IT WAS ONLY ABOUT FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN I LEFT Bryan Ponder’s—nearly three hours before I was due at Jean Arber’s for dinner. Ordinarily I would have nosed around the Hyattsville–Riverdale area, seeing what I could find in the local antique shops. But I wasn’t in an ordinary mood.
What I did instead was drive out to Greenbelt, Maryland, where I sat in the parking lot of a Safeway for two hours, watching people come and go with their bags of groceries. I felt blank, neither depressed nor elated, neither interested nor bored. Watching the humble citizens of Greenbelt carry out their equally humble bags of groceries was not an exciting way to pass the time, but it was sufficient. One woman’s sack burst as she was passing in front of my car and she looked so distressed that I got out to help her. The sack contained mostly Spam, plus a few cans of frozen orange juice and a stalk of celery. I guarded the Spam while the woman went back to get another sack.
I knew that at some point I had to call Cindy and tell her a lie, but no lie came immediately to mind and I kept putting it off. That proved to be a mistake, because while I was sitting watching the afternoon traffic back up on the street in front of me the car phone rang and it was Cindy.
“I thought you were going to call in,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’m out in Frederick,” I said, instinctively placing myself about fifty miles from my actual location.
“Come on back,” she said. “Lilah’s throwing a little party. She wants us.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “I don’t know if I can make it.”
There was a moment of silence. It was not a pleased silence, either.
“I told her we’d come,” Cindy said, as if that fact rendered the matter closed.
“I thought you were dependable,” she added. “What are you doing in Maryland, anyway?”
“I’m waiting to see a man about a gun,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “You’re going to screw up this party because of a gun?”
“I didn’t know there was going to be a party,” I pointed out.
“You would have if you’d called in.”
“I called in several times but the line was always busy,” I said. It wasn’t true, but it was plausible.
Cindy was silent again. She was not particularly contentious—argument for argument’s sake didn’t really interest her. Her view of life was grounded in certain simple verities, the main one being that she should get whatever she wanted. It was not so much a facet of selfishness as of extreme good health. To be denied might mean being unhappy, and she was too healthy to allow herself to be unhappy.
Unfortunately she had caught me in a rare mood. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to having dinner with Jean Arber and her daughters, but neither did I want to go to a party at Lilah Landry’s. I felt like I might just sit in the Safeway parking lot for several days, watching people carry out bags of groceries. I had settled in nicely to that life, and I wasn’t ready to leave it.
Consequently, I met silence with silence. Cindy didn’t say anything and neither did I.
I didn’t expect that to last long, and it didn’t.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.
“I already said it,” I said. “I really have to see this man about the gun. It’s a $20,000 gun. I can’t get him on the phone, either. He’s on his way here from Pennsylvania.”
It was not bad, for a spur-of-the-moment lie. After all, I did have a fine gun in the car. The right collector might pay me $20,000 for it. It meant I had something to show when I finally went back to face the music.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Cindy said. “I told Lilah we’d come to the party.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know I had a previous engagement,” I said. “And I didn’t know about the party. Things don’t always mesh.”
“They do in my life,” she said.
“Look,” I said. “Just go on to the party. I’ll get there when I can.”
“No way,” Cindy said. “I can’t show up without you.”
“Why not?”
“People are getting interested in you,” she said. “You’re being talked about. Lilah just asked me to get you. She’s not gonna want me showing up by myself.”
“That’s pretty insulting,” I said. “I don’t think we should go at all, in that case. Why go to a party where you’re not wanted?”
“But I am wanted, if I bring you,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “I think you’re subtracting yourself. If you’re not wanted unless you’re with me, then you’re not wanted.”
“I hate you,” she said suddenly. “You just got here last week and you don’t understand anything. Just shut up and come on back. You don’t have to buy a gun.
“I don’t appreciate this,” she went on, with a quiver in her voice. “I’ve done a lot for you. If it wasn’t for me people wouldn’t even be interested in you.”
“I don’t think they’re very interested,” I said. “I think I’m just a new face.”
There was another silence. During my life with Coffee I had become something of a connoisseur of silences. During the latter, Coffee was simply more or less absent. In fact, her genius was for the absent silence. Hers could go on for days.
Cindy’s present silence seemed to have elided from angry to hurt. It might have been strategy. Women can usually figure out when tears will get them more than blows.
“I didn’t think you’d do this to me,” she said, with a kind of dying fall in her voice. “I thought you were nice,” she added.
“I guess I’m not,” I said. It was all I could think of to say.
“I’m not going without you,” she said. “I’m going home. You just better come.”
Then she hung up.
I immediately called back, but the line was busy.
This was an unfortunate turn of events. Cindy had adopted, instinctively, the smart tactic of making me feel guilty. I had no doubt that she would do exactly what she said. She would go home and wait, expecting that guilt would bring me back in plenty of time for the party.
However, after sitting for a while, I found that I wasn’t feeling guilty. The parking lot of a Safeway in Greenbelt, Maryland, is in some ways a remote place. It was not literally a desert, but sitting in it I felt some of the remoteness that I might have felt had I been in a desert. Greenbelt seemed to be a kind of enclave for people who were not quite right. None of the people who were moping around in the parking lot were monsters in any way—in fact, they seemed rather pleasant—but on the other hand they weren’t quite like people in other places, either. A great many of them were stooped, whether with the weight of cares or because of arthritic conditions I don’t know. Many were smiling, and yet they didn’t look like the sort of people who had much to smile about. They didn’t seem to be smiling at anyone, or for any reason, unless they were secretly delighted to be carrying home shopping bags filled with Spam or Spaghetti-Os or other treats. I don’t think that was the case, though. I think they were just smiling out into the universe, in a rather childlike fashion.
In fact, the longer I watched them shuffle out of the Safeway and push their grocery carts slowly off to their nondescript little cars, the more it seemed that the parking lot in Greenbelt had developed its own indigenous life forms. You wouldn’t have seen a single person who looked like them in the parking lot of a Safeway in southwest Houston—to give only one example.
The effect of watching them for an hour or so was to make me feel extremely remote from Georgetown, Cindy, and all social obligations of a normal type. The people moving around my car all seemed to be slightly bent, slightly handicapped, slightly gaga, or just depressing to look at. As dusk fell I began to feel that I had wandered into a garden of grotesques. They were not aggressive grotesques—they all looked rather soft, rather helpless. I saw four men get off a bus and start across the parking lot and all four of them walked oddly. Instead of pointing forward their legs pointed at angles to one another.
Also, unfortunately, I notice clothes. All the hideous synthetics worn by the people in the Department of Transportation had depressed me that morning, and now the clothes of the people in the parking lot in Greenbelt were depressing me just as much. They looked like remnants that had been handed down through generations of bottom-grade civil servants. Overall, they reminded me of what people wear who work in the charity stores I used to work: Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul, Disabled Vets.
The longer I sat the more convinced I became that there must be some connection between the customers of this particular Safeway and the thrift stores of the D.C. area. Perhaps Greenbelt was a service town for all the thrifts, thoughtfully established by someone for just that purpose.
It was a snobbish thought, as I was well aware. But no one can be a successful scout without being a visual snob. The ability to spot beauty even in bad light is the first essential—perhaps the only essential. When I had first come to the parking lot the people had sort of matched my mood. I felt I must be slightly off center, for living the life I did—being surrounded by people who were slightly off center had been a kind of comfort. But the comfort was only temporary. I might be off center, but the people in the parking lot now were way off on the edge somewhere, in a time zone of their own. I might be adrift, but I didn’t want to drift any farther in their direction.
Besides, I had come out of my depression sufficiently to feel that I might be capable of dealing with a live current again. I picked up the phone and dialed Jean, and a live current answered.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the one with the soft car.”
“I know,” Belinda said, impatiently. “You jist come on. We’re havin’ peas.”