Stanley Elkin - George Mills

And something else. He had grown tolerant of his own bad driving. Regularly he dinged cars in parking lots, gouging metal divots from his once smooth fenders and altering the face of his grille, the delicate crosshatching piecemeal collapsing as he sought to negotiate parking spaces at four and five and six miles an hour. There was one car, a black ’76 Gremlin, that, parked by the curb in the narrow faculty lot behind his building, seemed always to be in his way, the dark molding about its left rear wheel an obstacle he seldom missed as he attempted to move into his slot in the single cramped row of cars. Each accident, each small engagement, brought a brief anger, then a queer, righteous, irrational fulfillment. The car was never not there, always, it seemed to Messenger, in a favored position among the automobiles lined up like race horses at a starting gate. Messenger cursed its owner’s regularity, the long-suffering smugness of the scarred and battered Gremlin. He never left a note — when he left in the afternoon the car was still there — or sought to hide the evidence of his guilt, the injured auto’s black paint smeared like spoor across his cream-colored Pontiac. On each occasion he made the same speech to himself. “My hand-eye coordination’s. going. Fuck him. Why should I worry about a little scratched paint?” But he knew he would neither die nor ever hurt anybody in an accident, that he would simply drive over curbs as he turned corners, skin cars parked along side streets, dent the odd fender here and there along life’s highway.

He was forty-five years old, an old middle-aged man, and required marijuana whenever he left his home.

“Meals-on-Wheels,” Messenger called as he pushed open the unlocked door.

“That’s all right,” a voice called thinly.

The house looked like the inside of a stringed instrument, the wood unpainted, gray as kindling. Even the furniture was unfinished. Messenger, looking at the warped woodwork and canted floors and walls, had the sense that the rooms needed to be tuned.

“Is it still hot?”

“Should be,” Messenger said, raising his voice to the woman he had not yet seen. “I could warm it up on your stove if you like.”

“Yeah,” the woman said, “that’d be terrific. A hot free lunch would make all the difference in my life.” She came out of her room. She was pushing an aluminum walker. “I’m Mrs. Carey,” Mrs. Carey said.

“Cornell Messenger.”

“Yeah,” she said, “how do you do? I missed you yesterday. I was to the clinic for tests. I didn’t know I’d be gone so long or I’d have left a note. Cigarette?”

“No thanks.” He had already begun to reheat the chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes.

“It was the first time I was out in over a month,” she said. “It felt real good. They picked me up in one of those minibuses they send round for the handicapped. They got them equipped with special lifts for wheelchairs. Welfare gave me a wheelchair but I swear to you it’s easier to get around with my walker. I ain’t got the strength in my arms to roll it. A woman needs somebody to push her. I’ll tell you something,” Mrs. Carey said. “I think it looks common when a lady pushes her own wheelchair. That sound funny? That’s the way of it. I’m a heavy smoker but even when I was walking I never smoked in the street. That looks common, too. You think it’s foolish a woman with a Welfare wheelchair and a free walker that travels the town in the handicap bus and waits on the warmed-over charity lunch should say such things and have such notions? You put me down for pride I sit in the kitchen in my nightgown and robe while some strange guy heats my meal?”

“No, of course not.”

“Ain’t you nice,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something you’re so nice. I qualify for benefits from seventeen agencies of the United Way. Last year it was only six. Next year, if I live and nothing happens, it could be thirty.”

“You should look on the bright side,” Cornell said.

“Yeah? You think so?”

“I certainly do.”

“How about that? Say, let me ask you something. Are you important? You told me on the blower you’re making Mrs. Glazer’s deliveries, and she’s married to a big shot over at the university. Maybe you’re important too.”

“No,” Cornell said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet. What’s wrong with Mrs. Glazer anyway?”

“I guess she’s sick.”

“Mind my business, huh? Okay. Let me ask you something else. What did you do with that lunch you had left over yesterday?”

“I ate it.”

“No kidding? Yeah? Maybe you ain’t important.”

“Important people eat a different lunch?”

“They eat omelets. They eat salads. They eat cold soups and thin fish. Let me ask you a question. I don’t get out much anymore. Just to the clinic, just to the agencies. Mrs. Glazer used to tell me, but she ain’t been by in weeks now.”

“Mrs. Glazer has cancer,” Messenger said.

“Oh shit,” Mrs. Carey said.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Cornell said.

“No no, that’s all right. Can I call her up? Is she home?”

“Well she’s home,” Messenger said, “but she’s very tired. It might be better if you waited.”

“You know a lot about it.”

“She’s a friend of mine.”

“Geez, I almost put my foot in it, didn’t I? How about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Hey, forget it,” Mrs. Carey said. “I didn’t know you was that Messenger.”

“ That Messenger? What do you mean? What were you going to ask me?”

An odd change seemed to have overtaken her. She became suddenly coy, teasing, returned quite mysteriously to a time when she had not been ill, the new quality somehow unseemly, as if she powered her own wheelchair perhaps, or smoked in the street. She wanted coaxing, Messenger saw, but he was annoyed. “Ha ha,” she laughed, almost singing. “Ha ha ha.” It was as if she remembered not flirtation exactly but flirtation’s poses and noises. He hoped she wasn’t going to hold her knees and sway in place. “Ha ha,” she chirped again.

“I seem to have been a regular tonic for you,” Cornell said. Was she rolling her eyes at him? Was she pursing her lips? What was this teenage pantomime all about?

“Are you holding? Have you got any mary jane on you?”

“What?”

“Are you high? Do you see visions? They jump the rates on your car insurance?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ha ha.”

“Look, lady, dinner is served.”

“Maybe you ought to give me a puff. I hear it does wonders for chicken-fried steak.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not an agency of the United Way.”

“Ooh, you’re angry.” Cornell had started to leave the kitchen. “What I’d like to know is how you find the time to come down here when there’s so much to be done at home? ”

“Nice meeting you.”

“I’m a goddamn shut-in, Mister. You think it’s a disappointment to me they give a marathon in the park I can’t run in it? It ain’t the long distances that get to you, honey, it’s the yards and inches. Time and tide took the world away. You think you can buy me off with TV, radio call-in shows, fucking Action Line? My good friend got cancer and you lay down the house rules? She’s tired, it might be better if I waited? She ain’t taking calls from the lower classes just now? She’ll take mine though. Want to bet?”

“Hey, come on, what are you so excited about? Don’t get so excited.”

“How’s whoosis, Audrey? Does she still bust out crying when she reads the paper?”

“Look.”

“Can she get her own breakfast cereal yet? Or is she still too upset about the French Revolution? How’s her husband? Is he still going to commit her if she don’t shape up?”