John Irving - The World According to Garp

He turned the pepper with a pair of tongs. When the pepper was charred, Garp snatched it up with the tongs and flipped it into the sink. The pepper hissed at him. “Talk all you want to,” Garp told it. “You don't have much time left.”

He was distracted. Usually he liked to stop thinking about other things while he cooked—in fact, he forced himself to. But he was suffering a crisis of confidence about marriage counseling.

“You're suffering a crisis of confidence about your writing ,” Helen told him, walking into the kitchen with even more than her usual authority—the freshly cut two-by-fours slung over and under her arm like matching shotguns.

Walt said, “Daddy burned something.”

“It was a pepper and Daddy meant to,” Garp said. “Every time you can't write you do something stupid,” Helen said. “Though I'll confess this is a better idea for a diversion than your last diversion.”

Garp had expected her to be ready, but he was surprised that she was so ready. What Helen called his last “diversion” from his stalled writing had been a baby-sitter.

Garp drove a wooden spoon deep into his tomato sauce. He flinched as some fool took the corner by the house with a roaring downshift and a squeal of tires that cut through Garp with the sound of a struck cat. He looked instinctively for Walt, who was right there—safe in the kitchen.

Helen said, “Where's Duncan?” She moved to the door but Garp cut in front of her.

“Duncan went to Ralph's,” he said; he was not worried, this time, that the speeding car meant Duncan had been hit, but it was Garp's habit to chase down speeding cars. He had properly bullied every fast driver in the neighborhood. The streets around Garp's house were cut in squares, bordered every block by stop signs; Garp could usually catch up to a car, on foot, provided that the car obeyed the stop signs.

He raced down the street after the sound of the car. Sometimes, if the car was going really fast, Garp would need three or four stop signs to catch up to it. Once he sprinted five blocks and was so out of breath when he caught up to the offending car that the driver was sure there'd been a murder in the neighborhood and Garp was either trying to report it or had done it himself.

Most drivers were impressed with Garp, and even if they swore about him later, they were polite and apologetic to his face, assuring him they would not speed in the neighborhood again. It was clear to them that Garp was in good physical shape. Most of them were high school kids who were easily embarrassed—caught hot-rodding around with their girl friends, or leaving little smoking-rubber stains in front of their girl friends' houses. Garp was not such a fool as to imagine that he changed their ways; all he hoped to do was make them speed somewhere else.

The present offender turned out to be a woman (Garp saw her earrings glinting, and the bracelets on her arm, as he ran up to her from behind). She was just ready to pull away from a stop sign when Garp rapped the wooden spoon on her window, startling her. The spoon, dribbling tomato sauce, looked at a glance as if it had been dipped in blood.

Garp waited for her to roll down her window, and was already phrasing his opening remarks ("I'm sorry I startled you, but I wanted to ask you a personal favor...") when he recognized that the woman was Ralph's mother—the notorious Mrs. Ralph. Duncan and Ralph were not with her; she was alone, and it was obvious that she had been crying.

“Yes, what is it?” she said. Garp couldn't tell if she recognized him as Duncan's father, or not.

“I'm sorry I startled you,” Garp began. He stopped. What else could he say to her? Smeary-faced, fresh from a fight with her ex-husband or a lover, the poor woman looked to be suffering her approaching middle-age like the flu; her body looked rumpled with misery, her eyes were red and vague. “I'm sorry,” Garp mumbled; he was sorry for her whole life. How could he tell her that all he wanted was for her to slow down?

“What is it?” she asked him.

“I'm Duncan's father,” Garp said.

“I know you are,” she said. “I'm Ralph's mother.”

“I know,” he said; he smiled.

“Duncan's father meets Ralph's mother,” she said, caustically. Then she burst into tears. Her face flopped forward and struck the horn. She sat up straight, suddenly hitting Garp's hand, resting on her rolled-down window; his fingers opened and he dropped the longhandled spoon into her lap. They both stared at it; the tomato sauce produced a stain on her wrinkled beige dress.

“You must think I'm a rotten mother,” Mrs. Ralph said. Garp, ever-conscious of safety, reached across her knees and turned off the ignition. He decided to leave the spoon in her lap. It was Garp's curse to be unable to conceal his feelings from people, even from strangers; if he thought contemptuous thoughts about you, somehow you knew .

“I don't know anything about what kind of mother you are,” Garp told her. “I think Ralph's a nice boy.”

“He can be a real shit,” she said.

“Perhaps you'd rather Duncan not stay with you tonight?” Garp asked—Garp hoped . To Garp, she didn't appear to know that Duncan was spending the night with Ralph. She looked at the spoon in her lap. “It's tomato sauce,” Garp said. To his surprise, Mrs. Ralph picked up the spoon and licked it.

“You're a cook?” she asked.

“Yes, I like to cook,” Garp said.

“It's very good,” Mrs. Ralph told him, handing him his spoon. “I should have gotten one like you—some muscular little prick who likes to cook.”

Garp counted in his head to five: then he said, “I'd be glad to go pick up the boys. They could spend the night with us, if you'd like to be alone.”

“Alone!” she cried. “I'm usually alone. I like having the boys with me. And they like it, too,” she said. “Do you know why?” Mrs. Ralph looked at him wickedly.

“Why?” Garp said.

“They like to watch me take a bath,” she said. “There's a crack in the door. Isn't it sweet that Ralph likes to show off his old mother to his friends?”

“Yes,” Garp said.

“You don't approve, do you, Mr. Garp?” she asked him. “You don't approve of me at all.”

“I'm sorry you're so unhappy,” Garp said. On the seat beside her in her messy car was a paperback of Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband : Garp remembered that Mrs. Ralph was going to school. “What are you majoring in?” he asked her, stupidly. He recalled she was a never-ending graduate student; her problem was probably a thesis that wouldn't come.

Mrs. Ralph shook her head. “You really keep your nose clean, don't you?” she asked Garp. “How long have you been married?”

“Almost eleven years,” Garp said. Mrs. Ralph looked more or less indifferent; Mrs. Ralph had been married for twelve.

“Your kid's safe with me,” she said, as if she were suddenly irritated with him, and as if she were reading his mind with utter accuracy. “Don't worry, I'm quite harmless—with children,” she added. “And I don't smoke in bed.”

“I'm sure it's good for the boys to watch you take a bath,” Garp told her, then felt immediately embarrassed for saying it, though it was one of the few things he'd told her that he meant.

“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't seem to do much good for my husband, and he watched me for years.” She looked up at Garp, whose mouth hurt from all his forced smiles. Just touch her cheek, or pat her hand, he thought; at least say something. But Garp was clumsy at being kind, and he didn't flirt.

“Well, husbands are funny,” he mumbled. Garp the marriage counselor, full of advice. “I don't think many of them know what they want.”