Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Mayn said he thought he had known how to drive a car — actually, a pick-up truck — without having ever learned.

Gordon waited a moment.

It was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, said Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father’s sister was a WAAC attached to the Eighth Air Force in England and she had picked up the language in no time (Gordon’s father’s joke) and would probably never have wanted to come home.

"Your father wasn’t in the War, then?" said Mayn.

"He had angina, he developed it in his thirties; he survived the War, but not by much," said Gordon.

"Some things take a while," said Mayn, mystifyingly.

Gordon said he hadn’t meant to go on like this.

Mayn laughed and thrust his open hand outward to raise his cuff and glanced at his wrist watch; Gordon laughed and added that there was a message to himself here someplace.

If they could get to the end, said Mayn; and by the way, the Crash in ‘29 and what happened afterward hit Chilean copper very hard — was it Chile the Baron had been aiming for?

Gordon said he supposed it must have been, and, he said, this is what you do if you give up your job; you go and talk to strangers.

Well, the need to change your life gets you through many a routine day, said Mayn.

Gordon said that his wife had a new job and she’d already changed. Actually her old volunteer job, but they were now paying her a salary. Amazing, eh?

It does seem to reverse the usual process, said Mayn as if he said it as an afterthought after paying such close attention to so much of what Gordon said, that Gordon felt Mayn wasn’t entirely there. But this was more of Gordon’s unemployed nonsense, probably. Newspaper people remembered everything and nothing. Everyone was eerie in Gordon’s present state of leisure, or about to ask him some question.

Mrs. Hollander and her daughter? said Mayn, rising with his glass. Such tremendous things happen when you’re a kid, and later on there they are, along with skipping a grade, said Gordon.

Well, you remember them, said Mayn.

Of his undeclared race with Maurice Metz there had been nothing to tell — not to his parents at the dinner table, and not to anyone else, probably. But there was. So was this why he remembered not telling? And it was funny, and he’d never told it even to Norma, his own wife.

Gordon crossed Livingston Street in mid-block by Brooklyn Polytechnic and crossed at an angle so that when he noticed the tall guy Metz with his lunch box and his briefcase with the strap around it, over on the side that Gordon was crossing to, he experienced a sensation of convergence, as he put it now, that was pleasing. He’d spoken to Metz at recess; Metz lived in a house several blocks from the river, on Clinton Street, which crossed one end of Livingston and where traffic from Atlantic Avenue made it next to impossible to play in the street, and Gordon’s mother had told his father that the Metzes were refugees. Metz played soccer at recess, and you could only get the ball away from him if you shoved him, and even then the ball would stick magnetized to his foot. Metz was smart and had shown how the German soldiers goose-stepped and had told how an entire division wrenched their necks when they turned their heads toward Hitler’s reviewing stand in a parade and for a month had to advance sideways in order to see what lay in front of them, and Gordon had said he was going to be a pilot and fly into Africa.

Mayn, standing in the kitchen doorway, said, Where did I hear about. . Brahmins was it?. . who look at heaven over their shoulder till they get fixed in that position and on account of their neck being twisted, nothing but liquids can get into their stomach.

Metz did not look at Gordon crossing the trolley tracks and converging on him, and Gordon reached that far side and turned onto the sidewalk a few steps ahead of Maurice Metz and Gordon heard Metz’s steps and quickened his, only to hear himself in step with Metz, who wore those high shoes. Gordon wanted to stop and say "Hi," but they turned into Boerum Place and speeded up.

Once inside the school building, they went up the stairs two at a time to the second floor: where they separated, Metz into fifth grade, Gordon into sixth. Gordon liked to be early, and sit in his desk with a library book. Or he would read a Street and Smith sports magazine, and Mrs. Hollander would come in and smile across the room at him and whoever else was early and say good morning quietly as if somebody was asleep.

And Gordon thought of this when he walked to school, whether he took the Clinton-Livingston route or Montague-Court Street-Livingston or sometimes went through the block-long corridor of the Courthouse to Livingston which felt like a shortcut because of the change to marble floors and revolving doors. As the days went on, he felt Maurice closer. They were out of step. At Schermerhorn they took their separate ways across the intersection, and Gordon had Metz in the corner of his eye when they got into the last half-block on the school side of Schermerhorn. In front of the school’s wrought-iron gateway was a seventh-grade girl named Elizabeth who recited poetry in assembly and had an extraordinarily narrow nose with a beautiful, knife-like keel. "Hi, Maurice," she called, and behind Gordon and Metz came a siege of running, panting steps, and as two little kids in corduroy long trousers sprinted between Gordon and Metz, Gordon heard a voice, Bill Bussing’s, call, "Hey, Gord, wait up," and Metz passed Gordon.

Bill Bussing was near-sighted. His glasses didn’t fall off when he ran relay races in the playground, but they didn’t fit the ridge of his nose right and in study period he was observed with glee by a few of his fellow sixth graders regularly contorting his face when his glasses slipped. He squinched up his nose, lifting his upper lip, curling out his lower. He would do it twice in succession, jamming his eyebrows high all in one violent motion as if he had a stuffed-up nose, and this unconscious, agony-like habit was quite fascinating for minutes at a stretch, partly because his powers of concentration were so great.

Gordon’s mother told Gordon he would end up wearing glasses if he read in a bad light. Gordon’s father said that he had developed longer and longer arms to read the Lunch Club menu in his office building and, reaching the limit of his development, he had had to acquire reading glasses or go hungry. Bill Bussing bought a container of chocolate milk in the cafeteria but brought his lunch, which he made himself. The breadless sandwich was what he said he’d invented which was stuck-together layers of liverwurst, salami, and baloney, but he would produce also a breaded pork chop in wax paper with a rubber band around it, a withered slab of fried fish, a typewriter-ribbon container of salted nuts, some stuffed olives, shrimps with toothpicks in them, some slick marinated raw carrot sticks — all of which he ate very fast in order to get out to the playground yard but would always offer to trade. Gordon brought some kind of meat sandwich on Thomas’s protein bread with lettuce and butter on it and a blue Thermos of milk, and his mother gave him money for a bowl of soup, but if it was vegetable, which was salty and peppery but basically tasteless, or if it was not tomato or corn, Gordon spent the money on Hershey bars after school. Bill Bussing always got out to the playground ahead of Gordon.

Maurice Metz was a different person in the playground. He held court against a brick wall and the little red-headed kid Arthur stood with him as if Dickie and others who engaged Metz in conversation to hear him curse in German and translate it and to consult him on whether for instance Hitler had a tank that could go over water were consulting Arthur as well. Arthur nodded as Metz made his predictions; Hitler, for example, Hitler would invent a new and totally secret weapon. Arthur spoke for Metz when he knew the answer, for instance that Metz’s aunt had committed suicide thinking that the Allied invasion of Europe would fail in the end. But Bill Bussing challenged Metz on this and other matters of fact and even went home with Metz after school.