Read Online Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell - Free Book Online Page A

already had
phoned the other and said, within impudent earshot, as if she were
convinced her mother was deaf or altogether unaware of her
surroundings, “She’s in some kind of surreal log." And then,
“No, not Lawnboy, she just sits there, writing" "Lawnboy"
was a code reference to a scandal involving Mrs. Hollingsworth and
the boy who cut the lawn.
    This condemnation had nothing to do, Mrs.
Hollingsworth knew, with what was actually on this list. That
whatever she was doing was not a real list—which was clear to
anyone who looked at it from across the room, and given the time she
spent on it was sufficient grounds for the surreal-fog charge. She
was not making a grocery list, she was not putting on her red ERA
coat and selling a house, she was not watching soap operas (real log?
real not-fog? surreal clarity?), she was not housecleaning, she was
not dolling up for Dad (whom the daughters despised but felt
nonetheless she should seek to please), so she was, ergo, in a
surreal fog.
    She wondered how these things, her children, had come
out of her. How had she borne into the world the Tupperware sisters?
And square canisters at that. Her daughters were with the world, with
the program. They had gotten aboard the wagon with the rest of the
NPR Rockettes. There was a great crowd of folk out there who had
assigned themselves the task of watching out for the surreal fog.
These were the same folk who thought you were a better person if you
could hum along to Mozart. Who elected themselves to all the
proprietary boards, local, state, national, and now global, that they
could. They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what
everyone did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel.
They were the three-headed dog guarding the boat of the sane. They
called it, moreover, being human. She could see that this was what
Forrest was riding against with his boys, who, unable to articulate
the evil, could nonetheless dress up against it and slouch against it
and ride their insolent sleighs in their insolent pants, showing
their asses, over the hills and through the woods to grandmothers
house we go. Her daughters looked like the Doublemint twins in this
cartoon. They had on matching lime-green sunsuits and cat’s-eye
glasses and chewed confidently.
    Mrs. Hollingsworth was ready to go on a date with
Rape Oswald if he came through the door. The Oswald she had left on a
sidewalk in Holly Springs Mississippi furiously pulling surreal fog
out of himself. She liked his pluck and his mettle. Maybe he was the
man for her. To the fog: en avant!
    And was she demented if she wanted surreal-fog Rape
Oswald more than her real-fog husband? There was nothing wrong with
her husband, except two things. He was a human being, and after
twenty-five years he resided indeed in a fog of familiarity next to
her, as she presumed she resided in one next to him. When she had
still had friends, she told one of them once, trying to put her
finger on just what was wrong between them, “I don’t know—he’s
just so. . . aloof. ”
She had felt ridiculous telling the woman this, watching her tsk her
head in an expression of pity suggesting that she did not suffer the
same aloofness at her familiar house. It got to where Mrs.
Hollingsworth felt self-conscious telling anyone anything, actually,
especially these Volvo tsk-tskers, all she or any of them had for
friends, and she had gradually obtained an agreeable predicament
wherein she did not say ridiculous self-conscious things to these
women, because she stopped talking to them altogether. Was it
demented to have no one to talk to? Or, more precisely, not to want
to talk to anyone? She hardly thought so. Was it demented to want an
imaginary man? Was that not the condition of all women, starting at
about age thirteen? Did they not really keep on doing it all their
lives? As did not men keep seeking imaginary women? What was so
demented in wanting Rape Oswald if you looked at it this way? He