Typical American (7 page)

She was not at home enough, though, even to fall ill.

This could not go on forever. Eventually, faith faltering, Helen studied harder, walked more, bought new clothes, wrote her parents less. She did continue to spend whole afternoons simply sitting still, staring, as though hoping to be visited by ghosts, or by a truly wasting disease; but she also developed a liking for American magazines, American newspapers. American radio — she kept her Philco in the corner of the living room nearest the bedroom, so she could listen nonstop. She sang along: "The corn is as high as an el-e-phant's eyyye..." She did not insist on folding all her clothes, but used the closet too. She began to say "red, white, and blue" instead of "blue, white, and red" and to distinguish "interest" from "interested" from "interesting." She caught a few colds. And she married Ralph, officially accepting what seemed already true — that she had indeed crossed a violent, black ocean; and that it was time to make herself as at home in her exile as she could.

"I guess," said Ralph, uncertainly.

Helen sighed. At home, room had always been made for her in the conversation; people paused before going on, and looked at her. Here, she had to launch herself into the talking, for instance during a lull, as now.

"You know that saying about a wife's ankle?" she put in softly.

"What?" said Ralph.

"Don't interrupt," said Theresa. "She's talking."

"I can't hear her"

"That saying," Helen said louder. "Do you know that saying, about a wife's ankle? Being tied to her husband's?"

"Of course," encouraged Theresa. "With a long red string. From the time she's born."

"Well, I think maybe my ankle was tied to my husband's and sister-in-law's both."

"Ah no! To both? To my ankle too?" Theresa protested, laughing. Then, in English, "Are you trying to pull my leg?"

Tliey all laughed. "Good joke!" cried Ralph.

"Good one!" Helen agreed.

Weren't they happy, though? At least until it was time for them to move to a run-down walk-up north of 125th Street, whose air smelled of mildew and dog. It was the kind of place where the poorest of students lived, where the differences in housekeeping between the halls and the rooms were as dramatic as the occupants could manage. An economy. Ralph and Helen and Theresa had agreed on it. Yet they were belatedly shocked. So many Negroes! Years later, they would shake their heads and call themselves prejudiced, but at the time they were profoundly disconcerted. And what kind of an apartment was this? This apartment sagged. Theresa poked a finger in a soft spot of plaster, occasioning a moist avalanche. "We're not the kind of people who live like this," she said.

But their super, it seemed, thought they were. That Pete! He expected them to stand endlessly in his doorway, his half German shepherd jumping up on them as he rambled on about the boiler. As for their situation — Was it an "urgency"? he'd ask. Only,

yes or no, to not be coming — not to see about their plumbing problems, not to see about their ceiling problems, not to see about the crack in the back bedroom wall that seemed quite definitely to be widening.

"Leaks," said Ralph, batting the dog away. "Paint come down. Big crack." Politely at first. Then, with more vigor, "You do nothing! This building falling down!" The result was that Pete once said he'd "swing by sometime," once explained that his boss, the owner, had some months ago done a bit of work on the roof.

"So?"

"Well now, I don't know that ever'thing a body says has got to have a point" he said.

Fan tong, Ralph called him — rice barrel. Helen and Theresa laughed. And here was the most irritating thing: fly open, feet up on his legless desk, dog at the door, he'd often be thumbing through course catalogs, exchanging one for another, sometimes working through two at once. Should he be a lawyer? A doctor? An engineer? As if he could be an engineer! As if he could get a Ph.D.!

A man, Pete said, was what he made up his mind to be.

"That man is fooling himself!" Ralph shook his head.

Helen, meanwhile, hired a plumber, scraped the loose paint so it wouldn't hang, walked Ralph's file cabinet into the back bedroom to hide the crack. Could this place ever be a home? Next to the file cabinet she put a tall bookcase, and straddling them, a small, wide one that only just cleared the ceiling.

"Smart y " admired Ralph.

"I saw it in a magazine," she told him. "This is called wall unit."

"Wall-unit," repeated Ralph. And later he observed that it was exactly in solutions like hers that a person could see how well they Changs were going to do in their new life.

"Not like that Pete," he said. "He's fooling himself"

Entertainment: Ralph took to imitating Pete's walk. He'd slump, a finger cleaning his ear, only to have Theresa gamely

cry out, "No, no like this," and add a shuffle, turning out her knees as Helen laughed. They studied the way Pete blew his nose, that they might get it right; they studied his sneeze, his laugh, the self-important way he flipped through his calendar. "Well, now, let me have some look-see," growled Theresa. "Typical Pete!" Ralph roared in approval. "Typical, typical Pete!" Ralph even mimicked Boyboy, Pete's mutt — strutting around, barking showily, calling himself "Ralph-Ralph." He paced back and forth, guarding the door with wide swishes of a brush tail; he jumped up on Helen and Theresa as they tried to dodge by with grocery bags. And pretty soon, no one knew quite how, "typical Pete" turned "typical American" turned typical American this, typical American that. "Typical American no-good," Ralph would say; Theresa, "typical American don't-know-how-to-get-along"; and Helen, wistfully, "typical American just-want-to-be-the-center-of-things." They were sure, of course, that they wouldn't "become wild" here in America, where there was "no one to control them." Yet they were more sure still as they shook their heads over a clerk who short-changed them ("typical American no-morals!"). Over a neighbor who snapped his key in his door lock ("typical American use-brute-force!"). Or what about that other neighbor's kid, who claimed the opposite of a Democrat to be a pelican? ("Peckin?" said Ralph. "A kind of bird," explained Theresa; then he laughed too. "Typical American just-dumb!") They discovered stories everywhere. A boy who stole his father's only pair of pants. A mother who kept her daughter on a leash. An animal trainer who, in a fit of anger, bit his wife's ear off.

"With his mouth?" Ralph couldn't believe it.

But it was true. Helen had read it in the American newspaper, which was honest enough to admit, one day, that they were right. Americans had degenerated since the War. As for why, that was complicated. Sitting in the green room that was the living room and Theresa's bedroom both, she read the whole article aloud. Ralph and Theresa listened carefully.

"That's what we were saying/' Ralph commented finally. He looked to Theresa, who nodded.

"Americans want to loosen up now, have a good time," she said. "They're sick of rationing,"

"Would you read it again?"

Helen would — glad, she supposed, to have in the family at least this one rickety seat. And sure enough, there it was once more, evidence of how smart they were. Imagine that — that they could see, in a foreign country, what was what! Above them, the ceiling light dropped haloes in their hair as they listened on. Everything, they heard, was going to be okay.

The only question was why Ralph lay awake whole nights, listening to Helen asleep in the next bed. It wasn't just the strangeness of rooming with a woman which kept him up with the streedights. Not anymore; he was already used to the company, or almost used to it — to the way she dressed in the morning, under the covers, reaching to the bureau with a lithe, bare arm; to the way she and his sister sometimes talked to each other through the door. He was more or less used to saying wife, to being called husband, whatever that meant. He was even used to sex, which he no longer wanted twice a day. Once was enough; already the fumbling had become memory. An ease had set in. He'd cross to her bed; a touch, and she'd turn over. A few touches more; buttons; then quiet, quiet, listening to be sure they weren't waking his sister. It was easy. Quiet. Quiet.

But Helen never said anything, or even seemed about to make a noise. She was so quiet he worried, not just in bed together, but all night, in their own beds, like this. Was there something the matter with her? She hid things, he'd discovered — keys, batteries, letters. She kept magazines under her mattress. What else might she be keeping from him? Maybe an illness, he thought, listening hard. For she didn't just breathe; she inhaled, then stopped, then expelled the air in a little burst. Squinting up at the ring-stained ceiling, he tried to make the sound she was

making. A slight popping, as if she had been holding her breath. Or as if there were some obstruction ... where? In her chest? No, in her throat. Right at the base of his own throat he thought he could feel a little door that might stick. He envisioned visits to the doctor. Cancer. An operation. Where would she want to be buried? He didn't even know. Or worse, he pictured a wife with no throat. How would she breathe? How would she eat? He swallowed. Would he have married her if he had known this would happen? And should he have married her if he wouldn't have?

He wished there were someone to ask, someone who could tell him how much love was the proper amount for a pair of newlyweds, how enthusiastic they should feel about their new duties and responsibilities, where they fell in the spectrum of human attachments. Did they talk to each other more than average? Less? Did they kiss enough? Fight too much? What mattered? He wished he were in China, where if there turned out to be something wrong with the marriage he could always take a concubine. That was a better system, he thought, more sure. Although now that he was thinking about it, he wondered if he would even know if something were wrong. For this was the odd thing — all his life, he'd known he would get married, and yet he'd never stopped to consider what it would be like once he was. Marriage, as he'd thought of it, was the end of a story, much like a Ph.D., except that the marriage story was shorter, and less work. Not that life wouldn't take up again, but it'd be in other realms. At home, the husband would command, the wife obey. They would find harmony under their pillows the way that children, New Year's morning, found chestnuts.

So he'd thought. But instead here he was, listening. Now she half turned, so that she faced away from him. He couldn't hear her at all. Had she stopped breathing? He sat up a little. A truck hitting a pothole, rumbling on. A distant radio, a soprano, very faint. He worked his pajama top out from under his back.

Nothing. He stilled himself, lay himself out, patient as land;

until finally, like a wandering rain, it came to him, not the sound he awaited, but something else, a recognition — that what he wanted more than anything was to secure her. He did not want her to float away into history, into the times, an upswelling of the masses. He wanted her to be permanent, an edifice whose piles touched the heart of the earth.

Still nothing. He got out of bed and crossed the cold aisle to hers, shivering. How attached he was already — it was frightening how attached — just to her sound and presence, to her simple animal company. To her ways of doing things — the way she rolled up the washcloths, the way she dusted with a feather duster. What a privilege it was to know another person's habits! To know when she set her hair. To know that she hid things. He wished she wouldn't hide things. But even so; yes, already he was attached. He could not imagine how he was going to feel in twenty years. And how about fifty? How was he going to let her walk around on the street then? He was going to want to keep her in a satin-lined box.

He fingered the hem of her pillowcase. The light in the room arced up to the ceiling, a half vault of stripes, below which he could almost make out the rise and fall of her body. Still he warmed his hands in his armpits; then gently picked up her head. It was heavy in his hands, and harder to grip than he'd expected — her hair. One of his thumbs slipped into the hol-iow of her ear. Yet he managed to turn her face back toward him. Ahh; her breathing again; better. She yawned, seemed to stir.

Had he awakened her? He froze, hunched over, listening.

Was she settling down?

He would count to ten, then move, he decided. One, he started, two.

But when eleven came he was still poised, waiting — holding his breath when she did, letting it go as she let hers.

With morning, though, once more came day. Ralph asked if Helen had something to tell him; and when it turned out that

there was nothing wrong (or nothing, at least, that she would admit), childish love turned into adolescent embarrassment turned into manly tyranny.

"This way," Ralph demonstrated, inhaling, exhaling. "Even. Do you see? You should breathe this way"

Helen mimicked him, timidly. "That one right?"

"Right" pronounced Ralph. "Again"

Helen did it again.

"Again," he commanded. "Again."

Helen thought a moment, then experimentally let her breath catch.

"No," said Ralph. "That wasn't right."

"Show me once more?" She tilted her head, and was pleased to see the pleasure with which Ralph authoritatively obliged.

So it went, back and forth, Ralph playing at husband, Helen at wife.

Later, the game over, Ralph approached Helen as she chopped vegetables. He had in the meantime gone to school to meet with his new advisor, who was not Pinkus — he missed Pinkus, who was consulting full-time now — but Pierce, a Professor Rodney S. Pierce, who with his greased goatee looked more like an artisan than an engineer. A bird-boned, finicky man. Anyway, Ralph had gone to meet with him, as he was supposed to, and had walked back, and now was supposed to be studying. And he would be, if Pierce's voice were not roaring in his ears. The ocean in a seashell. "Detail, Mr. Chang." So now what was he going to do? "It's a matter, shall we say, of inclination." Inclination. "There are engineers and there are engineers. I wouldn't presume to predict. But I should tell you. A favor, believe me. Nothing you don't realize yourself."