Chapter 11.2

Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, as my room was the stuffiest in the house. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping--to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without having been called--Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a belle-lettrist's inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics of my slowly-progressing book. As she bent her brown curs over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in an awkward imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying the piece of paper she held. I was just about to give her a rudimentary explanation of the work that I do—“You see, Lo, respectable adults earn their living”—when the house was suddenly vibrating with voluble Louise's voice telling Mrs. Haze who had just come home about a dead something she and Leslie Tomson had found in the basement, and little Lolita was not one to miss such a tale.

Sunday. House was quiet, Humbert was productive. Dolores and her mother off to the Hamiltons--a birthday party or something.

Monday. Rainy morning, gray and soft. My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard. But where is my prey? Nowhere to be found, all in the city where I left them. I keep waiting for one of Haze’s friends to have a smidgen of charm with which to tempt me, but no, not one, though that does not stop them all from trying. How much more country living until they look appetizing, and on that day, shall I take one to bed or kill myself?

I satisfy with morbidity while in the kitchen Lolita is banging the refrigerator door and screeching at her detested mamma (who, I suppose, is enjoying her third, cooing and subduedly mirthful, telephone conversation of the morning). Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlor and find the radio silent (and mamma still talking to Mrs. Chatfield or Mrs. Hamilton, very softly, flushed, smiling, cupping the telephone with her free hand, denying by implication that she denies those amusing rumors, rumor, roomer, whispering intimately, as she never does, the clear-cut lady, in face to face talk). Now it is my turn to be the fly, her lover in word if never in deed. And then comes Lolita's chuckle through my half-open door "Don't tell Mother but I've eaten all your bacon." Gone when I scuttle out of my room to reprimand her. My breakfast tray, lovingly prepared by my landlady, leers at me toothlessly, ready to be taken in. Quite a pair, these two.

Tuesday. Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming? Yesterday I tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks. Look out, lakecombers.

Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. "Choose your favorite seduction," she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car.

"Hurry up," she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when Lolita's sharp voice came from the parlor window: "You! Where are you going? I'm coming too! Wait!" "Ignore her," yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. I stepped out—"This is intolerable," began Haze—and Lo scrambled into the backseat, shivering with glee. Haze sideglanced at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out, forgetting that she was the one who had such powers. "And behold," said Lo (not for the first time) as the car leapt forward. "It is intolerable," said Haze, violently getting into second, "that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath." It was all true, but a day alone with Haze? No thank you.

The girl and I fell silent all the way to the store. The wings of the driver's Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile. I have nothing else to report, save that the lady decided to keep Humbert's Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.

Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People's Encyclopedia, I found a map of the states that a child's pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school:

Chatfield, Phyllis
Haze, Dolores
McCoo, Virginia
Windmuller, Louise
So On
So Forth

I imagined so well the rest of the colorful classroom around Lo: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard terror; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella; Ralph, who bullies and steals. And even as I took part in this rainy-day game, I also imagined their mothers, at least one of which I might meet at one of those insufferable parent-teacher evenings (or the teacher herself!), who would say, “So you’re the reason for Lo’s improving grades,” and would invite me to a private celebration in her bedroom. Yes, even as a tutor, Humbert the lion was on the prowl, getting ahead of himself, while Lo sat in her classroom, lost, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, mediocre, potential unrealized.

Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Something to break the monotony. Idle and idiotic fancies!

Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated Dolores for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder--and plunge with a local strumpet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant sunbather.

At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickax, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a dream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air--one of those little omissions due to the absentmindedness of the dream agent.

Saturday. After lunch I was reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes: she had crept up from behind. She uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing my recumbent position. The book like a sleigh left my lap, and Mrs. Haze strolled up and said indulgently: "Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations.” As if all of a sudden this was a house of discipline. “How I love this garden [no exclamation mark in her tone]. Isn't it divine in the sun [no question mark either]." And with a sign of feigned content, the obnoxious lady sank down on the grass and looked up at the sky as she leaned back on her splayed-out hands, and presently an old gray tennis ball bounced over her, and Lo's voice came from the house haughtily: "Pardonnez, Mother. I was not aiming at you." The look Haze gave her daughter was a fierce reminder of what seemed to be the house’s only rule—don’t bother Mother. It’s anarchy, I tell you. Boring, lazy anarchy.