“He set the price. He told me he wouldn’t take much because he has to walk this street to get to his apartment anyway.”
“He taught me a lot about the car today,” Natalie said.
“He’s very handsome, isn’t he?” the old lady said.
She asked Larry, “How were your parents?”
“Fine,” he said. “But I spent almost all the time with Andy. It’s almost his birthday, and he’s depressed. We went to see Mose Allison.”
“I think it stinks that hardly anyone else ever visits Andy,” she said.
“He doesn’t make it easy. He tells you everything that’s on his mind, and there’s no way you can pretend that his troubles don’t amount to much. You just have to sit there and nod.”
She remembered that Andy’s room looked like a gymnasium. There were handgrips and weights scattered on the floor. There was even a psychedelic pink hula hoop that he was to put inside his elbow and then move his arm in circles wide enough to make the hoop spin. He couldn’t do it. He would lie in bed with the hoop in back of his neck, and holding the sides, lift his neck off the pillow. His arms were barely strong enough to do that, really, but he could raise his neck with no trouble, so he just pretended that his arms pulling the loop were raising it. His parents thought that it was a special exercise that he had mastered.
“What did you do today?” Larry said now.
“I made spaghetti,” she said. She had made it the day before, but she thought that since he was mysterious about the time he spent away from her (“in the lab” and “at the gym” became interchangeable), she did not owe him a straight answer. That day she had dropped off the film and then she had sat at the drugstore counter to have a cup of coffee. She bought some cigarettes, though she had not smoked since high school. She smoked one mentholated cigarette and then threw the pack away in a garbage container outside the drugstore. Her mouth still felt cool inside.
He asked if she had planned anything for the weekend.
“No,” she said.
“Let’s do something you’d like to do. I’m a little ahead of myself in the lab right now.”
That night they ate spaghetti and made plans, and the next day they went for a ride in the country, to a factory where wooden toys were made. In the showroom he made a bear marionette shake and twist. She examined a small rocking horse, rhythmically pushing her finger up and down on the back rung of the rocker to make it rock. When they left they took with them a catalogue of toys they could order. She knew that they would never look at the catalogue again. On their way to the museum he stopped to wash the car. Because it was the weekend there were quite a few cars lined up waiting to go in. They were behind a blue Cadillac that seemed to inch forward of its own accord, without a driver. When the Cadillac moved into the washing area, a tiny man hopped out. He stood on tiptoe to reach the coin box to start the washing machine. She doubted if he was five feet tall.
“Look at that poor son of a bitch,” he said.
The little man was washing his car.
“If Andy could get out more,” Larry said. “If he could get rid of that feeling he has that he’s the only freak . . . I wonder if it wouldn’t do him good to come spend a week with us.”
“Are you going to take him in the wheelchair to the lab with you?” she said. “I’m not taking care of Andy all day.”
His face changed. “Just for a week was all I meant,” he said.
“I’m not doing it,” she said. She was thinking of the boy, and of the car. She had almost learned how to drive the car.
“Maybe in the warm weather,” she said. “When we could go to the park or something.”
He said nothing. The little man was rinsing his car. She sat inside when their turn came. She thought that Larry had no right to ask her to take care of Andy. Water flew out of the hose and battered the car. She thought of Andy, in the woods at night, stepping on the land mine, being blown into the air. She wondered if it threw him in an arc, so he ended up somewhere away from where he had been walking, or if it just blasted him straight up, if he went up the way an umbrella opens. Andy had been a wonderful ice skater. They all envied him his long sweeping turns, with his legs somehow neatly together and his body at the perfect angle. She never saw him have an accident on the ice. Never once. She had known Andy, and they had skated at Parker’s pond, for eight years before he was drafted.
The night before, as she and Larry were finishing dinner, he had asked her if she intended to vote for Nixon or McGovern in the election. “McGovern,” she said. How could he not have known that? She knew then that they were farther apart than she had thought. She hoped that on Election Day she could drive herself to the polls—not go with him and not walk. She planned not to ask the old lady if she wanted to come along because that would be one vote she could keep Nixon from getting.
At the museum she hesitated by the sculpture but did not point it out to him. He didn’t look at it. He gazed to the side, above it, at a Francis Bacon painting. He could have shifted his eyes just a little and seen the sculpture, and her, standing and staring.
After three more lessons she could drive the car. The last two times, which were later in the afternoon than her first lesson, they stopped at the drugstore to get the old lady’s paper, to save him from having to make the same trip back on foot. When he came out of the drugstore with the paper, after the final lesson, she asked him if he’d like to have a beer to celebrate.
“Sure,” he said.
They walked down the street to a bar that was filled with college students. She wondered if Larry ever came to this bar. He had never said that he did.
She and Michael talked. She asked why he wasn’t in high school. He told her that he had quit. He was living with his brother, and his brother was teaching him carpentry, which he had been interested in all along. On his napkin he drew a picture of the cabinets and bookshelves he and his brother had spent the last week constructing
