Philip Roth - Indignation

“Isn’t it?”

“ No. ”

“You’re awfully poised about everything, ” I said. “How do you know the nurse is going to do nothing?”

“She’s too embarrassed to.”

“Look, how did you get like this?”

“Like what?” asked Olivia, in anger now.

“So — expert.”

“Oh, yes, Olivia the expert,” she said sourly. “That’s what they called me at the Menninger Clinic.”

“But you are. You’re so under control.”

“You really think so, do you? I, who have eight thousand moods a minute, whose every emotion is a tornado, who can be thrown by a word, by a syllable, am ‘under control’? God, you are blind,” she said and went back to the bathroom with the towels.

Olivia came by bus to the hospital the next day — a fifty-minute bus ride in either direction — and in my room the same delightful business transpired, after which she cleaned up and, while in the bathroom disposing of the towels, changed the water in the vase to keep the flowers fresh.

Miss Clement now tended to me without speaking. Despite Olivia’s reassurance, I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t told someone, and that the payoff would come when I left the hospital and was back at school. I was as sure as my own father would have been that as a result of my having been caught having sexual contact with Olivia in my hospital room, full-scale disaster would shortly ensue.

Olivia was fascinated by my being a butcher’s son. It seemed far more interesting to her that I should be a butcher’s son than what was of no little interest to me, that she should be a doctor’s daughter. I’d never before dated a doctor’s daughter. Mostly the girls I’d known were girls whose fathers owned a neighborhood store, like my father did, or were salesmen who sold neckties or aluminum siding or life insurance, or were tradesmen — electricians, plumbers, and so forth. At the hospital, after I’d had my orgasm, she almost immediately began asking me about the store, and very quickly I got the idea: I was to her something on the order of the child of a snake charmer or of a circus performer raised in the big top. “Tell me more,” she said. “I want to hear more.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I know nothing about such things and because I like you so much. I want to learn everything about you. I want to know what made you you, Marcus.”

“Well, the store made me me, if anything did, though what exactly was made I can’t say I entirely know anymore. I’ve been in a very confused state of mind since I hit this place.”

“It made you hardworking. It made you honest. It gave you integrity.”

“Oh, did it?” I said. “The butcher shop?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, let me tell you about the fat man, then,” I said. “Let me tell you what he gave me in the way of integrity. We’ll start with him.”

“Goodie. Story time. The fat man and how he gave Marcus integrity.” She laughed in anticipation. The laugh of a child being tickled. Nothing exceptional, and still it enchanted me as much as everything else.

“Well, a fat man used to come every Friday and pick up all the fat. It’s possible he had a name, though it’s equally possible that he didn’t. He was just the fat man. He would come in once a week, announce, ‘Fat man here,’ weigh all the fat, pay my father for it, and take it away. The fat was in a garbage pail, a regular fifty-five-gallon pail about this high, and while we were cutting we were tossing the fat into the pail there. Before the big Jewish holidays, when people loaded up with meat, there could be a couple of pailfuls waiting for him. It couldn’t have been a lot of money that the fat man paid. A couple of bucks a week, no more than that. Well, our store was right near the corner where the bus to downtown stopped, the number eight Lyons Avenue bus. And on Fridays, after the fat man picked up the fat, he left behind the garbage cans, and I had the job of washing them out. I remember once one of the pretty girls from my class saying to me, ‘Oh, when I stopped at the bus stop in front of your father’s store, I saw you there cleaning out the garbage cans.’ So I went to my father and said, ‘This is ruining my social life. I can’t clean these garbage cans anymore.’ ”

“You cleaned them in front of the store?” Olivia asked. “Right out on the street?”

“Where else?” I said. “I had a scrub brush, Ajax, threw a little water in with the Ajax, and I’d scrub the inside of it. If you didn’t get it clean, it would start to smell. Become rancid. But you don’t want to hear this stuff.”

“I do. I do.”

“I had you down for a great woman of the world, but in many ways you’re a child, aren’t you?”

“But of course. Isn’t it a triumph at my age? Would you have it any other way? Continue. Washing the garbage cans after the fat man left.”

“Well, you’d get a pail of water, pour it in, swish it around, and empty it into the gutter, and from there it would flow down along the curbstone, carrying with it all the street-side debris, and then drain into the sewer grate at the corner. Then you’d do the whole thing a second time, and that would get the can clean.”

“And so,” said Olivia, laughing — no, not laughing, nibbling rather at the bait of a laugh—“you figured you weren’t going to pick up a lot of girls like that.”

“No, I wasn’t. That’s why I said to the boss — I always referred to my father as the boss in the store — I said, ‘Boss, I cannot do these garbage cans anymore. These girls from school are coming by, they stop in front of the store because of the bus, they see me cleaning garbage cans, and the next day I’m supposed to ask them to go out to a Saturday night movie with me? Boss, I can’t do it.’ And he said to me, ‘You’re ashamed? Why? What are you ashamed of? The only thing you have to be ashamed of is stealing. Nothing else. You clean the garbage cans.’ ”

“How terrific,” she said, and captivated me now with a different laugh entirely, a laugh that was laden with the love of life for all its unexpected charms. At that moment you would have thought the whole of Olivia lay in her laughter, when in fact it lay in her scar.

It was also “terrific” and amused her greatly when I told her about Big Mendelson, who worked for my father when I was a little kid. “Big Mendelson had a nasty mouth on him,” I said. “He really belonged in the back, in the refrigerator, and not in front waiting on customers. But I was seven or eight, and because he had this nasty kind of humor and because they called him Big Mendelson, I thought he was the funniest man on earth. Finally my father had to get rid of him.”

“What did Big Mendelson do that he had to get rid of him?”

“Well, on Thursday mornings,” I told her, “my father would come back from the chicken market and he would dump all the chickens in a pile and people would pick whatever chicken they wanted for the weekend. Dumped them on a table. Anyway, one woman, a Mrs. Sklon, she used to pick up a chicken and smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. Then she’d pick up another chicken, and again she’d smell the mouth and then smell the rear end. She did the same thing every week, and she did it so many times every week that Big Mendelson couldn’t contain himself, and one day he said, ‘Mrs. Sklon, can you pass that inspection?’ She got so mad at him, she picked up a knife from the counter and said, ‘If you ever talk to me that way again, I’ll stab you.’ ”

“And that’s why your father let him go?”

“Had to. By then he’d said lots of things like that. But about Mrs. Sklon Big Mendelson was right. Mrs. Sklon was no picnic even for me, and I was the nicest boy in the world.”