Women and Men (159 page)

"Stop pedaling and coast."

"Like this," called Sarah.

The boy was staying in front of her and on the turn nearly went over into the pedestrian path where people were passing with a transistor.

What book was the mother reading? She would be just as well-dressed on the subway in the morning. She wasn’t comfortable with the book, but it wasn’t the book; it was how time that she was spending was occupying her. He tried to repeat the thought. Possessing her. He looked at his watch. Two dollars, two-fifty. Next Sunday, double that for the same amount of time.

The boy wanted to stop; he’d done many circuits and other people were in the parking lot now, and he wanted to stop.

"Sarah, want a drink?" He thought she called back yes. The boy now coasting up past his mother looked toward him; the boy had an idea how to stop; he slowed way down, way down, then let the bike go over and jumped clear.

He looked down at his machine. He came and sat down on the curb.

He was close enough to be spoken to quietly so the mother didn’t hear: "Say, you better get it out of the way there."

The boy shrugged.

"I’ll show you how to stop."

The woman was watching. Sarah called.

He held the bike with the boy on it and got him to balance with his feet on the pedals, then drop one foot to the ground. The woman watched.

"But you got to be moving," said the boy.

When the time came you didn’t really think.

Sarah was watching too, but she was in motion coming round the bottom turn by the cafeteria path; she wasn’t watching where she was going, yet he saw that she’d made the turn and was approaching slowly. The boy looked back over his shoulder like a motorist.

Two other kids racing each other came up behind Sarah and it was a sideswipe squeeze, close enough to bump her knees or lock axles—well hardly—and when they got past her she seemed released as if other hands had been on her handlebars, and luckily no one else was coming up behind her for she turned across toward her father just as—he didn’t believe it—the black boy he was holding up suddenly decided to take off—the face would have been worth seeing—he staggered against the absence. But Sarah had forgotten how to stop or was thinking of something else, or maybe had been aiming for the black boy who wasn’t there.

"Daddy," she called, and he found he couldn’t get out of the way, and they would both have fallen if he hadn’t braced himself and caught her head-on by the handlebars.

She got off the bike. He was holding it.

She showed him where the wheel rubbed against the fender. She wanted something to drink.

She asked if they could go on the road next time. He said sure if she thought she was ready. She asked when she could ride one of the bikes with thin tires. He said those bikes were too big; she said no; he said they had hand brakes.

Maybe, she said (making a joke), they would just go on renting a different bike every week.

The thought consumed him. All those bikes. A chain of bikes. The city’s endless claim. But Sarah’s childhood was not endless.

But which was the thought that consumed him?

Sarah’s mother, ten blocks closer to the park, would say—he knew what she would say—Be a hero, if you want to shell out the money; but why buy her a bike now?

Well, he wanted the kid to have her own bike. But she would soon outgrow it, wherever it was at this moment. Well, what was money? No— he meant, what was it exactly? Like time, it had a claim on him to be used and not to go unused. These rental bikes had no reflectors apparently. His Raleigh had three red, two orange. He saw himself lifting the wheels out of the frame, holding the chain off the rear wheel’s gears, flagging cabs until he got one to stop—disembarking uptown, fixing his wheels back in, and renting a bike for Sarah.

Money was time—or had used to be, when there was money, before money had disappeared into an expanding cloud whose only bearable promise was that money might vanish into psychic barter. Well, if time was money, time spent thinking without success about how to avoid wasting money was money wasted. The thought was worth something. A medium of exchange. But hold on—the black woman had stood up to stretch—her head went one way, her hips the other—if wealth was a claim on someone else’s labor, what was he able to claim here but somebody’s exertion getting a bike out of the shed, and what was he paying for but someone to take his money and his identifying credit card and make an enterprising note of the time? Dumb question. Inflated thought. He felt himself—it made no sense at all—the most silent person in a radius of fifty miles. Dumb feeling, he thought. But then he remembered he was getting also the labor expended in order to buy the bikes—house them—fix them. He felt the sequence. He fitted into it. The owner couldn’t ride all those bikes—now or someday or once.

"Let’s take the bike back first," said Sarah.

How about a long-term lease at a lower rate? Or a quitrent!

Sarah was saying she wanted—Sunday dinner, he thought—a hot dog, taco chips, and an orange drink. Mark’s mother had her hands on her hips— if she was his mother—as she watched Mark pass. "What the man say to you?"

Listen, the rental people exerted a claim on
your
labor; for your labor such as it was was where you got the cash to pay.

But Sarah’s claim was greater and she wasn’t paying.

In fact, he paid the rental people so that he would then be
able
to give Sarah his labor.

O.K. But
give?

Say he rented
her?

When good neighbor Sally had rung the buzzer last night and had said to Sarah, "Darling,
might
I borrow your father for ten minutes?" Sarah had said, "Nothing doing." Her new phrase.

He remembered that the park cafeteria had beer. Sarah wheeled her bike. He looked at his watch and Sarah looked up at him and he thought he knew what she was going to say, but he was wrong. She said, "We’re both walking."

What did it cost Sarah to rent
him?

"You and Mommy would never slap me on the face," she said.

They were passing Mark’s mother when Mark came up and skidded to a stop.

"That’s great, man, you’ve done it all—ride, start, stop—all the first time."

"Well it isn’t the first time I forked out a dollar and a half an hour for a bike," said the woman. "Mark, you thank the man for helping you."

The book was a book of modern plays.

"Let’s go," said Sarah.

They crossed the pedestrian path on their way to the bike rental, and he got a whiff of mustard and meat. "You never forget how to ride a bike once you’ve learned," he said.

"That’s a likely story," said Sarah.

Sarah thought she would not go on the road next time after all but have one more time in the parking lot.

Good, if that was what she wanted.

And would he ride with her in the parking lot?

Sure.

THE HERMIT-INVENTOR OF NEW YORK, THE ANASAZI HEALER, AND THE UNKNOWN ABORTER

The grandson, who had refrained from asking if a certain skinny geezer that came and went one summer day
was
the man or weird character in question, would recall his grandmother’s remark—history, prediction, regret, relief—that there were things about the Hermit-Inventor not even she knew; for the grandson said, and at once recalled saying, that there was maybe stuff the Hermit-Investor didn’t know about the Anasazi
healefs
discoveries.

Oh that must be so, the grandmother averred, with a pensiveness not humorous this time, yet embracing but never equal to a knowledge they both had that the grandson would know things about these her fabled history and lands that she herself did not. Wasn’t this because she had always been so near to him, he to her?—yes: down the street of a New Jersey town’s seasons from the late-spring morning when light shared itself with him, shored from the tiers and banks and steep slopes of foliage seen from his own third-floor room when he would stay with his grandparents, or seen from his grandmother’s own second-floor bedroom (where once he had learned to whistle), prime green-sea mass of waves of maple-bough leaves that crowded the porch as if the trees were mysteriously withheld, all but their leaves, which so surrounded the dining-room windows of his grandparents’ house that lawn and dirt-ground and driveway and the raised sidewalks of Throckmorton Street where it crossed West Main all just flickered as if through the fine wings of butterflies known by name or as if precipitating the broken motions and real flow of these sidewalks’ own brown and slate lozenges, on, on to autumn’s first intuition that winter had been in its mind all along (we mean
chill)
when the boy, who was like a man and felt somewhat that way, left his own house for school; left always later than his kid brother always in haste yet with the leisure of those young years no matter what the weather (while the kid brother curiously hated and could burst with rage at the lunatic winds that visited the street during just six or seven January days, unlike the tougher elder brother), who came out of their now motherless house a hundred yards down the street from their grandparents’—and, on instinct that morning as he was turning at the end of the flagstone walk toward downtown, he glanced back in the direction of his grandmother’s house to find her there—a watchman or, in the midst of everything, a live eye—there diagonally up the street on the far side as if something in his head way in advance had been seeing her there but she hadn’t gotten the message until now, a figure who waved like a mother seeing him off to school, where he was a regular person and a husky, friendly guy, etcetera, nothing odd about him, he’d leave that to others in and out of his family: yet now seeing his grandmother standing by a pillar of her porch, her hands clasped, he registered some rift in the scheme as an extension of it, economy of scale long before he knew those words (which years later like many others seemed to have been waiting for him inside him)—only that that grandmother woman, whom he had fallen out with after recently doubting for the first time her old but secretly always mounting stories, doubting because they began to flicker as more than stories and to bear queerly upon his life so that he had to think that if an event
then
that was so like here and now wound
up
like that, things here will too—ugh ugh ugh and shoot and shit but it sounds silly!—was waving him ("downstreet," as you said in that town like "downwind") off to school from that home of hers that he loved and sometimes lived in, and not this other home of his own at the other end of this flagged walk less than a regulation championship pool’s length behind him his father’s house, his departed mother’s undervalued house, and his
own
(an early real-estate insight belonging to him as freshly and clearly as in later years the house never seemed to), from which he had just emerged (for yes he did feel the exposure), with a gray-with-white-trim porch one step lower than the porch of his grandparents’ white house, "his grandmother’s," up the street: yet his own porch had dark, earth-damp, min-erally aromatic room under it to store two or three (in fact two and a half) rakes and some crates and a litter of forgettable junk and an occasional eavesdropping boy and a lawnmower that you made into a congenial machine between your force and the sweet sluggish-grown growth of the grass that didn’t feel very grassy green when you were pushing through it: a house with, above that porch, a ruffled tangle of dry, dark, indestructible ivy running up and around the porch posts sticking by some adhesive, some type of time, and pretty only at a distance, but a porch not with the everlasting paint smell in one specific corner of his grandparents’ porch, the corner behind the all-weather wicker-white chair (with kind of webbed legs, roostery-furred legs, if you know what we meant at the wordless time this was thought) in which his grandfather sometimes but not in this weather or at this hour of the day sat with a tome of the Century
Dictopedia
(as he said it, open under a pearl-handled magnifier which he fingered and looked less
through
than
at,
murmuring that this way you could see double:) while this school morning, whether because alone and watched, or from a mental wind from her, to her, a very grandmother-wind if you will, the opposite of that supposed ill wind (yay) Danny Kaye sang of in one of those nutty movie numbers as the identical-twin celebrity-extrovert—or in fact mistral (of the largely unknown boy-man’s later years when we lived to Change or talk non-judgmentally of Change late into the night show and mistral became miztral); but did this grandmother-wind, like nor’easter or sou’wester (also a rain gear in the overall weather machine’s sluice-drive continuum), come
from?
or did it "go
to?"
(as Shakespeare in high school said, while Jim and friends snickered, "Go to"—"How now, Gratiano?"— "How now, my lord, wilt hear this piece of work?"—"Come hither, sit by me"—"Go to, thou varlet")—for this wind, grandmother or ill or other—or mother—moved this morning across his broadening shoulders from left to right pushing him to turn squads-right upon achieving the main sidewalk which he was going to do anyway toward school which is beyond the other, far end of town, and he thereupon turned
against
this momentum, only to find, up the street, his grandmother on her own porch waving, as his mother sometimes more slowly would from
her
window if she was awake and in position to and had she now still been among the living if in all probability suicidal:

C
UT,
said the man who played the director in a picture about Hollywood that was showing one weekend in Windrow, New Jersey; but you kept watching; the movie went on, the screen didn’t go blank on you with consequent whistling and stamping as if the audience were trying to get out: Cut yourself in on what someone else is doing, a woman coming home, saying hello, waving goodbye or was it good morning, or just good, practically speaking, off there, until you can’t tell if her scale is inside or all around her, like your own according to the powerful woman Mayn visited in the Bronx years later not because he wanted his
own
auras read but to get information on someone else, and there the locally famous woman, who was unexpectedly pregnant, leaning back thoughtful on one arm of her armchair, told him she do
him
but not gonna talk about someone else, some lady he said come to see her: Cut, to the grandmother waving slowly, not at all trying to be his mother (it came to him), but being herself, which didn’t rule out being at his house when he and his little brother got home from school, Brad earlier, Jim at dusk, a tall, surprisingly soft woman, although quiet somewhere inside her, for he understood one day that they had this understanding not to pry—let some feelings, some of the past, go unknown although wasn’t it true that it would always come out? and he waved back to this grandmother of his who’s way up the street there on the opposite side—she’s got
her
life thank you—as if this morning salute happened always or, looking ahead to when another event that felt sort of laid out, used to happen oh twenty years
later
in the century, and his own wife marveled that he accepted this odd event, namely, meeting just like that on a city street a very specific person from years past and on the spur of the moment taking for granted that here came this person he hadn’t seen in several years, but—well, walking down a street in New York’s Greenwich Village past a bike shop all metal, glass, and color and with a quarter ton of maroon newness in it, perhaps because of a great cold red English bike frame that, as he had not noticed knowingly before, is a plane figure in space, a near parallelogram stronger with sides and an angle or two gone on to a kiltered inertia of vector-time elegant and ready that always waited for it, a bike frame detached from all wheels applicable in future and hanging near a soft-blue French Motobecane completely assembled so the blue warmed the shining saddle as much as did the sunlight, he reflected upon a harshly curious interview he had just smiled, factored, and chatted his way through with a maverick meteorologist, only now to get run down by two small laughing kids escaping their mother who’s at the door of a brick-faced bank
just
as he met a russet-bearded man (economist) not knowingly seen by him in seven years, and (here’s the point) said directly, "Hi, Cliff," as if years were days, and nodded with a smile and passed on down the street for
another
seven, ten, twelve years—as if (did we say?) it had been laid out—