Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

It’s obvious I still can’t explain this properly now, or correctly, not properly, or clearly, which is just another example, or two of them, that I can’t explain this clearly now. Nor do I want to go back to try to correct or delete all or part of what I’ve written since Lucinda said “Come on.” As I said, and if I didn’t, I’m saying it now: I just want to push on.

Lucinda says (but in the new way) “Come on.” I say “No, you come with me.” She says “Please, help me over the wall. I have to get away from here. It’s too spooky, dangerous. Foreboding — that’s the word. There are signs all around that say do not enter. (Or Do Not Enter.) We’ve heard awful things about this place. There’s a couple supposed to live near here who eat any children who wander over the wall — exaggerated, perhaps, but just that people say something as horrible as that must mean something about what kind of people the couple are. So, help me.”

No, I say.

Now that’s the example I should have used before. Not that “Come on, Lucinda says” or “Come on, Lucinda says, giving him his hand.” And I didn’t intentionally leave out the quotation marks around “No” just to make a better example, but now that I did, I think it is. Because by saying “No, I say,” which that No, I say above could have meant, it could have meant I was saying both “No” and “I say”—the “I say” to emphasize how much I was saying “No.”

That explained it only a little better than my previous examples explained what they were supposed to be explaining, and I said I wouldn’t get sidetracked again from whatever my intention was in doing this piece, which after getting sidetracked so much, I forget. What was it? To let something go? “Going to let my mind go,” I think I said, whatever that means. What does it, if that was it, the intention, for if it was, exact or otherwise, that “Going to let my mind go,” I now don’t know. I read back but can’t find it. I know it’s there, but I read back too quickly, maybe because I just want to push on, not back, which also might have been my intention, or the only one. Sounds familiar. Was it? My intention, sole or one of? I ask Lucinda if she remembers if I mentioned what my intention was in starting out to get here, other than just to climb over the wall and be here, and she says “What?” “Nothing about my wanting to just push on or letting my mind go, or something else?” and she says “Not to me you didn’t.” “Didn’t mention it, you mean?” and she says “Far as I can remember, yes.”

Hell with it and the woods. I’m not going to push on if I don’t know why I’m pushing on, though I don’t see why I can’t if I don’t, but hell with it as I said. I realize all that could be an alibi of sorts. How so? That I just don’t want to go through these woods yet, out of tiredness, disinterest, lack of courage, etcetera — normal reasons, in other words, so there it stands. What does? The issue, the issue.

“Let’s go over,” I say, and she says “Where?” and I say The wall, of course,” and she says “Finally, because I thought you still might have meant the woods.” I say “To go over to the woods? What the hell would that mean if I’d said it?” and she says “Don’t get testy again. I thought you might have meant it as another word for through them,” and I say “Why? Have you ever heard me use the word ‘over’ that way before?” and she says “You never made up words that I know of, or used words in any way other than what they were meant for and people could easily understand, but I thought this time might have been the exception. It’s obvious I shouldn’t have thought that.” “You shouldn’t have,” and she says “All right, so I shouldn’t have and won’t anymore, if it’s going to irritate you so much, but let’s go over in the way you said.” We go to the wall. I give her a boost. She makes it to the top, gets on her knees and stretches down and gives me her hand and I clasp it and she says “Ready?” and I nod, and she pulls me to the top.

We jump to the other side. She takes a deep breath and says “Don’t you like it better over here?” and I say “No, I don’t think so.” Then go back over, but without my help this time,” and I say “You know that anytime I want to, I could, because I don’t need your help.” She says “Catch me,” and runs toward home, and I chase her and she lets me catch her and we roll on the grass and laugh and kiss and make love and then go home. At night, I come back and stare at the wall.

“Answer it, Warren,” she yelled through the partly opened bathroom door. “Warren, you there? Answer the phone and tell whoever it is I’m busy and I’ll call back.”

Warren was in his bedroom down the hall. He ran to his parents’ room, picked up the receiver and said hello.

“Hey, there, fella, how are you?”

“Daddy, that you?”

That’s me, sure, who else?”

“Where are you?”

“In a hotel. Away. How’s everything home? Your mother?”

“Fine. Today we went to the park and I fell off the swings, I didn’t get hurt, but Mommy said she won’t let me go on them anymore.”

“She’s probably right. You’re getting too big and fat for those things. If the clothes don’t fit — I mean the shoes, don’t buy them, which I suppose can be applied to you and your swings in some far-off way. Say, Warren, you want to get your mother on the phone for me?”

“She’s in the bathroom and says whoever it is she’ll call back.”

“Tell her if she calls back it’ll cost her two dollars station to station. Tell her that now.”

Warren dropped the receiver on the bed, ran across the room, stood, pressed up against the full-length bathroom door mirror and breathed heavily on it, leaving several moist clouds on the glass. He knocked on the door, yelled through the opened part of it when he got no response, his voice high above the shower splashing, “ Mom . Dad’s on the phone and says to hurry or it’ll cost you dollars to call him back.” He fingered a wavy streak through the runny mirror blotches. “Mom? I said Dad’s on the phone and he wants for you to hurry.”

She turned the shower off. “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute. I have to dry myself.”

He took two large hops and made a bellywhop on the bed. The receiver jumped up when he landed and fell to the floor. He walked two fingers across and down the bedspread to grab it, while his father was saying “Hey? What in God’s name is going on there?”

“I dropped the phone. I’m sorry.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“Getting dried. Where you calling from, Dad?”

“San Francisco.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where’s San Francisco? What do they teach you in school? In California. In America.”

“How far’s California?”

“A long way — too far to walk. About three thousand miles from you, but you’ll learn all about that when you get up to geography.”

“I’m in geography.”

Then maybe you haven’t come to it yet or you learned it and forgot. What’s holding up your mother?”

“She said a minute. When you coming home? Mommy said she didn’t know.”

“Soon, probably — depends on a lot of things. Look, do me a favor and ask your mother to really hustle.”

“I think she’s coming.” He ran to the bathroom door, listened, ran back. “Yeah, I can hear her putting on something. How come you didn’t day goodbye when you left? I didn’t see you.”

“No time. You know me when I have to make one of my flights. Rush-rush. Besides, what are you talking about? — you were sleeping. You’ve been good, though — not giving your mother any backtalk?”