.

—Pillar of salt.

Walker thinks.

If he turns around, she will turn into a pillar of salt.

No, that isn’t it. She will disappear.

Or will he disappear?

Or will they both?

What has put this thought in his head?

A detail from something he once heard, but he can’t remember how it goes. It is hard to keep straight what you were told at church as a kid from what you learned at school. It is hard to keep anything straight anymore—but damn, she is doing it again! Julia is lagging behind him, she has let him go ahead, in the mall, by himself!

It is Tuesday, they went out to eat. Lisa, their daughter, fifteen, who hasn’t yet fleshed out into their expectations, is off somewhere for the night with other girls in the neighborhood about whom they have no opinion. They only see friends on weekends, and have no plans for the one coming up. Julia didn’t want to stay at the restaurant for a few more drinks. Walker didn’t want to go to a movie. Neither wanted to go home. They settled on the mall.

What else is there to do?

Walker asks himself.

But Walker does not like malls. The massive columns painted in pastel colors, the quiet expanse of concrete floating over walls of glass, a gushing fountain, the sedative music he can barely hear—it is all irritating. And there is something pointless and vaguely illicit in going out in the middle of the week, the pointlessness multiplied into something else, large and disturbing, by the low, complex murmur of the voice of shoppers that settles over him like a heavy fog. The mall is crowded, two tiers full. People Walker does not know and does not want to know, who assault him at every step. They look on edge, predatory. Consumers consuming. Watchers, gawkers gawking, watching. Walker is getting edgy himself.

And Julia is somewhere behind him in all this noise, taking, he is sure, short, mincing steps.

—Pillar of salt.

Not that she is delicate, though he feels she sometimes affects this manner for her purposes. Or slow. When they first got together, at the university, they would go for long hikes in the Berkeley Hills. Then she marched at a brisk, vigorous pace, competing for the lead, and he’d let her go by, liked to watch her as she passed, Julia, being Julia, moving ahead. Love with Julia was sudden and frank, a postulate, not a posture, not a pose.

But after they had been married for a while, when they were out in public places, she began to slow down and let him keep walking until he left her some distance behind—until he realized he had left her behind. Then he had to stop and wait for her to catch up, or she stopped and stood waiting, and he had to go back until they were together again. It was her way of letting him know that he walked too fast, that he had stretched the invisible tether of their relationship.

Was being headstrong.

Or insensitive.

Or blind.

Or some such offense. She never explained. There was only that look on her face, at once a shrinking from injury, a flash of wordless anger, a look gone too soon for him to ask, leaving him guessing what was wrong. Walker did not expect miracles when he got married, but he thought when you took this step you might at least be able to put some of the nonsense in life aside.

—Pillar of salt.

Yet now it is just something she does, a gesture become habit, whose meaning has faded with repetition, with years of married life. Her eyes, not quite gray or green, opened so her irises are rimmed with white, stare through you without recognition, and the look has blurred into an expression too indistinct for Walker to describe.

—Not pillar of salt. Disappear.

Walker may be given to moments of abstraction, when he is absorbed in the progress of some thought and loses track of where he is, but he sees nothing in this behavior that should disturb her.

Worse, that she has to stage a demonstration to make a point. Matters important enough for gesture should find language, words that are succinct and clear. If you have something on your mind, you should say it, not let it fester. It is the unsaid that leads to fights, to harm.

Even worse, to act this way but forget why—which she seems to have done, which is something she does, forget things, she forgets things all the time—and not be aware she still does it, letting him go ahead, leaving him exposed before strangers, before strangers at a mall, keeping him in the eye of judgment, as if putting him on trial for all to see, as if he were an abuser of women, some callous male supreme, and even if it is only judgment past, maybe judgment gone and judgment only he remembers, it still is judgment, and the judgment of memory is a judgment from which there is no escape—

This is careless!

But what Walker most dislikes is making mountains out of molehills.

Lighten up.

Mellow out.

A mall is just a mall. It is part of the American landscape. It is the fruit of free enterprise. Julia is his wife, and he loves her. They have been married nearly twenty years. Walker, Walker thinks, is Walker. He is a middle manager in a Silicon Valley firm that makes computers, who has never claimed to be anything more or less than what he is. It should be enough, Walker believes, to be who you are. Sometimes it is all you can do.

So Walker reflects: The last few years have not been easy for her, and lately she has seemed adrift. Her career plans are up in the air; Lisa’s at high school, out of the house more often than in. Even Julia’s school—she went back to get a graduate degree—has proven to be a wash. And from the way she stares in the bathroom mirror, she probably thinks her looks have started to go as well. Slogging through your forties must be harder on women than men.

And Walker realizes: Julia is not devious, she is not hysterical. It is not a big deal, what she does, not worth argument. And once together, they start over; their marriage, their life goes on. Besides, if you had to account for everything you said and did—

Turn around. Go back to her.

—Pillar of salt.

Still the sense something will happen to her if he turns around. A foreboding. Not that Walker heeds those voices that sometimes pop into your head with special insistence, as if they could determine the course of your life. All kinds of things run around inside the brain. Yet there are things we hear that stay with, might change us, if we could only sort them out.

—Pillar of salt.

Or perhaps something will happen to him. But it’s a myth, he’s sure of this, probably a Greek myth. A story about metamorphosis, where people change into plants or animals or things.

Which Greek turns back?

Who changes into a pillar of salt?

Not that Walker is superstitious, either. He doesn’t believe that Greeks actually turned into plants or animals or pillars of salt, anymore than he believes anything will actually happen to anyone if he turns around. His beliefs do not have to be confirmed by mysterious events.

—Pillar of salt.

Or is it a Roman myth?

Or a story from the Bible?

And neither do angels hover over Walker’s head, beckoning with songs of bliss, nor demons torment him, trying to drag him down below. We only have each other to look at, ourselves to figure out. He has long since learned to come to terms with the strain religion puts on belief, the props of guilt placed there to give someone else the upper hand.

Still, he doesn’t pretend you can understand everything that goes on inside the head, that all can be explained by reason. He knows that the light of reason also casts shadows. And there has to be something within us and between us, or life would be a hopeless mess. Yet even Protestantism, back in Walnut Creek, was the aspirin pitch of admen, trying not to scare their suburban flocks away. And who else is there to listen to now? Those fundamentalists who have started to run for office, the bogeymen of faith? Or New Age flakes? Or pop psychologists and self-help philosophers, whose advice lasts as long as the sales of their books?

—Pillar of salt.

What’s a myth?

It is something that is not true. But there must be reasons myths have hung around—

Or will something happen to her if he doesn’t turn around?

Or to him?

Is it something he should try to prevent?

What does he believe can happen in the world?

And there must be reasons why it’s hard to get myths right. But Walker is getting confused. It has been a long time since he went to church, was in school.

Keep walking, Walker tells himself. You are not a bad person, he thinks.

Yet all these people at the mall—it is impossible to move forward, much less think straight. He treads on the heels of the slow and aimless while the impetuous shove from behind. Mothers plow through with baby carriages; small children trip on his feet. Everywhere the flow is broken by more people, people going the wrong way, people struck by the urge to go to stores on the other side.

And this mall has gone downhill. One anchor, I. Magnin’s, has pulled out; its windows remain vacant. No more the angular and nervous, yet aloof, yet sublime mannequins in shimmering gold and silver gowns. Macy’s, across the way, is struggling. Sears holds down the fort behind him. Woolworth’s looms ahead. Between them, the little stores that come and go, suing for a piece of your heart, a corner of your wallet:

Plastic furniture and greeting cards.

Sports shoes and software and gourmet cookies.

Jewelry for fingers, necks, wrists, and toes, for pierced ears, lips, noses, and bellies.

This is supposed to be an upscale neighborhood.

Mall arts and crafts, little booths in the walkway, disrupting the flow even more:

Driftwood sculpture and chrome license plate holders.

Stuffed animals in primary hues; exotic animals inlaid in stained wood.

Computer generated pictures, scattered colors, from which a three-dimensional image is supposed to emerge.

A mall, Walker thinks, is a substitute for something else.

A toy store—an arsenal of plastic, fantastic weapons; two aisles for girls, a pink and purple haze.

T-shirts and posters—pictures of sports, movie, and rock stars poised and frozen in a moment of climax; printed slogans that scream at you with their brass, their wit.

Frederick’s of Hollywood—a host of impassive seraphim with frosted hair and glassy stares, steely legs and high, hard breasts, wearing lacy see-through teddies and camisoles trimmed with fluff, and garter belts and mesh stockings, and sheer bras and panties red and black.

Signs of some language Walker does not wish to know. He keeps his arms close to his sides, balancing his composure, his sense of who he is. It is the way he feels every morning when he gets on I-280 to go to work.

A video game arcade—phosphorous monsters, aliens, thugs, and Nazis, and a welter of kids waiting to get at them; the sounds of hands slapping buttons, of shouts of anguish and ecstasy, of mass electronic slaughter.

Perhaps it is he who will disappear.

Or he will turn into a pillar of salt.

Sale signs everywhere. Stores going out of business. Stores reworking their facades with neon lights and fake stone, with classical columns that support nothing—postmodern glitz. Stores boarded up and painted with sentimental pictures of parks and old-time villages, but without indication of what is coming soon. Most of the stores he remembers when they first moved to Menlo Park—real antiques, a bookstore that sold books, a men’s store with clothes he could wear—are gone, and the ones that have replaced them are cheaper:

Budget rugs, Dollar Daze.

Or more gimmicky:

Party gags and novelties.

Gadgets impossibly complex and small.

More singular, more desperate in their appeal:

A store that sells only trolls.

As if the invisible hand has lost its grip.

California has taken several hits the last few years. Defense cuts, the exodus of high-tech, the perennial budget botch in Sacramento. But the Valley has always been overpriced and overgrown. It was only a matter of time. Pundits blame the lean years for their problems, when they should look back to when times were flush. Yet more than this, or less, or not this at all, because he does not think economics fully explains the decline, that what he sees at the mall can be located on the cycle of slumps and booms.

Because while Walker does believe in free enterprise, he doesn’t think anyone has stopped to consider what it can and cannot do, just as he believes in high-tech but does not buy his company’s hype that computers will revolutionize our lives. What matters is what computers process, and will what they process now become better in the future, or even different, or will it just be more of the same, processed faster?

Russian imports.

This was here the last time. Some enterprising émigré has capitalized on the fall of the Soviets. On the shelves, cloisonné boxes, chess sets, and gilt icons. Hanging in the window, hockey jerseys and army uniforms with red stars. On the ledge, rows of those nested dolls, opened and arranged in descending order. Identical peasant girls, large to small, with the same painted cheeks, the same folk smile. Then another set: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Khrushchev, Stalin, down to a tiny Lenin—

Not smiling.

Nasty business, Walker thinks, what he hears is happening in Russia, in the new republics whose names he has not yet learned. He wonders what those Marxists back at Berkeley think now.

Four years of protests, the burn of egos among palm trees and littered streets—he should have gone to Stanford, or maybe gone East, where he might have belonged, instead. He screwed around for a while because Berkeley was a good place to screw around. Then he turned ascetic when everyone got ascetic, which proved only to be another form of self-indulgence. Then it was time to get serious, but he couldn’t find anything in class to get serious about. Marx, Freud; class oppression, psychic repression—life was one big squeeze. He majored in electrical engineering because the logic of chips gave him some room. And at least there was a kind of music in what ran through the gates of NAND, AND, OR, and NOR; the rest was post-structuralist noise.

Whatever post-structuralism is.

With graduation, the need for pragmatism, a job market that supported little else. Grad school, then, and the trek to the Valley. If you can’t make a good choice, don’t make a dumb one. He wouldn’t do himself or anyone else any good by going broke. But he still tries to keep some sense of culture, some sense of something, which has survived deconstruction by Berkeley profs, that violence of sardonic minds. Because there has to more to our existence than that mechanism which negotiates the distance between our money and our desire. He has seen what has happened to some guys at the office, who can’t even sluice their salaries to women on the side but pour it directly into the pockets of their shrinks.

—Pillar of salt.

We have all lost touch with the Greeks.

Or the Romans.

Or the Christians or the Jews.

It doesn’t matter who turned around or what really happened. It doesn’t matter what is really happening now. To get bogged down in details, to focus on the literal, is to miss some larger point. Long ago, someone actually turned around somewhere, someone saw an actual pillar of salt, was reminded of something that happened, made a connection, told a story, and the story caught on and stayed. It meant something to someone then, it has meant something to us through the ages, and it must mean something to Walker now.

What matters is the point the story tells.

What?

Or maybe someone turned around and saw someone disappear, not really, but in a sense. But then that wouldn’t be metamorphosis.

Or maybe someone turned around, saw a pillar of salt, and disappeared himself, in a sense. But that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or maybe someone didn’t turn around and something happened to him or to someone else.

Then what?

Whoever it was who saw whatever, whatever it was that happened to him or to someone else, whoever it was who made the story up, Walker decides, he must have been a married man.

What is a pillar of salt, anyway?

What comes after post-structuralism?

Post-post-structuralism?

Clothes.

Little boutiques and huge discount outlets up and down the hall. What the world has revealed to Walker is that most stores at a mall sell clothes.

Clothes in colors that run a ragged spectrum from stark white and black to earthy to fleshy to fluorescents, or colors that do not look like colors, off the scale,

Clothes cut tight cut baggy cut short cut long, the cuts hiding, suggesting, revealing, boasting but not defining what they might dress,

Clothes with pockets that tell us they are pockets, clothes that see no need for their use; clothes with padded shoulders, the statement of a pointed shrug; clothes with lapels that taunt the concept of lapels, lapels thin, evanescent, lapels stately fat,

Plain clothes in natural fibers, affectedly austere; clothes embellished with obvious pleats and stitching, showy sequins and brass studs; brand name clothes branded with the logos of their brands; sports clothes sporting odd prints and loud plaids, abstract patterns chaotic and campy, Fiftyish fatuousness revived and reveled in,

Clothes for all occasions, a whole vocabulary of clothes, the cuts, the prints, the colors combined in so many different variations, phrasing each a different stance, a way of appearing, a way of being, a place to be,

Or flaunting, flirting with some stance, casual, slack in their acceptance of, or flouting, emphatically slack in their offhand rejection of yet still determined by the same need, the same itch,

Or flaunting, flirting, rejecting as if there were a need, a place, a way,

More slack now than ever, Walker thinks, more offhand, more off, more distant from, thus more desperately casual in the lock it has on them, their claim, the pretense of that which they cannot or will not embrace in the eternal ephemerality of their stance: the assertion of identity apart from yet premised by the argument of a gathering, of an order, of a plan, a plan posited, discounted, and displaced by mannequins who wear the clothes in perfect fits.

Clothes for all occasions in a place where there are no occasions.

Endless babble.

As goes the mall, so go the people. They look excited, scattered, lost. And what looks only crisp in the windows looks shoddy on the people, because they have them on, the shoppers, the clothes with the logos and slogans and designs, and they have washed the newness out of them, and what looks distinctive and almost possible on the mannequins looks cheap and improbable on the people as the clothes yield to the vagaries of the spirit, of the flesh, the bulging, the withering, the varying stages of decline from fitness, from resolve. It is like looking at distorted images in a hall of mirrors at a carnival of bad taste.

Is it the stores that reflect the people’s longing, or the people the stores’? A moot point—the machine is on and running and all there is to do now is wait and see where it will end, the appeal, the looking, the pitch, the buying, the reflection of reflections to exhaustion.

Mirrors upon mirrors.

Do his neighbors no longer shop here, have invasions from tract housing in San Jose come to fill the void? But when the rich dress down and anyone can buy imitations, how can you tell people apart?

Not money, this is not what bothers him. The car, the big house, the lawn he could do without. Not the loss of class lines, because Walker is not a bigot, not a toady for Republican crass. But the lack of some vital distinction.

Not the people, because Walker does not hate people, but there are times when you see too many of them all at once, and there is something about having large numbers together in public places—at a mall—that brings the worst out. You can see it in their faces as they mill through glass and concrete, their expectant but hollow stares, a gaze that touches meanness.

Not a way of being, but a reason for being together. A reason, Walker thinks, and some structure that might contain it.

—Pillar of salt.

Not disappear. In the story he’s trying to recall, someone turns around and someone turns into a pillar of salt. And even though it’s a myth and didn’t happen and couldn’t happen, it doesn’t have to happen to mean something.

—The cities of the plain.

What were their names? But not Greek. It is from the Bible, Genesis if he remembers right, and now he wishes his parents had dragged him to church more often, and that he had paid more attention when they did.

—In the beginning . . .

It’s a story about man’s fall from grace. The cities have gone to pot; the outcry against the sinners is great. God is displeased, so Abraham—

Abraham. Venerable, upright Abraham. This is the one. It is Abraham who turns around, and—

But Walker is not a prude. There is much he can take or leave. Nor does he believe people are wicked. Civilization has progressed beyond such simple views black and white. And we don’t need some transcendental paternal to tell us all how to behave. Still, the world has turned soft and weird, and when we lose our sense of direction, someone pays the price.

Teenagers are the worst.

A group of them have just elbowed their way around him—

Alone, put to task, they are whiny and timid. In a pack, turned loose, they are rude and loud. Before the displays in store windows, however, they are quiet and amazed.

Is that his daughter?

But he only sees their backs as they disappear into the crowd, shouting fuck.

—Sodom and Gomorrah.

So God sends two angels disguised as strangers to take a look around. Then the men of Sodom come and knock, wanting to know the strangers—

Knock on Abraham’s door?

Then what? When does Abraham turn around?

Who turns into a pillar of salt?

Where does Walker fit in?

Has Lisa been known?

Because Walker knows what wanting to know in the Bible means.

And what is Abraham’s wife’s name?

Because Julia is still behind him, thinking god knows what or worse, not thinking, making what comes next more difficult, because now there’s the problem of how to turn around and join her. Should he go back, nonchalant, as if nothing has happened? But something has happened, he has been walking by himself all this time, has already made the turn at the glaring lights of Woolworth’s and is going back the other way. A gap has been created between them that has become too large to dismiss and is growing larger. Has she wandered off into one of the stores without telling him, because she can do that, too, because she likes to shop, leaving it to him to search for her in this junkyard of American life?

Turn around. Go back.

Don’t turn around. Don’t go back.

Keep walking.

Because it has become one of those idle moments when the backwash of your life returns, swirling. You have to find some way to come to an understanding—or pull away before you’re sucked into a vortex of doubt that can stay with you for days.

But how do you assess a marriage, weigh the fights against the closeness, the eventual settling down against the trade-off of affection? Or make sense of the gray periods about which nothing can be said, of those large feelings that have reified into little things lifeless and opaque?

No thought of divorce. The topic has not come up in years. For both their first and only marriage. This has to be worth something. There was a time when he didn’t think they would make it, the charged silences, the dinner arguments that turned into week long battles, the truces broken in bed. But Walker did not enter marriage with illusions.

Yet how do you know when you’re giving in or giving up, compromising or being compromised? How can you even know yourself in marriage? Because it is difficult to see your own heart in the heat of anger, even in the warmth of love. Because the few times he put his foot down, he was brutal, not the Walker he thought he knew—

his father—

Back down, give in, give up—be a modern husband. The issues are never that important.

Turn around. Go back and find her.

Yet her suspicions—

And her criticism—

And her complaints—

But any virtue, on a bad day, can bleed into a vice, and self-assertion turn to self-righteousness. Julia is Julia. He cannot expect her to be someone else. Marriage is learning to live with what first caused you to fall in love—

Up ahead, some commotion, a dozen stores down—

And learning when to put love aside.

Before the fountain, next to deserted I. Magnin’s, a disturbance, and the people spread out like ants in broken ranks—

His love for Julia, who is somewhere behind him, Julia who probably isn’t thinking about anything at all.

It was Silicon Valley, he once thought, the Valley and the pressure of her work. His job is still secure, his company has stayed afloat. But after an initial spurt, her firm, a peripherals start-up, was on the ropes, and her department, PR, was always the first they wanted to sub out. And the high-tech egos, the exaggerated sense of purpose. The artificial sense of time, an urgency measured in microseconds that consumes the daylight hours yet ignores the advance of seasons and years. The euphoria from the feeling of boundless growth that keeps you from seeing how fickle the industry really is.

But now he’s not so sure, because Walker went through the same pressures, yet he learned how to cope. He left hardware design and worked his way into management before the abstract juices ran dry and kids fresh out of school pushed him out. There he learned how to make himself essential without being obtrusive, how to weigh ambition against the risks. When they brought in the fast-food king to run the show, he kept low and weathered the storm.

You need perspective to keep your head in this business, and perspective, he thinks, is what Julia lacks, Julia who is or is not behind him, who has faded from his life—

Someone’s shouting, people have turned to watch—

Lisa was a long, sober debate: their careers, their time, their marriage. When Julia got pregnant—had they really decided?—her stomach seemed to grow not with daughter but their swollen misgivings. A difficult labor, she came weeks late, and then there wasn’t the time or energy to fight. But instantly, magically Julia changed into a mother, a woman he didn’t know was there—

his mother—

Too much a mother. But the bawling baby turned into a sweet kid. And they didn’t argue about how to raise her; on matters of discipline, Julia and he agreed. And when Lisa turned six they both had to join forces against education in California, the crap going on in the schools.

Be a husband, be a father. There are worse things in life to do. Because Walker used to look on those years with fondness—

By the fountain, hands flying, shirts flapping—

Now he wonders why.

It is two boys horsing around—

He wonders why he hasn’t wondered why before.

Damn kids!

Because when it seemed they had most made a life together, even after her company had been saved by merger, Julia said she wasn’t going anywhere in her life. She then enrolled at some school in Palo Alto he had never heard of to get an advanced degree.

Clinical psychology!

Again their marriage was upset—the strain of night classes, the tension of deadlines both from work and school. Her all-nighters, the nights alone, the weekends he had to take Lisa out while Julia pounded away at her papers in manic fits. She made herself crazy studying craziness. It must have been the pressure women had started putting on themselves.

Mumbo jumbo, psychology. DSM-III-R, the manual of insanity at her side, she could only talk about disorders couched in terminology as freakish and fuzzy as the behavior it was supposed to describe. Friends who came to the house sane and healthy transformed, after they left, into figures of limping disease.

What is the point?

She didn’t even tell him when she quit work to go to school full-time. She only said, a week after giving notice, that at the rate she was going, she’d be too old to do anything with her degree if and when she got it. Julia, who is Julia, who had to be Julia, so he helped foot the bill and retrenched, waiting for this phase to pass—

The shouting is louder, a crowd has gathered—

Soft stuff, psychology. Once, for no reason, she hauled him to a marriage counselor, who only bored them both with sappy platitudes. For the experience, she said. A waste, anyway, because they—because Julia decided what they would say before each session.

What is the point?

But a master’s was not enough. She said you had to have a doctorate if you wanted a decent job. So then the dissertation, then the internship, then the boards, more years of this possession—

The crowd has formed a circle, thickening towards the stores. The people are silent, their faces illumined, moved by what they see—

The possession of Julia, with whom he once hiked in the Berkeley Hills, who is somewhere behind him, Julia who is Julia but who is not Julia, who has become someone else, because in his mind he sees her face, feels the blank stare burning through the people between them into the back of his head, Julia who has left it to him to go back and close the gap, has left him with the burden of their marriage, because she must not care, but he does, he cares about her, he cares about their marriage, and there is so much more that he cares about that he will never be able to explain but all he can hear now is the boys’ shouting and it’s getting harder to think—

What is the point?

—The purpose of therapy is know yourself, to uncover the traumas of the past that bind the way you now behave.

She once said.

Why glorify the mess of your childhood, why saddle the present with the past?

—To adapt, to make adjustments.

Adjust to what? Adapt how? Better to blow off steam by slamming the ball around at the courts than worry yourself with old wounds and work yourself up to a froth. What is the point?

—To lead a normal life!

Behind, above the people, water from the fountain shoots up and drops in careless play, looking as if it is falling on their heads. Macy’s mannequins, sheltered, calmly look down on the scene, hands in pockets. On their faces, the contempt that lures. Or laid-back, hands open in half gesture, they look up and beyond the people, blithely amused—

Then the age of analysis. When she found work, she took on a new demeanor, detached, distant, and cool. An intense composure, focused yet evasive: the therapist. Talk at the table got hard, night talk even harder. He was never saying what he thought he was saying, and even the same old marital quarrels somehow got maneuvered around fights into a no man’s land in which there was only the smell of war.

And then they didn’t talk.

Things in the house began to shift and waver with analysis, undergoing a continual transformation back into themselves. The Mission chairs and Navaho rugs and modern art prints turned into Mission chairs and Navaho rugs and modern art prints with new clarity that shed no light.

The crowd shifts, he sees again the hands, the shirts. The boys are not horsing around but fighting—

—Pillar of salt.

And the people keep coming, swarming towards the circle, pressing closer behind him, he is stuck—

—Sodom and Gomorrah.

And they keep flailing away, the kids, in the frenzied, artless combat of adolescents, exposed to each other’s blows without any attempt at defense, a flurry of arms and legs and violent faces, their flapping, floppy oversized plaid shirts—

—The wrath of God.

Not Abraham. Abraham is the one who tries to stay God’s hand, who cuts this deal with Him: if fifty righteous men can be found among the sinners, the cities of the plain will be spared.

Because why should the good be taken with the bad?

Not Abraham but Lot. Lot is who he’s been trying to remember. Abraham cuts the deal, then God sends two Angels disguised as strangers, who find only Lot, modest Lot, who takes them into his home. Then the men of Sodom, young and old, come banging on Lot’s door, wanting to know the strangers. The last straw. It is time to clear the slate. The angels strike the men of Sodom with blindness and tell Lot to take his family and flee, Lot who is not exemplary but merely good. For this he walks alone.

Does Lot’s wife have a name?

Because it is not Lot, but his wife who turns around. All Lot does is stay the course. It is Lot’s wife who has to linger. There is something she has to see. And it is Lot’s wife who turns into—

It’s a myth. More than a story, but less than some miraculous event. It couldn’t happen then and can’t happen now, but it refers to something that could happen and happens all the time. Because myths touch something deep inside all of us that escapes the eyes of shrinks—this is what he learned at school. Myths give shape to inner turmoil, substance to what else might lie beyond. The plot of our lives, the course of the stuff our hearts pump through our heads find connection with a Word:

He is not insensitive.

Or headstrong.

Or blind.

He has nothing to be ashamed of, nothing for which he should be greatly blamed. He has made the best decisions he can, and given the chance, if he had his life to do all over, he would make different, not better choices.

He does not exploit the vanity of people, nor squander his time and money in mindless consumption.

He worked hard to reach his position in the firm but did not break toes along the way. He helps manage the manufacture of computers, which, in the right hands, could do marvelous things.

He has been a dutiful father. His daughter has not dropped out of school, is not pregnant, and does not smoke crack.

He has abided his wife’s whims and moods, has been faithful to her during the times his faith was stretched. At least he has given their marriage a good shot.

And he does not walk too fast. Because when there are no good choices, the best plan is to make a decision and move on, go directly from point A to point B without haste but without hesitation, before the world drags you down into its decay.

But now he can’t see the boys or even the people. There is only a blur of faces, the mass of paunches and elbows and hands against him, the stench of sweat, stale clothes, and cheap perfume, their rank collected breath—

What is he supposed to do now, what does she expect him to do, go back and apologize? Should he slouch back with his tail between his legs, contrite and worried, overcome?

Because she does know what she is doing. A ruse, her weary look. The absent-minded way she lingers behind is a guise, a way of showing his supposed abuses have reached a new level, beyond injury, which now can only be patiently endured—

A strong hand, purple with grotesque tattoo, grabs his arm and pushes him aside—

A bearded lout in a Ferrari T-shirt going for the front row!

Adjust to what? To a society that cannot adjust itself? Adjust to feebs with nothing better to do than watch a couple of brats tear each other apart?

Or should he go back a raving madman?

Because he realizes that this face of worn tolerance is the face of the therapist gone bad, and that the face of the therapist is the same old face he has always known, a platform to stage her old complaints.

Psychology—Psyche. Who is she?

She must be a manipulating woman.

Because what is the motive for studying motives?

Who has to be what for whom?

Why else study psychology but to put him in his place?

And once at breakfast she flatly stated, regarding nothing, merely for his information is how she put it, that he had a passive-aggressive personality.

Water shoots from the fountain, and falls and cracks and spits—

Yet last week, after all the trouble she had gone through, after all the trouble she had caused them at home, after she finally passed the state boards, after she got hired on at the clinic where she did her internship, a solid outfit with a healthy clientele, after only one year of work there, after he had finally resigned himself not to Julia Thompson but Julia Guerrant, Licensed Psychologist, Ph.D.—

Last week she quit again.

Julia the careless, Julia of mincing step. She now talks about going back into PR. The degree in psychology should help, she says.

The floor shakes—

The ceiling falls—

Fire and brimstone rain destruction on the people of the Valley—

—Don’t look back.

Is what the angels say.

Keep walking, Walker thinks. Put these people, this mall, this world behind you. Put her behind you. Not divorce, because that would be avoidance, an indecision, a concession to failure. It has not become necessary yet. But for now, let her be the one who turns and looks, the one who turns into a pillar of salt. Because if she has to look on sick people with her sick, clinical eyes only to decide to pander to their disease, then let her shrivel with her self-absorption and self-indulgence, with her sterile analysis, her bitterness, and her defeat.

Damn borderline bitch!

The image of the body of Walker’s wife starts to dry and harden, to turn into a slender saline post—

And take the goddamn mall with you!

But the shouting stops—

A break in the crowd—

It is not two boys, but a boy and a girl who are fighting, and he sees she is more a woman than a girl because her shirt is ripped open, and they no longer fight because the man who pushed him aside has the boy clenched against his chest.

Walker’s heart bolts, but it only shoots a blank.

Walker, Walker realizes, has made a large mistake.

The girl kneels in the center of the circle with white expression, fending off aid with one hand, gathering her shirt in the other. The boy, his head on the Ferrari emblem, sags in the man’s flexed arms, docile beneath the coils of an immaculately trimmed beard springing from a stern and stoic face.

A trickle of blood leaks from the girl’s ear.

Blood flows freely from the boy’s nose onto a pattern of rippling muscles and sinuous tattoos.

Blood burns in Walker’s head, then drains.

Hitting women is not something men are supposed to do.

And they probably shouldn’t keep on walking while their wives are turning into pillars of salt.

Perhaps, then, this is not the myth that applies to him.

Or perhaps he is not as merely good as he thought.

Or perhaps he does not live in a world of myth. Because no mythic angels have visited Walker. The closest he has come are the Jehovah’s Witness and his son who came to his door one Sunday in stiff white shirts and black ties, who inquired about his faith. Walker, incensed by this invasion, told them solicitors were not allowed.

At any rate, it is mythic God who destroys the cities of the plain. It’s unlikely, however, He would raze a mall for being tacky.

The world is what it is.

But keep walking, Walker, Walker thinks.

Because Walker, not feeling mythic anymore, is too ashamed to turn around.

And point B is no longer in sight.

.

No one looks at him.

Massive columns painted in pastel colors rise from the ashes. Behind, the tempered voices of security guards, a whimper of youth, the sound of gushing water. Here and there, the stillness of indoor trees.

A smoldering conscience—

his—

cools and contracts to form a span of concrete floating on walls of glass.

No one looks at anyone.

But resurrected, they have returned, the dawdlers, the shovers, the mothers with baby carriages, the small children who trip over his feet, and they walk and watch as they walked and watched before, without plan or apparent purpose. They look, if they are looking, with acid eyes at merchandise, which, in the dim ventral cavity of the first floor, glows with unearthly glitter. Or they look at the sharply mannered faces of mannequins loosely grouped in the windows, who, ever blithe, look down, or look away from each other, or look above the heads of the people with casual, crafty disdain, over at mannequins on the other side.

The mannequins on the other side also look down, or away, or up to the second level, where there are more people who look at the stores, if they are looking, at more mannequins who do not look at them but also look off or down or still upward, through the vast open space of the hall, to a latticework of steel girders, to skylights above. Hovering over them all, like unsought grace, a soothing music he can barely hear.

He makes the turn at Sears—

Before he knows it, the bright lights of Woolworth’s—

Now behind him once more, once more the vastness of the mall. Walker looks up again, following the delicate tracery of gazes that do not intersect, up past the cantilevered walkways of the second level, across the space, past steel lace, through glass to a dark sky where fluttering spirits soar to fleeing horizons. Then he looks back down at the faces of the people, and they have changed. Not meanness. This is not what he sees, but wistfulness, inverted. Not guile in the mannequins, but chasteness, disguised and finely tuned. They all have the face of innocence, the people and their sculpted likenesses, of innocence transfigured, which, even turned, is still innocence, in whose wash he is gently absolved.

Then he sees what he has always seen but never noticed before, that not only do most stores sell clothes, but sell clothes for women. So many variations on the theme of women, so many mannequin legs and lips and poses and infinitely subtle curves, so many visions of women, so many ways to wrap and shape the body that eludes the covering—it is where the figure is missed, how well it is missed, that the feminine tenor is revealed. And it is in the bodies of the abstract mannequins—lithe yet featureless plastic hulls, or headless, armless torsos, or just tubing with a cranial circle and a few dorsal bends on which cloth loosely hangs—that the possibilities are most elusive, most alive.

But the real women who model lingerie in the full length, soft color photographs at Victoria’s Secret are subtly pretty, and seriously sensuous—

Then Julia will disappear.

She was dead asleep when he woke this morning, curled and buried in the sheets, and still asleep when he left for work, even though she had an interview with a software firm in San Jose.

—No one’s hiring.

She said at the restaurant.

Another dinner of civil conversation, avoided eyes, a duet of knives and forks. Her guard was up, her face stiff and formal—the professional face—but she looked distracted.

Is she seeing someone else?

Not distracted, but beset, on her face a webbing etched in lines around her eyes, a worrying of the years, a creasing as if from fear.

It is the look that appears in the bathroom mirror at night, when she takes off her face to go to bed.

It was the way Julia the psychologist looked when she got back from the clinic—another day with the beasts of Silicon Valley, obsessives and neurotics and narcissists, their minds fouled by money and chips, who came to her and forced her with their complaints.

—Turn around.

He is supposed to turn around.

—Go back and find her.

He is supposed to go back and find her.

—Take her home.

He is supposed to take her home.

Treeless hills, in summer brown and dry—

And as Walker turns and works his way back through the crowd, composing himself in memory and song, feeling the stir of myth once more, a pillar of salt dissolves and changes to quickness, into a living image of—

Bare hills, back in Berkeley, back in school, now in spring, now fully green, lush from winter rain, the greenness sensual and transcendent, like a woman’s presence, surging yet measured by the soft contours beneath a fluid sky, and he did not mind letting her go ahead when they went hiking, because he would watch her walk in her determined pace, follow the pulse of her calves rise through her thighs to the willful yet cadent bump of the seat of his desire, rise through the slender resolution of a strapless back to impatient shoulders held high, their blades pedaling the rhythm of imagined breasts, and still rise to a head that did not bob yet was fast with the shake of auburn hair, with the breath of her intent, the intent of Julia, emerging yet hidden in the direction of her eyes, he followed the motion of Julia moving through Julia into Julia, a motion separate yet confluent with the motion of the hills, with the motion of his passion for Julia, herself—

And Walker keeps searching among the faces of the people, this memory playing on the strings of his heart, and he hears returned soft music and low voices, a murmur of innocence more melodic, less confused.

Not Lot—

The next day, the apartment on Hillegass, Julia, rising from his bed, moving, yet not moving away from him but with him, before him, before the career that lay ahead of him that held only the logic of tedium and tension, a wasting of his years, Julia rising from his sheets, standing, facing the window, rising in the morning light, as if born there, as if stepping from a shell, but born not virginal but whole, embraced by his old T-shirt, on her luminous and filled, facing him, looking at him, Walker looking back, thinking there is this, if nothing else, but more than anything else there is this, Walker who told himself then what he remembers now, that if he couldn’t be anything in life there will always be—

Not Lot, but Orpheus—

Another myth.

Orpheus the poet, Orpheus the musician, who can charm beasts, stones, and trees. Orpheus the hero and lover, who conquers the world with song. This is the story he’s been trying to remember. It was the pillar of salt that tripped him up. It’s stories like that which screw us all up. Because there’s more to life, Walker thinks, than being good or bad.

Orpheus who turns and finds—

Eurydice—

His wife.

Julia.

But where is she?

Something is not right.

Walker slows yet keeps walking through the crowd, seeing not Julia but glass and concrete, and people and dummies and things. Not people, but a mob, and their faces have changed once more. They turn on him and glare, like the spirits of the damned, brushing, bumping against him, scratching him with their eyes. He no longer hears music but Muzak and the noise of their looks, the sounds of pure boredom, of menace and revenge.

—Don’t look back.

Innocence is the illusion.

—The ascent from hell.

There’s more: Eurydice, after wed to Orpheus, has to flee the lust of another man, and running, steps on a snake and dies. So Orpheus goes down to the underworld and sings to savage Hades, who lets him return her to the living, to his life—on one condition:

Don’t look back until she is in the light of the sun.

So Orpheus leads Eurydice from darkness with the sound of his lyre, but Orpheus turns around a moment too soon. Eurydice, only following him, turns into nothing, and Orpheus must enter the light alone.

But what does Orpheus do wrong?

Is he impatient? Does he love too much?

Or too little?

What has he, Walker, done wrong?

What is the light, and where is it?

How do you know when you’ve seen it?

When are you supposed to turn around in life?

But there she is—

On the escalator, past the fountain, Julia weightlessly descending—

Now at the landing—

And she turns and comes his way, but does not see him—

Go to her.

And Walker picks up his pace.

She is still as ever an attractive woman, who walks with an easy, flat-footed step—

Lisa—

yet walks with strength and poise. With her step, the verdant flow of her dress, a dress of forest green that she wears well, but which he does not recognize even though this evening he watched her put it on. Her face appears and disappears in the crowd, quiet and certain among the moil of stares. And she still hasn’t seen him, and still he goes to her, still not letting her out of his sight, in case she might yet still disappear—

Then Walker stops, not knowing why.

—Myths often run in cycles.

Another voice.

—In a sense they never end. What is solved in one is undone in the next; the cycle begins again.

His humanities instructor, an old, aloof, gray-witted prof, back at Berkeley, back in school.

There is still more, he recalls: After Lot flees Sodom and Gomorrah and is safe in the hills, his daughters get him drunk at night and sleep with him in turn. This way two races of men are born. He heard this not at First Pres in Walnut Creek, but in Western Civ 101.

What is that supposed to mean?

—Some cultures try to separate love from duty, some try to put the two together. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what they are doing. It’s easy to get the two mixed up.

And wifeless, desolate Orpheus is ripped limb from limb by crazed Thracian women, following the word of a jealous, murderous god.

Or that?

—The significance of myths is as much defined by what escapes them as what they manage to contain.

A joker, that prof, an ass—

But Julia still hasn’t seen him.

—We thought we got rid of them, but the desire for myths lives on. What we replaced them with still are myths, but myths turned inside out and displaced.

Yet still she comes, still closer—

Then Macy’s mannequins stare at him, and unseen faces gather and circle around him, closing in. Then he notices the fountain, then looks down. On the dirty white linoleum floor, by his feet, a spot of blood. He realizes where he stands.

But here she is, almost close enough to touch—

And now she sees him—

Her eyes—

Grayish green—

Opened wide—

Rimmed with white—

Not smiling.

Nor in them are Walker’s contained.

Where has she been? What has she been doing? Or thinking about, or of whom? Walker cannot tell. But now he remembers something else she does that happened early in their marriage and still occurs: the only time he ever sees her let her guard down is when he turns a corner at the house and suddenly comes upon her, and she is frankly startled, as if by a stranger.

Her face undergoes vague transformations, a hard beauty turning into harder beauty, without settling on any expression. There is movement in her hair, a writhing, as if from separate, living things.

Snakes, Walker thinks, now feeling a stiffening inside, and fabulous petrifaction.

Yet another myth—

.

.

.

South/mid 1970s

.

Almost without motion, without expression, Willy sits in the chair beside my desk. Short, thin, yet tough; white, but dark, reddened with age, maybe with dirt; his long face vacant, yet grave, yet durable, yet distinct with deeply cut features, yet pensive in the branching, in the involution of its complex lines—he seems large, and older than he probably is.

He leans forward and stares in my direction, but does not see my eyes or speak. His eyes, yellow, hard, and dull, glisten like glazed pots. And looking at him, at his empty gaze, at his taut jaw, at his thin lips split and dried shut, you would think that he has never spoken before in his life, or if he has, will not speak again. Only his hands move, above his lap, as if he is trying to join them but misses. I can’t remember if I said anything when he came in or if he replied, even though he just got here. A presence like his is disconcerting.

I sit back in my chair, trying to decide what I am supposed to do. I’m in a lousy mood and can’t shake it. Seeing Willy has sent it somewhere else, but nowhere higher. It is cold and gray out, but hot inside the building. Willy hasn’t taken off his coat, though, a denim jacket whose blue has faded. He also has on ribless corduroys and a pair of cowboy boots whose baroque tooled pattern has become obscured by the white cracks of wear. Nor has he taken off his hat—

That hat—

It’s one of those fleece lined leather caps with a visor, turned up, ear flaps, down, and a strap that dangles by his chin. On anyone else the hat would look moronic. On him, I don’t know what to think. Then again, when you’re down, simple things make little sense.

There is, of course, something about him, but in this job we see all kinds and learn not to take notice. Better to be patient until he says what he wants. His is a silence I am reluctant to disturb.

No smell of booze, however.

When the receptionist said there was a Willy Newhouse in the waiting room, the name didn’t ring any bells. It is easy to forget names and faces here—I have a caseload of over two hundred—but I don’t see many men. AFDC—welfare—is for kids and their mothers. Last week the only guy I saw was Freddy Angel, who was working an angle to claim his ex-wife’s check. Not so fast, Freddy. The few men I do see usually come in to try to get IV-D off their backs. IV-D: the agency that tracks down absent fathers to collect support.

Or the name Willy, a throwback to our days of Uncle Willys, made me think he might be a black grandfather whose daughter had run out, who had taken custody of the kids and come to continue their aid. I don’t see many white grandfathers, but it is not because their daughters are good mothers.

Yet this Willy is white, and there isn’t anything about him that tells me he is trying to get out of something or take charge of anything else. There is nothing about him that tells me anything at all. I have no idea who he is or why he is here.

That hat—

Reception has made a mistake.

“Letty.”

Did he say that? I look at him. His lips are welded, his eyes are fixed somewhere on my chest. But Letty does ring a bell. Letty Newhouse was once in my caseload; Willy must be her husband. And since the case was in her name, since only Letty came for the reviews, I have never seen him before.

Then I remember: this is the man I tried but couldn’t reach all summer a few summers ago. I needed to talk to him, not Letty, to make some adjustment, the nature of which now escapes me. I assume that is why he is here, and I tell him this, though I don’t think he has followed. He does, however, watch me when I leave the room to get the file.

That hat—

Another bell—

I feel I have seen him before—

But bells ring all the time here, and when they do they lack resonance. The things that come together seldom add up to very much.

Then in the hall it occurs to me: I’m the one who got this started, and he hasn’t spoken because he’s waiting for me to say what I want. Yet I don’t know why he hasn’t brought Letty or why he’s taken so long to come. I remember now I gave up on the case.

But Social Services is also a place where it’s easy to forget what you have done.

.

There’s a mob at the counter—Reception keeps the records. I weave my way up to the front and still have to shout the number of Willy’s file. Behind me, the push of clients. Hands, faces, the padding of winter coats; the smell of stale wool and sweat. Anxious voices, angry voices, the struggle to make oneself heard. You get used to it. I stay and stand my ground because I want to get back to the office. I don’t feel right leaving Willy there by himself.

But Judy brings the wrong folder. She glares at me, as if I have made the mistake, then goes back into the file room. After a few minutes, she still hasn’t returned, so I retreat and lean against the back wall, settling down. Letty’s file has probably been misplaced. You get used to this, too.

I was in good spirits this morning, almost elated, really for no reason. Moods come and go around here. You learn not to trust them. Also, you have to be careful: let yourself get too high and you only see how far you have to fall, and this is what happened, I was working on a good depression when Willy came.

Better to keep to yourself, because what I feel is not important compared to what my clients go through. Better, too, to be guarded, because they can turn on you for what has brought them here.

Next to me, the waiting room, also packed. Clients who have made it past reception. They look tired and worried—and are tired and worried—but loud voices have subsided to the low moan of boredom. Cold weather is now the problem, as winter is an expensive season. Bills pile up, they run out of money. Oil tanks empty in the middle of the month. So they come in to get a supplement to their check. Reception sends them to the department that handles emergencies, who sometimes send them to us, Eligibility, but we send them back to Emergency Services because this is not our job, and for each contact they have to go through Reception again and return to the waiting room until they lose heart and leave, or find someone who gives in and can get his supervisor to authorize a check. This is not a procedure. It just works out that way. Supplements are discouraged—bad form—but we also don’t have enough money to cover very many.

Some clients, when they run out of oil, try heating the house with their kitchen stoves, and then get stuck when the electric bill comes due. We’ve also run into a few fires.

Some come in not knowing what they want. Maybe this is somewhere to go on a winter day.

Some clients, however, know the system better than we do. Perhaps they even know us better than we know ourselves, because they know if they persist we usually do give in. They have a role to play, we have a role to play; the system keeps the game going.

Social Services is not a depressing place, though, only dismal. But here is an accomplishment, that we are able to subdue misery to the gray mood of a waiting room. The state keeps their checks at a precise amount just below what they need so that they scrape by without feeling too comfortable in the bosom of the state’s good grace. Because the state has more than the feelings of clients to weigh. Mood management, after all, is what we really do. A balance has to be struck between the guilt of those who see the poor as the saintly oppressed and the outrage of others who see demons on our backs. And because Raleigh answers to Washington, we have to consider the mood of the nation as well. Race, whatever is left of our old Southern business, complicates the equation one factor more. Like fashions our regulations change by slight degrees to reflect the shifts in mood. But it’s not easy telling devils from angels, someone’s benevolence from another’s malice. Everyone feels queasy about welfare, so it has to be kept out of the way, in its place. No one can stomach his ideals very long. If I side with my clients, it’s because the other players are harder to take.

It’s a difficult job, modulating the conscience of the world. And it’s a hard world, but it’s delicately constructed.

I’m on my fifth—sixth?—year here, still holding. Eligibility is largely clerical work: we fill out forms and add up numbers. There are other jobs at Social Services where I could make better use of my skills, other agencies where I could apply—and I have looked into these and I am going to school nights to get a MSW—but I feel I should stay put, because it is here, in Eligibility, that I probably do the most good. At least I get something tangible—money—into my clients’ hands.

Besides, after the last round of cuts, hiring is off everywhere.

Judy brings the right folder this time. Holding it, gauging its thickness, touching the softness years have worn into once stiff cardboard covers, seeing the fleshy beige color, I remember two things: Letty is still in my caseload, but also Letty is dead.

Willy, wifeless, sits in the chair beside my desk.

I carry the folder back through the institutional silence of our halls. Over an inch of forms—it is heavy, and feels heavier with what it no longer contains. I try to shape the appropriate emotion, but it is not sadness I can create. The best way to show compassion is not to give it. Clients neither want nor need nor believe our hearts. And my feelings won’t bring Letty back, or make his life or my work any lighter. There is no reason to add the weight of my sorrow to the burden he must presently bear.

Better, sometimes, to go under. It doesn’t matter what I feel. Still, I have discovered this much, the virtue of distance.

.

He is staring out the window when I return and doesn’t look at me when I sit down or at the file I rest between us on the desk. The coat lies in a heap beside his chair; the hat has been strapped tight around his jaw.

I apologize for the delay. Willy doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. I ask him if he is comfortable. He looks at his hands; his fingertips touch. His expression has not changed, or rather he has not found one.

I’m down. Willy is wherever Willy is. I won’t be able to bridge the space between us. I start to mention Letty, but what can I say? What is there to say? What else is there to do, what else can I do but get on with it?

I flip through the file, trying to figure out what needs to be done. After a few months here, names and numbers bleed together, and only through our forms can we find the order our grace has given. On the right side of the folder, Food Stamp forms. Below Food Stamps, agency memos, my notes, and other stuff we don’t know where else to put. On the left, AFDC review forms, the latest, mine, on top. Beneath mine, other reviews in other hands, gradually, increasingly yellow, filled out by the caseworkers before me, none of which I’ve had time to read.

Starting at the bottom, with the original application, I work my way up through the reviews that follow. It begins to fall into place. The check—about $200—was set up seven years ago for Letty’s two daughters from a previous marriage, Sarah and June, not long after she married Willy. The girls’ father had taken off or died—I can’t find which. Soon, a son with Willy, Sears, who was not added to the check. Sears was not eligible for AFDC because both parents were in the home. Letty was not eligible because she had Willy. Willy was not eligible because he was able to work—and did have a job. Only the daughters were eligible. The whole family, however, because of their income, could buy Food Stamps. My job depends upon understanding such subtleties.

The other reviews, a quick series in different hands, don’t tell me much, except that the family got shuffled around the department. Then I reach my handwriting, which tells me less. I return to the bottom. On the back of the application, crammed in unlined space, a long narrative from Letty’s first caseworker. He says that Willy is profoundly retarded, and in so many details of income and capability, outlines the situation of a man for whom he sees no hope. Willy must have come in with Letty for the initial interview. This caseworker also has his doubts about Letty and doesn’t think the family will hold together long.

Such analysis is not part of our job, however, nor does it serve any purpose. We’re not here to assess our clients’ character, their abilities, or their fate. And our work can distort vision; more often than not, our judgment is wrong. I remember the guy. He seemed serious and intense, but he burned out after a few years, quitting about the time I started. Letty lasted much longer at what she did than he.

Also, he was confused. Someone who is profoundly retarded would have trouble just tying his shoes. Profoundly retarded—I am struck by the term though, and find it somehow apt. There is something here, which might explain Willy’s silence.

I look at Willy. His eyes are still on his hands, restless before him. He begins working them together, fumbling, forcing his fingers in air, as if in something stiff.

He still has not looked at me.

I search for his age—57: another eight years before he can collect Social Security. On the other side of the folder there is a memo from Family Services, undated—something about child abuse. I don’t remember what this was about, but there must not have been anything to it. All kinds of things creep into our files. The memo, unfathomable in our cryptic jargon, tells me nothing. Also a memo from the fraud unit, warning me about my delay. I look back at my last review and wince. It is dated over two years ago. The law says we have to check up on our clients every six months. I’m not a stickler for rules, but I’m not careless, and the best way to keep from getting mired in regulations is to follow them.

What has happened? I go over my notes. The last time Letty was in my office, she said Willy’s back had given out, that he had to quit work. I told her he should look into Disability, though apparently nothing came of it. Going back through the Food Stamp forms, I see that I did reduce the amount they had to pay since their income went down when he lost his wages.

Letty. For a brief moment she comes alive. Also white, but also with a reddish complexion, Letty was a squat, confused, yet good-natured woman who always managed a smile, though it seemed to hurt. Now she is gone, I can only hope, to a place where her spirit brings less pain and more coherence. I only saw her two or three times. I found out she had died when I called one summer after she missed an appointment for her review, and one of the girls answered. Sandwiched between my notes, a clipping from the obits. We have to verify everything.

The next time I called, the phone was disconnected. Then I sent out four or five appointment letters that got no reply but were not returned by the post office. Later that summer, I went by the house. My notes stop there, and I can’t find anything else to account for the time since. I remember, however, why I put the case aside. I wanted to leave it alone to give the family time for their grief. I probably also knew it would be a hassle. Still, the delay—I should have eventually done something.

I remember my supervisor now, too—her memos I did not file. She told me to take care of Letty immediately and hounded me about her for weeks. The agency was getting bad press, and dead people receiving welfare was not a story we could afford, no matter what the circumstances. Besides, she said, you never know about some people.

What else is there to know?

She hasn’t mentioned the case since, however. No follow-up from Fraud—or Family Services, whatever their concern was. The last recession must have knocked us all for a loop.

But there is really only a slight technicality involved. The family is still receiving Letty’s share of the Food Stamps, yet only about twenty bucks. The check is still going out in her name, but Willy, as stepfather, is not legally responsible for the girls’ support, and they have not yet turned eighteen, so they can continue receiving the check in his name. Everyone can keep the Food Stamps—though I will have to subtract Letty’s portion—but I first have to terminate Letty’s case and have Willy fill out a new application. This is why I needed to have him come in.

I explain this to Willy and he nods without looking up. I don’t think he has followed, however, or knows what I am doing. His eyes, still on his hands, still fumbling, show not concentration but whatever its opposite is, yet an opposite equally intense.

Profoundly retarded—

Keep going. I pull out a fresh form and start the eligibility routine. I inform him that he is entitled to receive assistance from the state regardless of his race or creed.

No response.

I ask for the names of two people who are not relatives, who can testify to the information he gives.

No response, but his fingers straighten and spread out wide.

I look at the names on the last review.

Can I use Mrs. Wilson Porter, Mr. Justin Clyde?

He closes his hands. I decide this means I can.

Do they still live at the same address?

He squeezes his hands into fists.

I copy their addresses down.

Does he still live at the same address?

He puts one fist above the other.

But if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be getting the checks. The post office won’t forward them. The last review says he lives in a trailer park off I-85, at the edge of town. I copy this address, too.

Is anyone else living in the home, other than his two daughters, his son, and him?

His fingers fan out again.

What does that mean? Yet we’ve got a dialogue going, we’re making progress, and I continue down the page in this fashion, asking questions, looking at his hands and at the information on the last review, making my best guess. Letty’s interviews, I recall, went about the same way. The closer I get to the end of the form, however, the more I doubt what I have done.

Race?—but this is a sensitive question that we usually answer ourselves. I start to put white, then check the other reviews to make sure. The caseworker before me thinks Willy and Letty are half Lumbee. Perhaps I am wrong—his skin color suggests several shades. Newhouse, Lumbee. The name could be some kind of translation, but then again, it could be anything. Other than the cowboy boots, there is little to place him.

I turn back another year, to the worker before him, and she lists Letty as white and Willy as black. The caseworker before her says they are both black. The next checked Other for both, and the guy who took the application left the ethnic boxes blank. I can’t find anyone who agrees with me that Willy is white. Race, of course, does not matter here—though I wonder about some of us—but how can something that doesn’t matter yet has mattered so much so long be so uncertain?

I return to my notes. I did try to call the references after Letty died. The man who answered Mrs. Wilson Porter’s number did not know any Newhouses or Porters. Mr. Justin Clyde’s cousin, Mattie Hayes, answered his number and said he had moved out of state. She didn’t know any Newhouses, either. Then I went out to the trailer park—

Not a trailer park, more a scattering of mobile homes, wrecked cars, and mud among a clearing in the pines. I went out four times that summer. His trailer—a two-tone, off-white and a scabrous pastel—seemed bent, and listed on cinder blocks. No one answered when I knocked and the mailbox was empty. I didn’t see anyone inside when I stepped up to the small window on the door. Dust covered the kitchen countertops. Dry dishes were piled in the sink. What little furniture there was in the main room had no obvious arrangement, as if it had been left behind. Each time I went back, everything looked the same—

You never know about some people—

He still hasn’t looked at me—

Blood rushes to my head; his darkens with suspicion. Of all the things I should be used to here, this is the one that always catches me unprepared. It never happens the way you expect, but then that’s the way it always happens, and if there is anything familiar about Willy, this is what it is. His hands grope through air again, now in an awkward gesture of guilt. The image I had when he first came in undergoes vague racial transformations, then disappears, leaving in its wake the ghost of a fraud.

If I didn’t think of fraud that summer, it’s probably because it was too obvious, too simple, too sloppy. But he could have packed the kids off to a relative, and now live somewhere else, in another county for all I know, stopping by the trailer once a month for the check, which doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t have to. He probably couldn’t unload the thing anyway, which might be what got him started. And he may yet be in the trailer, because what I saw is how he lives, who he is, what I see before me. If he has come in today, it could be to find what else he can get from us, which doesn’t make sense either, but it’s how he would do this, too. There are other possibilities I can build, none of them neat, but they all come to the same conclusion.

I think of the questions I now have to ask, realize the futility, then consider calling Fraud. I look out the window, feeling angry and sick. I may have felt this way before.

The investigation would be a mess. It wouldn’t be my mess, but still it would be something I passed off, and too much gets passed off here as it is. Yet what would happen? We’d have to track down the kids, but then return them to Willy because while he’s not legally responsible for their support,  he is still their legal guardian. Maybe we’d try to take them away because he’s not a suitable parent. But we couldn’t do that without a court hearing to find him incompetent, which is unlikely. And even if he’s declared incompetent, then what? They go back to where he sent them? Not without another hearing. Get placed in foster care? If anyone would take them. Odds are, whatever we do, they’d still get stuck with Willy.

I don’t know what to do.

I have to do something.

I look at him, he looks at his hands. They still work their awkward massage of the space between them, define and knead it, then, collapsing together, destroy it—but they take my anger with their embrace.

What is at stake here? Who would gain what? What is right for whom? If we pursue this, he won’t get thrown in jail, which shouldn’t satisfy anyone anyway because it would cost the state a ton. And we’ll never see the money. When we return the kids, he gets to keep AFDC, but we still have to nail him for fraud, which, though it’s not that much a month, over years runs into thousands, which he won’t have, so we’ll take a small percentage from the check, token installments for the integrity of our system. Whatever life the kids had with Willy before he sent them away will at best get slightly worse. The kids are probably OK where they are, certainly better off than with Willy. And what about Willy himself? His crime is not heinous and he still deserves some kind of life. Two hundred bucks a month is hardly plush, even if I leave things alone and he keeps it all to himself. And if we do pursue and do manage to place the kids, he’ll lose the check yet still have to pay, but then he will have nothing—

Unless he has gone back to his old job, or found another.

His hands are now apart, his curled fingers upturned, searching for what they just lost.

Not likely. But I look at my notes to see where he last worked: Triad Brick.

Another bell—

Memories of heat and darkness, the hellish world of a kiln—

I worked there.

I don’t know why this didn’t strike me when Letty last came in, because I had to call the place to verify he had quit. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I even mentioned it to Letty, but I can imagine how far that went.

When I finished school, I took junk jobs while I looked for real work. In one I was a brick palletizer at Triad, a complicated title for a simple task. At the beginning of each day four of us, two to a team, would enter one of a dozen large dome kilns by a small opening, climb the pile, and lift, lower, and stack bricks on wood pallets so a forklift could come and take them someplace else.

We may have worked there at the same time—

But that year is a fog. I signed up at a temp agency and was sent from job to job. Some lasted only a few weeks; others I’d quit because I got fed up with the work, the pay, only to move on to another, just as bad. Between jobs, the interviews that didn’t pan out.

We had to have worked at the same time—

But there is little worth remembering from that time, because it was a time when I was young and stupid, easily impressed, and just as easily overwhelmed.

Time at the kiln was measured in bricks: twenty to fifty bricks a pallet, depending on their size, two or three pallets an hour, sixteen to twenty-four pallets a day. Cramped between a mound of bricks and the curved wall of a kiln, we moved time, lifting, lowering, stacking, and thus diminishing it, only to return to a kiln full of bricks the next day. It was a time of endless subtraction.

Yet the fog lifts, the last seven years vanish, as if to reveal a landscape, a pattern, a world—

We may have worked there together—

But once inside the kiln, you couldn’t see who you worked with, and after a while didn’t care. All I can remember from Triad is bricks. They were sharp edged, heavy, and rough; we had to use thick rubber gloves to hold them that we’d wear out in a week. Stacked close to the ceiling, smallest on top, largest at the bottom, bricks blocked out, seemed to absorb what little light came in. You couldn’t even hear yourself think or cuss, because outside the opening fans the size of airplane propellers roared to cool us, the bricks off. As we worked, we bumped, dragged, and scraped the bricks against each other and ourselves, raising a dust the fans returned that burned our eyes and, mixed with our sweat, seeped into cuts and scratches. Our hands cramped, sometimes locked. The bricks, still warm from the firing, got hotter the closer we worked to the center of the pile, as if in some inferno. Even on the cold mornings—it was winter—we stripped to our waists ten or fifteen minutes into the day—

Except for the old man—

Who never took off his jacket—

Or that hat—

Willy.

Now I see him in a kiln, crawling crablike over a pallet of bricks, his face covered with soupy, reddish paste, as if he secreted it, as if he were made of it, not flesh. Now I look at him on the chair beside my desk and see the same dark color, the same man—

I start to tell him—

But he still hasn’t looked at me.

Tell him what? He wouldn’t recognize me. And what could I mean to him if he did? I was just one of many others, and we couldn’t have worked together long. Teams changed, we came and went, mostly part-timers like me on the part-time circuit.

One day, we were together only one day—yet I know it was Willy who I worked with seven years ago. He moved slowly and deliberately, but with economy of effort, and I had trouble keeping up. I had the position on top, Willy, below. I was always stopping to straighten my back and catch my breath, and my halting labor broke the cadence of his. This irritated him, I could tell, but he never said anything about it. He never spoke about anything, or swore, or shrank, or groaned. The only interchange we had was the passing of hot, heavy bricks. Nor did he look up; he saw no further than arm’s length, than the bricks that came down in irregular rhythm—

Just as he now stares no farther than the form on my desk. His eyes, not focused, streaked with brown veins, moist but lifeless—do not show the light needed for recognition.

His hands, their quivering tendons, the large, knotted knuckles, his long, bent fingers, sinewy and scarred—clutch at something he cannot grasp.

Not a fraud—

But here he is, the man I spent a summer trying to track down, the man I once worked with one day seven winters ago, perhaps even the same day as today—it may not mean anything to him, but it must mean something. And though it may only be a coincidence, it is a large one, and like the blow that brings revelation, it strikes me with near celestial ring.

It was about the time he got married.

It was about the time Letty first came to Social Services.

It wasn’t long before the time I took this job.

And it was a time when I was young and stupid, but it was a time when I saw things precise and clear. While my body got stiff from the bending, the lifting, the lowering, my head grew sharp. Holding the bricks, I felt the weight of ideas, in the repetition of the labor, sensed an outline of new order. From the fatigue, the burning, the ill use of our bodies, I extrapolated the possibilities of meanings. And in the darkness of a kiln, I could see the afterimage of invisible cities, radiant, harmonious, and light—

The old man, one of the guys told me during a break, had been there twenty years. I only lasted a few weeks. Profoundly retarded—what could twenty years at Triad do to someone’s mind?

Not a fraud. It is no more likely he has cheated the state than it is he would realize that his wife’s death meant he’d have to come in so a name could be changed on a check. And it’s even more unlikely he has sent the kids packing. Willy is what he is, what I should have seen when he first came in, what I should have seen all along. He is a small man who has kept his family, his life together as well as he can, as well as can be expected—how much worse than any of us?—a man colored but not yet broken by the machinery of a huge and senseless plan—

But all I can do for him is finish the application so he’ll be square with the state, yet at least I have this to do. There are only a few lines left.

“Willy,” he says. “Name’s Willy Newhouse, not Will’m.”

He points to where I have written his name on the form.

And he looks at me, and his eyes flash.

And I tell him what I told his wife, that he might be eligible for Disability.

And he seems surprised, as if this is the first time he has heard about it. I tell him that if they do find him sufficiently disabled, he will recieve a check from Social Security, I will add him and his son to our check, and he’ll also get Medicare so someone can look at his back. Willy nods with me as I explain the procedure.

And there is so much more to be said, so much more I want to tell him, but I don’t know what or how—

I rise from my desk and go to the window, pointing out the Social Security building. He comes and, back bent, looks out.

But I still don’t think he has followed.

On one side of Social Security, the bus station; on the other a liquor store where a few drunks are standing. Beyond Social Security, beneath gray skies, a visible city: our city: a gray city, with buildings made of glass and steel and bricks.

The coincidence doesn’t mean anything. We did shit work together for a day. I moved on to Social Services. He stayed at Triad until his back gave out.

But his face, no longer vacant, is now eager, and as we return to our seats, his eyes, now alive, still look at mine. He’s waiting for me to say something else, but I don’t want to tell him what I haven’t yet told him that I know I won’t be able to explain. If he does receive Disability, we will have to count the extra income against his Food Stamps and it will also have to be considered for his son’s support, so the check from us I’m contemplating will need to be adjusted. My head races with the numbers, but I can’t figure it out. He should come out ahead, but not by much. I’ll have to wait several months for a notice from Social Security and then make the revision, which I will also have to explain—

If I can get him back in.

I doubt he’s thinking about a check from Social Security, however. I am afraid that, from all the letters I sent him, from my visits to the trailer that his neighbors must have told him about, from the widely spaced block letters of the words Social Services on the sign outside our building, from the hours he has just spent in my office—from all this, he might feel more is involved than my turning his wife’s check over to him or recommending other types of aid. I’m afraid he’s waiting for me to tell him something else, something he has been waiting to hear all his life.

He keeps looking at me, making me look down. When I raise my eyes, his fall, and though still glazed, once again look dull and dead. Then he looks at his hands, then begins to ply some new stuff he has found. This stuff is larger and stiffer.

I stare at the file, wondering how he and the kids have gotten by since he left his job. Their only income has to be Letty’s check.

A sweet guy, a nice man. Also a good worker. I remember this now—it’s what the secretary at Triad said when I called after I last saw Letty to verify he had quit. I asked if Willy had insurance or a pension. She said she thought we handled those things.

A pervert. Now I remember this, too. A woman phoned the agency, who referred her to Family Services, who sent me the memo in the file. And here they are, buried in the right side of the folder—my notes on the memo, dated that summer. The woman said he had an eye on one of the daughters, that we had to get that man out of the trailer, that Willy was dangerous. Family Services asked her how she knew this, and she said she knew what she knew. They doubted, however, there was anything to it. They got calls like that all the time. Also the informer was on our roll, and clients often strike at each other. Still, they staked out the trailer for several nights, as is their procedure, and didn’t see anything definite. A tossup, maybe, they said. At any rate, they needed hard proof before they could act, and let the case go. In my notes, the informer’s name: Mattie Hayes. The cousin of Willy’s reference, whom I called that summer, who said she didn’t know him. Did I make any connection then? What connection is there to be made?

A sweet guy, a good worker, a pervert—but what does anyone know about this man? What can any of us know about another?

Profoundly retarded—but how can we measure a man? How can we compare what he is with what he might have become, had his life been different, or gauge what he is or was or might have been against the endless workings of a world where things don’t work out?

Still, that hat—

But we protect ourselves as best we can.

Not a fraud—

Not a pervert—

I have to believe in something.

Profoundly retarded—I feel there is depth to what he cannot say. His silence is not the vacuum of empty mind, but has presence and weight, like the stuff his hands now try to mold. And there is something large in his perseverance, something lasting, something permanent in what must be his resolve, something monumental purely in the fact that he is here today before me. This is what I realize, the only significance my few hours with Willy might contain, that when you only have yourself to count on, you’d better learn how to count. I want to ask him how he has done it, where he has found the strength—

What I ask him is what I read from the last page of the form: Has he given his answers to the best of his abilities, does he understand that any deliberate misinformation constitutes fraud? Does he know the penalties for such behavior, a fine, imprisonment, or both?

He does not look up from his hands, still laboring with that stuff. The stuff has gotten larger.

I only need his signature to complete the application. I tell him to make an X, show him one, and rise to get a witness, but he leans over my desk, takes the pen from my hand, and pushes it against the form with his fist. He writes in large wavy letters:

N–E–W

—the letters falling away from the line.

He stops, ponders, then continues:

H–U–E–O–S

—down to the bottom edge of the page.

Twenty to fifty bricks a pallet times two or three pallets an hour times eight hours a day times two hundred and fifty days a year times over twenty years would make how many buildings, how many hueoses?

How small, how insignificant my life, I think.

He returns my pen and sits back.

There is nothing else I can do for him. I look towards the door. He looks at his hands, and goes back to working that stuff. Whatever he holds now is unmanageable and threatening, and he works it harder and struggles, and panic strikes his eyes—

It is a large coincidence that has brought us together again, but it occurs to me that our situation is really the same, that there is little difference between what I did seven years ago in a kiln and what I am doing now.

I am late for my eleven o’clock appointment.

There are others in the waiting room, waiting for me.

I fear he will sit there forever, and try to think of a way to get him to leave.

That hat—

I had one when I was a kid and hated it.

What I think next is that it is time to quit this job and move on if I’m ever going to get anything out of life.

“Mr. Newhouse, I was sorry to hear about Letty.”

But it’s too much. The old fool starts to cry.

.

.

I went to doctors all over town, and they couldn’t help me. My wife got tired of hearing me complain. I even got tired of hearing myself complain. I had reached the stage where I only had to pick up a racket for the pain to start, a sharp shooting pain that felt like a pin had been stuck through my shoulder. And when my damn arm really did begin to hurt, I finally had to give it up.

I never understood tennis anyway. The game was like some rite into which I had never been initiated. Whatever happened between the serve and the end of the point was a mystery of motion and involvement. I felt as if each time I slammed the ball into my opponent’s court I had touched off the release of a sudden fury that I could only fluster my way through in some awful kind of waltz.

The moment still comes back to me, when I’m facing a new client in the office, sometimes when I’m just walking uptown against the crowd, where I’ve charged the net and stand waiting for the return, tense, poised, and anxious—

I don’t know which makes us more miserable, the things we do from commitment and obligation, or those we do for joy.

Still, I’m sorry I quit. Somehow I think that if I had mastered the game I might be a better person for it today, more in control, more on top of things. I was too impatient: I didn’t get set, I rushed my strokes. Hell, I don’t need a psychiatrist. What I need now was a good pro, back then. I could serve, though, and hard. I will say that about my game. Win with your serve, and you only have to break your opponent’s once to take the set.

But how can you try to save the world if you don’t have a decent backhand?

The deal, at any rate, was this: if the kids stuck the program out for the summer, the Association would let them keep the shoes and rackets. They had to have the shoes. Even though Kirkwood Center was a public facility, it had good courts, which required some care. And that was my job back then, summers before I went to law school, collecting the fees, maintaining the courts—and trying to keep the public from tearing them up. Half those kids showed up the first day in street shoes. I doubt any of them had even been on a tennis court before.

The clinic was the brainchild of a local branch of the SLTA, though I don’t know why it’s called the Southern Lawn Tennis Association, because I’ve never seen a grass court anywhere in the South. There used to be a lot of clay, not the soft, grayish composition we had that everyone calls clay now, but thick red clay like the stuff that lies an inch below everywhere in the state. Even some of those raw little country towns with nothing more than a gas station and a post office used to have one or two of the old courts. It’s amazing, though, how many good players they produced. You could always spot them at the state tournament by the faint orange stain in their socks and shoes and the deep red crescent above their collars.

And I don’t know what the Association thought they could accomplish with their clinic, but then reform was in the air then—this was some twenty-five years ago, back in the 60s—and everyone was trying to do something, one way or the other. Better, maybe their reasoning, to show those kids something civil before someone else got to them. Maybe they wanted to turn them into proper Southern gentlemen. Really, I doubt they put much thought into their reasons, or their motives.

I suppose they meant well enough, though, and responded from within their means. They were, after all, a tennis association, tennis was what they understood, and tennis was what they offered. And they weren’t really a bad crowd. Nothing that snotty or exclusive about them—white collar, blue collar, even a few blacks, along with the guys who forked out ten grand a year at the Club. Everyone who played joined. You didn’t even have to be good at the game, you only had to show it a certain respect and take it seriously.

Too seriously, some of them. There were players for whom the game was an infernal labor, and it didn’t matter how good they were, their agony began the second they stepped on the court to pay penance for their fall from a heaven presided over by Bill Tilden. And tennis could bring out the worst side of others. Staid and sober men would cuss and hurl their rackets into the net with every mishit and bad shot they made. Line calls could become matters of personal injury, of righteous indignation. There would be moments when play on all courts stopped as everyone turned to watch someone who, having stormed from his side of the court to his opponent’s, stood over the tape, lowered his racket to a welter of ball marks, and then shouted for all he was worth that the one touching the line was his, as if the whole of an unfair world had reached consummation in a single point. It’s a fine line, I suppose, that separates justice from perversion.

Still, they all kept playing, they all managed to get along. And they all played at Kirkwood. Even the guys who belonged to the Club would put in an appearance. It was a community, of sorts.

At least they did know how to plan. The Association made the arrangements and had everything mapped out to the last day of summer. Members volunteered to teach and donated the rackets and balls, while a sporting goods store chipped in the shoes. An elaborate schedule was devised that allowed for rotations and substitutes so that there would be at least six instructors each day. God knows what they had in mind, because they even arranged to enter the kids in the city’s juniors tournament at the end of August.

The problem was that they didn’t know where to find the kids. They went to Parks and Recreation, who had the courts, who went to the Human Relations Council, who didn’t have anything but knew to call Social Services, who did have kids, who went to the Housing Authority, who had the bus. And, of course, Parks and Recreation knew where to find me, the public servant, and told me to have the courts in tournament shape for the first day.

I ran players off late morning so I could get them ready, sweeping twice, up and down and then across, pulling like a plow horse a large two-handled broom behind me. Then I brushed off the tapes, bringing into sharp relief the outlines of middle class obsession, given the clarity and dedication that only geometry can bring, and stood back to admire my work: so many different, well proportioned rectangles within larger rectangles laid out on a pristine gray-green field, bisected by eight nets stretched taut and tapered towards the center straps that I adjusted daily by the accepted and unimpeachable measurement, the length of a Jack Kramer plus the width of its face. Tennis, at last liberated from the dark halls of European aristocracy, from the back yards of the elite, into the wide open spaces of American democracy.

Then at noon, the bus came, on time, an old wreck, a converted school bus with “Brookview Homes” stenciled on the side. The driver squeezed out first, a fat cracker Baptist with a crew cut, who walked around while rubbing his hands together, surveying the place with ponderous skepticism. Next he looked for the nearest shade tree, beneath which he spent the rest of the summer sipping cokes and humming hymns to himself.

For a moment I wondered if the Association hadn’t found their kids after all, because from where I was standing the bus looked empty, but, as if on some unseen cue, they poured out the doors, twenty or so, and went straight for the courts. They ran helter-skelter all over them, cutting and scraping the surface with their leather and hard-soled basketball shoes. Some swung imaginary bats as they ran, while others sat on and tugged at the nets. Then a group lined up at one end, took a running start, and slid as far as they could in the grit, trying to see who could make the longest mark.

Needless to say, the kids were all black. When anyone talked about society back then, they meant problems, and problems meant race, and race meant black.

And these were raw kids. Not mean, not vicious, just raw. They were supposed to be ten to fourteen, but some looked older and much larger. Most had on jeans and ratty t-shirts several sizes too big. Their hair was cut close to the skull, and they all seemed to have a scar somewhere on them, which they wore with indifference. All their faces looked as if they had been scrubbed clean of any design or emotion, leaving only a lean, stark gaze. When they looked at you they had a way of looking through you, at some point beyond, as if you were in their way. If they were the ones the would-be reformers targeted for whatever had moved them, their anxieties or good will, the kids didn’t seem to know it.

The instructors herded them up, explained the business about the shoes, and gave a brief lecture on court etiquette. Then they took them to the storage room to pass out the equipment. The equipment should have been what tipped me off about their scheme, if I hadn’t been suspicious already. The shoes were mostly odd sizes and styles the store couldn’t unload. They had to stuff toilet paper in some to make them fit. Most of the balls you could squeeze together, and the rackets made for an odd and sorry arsenal. Ladies rackets. Sears rackets. Beginners rackets, feeble things, thin framed and loosely strung, the kind of rackets plumbers and hacks use, or the kind your father first buys you when he wants to see whether or not you’re going to take to the game, but obviously doesn’t want to blow too many bucks. And warped old models, relics from the attic, strung with brown, sagging gut, sporting on their throats pictures of players I’d never heard of.

It was the metal, though, that the kids went after, and a couple of fights broke out over who got them. There were about a half-dozen, aluminum and steel rackets with bright chrome or gold finishes, and all were split or had popped rivets. They were just coming out then and didn’t last long. The sound one made whenever a kid struck the ball was unnerving, like a cracked bell.

The equipment was serviceable in one respect, however, because after the instructors led them back on the courts to begin the lesson, it didn’t take them ten minutes to knock every one of some two hundred balls clear over the fence, and the rest of the hour was spent finding them. I had to stay late that night, filling in and sweeping over all the marks those kids had left.

The next day and the rest of the week the instructors managed something that resembled order, though not as much so tennis. I suppose from some perspective it might have looked funny, watching the staunch and not so staunch Southern fathers try to tame so many wild kids. Then again, I can’t imagine what that point of view might be, because even though the kids settled down somewhat, the instructors grew increasingly on edge. You could see it, as some leaned over the net and spoke to the kids with exaggerated politeness, or others just stood there and looked above their heads, working to regain composure, that their patience was being strained, as was some principle or reservation within they hadn’t resolved, perhaps were seeing for the first time. The kids picked up on the instructors’ frustration, though maybe misreading it, and they followed their advice as if being punished, sullenly hitting the ball and not caring whether it cleared the net or landed hard in the back fence. They had probably seen this routine before.

The second week substitutes had to be called in.

The third week was the start of the worst heat wave we’d had in decades. Eight days running the high hit over a hundred. The sun blared like a warning throughout the town, stirring memories of other summers and other cities, reminding us that though we had been spared the worst so far, the problems of society were not over yet. A curfew was reinstated on the coast, and there was an incident here, a police shooting in the projects, that had everyone talking about riots. This was the sense, that the unrest was some external contagion, bred in the Newarks and Watts’, not related to anything anyone was doing in the South, or to what had been going on all along for so long.

The courts dried out by noon and turned to dust that puffed up when a ball hit, or swirled in clouds with the slightest breeze. Just playing those days was challenge enough, but for the instructors the dust and heat were the catalysts that sped the transformation of their resolve into something else. Whatever magnanimity or faith the Association brought to the clinic soon turned to the look of grim tolerance.

They ran out of substitutes the fourth week, and the fifth week, with a show of excuses and apologies and complaints, there was wholesale desertion. Williams said he had to go on a business trip for a few days and never returned. Horton said it was a damn fine thing they were trying to do the day before he ducked out. McIntyre didn’t think tennis was the game for this kind of kid. Cowens wanted to know if there were any poor white kids in town. Brauer asked how they could take over where the kids’ parents had failed. Johnson was profuse in his apology and confessed he couldn’t take any more. Morehead simply quit, saying he didn’t have to give a reason. Dr. Greenfeld and Lucas, a black PE teacher, alone were quiet; but whatever their silence covered, both showed up every Monday for the rest of the summer.

Still, the kids kept coming, in fact, perversely, more of them came each week. And the bus kept coming, each day on schedule, as if nothing were wrong, bringing more and more kids to fewer and fewer instructors. The sixth week started with forty kids and just Greenfeld and Lucas, who somehow managed. Tuesday, only one instructor showed up, who could only handle a few and had to ignore the rest. The rest tried to carry on by themselves, but soon tired of that. One group started up a baseball game behind the locker room, using their rackets as bats. Another used them to attack bees swarming over the trash cans. I had to spend the hour running around to make sure the others, scattering all over the place, didn’t do anything worse. Wednesday no instructor came, but before I realized that, a handful had already taken off across the park and into the neighborhood.

The calls finally made their way to Wilson, our boss, the director of Parks and Recreation, a man who had a talent for appearing sufficiently harried in his job—when you could find him—and who bragged he’d never taken an hour’s exercise in his life. The next morning he met with Larry, the guy I worked with, and me at the Center. Wilson expressed his irritation at having been dragged from his office with a look down at the heavy wing-tip he ground into the grit on one court. The clinic, he let us know, wasn’t his idea, and he wouldn’t have approved of it had anyone asked him. However, he said, these were dangerous times. One had to be careful and appearances had to be kept up. Besides, he wasn’t going to let the botched efforts of others mar the image of his department. The clinic had started and was going to continue as planned. Against the Association itself or its instructors, however, he said nothing specific, and stared at us in a way that told us we shouldn’t, either. With a side-glance he suggested it would be an awfully fine gesture if Larry and I both be there at noon that day, even though we worked opposite shifts, to take over the lessons in case the instructors didn’t show up again. He then looked at us with a scowl we later decided meant there damn well better not be any talk about extra pay.

If any instructors intended to come back, they didn’t bother that afternoon, the following, or any other, aside from the conscientious Monday duo. I never found out if the Association pushed Wilson to get them off the hook, but doubt they did. Rather, this was just the way it happened, the way these things always happen, that messes are made and left for others to clean up. That, after all, is the reason here why government is created. The instructors eventually did return, but after work and weekends, this time to play, and Larry and I both got heavy looks that showed perhaps the anger that covers guilt, or maybe indignation that what we were finally doing was what we should have been doing from the start.

At any rate, we had their clinic now, a few hours after we talked to Wilson, and kept it for the rest of the summer. I don’t remember what Larry felt, but I was furious. Not only were we given an impossible task, not only did we have the Association’s half-baked scheme dumped on us, but I also felt as if we had been called upon to mediate the whole town’s failing conscience. Also, I didn’t know the first thing about teaching tennis.

Yet there we were, with all those kids, and I can still see not them but their life, its starkness, its otherness, and the distance and utter difference. Then as now, I was a liberal, but then as now, I wasn’t a sap. What they had gone through none of us could understand, and the only thing I knew with certainty was that what they needed would take more than manners and games we hadn’t learned ourselves.

Still, there we were, with all those kids, and we had to do something. Larry and I split them up, Larry taking half to the back courts, while I assembled the rest on the front. And then there I was, now alone with those kids, all eyes on me, and I didn’t know what to say. I looked back at them, restless under the noon sun, feeling awfully white and a little scared.

“You’ll probably find,” I told them with the only inspiration that came, “that the forehand is easier to learn. But don’t be afraid of the backhand. It’s supposed to be the more natural stroke.” I then demonstrated both, taking a few unsteady swings at invisible balls. A couple of them repeated the strokes with me, but stopped when the others glared. I didn’t know what they had already learned so decided to start from scratch. Mustering courage, I next showed them the serve and volley. No one cared about my work at the net, but several were impressed with my serve and gave it a shot. Next I broke them up into groups among the courts and told them to take turns hitting to each other, trying to get them to rally—and failing. They only went through the motions without moving balls back and forth across the nets. Larry fared about as well.

Yet this became the program the following weeks because it was the only one I could figure out that might be appropriate for their level, demonstration followed by practice. Not that I saw results or had any confidence in my plan, because even the instructors who had tried and did know what they were doing hadn’t gotten anywhere. Then again, the half-hearted effort of the others must have left the kids confused and the desertion had to have had some effect. Still, I had to do something. After I broke them up into groups, I’d go from court to court, giving advice to anyone who listened. Mostly, they ignored me, treating me like an intruder. Really, though, it didn’t make any difference what I did, because as I gingerly worked my way through the desultory groups, stepping on balls, getting stares, I also kept an eye myself on the park outside and the houses across the street. Because this had to be the unspoken directive from Wilson, not to teach but keep them out of trouble.

Maybe the Association did mean well, but so what? It doesn’t matter what their intentions were, because fickle behavior can do more harm than good. But to say the road to our modern hell is paved with good intentions would be giving too many people too much credit. It’s hard to believe the Association’s real purpose on some broader scale wasn’t the same as Wilson’s. And this was what angered me most, that I was I one who got stuck to fulfill it.

I suppose if I had protested loud enough, I could have gotten out, though I couldn’t imagine any argument I might make that wouldn’t sound selfish or dumb. And much as I resented the clinic, leaving it wouldn’t have felt right. It’s the problem you run into when you go against the words behind the words. But if I didn’t complain it was because I lacked the nerve, and for no better reason saw the clinic through to the end. Yet it was hard to hold any conviction in doing something that not only didn’t have a chance but I also didn’t believe in. My only solution to this dilemma was to fake engagement without thinking about society or its problems or its motives and what lay beneath them, and try to make the lessons as interesting as I could, as much for myself as them.

The kids, of course, remained bored; their rallying got even worse. So I was surprised when a couple of kids said they wanted to play for real and demanded I explain how to keep score, as if I were holding out or keeping a secret from them. I was saving that for last, and really didn’t care if we got to it or not. Matches are tedious and dull until you learn to keep the ball in play. Also, scoring in tennis is complicated—fifteen-love, fifteen-all, thirty-fifteen, but next, the way we said it, forty-five; deuce, ad in, ad out; game, set, and match—and as I explained these details, the whole business sounded strange and silly. Still, they picked it up, and quicker and better than anything else I told them. Then I turned them loose to compete. With the numbers, I had to improvise, setting up singles on one court and doubles, triples, and worse on the others. But while the kids didn’t hit any better and it was hard to say that what they were doing was tennis—the way they played, a set could take five minutes or last into the next century—they played with a passion approaching frenzy, a relief from so many days of heat and boredom.

And the rules. They wanted to know the rules—all of them. I had to pull out the book. It wasn’t long before I heard the shout: “Footfault, you cocksucker!” Footfaults. They called each other on footfaults. Nobody called footfaults there—it’d start a fight. Even in serious match play, learning rules is as much a matter of knowing which to follow as well as which you’re supposed to ignore. How could I explain that?

I think it would have been easier for me if someone had donated tennis shirts and shorts as well. Not that I care about decorum, but some appearances count for something. Also the clothes might have smoothed the edges of some of the rougher guys. Yet I don’t know why I was intimidated by them. That harsh gaze of theirs—but maybe they didn’t trust me as well. And after a while I realized that they weren’t really looking at me or at anything. They simply weren’t looking, as if I or anything else beyond a point in their vision had only uncertain existence. Nor did they seem to know each other, even after being together almost two months. I’d ask why someone dropped out and they’d say they didn’t know him. The next day, however, someone else—or two—would come to take his place.

I suppose I got sucked in somewhat, because, standing on the sideline shouting and cheering them on or entering a match to give advice, I began paying more attention to what was going on within the fence than what might happen without. Not that I got involved, it was just hard to see them play and not have the strokes down. They still didn’t listen, but I got used to that. What was harder was when they did—and I did get a small following—because then the burden fell on me to teach them what I wasn’t so sure about myself. And when they repeated what I showed them, I grew self-conscious about my own game, seeing my form mimicked by several kids in unison, more often than not exaggerated. But I had to wince when I saw the kinks in my backhand so faithfully repeated. Then again, in watching them copy me, I saw what I was doing wrong: I was hitting down on the ball and chopping at it instead of lifting it smoothly with a full follow-through. It is the natural stroke, swinging away from the body.

What hurt most was seeing a few take interest in the game. Even with the right environment, tennis is tough to break into. When you start out there’s little return for your efforts, and however much you practice, it always seems you’re doing more wrong than right. I resisted my father’s attempts for so many years that he finally gave up on me. I didn’t take the game seriously until I was in high school, and it still took several years before I played well enough to feel comfortable on a court. But even after you’ve played a long time and think you have a stroke grooved, you find days when it doesn’t work. The game’s all control and concentration. Luck counts for nothing. And when you think about all that has to be put together just to execute a single swing, then consider that you have to repeat it consistently, hundreds of times throughout a match, you realize that beating somebody is really beside the point. You look for a rhythm to carry you and try not to get too upset for a while.

But then the kids would never even know that much, because the city hadn’t yet put any courts on their side of town. And even if they did have courts, they wouldn’t have gotten far without some guidance. Yet the Association wasn’t going make the same mistake twice by following the clinic up the next summer—and didn’t.

None of which should have been news to them. And if they didn’t know from the start, they had to have realized soon that whatever they did that summer would be as far as they went with tennis. Still they kept coming, though I don’t know why. I don’t think the game even appealed to that many. I don’t know why they came in the first place. Tennis was still a white game, maybe they wanted to break a barrier, though I doubt they thought on those terms. Maybe they came because the same system that built their housing, paid their mothers’ checks, and tried to keep them in school no matter what they learned had designed another way to contain them, so when bus rolled up and opened its doors, they decided they were supposed to get in.

Or maybe they didn’t have anything else to do.

My concern about match play was borne out. After a few weeks, despite my encouragement, their initial fervor died down to a mechanical keeping of the score. To spark motivation, I told them about how well Ashe was doing that summer, and they didn’t know who I was talking about. I showed them a picture in Tennis, and one kid said, “Him? He’s a—he’s a colored boy.” If he didn’t use the other word, it may have been a sign they were beginning to accept me, or at any rate had gotten used to having me around. It was the first time I realized that not only was race in their heads, too, but that they had their hang-ups about it as well.

The picture of Ashe, however, was only good for a day, and towards the end I had to work harder to keep them going—

Except with one kid, who never let up—

Rudy.

This kid was intense, and I don’t think he took his eyes off me the entire summer. He was a lanky kid who never smiled, who moved with a hitch and a stalk. And he not only looked mean, he was mean, but I suppose he had to be because of his hand. He only had one hand, or rather his left was clubbed or mangled. It must have been a birth defect—he only had the vestiges of fingers—but I never looked at it closely. I didn’t want him to think I noticed.

Rudy paid absolute attention to me, nodding anxiously at whatever I showed him, and then repeating it vigorously until I told him he had it right. Not that he ever did, but I think he would have kept me the whole hour, repeating myself, if I didn’t make the excuse of needing to go on to the others. Really, I just wanted a break. He had a way of fixing and bearing down on you as if his eyes were guns. I felt I was always in their sights, even when we weren’t on the same court, even when he had gone home for the day.

Jesus, that kid scared me.

When he wasn’t tracking me down, he was maneuvering on the other courts to get the best to play against him and whatever partner he could find. Tennis is one of the few one-handed games. Maybe that was the attraction.

We worked out a serve, though I can’t imagine how he managed the toss since he couldn’t hold a ball with his left. I never could get him to stop running around his backhand.

Rudy aside, the final week the kids not only showed no life in their play, but also had lost their wildness. It was as if their spirit had been beaten out of them. While I couldn’t fault myself and knew where to place blame, I still felt guilty. After all, in a sense I was involved—so many weeks of taming them for nothing. Yet they still showed up, except the last day when we passed out the shoes and rackets. Then only half of them came. Larry and I thought some sort of ceremony was in order, but after we fumbled a few minutes while they stared at the ground, they got on the bus and we didn’t see them again—

No, seven came back two weeks later, for the juniors tournament. Wilson said we had to stick with the Association’s original plan, though we argued the experience would be bad for them. Tennis is hard enough in informal matches; tournament play is a different game altogether. The ball bounces differently. It requires a different set of nerves. On the grit, your coordination, your composure—everything can slip out from under you quickly. The kids didn’t have much to support them and had a long way to fall.

We did what we could, waiving the entry fees and even rigging the draw so that none of our kids would have to go up against the top seeds. Maybe we even fooled ourselves into thinking a few of them at least had a shot at close matches. There weren’t that many kids in town with talent, and most of the entrants weren’t far themselves from beginners. But our vision had been blurred by having spent so much time with our kids. It was a shock just seeing them scattered on the courts with all the white kids in tennis whites, who, good or not, flashed tennis in every move they made, as if the game were in their genes. They, the whites, were polite, but then they could afford to be. They blew our kids off the courts. Hard not to wonder if that wasn’t what the Association, at least unconsciously, had wanted from the start. Even if not, the effect was just the same.

Not that poor kids can’t learn, that’s not the point. There are real clinics in the ghettoes now, and shoe companies are pulling black talent out of college for their harems, luring them with big bucks. And if blacks ever got bored with basketball, you wouldn’t see a white guy again on center court. But what does this prove? That blacks can play other sports? They’re only draining their energy into entertaining the world without tapping into its power.

And winning championships, being the best isn’t what’s important. What matters is everybody else. From the smallest local tournament to Forest Hills, we live in a pyramid of competition that recognizes only the single winner and turns the rest into losers. We don’t need games to prove our insignificance. We don’t need to find our place, what we need is a place where we can get out of ourselves—

Rudy made it past the first round, the one-handed kid.

His opponent wasn’t white, he was pink, and spoiled rotten. His parents must have dropped over a hundred dollars on his clothes and racket, not to mention what they paid for lessons at the Club. His mother stood beside me on the porch, all agog in admiration of her little prince as he stretched out at the net, who, staying there, took practice swings, showing his good club form, while Rudy waited to begin the warm-up. But when His Highness finally made his way to the base line, he declared he was ready to play.

Rudy wasn’t pretty to watch, and it drove me crazy to see him still running around his backhand. Yet he ran like the devil, managing to cover the whole court, chasing down every ball, returning it in whatever way he could fashion. Not that he returned that many, because he lost the first set quickly. Nonetheless, he made the mother nervous. The first time Rudy hit that serve we worked out, she turned to me and asked, “He can’t do that, can he?”

There was a tense moment in the second set, when the pink kid hit a ball just out—I saw the mark. Rudy walked up to the line and stood over it in silence, as if afraid of it, but then hollered “Out!” The pink kid puffed up, his mother grabbed my arm, and Rudy turned and stared into the porch at me. From his expression, I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to confirm his call or was daring me to defy it. Not a line judge, of course I couldn’t say anything. After that call, he just shouted and ignored me. And his game picked up from there.

The other kid did have the strokes, but he didn’t have the head. When he approached the net, Rudy lobbed over him. When he played back, Rudy chopped the ball short, where it skipped and dribbled a few times before rolling to the kid’s feet. And Rudy kept dogging him, finding his weaknesses, until the pink kid’s game fell apart.

1-6, 9-7, 6-0.

The match over, the pink kid ran to his mother, shunning the handshake at the net. Both looked hurt and offended, as if they both had been cheated. Rudy stayed where he was, alone in the middle of the court while matches continued around him. I was ecstatic, yet Rudy looked mad, and bore down with his eyes not on me or the kid or the mother, but on the court itself, fixing himself in the intersection of all those meaningless lines.

Or maybe he was just waiting for things to settle down, because in another moment he broke into a smile and walked off.

It’s not a bad game. There’s not that much people can do together to let off a little steam without someone getting hurt. There’s not that much people can do together at all. And every now and then, after you’ve given up worrying about how well you’re doing, maybe for a brief and passing moment you experience a feeling that is almost marvelous. You’re on the court, but you’re not aware of it, because you’re caught up in the cadence of the fall-bounce-swing of play. The weight and beat of your heart become absorbed into the pressure of the ball against the strings and then are released in its flight over the net, as it plots a trajectory arcing somewhere between the coordinates of elation and despair. You give in and lose yourself to the feeling because you know you are not giving anything up—

Latham.

We had one player at the courts—Morris Latham. Conqueror of the South in his prime, he even made it to the quarters at Wimbledon. But I don’t care about his record, it was the way he looked, the way he hit the ball. Much as I’ve tried to put all that Southern crap behind me, there has to be something redeeming about this place, because only the South could have produced a Latham. On the court his manner was reserved, almost withdrawn, and he had a stoic look on his face that belied his clean, powerful shots, the smooth, easy grace of his swing. And he did it—hit that way—every single time. But not even that—

His backhand . . . was gorgeous. Pure, simple, seemingly effortless. Yet still not there, but somewhere between the time he snaps his head and racket back together, recoiling in anticipation of the bounce, and the time the ball meshes with the strings, in that fraction of a second that he stands there waiting, accepting, gravely holding at arm’s length a universe of infinite possibilities of all the possible paths, spins, and turns of the ball—it’s there you felt a surge inside as if the world were being drawn to a balance, and watching him you could almost believe that there were such a thing as grace.

Of course there isn’t. Even if there were, you couldn’t teach, much less learn or comprehend it. The essence of grace would lie in its rarity, in its inexpressible beauty.

The world doesn’t turn on my opinion, but I don’t think things are any better. There has been some change, but not much beyond what we have covered by the smile of our guilt, the shadow of our good intentions. We only have to look at the riots last year in LA to see what has been kept under the lid. As for us, I don’t think we can make laws fast enough to keep us from tearing each other apart.

The pink kid is probably out of law school now, climbing the ladder in a big firm. No telling what happened to Rudy. Not much hope for a kid like that.

I think I got him to pin the ball against the throat of the racket with his bad hand, and he tossed by throwing hand, racket, and ball up in the air and letting go.

Jesus, he could serve, and hard!

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