John Irving - The World According to Garp

“My train leaves at five,” Cushie said, but she smiled sympathetically.

“I didn't think you had to be back at any special time,” Garp said.

“Well, even Dibbs has some rules, you know,” Cushie said; she sounded hurt by her school's lax reputation. “And besides,” she said, “you see Helen. I know you do, don't you?”

“Not like this,” he admitted.

“Garp, you shouldn't tell anybody everything,” Cushie said.

It was a problem with his writing, too; Mr. Tinch had told him.

“You're too serious, all the time,” Cushie said, because for once she was in a position where she could lecture him.

On the river below them an eight-oared shell sleeked through the narrow channel of water remaining in The Gut and rowed toward the Steering boathouse before the tide went out and left them without enough water to get home on.

Then Garp and Cushie saw the golfer. He had come down through the marsh grass on the other side of the river; with his violet madras slacks rolled up above his knees, he waded into the mud flats where the tide had already receded. Ahead of him, on the wetter mud flats, lay his golf ball, perhaps six feet from the edge of the remaining water. Gingerly, the golfer stepped forward, but the mud now rose above his calf; using his golf club for balance, he dipped the shiny head into the muck and swore.

“Harry, come back!” someone called to him. It was his golfing partner, a man dressed with equal vividness, knee-length shorts of a green that no grass ever was and yellow knee socks. The golfer called Harry grimly stepped closer to his ball. He looked like a rare aquatic bird pursuing its egg in an oil slick.

“Harry, you're going to sink in that shit!” his friend warned him. It was then that Garp recognized Harry's partner: the man in green and yellow was Cushie's father, Fat Stew.

“It's a new ball!” Harry yelled; then his left leg disappeared, up to the hip; trying to turn back, Harry lost his balance and sat down. Quickly, he was mired to his waist, his frantic face very red above his powder-blue shirt—bluer than any sky. He waved his club but it slipped out of his hand and sailed into the mud, inches from his ball, impossibly white and forever out of Harry's reach.

“Help!” Harry screamed. But on all fours he was able to move a few feet toward Fat Stew and the safety of shore. “It feels like eels!” he cried. He moved forward on the trunk of his body, using his arms the way a seal on land will use its flippers. An awful slorping noise pursued him through the mud flats, as if beneath the mud some mouth was gasping to suck him in.

Garp and Cushie stifled their laughter in the bushes. Harry made his last lunge for shore. Stewart Percy, trying to help, stepped on the mud flats with just one foot and promptly lost a golf shoe and a yellow sock to the suction.

“Ssshhh! And lie still ,” Cushie demanded. They both noticed Garp was erect. “Oh, that's too bad,” Cushie whispered, looking sadly at his erection, but when he tried to tug her down in the grass with him, she said, “I don't want babies, Garp. Not even yours. And yours might be a Jap baby, you know,” Cushie said. “And I surely don't want one of those.”

“What?” Garp said. It was one thing not to know about rubbers, but what's this about Jap babies? he wondered.

“Ssshhh,” Cushie whispered. “I'm going to give you something to write about.”

The furious golfers were already slashing their way through the marsh grass, back to the immaculate fairway, when Cushie's mouth nipped the edge of Garp's tight belly button. Garp was never sure if his actual memory was jolted by that word Jap , and if at that moment he truly recalled bleeding in the Percys' house—little Cushie telling her parents that “Bonkie bit Garp” (and the scrutiny the child Garp had undergone in front of the naked Fat Stew). It may have been then that Garp remembered Fat Stew saying he had Jap eyes, and a view of his personal history clicked into perspective; regardless, at this moment Garp resolved to ask his mother for more details than she had offered him up to now. He felt the need to know more than that his father had been a soldier, and so forth. But he also felt Cushie Percy's soft lips on his belly, and when she took him suddenly into her warm mouth, he was very surprised and his sense of resolve was as quickly blown as the rest of him. There under the triple barrels of the Steering family cannons, T. S. Garp was first treated to sex in this relatively safe and nonreproductive manner. Of course, from Cushie's point of view, it was nonreciprocal, too.

They walked back along the Steering River holding hands.

“I want to see you next weekend,” Garp told her. He resolved he would not forget the rubbers.

“I know you really love Helen,” Cushie said. She probably hated Helen Holm, if she really knew her at all. Helen was such a snob about her brains.

“I still want to see you,” Garp said.

“You're nice,” Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. “And you're my oldest friend.” But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

“Who told you my father was Japanese?” Garp asked her.

“I don't know,” Cushie said. “I don't know if he really is, either.”

“I don't either,” Garp admitted.

“I don't know why you don't ask your mother,” Cushie said. But of course he had asked, and Jenny was absolutely unwavering from her first and only version.

When Garp phoned Cushie at Dibbs, she said, “Wow, it's you ! My father just called and told me I was not to see you or write to you or talk to you. Or even read your letters—as if you wrote any. I think some golfer saw us leaving the cannons.” She thought it was very funny, but Garp only saw that his future at the cannons had slipped from him. “I'll be home that weekend you graduate,” Cushie told him. But Garp wondered: If he bought the condoms now, would they still be usable for graduation? Could rubbers go bad? In how many weeks? And should you keep them in the refrigerator? There was no one to ask.

Garp thought of asking Ernie Holm, but he was already fearful that Helen would hear of his being with Cushie Percy, and although he had no real relationship with Helen that he could be unfaithful to, Garp did have his imagination and his plans.

He wrote Helen a long confessional letter about his “lust,” as he called it—and how it did not compare to his higher feelings for her, as he referred to them. Helen replied promptly that she didn't know why he was telling her all this, but that in her opinion he wrote about it very well. It was better writing than the story he'd shown her, for example, and she hoped he would continue to show her his writing. She added that her opinion of Cushie Percy, from what little she knew of the girl, was that she was rather stupid . “But pleasant,” Helen wrote. And if Garp was given to this lust, as he called it, wasn't he fortunate to have someone like Cushie around?

Garp wrote back that he would not show her another story until he wrote one that was good enough for her. He also discussed his feelings for not going to college. First, he thought, the only reason to go to college was to wrestle, and he wasn't sure he cared enough about it to wrestle at that level. He saw no point in simply continuing to wrestle at some small college where the sport wasn't emphasized. “It's only worth doing,” Garp wrote to Helen, “if I'm going to try to be the best.” He thought that trying to be the best at wrestling was not what he wanted; also, he knew, it was not likely he could be the best. And whoever heard of going to college to be the best at writing ?