“None Better”
OWL PRETZELS
“None Better”
This sign and the lesser signs-an arrow, a trumpet, a peanut, a tulip-seemed to possess reflections in mid-air, to shimmer on the transparent plane that extended over the square at the height of my hotel room. Cars, stoplights, twinkling shadows that were people, all merged for me in a visual liquor whose fumes were the future. City. This was city: the room I stood alone in vibrated on its paper walls with the haloes of advertisement. Well back from the window, seeing but unseen, I continued to undress, and the patches of scabbed skin I touched seemed the coarsely mottled outer petals of a delicate, delicious, silvery vegetable-heart I was peeling toward. I stood in my underpants, on the edge of a swim; reeds and mud took the print of my bare feet; Alton seemed herself already bathing in the lake of the night. The windowpane’s imperfections rippled the wet lights. A virginal sense of the forbidden welled over me like a wind and I discovered myself a unicorn.
Alton distended. Her arms of white traffic stretched riverward. Her shining hair fanned on the surface of the lake. My sense of myself amplified until, lover and loved, seer and seen, I compounded in several accented expansions my ego, the city, and the future, and during these seconds truly clove to the center of the sphere, and outmuscled time and tide. I would triumph. Yet the city shuffled and winked beyond the window unmoved, transparent to my penetration, and her dismissal dwindled me terribly. Hurrying as if my smallness were so many melting crystals which would vanish altogether if not gathered swiftly, I partially redressed and got into the bed nearest the wall; the cold sheets parted like leaves of marble, and I felt myself a dry seed lost in the folds of earth.
As the sheets warmed, I enlarged to human size, and then, as the dissolution of drowsiness crept toward me, a sensation, both vivid and numb, of enormity entered my cells, and I seemed a giant who included in his fingernail all the galaxies that are. This sensation operated not only in space but in time; it seemed, as literally as one says “a minute,” an eternity since I had risen from bed, put on my bright red shirt, stamped my foot at my mother, patted the dog through the frosted metal mesh, and drunk orange juice. These things seemed performed in photographs projected on a mist at the distance of the stars; they mixed with Lauren Bacall and Doris Day and via their faces I was returned to the bracing plane of everyday. I became aware of details: a distant rumble of voices, a spiral of wire holding together the leg of a chair a few feet from my face, the annoying flicker of lights on the walls. I got out of bed and lowered the shade and returned to bed. How warm the room was, compared with my room at Firetown! I thought of my mother and for the first time missed her; I longed to inhale her scent of cereal and to forget myself in watching her plod back and forth in our kitchen. When I saw her again I must tell her I understood why she moved us to the farm and that I did not blame her. And I must show my grandfather more respect and listen when he talks because…because…he will not always be with us.
My father seemed to come into the room at this moment, so I must have fallen asleep. My lips felt swollen, my bare legs boneless and long. His great shadow cut across the strip of pink light that the lowered shade left standing along the wall by the corner. I heard him set my books down on our table. “You asleep, Peter?”
“No. Where have you been?”
“I called your mother and Al Hummel. Your mother tells me to tell you not to worry about anything, and Al’s going to send his truck in for the car in the morning. He thinks it sounds like the driveshaft and he’ll try to get second-hand parts for me.”
“How do you feel?”
“O.K. I was talking to an awfully nice gentleman down stairs in the lobby; he travels all over the East consulting with these big stores and companies about their advertising programs and clears twenty thousand a year with a two-month vacation. I told him that was the kind of creative work you were interested in and he said he’d like to meet you. I thought of coming up to get you but figured you could probably use the sleep.”
“Thanks,” I said. His shadow cut back and forth across the light as he took off his coat, his tie, his shirt.
His voice chuckled. “The hell with him, huh? I guess that’s the attitude to take. A man like that would walk over your dead body to grab a nickel. That’s the kind of bastard I’ve done business with all my life; they’re too smart for me.”
When he got into bed, after his body stopped rustling the sheets, there was a pause, and he said, “Don’t worry about your old man, Peter. In God we trust.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “Good night.”
There was another pause, and then the darkness spoke: “Pleasant dreams, as Pop would say.” And his evoking my grandfather unexpectedly did make this strange room safe enough to sleep in, though a woman’s voice giggled down the hall, and doors kept slamming above and below us.
My sleep was simple and deep and my dreams scanty. When I awoke, all I remembered was being in an endless chemical laboratory, like a multiplication with mirrors of the basins and test tubes and Bunsen burners in Room 107 at Olinger High. There was on a table a small Mason jar such as my grandmother used to put up applesauce in. Its glass was clouded, I picked it up and put my ear to the lid and heard a tiny voice, as high in pitch as the voice that calls numbers in a hearing test, saying with a microscopic distinctness, “I want to die. I want to die.”
My father was already up and dressed. He stood by the window, its shade raised, and looked down at the city stirring itself into the gray morning. The sky was not clear; clouds like the undersides of long buns unrolled beyond the brick horizon of the city. He opened a window, to savor Alton, and the air tasted different from yesterday’s: milder, preparatory, stirred. Something had moved nearer.
Downstairs, our clerk had been replaced by a younger man, who stood straight and did not smile. “Has the old gentleman gone off duty?” my father asked.
“It’s a funny thing,” the new clerk said, without smiling at all. “Charlie died last night.”
“Huh? How could he do that?”
“I don’t know. It happened around two in the morning, they said. I wasn’t supposed to come on until eight. He just got up from the desk and went into the men’s room and died on the floor. Heart, it must have been. Didn’t the ambulance wake you?”
“Was that siren for my friend? I can’t believe what you’re saying. He was a wonderful Christian to us.”
“I didn’t know him very well myself.” The clerk accepted my father’s check only after a long explanation, and with a doubtful grimace.
My father and I scraped together the change in our pockets and found enough for breakfast at a diner. I had one dollar in my wallet but did not tell him, intending it to be a surprise when things got more desperate. The counter of the diner was lined with workmen soft-eyed and gruff from behind half-asleep still. I was relieved to see that the man working the griddle was not our hitchhiker. I ordered pancakes and bacon and it was the best breakfast I had had in months. My father ordered Wheaties, mushed the cereal into the milk, ate a few bites, and pushed it away. He looked at the clock. It said 7:25. He bit back a belch; his face whitened and the skin under his eyes seemed to sink against the socket bone. He saw me studying him in alarm and said, “I know. I look like the devil. I’ll shave in the boiler room over at school, Heller has a razor.” The pale grizzle, like a morning’s frost, of a day-old beard covered his cheeks and chin.
We left the diner and walked south toward the high dull owl of dead tubing. A tenuous winter mist, released by the rise in temperature, licked the damp cement and asphalt. We boarded a trolley at Fifth and Weiser. The interior was gay with the straw of the seats, and warm and nearly empty. Few other people were heading outwards against the pull of the city. Alton thinned; the row houses split like ice breaking; a distant hill was half tranced green and half new pastel houses; and after the long gliding stretch beyond the ice cream stand crowned by a great plaster replica of a cone, the motley brick houses of Olinger took hold around us. The school grounds and then the salmon-brick school appeared on the left; the boilerhouse smokestack admonished the sky like a steeple. We got out by Hummel’s Garage. Our Buick was not there yet. We were not late today; cars were still nosing into their slots. An orange bus racily heaved through a loop and swayed to a stop; students the size of birds, colored in bright patches, no two alike, tumbled from the doors in pairs.
