Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

Things were different then. At least for Druff. Well, give him credit, for others too. This was the earliest fifties. A time of girdled sexuality. (Poodle skirts were a sort of Su’ad’s veil.) If you knocked someone up you married her as much to make an honest man of yourself as an honest woman of the girl. Guilt was champ. He hadn’t thought the belt would ever change hands.

Now he knew, too late, it had all been just so much magic, the superstitious flimflam of conspired, agreeable fears. There’d been no especial power in her, he’d fallen through the net was all, squeezed through the cracks by his times, assigned, like others of his generation, high-flown attributes to what was mere rumor, the prose of innocence, guilt, the hype of “upbringing.” It was as if — truly — he’d lived by almanacs, “fun facts,” lore, raised in weathers controlled by swallows punctually returned to Capistrano or Puxatawney Phil frightened of his own shadow. He’d bought into such notions. It was like someone deciding to flesh out his portfolio because the NFL had won the Super Bowl that year, or someone pushed into buying or selling off because hems were high or low. (He didn’t remember the formula and reminded himself he would have to ask Margaret about that one when they were around the fire.) Well, why should he chastise himself, they all did. For who gave blowjobs then, who took it up the ass? Poor Druff, Druff thought, who was new to self-pity, a man who’d missed his season, who’d — you can imagine how he felt, you can just imagine — wasted ripeness and mourned girls — dreamgirls, indeed — he not only had never had but had never even dreamed about in dreams.

Sixty, his wife was sixty. Rose Helen was a golden-ager. Who’d dyed her hair since the first gray appeared in it in her late twenties, and had begun to let it go gray on her fifty-fifth birthday, and allowed the gray to go white, gradually turning the color of house salt. His golden-ager, his silver citizen.

And now recalled how he’d met her, how it had been on just such an almanac occasion as those he’d lived by years. On a pseudo-holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, named for a character in a comic strip, a day of suspended decorums, when the girls chased the boys, were permitted to ask them on dates, make first moves. (Only even that didn’t happen, or happened only timidly, some vouchsafed mistletoe indulgence which would never stand up in court, all of them playing a Mardi Gras in the head.)

In some gymnasium now forgotten. (Who’d forgotten so many details, his life chewed by remoteness and Druff left standing there holding on to a big bag of first impressions which hadn’t lasted, just some gray overview, and him a guy, this latent pol, whose stock-in-trade it was to recall everything, everybody’s facts and figures, who seemed, here at least, to have misplaced his own.) But, though this may only have been his politicals speaking, instincts of the retrograde enhanced, he seemed to remember bunting. (Perhaps it was a function only quasi-Sadie Hawkins, some student council thing, or even a do where Republicans asked Democrats to dance.) Well, it was gone. But in a gym at the state university. And Rose Helen, already twenty-two, already at her roots’ roots the melanin fading, a chromosome snapping in her aging hair. Sure, he remembered now. The only Sadie Hawkins part to it — for them, he meant; it really had been Sadie Hawkins Day — was that both of them had agreed to be there. A friend of his from her graduating class in high school had given him her name, had given her his, who’d never mentioned either to the other before, was not fixing them up but only supplying on some mutual demand (though he couldn’t, in truth, conceive of Rose Helen’s ever having asked for it) this unwritten letter of introduction, the names like a sort of reference — To whom it may concern, say.

His friend had told him Rose Helen was a cripple.

“She’s crippled?”

“What are you, Druff, planning to enter her in a footrace? She has this minor deformity. Some hip thing you can’t even notice. It’s no big deal, don’t be so narrow. She’s very insecure. I think she has an inferiority complex. My mother plays cards with her mother. She’s very self-conscious, that’s why she started college late. If I were you, I’d call her, Druff. It’s the crippled-up girls with the inferiority complexes who are hot to trot.”

“How come you never took her out?”

“Hey, don’t you listen? Our mothers are friends. Though, personally, my mom would love it. She keeps giving me this shit about her beautiful skin. Druff, I don’t know how we ever got born at all. To hear my mother tell it, you’d think clear skin was a secondary sex characteristic.”

And, really, you didn’t notice it, and after he met her the notion of her invisible physical deformity was vaguely exciting. It was a mild scoliosis, the slight curvature of her spine lifting her left hip and thrusting it faintly forward, providing a small shelf where she characteristically rested the palm of her hand and lending her the somewhat hard look of a dance hall girl in westerns. (“Miss Kitty,” he would call her later.)

But on the Sadie Hawkins Day in question they almost missed each other. He looked for a girl with a deformity. He looked for a girl with clear skin. And, though he found no cripples, two or three clear-skinned girls actually agreed to dance with him when he went up to them. He said his name, they told him theirs. Then he bowed out. (Jesus, Druff thought, do you see what I mean? I was this shit-scared guilt avoider! They could have sainted me, for Christ’s sake! Because it was only the knowledge that somewhere in that bunting’d, made-over gymnasium there must have been this shy, suffering Rose Helen lurching around looking for me that spooked me. Not just that her ma knew the ma of my friend, not even that my friend’s ma could connect me to the scene of my friend’s ma’s friend’s daughter’s shameful stand-up, but that I made the connection, I did, that these particular two or three clear- skinned girls were not that particular clear-skinned girl, and how would I feel if I were a crip and told, urged, Come on, Sadie Hawkins Day falls on a weekend this year, you can sleep in Saturday, come on, whaddaya say, how about it, come on, we have a mutual friend, and then get caught dancing with two or three girls who weren’t even deformed? No thank you. Thanks, but no thanks. Jesus, he thought, I was, I was — this Mikey!)

And found her, of course, where he should have looked first, along that wall of wallflowers, which isn’t always a wall, or even a partially occupied row of chairs, but often as not just an area, some dead space in the room which, occupied or not, busy or not, is something set aside, set off, a kind of sanctuary, as necessary to the practice of civilized life as flatware or toilets. Asking as soon as he saw her, “Are you Rose Helen Magnesson?”

“Yes, I am. Are you Robert Druff?”

“Yes. Happy Sadie Hawkins Day. Would you care to dance?”

Dancing wasn’t his specialty, even a simple box step, though now he thought that if it had only been a few years later, when people first began to dance to rhythm and blues, it might have been a different story. He could have handled the fast stuff, accommodated the large motor movements of funk. It was going in close that clumsied him, moved him, that is, toward unearned intimacy, pulled him, he meant, toward love. Dancing with Rose Helen that evening, moving his hand to rest casually on her left hip when she suddenly started, bolted, pushed it away, as if he’d grabbed her haunch.

Assuming he’d found it, accidentally touched her invisible deformity, whatever secreted, hidden-away thing it was (running on instinct here, believing, without knowing he held such beliefs, in some compensatory system of synergistics, of absolute justice, the up side of eye-for-eye) that, wounding her in one place, fixed her in another, cleared her skin, say — it was beautiful, remarkable, radiant in fact, incandescent, burning with the pearly collagens, moisturizers and organic steams, the mossy herbals and chemical brews of flush, full pores, all the natural cosmetics of, at once, a shining virginity and devastating pregnancy — and transfigured self-consciousness into a sort of shy, suffering charm.