My Petition For More Space Read online

  ‘Pretty bad. We’re separated. Lawyers are in it. Been going on six months.’

  The grandmother does not wish to be put off, and she asks the girl in a forcing voice, ‘What’s your petition, honey?’

  The girl says, ‘I want to change jobs.’

  ‘Why?’

  I feel a need to stay in the act, and I say, ‘That’s the first question she’ll get at the windows, for sure.’ I have already asked it, and she has told me: Because it takes her four hours through crowded streets to get to work from where she fives, and her petition to change residence has been twice denied.

  But now she says to the grandmother, ‘Because my work doesn’t satisfy me. I want to do something that will help other people. I’d like to work, say, at St. Raphael’s, or Connecticut Valley, or the Cheshire reform school. Something like that.’

  The grandmother says, ‘Think they’ll care about what satisfies you? Hah!’

  I am uncomfortable. I do not like this changing of answers. Besides, the girl is not one of the four touching the circuitry printer; the girl is one ahead and to the right of the grandmother. She touches me, and I touch the grandmother, but they do not touch each other. I do not want to be rung in on this second level of touchers. I do not, for example, want to make the acquaintance of the person in front of the grandmother, an elderly man in a shiny black suit—he touches her, she touches me; he touches the girl, she touches me. I have seen his face when he turned his head to speak to the girl, and it reminds me of the face of my father when he was old and sick and had been thinking too much about death. I don’t touch him. He doesn’t touch me.

  The grandmother, however, is really friendly, really meddlesome. My whisper, with my face turned left, about being separated from my wife, has not escaped her. She says to me, ‘When I was young I worked in a travel bureau. There was a certain island I used to send people who were lonely off to—you know, marriages breaking up, or maybe just never had had any opportunity for affection. It was my mission, you know, I thought it was my mission, to get them all together, so I sent them all down there to this one particular little island. Off Martinique. I never learned whether…’

  Her eyesight is bad. She has had at least one cataract operation, and she may have glaucoma. Through her thick glasses one sees huge orbs of benignity, generosity, a voracious mothering appetite.

  * * *

  —

  OVER THE GIRL‘S shoulder I look at the man in front of her. I have not seen much of his face, although I have noticed that he has turned his head from time to time as he and the girl have exchanged a few sentences. He is wearing a tan whipcord bush jacket, which seems to be well cut and was probably expensive, but he is unshaven, and his hair, balding at the crown, is oily, uncombed; there is something seedy about him. The girl’s breasts are nested in the box-pleats of his jacket, her pelvis must press against his buttocks. But he looks the sort of person not to notice pleasure even if it is thrust on him.

  I test her, whispering, ‘What’s the petition of the guy ahead of you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answers. ‘I’ll ask him.’

  In finding out that she has found out very little from him, I have pushed her into finding out more.

  She is speaking to him. I see his head quickly turn. He is responsive, his face haggard but mobile. Perhaps he understands pleasure better than I had thought…. It is strictly forbidden…Their exchanges go on longer than necessary. They are having quite a conversation.

  Indifferent to the outcome of this chat, I turn to the janitor and say in a loud, unpleasant voice, ‘Line’s slow this morning.’

  Every once in a while, perhaps once a minute, it is possible to shuffle one’s foot two or three inches forward. Sometimes, in this shuffling, one winds up a bit off balance, but it does not matter: the crowd-pressure holds you firmly upright. There are sixteen petition windows on the ground floor of the bureau building. You have to realize that each person feels keenly the justice of his request, and when the bureau person behind the bars of the window denies the petition, it is understandable that the petitioner would wish to argue awhile, first in anger or outrage and later perhaps in a whining tone—and all this takes time. Each person wants a fair turn at a window. It takes a few minutes, when you have been waiting in line, let’s say, nearly five hours, to absorb a no. This time-taking backs up the whole column, which is, I would estimate, by now, a quarter of a mile long.

  At my remark about the slowness of the line, the janitor is suddenly overcome by self-pity. ‘I’m not getting enough to eat,’ he says. ‘Look. My wife’s sick. She’s not right. After work, she’d come back to the sleeping-hall and Christ, here she’d start yelling at me, throwing junk. All this stuff would land in other people’s space. I had to take her up to Connecticut Valley. The admissions office, they said, “Sign here, lady.” She says, “What’s this?” They tell her, “This here is a voluntary self-commitment form.” She says, “Up yours, Jack.” They say, “You have to sign it, lady.” She jerks her head at me and says, “Get Mr. Big-ass here to sign it.” They say, “Come on, lady, regulations.” She says, “Voluntary my hine end.” I damn near passed out. I mean I really almost fainted. I’m hungry all the time.’

  His pinched face makes me sad. Those two in front of me are still buzzing away. I am not really listening to anything. I am wondering about chance.

  I am very close to this girl, we have been whispering confidences, soon we will be confessing to each other—how did this happen? Was I, in the back of my mind, hoping or planning to stand behind a girl like her when I joined the line at five in the morning? The night was overcast—dark as the bottom of the sea. I came up to the end of the line around the corner on Elm, streetlights were far away. How much could I have seen? Did I make a knowing choice? There were four columns to choose from, not so tightly packed as they are now that the street is so crowded. Might I just as well have dropped onto the next row to the left, in other words where the grandmother now stands, behind the sick-looking man who reminds me of my father? I try to think back to accidents of chance earlier this morning—for example, whatever it was in the pressure of my forefinger and thumb, turning a knob, that made me set my alarm to go off under my pillow (so as not to waken those in adjoining spaces) at four thirty-two, as it did, rather than, let’s say, at four twenty-nine, in which case I would have arrived at the line three minutes earlier and missed her. I have been on the line for five mornings before this; one morning I stood behind an old lady, otherwise I have been behind men. This morning…

  She has finished talking with the man in the bush jacket. She turns her head—to the right—and speaks just above a whisper: ‘It’s really interesting. He went on a company picnic the other day. They were taken in busses to Madison, and while he was waiting in line to get in the men’s enclosure to change into a bathing suit, this person in the line——’

  ‘Chance,’ I whisper.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The person he happened to be next to…It’s a matter of chance…’

  She puzzles a moment, pausing and cocking her head, but she apparently does not get through to the shadowy area behind what I have said. ‘Anyway,’ she goes on, ‘this individual offered to sell our friend here a chance in a money lottery. Our friend asked to see a ticket. It was a private lottery. Our friend said, “But that’s against the law.” This individual said, “Not at all,” and he pulled out some kind of permit, it looked airtight, had the state seal, governor’s signature, it was a very good document. Our friend took a chance on it, it was clean—he was given notice of the drawing. He lost, but the point is, it was a clean operation. So our friend says he’s going to put in for permission to conduct a lottery himself.’

  Now I understand his seedy appearance. He is a person who makes a life of looking for loopholes. I am disappointed that the girl is so interested in his harebrained scheme.

  ‘They
’ll never allow it,’ I whisper.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘How about the other individual? They let him.’

  ‘Who’s to say he didn’t forge the letter?’

  ‘With a state seal?’

  ‘You’re gullible, my dear.’

  It is a weakness to soften my rebuke with an endearment.

  I am thinking how hard it was for my mother to be demonstrative, but how powerful the emotion was behind her holding back. When I left home for labor duty in my sixteenth year—’home’ was a single room in a boardinghouse on Howe Street; that was the last year families had rooms of their own—she said good-bye to me on the stair landing, just reached out her hand and said, ‘Good-bye, son. Never forget who you are. Remember that you’re a Poynter, be proud.’ It was my first leave-taking, and it was to be my last. In other words, I was henceforth to be a man, I was going away once and for all. She had always kissed my cheek, or at least the air beside my cheek, each time I left the house, even just to run down to the corner on an errand for her, to get a pound and a half of ground chuck or a head of Bibb or some yogurt, in which last, by the way, she believed more fervently than she believed in her white-bearded Congregationalist God. But this time: just the handshake. Now in the waitline, pressing against this girl in blue, I am hit very hard, as never before, by a realization of my mother’s unshown pain in telling me that way that I was a man, and free.

  * * *

  —

  THE GRANDMOTHER is trying to get the girl’s attention. ‘Honey,’ she says. ‘Say, honey!’

  She aims her thick glasses at me and tells me to tell the girl she wants to speak to her. I do.

  ‘Listen, dearie,’ the grandmother says. ‘It’s not so easy to change jobs.’

  ‘Did you ever notice,’ I say to the grandmother, ‘how everybody in the waitline for petitions is absolutely sure that everybody else’s petition is going to be turned down?’

  There is a grin on the wide barbarian face. ‘They always are!’

  Then what are you doing here?’ the girl asks with astonishing bitterness.

  ‘Listen, I know whereof I speak. Don’t think I didn’t try to change jobs—just like you, dear. Not once, not twice—a dozen times. You think printing circuits was some kind of a joyride? Look at my eyes! They ruined my eyes. I’m three-quarters blind. You couldn’t let through a single faulty circuit because you’d be responsible for a mass transit tie-up, or maybe something worse—you know?—it might be a speech, some high muckamuck speaking, and “due to technical difficulties there has been an interruption of the audio portion of our broadcast”? They could always trace it back. Dock you. Disgrace you. Put you back a level…. I tried. Oh, I tried, all right. Don’t count on it, honey.’

  ‘That’s encouraging,’ I sarcastically say on the girl’s behalf.

  The girl coldly says, ‘But it’s different. Mine isn’t a selfish request.’

  ‘Hah!’ This comes out of Robert’s grandmother’s throat like a load of double-o buckshot.

  Right on top of this, the next quarter-hour siren cuts through the white sound of shuffling feet, of traffic, of caged birdsong, of voices of petitioners all up and down our waitline expressing their optimism, their hopes, their confidence in a future better than the past has been.

  ‘That fucking sireen,’ the man behind me says.

  * * *

  —

  THIS GIRL gives me, who have no particular right to it yet, a pain in my chest. It is the beginning of the creative pain. I want to protect her, she is vulnerable. But who knows better than I how vulnerable I am? I remember the voice of that girl I fell for in Niantic while I was on labor duty—so many years ago that I forget her name. It happened quickly, two or three evenings, an imported Irish beer called Harp (I remember its name), a drive-in movie, The Stunner (I remember its name), holding hands at a semi-pro baseball game under lights in the bleachered back yard of a smelly brakelining factory (and its name, Bestosite), then parked somewhere and facing each other in the unreal light from the dashboard of the decrepit car I had wangled for the evening from the Niantic transport pool (its name, Roadhawk)—the sound of triumph in her throat: ‘Yes! Yes! You have that hurt look around your mouth!’ It was not just my hurt look, it was not really a hurt look at all, it was the look of a steep fall: and she was seeing what was already, to her, at nineteen, an old, old sign, enabling her to make yet one more claim….

  This girl in the line turns her head to the right, and I barely hear this: ‘You started to tell me about your…You said lawyers.’

  ‘What can I say? I had my view of it, she had hers. I felt she broke our contract.’

  The girl nods slowly. Her head remains turned. My God, I see wetness on her cheek. But surely her tears have nothing to do with me. She must have had a sudden rush of thoughts about her own mistakes with the man she couldn’t hold. Or perhaps the cheerful grandmother has knocked her hopes too hard.

  I cannot put my hands on her hips or waist. It is against the law. She might well turn me in.

  I whisper, ‘You okay?’

  She nods again, then leans her head back toward me.

  I feel that I must be cautious…. It is strictly…Does she really want me to talk about my wife? It is so hard to understand, to say nothing of trying to describe, the end of a long relationship. The girl sniffles. She seems to have controlled herself…. My eye is caught by the head of a monstrously tall woman in the crush of pedestrians between us and the steady stream of vehicles in the street. This woman is walking toward Elm. She has large bulbous features which blend into a surprisingly beautiful face, and she compounds her enormities with a wig which towers higher and higher into the sky. She is buffeted as she moves by the impatience and press of those around her, and her head bobs slightly as she looks now this way, now that, at the tops of the heads of the tight crowd.

  ‘Look at that woman,’ I say, out loud this time, to the girl. ‘How calm she is!’

  The woman’s serenity moves me very deeply—it reaches down to the pool of strong feelings in my chest. Perhaps this serenity comes from the mere fact that her head is above all the rest of the heads, perhaps she is physically powerful and glad of it; but I think—perhaps I merely imagine—that there is something more. She has come to terms with what bothers all the rest of us. What is her secret? I wish I had the nerve to shout to her across all the people and ask her: What is your secret?

  The girl, the janitor, the woman in front and to the right of me who touches both of them—this last a middle-aged schoolteacher in a brown rep dress, whose face is ravaged by a disapproving attitude she freely vents on everything—all of these, and also the man in the bush jacket, and perhaps one or two others, have heard what I said and are looking at the tall woman. In her nodding way she glances at our group and sees us staring at her. She does not smile, and the light changes in her eyes. She guards the secret.

  * * *

  —

  I REMEMBER ONCE when I was a child my family took a trip to the sea. One morning I sat on a massive formation which the local boys called Tiger Rock. Off its end the water was deep and clear, and a network of sunlines played in constant motion on the shallower underwater boulders. There was a dark hole into which the older boys sometimes dived; I did not dare. Usually Tiger Rock swarmed with big boys, but now a hundred of them swam away with splashing and shouts, and I was alone on the rock. I held a fishing pole for a long time, with the hook and bait lowered into the hole—a bite!—and I pulled up a tiny fish, which then before my horrified eyes began to grow. It became fatter and fatter. Its dorsal fin rose erect and spiky. Its round open mouth wheezed. Its belly distended more and more. I was appalled at its anger at being lifted from its medium into mine. How could I get it off the hook and throw it back before it became as big as I? I did not call for help—the huge swarm of older boys was several yards away in the water, too noisy for my cri
es to reach any ears. I was paralyzed; eternity was caught on my fish hook. I remember the hugeness of the sky, my fear of the tremendous space I occupied alone and my sharper fear that this ballooning fish would swell up in its anger and fill all that space, crushing me on Tiger Rock. But then the little puffer reached the limit of its protest; in truth, it was still pathetically small. The rock was suddenly teeming with boys again, and my brother disdainfully took the fish off the hook and tossed it back in the sea. It floated like a buoy for an instant, deflated itself, dived with wobbling silvery flashes into the dark abyss.

  ‘My wife?’ I whisper to the girl. ‘It got so she couldn’t make it with me in a room full of people. It wasn’t that way at first. She changed. It was an absurd neurosis. We tried everything. I built a kind of frame and we draped sheets on it, but she could hear the people in the sleeping-hall talking and mouth-breathing in their sleep. There just wasn’t any pleasure in it for her. I didn’t feel I could just use her. She got desperate and began to cheat—I guess she thought that might clear things up. It’s not a very nice story.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell me anything about you,’ the girl whispers.

  The janitor really stretches his neck to hear what I will whisper next.

  ‘You mean,’ I whisper, ‘maybe I was the one who changed?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘It’s possible. You realize I have to see things from my side.’

  We lived at that time in a complex on George Street. Since we had a child, our space was not bad. On one wall of the sleeping-hall were photo-murals of a rain forest in Puerto Rico—an almost palpable misty dampness, huge shiny leaves, tendrils reaching for strangleholds. My wife and I quarreled about books; both of us could read. She was an electrician on a high level of expertise: was called to work on sophisticated automated machinery. Sometimes I wondered whether having been shocked so often she had perhaps shorted out her erogenous zones.