The World According to Garp

“That damn lesbian crowd,” Roberta said to Garp. “They're trying to make your mother into something she isn't.”

“I sometimes think that's what Mom is for,” Garp teased Roberta. “She makes people happy by letting them think she is something she isn't.”

“Well, they tried to confuse me,” Roberta said. “When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. “Be gay,” they said. “If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,” they told me. They were all cowards,” Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.

Roberta's vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother's house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance—yet most of them he'd met seemed especially intolerant of each other. It was a kind of infighting that made no sense to Garp and he marveled at his mother sorting them all out, keeping them happy and out of each other's hair. Robert Muldoon, Garp knew, had spent several months in drag before his actual operation. He'd go off in the morning dressed as Robert Muldoon; he went out shopping for women's clothes, and almost no one knew that he paid for his sex change with the banquet fees he collected for the speeches he gave to boys' clubs and men's clubs. In the evenings, at Dog's Head Harbor, Robert Muldoon would model his new clothes for Jenny and the critical women who shared her house. When the estrogen hormones began to enlarge his breasts and shift the former tight end's shape around, Robert gave up the banquet circuit and marched forth from the Dog's Head Harbor house in mannish women's suits and rather conservative wigs; he tried being Roberta long before he had the surgery. Clinically, now, Roberta had the same genitalia and urological equipment as most other women.

“But of course I can't conceive,” she told Garp. “I don't ovulate and I don't menstruate.” Neither do millions of other women, Jenny Fields had reassured her. “When I came home from the hospital,” Roberta said to Garp, “do you know what else your mother told me?”

Garp shook his head; “home” to Roberta, Garp knew, was Dog's Head Harbor.

“She told me I was less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew,” Roberta said. “I really needed that,” she said, “because I had to use this horrible dilator all the time so that my vagina wouldn't close; I felt like a machine.”

Good old mom,

Garp scribbled.

“There's such sympathy for people, in what you write,” Roberta told him, suddenly. “But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life,” she said. It was the same thing Jenny had always accused him of.

But now, he felt, he had more. With his jaw wired shut, with his wife with her arm in a sling all day—and Duncan with only half his pretty face intact—Garp felt more generous toward the other wretches who wandered into Dog's Head Harbor.

It was a summer town. Out of season, the bleached shingled house with its porches and garrets was the only occupied mansion along the gray-green dunes and the white beach at the end of Ocean Lane. An occasional dog sniffed through the bone-colored driftwood, and retired people, living some miles inland, in their former summer houses, occasionally strolled the shore, scrutinizing the shells. In summer there were lots of dogs and children and mothers' helpers all over the beach, and always a bright boat or two in the harbor. But when the Garps moved in with Jenny, the shoreline seemed abandoned. The beach, littered with the debris washed in with the high tides of winter, was deserted. The Atlantic Ocean, through April and through May, was the livid color of a bruise—was the color of the bridge of Helen's nose.

Visitors to the town, in the off-season, were quickly spotted as lost women in search of the famous nurse, Jenny Fields. In summer, these women often spent a whole day in Dog's Head Harbor trying to find someone who knew where Jenny lived. But the permanent residents of Dog's Head Harbor all knew: “The last house at the end of Ocean Lane,” they told the damaged girls and women who asked for directions. “It's as big as a hotel, honey. You can't miss it.”

Sometimes these searchers would trudge out to the beach first and view the house for a long time before they got up the nerve to come see if Jenny was home; sometimes Garp would see them, single or in twos and threes, squatting on the windy dunes and watching the house as if they were trying to read the degree of sympathy therein. If there were more than one, they conferred on the beach; one of them was elected to knock on the door while the others huddled on the dunes, like dogs told to stay! until they're called.

Helen bought Duncan a telescope, and from his room with a sea view Duncan spied on the trepid visitors and often announced their presence hours before the knock on the door. “Someone for Grandma,” he'd say. Focusing, always focusing. “She's about twenty-four. Or maybe fourteen. She has a blue knapsack. She has an orange with her but I don't think she's going to eat it. Someone's with her but I can't see her face. She's lying down; no, she's being sick. No, she's wearing a kind of mask. Maybe she's the other one's mother—no, her sister. Or just a friend.

“Now she's eating the orange. It doesn't look very good,” Duncan would report. And Roberta would look, too; and sometimes Helen. It was often Garp who answered the door.

“Yes, she's my mother,” he'd say, “but she's out shopping right now. Please come in, if you want to wait for her.” And he would smile, though all the time he would be scrutinizing the person as carefully as the retired people along the beach looked at their seashells. And before his jaw healed, and his mauled tongue grew back together, Garp would answer the door with a ready supply of notes. Many of the visitors were not in the least surprised by being handed notes, because this was the only way they communicated, too.

Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian.

And Garp would give her his:

Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.

And he'd smile at them, and hand them a second note, depending on the occasion. One said:

There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.

And there was one that said:

Don't be upset. My mother will be back very soon. There are other women here. Would you like to see them?

It was in this period that Garp took to wearing a sport jacket again, not out of nostalgia for his days at Steering, or in Vienna—and certainly not out of any necessity to be well dressed at Dog's Head Harbor, where Roberta seemed the only woman who was concerned with what she wore—but only because of his need for pockets; he carried so many notes.

He tried running on the beach but he had to give it up; it jarred his jaw and jangled his tongue against his teeth. But he walked for miles along the sand. He was returning from a walk the day the police car brought the young man to Jenny's house; arm in arm, the policemen helped him up the big front porch.

“Mr. Garp?” one of the policemen asked.

Garp dressed in running gear for his walks; he didn't have any notes on him, but he nodded, yes, he was Mr. Garp.

“You know this kid?” the policeman asked.

“Of course he does,” the young man said. “You cops don't ever believe anybody. You don't know how to relax.”

It was the kid in the purple caftan, the boy Garp had escorted from the boudoir of Mrs. Ralph—what seemed to Garp like years ago. Garp considered not recognizing him, but he nodded.

“The kid's got no money,” the policeman explained. “He doesn't live around here, and he's got no job. He's not in school anywhere and when we called his folks, they said they didn't even know where he was—and they didn't sound very interested to find out. But he says he's staying with you—and you'll speak up for him.”

Garp, of course, couldn't speak. He pointed to his wire mesh and imitated the act of writing a note on his palm.

“When'd you get the braces?” the kid asked. “Most people have them when they're younger. They're the craziest-looking braces I ever saw.”

Garp wrote out a note on the back of a traffic violation form that the policeman handed him.

Yes, I'll take responsibility for him. But I can't speak up for him because I have a broken