The sound of Mary rustling and gagging roused her. She jumped up and ran across the room, managing to catch the washcloth before it fell into the bucket. She held Mary’s forehead and patted her back and tried not to look at the bucket.
36
Another Point of View
Assignment: You are to rewrite the story you have chosen to revise from the point of view of another character in your story. It is risky to choose (1) a pet’s point of view, (2) the point of view of a piece of furniture or a fly on the wall, (3) the point of view of one of your character’s alternative personalities. These and other tricks have been tried before and have, invariably, failed. Your goal is to enrich your portrait of both the old point-of-view character and the new one. You have a certain amount of leeway in changing the plot of your story, but it should be recognizably the same story.
Oct. 25, 1989
Monahan, FW 325
“The Boy,” version #3
a story by Gary Olson
Although he kept quiet about them, and he was only eight, Larry had some extra powers that he didn’t really understand. For example, he could see around corners, and he could remember his whole life, all the way back to being born. He didn’t let himself remember the early part of his life very often, though, because it made him too sad. That was when his mother, Lydia, had been younger and prettier and thinner and happier. That was when his father had come home every night right after work to have dinner with her and play with him, Larry. They were a happy famly then, and Larry missed that now. The extra powers seemed to make him see things that made him sad rather than happy.
“Lydia and Larry”
a story by Gary Olson
Larry knew he had lost his mom—she had been taken away one night by the police, and an enormous fat woman who didn’t love him had been supplied in her place, a real screamer. They had also supplied another child, his supposed sister, Allison, but in fact Allison came from another family entirely. Larry thought it was very weird that his father, Lyle, hadn’t noticed the switch, but Lyle was very busy in his job, and often worked two shifts, so he didn’t notice much of anything.
Some days, Larry tried to get the new mom to admit that she wasn’t Lydia, and he never really did, but she always started screaming at him, and that was a dead giveaway. His real mom had never screamed at him, and he could remember many times when he would be lying in her arms, looking up at her, and she would be smiling down at him, and he knew he was going to get to suck her breast
“Lyle”
a story by Gary Olson
Lyle Karstensen often wondered whether it was him who was really to blame for what had happened to his wife, Lydia. He knew now, looking back ten years to their years at college, that he hadn’t really appreciated Lydia, and that she had stuck by him in spite of the many ways that he had ignored or belittled her. For example, he remembered how he would make her sleep in filthy dirty sheets until she made up her mind to wash them. He remembered how he had let the pizza boxes stack up in his room, even though his roommates had thought it was disgusting. And he remembered how jealous he had been of his roommate Larry, whom he thought Lydia was paying too much attention to. That was why, after Larry was killed in a terrible accident, trying to save some elderly people in a fire, Lyle had named his firstborn son after Larry.
The fire had taken place in Los Angeles, where Larry was directing his first movie at the lowly age of twenty-five. He had written the script, too, and everyone was very excited about the project. But he lived down the street from a group home for elderly people, and when, in the middle of one night, the faulty electric wiring started to burn, Larry had thought nothing of
Mr. Monahan—
I have worked very hard on this paper. I really have been working every day, like you said, for forty-five minutes or an hour, and rewarding myself for it, trying to build good habits. But I am not getting anywhere. Here are my beginnings, just to show you that I HAVE been working. I hope you will not grade these. I will try again for next week.
37
Earl’s Opinion
EVEN THOUGH Bob Carlson was of absolutely no use to her, Diane found that she was taking a surprisingly active role in pursuing their relationship. This was clearly not a good idea, since it implied a certain attachment on her part that did not conform to her plans. This did not mean that she didn’t date other guys—she had dated a Theta Chi, a Sigma Chi, a TKE, and a DKE. All four had taken her to fraternity parties where she had witnessed her future made present, and honed her social and flirtation skills. All four dates had been big successes, but each of the four boys she had gone out with had been a trial. They only wanted to kiss when they were drunk, and then their kisses were overabundantly wet. They didn’t want to actually talk to her, just to have her on hand while they talked to their fraternity brothers. Worst of all, when she resisted getting particularly drunk herself (in the interests of further study), their attention shifted to other girls in the room who were moving more rapidly toward unconsciousness.
The thing about these guys was that they had no secrets. Their high opinions of themselves, and their sense of entitlement to things like sexual favors, nice clothes, good cars, and a future in which everything would go their way, were fully on display. What you saw was what you got, and she did not believe, as some of the other girls said, that the boys at the parties were separate from some sober incarnation of the same boys. The boys at the parties were being who they wanted to be, and while at one time she had harbored illusions about who they were, and while she had lost some of her enthusiasm for them, she still didn’t doubt that their world was where she was headed. Now she just thought that forewarned was forearmed.
Bob, though, was full of secrets. The plain face with the great body constituted one secret. The sexual inexperience with the big dick constituted another. The way he wrote letters to girls all the time was mysterious (she hadn’t quite brought herself to rifling his things to see what they wrote back to him—that guy Gary was always in the apartment, working at his computer). The way he disappeared five times a day, including every night at eleven, no matter what they were doing, supposedly to do his work-study job, was one of these mysteries, though not, in the end, the biggest one. The biggest one was how, in contrast to the Theta Chi, the TKE, the DKE, and the Sigma Chi, he had developed a personality of his own, while they seemed to partake of a group personality, which, admittedly, varied slightly by fraternity—Thetas studied a little more, Sigmas preferred Miller to Bud, TKE was a real animal house, and DKEs were especially resentful if you didn’t go along with their sexual plans.
During that week when all the roommates had hid out together (thank God that weirdness was over and she was back on track), she’d tried not seeing Bob at all. Mary said, “Why don’t you just admit that he’s a nice guy and go with it?”
Sherri said, “I knew ten guys in my high school that were just like him.”
Keri said, “It’s been a couple of months. Don’t you think if you liked him, you’d know it by now?”
They hadn’t seen what a crisis this was for her, because they didn’t understand the seriousness of undergraduate corporate life, Diane thought. The fast track, for a girl, was more like a high wire. You had to take every step with care, and you also knew there were going to be sacrifices. In the end, though, she hadn’t been able to go on not seeing him, and had decided to pursue a more creative management strategy. When he stood up from his statistics problems and came around the table to give her a kiss, she said, “Don’t distract me.”
His feelings were hurt. He went back to his own side of the desk. His section was two chapters behind hers. When he struggled, she sometimes helped, as a way of pulling him onto the fast track with her, but not tonight. Her plan was that when tonight he closed his books, kissed her, and headed off across the campus, he would be so wrapped up in perplexed depression that he wouldn’t even raise his eyes from the contemplation of his shoes.
Yes, it was ruthless, but
even aside from the fact that ruthlessness in general was a quality to be cultivated, he had brought this upon himself with his secrecy about wherever it was he went five times a day. She glanced at her watch. Ten-thirty. She focused on Rules of Apposition. Almost immediately (when you were determined to succeed, even the time reading grammar rules tended to fly), Bob stood up and pulled on his jacket. He came around the table. Diane saw that her books were sitting on his hat, so she pulled it out and handed it to him, also handing him a smile. He looked a little more depressed than she had planned, maybe a little too much on the it’s-not-worth-the-grief side. She reached into his coat sleeve, which was too long because he was always forgetting gloves and hunching his fists up into his sleeves for warmth, and gave his big, muscular, and incredibly sexy hand a squeeze. She felt the squeeze in her own viscera—God, if he knew, if anyone knew, how exposed and embarrassed she would be!
“Well, good night,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come back and walk you to Dubuque House? I hate you walking across campus alone.”
“Sherri and Keri are up on the fourth floor. We’ll be okay. I’ll see you tomorrow. Come over to the house for breakfast after your early class. It’s Muffin Day.” One place where he had her was this no sex on Sundays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays, because he hated to go to his statistics class (7:30 a.m.) in a state of exhausted tristesse (that was not what he called it). He nodded, then turned and slumped across the atrium and out of the library into the night. She had positioned them at a table by the east windows, so she watched until he rounded Lorman Hall, and she was on her feet, into her jacket, her gloves, and her own hat at once. Keri, who had been alerted earlier, had agreed to pick up her books on her way out of the library.
The campus walks were well lit, but as soon as she rounded Lorman Hall herself, Diane saw that Bob wasn’t sticking to the walks. She had to stop and sweep the area for signs of him (why hadn’t she surreptitiously stuck a piece of fluorescent tape across the back of his jacket? He would never have noticed), losing precious steps while she tried to pick dark movement out of the dark trees planted everywhere. There he was. She ran through the frosty grass, soaking her shoes but making up time, then halted behind a tree, gazing again. It was true that she did not feel safe, especially in these darker spots—those axe murder rumors, said her anthropology professor, were just migrating legends, perennials on every campus since the beginning of higher education, but they were potent all the same. It could be that she had thrown Bob into such a revery that he wouldn’t even hear her dying screams—
There he was again, heading for Davis Hall, but no, he passed that one, too. She scurried to keep him in her sights. He was darling from behind—bowlegged, small-assed, broad-shouldered, his walk a little shambly and a little springy, and if Sherri knew ten like him, then what was she doing dating some of the graceless clods and squirrelly yahoos that she kept bringing back to the room like trophy heads?
He slowed, probably to look at that garden, he was a sucker for that stuff, and Diane almost got too close, but that turned out okay, too, because then, when he went beside the loading dock of that dark building behind the garden and unlocked the door and threw it open, she was just close enough that with a burst of silent speed, she could grab it before it latched and hold it while his footsteps receded down the echoing hall. She’d have bet everything in her checking account ($611.37, minus a $1.05 service charge) that he had no sense of her pursuit. She stood and held the door. As he walked away, he turned on the lights, his trail of bread crumbs. She waited. At last there was the ringing sound of a heavy metallic door, then silence. She slipped inside and let the door she had been holding latch behind her.
Pursuit had made her hungry for him, no doubt about it. Though she knew he had no idea she was following him, it still seemed that he was getting away from her, and she was having second thoughts, probably inevitable and not ones she should pay a lot of attention to, about how she treated him, how she was, which was often irritable and cool, withholding of her time and her patience and all promises about even the most immediate future. She knew he thought she might sever relations at any moment—without prior experience he had no way of valuing the one thing she offered freely and even gladly—sex. Her own prior experience told her that her response was right out of a male fantasy, and exactly the sort of response those TKEs, DKEs, Sigmas, and Thetas thought they were entitled to and never got. But Bob was a little afraid of it. That put her at a disadvantage. And being at a disadvantage was against her personal rules of business.
So she made her sneakers quiet on the concrete floor. Lights led her, with only two wrong turns, to a large metallic door, newer than the others in the building, and sealed all around with dark gray rubber: that would be the door. The handle turned. The sealers sucked a little as they released, and before she even had a peep inside, a strong, acrid hog smell poured out of the opening, and, in spite of herself, she said, “Yuck.”
But softly. When she could see inside, she saw that Bob hadn’t heard her, though the hog had. It was lying on its side, trotters toward the door, its head lifted, its eyes dark and curious, its ears perked. Bob was inside the pen, picking up straw with a pitchfork and throwing it into a wheelbarrow. Diane paused for a moment, then said, cheerily, “Well, I caught you!”
Bob whirled around.
“You refused to tell me. I don’t think that was very nice.”
He didn’t look pleased.
“You didn’t have to make such a mystery of things. Lots of people have unpleasant work-study jobs.”
“How about if I talk to you later. I’ve got stuff to do.”
Diane closed the door behind her and walked over to the pen. She said, “What’s its name?”
Earl, breaking his nighttime routine of many months, heaved to his feet and moved toward the far end of the pen.
Diane said, “God, that’s a big animal! How much does it weigh?”
“Almost six hundred pounds. His name is Earl. Earl Butz.”
“He’s really white, isn’t he? I mean, really white. I thought pigs were pink or something.”
“He’s a Landrace. They’re white. He’s a very fastidious hog. Lots of times they are. Anyway, you’re making him nervous. Your voice is too shrill.”
That wasn’t the half of it, in Earl’s opinion. Lifelong solitude had made Earl an especially sensitive hog. An inborn preference for calm had blossomed, absent the hurly-burly of other porcine companions, into a decided disinclination toward any noise or disruption whatsoever. Diane carried disruption on her person. Her actions were quick and harsh, her voice was shrill, her very being was excitable. Earl was as sensitive to body language as any animal. It seemed important to him to put as much distance between himself and her as possible. And he didn’t want to look at her, either. He looked at the wall in preference, and also let down a pointed stream of urine. Diane said, “Yuck,” just as if an intelligent animal like Earl couldn’t hear and understand her distaste. He grunted.
“See,” said Bob. “He’s acting very weird.”
“God, he’s so fat. I mean, look at the rolls!”
“You don’t have to insult him.”
“I don’t have to insult a pig?” She laughed. That, Earl did not like at all. The most mirth he had ever heard was a deep guffaw from Dr. Bo Jones or a chuckle from Bob. He twitched his tail and grunted again.
“Hey, Diane. PLEASE go out and wait for me. You’re making him nervous, and I’m annoyed that you followed me without asking. That’s probably bothering him, too. He’s a valuable hog. He’s my responsibility. I’ll be finished in ten minutes.”
“Well, I’m just leaving.” She turned and walked toward the door. As she put her hand on the handle, he said, “Don’t cross the campus. Just wait.”
“I can’t stand that protective shit!” She opened the door and let it slam behind her.
Earl turned and walked across his pen, then turned again, and walked back in the other direction. He felt in his
own tissues that he didn’t have the vitality to throw off this disturbance. Bob finished picking out his pen, then wheeled the barrow away, coming back with more straw. Earl stared at him. He saw that Bob gave him some extra straw. Then Bob picked up the scratching stick. But Earl didn’t go over to the fence. He didn’t want to. All he wanted to do was stand there staring, like a dumb animal. Besides, the shooting pains he tried so hard to avoid were starting in his forelegs. He sighed.
Bob sighed. After a few minutes, when Earl still refused to move, he stood the scratching stick against the wall, said, “Okay, Earl, I’ll leave you alone.” Then he turned out the light and went out. Earl stood there in the dark. It occurred to him to visit his feed trough, what he would normally do when he found himself on his feet, but for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel like it.
She was sitting on the loading dock when he came out, and she wormed her hand into his as they started across the campus, but all he said between Old Meats and Dubuque House was “He really is fat, isn’t he?”
Diane didn’t reply. It was possible, she felt, that she had made a mistake that she was going to regret. What that felt like was a thick, seeping coldness in her limbs. But that was not what she THOUGHT. What she THOUGHT was that the exigencies of competition often required bold action, and if Bob truly understood that, then he would feel admiration rather than annoyance.