John Gardner - October Light

What came to her mind first was the ugly old men she would sometimes notice at bus stations, when she went on her yearly spree with Estelle to New York: old blear-eyed bums, tobacco running down their whiskered chins, fingernails black, trousers unbuttoned, perhaps one eye poked out and grown over below the lid. But she knew at once that, ugly as they were, they weren’t the ones. Such people never read, or if they did, read only newspapers, following along under the words with their fingers, jerking and muttering, finding in everything they stumbled on new and ever more bitter confirmation of what their lives had taught them long ago, that sorrow and disease are the lot of all animals, so that perhaps they’d been right, after all, to give in, become these mindless and despairing husks that they knew very well they’d become. No, they were not the ones; no. Her own brother James might become such a man without much labor, violent, stubborn, and self-critical as he was, beset with more troubles than a cranberry merchant; and though he was her enemy, for now at least—“in war enemies, in peace friends,” as Horace would say — James and miserable people like him were not the evil she’d hurled from her bed. Young people, then?

She pursed her lips and pulled at a strand of her hair, considering. It was possible, of course. She half-turned and felt behind her on the bed for the bedpan. Some young people, heaven knew, were arrogant fools, always sneering at their elders, sure they knew far more than anybody. It wasn’t true of the young people she knew just now; but she had known such children from time to time. And one thought of people like Patricia Hearst, or those people who blew up banks and stores, or those Manson people — terrifying things! — Satanists who lived off the garbage of hotels — so she’d heard on the news — and at night crept into people’s houses and chopped them up horribly, no one knew why. But it was hard to believe such people as poor Patricia or those others read novels, though perhaps they read Communist tracts — perhaps they read even honest books about the troubles in the world, and because they were young and hadn’t yet noticed that for the most part grown-ups are merely stupid, not purposely evil (though some were that too), they took things into their own young, foolish hands. They were idealists, in a certain sad, terrible way. Some of them had gotten good grades in college, she’d seen on TV, and if you could believe what they said — and Sally was inclined to believe what people said, even when she knew they were partly lying — their whole purpose was to call attention to social injustices and destroy what they saw as the System. She would not care to be friends with such people (it might be interesting — though Horace would be shocked — to talk with one, briefly), but she could not believe it was for them her book was meant. They had better things to do — self-pity to revel in and plots to hatch, sticking pins into candle-lit maps somewhere down cellar. The book would bore them, even though they might well agree with its sour opinions.

Who then?

She finished with the bedpan, opened the window and dumped it out, closed the window again, and, noticing only now how cold the floor was, pushed her feet into her slippers. She absently took an apple and began to eat it, pacing in an L back and forth around the bed, back and forth between the window and the attic door. The night was very quiet. Out in the barn she could hear James’ milking machines chugging. She paused, sucking a piece of apple from her dentures and thinking of him moving from cow to cow, hunched over, hauling heavy cans, laboring on though his life, he must know if he looked at it, had no longer any hint of rhyme or reason — laboring on by senseless habit, or for the cows’ sake and, by accident, half against his will, for hers.

She turned in haste from the window and the thought. There was only one place that thought could lead, she knew: capitulation. She’d find herself giving in to his senseless tyranny, a life not worth living, as far as she was concerned, plain and dreary as a plank in the barn — giving in for no better reason than James had for milking his cows. She glanced past her shoulder at the book on the floor, face down, as she’d have looked at a crushed brown spider that might not be dead.

She returned to her pacing, touching the bedpost each time she went by. Who else was there, she asked herself, that read books? Suddenly and mysteriously — though she did not notice the mystery — a picture came to her, clearer than a picture on television, of people on a bus. It was a gloomy bus with knife-slashed seats and, outside the windows, dull rain and the lights of a city. Perhaps it was a bus she’d really seen, in New York for instance, or perhaps she was only imagining it, as she imagined things while reading; either way, the image was crystal clear, so clear that, except for curious blurs and uncertainties, she could study the faces one by one.

She studied a large, middle-aged black woman. The woman was tired, her head tipped back, the flesh of her face all hanging, it seemed, from the shiny bridge of her nose. Her eyes were closed, her fingers interlaced, her workshoes worn over on the outsides. She had a paper bag, wrinkled as if she’d carried things home in it many times. She had with her no newspaper, no books. If she ever read anything, it was the Bible. There were people these days — mostly young; people that never read it — who claimed the Bible was an enslaver of women like this one, this … From nowhere the weird thought came that the black woman’s name was Sally. How odd! … Perhaps it was true (her mind hurried on) that the Bible enslaved the poor and oppressed, such as women, inclining them to acceptance; but Sally Abbott for one did not believe it. She was a true Christian woman if ever one lived, though she said so herself, and she was no slave. Some things, of course, one had to accept without whimpering, such as old age. But as for human tyranny … Sally Abbott smiled, her eyes closed tightly, studying the black woman. For all her weariness, all her burdens of family, poverty, uncertainty, and the weight of her flesh, she was no cowed dog, no weakling. Her black eyes could flash, she could lash out with words or with her hand or with the end of her broom …

She studied the young, light-skinned black girl beside the fat woman, no relation. The girl was beautiful and generous of heart, though it seemed to her troubled in some way, dissatisfied or frightened. She had a brown leather purse, an elegant brown coat, and probably, at home in her apartment, good books, novels translated from French, poetry by Langston Hughes, biographies perhaps, also records and prints … Her face was motionless, hiding all her thoughts. Her hands, too — in brown gloves — were motionless. Sally realized with a start that the girl was Pearl Wilson, from her novel.

But she did not stop her little game with her mind merely because her mind had tricked her. She pressed her fingertips to her eyelids until colors came, but also an image. Behind them sat … a rabbi with a tangled beard. She smiled — he somehow pleased her — but passed over him at once, remembering her purpose. He, certainly, would waste no time on such a novel.

There was a countrified girl with bad skin, a cheap overcoat of electric purple, a piece of gum in her cheek, and in her squat, slightly spatulate hands she had, Sally saw, a paperback novel. But it was a novel about a nurse, some silly, frumpy book that could surely do no harm, no more harm than a daydream, a cup of hot milk — or at any rate no harm beyond making her snap at her husband, if she should be lucky enough to catch one, some innocent drudge like Ginny’s Mr. Nit — no harm beyond making her criticize the man, or use tears against him because he failed to measure up to the doctor who loved the nurse (Jennifer) in her book.