Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“In Five Oaks? That’s a good one. You’ve gotten kind of moody yourself, Ma.”

“Me? You still eat meat, don’t you? You haven’t turned into one of these vegetarians?” She dropped two of the steaks into the cart and gazed down the grocery aisle toward the dairy products. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “ I’m not sitting up watching television and sitting around all day, Saul. I’m not making trips all over the country.”

“My seeing you doesn’t have a purpose? Seeing my mother? That’s a hell of a thing to say. It’s summertime. Besides, I’m not in your way. You don’t have a job or anything.”

She banged the shopping cart into his hip, as a nudge. “Well, I know you do have a purpose, being here. And I certainly do have a job. I work. You just don’t know what it is that I do. Do you? No, you don’t. I go to an office four times a week, Saul, where I. .” She nodded to herself. “Oh, never mind. It’s nice, that I have a job, a serious job, and you don’t know what it is. You don’t keep yourself informed. Don’t have a ghost of a clue, do you, honey? You don’t ask.” She turned around to look at him. “What do you mean, I’ve gotten moody?”

“I’m your son,” Saul said. “I can tell.” Shoppers passed them quickly. The two of them, mother and adult son, were becalmed in a sea of shoppers passing by them in waves. “So what’s this job? What’s going on with you, Ma?”

Delia had been looking straight ahead of her, and all at once she flinched. “What’s going on with me? I’m hanging by a thread. Oh, look. Somebody fell.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Up there.” She pointed toward the dairy products and the case for frozen foods. “Somebody fell up there.”

Saul looked in the direction where she was pointing and saw a man on the floor. He was reasonably well dressed, and Saul was quickly ashamed of himself for thinking that people who fell to the floor in public places were always shabby. Anyone could fall to the floor. Saul himself could do so; he was quite capable of it. The man had apparently slipped on some wet linoleum tiles — there was a standing yellow hazard marker just off to the left with a little silhouette figure of a falling person on it — and by the time Saul got there, being careful of his own footing, the man was already on his knees, and then, with Saul’s help, on his feet. “My mistake,” the man said, in apology. Next to where he had fallen there stood, in the center aisle, a pyramid display of canned tomatoes with their brightly dark red labels, and after the man thanked Saul, he brushed himself off and went on his way, carrying a frozen dinner he had picked up from the floor. Saul stayed where he was. He could not take his eyes off the display. The red of the labels was magnetic, visually fixating. Tomato cans! He was unable to look at anything else. People and things passed by him. More bland music of some sort drizzled down from the ceiling speakers — small, drabby, synthetic music — as Saul felt himself sucked wholly into the blood-red colors on the cans.

When he finally came to his senses, his mother was beside him. “A mitzvah,” she said. “Good for you. What’s with those cans, Saul?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They look like. . never mind. Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, at the checkout line, his mother turned toward him and smiled again. “Oh, I know it’s hard doing this with me. It’s no fun, is it, all grown up and still going to the grocery store with your mother. I just thought it would give us something to do.”

Saul unloaded the grocery cart, lost in thought, watching his mother take out her checkbook. She did it with a restrained bossiness. Down through the years, she had carried on her life without altering it very much for Saul’s, or Howie’s, benefit. Her feminism was personal and private and therefore eccentric, and she had formed the habit of resenting men as a class because her husband had died and left her alone with two sons. Solitude had made her flirty at first, and then impersonal. Getting anything personal out of her was like trying to open a tuna fish can with your thumbs. Saul and Howie had their worlds, she had hers. And the boys shared a guilt with their father, because, one by one, they would grow up and abandon her, which was what males did. Either they died or they took off. In Delia’s version of things, male adulthood was disloyalty by its very nature. Even providing her with another grandchild wouldn’t close that wound.

No wonder a sweet and devoted teenaged lover had knocked the stuffing out of her.

Watching her pay for her groceries, Saul thought of his mother’s dutifulness. She had been good about taking Saul, and then Howie, to Little League practice after Saul’s father had died, but her heart wasn’t in it, in any of those male activities, those sports . Howie’s sickliness had given her a cause to preoccupy her, but her sons didn’t have anything to give her in return. But now, some shift had taken place in her. Her heart had been stripped bare. Sympathies had opened up. Suddenly she was out of character. In midlife she had become someone else. And she deserved everything she got, all the rewards of feeling, Saul thought, especially if she had lost her heart to this kid.

Carrying the groceries out to the car, feeling brave, Saul said, “How’s your love life, Ma? Any prospects?”

“Why? Did Patsy say something to you?”

“No, in fact, she didn’t.”

Saul was putting the grocery bags in the trunk, but he could tell that his mother was checking his face for deceit. She had an internal psycho-galvanometer with Saul and could detect his polite lies a continent away. Her right eyebrow went up, like that of a food critic, and she ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes, there is somebody,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it.”

She waited at the passenger-side door for Saul to unlock and open it for her, which he did, practicing his manners. Back behind the wheel, he asked her why not.

“Because some things you can’t talk about,” Delia said. She was getting grumpy. She harumphed and squirmed in the seat. “All your generation does is talk about sex all the time. Some things should be left to themselves.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Saul said.

“Listen to you! You quit your job, you come here, you drive me to the Giant and stare at a display of tomato cans, and you tell me that you can talk about anything. Saul, you and I can’t talk about the important things in life, because they’re all secrets. Everything important is a secret. No one ever talks about anything. Deny it. I dare you. That student of yours died, and his death was his secret, and you don’t have the words for it. Who would?”

“It’s not that I wouldn’t, but that I can’t. It’s beyond me. In your case, you can, but you won’t. ”

“Well, as for ‘can’t,’ I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Delia said. Saul turned the key to the ignition, and the car, in its puny way, roared to life. “All right. I’ll tell you something. He’s very. . young. He’s a very young man.”

“What’s his name?” Saul asked, driving out of the parking lot and pretending nonchalance.

“Jimmy,” Delia told him, and when she said the word, Saul accidentally hit the brake, throwing both himself and his mother against their seatbelts. A car behind them screeched to a stop and the driver honked at them.

“Sorry,” Saul said. “I’m not used to this car.” He was blushing.

Delia stared straight ahead at the traffic. Saul could see that his mother’s eyes were watering. “Patsy told you, didn’t she? Patsy told you about Jimmy.”