Typical American (21 page)

"7

would be put up — a labor. Yet how much harder to take it back down! There was too much face to be lost.

Still Helen stood now, desperate, prideless, before Theresa's blank apartment door. She rang.

"Are you busy?"

Theresa stared at Helen as if she'd never seen her before, though she was the one who'd cut her hair. Gone her neat bun; her hair hung loose, tucked behind her ears. And who was this behind her?

"You have a cat."

"Two" Theresa pointed. "Callie, this is, and that's Mona." They were twin Siamese, one too comfortably settled on the bed to do more than twitch an ear. The other pedalled its narrow shoulders up and down, stalking the open door. "For company"

Helen noticed a red rug, piles of books on the floor, white eyelet cafe curtains on the windows. On the walls, reproduction Chinese paintings, mostly landscapes. "I brought you a present Actually, two presents."

Theresa cleared her throat. "Not, ah, chicken, I hope?"

Helen handed her a brown and green tile ashtray. "Callie made it, but look who signed it"

Theresa turned it over and saw in large, wobbly letters: LOVE, MONA. COME BACK! "Ifs beautiful." She laughed sadly.

"Also, this."

Theresa unwrapped a stem of lavender moth orchids. "Symbol of unappreciated virtue." She laughed sadly again. "Have you eaten?"

Helen hesitated.

"Don't be polite," said Theresa, scooping Callie up before she escaped to the hall. "Come in."

Monday morning, thinking of Theresa (There must be something you can do, she'd said, you're so resourceful. Remember how you fixed the furnace?), Helen called the Salvation Army. "Do you pick up furniture? What, three-week wait? Yes, well, this

is brand-new, beautiful, let me describe to you. No? Then let me describe to your boss, okay?"

By evening it was gone.

"What's going on?" Ralph wanted to know.

"The color was wrong. Too light."

"Are you crazy? That sofa was expensive."

"Also it had fleas."

"Fleas?"

Grover coughed. "To the Salvation Army?"

"That's right."

Helen was eating melon seeds, Chinese style. This involved shelling the seeds in her mouth with skillful discretion. She raised her hand to her lips, delicately emitted the empty hulls.

"I get your drift," said Grover.

"Do you?" She lowered her gaze girlishly, depositing the seed hulls into a dish. "But I don't get it myself."

"Is that right." He hesitated, then with a straight arm reached and undid her top button.

She waited.

He undid another. He ran his fingertip from her collarbone to her bra.

"The girls," she protested.

"You love those half-pints." He eased her to him.

"There's no place to lie down."

He grunted.

"Did you see my nails?" She fluttered her red fingertips against his palm. "Special for you. Watch I don't pinch, though," she sang. She nipped his thumb.

Grover smiled indulgently. "I'll tell you what this hand is for."

"For better things?"

"The best."

"No more kitchen floors?"

"Not a one."

"You promise? You give me a maid?"

"Two maids."

"Three?"

"As many as you want. Four maids."

"Five?"

"A staff. That's what you want, right? A staff?"

As she nodded, he unzipped his pants.

"That's what you got," he said.

She peered cautiously at her handful. "All mine?"

"All yours."

She hesitated.

"Relax."

"To do what I like with it?"

"Whatever your sweet heart desires."

"You mean, I say left, it goes left?"

"Sure."

"I say right, it goes right?"

"Sure."

"I say it's good, it gets petted." She stroked him, her nails flashing. "I say it's bad, it gets —"

Grover yowled so loudly the register downstairs stopped ringing.

*3i

of being unable to live the life they would otherwise have to lead. They settled on this complicity: they would not heal their rift — their mysterious rift — but bridge it, with manners. There would be coolness on both sides, a twin coolness.

Three days later, frosty warming. "Tell Mom we ate too much broccoli this week already." "Tell Mom she can pull down the screen windows herself." "Tell Mom my blue jacket, one button came off." And, "Tell Mom my jacket, blue one, button came off, I'm not going ask second time."

"Dad says to tell you again he really needs that button sewn on," Callie told Helen.

"Yeah!" said Mona. "He says he's" — she mimicked Ralph's voice — "not going to ask second time."

"Tell Dad he can sew it himself." Resolute, Helen rinsed more broccoli.

The girls whizzed from the kitchen to the living room. "Mom says you can do it yourself," reported Callie.

"Myself!" said Ralph.

"She means get lost," explained Mona.

"And guess what's for supper!" shouted Callie.

The girls giggled.

Another day: "Tell Mom Uncle Grover say yes for the addition, we paying five percent interest."

The girls flocked to the kitchen doorway. "Dad says —"

"What you say?" Helen sidled, nonchalant, into the living room. "Don't 'tell Mom,' tell me."

"Five percent interest. He'll write us a second mortgage." Ralph looked thoughtful. "It's nice of him. Who would accept a house with such a big first mortgage as collateral* Only a friend."

"Hmm."

Silence. Outside, the newspaper hit the screen door — thwapl

"That boy!" exclaimed Helen. "I told him not to throw the paper like that!"

"He's going to ruin our screen," agreed Ralph.

More silence.

Finally Helen, shirting her weight, asked, "Did you put your jacket on the sewing pile?"

Ralph cleared his throat, a peacemaking response. "We're going to start construction as soon as we get so-called building per-mit."

"You're sure it's a good idea?"

"I'm sure."

She hesitated. "He thinks so too?"

"Who? Grover?" Ralph was studiously offhand. "For a long time, as you know, he was lukewarm about it. But now all of a sudden, he's hot on the idea."

"All of a sudden? Just like that?"

"He wants to give me a chance to show how smart I am."

How could they proceed with business as usual? It was true that anything was possible when men were involved; yet Helen had to wonder if mere weren't twists to the story she couldn't discern. Suddenly Grover had changed his mind. What did it mean?

She teased the facts anxiously but, as she told Theresa, without result.

Anyway, so long as the project consisted of talk, it did not seem quite real to her. It was as if, in the close muff of a January dusk, she had been asked to imagine streaming, rose-smattered summer, the children in bug bites and grass stains. Who could believe such a time was coming? It would; yet she was taken aback the day Ralph had indeed gotten together his land tide, deed, plot plan, photos, and drawings (that was elevation and side view for the drawings), not to say his floor plans, existing and proposed. He'd written his statements, completed his tables, secured his signatures. He'd appeared at meetings. Before boards. He'd paid fees. And finally now, just when he'd mastered the parking patterns at City Hall — he even knew which meters

*33

were jammed, so he could park free — he had his building permit. He came home waving it like a banner. "Ready to start construction! 9 '

That's when Helen, tumbling to attention, asked to see the numbers.

"Sure!" Her belated interest so delighted Ralph that as they huddled over the kitchen table, he kissed her several times, ardently. She kissed him back, though for today all she cared was that the calculations laid before her like a nice cooked lunch should turn out digestible.

"Three hundred-sixty-five days a year" Ralph said, "times three meals —"

"No holidays?" wondered Helen. "Three meals a day?"

He waved her questions aside. "The thing to watch is the overhead. Say the heating bill runs to this much a month, and in the summer, air conditioning to this amount here. ... We have to consider that the cost of the chicken may rise, probably it won't double, but let's take that anyway, just to be on the safe side ..."

Though Helen had had little trouble understanding the purchase of the house, she found following these numbers harder. She went over each section of each page several times, yet still felt she was not being thorough enough; certain numbers seemed to her to be mysteriously reappearing, like mildew. Three pages in, she wondered if they couldn't start all over.

"That gives us these figures here —" continued Ralph.

"But the after-tax income depends on the projected income," she protested.

"You can call it whatever you want," Ralph explained. "What I'm trying to say is, this number here is what you end up with. So-called money in the pocket."

"But it's not money in the pocket. It's a guess."

"Of course it's a guess." Ralph held patient. "All the numbers are guesses."

"They're not real."

*34

"Sure they're real. They're real guesses."

"What if they're wrong?" The page shifted and blurred before Helen's eyes.

"If you didn't have to believe something, you wouldn't be doing business." Ralph patted her. "Relax. Have faith."

bulked, a wrong guess, a thing Ralph had failed to take into account. At night, in his dreams, he saw red X's pencilled down the side of the store. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The building that had fairly convulsed with activity was now deceased. There were no workmen on the site, only Ralph, a lone mourner. Until the crane arrived, that is — a colossal arm reached out of the sky to stage a resurrection.

Life! Hope!

Followed by more delays. Now the crew waited on the building inspector. Ralph reworked the numbers.

"How many days have we lost so far?" Grover thought they should sue.

Ralph complained to Bud, the contractor. "Do you realize we lose twelve days already? Twelve days! And all this time the roof open like that! We going to sue!"

Bud bristled. "Don't you go threatening me, now." They argued, to no conclusion.

Yet all the same, progress resulted. The framing went up, the exterior walls, the siding. The roof was tarred. An indoor ladder grew stilts, turned into stairs. Tilers came, plasterers.

Now Ralph drove by, marvelling at life. At his life. Everything was going up, he was going up, up, up! What more could he ask for, but this — the late-day sun gilding the top of his new store gold as the knob of a flagpole. Ralph's Chicken Palace. Though the shingles of the original storefront were smaller than those of the addition, they blended together fine, he thought; plus with the sign as a distraction, who would notice? He admired the two upstairs sliding windows, even as he vaguely supposed he could ask one thing more, one small thing — that Helen might be returned to him. He did not want to think of it now, in his contentment; but sometimes he looked at her, and it seemed that his Helen, the real Helen, had moved away. He spoke to her as though on the telephone. How are you* He missed her even as he saw her. Particularly when he saw her. The resemblance between the old Helen and the new was so

striking, he could not look too long. It was as if he had spotted a certain stranger on the street; if he didn't look away he might grasp the stranger's arm, insisting, You look so familiar, only to have the stranger pull away. You're crazy, she'd tell him, knocking his love to the sidewalk.

Still, life was improved in ways he'd never dreamed possible; in one step, he'd reached heaven, just as in the saying. Now when he saw people for whom America was a disappointment, for instance — the Petes of the world — he did not look away. He did not fear he would turn out like them; he only felt sorry that some people worked hard but proved unlucky. The grocer family around the corner who had gone out of business, for example. One day he'd walked by, and there they were — a girl, her parents, an assistant, looking disoriented and somehow ragged around the edges, as though they'd been torn out of a book. Their heads were bent, in sorrow or in prayer; Ralph, passing by, bent his head in sympathy. His fortune was to live in the other America, the legendary America that was every wish come true. What did it hurt to allow them a place in his heart? At the end of the block, he picked a fairly clean paper bag up off the ground, filled it with all the money in his wallet. Then he turned and headed back toward the family, his hands sweaty as a suitor's.

Though they joked about hiring a fengshui expert to determine a propitious day for the grand reopening, in the end Ralph and Helen — more practically — simply planned to resume business as soon as possible. "Let the contractor pick the day," they quipped. And so it was that the day was a perfect day, so clear and sunny that they had to squint, even indoors. They positioned potted plants with red ribbon pompoms in the window. Nervously, they festooned the front serving counter with ribbons — not believing, quite, that people would come.

But people did come, and did sit and chew and swallow, their Adam's apples bobbing, as if there were nothing remarkable in

the cheery red-and-white-striped wallpaper, with its matching red booths and bright white Formica tabletops; as if there were nothing even a little breathtaking in Otis the waiter (formerly a cantankerous cook) actually waiting table, exactly as ordered. A few people asked if the upstairs had always been there, wished Ralph and Helen luck, that sort of thing — no one didn't like the new name — but for the most part they ate ensconced in the satisfactions and treacheries of their own lives, wiping their mouths absendy. Except, that is, when Ralph shouted, "Otis!" from downstairs. Using a small hole in one corner of the addition, Ralph had rigged a series of mirrors so that he could keep an eye on what was going on up there; Otis called this apparatus the periscope, and sometimes talked down through the opening in the floor. "Aye, aye, scope," he'd answer, "I'll get that table one-two." This, Ralph noticed, made people look up.