Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

Mrs. Jaffey had been the oldest teacher at the Garret A. Hobart Grammar School, and none of the other teachers had gotten on with her very well. She had intended to retire at the end of the semester anyhow. She was sixty-eight years old. According to Mr. Hillings the Principal she had taught at the school when it first opened up, forty-one years ago, in 1904.

He, Skip Stevens, had gotten along swell with Mrs. Jaffey. In fact, she had supervised his election to Class President, which entitled him to hold forth at assemblies in the name of Fifth Grade, plus honorary powers such as deciding when to water the Fifth Grade Vegetable Garden in back of the school. At that time he had been a beefy, large boy, with red hair and freckles, good at kickball during recess, the first out of the cafeteria at lunch time and onto the playing field.

Now, looking back, he realized that he had been a bully. Since he had outweighed the other boys, it had been a natural role; he did not feel guilt. Somebody had to be the bully, at that age.

As far as Mrs. Jaffey went, during her last months she had become too infirm and inobservant to bother anyone. By the time she had given up and gone downstairs to the nurse, he had had the run of the room. One day he had started a fire in the cloakroom. And once, when Mrs. Jaffey had left to go to the teachers’ washroom, he had dumped the wastebasket onto her desk.

Susan, re-emerging from the kitchen, holding an aluminum coffee pot, said, “Bruce, do you have your car? There’s no milk. I wonder if I could talk you into going down and getting a carton of milk. Here.” She sat down the coffee pot and went over to pick up her purse from the living room sofa. Handing him a fifty-cent piece she said, “There’s a grocery store down about four blocks, on the corner. What happened about you car wax? Did you get that cleared up?”

“Yes,” he said. “I closed the deal.” He did not accept the fifty-cent piece. But he started toward the front door.

“And when do you have to go back to Reno?”

“This evening,” he said.

“Oh good,” she said. “Then you don’t have to leave right away.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said, opening the door and going out onto the porch.

As he drove off, away from the house, he wondered to himself why he did not mind doing this. Errands, he thought. But it meant he could do something for her.

That pleased him.

Should it? he asked himself. Should I want to do something for her? A woman I feared…a young lady teacher who bawled me out, humiliated me in front of the class. Perhaps, he thought, I am re-entering the pattern. Obedience. Slavery. The inequality of childhood…

But he did not feel chained, compulsively following orders from her. He got a kick out of it; driving along in his Merc, searching for the grocery store, he felt important. Useful. To be depended on.

When he arrived back at the house, with the carton of milk, he found her in the living room. She had a fountain pen out, and was signing checks, grim-faced, with her lips drawn tightly together. That expression was strong in his memory: the tight, fierce resentment on her face. The lines crossing her forehead. She had put a shawl-like sweater over her shoulders, unbuttoned—a loose grandmotherish pink sweater, for warmth. The living room seemed cool to him, too. Dark and quiet and out of the sun. During his absence she had shut off the radio; the dance music no longer played. Without it, the house seemed older, more serious and sturdy. In her sweater she, too, seemed older. She had put shoes on, not the ones he had noticed in the yard, but a pair of saddle shoes. And white cotton bobby socks.

“Does your discount house sell typewriters?” she asked, without looking up. “Or did I ask you that.”

He carried the carton of milk into the kitchen. In addition to it he had bought a couple of bottles of Lucky Lager beer and a bag of cheese-flavored crackers. “We carry a few lines of portables,” he said. “No office models or electrics.”

Pushing a piece of folded-up shiny paper toward him she said, “See what you think of this.”

He read it over. It was an ad for a portable that used the new carbon ribbon.

“The salesmen come in,” Susan said. “They start giving us all the verbiage…honestly, the way they push the retailer around. Loading them up.”

“You have to fight back,” he said.

“We sell a few used machines. We just don’t have enough money to stock portables. If they’d give them to us on consignment…does it tell how much they want for this one?”

He saw no price on the ad, either wholesale or retail. “No,” he said.

“Thanks for getting the milk,” she said. Arising, she shut the checkbook, stuck the fountain pen away, and started past him. But then she halted, directly in front of him and very close to him, so that she breathed up into his face. For the first time he realized that she was much shorter than he. To talk to him while standing so close she had to look almost straight up. It gave her an imploring manner, as if she were begging him for something. “How can we make any profit if we don’t have any money to start out with? All we can do is meet the bills that come in for gas and lights. The Idaho Power Company really has us. And the paper and carbon paper we use—of course, we get it at cost. But still.” Standing in front of him, petitioning him, she seemed not only small, but bony and cold as well. Under her sweater her shoulders pulled forward, as if she were shivering. And all the time she kept her eyes fixed on his face.

He had never had an opportunity to see her this close up. It broke apart his memory of her. For one thing, he could tell that his life-long impression of her physical strength was erroneous; she had no more than any other woman, and he had always recognized that by and large, most women were delicate and even somewhat frail. And it seemed to him that she recognized it, too. But no doubt she always had. She had appeared mean and strong to them because first of all they had been so small, and, in addition, she had been angry at them, and it has been her job to terrify and badger and impress them. That was why the school board had chosen her; they needed a teacher that could keep the children in hand. Outside of her job, she had probably been like this even then. Yes, he thought, when he had later on delivered the paper to her house he had one day seen inside and noticed tiny china teacups on a table in the dining room. She had been serving tea to lady friends. It had not jibed with his image of her. So his image had always been false.

She padded past him, across the carpet, her shoes making no sound. “Oh,” she said, “I’ll bet you got homogenized milk. I should have told you to get the regular, so we can pour off the cream.” She opened the brown paper bag and saw the beer. “Beer,” she said.

“It’s a warm day,” he said, with nervousness.

“You did get regular milk,” she said, lifting out the carton.

“That’s right,” he said.

“Do you want coffee?”

“I’d rather have beer.”

“No beer for me. I can never drink beer.” At the drainboard she produced an opener and opened his beer bottle for him. She poured him a glassful and held it out to him. “What did you think of the R & J Mimeographing Service?” she said.

“Seemed very nice at first glance. Modern.”

She said, “Would you look over the office and tell me what you think we ought to do? I know you have experience we don’t have.”

Taken by surprise he could say nothing.

“Do you know what I wish?” she said. “I wish you’d take it over and run it. You could put in a line of portables. Then at Christmas when everybody else is making money we’d have something to sell.” With intensity she glared up at him, her eyes small. “I mean it. While you were gone I thought about it. Zoe is no good at all; I have to get rid of her. I’m going to anyhow. Each of us has three thousand dollars in it; that’s all. Just six thousand dollars in all. The settlement I reached with Walt gives me just about that. I was going to pay off this house, but what I think I’ll do—what I really want to do—is buy out Zoe and run the office myself. Then you can take it over and do what you want. Maybe I can make a deal with the bank and borrow enough so you can put in portables, or if you don’t want to do that, you can put in whatever else you want.”