Padgett Powell - Cries for Help, Various - Stories

With the police chief’s son tackling him as it were, and smelling awful, and as hot and moist as dim sum, Thang Phong thought, Why you even in my country, get off me (the violent elbowing twist that sent the boy to the ground came with the word off ). When Mrs. Grieveport slashed open the curtain and he saw all her puffy whiteness, he was still desperately trying and failing to conjure an image of his own dark mother. His reaching back and forward to prevent falling had no thoughts within it; one merely never wishes to fall, especially on porcelain. The urge to not fall on porcelain is pre-intellectual.

Thang Phong did not ever realize that he was connected to the death of the son of the chief of police, because he never read in the paper about the boy’s being found dead of a heart attack on the sidewalk, and he did not know about the police chief’s troubles, or his troubled boy, or any of it. About Mrs. Nielson’s demise he knew he was responsible, but in a defensible if regrettable manslaughtery self-defensive accidental way only. The guilt that was natural he sought to assuage by playing the piano intensely at concerts that in any way memorialized her: at recitals of her former students, say. When he played at venues unrelated to her, he often found a way to mention that she had been his best teacher and that he considered her not only a world-class teacher but a world-class player in her own right.

It gives me some pleasure, at a time when I have come to not take pleasure in pleasure, to hazard that Thang Phong loved Mrs. Jones, and loves her still. In time of course he came to recall his own mother clearly, but the image of his naked piano teacher reaching for him still comes much more readily to his mind.

One does not decide to stop being oneself; one merely stops deciding to be oneself. There is a quotient of energy the expenditure of which is necessary for one to be perceived in a way one is accustomed to, and to perceive oneself in a way one is accustomed to. And this expenditure becomes optional, its expense even a matter to chuckle at. It is like the energy required to eat meat and to be perceived as a red-blooded kind of dude. Suddenly, or gradually, it would be just as well to be a vegetarian, or anything else. The energy for holding course is gone. It is the incipience, this waving away of the compass bearing, of a nervous breakdown, a term that would disturb someone still holding course but a prospect that sounds inviting to someone waving off the compass. So, ladies, what I mean to say is that I have become a vegan in my head and no longer care who I am or who you think I am. I realize all this makes not a large ripple on the universal pond of vanity.

A bear skinned-out resembles a man, I have heard. This apparently disturbs hunters who have not been disturbed to that point in the adventure of killing a bear. But they get the willies once the hide sits there and the naked bear here.

A little dialogue played one morning in Mrs. Terrell Stamp’s head:

Don’t sit on that knife.

I can sit on these knives?

Yes. Sit on those, but not on that one there.

These here are okay?

Yes. Sit right on them.

Like this?

Yes. You can squirm down on them, they won’t hurt you.

Are they rubber?

No, they are not rubber . God. They are just. . well, sittable knives, and that one is not a sittable knife.

Mrs. Terrell Stamp had many things on her mind, but foremost was marble cake in the morning. It was cold outside and she was happy to have her ingredients inside. She might go outside but if she did it would not be because she had to but because she wanted to. She liked to let good cold air come up her skirt for just a shot, then head back to the oven she could stand near while making the cake. She specialized in marble cake because she liked the wide tolerances involved in folding in the marbling fudge cake. There was not a right way or a wrong way to fold. If what was in one bowl got into what was in the other bowl, you had succeeded, more or less. You could do it without taking your eyes off a soap opera. There was precision cooking, and certainly other precision adventures in life, and Mrs. Terrell Stamp sought to avoid them. She liked loose, relaxed things, like popping out into the snow in a skirt for a minute, making a cake while looking at TV, leaning against the stove and thinking about nothing but how nice the stove was after the snow, how good the cake was beginning to smell, how crummy the soaps were but you kept watching largely because they were crummy. That was their point: loose art for the loose. You could have a marble cake that was not pretty, just as you could have, say, a dalmatian with heavy unattractive spots, but you liked the dog anyway, and you liked the cake too. That’s how she liked life — heavy or clumsy or inelegant or not smart, but good anyway.

When the children got home from school in the afternoon she remembered who they were and how many they were and loved them. Raising children was the loosest, most imprecise art of the widest conceivable tolerances, to her mind, of any enterprise on earth, except perhaps drug addiction of the terminal sort. Half of daily television was now devoted to the premise that already loose parents should not attempt to raise children. She’d seen a sixty-year-old mother in a bikini try to mount a talk-show host in front of her own daughter. This had of course been an attempt to tighten up the daughter. The mother was screwed up, of course, but she was not incognizant of the underlying principles at work: appear tight, stay loose. The mother had hit on the errant proposition of appearing loose as well, an experiment that was failing. The daughter was aghast at the mother though, so it was debatable really whether the experiment would fail. It was unlikely, at any rate, that the daughter was going to try to mount the host after the mother had pawed him. And she would now in all likelihood hesitate before wearing an immodest bathing suit. Perhaps the crazed mother was genius. She was a bag of frenetic cellulite with badly dyed hair. Mrs. Stamp could not see her maintaining course too much longer.

The show made her nervous, as they all did: an entire industry predicated on, and capitalizing on, the fact that Americans did not know how to properly have children or to eat. The soap operas tried to demonstrate the opposite fiction: that we were infinitely sexy and slim and in and out of love in mysterious and glamorous continuum. Television offered a dramatic commercialized equivalent to her little polar minuet between the cold snow and the warm stove.

In a contemplative penseroso of this sort one morning in her kitchen, the roof of her entire house lifted off, almost noiselessly, and spun away, up up and away as if in a cartoon. It was non-threatening, this putative tragedy, so that Mrs. Stamp had occasion to be reminded of Dorothy’s house spinning as it left (or returned to?) Kansas, for her roof spun also, that slow, screwing spin that things approaching or leaving earth do, having something, she thought, to do with the earth’s spinning beneath them. Her roof sucked off the house like a tin of coffee being opened and spiraled off, dropping on her a small gentle rain of pink insulation tufts like mimosa blossoms. A sprinkling of roofing nails tinkled easily onto the kitchen floor. She could suddenly see how filthy her kitchen was, far more disturbing than the roof’s leaving. The weather outside was pleasant; what she could see of it, brushing insulation from her face, was what they meant when they said partly cloudy. There was no wind, no darkness to account for the roof’s spinning away to Oz or to outer space or to the nearest trailer park or strip mall. It would be a fine irony, and a sure sign of the hand of God, if the roof landed in a trailer park and did damage. Over the years He had hurled all the trailers he could and He was now ripping up parts of better built homes and throwing them at the trailers. Mrs. Stamp checked out her kitchen and it was all in working order. She still had water, gas, and the television was still on in the next room. What a pleasant day it was. The phone worked too. She should call someone and report the roof but did not know whom to call. She hated decisions and she most hated decisions involving telephones.