Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“ ‘I changed the sheets—’

“ ‘I know. Yesterday. Unless, of course, you were about to say afterward.’

“ ‘We didn’t do anything, Mrs. Simon.’

“ ‘It’s enough if you so much as sat with him on the side of the bed. Change my sheets.’

“ ‘Look—’

“ ‘Oh no, doll. You look. You’re seventeen years old. This is your first employment. You don’t have references. You’re not used to living away from home. Certainly you’re unused to living with your employers. Mr. Simon and I, however, have lived with servants all our lives.

“ ‘Do you know why it’s necessary that you girls have references? Do you know what’s actually in those characters we write? Our phone numbers and addresses, doll. So we may telephone each other. So we may visit. So we may say to each other what it would not always be wise to put down on paper.

“ ‘Some girls are sickly, some nasty, some dishonest.’

“ ‘I’m not any of those things,’ your mother said.

“ ‘Oh?’ Mrs. Simon said. ‘But as soon as my back is turned you invite a janitor into my home to use a bathroom you were specifically told was out of bounds. Mr. Mindian will definitely have to be informed.’

“ ‘He didn’t use your toilet. I did.’

“ ‘You let him watch? Oh,’ she said, ‘ loathsome! ’

“ ‘No,’ your mother said. ‘Oh my God, you don’t understand. Here.’ And chose just that moment to return Mrs. Simon’s wrist watch, which she took out of her purse, having put it there because she had not yet decided how to tell her she had found it.

“It was almost a formal exchange, trade. Wrist watch for wrench, the two objects changing hands, not returned so much as simultaneously surrendered, restored, like spoils appropriated in a war.

“ ‘I want you out of my house,’ Mrs. Simon said.

“ ‘But where could I go?’

“ ‘Why, to your janitor,’ she said. ‘What, will he want a reference? Very well. You may tell him that you are a lying, quarrelsome young girl who steals watches and permits men to observe her while she sits on toilets. I will vouch for it. Get your things.’

“She kept house for him in the storage locker.

“It was more like a kid’s clubhouse than ever, that tucked snug sense of coze and warm comfy, all of luxury they would ever know, the two of them, the brooding, self-conscious young man and the farmer’s daughter returned to a kind of sybaritic nest condition, some quilted idyll of semiconscious life.

“It wasn’t even sex. It was more like bathing, some long, painless, post-op ease.

“They knew she was there, the maids and tenants and children. Even Mindian knew she was there. No one complained. Why would they? They were fearful of driving off for nothing in return the one absolutely special and spectacular thing that had ever happened to them. It was like having peacocks in your backyard, tamed bears, docile deer. Just knowing they were there lent a sort of glory and luck to the neighborhood. They didn’t even discuss it among themselves — as his catcher and teammates will say nothing even in the seventh and eighth and ninth innings of the pitcher’s no-hit game for fear of jinxing they can barely say what — love in vitro, domestic science in the cellar. The freak your father and the freak your mother belonged to all of them, and if they happened to make their queer nest in one of Mindian’s buildings rather than in another, why that was merely the way Nature arranges these things. It was understood, accepted, the way Catholics understand and accept that the Pope must reside in Rome, or a Normandy Frenchman that Paris is his capital. If George, living alone in that storeroom, had been famous, the two of them down there were twice as famous, more. (Yet everyone, even those who were not Mindian’s tenants, understood that they were not to be disturbed — that is to say, stared at; that is to say bothered.)

“So they knew they were there. The housemaids even agreed, it may even have been without conferral, upon a suitable genealogy for the pair. They had it that your mother and father were the daughter and son of Polish and Italian janitors in the neighborhood, that not only could they not speak English, even though they had heard them speak it, but could not even speak to each other, even though they had heard them.

“The neighborhood, still without conferral, knew it had a problem. (They really didn’t want anything to change.) It knew it was not enough not to rock the boat or simply to maintain silence. If they ignored the principals to their faces, wouldn’t this be taken as a sign of disapproval? The lovers — though God knows that whatever they were it wasn’t lovers, highly developed animals, perhaps, of two entirely different species, each the last of its kind, who took their comfort from each other only because there was no one else in the world they could get it from; lovers? they were too far gone in despair, too lonely to love; lovers? they were the King and Queen of cuddle is all — needed reassurance they thought.

“The maids and housewives sometimes took Nancy with them when they went shopping. In the stores they would hold up ripe tomatoes, crisp stalks of green celery, fruits of the season, candy, for God’s sake, whatever was accommodate to that heatless, iceless larder in which they lived, whatever could be consumed raw. (Or left treats for them on the cellar steps, fresh-baked cookies, hard-boiled eggs, leftover meats which even your doggy daddy and puss mom understood were scraps.) Using Nancy’s (George’s) money of course, but giving it to the grocer themselves, the lovers’ middlemen and agents, and counting the change, too — though who had ever heard of them would have ever shortchanged them? — before handing it over. As if Nancy were a child perhaps, or handicapped. And who knows, maybe they did need help. How many pounds of tomatoes and grapes do you need when you’re shopping for two and tomatoes and grapes are all that you’re buying? But the food was the single overture they made. They never attempted to add anything to, or alter anything in, the room itself. As if your parents really were animals and it was understood that animals knew best how to furnish their lairs and nests and dens. (If your father’s light bulb had burned out, I don’t think anyone would have thought to offer the loan of a spare for so much as a night.)

“George had his chores, his work. He rose at 5:00 A.M. to climb the twenty-four flights of back stairs in Mindian’s eight buildings to take down the forty-eight garbage cans. He had his furnaces to tend, the small repair jobs, the sleds that he carried up from the basement for the smaller children, the three or four emergencies a day that he could absolutely count on. (People locked themselves out of their apartments, they ran out of fuses, they let their bathtubs spill over.) I say count on because he counted on them for tips. (They tipped him now. All the world loves a lover.)

“When he got out of their narrow bed in the fifty-degree room (the temperature of a cave) he told her to stay where she was and she did. While he dressed in the dark. She could just make him out, his naked body. And wondered: What is happening to me? What has already happened? Wondering not who this stranger was who had taken her virginity and with whom she had committed acts that had been reserved in her head not for some future when she was safely married but for other people altogether. Not questioning, as you might think, her own, or even George’s, character so much as marveling at her luck. She loved it. She even loved the little room, their unicorn position in other people’s imaginations. She too believed they brought luck to the neighborhood. She believed that she and George were a blessing to all of Milwaukee, a feather in the cap of the United States of America.