Then she gathered up her things and put them in the dryer. This may be the point at which she lost her sock, nobody is sure. Or it may be that she lost her sock later, when she took her clothes out of the dryer. Who can tell about these things so long after they happen?
At any rate, when she got home, she was missing one of her socks. It was just an ordinary grey ragg-wool sock. You probably have a pair yourself. Everyone I know has a pair of these socks. Some have two pair.
This woman, she only had one pair. So she was annoyed at missing the sock, and she went back to the laundromat in search of it. But the sock was nowhere to be found. Who would take just one sock, she thought, and she went home.
That very day, she noticed something peculiar about her left foot. It dragged, it stuck out wrong. It tripped the woman up when she walked, and it seemed to have a mind of its own. It’s sulking at the loss of its sock, she thought. I will pay it no mind, and it will soon forget.
But the foot did not forget. Instead, its will seemed to grow stronger, as if it were seeking to dominate her whole body. I cannot have my body ruled by my foot, she thought. I’ll show it who’s master. So she sat at home all weekend and looked out the window. Although her foot twitched and throbbed, she refused to give in. It was not a fun weekend.
On Monday, she had to go to work. She got up, lifted her foot out of bed, and limped to the breakfast table. She wrestled her foot into a thin white sock and jammed it into her shoe. She dragged it down the street to the trolley line. As she rode the trolley, her foot jiggled and tapped its way out into the aisle, jutted straight out ahead of her, stomped up and down with rage. Other passengers gave her sharp looks and told her to keep her feet to herself.
At work, she avoided other people as much as she could. She kept her foot under her desk, but it continued to jerk up and down, sometimes striking the inside of the metal desk with a thwanging sound. The woman at the next desk became impatient and took to slamming her stapler around very noisily.
The next day, she called in sock. I mean sick, she called in sick. Her foot was becoming more agitated. She decided to let the fool thing have its way. It walked out the door and down the street, taking her past the laundromat, past the grocery store, past the gas station and up to the vacant lot.
On the north side of the vacant lot was a garage, and in the garage lived a man named Henry. Henry had been living there for years. He collected bottles and cans and returned them for their deposits. He didn’t bother anyone much, and nobody bothered much with him.
Oh no, thought the woman. I can’t take a sock away from Henry. He needs it more than I do.
But sure enough, her foot walked her right up to Henry’s garage. It wanted to go inside, but she walked it right on by. She pretended to look in the window of the hardware store on the other side of the vacant lot. It contained brooms and dusty tools. Her foot pawed the ground to go back.
As she stood there struggling, Henry came out of the garage. He smelled like a lube job, and he was wearing her sock on his left hand like a mitten, his thumb stuck through the hole in the heel.
He said something to her, but the woman wasn’t listening. Her foot was trying very hard to leap up into Henry’s hand, and the woman was resisting with all her might. As you can see, she was not the sort of person who casually thrust her feet into other people’s hands.
Henry brushed by her then, and she never did catch what he was saying. Perhaps he was just muttering, who knows? He muttered a lot, Henry.
Certainly he was muttering later when she caught up with him and gave him a pair of gloves. He took them and muttered his thanks, and then he asked her if she could spare him a dollar for trolley fare. The woman, her left foot chattering against the pavement, said she’d give him two if he’d give her the grey sock. He grabbed the bills, flung the sock in her direction, and hobbled off quickly, his left hand clutching pathetically at the air.
The woman is very careful of her socks now, and always counts them before she leaves the laundromat, but she is a woman who lives with the knowledge that her body can be ruled by her foot, and how she can be happy knowing that I’m damned if I can figure out.
That’s all there is to this story, and there’s no use in complaining if you don’t like it, because this is the way it’s got to be told.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This story was written from start to finish in a single day, after an emotional experience with some wet socks, and owes a debt to Gary Snyder’s ethnographic essay “He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village.”
It’s pretty straightforward, and it sprung full-blown into my head, just as it is told. I typed it up, changed a couple of words, and printed it out. I wish all my stories worked this way.
Coming to Terms
The life leaked out of the old man. He lay in bed for more than a month, in hospital and nursing home, in worlds of pain. He fought first for control of his death, then for control of his life once more. Toward the end he gave up his desire for control, as much as he was able. He still issued every visitor a list of tasks, but he knew he had no control over whether those tasks got done.
So, painstakingly, he combed the thatch of the past. He returned to the old mysteries and puzzles, and reflected at length on the lives and motivations of people long dead. He constructed theories to explain the petty cruelties of childhood bullies. He made plans to purchase a small house, to reclaim his land in Guatemala, to publish essays, fiction, fragments of prose. He ate bananas and rye bread and institutional meals, and put his teeth in when visitors stopped by. He resolved not to worry about things he couldn’t fix, and struggled to keep that resolution.
Then the muscles of his heart, exhausted after three billion beats and weakened by pneumonia, diabetes, and the stress of a choleric temperament, paused just for a moment, and could not resume. A nurse called for help and, with a team of aides, brought him back. He squeezed her hand, his heart failed again, and they let him go. The tenuous flow of electrochemical impulses that made up his nervous system slowed and ceased, and the order that he had imposed on the universe started to disintegrate, releasing heat.
His body cooled. A mortician came and removed it. A nurse’s aide gathered his belongings together, threw out a few unimportant scraps of paper, put the rest in a plastic bag. The bed was remade: someone was waiting for it.
Friends came to visit, and found him gone. The news traveled, a spasm of regret at the disappearance of a keen mind, a brilliant wit, a generous friend. Kindnesses postponed would not be realized. Harsh words, whatever the source or reason, could not be unsaid.
He died with a book newly released, an essay in the current issue of a popular journal, a story to appear shortly in a well-known magazine. He left a respectable amount of work and a stack of unpublished manuscripts made more marketable by the fact of his death. For days after he died, his friends continued to receive his cards and letters.
After the passage of several weeks, his daughter, sorry about her father’s death but not pleased at having to shoulder the responsibility, came from out of state to pack up his papers and books and to dispose, somehow, of the rest of his belongings. She unlocked the door and let herself into the silent, stale-smelling apartment.
The old man’s spirit was still strong; he had always put its stamp on everything of consequence in his possession.
An umbrella with the handle carved into the shape of a goose’s head leaned against the wall inside the door. A tag hung from the neck. It read, in her father’s handwriting: “The kind gift of Arthur Detweiler, whom I met in the public library reading room on a rainy March afternoon.”