Read Online When She Was Good by Philip Roth - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Philip Roth
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sweetheart, droning through the open window of 104. Never again in Roy’s entire life—
never—
would he have to walk up to the board and stand there with the chalk in his hand while old “Criss” gave him a problem to do in front of the entire class. To his surprise, the revelation made him very sad. And he had hated algebra. He had barely passed. When he had come home with a D his father had practically hit the ceiling … Boy, the things you can miss, he thought, if you’re a little crazy in the head, and strolled on, down through the ravine and out to the river, where he sat in the sun by the landing, separating Hydrox cookies, eating first the bare half, then the half to which the filling had adhered, and thinking, “Twenty. Twenty years old. Twenty-year-old Roy Bassart.” He watched the flow of the river and thought that the water was like time itself. Somebody ought to write a poem about that, he thought, and then he thought, “Why not me?”
The water is like time itself,
Running … running …
The water is like time itself,
Flowing … flowing …
Sometimes even before noon he was overtaken with hunger, and he would stop off downtown at Dale’s Dairy Bar for a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato, and a glass of milk. At the PX in Adak they wouldn’t make a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato sandwich. Don’t ask why, he once said to Uncle Julian. They just wouldn’t do it. They had the cheese and the bacon and the tomato and the bread, but they just wouldn’t put it all together on the grill, even if you told them how. You could talk yourself red in the face to the guy behind the counter, but he simply wouldn’t
do
it. Well, that’s the old chicken s—t Army, as he told Julian.
Afternoons he would often drop by the public library,where his old steady, Bev Collison, used to work after school. With his drawing pad in his lap, he would look through magazines for scenes to copy out. He had lost interest in the human head, and decided that rather than drive himself crazy trying to get a mouth to look like something that opened and closed, he would specialize in landscapes. He looked through hundreds of
Holiday
magazines—without much inspiration—though he did get to read about a lot of places and national customs of which he was totally ignorant, so it wasn’t time wasted—except when he fell asleep because the library as usual was so damn stuffy, and you actually had to make a requisition to get them to open a window and let some air in the place. Just like the Army. The most simple-minded thing, and you had to go around all day getting somebody’s permission to do it. Oh, brother, was it good to be free. With a whole life ahead of him. A whole future, in which he could be and do anything he wanted.
During the fall he would usually walk back out to the high school late in the afternoon to watch the football team practice, and stay on until it was practically dark, moving up and down the sidelines with the plays. Close in like that he could hear the rough canvasy
slap!
as the linemen came together—a sound he especially liked—and actually see those amazing granite legs of Tug Sigerson, which were said never to stop churning, even at the bottom of a pile-up. They would pull ten guys off him and there would be old Tug, still going for the extra inch, the inch that by the end of a game really could be the difference between victory and defeat. Or suddenly he would have to go scattering back with the little crowd of spectators, as one of the halfbacks came galloping straight at them, spraying chunks of dirt so high and so far that on his way home Roy sometimes found a little clump of the playing field in his hair. “Boy,” he’d think, breaking the earth in his fingers, “that kid was
movin
’.”
The guy you especially wanted to watch up close, just for the beauty of it, was the big left end, Wild Bill Elliott. Wild Bill had spent three years faking the opposition out of theirpants,
never—
would he have to walk up to the board and stand there with the chalk in his hand while old “Criss” gave him a problem to do in front of the entire class. To his surprise, the revelation made him very sad. And he had hated algebra. He had barely passed. When he had come home with a D his father had practically hit the ceiling … Boy, the things you can miss, he thought, if you’re a little crazy in the head, and strolled on, down through the ravine and out to the river, where he sat in the sun by the landing, separating Hydrox cookies, eating first the bare half, then the half to which the filling had adhered, and thinking, “Twenty. Twenty years old. Twenty-year-old Roy Bassart.” He watched the flow of the river and thought that the water was like time itself. Somebody ought to write a poem about that, he thought, and then he thought, “Why not me?”
The water is like time itself,
Running … running …
The water is like time itself,
Flowing … flowing …
Sometimes even before noon he was overtaken with hunger, and he would stop off downtown at Dale’s Dairy Bar for a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato, and a glass of milk. At the PX in Adak they wouldn’t make a grilled cheese and bacon and tomato sandwich. Don’t ask why, he once said to Uncle Julian. They just wouldn’t do it. They had the cheese and the bacon and the tomato and the bread, but they just wouldn’t put it all together on the grill, even if you told them how. You could talk yourself red in the face to the guy behind the counter, but he simply wouldn’t
do
it. Well, that’s the old chicken s—t Army, as he told Julian.
Afternoons he would often drop by the public library,where his old steady, Bev Collison, used to work after school. With his drawing pad in his lap, he would look through magazines for scenes to copy out. He had lost interest in the human head, and decided that rather than drive himself crazy trying to get a mouth to look like something that opened and closed, he would specialize in landscapes. He looked through hundreds of
Holiday
magazines—without much inspiration—though he did get to read about a lot of places and national customs of which he was totally ignorant, so it wasn’t time wasted—except when he fell asleep because the library as usual was so damn stuffy, and you actually had to make a requisition to get them to open a window and let some air in the place. Just like the Army. The most simple-minded thing, and you had to go around all day getting somebody’s permission to do it. Oh, brother, was it good to be free. With a whole life ahead of him. A whole future, in which he could be and do anything he wanted.
During the fall he would usually walk back out to the high school late in the afternoon to watch the football team practice, and stay on until it was practically dark, moving up and down the sidelines with the plays. Close in like that he could hear the rough canvasy
slap!
as the linemen came together—a sound he especially liked—and actually see those amazing granite legs of Tug Sigerson, which were said never to stop churning, even at the bottom of a pile-up. They would pull ten guys off him and there would be old Tug, still going for the extra inch, the inch that by the end of a game really could be the difference between victory and defeat. Or suddenly he would have to go scattering back with the little crowd of spectators, as one of the halfbacks came galloping straight at them, spraying chunks of dirt so high and so far that on his way home Roy sometimes found a little clump of the playing field in his hair. “Boy,” he’d think, breaking the earth in his fingers, “that kid was
movin
’.”
The guy you especially wanted to watch up close, just for the beauty of it, was the big left end, Wild Bill Elliott. Wild Bill had spent three years faking the opposition out of theirpants,
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