One of her daughters was home, precisely why she could not recall. It was not irregular. One or the other came for a bit and spent most of her time on the phone to the other reporting the deterioration of the home scene. This one, this time, already had phoned the other and said, within impudent earshot, as if she were convinced her mother was deaf or altogether unaware of her surroundings, “She’s in some kind of surreal fog.” And then, “No, not Lawnboy, she just sits there, writing.” “Lawnboy” was a code reference to a scandal involving Mrs. Hollingsworth and the boy who cut the lawn.
This condemnation had nothing to do, Mrs. Hollingsworth knew, with what was actually on this list. That whatever she was doing was not a real list — which was clear to anyone who looked at it from across the room, and given the time she spent on it — was sufficient grounds for the surreal-fog charge. She was not making a grocery list, she was not putting on her red ERA coat and selling a house, she was not watching soap operas (real fog? real not-fog? surreal clarity?), she was not housecleaning, she was not dolling up for Dad (whom the daughters despised but felt nonetheless she should seek to please), so she was, ergo, in a surreal fog.
She wondered how these things, her children, had come out of her. How had she borne into the world the Tupperware sisters? And square canisters at that. Her daughters were with the world, with the program. They had gotten aboard the wagon with the rest of the NPR Rockettes. There was a great crowd of folk out there who had assigned themselves the task of watching out for the surreal fog. These were the same folk who thought you were a better person if you could hum along to Mozart. Who elected themselves to all the proprietary boards, local, state, national, and now global, that they could. They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what everyone did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel. They were the three-headed dog guarding the boat of the sane. They called it, moreover, being human. She could see that this was what Forrest was riding against with his boys, who, unable to articulate the evil, could nonetheless dress up against it and slouch against it and ride their insolent sleighs in their insolent pants, showing their asses, over the hills and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go. Her daughters looked like the Doublemint twins in this cartoon. They had on matching lime-green sunsuits and cat’s-eye glasses and chewed confidently.
Mrs. Hollingsworth was ready to go on a date with Rape Oswald if he came through the door. The Oswald she had left on a sidewalk in Holly Springs Mississippi furiously pulling surreal fog out of himself. She liked his pluck and his mettle. Maybe he was the man for her. To the fog: en avant!
And was she demented if she wanted surreal-fog Rape Oswald more than her real-fog husband? There was nothing wrong with her husband, except two things. He was a human being, and after twenty-five years he resided indeed in a fog of familiarity next to her, as she presumed she resided in one next to him. When she had still had friends, she told one of them once, trying to put her finger on just what was wrong between them, “I don’t know — he’s just so … aloof.” She had felt ridiculous telling the woman this, watching her tsk her head in an expression of pity suggesting that she did not suffer the same aloofness at her familiar house. It got to where Mrs. Hollingsworth felt self-conscious telling anyone anything, actually, especially these Volvo tsk-tskers, all she or any of them had for friends, and she had gradually obtained an agreeable predicament wherein she did not say ridiculous self-conscious things to these women, because she stopped talking to them altogether. Was it demented to have no one to talk to? Or, more precisely, not to want to talk to anyone? She hardly thought so. Was it demented to want an imaginary man? Was that not the condition of all women, starting at about age thirteen? Did they not really keep on doing it all their lives? As did not men keep seeking imaginary women? What was so demented in wanting Rape Oswald if you looked at it this way? He beat hell out of the guy too tired to get off the cot for thinking he had somehow failed his father and because he was no longer in a transport of love, and he had the quintessential (imaginary) woman. Or was she imaginary? Let us posit she is real, by reason that she is quintessentially imaginary. She is so surreal that she enters a new dimension, of the real. And this woman is then, really, Mrs. Hollingsworth, who is getting tired of Lonnie Schmonnie on the cot and has been making eye contact with the man down on the square who wants her so bad he has swooned to the concrete and risked arrest in the most direct, most natural, least calculated expression of his desire for her that occurs to him. Let us say he is not a human being, even. The NPR Rockettes will not quarrel with that. The Tupperware ladies will admit, “Perhaps he wasn’t, um, fully human.” Everyone will be very satisfied with that generous consideration of Rape Oswald, on the ground with his need. Cerberus guarding the boat of the sane will bark approval, looking like the RCA dog.
She had worked herself up into a state. She found her daughter, off the phone, and said to her, “Lawnboy and I never slept with each other, love, because he could not contain himself when I kissed him — a young thing who could not leave his mother.” Then she went back in the kitchen and removed the phone from the hook so that the girl would have to contain this thickening of the surreal fog by herself for a while. She looked at her prodigious list, her meal for the hungriest largest fool alive. She was in love with the fool who would eat this meal, and digest it, and profit from it, and know what it was.
Forrest was the purest of foolish heroes, riding hard. He was canvas and light, leather and speed, and he did not abide instruction, moral or immoral.
Oswald was the boy. Oswald was the boy listening only to himself, and to her. Oswald was hungry, and a fool, and hers.
Sea Change
WHEN OSWALD ENTERED THE room, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hi, Ray.” He looked at her with a tilt to his head, and then straightened it, as if he had taken her meaning. He had: Rape was a nickname that had done him no good. It had come from a blending of Ray Payne, his first and middle names. A girl in high school had thought his name was Rape Hayne Oswald, and the business had stuck. How the woman handing him the drink she was handing him, in the house in which she was handing it to him, knew his real name, if she did, was beyond him. He was in one of those zones where what you knew, and even what you thought you knew, was far exceeded by what you could not possibly know. He sensed this. It happened more and more to him, rather than less and less, as he perceived was the normal expectation in human life. His had not been the normal life. This losing it agreed with him. There was no profit in saying to someone who somehow knew your real name, “How do you know my real name?” There was so much work involved in determining how she did, if she did — it was possible she mistakenly thought this his name, as had the girl in high school thought it else, for example — that he had learned over time not to try. This kind of indeterminacy had been hard for him to accept at first. He had fought it. The fight had given him hemorrhoids, literal and figurative.