A Handful of Time (5 page)

“Thanks,” he said, “for all of it.” Then, seeing her tears, he said, “Well, really, what did you expect?”

There was a sharp stone beneath her shoulder, and she moved against it, so that it would cut through her pain. And, feeling the blood warm on her skin her tears stopped, for it was the stone that had hurt her, and not the Man.

“You act,” she said with a sneer, “as I would expect a man to act.”

“And you,” he said, walking off with his heavy steps, “have very kindly acted as I would expect a woman to act.”

Thus it was that she opened her veins on the sharp rock. Not out of love. Not out of sorrow. Not even out of fear. Out of pride.

N
OW JUST
why is it that men are so different from women? And how did it happen that I was faced not only with Bob, who became more inexplicable each day, but also with his offspring, who was even less explicable. Indeed I could see how women used to feel like Vessels, for I could find no vestige of
my
heredity in son Robert.

I floated disconsolately in the foamy Floatwater, trying to feel as luxuriant as the ladies in the advertisements. I calculated I should have at least eight extra minutes in which to relax and think. The thing to do was relax first… provided Robert didn’t once more start stuffing the good china down the garbage grinder. What a noise that had made! And my mother-in-law had said, What happened to the Large Vegetable Bowl I gave you and Bob for your anniversary? And then, I don’t understand how Robert got so…

Well, I don’t understand it either, I thought fitfully, forgetting to relax. Male creatures are, I decided suddenly, an entirely alien species, as I read somewhere once. After all, they don’t have that extra Y-chromosome, or whatever the civilizing factor is. They all suffer from Y-chromosome-envy, which is what makes them act so odd‌—‌

Though, looking at the problem rationally, Bob
had
seemed totally human when we got married. I sighed, feeling the comforting, enveloping pressure of the Float-water around my body, and when I closed my eyes, I could remember a succession of long, low-slung evenings that began with martinis and progressed into all sorts of interesting discussions about nothing and‌—‌well, the end of each evening seemed to sort of merge into the beginning of the next evening.

And then Robert had come along, and as an infant he had been so
good.
All cute and gurgly and tactful about going to sleep at just the right moment. We had no warning at all. I mean we just sort of assumed he’d stay that way. And every time I poked Robert in the diaper changer I thought how nice it was that he had been a boy and that if he’d been a girl I might even have been jealous of him.

I went underwater and held my breath until I counted a hundred. When I came up the walls blushed faintly and a little fairy sang out, “Surprise! Surprise.”

“Answer the door, Robert,” I shouted. I could see him through the one-way walls of his room, trying to set fire to the cat with a book of coldflame matches.

“Robert! You’re almost four years old!”

The door bell sent another blush through the house.

Robert calmly finished striking the entire book of matches.

“What?” he answered finally.

“Answer the door. Mama doesn’t have any clothes on. If it’s someone we know, tell them to come in and wait.” I did the bathroom wall back so I could hear who it was.

“My mother,” Robert announced grandly, “say to tell you she don’t have no close on. Come on in.”

“Well, that’s
mighty
nice of you, sonny.” It was an unshaven male voice. Totally unfamiliar.

I dashed into the Family Room, meshing the openings of my bathrobe as I went.

“How ’bout a drink,” Robert was saying. “Gin? Coolfizz?”

“Coolfizz,” the unshaven voice grated companionably.

I grabbed up Robert, my heart thumping. There’ve been all these tramps around lately since they tore down the last of the slums. I pinched my son vigorously and he howled bloody murder.

“My child,” I said shakily, “isn’t well. If you could come back some other time, perhaps…”

“I could,” he said noncommittally. He picked up a lighting tablet from the servo tray, stuffed it into his cigar and puffed life into the tobacco.

He was a small, thin man, sort of dust-colored, with an air of want about him. Not hunger. Something else.

“She
pinched
me,” Robert screeched, finally articulate through his sobs. He pushed off from me with both feet, landing on the strange man’s lap and leaving me sprawled on the floor.

“Poor little thing,” the man said, patting Robert with a hand that should have been dirty but wasn’t. “No wonder he’s not well.”

“Frankly,” I said, “I was trying tactfully to get you to leave. After all, how do you think I feel, having a total stranger walk in on me and my defenseless little boy?”

“Not
a little boy,” Robert growled, showing his teeth.

“Robert,” I warned in my most vicious tone, “if you bite me in front of this strange man I’ll…” I couldn’t think of anything bad enough, but Robert got the idea. He somersaulted over to our third set of indestructible drapes and began to climb.

“See?” I told the man. “He gets over-excited when strangers are around. Now
please
go.”

“He’s
not over-excited,” the man pointed out “You are. And I’m not a perfect stranger. I’m the baby sitter and Family Friend.”

“Down, Robert, down!” I cried, wringing my hands.

“I’m an old
bum,
”
the man said proudly, “from the very last slum. And due to modern technology and social efficiency, old bums have been rebuilt and sent out to make the world a better place to live in.”

“So this is how you do it!” I began. There was a sound like a fingernail being scraped along a blackboard. I winced and even tried not to look. It was Robert, descending with the lower portion of the drape on the north exposure.

“Now that
does
it,” I told the old man furiously. “I told you strangers excite him.”

“Ole curtain’s no good,” Robert said sullenly, draping the material around his temples like Spacerman.

“Why don’t you spank him? It wouldn’t help him any, but you’d feel a lot better.”

“His playgroup leader won’t
let
me spank him.” I was beginning to shake and the palms of my hands were getting itchy. “If you go away he’ll calm down. Family Friend! If there’s anything I
hate,
it’s helpful people with cheerful little pamphlets who come around at just the wrong time. Now go away, whatever-your-name is.”

“My name’s Smitty and I live across the street on the third level and I’ve been observing you a long time and I came to help and I didn’t know I wasn’t…” The man broke off and to my horror he began to cry. I’ve never seen a man cry before and it made me feel like melting all over the floor. And also‌—‌well, I’ve always thought men were leathery all the way through. I didn’t know they were in layers, like women. In my experience, they either howl, like Robert, or storm up and down the house cursing, like Bob. And they only have two moods, good and bad, like faucets. Only this… well, obviously this man had been putting on a gallant front and I had broken it and even I could see that’s about the dirtiest thing you could do to a person.

“Get him a glass of gin, Robert,” I said “That white stuff in the bottle.”

“He said he wanted Coolfizz.”

“He needs gin.”

“Don’t bother, ma’m. I’ll just go.”

I pushed him back down, because words are all very well, but there isn’t any word that beats a little human contact.

“I don’t know why,” he said, “I thought just getting cleaned up a little was going to make me respectable. I ain’t… I’m not ever going to be like other people, Miss Angie. I already faced that. But I thought like this. Me and the other Voluntary Readjustments. I can’t get no regular job. Any regular job. Even if it wasn’t for my background, I’m too old. I got no training, except handicrafts once when I was in the pen and that ain’t… anyway, I asked myself, what kind of job is there in the world that there ain’t no machine to do it and other people don’t want to do it and I might be able to do it?”

“I know a job exactly like that,” I said grimly, “only you aren’t equipped to do it In fact, it looks as if I can’t even do it.”

“I was thinking along those lines,” he said, relighting his cigar and beginning to look more cheerful. “Like this. They got labor-saving devices for everything else. But they don’t have them for being a wife and mama. You got counselors and you got playgroups and so forth, but there ain’t nobody but the mama for at least twenty hours of the day.”

“I know,” I said with a sigh. “But Smitty, much as I appreciate your offer to be the baby sitter and Family Friend, I don’t quite see what you could do. I mean it isn’t just a matter of wanting to get away from Robert now and then. It’s a matter of doing something about his development. Why does Robert want to climb up the drapes? Why do I have to close my eyes and cross my fingers every time I walk into a room when he’s been there first? And he’s exactly like Bob! Just when he’s done something absolutely atrocious, he looks at me with those great, big, innocent eyes and his look is
accusing.
You’d think I’d been hammering bamboo splinters under his fingernails instead of racking my brains day and night trying to think of ways to please him.”

“Now, Miss Angie, your husband don’t really commit atrocities, does he? He looks like such a nice, refined young gentleman.”

“Well, I suppose going to sit in the Omnivision Room by himself every evening isn’t really an atrocity. Only if you think of it as killing a perfectly beautiful evening seven nights a week, maybe it
is
an atrocity.”

“You could go sit in there with him.”

“I don’t like to watch sports. All those silly little men running around some kind of field or other! I don’t really see how grown men can…”

“Here de gin,” Robert said cheerfully, turning it upside down in the gyrocup.

“Don’t
do that.” It unnerves even me.

“You take it,” Smitty said generously. “No, no. It’s for you. I can’t drink this early.”

Smitty took the gin and stared at it. “I… I took the cure,” he said slowly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that you looked like a man who needed a drink.”

“I
tole
you he wanted Coolfizz.” Robert said scornfully. And just to show how scornful he was he started up the other drape. I decided, What the hell. I’d have to get a whole new set anyway.

But Smitty was still holding the gin, looking at it and turning it slowly in his hand. “I’ve took the cure before,” he said. “But this time… the smell of liquor reminds me of a lot of things. Do you know what I’ve come out of, Miss Angie?”

“I’ve got some idea,” I said. How do you tell a person you understand? Particularly if you obviously don’t. Not really.

“I came out of the last slum. Were you ever in a slum?”

“Yes, I was. My last year of college. I went down to see it and write a term paper. I called it ‘The Vanishing American.’ I had on a white plastipaper dress and a pink camellia in my hair. I felt like I was going to the zoo. People aren’t nice, Smitty,” I said, by way of apology.

Smitty was still holding the gin and smelling it. “I wasn’t no prize myself. Go on.”

“I can remember walking along a shaky balcony sort of affair and I was sure it was going to tear out from under my feet any minute. I passed several screen doors with old newspapers tacked over them and found the second from the end. I was supposed to see the man there and offer to take him to the clinic for a treatment. That was the excuse.

“I knocked. I went in. There was only darkness until my eyes adjusted. Everywhere was the smell of stale urine, coal oil and cooking red beans, though nothing cooked in the room. Someone coughed. The man I had come to see was thin and suspicious-looking and he had tuberculosis. There was old, old dirt in the seams of the walls and the bedclothes and the very air. Not only his dirt. A chilly sort of anonymous dirt from so many people that had stayed there without living there.

“
 
‘I’ve come to take you to the clinic,’ I told the man.

“
 
‘Go to hell,’ he said. He didn’t even look at me.”

“That might have been me,” Smitty said. “What did you do?”

“I left. It only had to be a short term paper. But Smitty, I wasn’t as beastly as I sound. I thought about that man and thought about him. And that room full of other people’s dirt he lived in. Some dirt is nice and clean, you know. Like Robert’s dirt. But I kept trying to imagine what it must be like, always to be dulled with drugs or drink and never to see the world and never to know what it is to be a man. Oh, Smitty, I’m
sorry.
I didn’t mean…”

“No, I’m glad you know. Because, you see, I’ve been through Voluntary Readjustment. Physical and mental. The physical was nothing. I don’t even know what diseases I had. But the mental…”

Smitty drank down the gin, all at once. Then his eyes blanked out and he shuddered. “It’s worse,” he said dully, “to have it and not to want it then it was to want it and not to have it.” If he’d had his habits removed, what was left? All the paper scenery blew away and there was no beauty anywhere.

“I had to get born at an advanced age,” Smitty said finally, “and I had to get born grown up. Take it from me, Miss Angie, when those babies cry, they got a reason.

“But you see, now I got an inside track on the human mind because I just had mine opened up and hosed out in front of my eyes. And I got something else, special, for Robert.”

“For Robert?”

“Miss Angie, I don’t want to shock you. But what a little boy is
really
like is‌—‌well, when I wanted a meal or liquor or a fix or if I just wanted to kick over garbage cans, that was all I thought about. I wanted it with everything in me and I wanted it right away and I didn’t care who got hurt or what got broken or sometimes even if I got caught. So you see, I got this old me I carry around in my mind and it don’t even twitch no more, but I got to look at it all the time and you know what it looks an awful lot like?”