The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [16]
To my relief she greets me cheerfully. She clasps one leg, rests her cheek on a knee and rubs an iron welt with steel wool. She has the advantage of me, sitting at her ease in a litter of summers past, broken wicker, split croquet balls, rotting hammocks. Now she wipes the welt with solvent; it begins to turn pale. “Well? Aren’t you supposed to tell me something?”
“Yes, but I forget what it was.”
“Binx Binx. You’re to tell me all sorts of things.”
“That’s true.”
“It will end with me telling you.”
“That would be better.”
“How do you make your way in the world?”
“Is that What you call it? I don’t really know. Last month I made three thousand dollars—less capital gains.”
“How did you get through a war without getting killed?”
“It was not through any doing of yours.”
“Anh anh anh.” It is an old passage between us, more of a joke now than a quarrel. “And how do you appear so reasonable to Mother?”
“I feel reasonable with her.”
“She thinks you’re one of her kind.”
“What kind is that?”
“A proper Bolling. Jules thinks you’re a go-getter. But you don’t fool me.”
“You know.”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.”
She is in tolerable good spirits. It is not necessary to pay too much attention to her. I spy the basket-arm of a broken settee. It has a presence about it: the ghost of twenty summers in Feliciana. I perch on a bony spine of wicker and prop hands on knees.
“I remember what I came for. Will you go to Lejiers and watch the parade?”
Kate stretches out a leg to get at her cigarettes. Her ritual of smoking stands her in good stead. She extracts the wadded pack, kneads the warm cellophane, taps a cigarette violently and accurately against her thumbnail, lights it with a Zippo worn smooth and yellow as a pocket watch. Pushing back her shingled hair, she blows out a plume of gray lung smoke and plucks a grain from her tongue. She reminds me of college girls before the war, how they would sit five and six in a convertible, seeming old to me and sullen-silent toward men and toward their own sex, how they would take refuge in their cigarettes: the stripping of cellophane, the clash of Zippos, the rushing plume of lung smoke expelled up in a long hissing sigh.
“Her idea?”
“Yes.”
Kate begins to nod and goes on nodding. “You must have had quite a powwow.”
“Not much of one.”
“You’ve never understood Mother’s dynamics.”
“Her dynamics?”
“What do you suppose she and I talk about?”
“What?”
“You. I’m sick of talking about you.”
Now I do look at her. Her voice has suddenly taken on its “objective” tone. Since she started her social work, Kate has spells of talking frankly in which she recites case histories in a kind of droning scientific voice: “—and all the While it was perfectly obvious that the poor woman had never experienced an orgasm.” “Is such a thing possible!” I would cry and we would shake our heads in the strong sense of our new camaraderie, the camaraderie of a science which is not too objective to pity the follies and ignorance of the world.
There is nothing new in her tack against her stepmother. Nor do I object, to tell the truth. It seems to serve her well enough, this discovery of the possibilities of hatred. She warms under its influence. It serves to make the basement a friendlier place. Her hatred is a consequence of a swing of her dialectic. She has, in the past few months, swung back to her father (the basement is to be a TV room for him). In the beginning she had been her father’s child. Then, as a young girl, the person of her stepmother, this quick, charming and above all intelligent woman, had appeared at a critical time in her rebellion. Her stepmother became for her the rallying point of all those forces which, until then, had been hardly felt as more than formless discontents. If she hadn’t much use for her father’s ways, his dogged good nature, his Catholic unseriousness, his little water closet jokes, his dumbness about his God, the good Lord; the everlasting dumb importuning of her just to be good, to mind the sisters, and to go his way, his dumb way of inner faith and outer good spirits