Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Roy hobbled into the room in one boot, said he was still looking for the other.

“You don’t wear cowboy boots on Saturdays. Just Tuesdays and Fridays — you know that. “

There it is,” Roy said, and he crawled under the couch, came out with the boot and sat on the floor to put it on.

“I said you don’t wear those boots on Saturdays. Find your moccasins, jackboots, even your mukluks, but I want no more diddling around.”

“Please?” Roy said, and he stood up, walked a few steps and fell over; the boots were on the wrong feet. Most of his clothes, books, toys, tools and crayons fell out of the knapsack and Roy screamed “Damn it.” He threw the knapsack at his dog, who had just come into the room, and was snapping his crayons in two when Helen picked him up by his ankles and began tapping his head on the rug.

“Idiot,” she said.

“I give up,” he said.

“Idiot, idiot, idiot.”

“Mom, I said I give up, so let me down.”

She stood him up on his feet. They looked crossly at each other, Roy serious, Helen mocking, then started laughing, and hugged. The dog, Sabine, got between their legs. “Ummm,” Helen said, still hugging Roy with her eyes closed, “just ummm.”

They all left the house. Dirk got on one knee to pick weeds out of the gravel driveway as Helen, Roy and Sabine got into her car. “Call next time,” she said. “And if you’re going to Ken’s thing Sunday night, maybe Don and I will see you there,” and she started the car, he stepped aside, and they drove away.

He weeded the driveway clean, got in his car and was in the freeway’s speed lane doing 75, miles from their house, when he saw them in the rearview mirror, Roy and Sabine standing on the back seat, looking out the rear window, Helen wanting to pass. He flicked on the directional signal and switched lanes. Helen flashed a begrudging thanks as she drove alongside him. Roy spotted him and beamed and waved. Dirk waved back. Roy now waved with both hands and shook Sabine’s paw at him and nudged Helen’s shoulder to point out Dirk driving behind them in the adjoining lane. Dirk floored the gas pedal, but her more powerful Saab was still increasing its speed and distance over him. Roy displayed his tool kit, took a hammer out of it and made hammering motions in the air. Dirk smiled, nodded. Soon there were several cars separating hers from his laboring Volks, and Roy blew him a kiss.

Dirk turned on the portable radio strapped to the front passenger seat by the seat belt. The Warsaw Concerto by Richard Addinsell, the announcer said, and the name of the orchestra, conductor, pianist, record label and the LP number and time of day. Dirk hadn’t heard the piece for years. When he was thirteen or fourteen, it had been his favorite music — this same pianist on both sides of a 12-inch breakable record that, at fifteen, he jokingly broke over his brother’s head. He tuned the radio in, listened to the loud dramatic opening, switched to AM and the telephone voice of a woman who said “Certainly, Dr. King’s death is sad, as every assassination and sudden making of a widow and four fatherless children is sad. But who’s to say he wasn’t asking for it a little, you know what I mean?” and the broadcaster’s enraged denouncement of her bigotry and proclamation of her stupidity and the loud click of his hanging up, and Dirk turned the radio off. A car honked behind him. He was straddling the broken white line between the two left lanes, and while he edged into the slow lane, an elderly woman cut into the speed lane, narrowly missing his rear fender. From across the middle lane, they looked at each other. She frowned, glared. Dirk let his tongue hang out and crossed his eyes, as if he were being strangled. She accelerated her huge Mercedes to 80, 90; in seconds, he was left far behind. He took the San Mateo exit to the restaurant he liked best in the Bay area, at the outskirts of town.

They’d had their wedding reception there, unusual Japanese and Okinawan dishes made special for the feast in the tatami room upstairs. Lots of the guests got drunk on shochu and high-grade sake illegally flown in that week from Tokyo through the owner’s secret contacts at JAL; most of the other guests got stoned on Israeli hashish smoked in the spray-deodorized johns. Irises, cherry blossoms, rose incense, paper slippers, friends’ children sitting on the foot-high tables and guzzling from sake carafes filled with soda, handfuls of cold cooked rice thrown at the couple as they left. Later, he picked rice out of her hair; together, they painted “peace” in fluorescent acrylics on their bedroom window overlooking the beach at Santa Cruz; in bed, she said how life was best when she had the sun, health, loving man and a backward and upside-down view of “peace” from a comfy new mattress all at the same time; but where, she wanted to know, will they go from here?

A card, hooked over his front doorknob, read that he hadn’t been home to receive a telegram; and penciled on the other side was the deliverer’s personal message: The gram’s been slipped under your door.”

“If you have no objections,” Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, “I’ll be driving up for weekend with two girls.”

Chrisie’s younger daughter, Sophie, was genetically his. He’d met Chrisie at a New York party three summers ago, he in the city to be with his dying sister and grieving folks, she on a week’s vacation from the man who was still her adoring hot-tempered husband; and minutes after their orgasm, when he was squirming out from under her to breathe, she said she was convinced she conceived. “Preposterous, granted, but I felt it, just as I felt it with Caroline three years ago, their infinitesimal gametic coupling before, as explosive as our own.”

He rolled up the canvas he’d been painting on the floor, put away his income-tax statements and forms — Federal, state, New York City, six jobs in one year and once three part-time jobs a day, and he was going to be penalized for filing late — shampooed his rug with laundry detergent, washed down the baseboards with diluted ammonia, dusted every object in the place a two-and five-year-old could touch or climb up on a chair and reach; on his knees, scoured the bathroom tub and tiles and soaped the linoleum floors with the now ammonia-maimed sponge.

He left the door unlocked and hauled two bags of linens and clothes to the laundromat down the hill. A girl was in front, her smock cut from the same inexpensive Indian bedspread he used to cover the mattress on his floor. “Spare change?” she said. He never gave, but today handed her a quarter. Thanks loads,” and “Spare change?” to a man approaching the laundromat with a box filled with laundry, detergent, starch and magazines. He said “I work for my money.” She said “I work for it too, by asking for spare change.” He said “Dumb begging kid,” and she said “Dear beautiful man.” And he: “You ought to be thrown into Santa Rita with the rest of your crazy friends,” and she: “And you ought to drop some acid.” He: “And you ought to poison yourself also.” She: “I wasn’t referring to poison.” “Well, I was.” “Spare change? Spare a dime, a nickel, a penny, a smile?” “Out of my way, pig,” and he shoved her aside with the box and went into the laundromat.

Dirk read while his laundry was being washed. His were the most colorful clothes in the machines. A few minutes before the cycles finished, he got up to stick a dime in the one free drier, but a woman beat him to it by a couple of seconds. “You got to be fast, not slow,” she said, and stuck three dimes into the coin slot.

“Spare change?” the girl said outside.

A man set down four shopping bags of laundry and opened his change purse. “Oh, no,” and he snapped the purse shut, “I forgot. I’ll need all the change for the machines. The coin changers have been vandalized so often this month the owner’s had to seal them up, and now she’s got to take them out, as they’re still being forced open. People are violent and nuts.”