Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

This wasn’t true, but she didn’t say so. For a moment they looked over each other’s shoulders.

The waitress came with Ann’s vegetable crepe and Davey’s cannelloni. She held her tray and with a napkin put Davey’s dish in front of him; it was an ovenproof dish with raised edges. "It’s hot," his mother and the waitress said.

A year of weekends, a future of learning the deep seas and the American trails. A back flip so slow above the blank tiles of an empty April pool that the diver holds virtually still among all his dreams of action within unlimited time, and before he finds the pool below him it has been filled.

She raised her empty glass and caught the waitress’s eye.

‘They have a diving board," said Davey. "I told Alex you were a champion diver."

‘That’s not true, dear," she said, startled.

"Well, you did it in college."

"For a while I did."

"We’re going to a drive-in movie Saturday night," said Davey. "They’ve got a drive-in right near this golf course, Alex said."

She’s already there, but it’s somewhere else, and she imagines a couple passing on an adjacent highway, and the giant heads of the two romantic leads stand high to the left at an angle like that of a door ajar. And she has arranged for this night highway to run in the opposite direction at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour, so that the couple can keep driving and still see their movie from that tall and curious angle all the way to the end.

"If I give you money for the movie, you won’t spend it on that record, will you?" said Ann.

"I was thinking of giving the record to Alex," said Davey. "You know, as a present. I know he wants it."

"Why don’t you give his mother something; she’s picking you up and driving you out there."

"I don’t know what she’d like," said Davey.

Ann did not care any more than he did. They were enjoying the advantage of the menu’s variety, as they would not be able to do at home, where an avocado was slowly ripening and watercress didn’t need to be bought for tomorrow night’s salad. Her hand dropped to feel her shoulder bag hanging from the back of her chair by its strap. She had enough money to fly to Boston and leave Davey in front of the TV set watching the game; the Yankees were on the road in a different time zone. She’d fly to a city that was part Boston, part San Francisco, and fly back before the game was over, as if Davey couldn’t put himself to bed. But, once begun, the picture would not stop, and something stirred in the kitchen of her dark apartment and she heard him get out of bed and go see what it was. She kept forgetting what it was that was in Boston and San Francisco, and she kept falling asleep when she knew he was in the kitchen alone with that sound that didn’t stop. It was the avocado sprouting from its pit — hard to believe but easy to hear — and he was having an educational experience in the middle of the night watching it, but she couldn’t keep awake she was so mad.

"I’ll give you fifteen dollars and that will be your allowance, and you can pay for your movie and you can buy them all ice cream Saturday night," she said.

"O.K., Mom, thanks. How’s your crepe?"

Her vegetable crepe was better than his cannelloni, she was sure.

While she listened to him volunteer a progress report on what was going on in school — what was going on in science — which he almost never did, the avocado pit kept shedding light by means of the tree that grew out of it. She was sure. The light opened up the apartment house and flattened it and spread it out to become something like land, but it was more like time, and time that there was no way any more of measuring. And the answer was that this new variety of avocado could either ripen or at its heart be totally and with unprecedented richness a pit, all pit — hence the tree, hence the light, and the apartment house turning into a land of new time. Picture all that, she thought.

She thought he was being nice to her, telling her what they were doing in science class. Yes, she knew about genes and she had heard of Mendel, but she had forgotten that it was pea plants he studied. It was about inheriting traits, and it was all about dominant and recessive. She thought of chins, she thought of personalities. Davey talked fast, looking over her shoulder, and she told him she thought he had it just slightly mixed up but she couldn’t remember for sure. He said that that was how Mr. Skull had explained it.

Mr. Skull?

Mr. Skull.

She hadn’t heard of Mr. Skull. Maybe they presented it differently now, she said.

Well, according to Mr. Skull, Mendel was a monk and a schoolteacher, and wasn’t known during his own lifetime, and eventually his eyesight started to go; but what mattered was that he took the next step. Nowadays, they knew that Mendel didn’t have the whole truth; there was a lot of stuff he hadn’t gotten up to.

"But you will," she said.

"But it won’t necessarily be true," said Davey, and as his mother reached in her bag for her cigarettes he opened a book of matches that had been lying in the ashtray, but she put her cigarette pack on the table and shook her head.

"True?" she said, remembering words. "Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on."

"It must be more than that," said Davey.

"Nope," she said.

"Who said?"

"Actually, your father. He said that."

"He did?"

"Yes, he did. I can assure you he said that."

She didn’t like her tone. Alone with her son, Ann had gotten used to being very alert, yet she lived also with this single-minded sense of hers that she wasn’t seeing everything. Yet she knew she was a good mother.

She hadn’t seen the door to the small vestibule open. She was mopping the last of the oil off her salad plate with the last crust of their bread. Then she saw the young man in the white doorway. He wore bluejeans and a leather jacket. He paused, she felt, to give a person he’d come to see time to see him. He was looking toward the far end of the restaurant, where the kitchen was — the far end of what was really just a room.

The young man passed their table, and she said, "He didn’t come here to eat."

"How do you know?" said her son. "He probably works here."

"Either he’s the dishwasher or his girlfriend works here," she said.

"Well, he’s talking to the waitress," said her son. "She’s sitting at the last table and he said something to her."

"You see?" she said, observing Davey, and chewing her bread and holding and gently tilting her wine glass. She knew that the man in jeans wasn’t the young French waitress’s boyfriend.

"She’s pointing," said her son, and his mother raised her finger to her lips in case they could hear Davey back there. "He’s going to the phone. There’s a phone on the wall right by the entrance to the kitchen."

"Well, that’s what he came in for," she said. "He’s not the waitress’s boyfriend."

"Isn’t he a little young for her?" said her son.

"I wouldn’t be surprised," she said. The young man had long ginger hair, lank but carefully combed, and eyes like those of some animal so rarely seen that its ordinariness is what is most striking during a brief moment of exposure; his short, light-brown leather jacket looked as if it had traveled, and there was a touch of color about him she didn’t identify at the moment. She looked into her son’s face and was tired for the first time today.

"That was a pretty quick phone call," he said. "That was a quickie."

"Maybe he was calling his girlfriend," she said.

"He just disappeared, if you want to know," said her son. "He must have gone to the bathroom."

"I bet that’s why he really came in here."

"But he asked the waitress for the phone."