here, hinting at the dark nova the hair could become at any time, should someone outside my influence wish it.

And Melinda Metalman standing straight, with a straight spine, but for the swan’s curve of her neck and the bit of the hip-shot pelvis with which she pummeled the unwary, a solid, straight, juicy girl, her gown just low enough to afford the thinking man imaginative access to the systems that must have lain just within, revolving broad and silent about their still red point. And, and this posture—what was it about a head, with its dark, spreading, fluttery eyes, about a head placed so easily atop a simple vertical line? Perhaps just the contrast with the rest of the wildlife in that cold frosted marsh, perhaps merely the fact that the head was easy and content to let things come, that it did not jut out to snap at them. Sounds of snapping were all around me, and I loathed them, and I loathed too and still do loathe any and all heads which jut.

But dancing was of course out of the question, and this girl in the throes of Rite of course either danced or installed herself in a social orbit around the hors d‘oeuvre bar, and I will never ever again approach a female at an hors d’oeuvre bar.

And yes too following me about the perimeter of the room as I circled, joined at the soft parts of our bones, was as always the deeply chilling presence of Veronica Vigorous, and so yes anything at all was rendered impossible, assuming that it wouldn’t have been, which it would have, and so here I was tiny and icy and tired. But I can remember in the cold bath of the chandelier that vertical line, and the hair, and the eyes that were wings in a head to which jutting was clearly a thing unfamiliar, to be laughed at with the toss of a tiny star-burst curl.