Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

In this distraction, Mrs. Hollingsworth forgot about the lawn boy until he appeared again on her stoop wearing a suit and a fedora.

“Not another one” she said, referring to costumes.

“No, ma’am,” the boy said, removing his hat. “It’s me.”

“I know it’s you,” Mrs. Hollingsworth said. “You think I’d have two boys stealing lawn mowers for me?”

“I don’t know what you’d have, lady.” He looked her in the eye. This was a fully matured something with a mouth on it, she thought, like a baby snake.

“You ought to have me in before they spot me.” She swung open the door and swept her arm into the foyer, into which the lawn boy strode, hitching the pants of his too large suit and looking, she thought, for a place to throw the hat. She had a momentary loss of composure as Andy Hardy crossed her mind, and she might have lost her nerve altogether had the child hung the hat on anything. But he did, instead, something rather redeeming: he went directly to the kitchen, opened the sink cabinet, and put the hat, and then the suit, which he removed, revealing the same white shirt and surrey-frilled pants as before, into the trash compactor.

“That’s the old man’s and that’s the old brother’s,” he said, hitting the compactor switch. “They’re dumb. All I knew, they’d have the joint staked out.”

Mrs. Hollingsworth started laughing, aware that it might suggest again to the boy that she was laughing at him. But the boy sat at the kitchen table, apparently not bothered by her laughing, and drummed his fingernails. With a short glass of whiskey and some smoke in the room and a little hair on his face he’d have looked a seasoned drinker in a bar.

She got to the table and sat, trying to behave herself, wiping tears from her eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

For what indeed. “Do you steal much?”

“Whenever,” he said. He looked around, finally at the calendar on which she recorded family doings: lessons, parties, drudge.

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“You talk a lot, lady,” he said, and laughed himself. “I’m kidding.”

She looked at him: he was playing a part. He was a card.

“It’s a strange thing,” he said. “You’d never get caught taking a whole lawn mower, for some reason. I got caught once. You know what for?”

“What for?”

“Do you know what a WD-40 straw is?”

“No.”

“It’s a straw…a red plastic straw too skinny to even stir coffee or something. It, it sprays WD-40. It costs about nothing. It comes with the WD-40, for free. I got caught stealing one. It’s six inches long. It’s red.”

“What’s your name, son?”

He looked at her, rather sharply she thought, and she also thought, Not acting now. She said, before she knew why, but immediately knew why, “I mean, what’s your name?”

“Jimmy.” His attitude said, That’s better.

“Jimmy what?”

“Well…I thought this would be a, ah, first names only, like a hot line.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Teeth.”

“What?”

“My name.”

“Your name what?”

“Jimmy Teeth.”

“Jimmy Teeth.”

“Yes’m.” He said this squarely, defiantly.

“Jimmy Teeth,” she said, “I’m Janice Halsey,” and extended her hand to him. He shook it, firmly.

“You ain’t no Mrs. Halsey.”

“No, I’m not no Mrs. Halsey.”

She couldn’t tell if he got this, nor could she expect him to know it was not a lie but her maiden name. It seemed time to use her maiden name again with a twelve-year-old suitor, or whatever he was.

“Okay,” he said, “Janice Halsey.”

“Okay, Jimmy Teeth.” She wondered if he was lying but didn’t think he was. He’d have said Jimmy Diamond if he was lying.

A silence followed which could have been, as Mrs. Hollingsworth’s laughing earlier could have been, misinterpreted, caused in this case by the awkwardness of Jimmy Teeth’s name or Mrs. Hollingsworth’s apparent lying about hers, or both, but it seemed finally just a silence, an odd, agreeable calm between two people in a situation that would presumably not make for agreeable calm. A boy who had stolen lawn mowers and clothes to present, apparently, a boundless need, who had to be no matter how savvy on some levels completely innocent on others, who had in disguise matriculated in the kitchen of a woman whose reactions to his proposition he could not possibly predict, who had to be therefore in part terrified, sat before that random, unknown woman twenty-five years his senior as placid as a gangster; the woman who entertained him, entertained his lunatic hope, who had borne children before another woman had borne this one, who had certain fears of the sexual abuse of children, who had once allowed death-do-us-part vows be read before her as she smiled and cried in an expensive white dress and believed, who had packed lunches and packed the issue of that marriage off to school and that husband off to work, who had had soap-opera days and ironing and long adult afternoons, who had had Sunday brunch and vacations on tropical islands and new station wagons and could read Bovary in the French and whose parents were dead, looked calmly at the boy who had stolen a lawn mower and clothes and calmly looked back at her.

She let the moment continue — suspire, as she was wont to put it.

“Well,” Jimmy Teeth said, “ do you like it?”

“Like what?”

“The South.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Me too.”

He has no idea what he’s talking about, she thought. He’s making talk. Her job, as superior here, was to rescue him from babbling. He’d shown that under ordinary circumstances he was not prone to babble or to other loose business. But still, the non-awkwardness of the definitively awkward minuet they were in continued to please her.

“The thing about the South,” she said, getting up with the sudden perfect idea that she have a drink — a very sweet Manhattan struck her in the cortex, and she got Jimmy Teeth the lemonade the law had earlier cost him—“the thing about the South is that it’s a vale of tears that were shed a long time ago. Its a vale of dry tears.” She looked at Jimmy Teeth.

“Yes’m,” he said. “Good ade.” He thought that this woman was likely too square for him. She had probably not gotten any further in the video age than, say, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, if that. She had on some kind of sweater without buttons.

“Do you understand?” she was saying. “A vale of dry tears stands in relation to true weeping as dry cleaning stands to true washing and cleaning.”

“Yes’m, I got that.”

They sipped their drinks, and Jimmy Teeth feared that the thing had gone this far and yet might not work — how could it do that? Where would he begin anew, with whom? Talk about a vale of dry tears — when Mrs. Hollingsworth again extended her hand to him, only this time it was flat on the table, palm up. The only thing he could figure to do was cover it with his, noting his dirty fingernails and thinking his mother was right in her constant failing fingernail vigilance. Mrs. Hollingsworth covered his hand with her other one and pressed their hands together and Jimmy Teeth felt something he had not yet felt in all the considerable feeling of himself he had done to date. He felt a surge of something like liquid that came up warmly into his shoulders and head and almost made him cry.

Mrs. Hollingsworth looked down at the table between her arms, and Jimmy Teeth thought she was going to cry. But she did not. He sat there for what seemed a very long time, knowing he could not move his hand but not knowing what else he could or couldn’t do. He thought for the first time, What if someone comes in? He didn’t have a lawn mower and his suit was in the garbage. Explain that. Jimmy Teeth could explain a few things, but he couldn’t explain that. Mrs. Hollingsworth was, like, praying still, and he had time to think how he might try to explain his presence. My lawn mower’s impounded and my suit’s compacted. It was funny if you said it like that, and he laughed. The laugh was like the other inappropriate moments they had already shared: it wasn’t inappropriate. They had a little territory here that was, apparently, unique: nothing was inappropriate. Jimmy Teeth saw that. Mrs. Hollingsworth saw that, too, though in an ironic light.