“Yes, I think so,” Garp said. He checked his horrid purse; his wallet was safely there. And his wig—tousled still further—was under his arm. Roberta had Garp's real clothes and Garp looked in vain for any sign of Roberta emerging from the first feminist funeral.
“Put that wig on,” Dotty advised him, “or you'll be mistaken for one of those transvestites.” He struggled to put it on; she helped him. “People are really rough on transvestites,” Dotty added. She took several bobby pins from her own gray head of hair and fastened Garp's wig more decently in place.
The scratch on his cheek, she told him, would stop bleeding very soon.
On the steps of School of Nursing Hall, a tall black woman who looked like an even match for Roberta shook her fist at Garp but said not a word. Perhaps she was another Ellen Jamesian. A few other women were gathering there and Garp feared they might be thinking over the advisability of an open attack. Oddly at the fringe of their group, but seeming to have no connection with them, was a wraithlike girl, or barely grown-up child; she was a dirty blond-headed girl with piercing eyes the color of coffee-stained saucers—like a drug-user's eyes, or someone long involved in hard tears. Garp felt frozen by her stare, and frightened of her—as if she were really crazy, a kind of teen-age hit man for the women's movement, with a gun in her oversized purse. He clutched his own ratty bag, recalling that his wallet was at least full of credit cards; he had enough cash for a cab to the airport and the credit cards could get him a flight to Boston and the bosom, so to speak, of his remaining family. He wished he could relieve himself of his ostentatious tits, but there they were, as if he'd been born with them—and born, too, in this alternately tight and baggy jump suit. It was all he had and it would have to do. From the din escaping from School of Nursing Hall, Garp knew that Roberta was deep in the throes of debate—if not combat. Someone who had fainted, or had been mauled, was carried out; more police went in.
“Your mother was a first-rate nurse and a woman who made every woman proud,” the nurse named Dotty told him. “I'll bet she was a good mother, too.”
“She sure was,” Garp said.
The nurse got him a cab; the last he saw of her, she was walking away from the curb, back toward School of Nursing Hall. The other women who'd seemed so threatening, on the steps outside the building, appeared to be not interested in molesting her. More police were arriving; to Garp looked for the strange saucer-eyed girl, but she was not among the other women.
He asked the cabby who the new governor of New Hampshire was. Garp tried to conceal the depth of his voice, but the cabby, familiar with the eccentricities of his job, seemed unsurprised at both Garp's voice and Garp's appearance.
“I was out of the country,” Garp said.
“You didn't miss nothin', sweetie,” the cabby told him. “That broad broke down.”
“Sally Devlin?” said Garp.
“She cracked up, right on the TV,” the cabby said. “She was so flipped out over the assassination, she couldn't control herself. She was givin' this speech but she couldn't get through it, you know7
“She looked like a real idiot to me,” the cabby said. “She couldn't be no governor if she couldn't control herself no better than that.”
And Garp saw the pattern of the woman's loss emerging. Perhaps the foul incumbent governor had remarked that Ms. Devlin's inability to control her emotions was “just like a woman.” Disgraced by her demonstration of her feelings for Jenny Fields, Sally Devlin was judged not competent enough for whatever dubious work being a governor entailed.
Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people. “In my opinion,” the cabby said, “it took something like that shooting to show the people that the woman couldn't handle the job, you know?”
“Shut up and drive,” Garp said.
“Look, honey,” the cabby. said. “I don't have to put up with no abuse.”
“You're an asshole and a moron,” Garp told him, “and if you don't drive me to the airport with your mouth shut, I'll tell a cop you tried to paw me all over.”
The cabby floored the accelerator and drove for a while in furious silence, hoping the speed and recklessness of his driving would scare his passenger.
“If you don't slow down,” Garp said, “I'll tell a cop you tried to rape me.”
“Fucking weirdo,” the cabby said, but he slowed down and drove to the airport without another word. Garp put the money for the tip on the taxi's hood and one of the coins rolled into the crack between the hood and fender. “Fucking women,” the cabby said.
“Fucking men,” said Garp, feeling—with mixed feelings—that he had done his duty to ensure that the sex war went on.
At the airport they questioned Garp's American Express card and asked for further identification. Inevitably, they asked him about the initials T. S. The airline ticket-maker was clearly not in touch with the literary world—not to know who T. S. Garp was.
He told the ticket-maker that T. was for Tillie, S. was for Sarah. “Tillie Sarah Garp?” the ticket-maker said. She was a young woman, and she clearly disapproved of Garp's oddly fetching but whorish appearance. “Nothing to check, and no carry-on luggage?” Garp was asked.
“No, nothing,” he said.
“You have a coat?” the stewardess asked him, also giving him a condescending appraisal.
“No coat,” Garp said. The stewardess gave a start at the deepness of his voice. “No bags and nothing to hang up,” he said, smiling. He felt that all he had was breasts—the terrific knockers Roberta had made for him—and he walked slouched and stoop-shouldered to try to hold them back. There was no holding them back, though.
As soon as he chose a seat, some man chose to sit beside him. Garp looked out the window. Passengers were still hurrying to his plane. Among them, he saw a wraithlike, dirty blond-haired girl. She had no coat and no carry-on luggage, either. Just that oversized pursebig enough for a bomb. Thickly, Garp sensed the Under Toad—a wriggle at his hip. He looked toward the aisle, so that he would notice where the girl chose to sit, but he looked into the leering face of the man who'd taken the aisle seat beside him.
“Perhaps, when we're in the air,” the man said, knowingly, “I could buy you a little drink?” His small, close-together eyes were riveted on the twisted zipper of Garp's straining turquoise jump suit.
Garp felt a peculiar kind of unfairness overwhelm him. He had not asked to have such an anatomy. He wished he could have spent a quiet time, just talking, with that wise and pleasant-looking woman, Sally Devlin, the failed gubernatorial candidate from New Hampshire. He would have told her that she was too good for the rotten job.
“That's some suit you got,” said Garp's leering seat partner.
“Go stick it in your ear,” Garp said. He was, after all, the son of a woman who'd slashed a masher at a movie in Boston—years ago, long ago. The man struggled to get up, but he couldn't; his seat belt would not release him. He looked helplessly at Garp. Garp leaned over the man's trapped lap; Garp gagged on his own dose of perfume, which he remembered Roberta slathering over him. He got the seat-belt clasp to operate properly and released the man with a sharp snap. Then Garp growled a menacing whisper in the man's very red ear. “When we're in the air, cutie,” he whispered to the frightened fellow, “go blow yourself in the bathroom.”
But when the man deserted Garp's company, the aisle seat was vacant, inviting someone else. Garp glared challengingly at the empty seat, daring the next man on the make to sit there. The person who approached Garp shook his momentary confidence. She was very thin, her girlish hands bony and clutching her oversized purse. She didn't ask first; she just sat down. The Under Toad is a very young girl today, Garp thought. When she reached into her purse, Garp caught her wrist and pulled her hand out of the bag and into her lap. She was not strong, and in her hand there was no gun; there was not even a knife. Garp saw only a pad of paper and a pencil with the eraser bitten down to a nub.