The only thing to do was to pray about it, even if it took all night to get some kind of sign, so after carefully brushing her teeth, she knelt beside her bed and fixed her attention. When she got up an hour later, she knew what the Lord wanted her to do, and in the morning she still knew it, so she called in sick and set about following His orders.
First, she went to the university library and checked the budget book out at the reserve desk. She noted that Nils Harstad, dean of extension and professor of agronomy, earned $121,000 a year.
Second, she looked Nils up in the phone book and drove past his house. It was large, probably four or five bedrooms, brick, and surrounded by expensive plantings.
Third, she called a realtor and told him she was new in town, come from California, and looking for a big traditional brick house in the best neighborhood. What should she expect to pay? “Weeeeelllll,” he said, “IF one should come on the market, which doesn’t happen very often, you’d be looking at a quarter million, depending on the shape it’s in. Can I take your name?” She hung up.
Fourth, she meditated over the entry in the phone book. Apart from Ivar, who lived at the same address, there were no other Harstads in the phone book and no teen-line, which meant either young children (unlikely) or married children or none.
Fifth, she looked around the two-bedroom bungalow she shared with her father, and at her most recent pay stub from the university. She gazed upon the photo of her boyfriend, Travis, who was a long-distance trucker with a wife and small children in Pennsylvania, and she looked in the mirror. She knew she was plain and that she didn’t know how to dress. She recognized that kindliness and turning away from anger, two of her real virtues, had never carried her so far before, not once in ten years.
She stood up and turned a sober pirouette, then leaned close to the mirror. She whispered a word. The word was “Cinderella.”
16
Earl Ponders
WHEN EARL BUTZ leaned his bulk against the bars of his pen to better meet up with and enjoy the scratching he was getting from Bob, the orange steel bars bowed slightly outward, but Bob, whose life since meeting Diane had been a whirlwind of new experiences, didn’t notice. He just scratched and scratched. Earl, for whom being scratched was a major source of pleasure, was asking no questions. If Bob wanted to stand there with his elbow on the pen and his chin in his hand and scratch and scratch and scratch, Earl’s only responsibility was to stand there likewise and enjoy it. Nevertheless, the bars of the pen showed what the charts also showed but what Bob was too preoccupied to notice—Earl Butz was getting monstrous big.
Earl himself felt it in the effort it took him to heave himself to his trotters in the morning, in his increasing desire to lie around and have things, like cooling baths, brought to him, rather than going out to receive them. There was a suspicious bulge toward the center of the pen in the shape of Earl’s toileting area—his characteristic fastidiousness was beginning to disappear. He still worked hard at his main occupation of eating. He couldn’t help that, it was bred into him; but like any variety of genius, appetite was beginning to overshadow other, more individual traits of his personality. He no longer played with his toys, for example, though he often contemplated them from a recumbent position. And he did not only feel his growing bulk spiritually, he felt it physically, in the form of migrating pains in his legs and trotters. There was no persistent lameness—a limp would have revealed that to Bob and he would have noticed, he wasn’t completely dazed, after all—no, the pains were sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes sharp and sometimes mild, but never, anymore, absent. He could avoid them by lying down in his pile of straw, and so that’s what he did whenever he wasn’t hard at the trough.
For his part, Bob saw Earl so frequently that these signs of decline, if that’s what they were, were hidden from him. In addition to that, he was remarkably fond of Earl—of his friendly, willing nature and the philosophical way that he made the best of his incarceration—and so he was not inclined to notice evidence of pain that would only give him pain, too. Whatever stirrings of unease that some subrational apprehension of Earl, some bodily response that came from a life of knowing hogs, might give him had not yet surfaced, and certainly would have a hard time doing so amidst the storm of feelings he now entertained for Diane Peterson, the girl he had met at the party.
In Bob’s former opinion, girls had been generally unremarkable. Some future one had your name on her, but her likeness to your sisters or aunts or mother was major, and reassuring. He had long assumed a relationship to the whole realm of girls that was very similar to his father’s relationship to his mother—respectful, with much understood, little actually declared. He had been subtly warned against anything else, for one thing. His father and grandfather spoke disapprovingly about boys and men who followed their dicks around; his mother and aunts reserved their most puzzled scorn for girls and women who didn’t fit in, didn’t ask for recipes, and thought themselves better than other people. It was easy to see the rational basis for all of this disapproval, too—that kind of man and those kinds of women made no one happy, least of all themselves.
Nevertheless, now there was Diane. All judgments he might have made about her character, all predictions he might have based on those judgments, were blasted away by her own sense of her future. “Make the best of it,” his father’s commonest and sagest advice, didn’t even occupy a niche in Diane’s brain.
It was also surprising to him how many different perceptions he had of Diane, after just Saturday night, and then another little datelike engagement Tuesday, when they studied in the library together. He had to spend all these extra hours mulling and scratching Earl’s back just to sort through everything. Girls before had presented him with fairly uniform surfaces; Diane dazzled him with facets. Everything she said or did contained some bit of knowledge about her that he had to have, as if he were collecting jewels. His capacity for appreciating her astonished him. It was as if a whole new wing in the cottage of his inner life had suddenly opened up, revealing to him long unknown riches that he already possessed. He wasn’t the dull guy he always considered himself to be.
Earl was a comforting and calming companion in all of this. The discipline of keeping the hog’s snowy hide clean, his pen picked out, his trough full, of checking him for the odd parasite, the stray infection (for these, though there were no other hogs around, Bob himself was a vector, since hogs and people share certain diseases), of just easing his solitude (which Bob felt more poignantly now that he felt his own solitude more), was an honorable way to pass the time, Bob felt. He did it all for Diane, though she hated agronomy, was afraid of hogs, would certainly run from every activity that his family members did on a daily basis.
And it was an honorable discipline. Earl himself had no quarrel with that. It’s hard even for a hog to know whether to blame others or himself, especially when the new afflictions seem ephemeral—possibly the product of some little mood swing or change in the Zeitgeist.
17
A Vision of the Future
Assignment: Write a story based on the following situation: three people are in a room and something happens which at least one of them must react to. You may define the idea of “room” very loosely. Remember that it is not enough to set the situation up—a story doesn’t begin until a character recognizes a dilemma and responds to it, and it doesn’t end until no further responses can be made. A note on ambiguity: Please remember that most readers do not want to decide for themselves what happened, though they may like to decide how to interpret it. If you, the writer, don’t know what happened, that is not ambiguity, it is a fault in the story. Just make something up.
Sept. 17
Monahan, FW 325
“The Boy”
a story by Gary Olson
The room was dark, even though it was nearly noon, because Lydia Karstensen had the shades drawn. Lydia didn’t like the daylight, because it made her see too much. She had gotten into the habit, since the
birth of the boy, of staying up late watching TV, then sleeping as long as she could. If she had to go out for groceries or something, she would try to get Lyle to do it on his way home from work. Lyle, though he had a good degree in electrical engineering from a well-known university, worked in a factory.
Lydia woke up and heaved her giant body over onto its side, then she laid there, feeling around on the floor for the candy box she had been eating from the night before. All the chocolates were gone. She yelled, “Brownie, get in here!” but the dog was afraid of her, and just hid under the kichen table. Suddenly, Lydia realized that her daughter and son were in the room. They were sitting very quietly in the corner, huddled together, holding hands. She said, “Why aren’t you kids in school?”
The boy said, “Allison had a temperature, so Daddy said I could stay home and take care of her.”
Lydia said, “I haven’t got time for this. I’m going to take a shower.” She heaved her pig-like bulk out of bed. She took off her nightgown. The children hid there eyes. Lydia said, “What a shit-hole this place is. I don’t know why we can’t have a house of our own.”
She was waddling toward the bathroom.
The boy saw that the cord to the telephone was stretched between the bed and the wall. He didn’t say anything. Lydia didn’t see it. She hadn’t seen her feet in years. She stumbled over the cord, which did not pull out of the wall. She fell down with a thump that shook the apartment building. The boy could feel it.
Lydia said, “Oh shit. Help me up.” But her leg was broken, and try as he might, the boy could not get her up. Then Lydia began to cough. She coughed some blood up. She said, “Hand me the phone,” but the phone was dead. The boy and his sister went back to huddling together in the corner.
Lydia said, “Something’s really wrong with me. I think I’m going to die. Come give me a hug, you two.” Allison got up and went over to her mother. She hugged her around her fat neck.
But the boy didn’t move. He remembered too many slaps, too many times his mother had yelled at him. All he did was sit and watch. Pretty soon, a gurgle came from Lydia’s throat and then she was dead.
When Lyle came home from his shift at the factory, he noticed that all was quiet in the apartment. He began looking all over the apartment.
He went into the bedroom.
The first thing he saw was Lydia’s giant bulk lying lifeless near the bathroom. He shouted, “Oh, my God!” Really he had always loved her in spite of everything. Then he saw the children, huddled together in the corner. Allison was crying, and she jumped up and ran into her daddy’s arms. He looked at the boy. The boy did not move. He looked back at his father.
The boy’s hair, which had been almost black, had turned completely white.
The End
Gary—
I think this story needs some work. You seem preoccupied with Lydia’s fatness. Does fatness itself make her unlikable? That’s what you seem to be implying. What is her personality like apart from her fatness? What did she used to be like? What was it about her that Lyle fell for to begin with? How has she gotten the way she is? How does she feel about it? You need to explore her character some more. The boy needs a name. What is his personality like? Is he malevolent? I don’t quite understand how you want me to take him. If you decide to rewrite this story, please see me first.
Gary finished reading the comment with some resentment. He himself had found the story both poignant and thrillingly scary. He had, in fact, stayed awake for some hours after writing it, thinking what a revolutionary combination it was of Stephen King and Charles Dickens. AND he had fulfilled the assignment exactly. Three people in a room, something happens, they react until they’ve used up all the possible reactions. He turned the paper over, looking for a grade, but there was none.
The press of students changing classes that had moved him to one corner of the corridor had thinned, and now he saw the door to the Spanish class open. Lydia came out with another girl. Gary’s first thought was to shove his paper into his notebook and look away. He shouldn’t have used her name, or Lyle’s. Though it seemed easier, it was too dangerous. She and the other girl passed him and started up the stairs. She had a great pair of jeans on, tight, with red flats. Her thick liquid ponytail swung back and forth, and she laughed, suddenly, her musical laugh. They were talking excitedly about something. Gary moved as close to them as he could without attracting their notice, and began to listen in. The thing was, it was hard to remember what they were saying. You had to cultivate your memory, the way Professor Monahan was always telling them to. But there was no doubt about one thing. It was interesting as hell once you started paying attention.
18
A Soldier of the Revolution
LOREN STROOP DROVE an old John Deere tractor with thousands of hours on it and without a cab of any sort, much less an air-conditioned one, so he had found that keeping abreast of bulletproof vest technology really paid for itself in weight and comfort, especially for summer cultivating and hay harvesting. Every year he bought the newest model advertised in police magazines and wrote it off on his tax forms under “miscellaneous equipment.” After a year’s wear, a vest was pretty rank, but Loren passed it on anyway, to the local sheriffs troop or to anyone who asked. Loren’s wife was dead and he didn’t have any kids of his own, so he was known around the neighborhood as a generous old guy.
Loren liked to keep busy, and his interests took him out of the house, so the bulletproof vest was his best protection against the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag businesses, all of whom, he knew, wanted to get him out of the way before he perfected and marketed his invention, which was going to revolutionize American agriculture. This didn’t mean that he was lax about residential security—he had a burglar alarm and there were plenty of dogs inside and outside the house. He saw on the TV once where they asked a bunch of convicted burglars what security system they would use, and they all said they would just get a dog, and he felt vindicated. He’d always thought you could rely on dogs, the more the better.
Loren himself didn’t own a gun anymore. It was his opinion that a gun just invited you to use it. Every time you got mad at something, your thoughts started to circle around that gun, as if that gun would solve anything. No, his personal safety was of secondary importance. He put his energy into working on his drawings and plans. He thought it was a good idea to keep copies of them in various places, and make sure they would get out if he should no longer be around to do it, by composing letters to various officials, to be sent out upon his demise, even if the circumstances didn’t seem suspicious. He intended to get around to that very soon. He was well aware that the CIA, the FBI, and the big ag companies had plenty of ways of doing you in so that it looked accidental, or even like it was your own fault (the injustice of THAT really stuck in his craw). Wasn’t there an old story about a man who was negotiating to change jobs from one big company to another—computers, maybe, or oil—and he was staying at a hotel out East, and they found him in bed with a bullet in his brain and they said it was suicide even though the gun was lying on the floor and the guy’s arms were tucked under the covers? This was a clear example of how far they would go to protect themselves and, most importantly, their investments. If you were going to revolutionize American agriculture, which meant you were going to render obsolete billions of dollars of investments already made, then it was naive to think that they were just going to let you walk in and do it.
Nevertheless, Loren was a tremendous patriot from way back—he ran the flag up every day, and he followed the old rules about taking it down in the rain and folding it up in a triangle and never letting it touch the ground, and he also knew, with the same conviction, that his dean of extension, Dr. Nils Harstad, would eventually do the right thing and champion Loren’s invention. The thing was getting past Dr. Harstad’s secretary, who, like most women, didn’t have a grasp of the principles involved and preferred filing her nails to forwarding American agriculture.
Well, a man like
Loren Stroop, an experienced farmer who hadn’t overextended himself financially and kept every part of his life in good order, was a man who had all the time in the world and could afford, even at the beginning of harvest, to wait patiently for an interview. Every weekday morning he fed the dogs, made himself an early breakfast, put the dishes in the sink, and went out and worked in the fields until about noon. Then he went inside for a sandwich and a glass of milk, changed out of his work clothes (but not his bulletproof vest, because they could pick out your car even if you had it painted every year, which Loren did, and wrote it off under “depreciation”) and drove in to the extension office at the university (his university, founded under the Morrill Act to help him), arriving there at one p.m., and parking illegally for exactly an hour (the parking office was orderly, as well, and didn’t send a ticketing van to that parking lot until after two). Loren had weighed the dangers of maintaining a routine, especially after they said on the TV that those people who were always getting kidnapped in those foreign countries left themselves open to that by doing the same thing every day, but how to vary his routine was something he hadn’t yet decided and, he felt, had to be approached with caution. In his experience, when you varied your routine you tended to forget a lot of things, and more as you got older, no denying that.
Anyway, after one, he sat politely in his dean of extension’s office for about forty-five minutes, always sending in his name and a reminder of who he was, written out in pencil so as not to inconvenience the secretary. These visits reconfirmed his understanding that the dean was an extremely busy man, and that sometimes people had to wait years to see him, as it once had been, they said on TV, with kings and princes over in Europe.