The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Page 6

  It was cloudy and cold. The cars’ tires laid behind them on the snowy street a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls. I had stepped on some earlier; they squeaked. We could have wished for more traffic. When a car came, we all popped it one. In the intervals between cars we reverted to the natural solitude of children.

  I started making an iceball—a perfect iceball, from the perfectly white snow, perfectly spherical, and squeezed perfectly translucent, all the way through. (The Fahey boys and I considered it unfair actually to throw an iceball at somebody but it had been known to happen.)

  I had just embarked on the iceball project when we heard tire chains come clanking from afar. A black Buick was moving toward us down the street. We all spread out, banged together some regular snowballs, took aim, and, when the Buick drew nigh, fired.

  A soft snowball hit the driver’s windshield right in front of the driver’s face. It made a smashed star with a hump in the middle.

  Often, of course, we hit our target, but this time, the only time in all of life, the car pulled over and stopped. Its wide black door opened; a man sprang out of it, running. He didn’t even close the car door.

  He ran after us, right up the snowy Reynolds sidewalk, and we ran away from him. At the corner, I looked back; incredibly, he was still after us. He was in city clothes: a suit and tie, street shoes. Any normal adult would have quit, having sprung us into flight and made his point. This man, though, was gaining on us. He was a thin man, all action. All of a sudden, we were running for our lives.

  Wordless, we split up. We were on our turf; we could lose ourselves in the neighborhood backyards, everyone for himself. I paused and considered. Everyone had vanished except Mikey Fahey, who was just rounding the corner of a yellow brick house. Poor Mikey, I trailed him, and the driver of the Buick sensibly picked the two of us to follow. The man apparently had all day.

  He chased Mikey and me around the yellow house and up a backyard path we knew by heart: under a low tree, up a bank, through a hedge, down some snowy steps, and across the grocery store’s delivery driveway. We smashed through a gap in another hedge, entered a scruffy backyard, and ran around its back porch and tight between houses to Edgerton Avenue; we ran across Edgerton to an alley and up our own sliding woodpile to the Halls’ front yard; he kept coming. We ran up Lloyd Street and wound through mazy backyards toward the steep hilltop at Willard and Lang.

  He chased us silently, block after block. He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive.

  Mikey and I had nowhere to go, in our own neighborhood or out of it, but away from this man who was chasing us. He impelled us forward; we compelled him to follow our route. The air was cold; every breath tore my throat. We kept running, block after block; we kept improvising, backyard after backyard, running a frantic course and choosing it simultaneously, failing always to find small places or hard places that might slow him down, and discovering always, exhilarated, dismayed, that only bare speed could save us—for he would never give us up, this man—and we were beginning to lose speed.

  Ten blocks he chased us through the backyard labyrinths before he finally caught us by our jackets. He caught us and we all stopped.

  We three stood staggering, half-blinded, coughing, in an obscure hilltop backyard, a man in his twenties, a boy, a girl. He had released our jackets, our pursuer, our captor, our hero: for he knew we weren’t going anywhere. We all played by the rules. Mikey and I unzipped our jackets. I pulled off my sopping mittens. We looked back over our tracks multiplied in the backyard’s new snow. All morning we had been breaking that soft white surface. We didn’t look at each other. I was cherishing my excitement. The man’s lower pants legs were wet; his cuffs were full of snow, and there was a prow of snow beneath them on his shoes and socks. Some trees bordered the little flat backyard, some messy winter trees. There was no one around: a clearing in a grove, and we the only players.

  It was a long time before he could speak. I had some difficulty at first recalling why we were even there. My lips felt swollen; I couldn’t see out of the sides of my eyes; I kept coughing.

  “You stupid kids,” he began perfunctorily.

  We listened perfunctorily, too, if we listened at all, for the chewing out was redundant, a mere formality, and beside the point. The point was that he had chased us passionately without giving up, and that he had caught us. I wanted the glory to last forever.

  But how could it? We could have run through every backyard in North America until we got to Panama. And when he trapped us at the lip of the Panama Canal? What precisely could he have done to prolong the drama of the chase and cap its glory?

  I brooded about this for the next few years. He could have fried Mikey Fahey and me in boiling oil, say, or dismembered us piecemeal, or staked us to anthills. None of which I really wanted, and none of which any adult was likely to do, even in the spirit of fun. He could only chew us out there in the Panamanian jungle, after months or years of exalting pursuit. He could only begin, “You stupid kids,” and continue in his ordinary Pittsburgh accent with his normal righteous anger and the usual common sense.

  If in that snowy backyard the driver of the black Buick had cut off our heads, Mikey’s and mine, I would have died happy, for nothing since has required so much of me as being chased all over Pittsburgh in the middle of winter—running terrified, exhausted—by this sainted, skinny, furious redheaded man who wished to have a word with us.

  I don’t know how he found his way back to his car.

  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

  JOKES

  OUR PARENTS WOULD SOONER HAVE LEFT US out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked. When we got the first Tom Lehrer album in 1954, Mother went through the album with me, cut by cut, explaining. BVDs are men’s underwear. Radiation makes you sterile, and lead protects from radiation, so the joke is . . .

  Our father kept in his breast pocket a little black notebook. There he noted jokes he wanted to remember. Remembering jokes was a moral obligation. People who said, “I can never remember jokes,” were like people who said, obliviously, “I can never remember names,” or, “I don’t bathe.”

  “No one tells jokes like your father,” Mother said. Telling a good joke well—successfully, perfectly—was the highest art. It was an art because it was up to you: If you did not get the laugh, you had told it wrong. Work on it, and do it better next time. Never blame the joke, or, worse, the audience.

  As we children got older, our parents discussed with us every technical, theoretical, and moral aspect of the art. We tinkered with a joke’s narrative structure: “Maybe you should begin with the Indians.” We polished the wording. We analyzed pacing. We admired with Father the leisurely meanders of the shaggy-dog story. “A young couple moved to the Swiss Alps,” one story of his began, “with their grand piano”; and ended, to a blizzard of thrown napkins, “. . . Oppernockity tunes but once.” “Frog goes into a bank,” another story began, to my enduring pleasure. The joke was not great, but with what a sweet light splash you could launch it! “Frog goes into a bank,” you said, and your canoe had slipped delicately and surely into the water, into Lake Champlain with painted Indians behind every tree, and there was no turning back.

  Father was also very fond of stories set in bars that starred zoo animals or insects. These creatures apparently came into bars all over America, sometimes accompanied, sometimes alone, and sat down
to face incredulous, sarcastic bartenders. (It was a wonder the bartenders were always so surprised to see talking dogs or drinking monkeys or performing ants, so surprised year after year, when clearly this sort of thing was the very essence of bar life.) In the years he had been more loose, swinging aloft in the airy interval between college and marriage, Father had frequented bars in New York, listening to jazz. Bars had no place whatever in the small Pittsburgh world he had grown up in, and lived in now. Bars were so far from our experience that I had assumed, in my detective work, that their customers were ipso facto crooks. Father’s bar jokes—“and there were the regulars, all sitting around”—gave him the raffish air of a man at home anywhere. (How poignant were his “you knows” directed at me: You know how bartenders are; you know how the regulars would all be sitting around. For either I, a nine-year-old girl, knew what he was talking about, then or ever, or nobody did. Only because I read a lot, I often knew.)

  Our mother favored a staccato, stand-up style; if our father could perorate, she could condense. Fellow goes to a psychiatrist. “You’re crazy.” “I want a second opinion!” “You’re ugly.” How do you get an elephant out of the theater? “You can’t; it’s in his blood.”

  What else in life so required, and so rewarded, such care?

  “Tell the girls the one about the four-by-twos, Frank.”

  “Let’s see. Let’s see.”

  “Fellow goes into a lumberyard . . .”

  “Yes, but it’s tricky. It’s a matter of point of view.” And Father left the dining room, rubbing his face as if he were smearing on greasepaint, and returned when he was ready.

  “Ready with the four-by-twos?” Mother said.

  Our father hung his hands in his pockets and regarded the far ceiling with fond reminiscence.

  “Fellow comes into a lumberyard,” he began. “Says to the guy, ‘I need some four-by-twos.’ ‘You mean two-by-fours?’ ‘Just a minute. I’ll find out.’ He walks out to the parking lot, where his buddies are waiting in the car. They roll down the car window. He confers with them awhile and comes back across the parking lot and says to the lumberyard guy, ‘Yes. I mean two-by-fours.’

  “Lumberyard guy says, ‘How long do you want them?’ ‘Just a minute,’ fellow says, ‘I’ll find out.’ He goes out across the parking lot and confers with the people in the car and comes back across the parking lot to the lumberyard and says to the guy, ‘A long time. We’re building a house.’”

  After any performance Father rubbed the top of his face with both hands, as if it had all been a dream. He sat back down at the dining-room table, laughing and shaking his head. “And when you tell a joke,” Mother said to Amy and me, “laugh. It’s mean not to.”

  We were brought up on the classics. Our parents told us all the great old American jokes, practically by number. They collaborated on, and for our benefit specialized in, the painstaking, near-paleontological reconstruction of vanished jokes from extant taglines; they could vivify old New Yorker cartoons, source of many taglines. The lines themselves—“Back to the old drawing board,” and, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it,” and, “A simple yes or no will suffice”—were no longer funny; they were instead something better, they were fixtures in the language. The taglines of old jokes were the most powerful expressions we learned at our parents’ knees. A few words suggested an entire story and a wealth of feelings. Learning our culture backward this way, Amy and Molly and I heard only later about The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and still later about the Greek and Roman myths, which held no residue of feeling for us at all—certainly not the vibrant suggestiveness of old American jokes and cartoons.

  Our parents reserved a few select jokes, such as “Archibald à Soulbroke,” like vintage wines, for extraordinary occasions. We heard about or witnessed those rare moments—maybe three or four in a lifetime—when circumstances combined to float our father to the top of the world, from which precarious eminence he would consent to fling himself into “Archibald à Soulbroke.”

  Telling “Archibald à Soulbroke” was for Father an exhilarating ordeal, like walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. It was a long, absurdly funny, excruciatingly tricky tour de force he had to tell fast, and it required beat-perfect concentration. He had to go off alone and rouse himself to an exalted, superhuman pitch in order to pace the hot coals of its dazzling verbal surface. Often enough he returned to a crowd whose moment had passed.

  There was another very complicated sort of joke that required a long weekend with tolerant friends. First, you had to tell a joke that was not funny. It was a long, pointless story about a construction job that ended with someone’s throwing away a brick. There was nothing funny about it at all, and when your friends did not laugh, you had to pretend you’d muffed it. (Your husband in the crowd could shill for you: “’Tain’t funny, Pam. You told it all wrong.”)

  A few days later, if you could contrive another occasion for joke telling, and if your friends still permitted you to speak, you set forth on another joke, this one an old nineteenth-century chestnut about angry passengers on a train: The lady plucks the lighted, smelly cigar from the man’s mouth and flings it from the moving train’s window. The man seizes the little black poodle from her lap and hurls the poor dog from the same window. When at last the passengers draw unspeaking into the station, what do they see coming down the platform but the black poodle, and guess what it has in its mouth? “The cigar,” say your friends, bored sick and vowing to never spend another weekend with you. “No,” you say, triumphant, “the brick.”

  This was Mother’s kind of joke. Its very riskiness excited her. It wasn’t funny, but it was interesting to set up, and it elicited from her friends a grudging admiration.

  How long, I wondered, could you stretch this out? How boldly could you push an audience—not, in Mother’s terms, to “slay them,” but to please them in some grand way? How could you convince the listeners that you knew what you were doing, that the payoff would come? Or conversely, how long could you lead them to think you were stupid, a dumb blonde, only to enhance their surprise at the punch line, and heighten their pleasure in the good story you had controlled all along? Alone, energetic, and trying to fall asleep, or walking the residential streets long distances every day, I pondered these things.

  Our parents were sympathetic to what professional comedians call flop sweat. Boldness was all at our house, and of course you would lose some. Anyone could be misled by poor judgment into telling a “woulda hadda been there.” Telling a funny story was harder than telling a joke; it was trying out, as a tidy unit, some raveling shred of the day’s fabric. You learned to gauge what sorts of thing would “tell.” You learned that some people, notably your parents, could rescue some things by careful narration from the category “woulda hadda been there” to the category “it tells.”

  At the heart of originating a funny story was recognizing it as it floated by. You scooped the potentially solid tale from the flux of history. Once I overheard my parents arguing over a thirty-year-old story’s credit line. “It was my mother who said that,” Mother said. “Yes, but”—Father was downright smug—“I was the one who noticed she said that.”

  The sight gag was a noble form, and the running gag was a noble form. In combination they produced the top of the line, the running sight gag. How splendid it was when my parents could get a running sight gag going. We heard about these legendary occasions with a thrill of family pride, as other children hear about their progenitors’ war exploits.

  The sight gag could blur with the practical joke—not a noble form but a friendly one, that helps the years pass. My parents favored practical jokes of the sort you set up and then retire from, much as one writes books, possibly because imagining people’s reactions beat witnessing them. They procured a living hen and “hypnotized” it by setting it on the sink before the bathroom mirror in a friend’s cottage by the Jersey shore. They spent weeks constructing a ten-foot sea monster—from truck
inner tubes, cement blocks, broomsticks, lumber, pillows—and set it afloat in a friend’s pond. On Sanibel Island, Florida, they baffled the shell collectors each Saint Patrick’s Day by boiling a bucketful of fine shells in green dye and strewing the green shells up and down the beach before dawn. I woke one Christmas morning to find in my stocking, hung from the mantel with care, a leg. Mother had charmed a department store display manager into lending her one.

  When I visited my friends, I was well advised to rise when their parents entered the room. When my friends visited me, they were well advised to duck.

  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

  WAKING UP WILD

  WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BE ALIVE? Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed.

  Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down. For a joke you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!