Robert Coover - John's Wife

Serving on church committees, consoling those who had lost loved ones, and providing sustenance to those in need were but a few of John’s wife’s volunteer civic and religious activities in town. She was also a member of the BPW, Ladies’ Aid, the Parent-Teacher Association, and the Literary Society, which met each month in the town library, except in the summer, less often since the longtime town librarian had died. She rarely missed a school play, attending even those in which friends’ children performed. When old Snuffy retired after nearly thirty years of high school teaching and coaching to take up a managerial post out at John’s airport, it was she who presented him at halftime of the homecoming game with the honorary “Coach of the Century” trophy from his players and ex-players, which read simply: DIG IN, SON. Many in town might pass unnoticed for weeks on end, old Snuffy himself, for example, or others like the drugstore simpleton, tethered to his pinball machines and video games, or his sister Columbia, sullenly overweight and whited out by her nursing uniform, or timid Trevor, housebound Edna, and most old folks much of the time, sad to say, but not John’s wife. She was at the inaugural meeting of the town cleanup campaign, and when they stenciled KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL on all the trash-cans in town, she helped cut the stencils, and people said hers were the neatest. She collected door-to-door each year for the Community Chest and the March of Dimes, sang in the church choir, and though she rarely sought or held office, was treasurer for two years of the Pioneers Day parade committee. She was always in the parade itself, on one float or another or perched on the backseat of one of the lead convertibles, usually dressed in a beautiful pioneer costume, her presence as indispensable as a definiendum’s to a definition (something Kate the librarian once said, though not even Ellsworth could repeat it after). When the decorating of the city fire hydrants was in fashion, she painted one a vivid emerald green, trimmed in metallic gold, which many said was an expression of her true personality, hidden beneath her modest, somewhat dry and formal surface, and others said showed a lack of a sense of humor. Ellsworth recalled that these were the colors of the dress a princess wore in a story he had read to her as a child and Maynard that this was how her high school bicycle was painted, each deriving his own private meaning from his recollection, which may or may not have been accurate. Gordon’s photos of the hydrant and its painter added nothing to his knowledge, though a swatch of glitter on her bluejeaned thigh did haunt for a time his darkroom nights. Waldo’s wife Lorraine, who interpreted all the painted fireplugs as condom fantasies (hers she’d painted like a one-eyed toothless Martian in a tux, though lame Gretchen won first prize with a winsome portrait of her white-jacketed father-in-law), felt a twinge of jealousy when she saw John’s wife’s hydrant, but Barnaby felt only sorrow, perceiving his daughter’s deep malaise.

By the time Gretchen won the hydrant-painting competition, her husband Cornell, though the father of her six children, including triplets born just three months before the contest, much to Grandpa’s great delight (thus the beaming smile on the fireplug’s cartoon face), was little more than a peripheral nuisance to the family, which centered now around the thickly bespectacled lady from the north with the anguished grimace and the withered leg. Lumby loved her, Oxford did, as did all her babies of course (and there were more to come), and so did even, from a distance, her brother-in-law Harvie, grateful that his lonely sister had found true companionship at last, and so, with brotherly gratitude, loving the beloved. And Corny, who spent his mind-bombed days behind pin-ball machines and pornographic magazines, loved her, too, as best he could in his woeful way, having less than all his marbles, as was often said — a strange boy stranger yet as man: his thinning hair uncombed, his eyes unfocused, the hairs of his blond moustache hanging down over his pink mouth like a kind of wispy curtain, nothing but nonsense heard from behind it. With cause, of course, were his marbles lost and scattered, as all who knew his Paris story knew, but that boy was born to strangeness, not all there from the get-go, and in more marbly ways than one, as his sister Lumby would say, speaking euphemistically, she unable to figure out, given his little problem, just how the little sperm machine got the job done, so to speak. Though get it done he clearly did, his bride’s fecundity, even at this early stage in her parturient career, already notorious in the town and soon to become a local legend.

One who was not surprised by the frequent ripening of the crippled drugstore lady’s womb was Pauline, who had seen Corny’s little problem, as his sister called it, from a different perspective. Though she and Corny had been in high school at the same time, just a class or two apart, Pauline had always thought of him as light-years younger, not only because she felt so much older than almost all the boys she knew, but because Corny was such a backward little shrimp, hanging out mostly with gradeschool children right up into her senior year in high school, which was when she began noticing him staring at her from across the room with that confused wall-eyed look of puppydog desire she had seen drift across the faces of successive generations of boys like the special effects in werewolf movies. She had known by all her five senses his two brothers before him, Harvie, the one they called Hard Yard, being off only by an inch or two, and Yale, who was so sweet, and she supposed, by the looks he was giving her, she would eventually know their little brother in like manner as well. This came to pass, though not without a great deal of hesitation on Corny’s part, a lot of time-wasting teasing and pretended hostility and disinterest and silly snickering in the corridors, before he finally turned up at the trailer park on his bicycle one twilit summer evening with two of his little friends, asking if she would like to go riding with them. Luckily, her Daddy Duwayne was not around, he would have eaten them alive. She asked them how much money they had and what they wanted. The idea of needing money had apparently not occurred to them: nothing but small change among the three of them. But what they wanted was small change, too: they merely wanted (after a long list of false wants was got through, starting with the supposed fun of a bike ride) to see. So she took them around behind the trailer and dropped her jeans and underpants, raised her tee shirt. Their frozen, pop-eyed, red-faced, grimacing expressions were so comicbook-like they made her laugh. “You can touch if you want,” she said, feeling generous. Corny held back but the others poked about gingerly like little kids trying to guess the contents of wrapped Christmas presents, and eventually Corny, timidly, joined in. Even body hair seemed strange to them, though one said squeakily he had seen his mother’s and it was just like that, as though this were some kind of brag. She chased them off finally with threats of her violent daddy’s imminent return, but they were back almost every week after that, with more money now and with more boldness in their explorations. They made her bend over and touch her toes, squat, lie down and spread her legs, roll over, get up on her knees and elbows, lie on her side with one knee in the air, press up on her shoulders with her knees by her ears, as they squeezed and patted and palpated and dipped their fingers in wherever they could. Then one evening, just for fun, she told them it was their turn, they had to take their clothes off now and show her. They went rigid with fear, and when she reached for one of their belt buckles, they ran off, leaving her giggling in her own puddle of cast-off clothes and feeling about a hundred years old. But then, later, Corny came back alone and, though he had seemingly lost his power to speak, he indicated by his undone belt buckle that she was to undress him and so she did, remarking to herself, as she took what she found down there into that cavity which had made her locally famous and by which she logged what simple memory she kept of that half of the town’s population, how much more interesting it was, even for an incurious person such as herself, to know mankind in all its variety than to surrender, like John’s wife, say, to the experience of one alone, no matter how beautiful.