Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

Mrs. Hollingsworth put the blueberries back down into the surreal fog of the freezer and left the store without buying the blueberries or the okra or anything at all. It was acceptable, leaving the grocery store empty-handed, the odd time.

Home

When she got home purchaseless from the store, nosing the Volvo through some boys on her street whom she had difficulty regarding as the backbone of Forrest’s final command, particularly given the horrendous postures of the boys, Mrs. Hollingsworth retook her kitchen, headquarters for her recent lovely campaign. The house had a thick and palpable quiet to it that was almost frightening; it allowed you to smell its emptiness. This stillness and smell of emptiness and quiet ticking space had in fact frightened her before her visit to the wonderful place of the list, before her list — making ride with Forrest. Now there was something thrilling about it, a challenge to defy it.

Something final had occurred as she held the blueberries just above the cool fog of the freezer. “I guess I had a goddamn epiphany,” she said to her egg pot, and put an egg on to boil. She understood that she had come to use this little gesture, boiling an egg, as a signal that she could, at will, cook a real meal. There had been nothing like cooking that other one, though. Ray Oswald had saved her life — she tried that out in her mind, observed the hysterical stripe down it, like the line of white down a skunk, and thought the little skunky idea was fine. She had gone to a marvelous, improbable, at times profane and silly place, and it had been just what she needed. There was not a lot to be said for replacing your uncorrupted dull daily waste of living with a corrupted vital imaginary escape from it, perhaps, but it was a fact that she and others around her were living in stilled and stilted timid toadspawn conformity, afraid of something they could not identify except in particulars — their burglar bars, their life insurance policies, their options — weighing at every moment of their lives. This was a fearful fetid nothingness she could do nothing about. She had at least not escaped into the talk shows, or into part — time commercial self — actualizing (a 6 percent commission on a house made you whole), or into swooning at the disorders of environment management. She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up into cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless runover gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. She wondered what Forrest might make of these tree and owl rebels. Forrest was the only man on earth who could ride against the forces of the NPR, stop the music of antidoom, tell them the music wasn’t going to cut it, they were doomed before the first idler picked up the first fiddle. jesus been hard on all you, she could hear him say.

But she knew he wasn’t interested in that, because she wasn’t interested in that. The root cause of no trees left was no people to say too many people. And that was because, by hysterical reasoning, the Civil War had been lost, the Union perfected, and the perfect Union meant the most populous one you could make. Once the one population got on everyones nerves, as it had, it was a simple logical matter to assert the good of other populations; hence the loud, swiveling, clarion call extolling the endless virtues these days of what had come to be called, in exquisite euphemism, in the speech of the realm, diversity. Forrest had not meant to stop this nonsense, because he had not — no one had — had the sense to see nonsense like it coming, or even to conceive it, way back then when people were still sane shooting each other over Sir Walter Scott.

She got her egg, cooled it in a stream of tapwater, and sat down to eat it. The man now up off the bed who had lost the most beautiful woman in the world and not got a job carrying grain and seed to be beaten by high school boys and ignored by old men was the man for her, after all. He was wounded, and none too custodial of his wounds, but who was any better? Her head was no clearer than his, his no more fogged than hers. In the surreal fog she could see him ask a plain woman to a real dance in Holly Springs Mississippi and begin again.

She drew a hot bath. She had found this was a tonic thing to do in the middle of the day, especially if you ran the water too hot and allowed yourself plenty of time to waste in it. She traipsed around naked, ostensibly collecting little bath necessities, a little Clinique this in a bottle the color of a stinkbug, the eau de that in cut glass, a German boar-bristle brush with a nice waxed wood handle that felt much better to your hand than the bristle did to your skin. She did not need or want these things.

She wanted only the good heat and the water and her calmed mind. She got in the bath.

The water was hot enough to make her wonder if she should let it cool — perhaps she was herself a giant human egg set to boil — but stepping out of a tub once in it is a hassle greater than burning yourself, so she slipped on in. The determination was good. She was level with steam coming off the water. It went over the surface of the water like miniature clouds, which is what it was. She moved these small clouds about gently with her hands. The clear, unbroken water under them was perfect and beautiful.

She suddenly wanted a lemon beagle. The prospect of this yellow-and-white dog was vivid — a washed-out-looking gentle thing that hunted rabbits with great passion and even greater skill but meant no harm to rabbits. She was not sure if you called it a lemon beagle or a lemon-and-white. To lie in a scalding tub of water in the middle of the day in a transport of steam and want a dog she had not thought of or seen in maybe thirty years, and have this be the dominant want in her heart at this moment — was she trivial? Was she merely idle?

She entertained this thought: she was losing her way. Was she losing her way? The question presumed she had once not been losing her way. Had she once not been losing her way? She thought it obvious that all people, or virtually all, must for a time be convinced they know their way. It has not yet occurred to them that they do not know their way, to be more precise. Then at some point it does occur to them. They may suddenly, or gradually, feel that they do not know their way, and they may then be able to doubt that they ever actually did know it. Given the condition they suddenly find themselves in, they wonder what species of hoodwink convinced them they ever thought they knew what was going on. They had merely trotted along, confident and doglike, as people do, full of pride and certainty and ambition and their little educations, as people are supposed to. And some of them, like Mrs. Hollingsworth, come to a halt. In a tub, in a store, in a kitchen, in making a list of real things, in making a list of surreal things, in cooking for a sane man or cooking for a fool.

She thought again about the place she'd been. Was there a fool it would nourish, real or not? What if the fool it would nourish was only the cook? The cook who lay under small hot gambols of surreal fog the idle live-long day wanting a bleachy yellow dog? Not wanting even, perhaps, probably, a real dog but just this prospect of a dog? No damned shed hair and Volvoing it to the vet where the labels on a vaccine read like computer applications and cost as much. She just wanted a dog.