Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Let’s take the bike back first," said Sarah.

How about a long-term lease at a lower rate? Or a quitrent!

Sarah was saying she wanted — Sunday dinner, he thought — a hot dog, taco chips, and an orange drink. Mark’s mother had her hands on her hips— if she was his mother — as she watched Mark pass. "What the man say to you?"

Listen, the rental people exerted a claim on your labor; for your labor such as it was was where you got the cash to pay.

But Sarah’s claim was greater and she wasn’t paying.

In fact, he paid the rental people so that he would then be able to give Sarah his labor.

O.K. But give?

Say he rented her?

When good neighbor Sally had rung the buzzer last night and had said to Sarah, "Darling, might I borrow your father for ten minutes?" Sarah had said, "Nothing doing." Her new phrase.

He remembered that the park cafeteria had beer. Sarah wheeled her bike. He looked at his watch and Sarah looked up at him and he thought he knew what she was going to say, but he was wrong. She said, "We’re both walking."

What did it cost Sarah to rent him?

"You and Mommy would never slap me on the face," she said.

They were passing Mark’s mother when Mark came up and skidded to a stop.

"That’s great, man, you’ve done it all — ride, start, stop — all the first time."

"Well it isn’t the first time I forked out a dollar and a half an hour for a bike," said the woman. "Mark, you thank the man for helping you."

The book was a book of modern plays.

"Let’s go," said Sarah.

They crossed the pedestrian path on their way to the bike rental, and he got a whiff of mustard and meat. "You never forget how to ride a bike once you’ve learned," he said.

"That’s a likely story," said Sarah.

Sarah thought she would not go on the road next time after all but have one more time in the parking lot.

Good, if that was what she wanted.

And would he ride with her in the parking lot?

Sure.

The grandson, who had refrained from asking if a certain skinny geezer that came and went one summer day was the man or weird character in question, would recall his grandmother’s remark — history, prediction, regret, relief — that there were things about the Hermit-Inventor not even she knew; for the grandson said, and at once recalled saying, that there was maybe stuff the Hermit-Investor didn’t know about the Anasazi healefs discoveries.

Oh that must be so, the grandmother averred, with a pensiveness not humorous this time, yet embracing but never equal to a knowledge they both had that the grandson would know things about these her fabled history and lands that she herself did not. Wasn’t this because she had always been so near to him, he to her? — yes: down the street of a New Jersey town’s seasons from the late-spring morning when light shared itself with him, shored from the tiers and banks and steep slopes of foliage seen from his own third-floor room when he would stay with his grandparents, or seen from his grandmother’s own second-floor bedroom (where once he had learned to whistle), prime green-sea mass of waves of maple-bough leaves that crowded the porch as if the trees were mysteriously withheld, all but their leaves, which so surrounded the dining-room windows of his grandparents’ house that lawn and dirt-ground and driveway and the raised sidewalks of Throckmorton Street where it crossed West Main all just flickered as if through the fine wings of butterflies known by name or as if precipitating the broken motions and real flow of these sidewalks’ own brown and slate lozenges, on, on to autumn’s first intuition that winter had been in its mind all along (we mean chill) when the boy, who was like a man and felt somewhat that way, left his own house for school; left always later than his kid brother always in haste yet with the leisure of those young years no matter what the weather (while the kid brother curiously hated and could burst with rage at the lunatic winds that visited the street during just six or seven January days, unlike the tougher elder brother), who came out of their now motherless house a hundred yards down the street from their grandparents’—and, on instinct that morning as he was turning at the end of the flagstone walk toward downtown, he glanced back in the direction of his grandmother’s house to find her there — a watchman or, in the midst of everything, a live eye — there diagonally up the street on the far side as if something in his head way in advance had been seeing her there but she hadn’t gotten the message until now, a figure who waved like a mother seeing him off to school, where he was a regular person and a husky, friendly guy, etcetera, nothing odd about him, he’d leave that to others in and out of his family: yet now seeing his grandmother standing by a pillar of her porch, her hands clasped, he registered some rift in the scheme as an extension of it, economy of scale long before he knew those words (which years later like many others seemed to have been waiting for him inside him) — only that that grandmother woman, whom he had fallen out with after recently doubting for the first time her old but secretly always mounting stories, doubting because they began to flicker as more than stories and to bear queerly upon his life so that he had to think that if an event then that was so like here and now wound up like that, things here will too — ugh ugh ugh and shoot and shit but it sounds silly! — was waving him ("downstreet," as you said in that town like "downwind") off to school from that home of hers that he loved and sometimes lived in, and not this other home of his own at the other end of this flagged walk less than a regulation championship pool’s length behind him his father’s house, his departed mother’s undervalued house, and his own (an early real-estate insight belonging to him as freshly and clearly as in later years the house never seemed to), from which he had just emerged (for yes he did feel the exposure), with a gray-with-white-trim porch one step lower than the porch of his grandparents’ white house, "his grandmother’s," up the street: yet his own porch had dark, earth-damp, min-erally aromatic room under it to store two or three (in fact two and a half) rakes and some crates and a litter of forgettable junk and an occasional eavesdropping boy and a lawnmower that you made into a congenial machine between your force and the sweet sluggish-grown growth of the grass that didn’t feel very grassy green when you were pushing through it: a house with, above that porch, a ruffled tangle of dry, dark, indestructible ivy running up and around the porch posts sticking by some adhesive, some type of time, and pretty only at a distance, but a porch not with the everlasting paint smell in one specific corner of his grandparents’ porch, the corner behind the all-weather wicker-white chair (with kind of webbed legs, roostery-furred legs, if you know what we meant at the wordless time this was thought) in which his grandfather sometimes but not in this weather or at this hour of the day sat with a tome of the Century Dictopedia (as he said it, open under a pearl-handled magnifier which he fingered and looked less through than at, murmuring that this way you could see double:) while this school morning, whether because alone and watched, or from a mental wind from her, to her, a very grandmother-wind if you will, the opposite of that supposed ill wind (yay) Danny Kaye sang of in one of those nutty movie numbers as the identical-twin celebrity-extrovert — or in fact mistral (of the largely unknown boy-man’s later years when we lived to Change or talk non-judgmentally of Change late into the night show and mistral became miztral); but did this grandmother-wind, like nor’easter or sou’wester (also a rain gear in the overall weather machine’s sluice-drive continuum), come from? or did it "go to?" (as Shakespeare in high school said, while Jim and friends snickered, "Go to" — "How now, Gratiano?" — "How now, my lord, wilt hear this piece of work?" — "Come hither, sit by me" — "Go to, thou varlet") — for this wind, grandmother or ill or other — or mother — moved this morning across his broadening shoulders from left to right pushing him to turn squads-right upon achieving the main sidewalk which he was going to do anyway toward school which is beyond the other, far end of town, and he thereupon turned against this momentum, only to find, up the street, his grandmother on her own porch waving, as his mother sometimes more slowly would from her window if she was awake and in position to and had she now still been among the living if in all probability suicidal: