A Handful of Time (6 page)

“What?” I asked, cringing a little at the sound of the other curtain tearing.

“It looks like a very small boy.”

“All right,” I said, “I buy that. Now, how do you open up his mind and hose it out?”

“You miss the point, Miss Angie. I mean, I understand how he feels. And if you’ll pardon my saying so, you don’t.”

“Well, I…” A thought descended on me abruptly. “My God! Cousin Alice! I was getting ready to take Robert to a birthday party.”

“Hell with Cousin Alice,” Robert said. He’s astonishingly like his father.

“Tut-tut,” Smitty murmured reprovingly. “That ain’t nice. Say, ‘Cousin Alice can go soak her head.’
 
”

“Dat right?” Robert asked with the worshipful glance he usually reserves for the repair men.

“That ain’t nice, either,” I pointed out.

“A boy has to say
something…
”
Smitty said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Yeah!” Robert agreed roundly.

After the inferno invariably produced by a successful children’s party, the house was a positive paradise of peace, even with Robert in it.

I walked into the kitchen to tape in something for dinner, and Robert came dashing in screaming, which is his normal tone of voice.

“Hush, dear,” I said, trying to concentrate on halving a soufflé recipe. “How do you divide three eggs in half?” There’s no way to punch half an egg. I settled on two eggs instead.

“Where my knife!” Robert screamed.

“Shut up, honey.” Let’s see. That would be two and a half tablespoons of flour. But I can’t punch half a…

“Mama!”

“Oh, all right. Knife? Knife?” I muttered, feeling about my person. It was stuck in my belt.

“Dey’s a wolf in my room,” Robert explained, dashing off with the rubber knife poised for a plunge.

“Five, six,” I punched for the flour. Robert thinks the neighborhood is entirely infested with wolves. “Six. Seven.” What sort of complex is that? Lupuslazuli? Did that sound right? “Eight.”

There was a horrendous crash from Robert’s room. “Oh, Lord,” I thought, “I forgot and left the cat in there. I’ll bet he’s popping the bed out at her.”

“Wolf!” Robert was screaming.

I walked into his room.

There was a huge, slavering wolf in the middle of the floor. Robert was circling him, rubber knife in hand. The wolf turned toward me, crouching to spring.

“Run, Robert!” I screamed.

“What’s the matter?” I heard Smitty cry. He’d heard me and come rushing in the front door.

That was the last thing I heard. The last thing I saw was Robert jumping on that ravening beast’s back and stabbing him with the rubber knife.

I came to with Smitty waving a bottle of sudsy ammonia under my nose.

“Don’t worry, Mama,” Robert cooed. “Robert killded the wolf.”

Robert and Smitty split their sides laughing. I could have strangled them both with my bare hands.

“And just how did you pull this little coup?” I asked.

“Eggdyglasma,” Robert said darkly. “Smitty gave it to me.”

“And what is this eggdyglasma and how did Robert do it?”

“Ectoplasm,” Smitty said with learned correctness. “I got it during my Readjustment. It’s used for the… um… Projective Technique. I tell you, Miss Angie, that ectoplasm’s had
some
exercise.”

“Where is it now?” I was afraid to look around the room.

“I don’t know,” Smitty said. “I give it to Robert It’s his.”

“Oh, no it isn’t,” I said. “I’m not going to have that thing around the house.”

“A boy needs to exercise his imagination,” Smitty said. “And you won’t make no more wolves, will you Robert?”

“I won’t make no more wolves,” Robert agreed.

“Any more,” Smitty corrected. “See what a good boy you got here? You just leave his education to me for a while and concentrate on your husband.”

“Smitty,” I said, “I think you make a fine baby sitter and Family Friend. But I
already
concentrate on my husband. It’s not my fault. He just doesn’t listen. I might as well be talking to the house motors.”

“He
doesn’t listen?” Smitty asked cryptically.

“There is a horse,” my husband said, “in the bathtub.”

“I know, I know,” I muttered nervously. I had just taken the soufflé out. There was something wrong with it. One thing I noticed immediately. I had forgotten to add the cheese. “Do you like soufflé manqué?” I asked sort of hopelessly.

“There is a…”

“Oh, all
right.
You don’t have to shout. Go get Robert’s rubber knife and stab him.”

“Angie,” Robert said, in that tone as though we speak foreign languages to each other, “When I come home from work I’m tired. Why can’t you at least arrange things so I can‌—‌”

“You are not tired,” I said. “You didn’t
used
to be tired.” I burst into tears.

“Oh for heaven’s
sake,”
Bob snarled. “I’ll go talk to Robert. What’s he doing? Pouring ink all over my white shirts?”

Broodily, I dialed a cold luncheon meat sandwich.

Bob reappeared in the kitchen almost immediately with an odd look on his face. “There’s an old tramp in Robert’s room,” he whispered as though he wanted to keep things quiet until he called the police.

“It’s all right,” I said, knowing I’d never really get the idea across. “He’s not an old tramp. His name’s Smitty and he’s an ex-con.”

“
An
ex-con!
That makes it all right?”

“You needn’t raise your voice. He’s reformed now and he’s of good character. He’s a Voluntary Readjustment.”

“How do you know he’s of good character?”

“I just know.”

“Angie,” Bob said, still in that foreign language, “you don’t just
know
anything. Come on. We can’t leave Robert alone with that criminal.”

But Bob was so fascinated at the sight through the oneway walls of Robert’s room that we both stood and watched.

There were two cats, and Tina Louise was spitting at her double.

“That’s right,” Smitty was saying. “Leave that old real cat alone. What an ex-con wants to do, see, is stay out of trouble. Your old lady catches you clipping the fur off her cat, she’ll have your hide. This way, see, you do what you want and she can’t say a thing.”

“Dat right?” Robert said, his eyes shining.

“Right. Now go ahead.”

Robert clipped to his heart’s content. He clipped until the pseudocat disappeared completely.

Tina Louise stomped out, her eyes glassy. She hasn’t been the same since.

“What would you like for dinner, Smitty?” I asked.

“Spinach,” he said. “Hamburger steak and baked potato. A glass of milk.”

“Me too,” Robert cried.

There was a howl from the kitchen. “Who the hell is this cold luncheon meat sandwich for?”

“I dialed it for you,” I said, “because you were so nasty about the soufflé.”

“I wasn’t nasty‌—‌”

“Now, Miss,” Smitty said reprovingly, “that’s no dinner to give your old man when he’s just come home from a hard day’s work.”

“Why does everybody think he works so hard? He doesn’t work hard.” I was beginning to feel a little hysterical.

A long-toothed monster with two heads and green prickles came lumbering in. I grabbed Robert’s rubber knife and slashed it to pieces.

“You ruined my monster!” Robert wailed.

“You oughtn’t ruin his monster,” Smitty told me reprovingly.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I screamed. I burst into tears and threw myself on the sofa. “To hell with all of you.”

“Now, now,” Smitty said soothingly. “This is no time to give up. We’re doing fine with Robert and you’re just the kind of woman your husband needs. It’s just that…”

“That
what?”

“You’d only get mad if I told you.”

Smitty went out, and came back shortly with a couple of glasses of what looked like liquid lipstick. “It’s a Bloody Paradise,” he said in answer to my look.

“What’s in them?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t enjoy it if I told you. It’s something I learned about before my Readjustment. I got special knowledge, see, and there are times when it comes in handy.”

Even one sip of a Bloody Paradise is nice, and half of one gives the general effect of living under water. Under water, Bob began to look positively human. The look in his eyes was not in a foreign language.

I opened my mouth to say, “Now why don’t you look at me that way all the time?” But my vocal cords were frozen. I couldn’t say a word.

Smitty came out of the kitchen and grinned at me. “That one thing wrong with you,” he recalled. “You talk too much.”

I heard the door to the Family Room slide down softly behind Smitty.

It was an entirely successful evening.

There really aren’t any words that beat a little human contact.

A
THOUGHT
struck me.

I swerved off the road, heard a truck roar by screaming with its angry horn, and held on to the steering wheel until I stopped shaking.

I have been struck by thoughts before.

But the others were my own.

I realized almost immediately that it had not been really a thought. It had been a printed sentence that appeared suddenly before my eyes. I had been driving all day and by this time I was hypnotized into a numb world of endless strips of highway and the hoarse mutterings of motors. The road moved on and on, the countryside looming up dimly at the sides, forever running back from me, like a motion picture.

Then suddenly there was the still, as when the camera breaks down and you feel deceived and cheated.

And the sentence.

I began to laugh at myself.

Once I woke up from a nightmare sweating and scared so stiff I couldn’t bring myself to reach out from the blanket to turn on the light. Then I recalled the nightmare. I’d dreamed my cat was trying to hang herself with my best necktie.

So I laughed, recalling the alien thought that stopped the road in its tracks.

YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, the sentence had said.

The night traffic went by me. Salesmen going home. A low thunder, the flick of a scream, the long disappearing sound of cars going by in the night. The idiot sounds of sane civilization all around me.

I started up the car again. I felt as though I’d dropped into some odd pocket of the universe. I looked into the brilliant, mindless eyes of a speeding car, waited my turn, and nosed back into the mainstream.

Long day. Too much driving. Not enough sales. Dearth of a salesman. I laughed nervously. I’d have to have either my eyes or my head examined.

Eyes, I concluded. It would be much cheaper.

“g,w,f,y,” I said. I think I can even see the little ones in the bottom line: “a,” I squinted hard, “m…”

“Never mind,” the doctor said, blinding me with a flashlight. “Look to your left. All the way. Now to the right. Hmm.”

I kept wishing he’d regard my eyes as more like windows of the soul and less like a television set.

He made me look at those deceptive little pictures with the colors. “Odd,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

He pulled one lid up and had a good look inside.

“What did you say your symptoms were?”

I hadn’t told him and I wasn’t about to. “Er… things seem to get out of… er… focus sometimes. I’ll be looking down at something like the… er… floor and suddenly…
there it is!”

“Caught it!” he said triumphantly. “Fine! Fine aberration,” as though he had invented it himself.

“Did you see it, too?” I was intent on looking around the floor now, because I had seen it very plainly.

“Yes, indeed. A rare type of spasmodic strabismus, I should say.”

I sighed but it was more a shudder. I was cold inside. Maybe he saw a spasmodic strabismus. I saw a sign that said, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD.

“Nothing I can do for you,” the doctor said jovially, “short of operating. I don’t think it’s serious enough to warrant a corrective operation. Nothing to worry about. Just ignore it and check back with me in six months.”

Nothing to worry about. That was easy to say.

Maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist. But the thing was so
real.
Were visions that real to other crazy people?

Other
crazy people!

I dropped into a telephone booth and began to flip through the yellow pages of a telephone book. How do you find a psychiatrist? They just list them all as physicians.

Do you call a doctor and ask him to give you a good, cheap psychiatrist?

I couldn’t afford a psychiatrist. Fifteen or twenty dollars an hour or whatever it is. I had eighty dollars a month payments on the car and I was about to sink a heavy down payment on a hi-fi set. No two ways about it.

I dropped the telephone book and stooped absently to pick it up.

YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, the cover flashed at me.

I got out fast.

Eventually, of course, I ended up in a headshrinker’s office. A man can take only so much. I got so I was afraid to drive.

The psychiatrist, to my surprise, sported neither a goatee nor an accent. Nor did he have a couch, unless the armchair was a folding couch. I stood staring at him and the antique, polished table he apparently used for a desk.

“Have a seat,” he offered, but I was too tensed up to sit down. Hell, I was embarrassed. How was I going to tell him about my delusion without having him think I was crazy?

Finally I said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, doctor.”

That was a bad beginning. He just looked at me.

“Well, this thing keeps… well, here I was on the road one night, driving along, when suddenly I see this… Great Gods of Olympus, doctor, how old is that desk?”

Even his bespectacled calm was disturbed, but that was the least of my concerns. For his desk had flashed a message at me. And the message was, WITH LUCK AND PLUCK YOU WILL RISE TO GREATNESS.

The doctor cleared his throat and arranged his thoughts “Around 1880, I should say. Er… any special reason for asking?”

“You’ve just cured me, doctor!” I shouted, and scooted out of the office throwing a large bill at the receptionist.