Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

After propping herself up, Patsy dazedly took off her blouse and put on a T-shirt, the clothes feeling like dream-stuff to her, dream-clothes on her suddenly clammy skin. Very tentatively, she stood up, grasping the windowsill for balance. She was okay. Rather quickly, she felt fine. She knew that it was eighteen minutes after one o’clock without looking at her watch. The electric shock had done that to her. She would never need a watch again in her life. She would always know what time it was. She went into Mary Esther’s room; with the shades drawn, even in this heat, the baby was still sleeping soundly, making tiny baby-snores. When she looked outside through the dusty glass, she saw the Bruckner Buick balloon above the treetops, and, on the front lawn, sitting next to his bicycle, Gordy Himmelman, holding the side of his broken head. Was she hallucinating again? No, he was back. Now he was always back.

Through the thick blanket of heat, she navigated her way out to where Gordy Himmelman was sitting. She didn’t think he had brought his gun this time. Where the bruises were, he had swelled up. He looked like a cartoon of a man with a toothache, or a boxer after eight rounds. As she approached him, she couldn’t think of what to say or what to do. So she just stood there in front of him.

“Don’t nobody around here ever wear shoes?” Gordy Himmelman asked, not looking up.

Patsy looked down at her feet. “Guess not.” Then she added, “It’s summertime.”

He nodded in agreement. “Okay,” he said pleasantly, pounding the grass with his fist. You could convince him with logic.

“Hi,” she replied. She sat down on the lawn next to him. She noticed that he gave off a powerful smell of rotting sugar beets, or vegetables left forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. “I was in the basement,” she said. “Just now. There’s a bad dehumidifier down there, it’s not grounded or something, and the electric shock. . I was. . it threw me to the floor. I didn’t know electricity could do that. I was almost. .” She couldn’t think of the word. It was nineteen minutes past one. Now it was twenty minutes past one.

“Yeah?”

“I was almost. .”

“Killed?”

“Yes. No. Killed with electricity. But there’s a word. .”

“Electric-chaired.”

“No, that’s not the word.” She thought she would faint again, so she put her head between her knees. The blood rushed to her brain. “ Electrocuted. I finally remembered it. Gordy, what are you doing here?”

“Dude.” He shook his head with exasperation. “Everybody keeps asking me that. Can’t I have some company?”

“So what else is happening, besides you?” Patsy asked, interested suddenly in all aspects of life. “You didn’t bring that gun again, did you?”

“She hid it. Hey, I saw a rat on my way over here,” he said. “Crossing the road in broad daylight. That’s what’s new. Homeless, on account of they filled in the dump. It was looking sickly. You ever see a rat dancing in broad daylight?”

No, she never had. They sat out on the lawn for another five minutes, saying nothing, Gordy pulling up little bits of grass, the two of them making small adjustments on the lawn so that they would stay in the shade, until Saul and Harold returned, both of them soaked in sweat and smelling like dogs, and Saul loaded Gordy and his bicycle back into the car and drove him home again, this time without incident. By that time, it was twelve minutes after two.

During the fall and winter, Mary Esther, whom they often called Emmy now, grew so rapidly and easily that her parents could not always believe their good fortune in having such a child. She was a mild, sweet-tempered baby, given to smiles and careful listening with her eyes wide open and her head slightly tilted in concentration. She only seemed to cry when there was something specific she wanted — food, or a diaper change, or sleep. Her screaming always appeared to have a rational purpose. She did not cry — as Delia informed Saul that he had done — for no particular reason, or for the pleasure of sheer temperamental discharge. When Emmy was eight months old, in November, her verbal sounds already seemed to be on the verge of becoming words, and she looked at her parents with such intelligence and full comprehension that at certain times Saul felt his privacy violated. Through some means that he could not imagine, his daughter had already acquired — he was certain of this — an ability to read his mind.

The house with loose brown aluminum siding was now too small for the three of them. Saul and Patsy were getting in one another’s way. That physical congestion had been a pleasure when they were first married, but now it was not. And the problem with mice in the basement was no longer a pretext for comedy. Besides, they did not want to be renters anymore to a landlord like Mr. Munger, the unsuccessful Pentecostal evangelist whose raptures, it was said, were unconvincing. To make ends meet, he worked as an electrician. He had come to fix the ungrounded humidifier and talked without conviction about Jesus.

During the time that they had been in Five Oaks, the farm fields near their house had been purchased by a developer from Ann Arbor, and on all sides of their rental property, apartments and condos and housing projects were springing up in fields where cows had once grazed and soybeans had been planted. Mr. Munger had not yet sold his property to the developers, but it was just a matter of time before he did. After a week of indecision, Saul and Patsy finally purchased a house on Whitefeather Road two miles closer to downtown than their rental house had been. A two-story economy-sized colonial on a good-sized lot in a development called The Uplands, the house had large front and back yards and a shady tree in front, and with some contributions from Patsy’s parents for the down payment, they had calculated that they could afford it, though just barely. Patsy found it curious, or mortifying, that she, a loan officer at the bank, had had to apply for a loan in exactly the way everyone else did.

They moved in in October. Saul took two personal days off from teaching American history to help Patsy unpack their earthly possessions — the furniture, the kitchen utensils, the posters, the board games, including the Scrabble set — and arrange the house. Patsy herself had taken two days’ leave from the bank branch where she now worked. Emmy’s room on the second floor looked north, where, in the distance, the Wolverine Outlet Mall was still visible, as was the Bruckner Buick plasticene polar bear, which their daughter also loved to see from the car. In the mornings, she would stand up in her crib and gaze out the window at the Bruckner Buick blimp balloon, which was usually observable on clear days to the east of the outlet mall.

After her first word, “Wzzat,” and her second word, “Mama,” her next word was “Dadda.” Her seventh or eighth word was “Gordy.”

Gordy had continued to show up intermittently on Saul and Patsy’s front lawn when they still lived in the rented house with loose brown aluminum siding. At first they were alarmed at his arrivals and would try to get him to go home. After four or five visits, however, they began to get used to him. Sometimes they gave him odd jobs to do, which he would either try to perform or not, depending on his mood and skills. A few times they paid him, and he looked at the money they handed to him with disbelief and incomprehension. He never thanked them or expressed any gratitude.

They had both given up trying to discover the purpose of his visits. After asking him what he wanted or what they could do for him and receiving no comprehensible answer, they didn’t persist. Saul called Brenda Bagley, and if she happened to be at home, she would tell him to send Gordy back if he was being a pest. He wasn’t a pest, exactly, but you couldn’t ask him anymore why he was there, because the question had become metaphysical. It was like trying to ask a dog why it followed you around.