John D. MacDonald
Kitten on a Trampoline
On a warm and bright and shining day of a brand-new year I was driving a company car from Naples, Florida, north to Tampa. I was slamming it through traffic, irritable and edgy. The back end was stowed with samples, literature and display materials. I’d kept myself in top gear for three years, ever since I’d been graduated from Florida State. I’d turned myself into the best road man the Owen Drug Company had ever seen. I was making twenty thousand a year. I was buying Owen stock with every dime I could hoard after taxes and bachelor living expenses. I’d won all kinds of awards by working ninety-hour weeks at a dead run. I was on my way to a brilliant career.
But I was chronically hoarse from giving my spiel to doctors and druggists, and I tried not to notice that I was going through three packs of cigarettes a day, or notice the persistent tremor in my hands or the deepening frown wrinkles between my brows. I hadn’t been sleeping well of late, and I was bothered by nervous indigestion. My weight was down, and my temper was too easily lost.
But you have to keep pushing and churning if you are going to get anywhere in this world.
I came roaring up Route 41 into the south end of Sarasota. I would have made the light by a big shopping center if a dawdling cluck in a quarter acre of Ohio Cadillac hadn’t drifted over into my lane and blocked me out of the play. I was running behind schedule, and so I sat, cursing him, holding my steering wheel so tightly my knuckles ached.
I happened to glance over toward a part of the big shopping-section parking lot which had been fenced off. A crowd of people were clustered with their backs toward the highway, watching something.
I saw a girl burst up into the air, higher than their heads. With her body straight out, she made a turn so slow and so elegant it seemed that I was watching it in slow motion, and then fell back out of sight and reappeared again in a slight variation of the first turn. I knew that the girl in the sunlight was the most astonishingly beautiful thing I had ever seen. I watched her until an indignant horn blatted behind me, and I saw the Ohio Cadillac so far ahead I knew the light had changed long ago.
I charged ahead, but somehow I couldn’t get back into the strain-and-scurry frame of mind. I suddenly had the horrible realization that I was close to breaking into tears. I now know it was a clue to the extent of my nervous exhaustion. Something so precious had occurred that I couldn’t even put a name to it. And here I was, running away from it. I drifted over to the curb, found a place to turn around and went back and parked, locked the car and joined the people.
It was one of those Trampoline layouts which are suddenly appearing all over the country. Seventy-five cents for thirty minutes of bouncing up and down. I had seen it being done, but not like this. Neither had the other people, I guess. Except for some squealing kids, the other customers inside the fence had stopped to watch her also, in a hypnotic silence. It was like a wild strange dance she was improvising as she went along, with a complete grace and total control in spite of the tremendous height she was achieving. She was young, she had a burnished tan and she was sweetly and strongly constructed. Her hair was a tousled brown-red mass. She wore a sleeveless yellow-print blouse and little chocolate-colored shorts. I could see her face clearly only at the apex of those leaps when she was turning slowly. It was one of those wide-cheeked Slavic faces of a totally deceptive placidity. She had a dreaming look, a contentment, a half smile. She drifted and spun in a better world than any of us could know.
Suddenly she smothered the next leap with a deft flex of brown knees and stepped off the Trampoline. We gave an audible group sigh because it was over, and then we all began clapping. She looked startled, but smiled with a professional brilliance, bowed with professional aplomb and bent to put her shoes back on as the applause died and the people began drifting away.
I moved toward the gate where she would come out. I heard the proprietor telling her to stop there at any time and be his guest. It was a smart business gambit for him. She came out, moving slowly, earthbound after soaring, carrying a yellow purse. She was sturdy and smaller than I would have guessed. But as she neared me I could detect none of the residual puffing and damp sweatiness of great athletic effort.
“There should have been music with that,” I told her. She gave me that single cool glance of dismissal all girls that pretty must learn. I walked beside her. She pretended I was not there.
“I have to tell you something,” I said. “I don’t loaf around bothering pretty girls. I was driving through. I had to stop for that light. Then I saw you over the heads of those people, way up in the middle of the air. I drove on because I’m supposed to be in Tampa by four o’clock for a sales meeting, but I found out I had to come back and find you and tell you how beautiful it was. That’s all.”
She stopped and looked up at me. “So you’ve told me. Now go to Tampa.” It was an urchin voice, unmannered and with a faraway spice of accent. She was affecting an elaborate boredom.
We were near a drugstore. “I could buy you a coffee or a soda.”
She shrugged. “I’m thirsty,” she said.
We went in and sat at the counter. She ordered limeade. I ordered coffee. I put my business card on the counter top.
“Paul Fox,” she read. “Short name.”
“I’m twenty-five. I’m not married. I cover the whole southern half of the state. I’m based in Tampa. I spend four days a month there. I drive fifty thousand miles a year.”
“Enchanting,” she said tonelessly.
“I had the ridiculous feeling you might tell me your name.”
“For one limeade? Why not? Wanda Markava.”
I looked at my watch. I spotted the phone booths. “Wanda, I have to make a phone call. Promise you won’t leave before I get back.”
“If you don’t get back before I feel like leaving, I won’t be here. How much do you expect out of one limeade?”
I called Harry Fletcher in Tampa and told him I was held up in Sarasota by car trouble, and I couldn’t make the meeting. He told me to pick up a rental car. I said it was tire trouble, and I’d wrenched my back changing the wheel and I didn’t feel like driving. He believed my every word. It was my first lapse from total dependability. I saw Wanda get off the stool and stroll toward the door. I cut Harry off by saying loudly, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Damn it!” and hanging up.
I caught up with her a hundred feet from the store. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Can I walk with you?”
“I don’t own the sidewalks. It’s a long way. You’ll miss your meeting.”
“I phoned Tampa and told them I would.”
“You’re wasting your time, Paul Fox.”
“Kindly let me be the judge of what is a waste of time and what isn’t.”
She gave me an oblique glance and said, “I have to go home to take care of my three babies and start cooking a big hot dinner for my husband.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. My heart rolled over and died. She walked on and turned back and looked at me curiously. Suddenly she threw her head back and gave a curiously abrupt bark of rather harsh laughter. “No husband. No babies. Come along. It was a good way to get rid of you, Paul Pest Fox, but you looked too sad. There’s a hundred other ways.”
We walked together in January sunlight. I stole careful glances at her. Only the most perfect physical conditioning can produce a walk like hers, as lithe and unself-conscious as a tan panther on a jungle path. There was a childish look about the blandness of forehead, the snubbed nose and the placid symmetry of her cheek. And there was a small-boy appeal in the squareness and sturdiness of her hands. But the impact of the total creature was vividly, uncompromisingly female.