Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

“Yes,” he said. He hadn’t left anything at the motel. “But are you sure you want to do this?” To him it seemed a big step.

“I know I do,” she said, opening the front door. “It’s perfectly natural; I’m surprised we didn’t think of it earlier.” Pausing, she said over her shoulder, “Unless you feel squeamish about it.”

“Squeamish,” he echoed. “How?”

“I guess you don’t. Embarrassed, maybe I mean. We’re going to be together all the time anyhow. In a small business with just two people—you’re used to a big outfit, aren’t you? A small business is much more personal, almost like a family.”

At one time he had worked for a drugstore that employed only one clerk, in addition to himself as stockboy. So he knew.

“I’m pretty easy to get along with,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said, “because I’m not. I have moods. I get depressed. When you came here yesterday I was having one of my depressed periods. But you snapped me out of it.” In a spontaneous flurry, she caught hold of his sleeve and tugged him along with her, down the path to the car. “You’re good therapy for me,” she told him over her shoulder.

Within the hour he found himself installed in a high-ceilinged bedroom, his suitcases and boxes piled up on the floor off to one side and his clothes hanging in the closet. His shaving gear was put away in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, along with his squeeze bottle of deodorant, hairbrush, toothbrush, and all the rest of the little bottles and tubes and tins.

By now Susan’s child had gone to bed. The TV set was off. The house, with just him and Susan up and about, had become informal to a degree new to him; he had never known such an absence of pressure on him.

The two of them sat in the living room, relaxing. Presently Susan started hearkening back to her days as a school teacher. It seemed always in the back of her mind.

“I was still teaching when I met Pete,” she said. “Taffy’s Dad. That was in 1949. He wanted me to quit, and I did when Taffy came along. And we moved from Montario to Boise.” From a bureau drawer she brought forth a huge scrapbook. Seated beside him she turned pages, showing him snapshots and documents from the near past. “My sixth grade class at Garret A. Hobart in 1948,” she said, pointing to a print.

At last he got to see the class picture for the fifth grade of 1945, his class. Sure enough, his fat round face peered from the second row. There he was, one of a number of grumpy, stodgy-looking small boys, lost among his peers and certainly so different in appearance from now that no one would make the connection. In fact, had he not known this print, he would have failed to recognize himself or even be aware that he was somewhere among the faces. Both he and Susan studied the class picture. There she was, quite easy to spot; she stood to one side, rigid and formal, with a smile, her eyes partly shut because of the bright sun. Wearing her suit with the big buttons…astonishing, he thought, to see this picture again. A copy had belonged to him but his mother had gotten it years ago; he had not seen it since that time.

And, in the photograph, Miss Reuben as she was then, in 1945, but not as he remembered her. He saw only a very pretty, muscular young woman, smartly-dressed, somewhat thin, with anxious lines around her eyes and mouth. A worrier, he thought. Tense, ferociously conscious of the responsibility of managing a class. Perhaps too tense. Too concerned. He remembered that one day a boy had been cut badly on a broken pop bottle during recess; Miss Reuben had run for the nurse, and although she had brought the nurse at once, and managed to get the other children to return to their business, she had been forced to go off by herself for awhile, and even then, even as fifth graders, they had been aware of her near-hysteria. She had stood gripping her handkerchief, her back to everybody, poking at her eyes and nose. At that time, of course, it had made them all giggle. They had barely been able to restrain their mirth.

While he sat studying the picture he saw beneath it, in microscopic print, the names of the students. Sure enough, there was his name: Bruce Stevens. However, Susan did not notice. She had started recalling other events and was no longer interested in the page.

“I never should have given up teaching,” she said. “But I just wasn’t suited for it. I used to come home shaking from head to foot. The noise and confusion. It always gave me a headache. Children running in all directions. Pete said I had no aptitude for dealing with children. He said I was too neurotic. Maybe he was right. That’s one of the reasons why we split up. We couldn’t agree on how to raise Taffy.”

“What’s he doing now?” he asked, turning the page to obscure his name.

Susan said, “He’s in Chicago. I don’t have any idea what he’s doing. He was an engineering student when I met him. I was twenty-six and he as twenty-five.”

“How old were you when you started teaching?” he said.

“Let’s see,” she said. “I started in Tampa, Florida. In 1943. I remember, because the Battle of Stalingrad was going on the month I first had a class of my own. I was nineteen.”

“What about when you first started at Garret A. Hobart?”

She said, “It was 1945, so I was twenty-one.”

So she was exactly ten years older than he. She was thirty-four, now. About what he had thought.

“I’ve never seen any of those little people since,” Susan said. “They just vanished. Thirteen years ago…they must be almost grown up by now. My lord, they would be grown up; they were eleven or so then, so they’d be twenty-four years old now. Married, and some of them with children.” She got a pensive expression on her face. “Some of them could have children starting to school. That would be stretching it, though. But it makes you stop and think.”

“It’s a long thirteen years between eleven and twenty-four,” he said.

“Very important. But when I look back it doesn’t seem to have made very much difference as far as I’m concerned. Twenty-one to thirty-four. But I shouldn’t say that. Here I have Taffy, and I’ve been married and divorced twice! So I don’t mean that. But I feel the same. I don’t feel I’ve changed much inside during that period. I suppose I look different.” She turned back to re-examine the picture of herself taken in 1945.

“I don’t think you look much different,” he said. And certainly she did not.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s a very nice compliment.”

“I mean it,” he said.

She closed the scrapbook. “I feel so discouraged,” she said. “I don’t mean right now; I mean in general, these last few years. When two marriages have failed…you always wonder if it’s you. I know it was me. Pete said I did nothing but brood and worry, and Walt didn’t tell me that, but he might as well have; he said I treated everything as a crisis. He said I have a crisis mentality. I fear calamity any moment. Like Henny Penny. The sky is falling…do you recall?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And they both feel I’m imparting it to Taffy.” Turning toward him she said urgently, “That’s why I need somebody around me who’s cheerful and easy-going and takes things in his stride. Like you.”

“I don’t think necessarily you’re imparting anything like that to Taffy,” he said, thinking that after all she had terrorized him for a year, left a permanent impression in his mind, and yet he had emerged, survived it, arrived at adulthood in an optimistic mood. Was that not proof that she had done no real harm? Of course, he thought, maybe I’m just lucky. And he also thought, Maybe there is damage to me, down under the surface. I just don’t know it. I haven’t seen it.