A few days later a letter came from Roger:
Dear Patsy,
I am no good at writing letters but have been meaning to write and thank you for all that chicken you fixed, not to mention that gourd, I have thought it over and am sure it was a gourd. Last week sold an oillease, my first oil-lease in six years. Hope they get a good well, my eating system is gradually wearing out, could buy a section of land with what I owe doctors now.
Well, I thought Davey was a fine boy, will tell old Jim so if I ever see him. I hope you will bring Davey to see me sometime, Jim too if you can catch him, next time you come I will take Davey for a horseback ride. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a shower tonight, cloudy back in the west, think I left the windows down in the pickup and had better go check, it wouldn’t take much of a gully-washer to drown that old thing for good.
Your uncle,
Roger
That night, in her robe and gown, during the late news, she wrote him:
Dear Roger,
It was nice of you to write. We are very lonesome these days. I agree with you now that it was a bad idea, Jim’s going up there. I don’t blame him for wanting to get away from my shrewish tongue but Davey is another matter—I’m sure he needs a father almost daily. Besides, it’s me that’s lonesome. I was never alone before. I’ve taken to watching television and the horrible part is I cry if anything sad happens, no matter how corny.
We will come, sometime. I imagine it will be a while yet before Davey can sit a horse. I hope your oil well comes in, but if you would try not frying those eggs so hard your stomach would fare better. You might even try eating a gourd or two, of the sort I had. If you were ever around me for very long you’d have to endure some culinary reform, I’m afraid.
If I get much lonesomer I guess I’ll have to break down and go to the Panhandle, after all, much as I’m opposed to it. I guess I just wasn’t meant to take care of myself. Anyhow, do write if anything comes up I should know. In the meantime, I love you.
Patsy Carpenter
She sniffed a little when she put it in the envelope. It was true, how the nights left her longing for Jim. Any silly late show could break her up, if it was sentimental enough; but TV was better than no TV. At least it was a voice. Jim called every two or three nights. She had told him that she missed him and had tried to let him know with her tone that she was sorry she had been so unbending about the matter of the whore; he had been polite, even comforting on one or two occasions, but he had not asked them to come to Amarillo and she could not quite bring herself to offer.
Davey began to cry. He had become a wiggly sleeper and often got himself contorted in corners, or his legs stuck between the bars. He was in a corner, crying heartily, and Patsy picked him up and shushed him and walked him a bit, humming “King of the Road.” After a time Davey hushed, his face against her shoulder. She became aware that he had shat his pants and switched on a little light she had arranged for such occasions. When put on his back he began to cry loudly again, but she deftly undiapered him, made a face at the consistency of the mess, and increased the volume of her own singing while she cleaned and powdered him. “Trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let, fifty cents . . .” she sang loudly and giggled. Davey, as if sensing some mockery, upped the ante with the loudest cry he was capable of, his face red with effort. “Oh, goodness,” she said, peering at his bottom to be sure it was clean before reaching for a safety pin. “Hush, baby, I wasn’t really trying to drown you out. Hush, Davey,” and in a minute she had him diapered and walked him again, humming. Soon he slept. When she eased him down on his stomach he stiffened and woke for a second, rubbed his nose with his fist, and tried to turn over, but Patsy stood by the bed and put her hand on his back, talking to him softly until he relaxed again. Soon it was so quiet she heard his breath. Then she stood up and yawned, tried to think of something she really wanted to read and couldn’t, scratched her hair and regretted not having washed it that day, and took the soiled diaper and rinsed it in the toilet. When she came back she sat in front of the TV set and hugged her knees. Rod Cameron was getting things thrown at him by Yvonne De Carlo, who seemed to be keeping a saloon. Nothing to cry about there. A Dodge commercial came on. Numerous local Dodge dealers appeared in white hats, giving away cars for thousands less than any other dealers in the world. Then there was a commercial of a girl who got a handshake one night, changed her mouthwash on the advice of a hip girl friend, and got a kiss the next. Such commercials sometimes brought on self-pity. Patsy was quite confident of her breath, and yet never got kissed any more, or anything else any more, either. But before self-pity could set in Rod Cameron was back, having chairs broken over his head. She turned to Johnny Carson, who was talking to a songstress with a hairdo that went up and up and up, almost out of camera. She turned back, hoping the movie might have improved. Rod Cameron was arguing with a sheriff. She heard Davey kick the crib with one foot, as if he were going to start scooting in his sleep. Then she heard him sigh, and he was still. She reached out one leg, punched the turn-off button with her big toe, and watched the light become a tiny bright point and disappear. Then she sat in the pitch dark room and thought a bit and hummed a bit and hugged her knees against her breasts.
BOOK III
Sleeping Around
1
PATSY HAD NEVER THOUGHT of herself as a lonely person and had never believed that loneliness would be a problem—not for her. First there had been her family, and Miri, and then there had been Emma and her other girl friends at college. She had not made deep friendships easily, but she chatted easily and got deeply involved in her chats, and it was almost as good; at least she had never lacked for companionship. And then there had been Jim—constantly Jim. She had to concentrate hard to remember when she had not been living with him. Of course they had not got on perfectly, but he had always been there, and she could usually get him to talk to her if she really wanted to talk. He was there in the bed at night, quiet and male, and she had always assumed he could be counted on to take care of her if she really needed to be taken care of. She had read a lot about loneliness and knew it was one of the great problems of modern life, but it had never been very real to her. Besides Jim, there was Davey. Who could be lonely with two males in the house? Even the trouble over the whore had not made her really lonely. It was a bad time, but there was no reason to suppose they wouldn’t get past it, sooner or later.
Then Jim went off to the Panhandle, and just as he did, Juanita had to leave for a week. She had a daughter in Matamoros who was in some kind of trouble. Patsy and Davey were by themselves for the first time. The first week went by all right—Roger’s visit helped—but by the second week she had begun to feel strange. It was nothing major, certainly nothing desperate, just a kind of restlessness. The days seemed hard to order. She either had too much to do at a given moment or absolutely nothing. Davey either demanded her total attention, or he slept and needed no attention at all. With Juanita gone she could not go out when he slept, and she found that she had suddenly lost her capacity for doing things. She had always been active, but her activity tended to come in spurts. She would do things and then lie on her bed and read, or else lie on her bed and read and then get up and bustle about doing things. But by the time Jim had been gone a week, she discovered that she had lost her taste for reading and also her interest in doing things. Very often, when Davey slept, she did nothing. She lay on her bed and didn’t read, or she sat in the rocking chair, rocking, contemplating the ends of her hair, gazing at the hot back yard, waiting for Davey to wake up and need her. At night she watched television and didn’t like it, but kept watching it anyway, feeling it might get better at any minute; sometimes she watched it because it was too much trouble to get up and turn it off. She only came to life when Davey was awake, when he was nursing or needing a bath or something, and she discovered, somewhat to her dismay, that she was not always as in rapport with Davey as she had supposed she would be. Davey was not always interested in her and
didn’t always welcome her interest in him. He developed a dislike for her bed, where he had once napped so peacefully. When put on it, he fretted and kicked and squalled and turned over. Sometimes he would be nice, would gurgle at her, poke his finger in her mouth, smile, grasp her hair, and he was quite healthy and took quantities of her milk, but there were times when she found his fretfulness a bore and times when he simply acted as if she were bugging him. Often he would just as soon be let alone. If anyone was lonely, it wasn’t Davey.
Sometimes she thought of Hank Malory, but she tried not to. It made her feel sorry for herself, and she didn’t want to feel sorry for herself. Whatever guilt she had felt at the time had completely evaporated and she looked back on their two-week romance as something pleasant but not quite real. Actual life could not be that warm and that easy for very long. Had he not gone away just when he had, the bloom of their relationship would surely have withered and they would have become mean to each other, or else indifferent. She was glad he had gone when he had; she only wished there were some way to get him completely out of her mind. The trouble was that he was lovely to think about, except that thinking about him sometimes made her feel sexy; there was no advantage to that. Her idleness and the fact that it was summer just made such feelings worse.
Almost every afternoon she took Davey for a walk in his carriage—usually to the Hortons’—and often as not she came back feeling sexy. It annoyed her and she attributed it partly to her idle daydreams of Hank and partly to the heat, the still, heavy, moist heat of Houston. Everything grew so, in the heat. If it rained in the afternoon the spiky St. Augustine grass was up three inches overnight, or so it seemed. The foliage in the Whitneys’ back yard was always sprouting and spreading, green and shining with rain, the beautiful ferns growing so fast that the gardener could scarcely keep them properly thinned. Houston in June was almost too fertile, too fecund; the Horn of Plenty was spilling over and Patsy decided it must be affecting her subliminally. Something was. At night, when some embrace on the late show reminded her that in the real world, as on the TV screen, humans did actually kiss and hold each other and make love she felt humiliated and small, for she was a woman, she had had a baby, she was ready to give such plenty as she had, and yet no man was there to touch her. She thought of the movie stars and what she had read of them and it puzzled her that it should be so easy for them to move from love to love and bed to bed and yet remain handsome and lovely and gay. It made her feel all the smaller. Not only could she not move from man to man, she could not really hold or please the man she had, and she had not been generous enough to accommodate the only other man who had really wanted her. The day before her period she felt swollen and irritable and gave Davey a slap because he wouldn’t lie still while being diapered. She got tired to death of Frazer that same afternoon and flipped crossly through a paperback by Peg Bracken, wishing someone would call, or that Juanita would come back, or that something would happen to make either the spirit or the flesh work out better for her.
Lacking either consolation, she turned as usual to her friends the Hortons. Almost every evening, when it was cool enough to go out, she sprayed her arms and calves and ankles with mosquito spray and put Davey in his carriage and pushed him up Mandell Street to the Hortons’ garage on West Main. The area beyond the freeway had once been a solid middle-class neighborhood full of two-story brick houses; but lacking the protection of even minimal zoning, it had gradually become pocked with apartment houses, most of them peopled by the young and the divorced. As Patsy walked along she was ogled by shirtless young men drinking beer on their balconies.
The Hortons were having a grim summer, in their way. They were too broke to leave town, and Flap was studying himself red-eyed for his preliminary exams, which came in the early fall. The boys were big enough to bash each other and have it really hurt, and they frequently did. They only had two air conditioners for four rooms, which kept them huddled together more than they liked to be. The kitchen wasn’t air-conditioned, so Emma didn’t cook except when absolutely forced to. She spent most of her time mediating elaborate arguments between the boys, or else protecting one or another boy from Flap, who had grown intolerant of being interrupted while studying. The boys invariably did interrupt him and he sometimes swatted them more heavy-handedly than Emma thought good, so they themselves were frequently in fights.
“Fire or ice,” Patsy said, comparing their overcrowdedness with her loneliness, and they all sat around and drank beer for an hour or so every evening, talking about how in despair they were and in the meanwhile laughing uproariously at their own wit or the antics of their children. Teddy and Tommy were both reasonably respectful of Davey’s fragility, and Tommy, who considered himself infinitely more responsible than his brother, was good at planting himself in front of the baby carriage to be stared at by Davey, who loved to stare at human beings closer to his own size. Teddy thought Davey a bore and once threw a ball up in the air in such a way that it came down—by sheer accident, he claimed—in the baby carriage. It was only a rubber ball, but Emma scolded him fiercely. Davey had not been hit and Patsy kept calm. Teddy took his reprimand casually, humming to himself while it was in progress.
One evening ten days after Jim had left, the Hortons walked over to her place. The Whitneys were gone and they all sat out in the big back yard while it grew dark. The boys had orange Popsicles, provided by Patsy. Davey lay on a blanket between his mother and Emma, wiggling on his stomach. “A few months and he’ll be mo-bile,” Emma said.
Patsy wore jeans and an old blue blouse. She had washed her hair that afternoon and felt clean and in good spirits. Flap lay on his back on the grass with a copy of Ramparts spread over his face. Occasionally Teddy sat on his chest for a few minutes while he picked particles of grass off his Popsicle. Flap pretended to be asleep but he was actually putting into effect a plan he had to see Patsy’s breasts, or at least one of them. If she thought he was asleep she might decide to nurse Davey and he could peer out from under the Ramparts and watch. He had always wanted to see Patsy’s breasts, and that was the only plan he could devise that offered any hope of success.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work. It was not feeding time and in any case Patsy was not about to uncover herself around such a transparent lecher as Flap. When it grew dark they all went inside.
Patsy left Davey on his blanket and went to the kitchen to make lemonade. When she carried in the drinks, Emma had gone to the john, Flap was lying on his stomach on the floor reading an old book catalogue, and Tommy and Teddy were sitting politely on the couch awaiting their lemonade. Flap reached up for his beer and the boys took their glasses carefully and sipped sly sips. It wasn’t until she was lowering herself to the floor that Patsy noticed a drastic change in the company. Davey wasn’t on his blanket.
“Where’s Davey?” she asked, her heart pounding. She looked around the open floor but didn’t see him. In the moment of quiet they all heard the toilet flush. Patsy hurried to the baby bed, thinking she had absent-mindedly put him back in it, or that perhaps Emma had, but he was not there either. Her legs felt shaky. “Did Emma take him?” she asked.
“To the john?” Flap asked. He looked up, puzzled, just as Emma walked in.
“Davey’s gone,” Patsy said. “Where could he have gone? I was only out of the room for a minute.”
“He couldn’t be gone,” Emma said. Then she and Flap both looked at their sons. Teddy was sipping lemonade, a picture of angelic innocence, but Tommy was red in the face from the effort it took to repress his laughter.
“Aha,” Flap said.
“He’s under the baby bed,” Tommy said. “Teddy rolled him while you were reading.” He began to giggle. Teddy pretended not to hear, but a sly grin touched his lips. Patsy rushed to the bed and sure enough Davey was there, on his back, and quite pleased about it. He was trying to reach the bedsprings. He only began to fret when Patsy swooped him out and held him. Her arms and legs were trembling from the scare she’d had, and she w
as afraid to look at Teddy for fear she’d go yank him off the couch and spank him. But Emma did just that, and in a minute he was properly spanked and was crying loudly, almost in tune with Davey, who started crying as soon as Teddy did. The Hortons quickly gathered themselves up and left, Tommy pleading to be allowed to finish his lemonade. Patsy cried a bit from relief and tension and tried to get them to stay. She felt silly for getting upset over nothing, but they were all embarrassed and glad to be out of one another’s company for a time. Patsy made an awkward attempt to make friends again with Teddy, but he would have none of it.
“She’s really uptight,” Flap said as they walked home. Teddy was riding on his hip, totally exhausted.
“You can’t blame her,” Emma said. “Jim was a fool to go off and leave her with that baby, I don’t care how temporary the job is. If one of mine had disappeared I’d have acted the same way. Fortunately you were always around trying to screw me when things like that happened and I never had a chance to get nervous.”
“You think if I went back and tried to screw her it would help?” Flap asked, trying to be jocular. It came out wrong and he instantly regretted having said it. Emma was huffy the rest of the evening.
Patsy kept crying and wiping her eyes long after they were gone, although she knew it was silly. Davey was already blissfully asleep, not a bit the worse for having been rolled. But the sense of panic she had felt when she couldn’t locate him wouldn’t quite leave her. Several times she went over and looked, to be sure he was in the baby bed. It was absurd, but she was terrified. She checked all the windows and doors to be sure no one could creep in and steal him. A bath failed to calm her and she was in bed trying to go to sleep when the phone rang.