Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

She wore two green plaid flannel shirts and a thin torn jacket. Like Fenstad, she wore no gloves. Her jeans were patched, and she gave off a strong smell, something like hay, Fenstad thought, mixed with tar and sweat. He looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing penny loafers with no socks. Coins, old pennies, were in both shoes; the leather was wet and cracked. He looked in the woman’s face. Under a hat that seemed to collapse on either side of her head, her face was thin and chalk-white except for the fatigue lines under her eyes. The eyes themselves were bright blue, beautiful, and crazy. To Fenstad, she looked desperate, percolating slightly with insanity, and he was about to say so to his mother when the woman bent down toward him and said, “Mister, can you spare any money?”

Involuntarily, Fenstad looked toward the kitchen, hoping that the manager would spot this person and take her away. When he looked back again, his mother was taking her blue coat off, wriggling in the booth to free her arms from the sleeves. Stopping and starting again, she appeared to be stuck inside the coat; then she lifted herself up, trying to stand, and with a quick, quiet groan slipped the coat off. She reached down and folded the coat over and held it toward the woman. “Here,” she said. “Here’s my coat. Take it before my son stops me.”

“Mother, you can’t.” Fenstad reached forward to grab the coat, but his mother pulled it away from him.

When Fenstad looked back at the woman, her mouth was open, showing several gray teeth. Her hands were outstretched, and he understood, after a moment, that this was a posture of refusal, a gesture saying no, and that the woman wasn’t used to it and did it awkwardly. Fenstad’s mother was standing and trying to push the coat toward the woman, not toward her hands but lower, at waist level, and she was saying, “Here, here, here, here.” The sound, like a human birdcall, frightened Fenstad, and he stood up quickly, reached for his wallet, and removed the first two bills he could find, two twenties. He grabbed the woman’s chapped, ungloved left hand.

“Take these,” he said, putting the two bills in her icy palm, “for the love of God, and please go.”

He was close to her face. Tonight he would pray for her. For a moment the woman’s expression was vacant. His mother was still pushing the coat at her, and the woman was unsteadily bracing herself. The woman’s mouth was open, and her stagnant-water breath washed over him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re my little baby cousin.”

“Go away, please,” Fenstad said. He pushed at her. She turned, clutching his money. He reached around to put his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “Ma,” he said, “she’s gone now. Mother, sit down. I gave her money for a coat.” His mother fell down on her side of the booth, and her blue coat rolled over on the bench beside her, showing the label and the shiny inner lining. When he looked up, the woman who had been begging had disappeared, though he could still smell her odor, an essence of wretchedness.

“Excuse me, Harry,” his mother said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She rose and walked toward the front of the restaurant, turned a corner, and was out of sight. Fenstad sat and tried to collect himself. When the waiter came, a boy with an earring and red hair in a flattop, Fenstad just shook his head and said, “More tea.” He realized that his mother hadn’t taken off her earmuffs, and the image of his mother in the ladies’ room with her earmuffs on gave him a fit of uneasiness. After getting up from the booth and following the path that his mother had taken, he stood outside the ladies’-room door and, when no one came in or out, he knocked. He waited for a decent interval. Still hearing no answer, he opened the door.

His mother was standing with her arms down on either side of the first sink. She was holding herself there, her eyes following the hot water as it poured from the tap around the bright porcelain sink down into the drain, and she looked furious. Fenstad touched her and she snapped toward him.

“Your logic!” she said.

He opened the door for her and helped her back to the booth. The second cup of tea had been served, and Fenstad’s mother sipped it in silence. They did not converse. When she had finished, she said, “All right. I do feel better now. Let’s go.”

At the curb in front of her apartment building he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Pick me up next Tuesday,” she said. “I want to go back to that class.” He nodded. He watched as she made her way past the security guard at the front desk; then he put his car into drive and started home.

That night he skated in the dark for an hour with his friend Susan, the pharmacist. She was an excellent skater; they had met on the ice. She kept late hours and, like Fenstad, enjoyed skating at night. She listened attentively to his story about his mother and the woman in the restaurant. To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn’t believe in giving advice, even when asked.

The following Tuesday, Fenstad’s mother was again in the back row next to York Follette. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was flickering, which gave the room, Fenstad thought, a sinister quality, like a debtors’ prison or a refuge for the homeless. He’d been thinking about such people for the entire week. For seven days now he had caught whiffs of the woman’s breath in the air, and one morning, Friday, he thought he caught a touch of the rotten-celery smell on his own breath, after a particularly difficult sales meeting.

Tonight was how-to night. The students were expected to stand at the front of the class and read their papers, instructing their peers and answering questions if necessary. Starting off, and reading her paper in a frightened monotone, Mrs. Nelson told the class how to bake a cheese soufflé. Arlene Fisher’s paper was about mushroom hunting. Fenstad was put off by the introduction. “The advantage to mushrooms,” Arlene Fisher read, “is that they are delicious. The disadvantage to mushrooms is that they can make you sick, even die.” But then she explained how to recognize the common shaggymane by its cylindrical cap and dark tufts; she drew a model on the board. She warned the class against the Clitocybe illudens , the Jack-o’-Lantern. “Never eat a mushroom like this one or any mushroom that glows in the dark. Take heed!” she said, fixing her gaze on the class. Fenstad saw his mother taking rapid notes. Harold Ronson, the mechanic, reading his own prose painfully and slowly, told the class how to get rust spots out of their automobiles. Again Fenstad noticed his mother taking notes. York Follette told the class about the proper procedures for laying down attic insulation and how to know when enough was enough, so that a homeowner wouldn’t be robbed blind, as he put it, by the salesmen, in whose ranks he had once counted himself.

Barb Kjellerud had brought along a cassette player, and told the class that her hobby was ballroom dancing; she would instruct them in the basic waltz. She pushed the PLAY button on the tape machine, and “Tales from the Vienna Woods” came booming out. To the accompaniment of the music she read her paper, illustrating, as she went, how the steps were to be performed. She danced alone in front of them, doing so with flair. Her blond hair swayed as she danced, Fenstad noticed. She looked a bit like a contestant in a beauty contest who had too much personality to win. She explained to the men the necessity of leading. Someone had to lead, she said, and tradition had given this responsibility to the male. Fenstad heard his mother snicker.

When Barb Kjellerud asked for volunteers, Fenstad’s mother raised her hand. She said she knew how to waltz and would help out. At the front of the class she made a counterclockwise motion with her hand, and for the next minute, sitting at the back of the room, Fenstad watched his mother and one of the sanitation workers waltzing under the flickering fluorescent lights.