Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

ON HER WAY TO the grocery store, to which she could walk, in celebration of which she often wore lizard-skin cowboy boots and other dress excessive for a daily trip to buy food for a family, Mrs. Hollingsworth recited, “It loves me, it loves me not. I love it, I love it not—” until she was interrupted by a child behind a picket fence next to the sidewalk.

“What are you talking about, lady?” This came equably from a round freckled face just above the sharpened pickets, all of which suggested briefly an uncarved, unlit pumpkin speaking to her.

“The South,” Mrs. Hollingsworth said to the pumpkin face, which she presumed, not altogether comfortably, a portrait of innocence. The child was in fact a portrait of insolence and had wanted to say not “What are you talking about, lady?” but “Hey, lady, how about some pussy?” He had watched her for weeks walk in costumes to and from the store and he had prodigious twelve-year-old need.

“The South?” he asked. “What’s that?”

“This,” Mrs. Hollingsworth said, indicating with her arm the trees and air and houses and suspiring history and ennui and corruption and meanness and game violators and bottomland and chivalric humanism and people who are smart about money and people who don’t have a clue and heroism and stray pets around them.

“Have you lost your mind?” the boy asked.

Mrs. Hollingsworth, to whom the proposition was tenable, said, “Grow up,” and walked on.

The child was left there in a rage of early tumescence, kicking himself for insulting the object of his waking and sleeping lusts. The back of his T-shirt, which Mrs. Hollingsworth had not seen, said JUST BLOW ME, ostensibly in promotion of a brand of bubble gum. He had had the wit not to let his parents see the shirt and knew, almost, what it meant. He had the mouth and the where right but was taking the BLOW literally. He had intended asking Mrs. Hollingsworth how about some pussy and then turning his back to her. It would have worked, he was sure.

The child had no way of knowing that it would probably have worked. Mrs. Hollingsworth had three children, one older than her suitor, and had been happily married for fifteen years, and was a good mother and wife, and was enraged about it. She had said recently to a business associate of her husband, who had been out of town and had appointed her the associate’s entertainment in his stead, which associate had begun kissing the back of her neck in the car outside the restaurant she’d taken them to, “Hey, for all you know, I might be the town tramp.” What the business associate thought of her and her proclivities, if anything, is not known; he kept kissing her neck, which she proffered more of, and angled her head to make taut and handsome.

What Mrs. Hollingsworth thought was: I could be the town tramp. The business associate was, in fact, not the first relief she had had from the happy marriage, but she had not entertained the notion of going wholesale. She would have entertained the notion of this little smart-ass pumpkin head, un Lolito. It was hysterical, she was hysterical, it was perfect. But the pumpkin head had not shown his cards.

The next time Mrs. Hollingsworth saw the child he was standing on her front stoop with a new-looking Lawn-Boy mower behind him the color of a katydid. Through the peephole’s fish-eye lens the boy looked obscenely older, his freckles the size of rain splats on concrete, and the mower was giving off shafts of a soft green light that was spectral.

She opened the door and said, neutrally, “Yes?” and looked from the boy to the mower and back to the boy and then up and down the boy.

“What?” he said. “My shorts?” He looked down at his shorts, which were cutoffs with ridiculously lacerated hems. In fact, she saw then, they had been sliced up from the cut edge about two inches on about one-inch centers, giving them a kind of surrey-roof frill. His skinny legs hung out of this frilliness like strings themselves. Mrs. Hollingsworth laughed and said, “No, not your shorts.”

“What, then?”

“ What what?”

“What are you laughing at?”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You were too.”

Mrs. Hollingsworth laughed again.

“See?”

She laughed some more.

“Goddamn, lady.”

“ What?”

“ What what,” he said, obviously mocking her.

“Goddamn what?”

“Just goddamn, lady.”

“Okay. That’s better.”

The boy drew himself up, as if in summary of certain points he had been making. “Do you want your lawn cut?” When he said this, a hail of profane words and images fell in his brain. Do you want a cherry on it? Do you want nuts on it? Do you want your nuts crushed? Do you want your tits blown off? “Do you want your lawn cut?” he said again, strangely almost out of breath.

“No,” Mrs. Hollingsworth said. “But you can cut it anyway.”

She closed the door then and decided that would be the test for this little rogue: if he cut the lawn with no more ado, no price, no terms, no promise, he was to be regarded as a significant little foul ball landing in the happy proper play of her enraging days.

Through the fish-eyed peephole Mrs. Hollingsworth watched him address his Lawn-Boy. He took a deep breath and glanced at the sky before securing the machine with his foot and pulling the cord. It started right up. He took the handle and pushed against it with his thighs, stood there not moving, and momentarily seemed to wilt over the handle before taking a giant stride. He marched the machine over the lawn faster than she had ever seen a lawn mower go. He was flying over the lawn, blasting sticks and ant beds and, he thought, a pet toy of some sort into flakbursts of airborne detritus that was collecting around his nostrils. He was a cute little thing.

When she let him into the back yard and he did not talk or even look at her, Mrs. Hollingsworth confirmed her suspicions that the child was on a sexual mission. He was bold and terrified.

“I’ll make the lemonade,” she said.

He said, “Yes’m.”

Not “make us some lemonade,” not “Would you like some lemonade, or something?” The lemonade. She was thrilled by this little stage irony. The boy was not himself unaware of something off. “Yes’m” was as close as he had ever come in his life to saying “ma’am.”

When he finished the blitzkrieg of the yard, he sat on the little two-seater rowing swing on the children’s gym set and Mrs. Hollingsworth emerged with a tray. On it was a hand-painted pitcher and tumblers and loose lemons as garnish — impractical but irresistible to Mrs. Hollingsworth’s sense of kitsch in still life. She noted how unadult the boy looked sitting where her own children sat, even though he was obviously consumed with adult concerns. She wondered for the first time why he was not, as her children were, in school.

She put the tray on one seat of the glider, also attached to the gym set, though it was clearly intended for adults. It was a swinging double-benched arbor, actually, and her plan was to sit them both on one of the benches opposite the lemonade and serve the child properly until the accidental touch, or his blurting whatever he might blurt, set the lunacy of his early need and her late fatigue in motion.