William Gaddis - A Folic Of His Own

— Wait, wait I want to keep that, I…

— This? She held up Hobbytime, — you're going to start another ant farm?

— No, there's a fish tank…

— My God Oscar. I'm going to have a bath. Unless she's used all the hot water in the kitchen of course, and remind me to tell her. When she does those chops for dinner tonight for God's sake not to overcook them.

But a fish tank? when they could better be watched in living colour and much wilder variety spawning and feeding, fin ripping and vacant staring glassy eyed from far grander submarine vistas and exotic plant and coral strewn habitats right here on his nature program, spared those custodial concerns for wind and wave, temperature and salinity, aeration, pH balance, light and filtration and the daily toll of all those mouths to feed confined, best of all, where they could be summoned and banished in an instant like those hordes of his own species crowding the channels elsewhere rather than actually having them all over the house here firing guns, spouting news events, telling jokes, doing pushups, deep knee bends, shuddering with diarrhea, howling half dressed and full of passionate intensity humping guitars like the monkey with the greased football loosing mere anarchy upon the world where three's a crowd even in a house as large as this one, how long did he think she expected to stay? Just let her cool down, leave it to Harry, it couldn't all go on forever could it? and she wasn't still on the warpath like she'd been when he'd driven off without her, muttering — I could kill him! or, in the car when they'd gone shopping for groceries, snapping — Murder? yes. Divorce? never! interrupting a barrage of questions prying into everything from adultery to revenge and this lecherous accident lawyer, dry skin, depilatories, mammograms, reconciling with Daddy since tragedy'd struck coming down, all of it, to money, to the question of money right down to that faltering moment over seven dollars at the gas station but mostly, it was mostly just this feeling that — we never get to be alone anymore like it used to be Oscar, like remember that time we were doing it outdoors in the woods with those pine tree needles sticking into me with that squirrel watching us doing it and that rabbit where we were scared any minute she might see us? where any minute now she might come through the door with some new perplexity embracing household management, errands, the laundry or cornering him alone with — where in God's name she got hold of that car, it's really putting your life in her hands, she says it needs a new alternator whatever that might be, but I'm sure she imagines you'll pay for it, of course the reason she's never got a penny is that everything she's got goes on cosmetics, she's panic stricken at the thought of a wrinkle let alone this lump she rattles on about in her breast but I'm sure you've managed to find that all by yourself haven't you, is that the same shirt you've had on for a week? I'm almost afraid to trust her with the laundry after what happened to my beige cotton blouse and that little white alarm clock, have you seen it recently? I suppose she's managed to break it too like she did the last of those hideous Spode teacups, we simply can't go on like this Oscar do you ever expect to hear from Ilse again?

— Yes she called, while you were both out shopping she…

— Well thank God. When do you expect her.

— Well she, I don't. I told her I didn't think we could…

— That we can't afford her? My God, it's costing us more in sheer carnage than whatever her miserable wages came to isn't it? and you'd like to see everything around here taken care of by me and this poor girl out there right now mopping the kitchen floor just to save a few dollars?

— It's, no Christina it's her sister, she…

— It's no more her sister than the man in the moon, I think your mind's beginning to go Oscar. I trip over her every time I walk through the door don't I?

— I mean Ilse, Ilse's sister the one with the cataracts. She wants to get back out here to work but she's afraid her sister will have an accident because she can hardly see and gets confused about the gas stove, so she offered to…

— She offered to bring a blind woman out here for the rest of us to wait on while she's busy blowing up the house?

— No, no she just thought she could put her sister in the cubby in the top floor where she wouldn't be in the way, that she could peel vegetables and things like that to help out just until spring when the weather gets…

— Till spring! My God Oscar, has it occurred to you to worry about getting through the winter first? sitting here with the television running while you stare out at the, look. Look, can you see him out there? Reared up on the top step of the upper lawn beneath the window clutching an acorn, head darting, tail twitching, the squirrel scampered off at the wave of her hand, — did you see him? You think maybe he was trying to tell you something? One of Hiawatha's mangy little refugees setting up his layaway plan for the hard times ahead while Hiawatha sits here on the shore of Gitche Gumee, the minute old Nokomis walks into the wigwam he opens a book, his eyes seeking sanctuary on the page where It seemed to me that the surface of the lake had changed, often dramatically, each time I looked back at the water — you're not even watching this grisly thing then? are you? with a wave at the silent screen where, as though abruptly dismissed by the toss of her hand, the stretcher borne writhings of survivors of a tenement fire blazing away in the background gave way to the decorous designer sheeted writhings of a middleaging arthritic enduring languorous massage with a heat penetrating unguent and a Florida backdrop Kissing Pain Goodbye, had he called that therapist? Well not exactly, no, he'd told Ilse he didn't think things would work out so he'd just send her the money and — Send her what money! Well, that last week she was here and had to leave when her sister called on such short notice that — She left us in the lurch with nothing in the house but half a dozen eggs while we're paying her through the roof to handle your God knows what in there in the bathtub? Get that down to a quid pro quo now for every gallon of gas that goes into that death trap when we go shopping and maybe she can take right up where Ilse left off, of course I'm sure she already oh, Lily? you've finished out there? Yes sit down for a minute, something I meant to ask you talking to him till I'm blue in the face while he sits there staring at a book, will you look at him? A minute later a. sudden wind had transformed it into a blustering Scottish loch with a surface current and whitecaps. The light can change with an equal suddenness — and can we turn that thing off if no one's watching it? Yummy! a waffle crowned with peanut butter being drenched with maple syrup abruptly displaced by a barefoot procession of bulging eyes and distended bellies fleeing a famine in Ethiopia — and bread? do we need bread? and flour, there's a pencil right there under that napkin we'd better make a list, go shopping without one when you're hungry and you come home with everything in sight, flour. I said flour didn't I, if we need it or not just to be safe there's no earthly reason you can't make a perfectly smooth bechamel sauce with this new processed flour Lily, you can try it again tonight with, write down cauliflower yes, we haven't had cauliflower it should be quite cheap now it's that time of year after all, isn't it. Oscar? do you think of anything? That time of year? watching those fragile fingers stumble paused over the spelling of cauliflower when yellow leaves, or none, or few he could have told them, and here came the squirrel again emptyhanded back down the steps to scamper off across the lower lawn toward a white oak for another acorn till at last when hard times came he'd have not the faintest notion where he'd buried any of them in this frenzy of survival serving neither himself nor even his kind but another vast kingdom, a different order entirely, planting white oaks broadcast — and while we're at it, tea, we always need tea, and yes sugar, just to be safe. Wasn't that what all this was about, after all? from the squirrel down there in the throes of its own monstrous miscalculations to that rabbit lunching nearby, panic quivering through every fibre of its being and beauty nothing but beginning of terror it was still just able to bear for what might that very instant be circling overhead or slithering toward it in the discoloured grass? All this, as she'd charged a minute before, trying to tell him something, there was simply no getting through a thought, let alone putting two of them together to make an idea, before she came up with something else out of nowhere, something in yesterday's paper about the parties in that ridiculous Cyclone Seven case exchanging places? renewing the fray now that horrid dog was out of the way with its genuine simulated Spotskin® and all the rest of it, Minjekahwun, Wear 'Em With The Skinside Inside, of simply getting through a page of the book here by the shining Big-Sea-Water, dark behind it rose the forest where the pigeon, the Omeme, building nests among the pine trees? At times there is a clarity of detail at great distances when, for example, each branch of a thorn tree on thee far bank is minutely sharp to the eye. Instantly it will become a dull strip of grey, and without a cloud in the sky to account for the change. This can produce mild hallucinations as the middle distance advances and recedes where a moment before gusts had flung up the branches of the pines like the skirts of the beautiful Wenonah being ravished by the West Wind, by the heartless Mudjekeewis bending low the flowers and grasses and you can soon begin to feel oppressed by the strange gloom of this lake, with its isolated houses and its wide lawns that slip into the water as if the lake were slowly Hooding and in flocks the wild goose, Wawa, flying to the fenlands northward and the squirrel, Adjidaumo, rattling in his hoard of acorns and the serpent, the Kenabeek — all coming right around full circle and probably getting it wrong at that, she came on, — have you heard a single word I've said Oscar? What is that you're reading. The jumble rattling around in your head, how can you expect us to know what you think when you simply sit here without a word, it's really quite rude. Pretending to read while I'm talking to you, can you answer my question? What was it I asked you. Have you thought any more about calling Father? Changing sides in that idiotic lawsuit they're just trying to drive him around the bend, as though things weren't already bad enough with all this nonsense about impeachment, about inherited madness running in the family, to simply sit down and write him a letter? Well? Well, he could have told them about all that, how John Brown's mother and grandmother both died mad — but on second thought he'd probably pass for Exhibit A himself will you take a look at him right now?