Moved, we sniffle a bit, wipe our eyes, and step from the smoky fragrance of incense into the cold, clear air of a long marble corridor.
IV
We encounter the writer in his study. Slouched before his computer, he is sipping a glass of sherry and is obviously not completely sober.
Following our most recent insight regarding our subject (which is, of course, writing), we ask not “What are you writing?” but “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing? you ask. I’m trying to find a rhyme for ‘okra.’ I’ve gone through two bottles of Dry Sack, but I’m stumped. Maybe I ought to abandon okra and go on with ‘cauliflower.’ Lots of rhymes for that: ‘power,’ ‘Adenauer,’ ‘bower,’ ‘cower,’ ‘shower.’ . . .
“How’s this, huh? ‘Ah, snowy, bumpy cauliflower, / Thy aroma hast the power / To make me think of earlier years / With all their joys and their tears.’ Man, I’m hot now. Just one more tetch of Dry Sack, and. . . .”
Declining the Writer’s offer of a glass of sherry, we depart his study, the cloyingly sweet odor of the wine our most vivid legacy of this visit.
V
We encounter the writer in her study, sitting in front of the screen of her computer, a generic model assembled by her engineer husband. So engrossed in her own lucubrations is she, that for several minutes she is unaware of our presence. Beside her on a paper plate lies a half-eaten hamburger, sans mustard or ketchup, pickle and onion carefully removed and sagging over the edge of the plate onto the desk.
Following our most recent insight regarding our subject (which is, of course, writing), we ask not “What are you writing?” but “What are you doing?”
Receiving no answer, we ask again, more insistently, “What are you doing?”
Startled, the Writer looks up, now aware of our presence.
“I’m composing an explication of and commentary on a text by Paul Ricoeur. Perhaps you’re familiar with this: ‘In some cases the matter to be recovered is so remote, is in a channel of thinking or feeling so alien to our own, that even a savant’s “restoration” of the environmental context is not adequate. This is always true in some degree—’“
“That was not Ricoeur,” we interrupt; “it was Burke.”
“Oh,” says the Writer. “Oh.”
We tiptoe out of her study, the aroma of cold hamburger lingering in our memories.
The Seasons: Four Prose Lyrics
I
Under the scrub cedars, crystalline snow rots slowly away, rivulets coursing down the mountain, zigzag. A badger lumbers up the trail, pauses, looks at the boy, hisses, and lumbers on. A hawk circles high, falls from sight behind a peak, then struggles upward, a snake in its talons.
The valley below lazes in the afternoon sun, the sagebrush powdery silver, bright in the keen light against yellow sand and moist black earth. The mountains opposite are bare and dun.
The boy watches covetously as Mr. Armstrong’s bronze Packard Clipper glides silently along the ribbon of highway. In the Packard Clipper, more desirable than Mr. Holt’s black LaSalle or Mr. Johnson’s gray Buick, the boy could drive forever: Reno, San Francisco, Seattle—magic destinations.
He closes his eyes. He is on a highway to somewhere in the Packard Clipper, the girl beside him, smelling of Jergen’s lotion, her plaid skirt above her knees, her breasts rising and falling under the white blouse as she breathes. The silvery center line stretches ahead endlessly, the boy drives onward, the girl breathes quietly.
II
Like a pride of lions on the veldt, we laze on the grass in the shade of a locust tree, yawning, rolling over now and then, stretching. The heat of August afternoon ascends in shimmers from the sidewalk. In the Dutchman’s yard next door, the chickens are settled down in the shade of a lean-to, their feathers ruffled against the heat.
Don Munding rolls over on his side, props his head on his hand, and says, “Wish we had fifteen cents.”
“Yeh,” says Sonny Markowski.
“Yeh,” I say.
“Think your aunt would give us fifteen cents?” asks Don.
“Maybe,” I say.
“Then ask her for it,” says Sonny.
“Okay,” I say, but I don’t move.
Nor can I stir until the three coaches of the electric railway have passed on the tracks behind my aunt’s house. I hear the horn far away, as the train approaches the trestle, and then nearer as it crosses Redwood Road. And now the electric crackle of the trolley and the metallic thump of the wheels. A blast of the horn directly behind the house and lot sets the old cocker spaniel to howling madly. I feel the earth tremble slightly. And then the sound grows ever fainter, the horn virtually inaudible, the train gone, leaving behind an electric smell, releasing me.
“Go ask your aunt for fifteen cents,” says Sonny.
Leonine, I rise majestically, and, feline, slink around the corner of the house, into the back door, and down the basement, where my aunt is doing the laundry. She wrings the clothes through the white rubber rollers of the Maytag, and they fall into a large basket on the floor. The room smells of White King laundry soap, as does my aunt, always.
“C’n I have fifteen cents?” I ask her, without preliminaries.
“Why fifteen cents?” she asks.
“Cause Sonny and Don are out there, too,” I reply.
My aunt, a soft touch, but a thoroughgoing Puritan nonetheless, tells me, “You can have fifteen cents if you’ll help me hang the laundry out to dry.”
The last pair of Mormon garments through the wringer, my aunt puts on her large straw hat with the pink ribbon around the crown, and we lug the basket, she on one handle and I on the other, to the yard and pin each item to the wires that stretch from pole to pole perhaps forty feet. The laundry hangs sodden in the heat, the sagging mid-section of the wires held up by portable forked poles.
When I return to the shade of the locust tree, Sonny and Don regard me through half-closed eyes, but since I don’t flop on the lawn, they know that I have the fifteen cents, and they lazily, in slow motion, get to their feet. We walk across the road to the two-pump service station (regular and ethyl), our Keds scrunching the gravel of the apron. Mr. Maw sits in an old swivel chair in front of the small frame building. Barely moving, he nods assent for us to enter, and we go through the open door. On shelves to our left, cans of Quaker State motor oil. On the back-wall shelves, loaves of Wonder Bread, packages of Fisher doughnuts, and cans: Pierce’s pork and beans, Spam, Del Monte salmon. To our right, a glass display case (with jawbreakers, Doughboys, Tootsie Rolls, licorice cigars, marshmallow bananas, bubble gum, small wax bottles filled with punch) and a noisy freezer, chug, chugging. I open one lid of the freezer, take out three Fudgesicles, give one to Don and one to Sonny, and, leaving, place three nickels in Mr. Maw’s outstretched hand. No words have been exchanged during the whole transaction.
As we are leaving the station, a shining new black Terraplane skids slightly on the gravel as it pulls up to the pumps.
We cross the road, settle ourselves in the shade under the locust, remove the paper bags from the Fudgesicles, and begin voluptuously to lick at the rapidly melting, watery ice cream.
III
Two odors, aromas, smells. Frying pork chops and burning leaves—one richly oleaginous, the other spicily acrid.
In the almost dark of a mid-October six o’clock, the entry light and the windows of the red-brick apartment house glow through the chilly haze.