The World According to Garp

3. WHAT HE WANTED TO BE WHEN HE GREW UP

In 1781 the widow and children of Everett Steering founded Steering Academy, as it was first called, because Everett Steering had announced to his family, while carving his last Christmas goose, that his only disappointment with his town was that he had not provided his boys with an academy capable of preparing them for a higher education. He did not mention his girls. He was a shipbuilder in a village whose life-link to the sea was a doomed river; Everett knew the river was doomed. He was a smart man, and not usually playful, but after Christmas dinner he indulged in a snowball fight with both his boys and his girls. He died of apoplexy before nightfall. Everett Steering was seventy-two; even his boys and his girls were too old for snowball fights, but he had a right to call the town of Steering his town.

It had been named after him in a glut of enthusiasm for the town's independence following the Revolutionary War. Everett Steering had organized the installation of mounted cannons at strategic points along the river shore; these cannons were meant to discourage an attack that never came—from the British, who were expected to sail up the river from the sea at Great Bay. The river was called Great River then, but after the war it was called the Steering River; and the town, which had no proper name—but had always been called The Meadows, because it lay in the salt- and fresh-water marshes only a few miles inland from Great Bay—was also called Steering.

Many families in Steering were dependent on shipbuilding, or on other business that came up the river from the sea; since it was first called The Meadows, the village had been a backup port to Great Bay. But along with his wishes to found a boys' academy, Everett Steering told his family that Steering would not be a port for very long. The river, he noticed, was choking with silt.

In all his life, Everett Steering was known to tell only one joke, and only to his family. The joke was that the only river to have been named after him was full of mud; and it was getting fuller by the minute. The land was all marsh and meadow, from Steering to the sea, and unless people decided that Steering was worth maintaining as a port, and gouged a deeper channel for the river, Everett knew that even a rowboat would eventually have trouble making it from Steering to Great Bay (unless there was a very high tide). Everett knew that the tide would one day fill in the riverbed from his home town to the Atlantic.

In the next century, the Steering family was wise to stake its life-support system on the textile mills they constructed to span the waterfall on the freshwater part of the Steering River. By the time of the Civil War the only business in the town of Steering, on the Steering River, was the Steering Mills. The family got out of boats and into textiles when the time was ripe.

Another shipbuilding family in Steering was not so lucky; this family's last ship made it only half the way from Steering to the sea. In a once-notorious part of the river, called The Gut, the last ship made in Steering settled into the mud forever, and for years it could be seen from the road, half out of the water at high tide and completely dry at low tide. Kids played in it until it listed to its side and crushed someone's dog. A pig farmer named Gilmore salvaged the ship's masts to raise his barn. And by the time young Garp attended Steering, the varsity crew could row their shells on the river only at high tide. At low tide the Steering River is one wet mudflat from Steering to the sea.

It was, therefore, due to Everett Steering's instincts about water that a boys' academy was founded in 1781. After a century or so, it flourished.

“Over all those years,” Garp wrote, “the shrewd Steering genes must have suffered some dilution; the family instincts regarding water went from good to very bad.” Garp enjoyed referring to Midge Steering Percy in this way. “A Steering whose water instincts had run their course,” he said. Garp thought it wonderfully ironic “that the Steering genes for water sense ran out of chromosomes when they got to Midge. Her sense of water was so perverse,” Garp wrote, “that it attracted her first to Hawaii and then to the United States Navy—in the form of Fat Stew.”

Midge Steering Percy was the end of the bloodline. The Steering School itself would become the last Steering after her, and perhaps old Everett foresaw that, too; many families have left less, or worse, behind. In Garp's day, at least, the Steering School was still relentless and definite in its purpose: “the preparing of young men for a higher education.” And in Garp's case, he had a mother who also took that purpose seriously. Garp himself took the school so seriously that even Everett Steering, with his one joke in a lifetime, would have been pleased.

Garp knew what to take for courses and whom to have for teachers. That is often the difference between doing well or poorly in a school. He was not really a gifted student, but he had direction; many of his courses were still fresh in Jenny's mind, and she was a good drillmaster. Garp was probably no more of a natural at intellectual pursuits than his mother, but he had Jenny's powerful discipline; a nurse is a natural at establishing a routine, and Garp believed in his mother.

If Jenny was remiss in her advice, it was in only one area. She had never paid any attention to the sports at Steering; she could offer Garp no suggestions as to what games he might like to play. She could tell him that he would like East Asian Civilization with Mr. Merrill more than he would like Tudor England with Mr. Langdell. But, for example, Jenny did not know the differences in pleasure and pain between football and soccer. She had observed only that her son was small, strong, well balanced, quick, and solitary; she assumed he already knew what games he liked to play. He did not.

Crew, he thought, was stupid. Rowing a boat in unison, a galley slave dipping your oar in foul water and the Steering River was indeed foul. The river was afloat with factory scum and human turds—and always the after-tide, salt-water slime was on the mudflats (a muck the texture of refrigerated bacon fat). Everett Steering's river was full of more than mud, but even if it had been sparkling clean, Garp was no oarsman. And no tennis player, either. In one of his earliest essays—his freshman year at Steering—Garp wrote: “I do not care for balls. The ball stands between the athlete and his exercise. So do hockey pucks, and badminton birdies—and skates, like skis, intrude between the body and the ground. And when one further removes one's body from the contest by an extension device—such as a racket, a bat, or a stick—all purity of movement, strength, and focus is lost.” Even at fifteen, one could sense his instinct for a personal aesthetic.

Since he was too small for football, and soccer certainly involved a ball, he ran long distance, which was called cross-country, but he stepped in too many puddles and suffered all fall from a perpetual cold.

When the winter sports season opened, Jenny was distressed at how much restlessness her son exhibited; she criticized him for making too much of a mere athletic decision—why didn't he know what form of exercise he might prefer? But sports did not feel like recreation to Garp. Nothing felt like recreation to Garp. From the beginning, he appeared to believe there was something strenuous to achieve. ("Writers do not read for fun,” Garp would write, later, speaking for himself.) Even before young Garp knew he was going to be a writer, or knew what he wanted to be, it appears he did nothing “for fun.”

Garp was confined to the infirmary on the day he was supposed to sign up for a winter sport. Jenny would not let him get out of bed. “You don't know what you want to sign up for, anyway,” she told him. All Garp could do was cough.

“This is silly beyond mortal belief,” Jenny told him. “Fifteen years in this snotty, rude community and you fall to pieces trying to decide what game you're going to play to occupy your afternoons.”

“I haven't found my sport, Mom,” Garp croaked. “I've got to have a sport.”

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“I don't know,” he moaned. He coughed and coughed.

“God, listen to you,” Jenny complained. “I'll find you a sport,” she said. “I'll go over to the gym and sign you up for something.”

“No!” Garp begged.

And Jenny pronounced what was for Garp, in his four years at Steering, her litany. “I know more than you do, don't I?", she said. Garp fell back on his sweaty pillow.

“Not about this, Mom,” he said. “You took all the courses but you never played on any of the teams.”

If Jenny Fields recognized this as a rare oversight, she did not admit it. It was a typical Steering December day, the ground glassy with frozen slush and the snow gray and muddy from the boots of eight hundred boys. Jenny Fields bundled up and trudged across the winter-grim campus like the convinced and determined mother she was. She looked like a nurse resigned to bring what slim hope she could to the bitter Russian front. In such a manner Jenny Fields approached the Steering gym. In her fifteen years at Steering, Jenny had never been there; she had not known it was important. At the far end of the Steering campus, ringed by the acres of playing fields, the hockey rinks, the tennis courts like the cross section of a huge, human hive, Jenny saw the giant gymnasium loom out of the dirty snow like a battle she had not anticipated, and her heart filled with worry and with gloom.

The Seabrook Gymnasium and Field House—and the Seabrook Stadium, and the Seabrook Ice Hockey Rinks—were named after the superb athlete and World War I flying ace Miles Seabrook, whose face and massive torso greeted Jenny in a triptych of photographs enshrined in the display case in the gym's vast entrance-way: Miles Seabrook, '09, his head in a leather football helmet, his shoulder pads probably unnecessary. Beneath the photo of old No. 32 was the near-demolished jersey itself: faded and frequently under the attack of moths, the jersey lay in a heap in the locked trophy case under the first third of Miles Seabrook's triptych photograph. A sign said: HIS ACTUAL SHIRT.

The center shot in the triptych showed Miles Seabrook as a hockey goalie—in those old days the goalies wore pads, but the brave face was naked, the eyes clear and challenging, the scar tissue everywhere. Miles Seabrook's bulk filled the dwarfed net. How could anyone have scored on Miles Seabrook, his cat-quick and bear-sized leather paws, his club-like stick and swollen chest protector, his skates like the long claws of a giant anteater? Beneath the football and the hockey pictures were the scores of the annual big games: in every Steering sport, the season ended in the traditional contest with Bath Academy, nearly as old and famous as Steering, and every Steering schoolboy's hated rival. The vile Bath boys in their gold and green (in Garp's day, these colors were called puke and baby-shit): STEERING 7, BATH 6; STEERING 3, BATH 0. Nobody scored on Miles.

Captain Miles Seabrook, as he was called in the third photo in the triptych, stared back at Jenny Fields in a uniform all too familiar to her. It was a flyboy's suit, she saw in an instant; although the costumes changed between world wars, they did not change so much that Jenny failed to recognize the Reece-lined collar of the flight jacket, turned up at a cocky angle, and the confident, untied chin strap of the flight cap, the tipped up earmuffs (miles Seabrook's ears could never get cold!), and the goggles pushed carelessly up off the forehead. At his throat, the pure white scarf. No score was cited beneath this portrait, but if anyone in the Steering Athletic Department had possessed a sense of humor, Jenny might have read: UNITED STATES 16, GERMANY 1. Sixteen was the number of planes Miles Seabrook shot down before the Germans scored on him.

Ribbons and medals lay dusty in the locked trophy case, like offerings at an altar to Miles Seabrook. There was a battered wooden thing, which Jenny mistook for part of Miles Seabrook's shot-down plane; she was prepared for any tastelessness, but the wood was only all that remained of his last hockey stick. Why not his jock? thought Jenny Fields. Or, like a keepsake of a dead baby, a lock of his hair? Which was, in all three photos, covered by a helmet or a cap or a big striped sock. Perhaps, Jenny thought—with characteristic scorn—Miles Seabrook was hairless.

Jenny resented the implications lying honored in that dusty case. The warrior-athlete, merely undergoing an other change of uniform. Each time the body was offered only a pretense of protection: as a Steering School nurse, Jenny had seen fifteen years of football and hockey injuries, in spite of helmets, masks, straps, buckles, hinges, and pads. And Sergeant Garp, and the others, had shown Jenny that men at war had the most illusory protection of all.

Wearily, Jenny moved on; when she passed the display cases, she felt she was moving toward the engine of a dangerous machine. She avoided the arena-sized spaces in the gymnasium, where she could hear the shouts and grunts of contest. She sought the dark corridors, where, she supposed, the offices were. Have I spent fifteen years, she thought, to lose my child to this?

She recognized a part of the smell. Disinfectant. Years of strenuous scrubbing. No doubt that a gym was a place where germs of monstrous potential lay waiting for a chance to breed. That part of the smell reminded her of hospitals, and of the Steering infirmary—bottled, post-operative air. But here in the huge house built to the memory of Miles Seabrook there was another smell, as distasteful to Jenny Fields as the smell of sex. The complex of gym and field house had been erected in 1919, less than a year before she was born: what Jenny smelled was almost forty years of the forced farts and the sweat of boys under stress and strain. What Jenny smelled was competition, fierce and full of disappointment. She was such an outsider, it had never been part of her growing up.

In a corridor that seemed separated from the central areas of the gym's various energies, Jenny stood still and listened. Somewhere near her was a weight-lifting room; she heard the iron bashing and the terrible heaves of hernias in progress—a nurse's view of such exertion. In fact, it seemed to Jenny that the whole building groaned and pushed, as if every schoolboy at Steering suffered constipation and sought relievement in the horrid gym.

Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

The bleeding wrestler was at that instant upon her. Jenny was not sure how the groggy, dripping boy had surprised her, but a door opened off this corridor of small, innocuous-appearing rooms, and the matted face of the wrestler was smack in front of her with his ear guards pulled so askew on his head that the chin strap had slipped to his mouth, where it tugged his upper lip into a fishlike sneer. The little bowl of the strap, which had once cupped his chin, now brimmed with blood from his streaming nose.

As a nurse, Jenny was not over impressed with blood, but she cringed at her anticipated collision with the thick, wet, hard-looking boy, who somehow dodged her, lunging sideways. With admirable trajectory and volume, he vomited on his fellow wrestler who was struggling to support him. “Excuse me,” he burbled, for most of the boys at Steering were well brought up.

His fellow wrestler did him the favor of pulling his head gear off, so that the hapless puker would not choke or strangle; quite unmindful of his own bespattering, he called loudly back into the open door of the wrestling room, “Carlisle didn't make it!”

From the door of that room, whose heat beckoned Jenny in the way a tropical greenhouse might be alluring in midwinter, a man's clear tenor voice responded. “Carlisle! You had two helpings of that dining-hall slop for lunch, Carlisle! One helping and you deserve to lose it! No sympathy, Carlisle!”

Carlisle, for whom there was no sympathy, continued his lurching progress down the corridor; he bled and barfed his way to a door, through which he made his smeared escape. His fellow wrestler, who in Jenny's opinion had also withheld his sympathy, dropped Carlisle's headgear in the corridor with the rest of Carlisle's muck; then he followed Carlisle to the lockers. Jenny hoped that he was going somewhere to change his clothes.

She looked at the wrestling room's open door; she breathed deeply and stepped inside. Immediately, she felt off-balance. Underfoot was a soft fleshy feel, and the wall sank under her touch when she leaned against it; she was inside a padded cell, the floor and the wall mats warm and yielding, the air so stifling hot and stench-full of sweat that she hardly dared to breathe.

“Shut the door!” said the man's tenor voice—because wrestlers, Jenny would later know, love the heat and their own sweat, especially when they're cutting weight, and they thrive when the walls and floors are as hot and giving as the buttocks of sleeping girls.

Jenny shut the door. Even the door had a mat on it, and she slumped against it, imagining someone might open the door from the outside and mercifully release her. The man with the tenor voice was the coach and Jenny, through the shimmering heat, watched him pace against the long room's wall, unable to stand still while he squinted at his struggling wrestlers. “Thirty seconds!” he screamed to them. The couples on the mat bucked as if they were electrically stimulated. The batches of twosomes around the wrestling room were each locked in some violent tangle, the intent of each wrestler, in Jenny's eye, as deliberate and as desperate as rape.

“Fifteen seconds!” the coach screamed. “Push it!”

The twisted pair nearest Jenny suddenly came apart, their limbs unknotting, the veins on their arms and necks popping. A breathless cry and a string of saliva broke from one boy's mouth as his opponent broke free of him and they uncoupled, bashing into the padded wall.

“Time's up!” the coach screamed. He did not use a whistle. The wrestlers went suddenly limp, untying each other from each other with great slowness. A half dozen of them now lumbered toward Jenny at the door; they had the water fountain and fresh air on their minds, though Jenny assumed they were all heading for the hall in order to throw up, or bleed in peace—or both.

Jenny and the coach were the only standing bodies left in the wrestling room. Jenny observed that the coach was a neat, small man, as compact as a spring; she also observed he was nearly blind, because the coach now squinted in her direction, recognizing that her whiteness and her shape were foreign to the wrestling room. He began to grope for his glasses, which he usually stashed above the wall mats, at about head level—where they would not be so easily crushed by a wrestler who was flung upon them. Jenny observed that the coach was about her age, and that she had never seen him on or about the Steering campus before—with or without his glasses.

The coach was new at Steering. His name was Ernie Holm, and so far he had found the Steering community to be just as snotty as Jenny had found it. Ernie Holm had been a two-time Big Ten wrestling champion at the University of Iowa, but he had never won a national title and he had coached in high schools all over Iowa for fifteen years while trying to raise his only child, a daughter, all by himself. He was bone-tired of the Midwest, as he would have said it himself, and he had come East to assure his daughter of a classy education—as he would also have said it. She was the brains of the family, he was fond of saying—and she had her mother's fine looks, which he never mentioned.

Helen Holm, at fifteen, had spent a lifetime of three-hour afternoons sitting in wrestling rooms, from Iowa to Steering, watching boys of many sizes sweat and throw each other around. Helen would remark, years later, that spending her childhood as the only girl in a wrestling room had made her a reader. “I was brought up to be a spectator,” Helen said. “I was raised to be a voyeur.”

She was such a good and nonstop reader, in fact, that Ernie Holm had moved East just for her. He took the job at Steering for Helen's sake, because he had read in his contract that the children of the faculty and staff could attend the Steering School for free—or they could receive a comparable sum of money toward their tuition at another private school. Ernie Holm was a bad reader, himself; he had somehow overlooked the fact that Steering admitted only boys.

He found himself moving into the chilly Steering community in the fall, with his brainy daughter once more enrolled in a small, bad public school. In fact, the public school in the town of Steering was probably worse than most public schools because the smart boys in the town went to Steering, and the smart girls went away. Ernie Holm hadn't figured he'd have to send his daughter away from him—that had been why he'd moved: to stay with her. So while Ernie Holm was getting used to his new duties at Steering, Helen Holm wandered the fringes of the great school, devouring its bookstore and its library (hearing stories, no doubt, of the community's other great reader: Jenny Fields); and Helen continued to be bored, as she had been bored in Iowa, by her boring classmates in her boring public school.

Ernie Holm was sensitive to people who were bored. He had married a nurse sixteen years earlier; when Helen had been born, the nurse gave up her nursing to be a full-time mother. After six months she wanted to be a nurse again, but there were no day-care centers in Iowa in those years, and Ernie Holm's new wife grew gradually more distant under the strain of being a full-time mother and an ex-nurse. One day she left him. She left him with a full-time daughter and no explanation.

So Helen Holm grew up in wrestling rooms, which are very safe for children—being padded everywhere, and always warm. Books had kept Helen from being bored, although Ernie Holm worried how long his daughter's studiousness could continue to be nourished in a vacuum. Ernie was sure that the genes for being bored were in his daughter.

Thus he came to Steering. Thus Helen, who also wore glasses—as needfully as her father—was with him that day Jenny Fields walked into the wrestling room. Jenny didn't notice Helen; few people noticed Helen, when Helen was fifteen. Helen, however, noticed Jenny right away; Helen was unlike her father in that she didn't wrestle with the boys, or demonstrate moves and holds, and so she kept her glasses on.

Helen Holm was forever on the lookout for nurses because she was forever on the lookout for her disappeared mother, whom Ernie had made no attempt to find. With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer. But when Helen had been small, Ernie had indulged her with a speculative fable he no doubt liked to imagine himself—it was a story that had always intrigued Helen, too. “One day,” went the story, “you might see a pretty nurse, sort of looking like she doesn't know where she is anymore, and she might look at you like she doesn't know who you are, either—but she might look curious to find out.”

“And that will be my mom?” Helen used to ask her father.

“And that will be your mom!” Ernie used to say.

So when Helen Holm looked up from her book in the Steering wrestling room, she thought she saw her mother. Jenny Fields in her white uniform was forever appearing out of place; there on the crimson mats of the Steering School, she looked dark and healthy, strong-boned and handsome if not exactly pretty, and Helen Hohn must have thought that no other woman would have ventured into this soft-floored inferno where her father worked. Helen's glasses fogged, she closed her book; in her anonymous gray sweat suit, which hid her gawky fifteen-year-old frame—her hard hips and her small breasts—she stood up awkwardly against the wrestling-room wall and waited for her father's sign of recognition.

But Ernie Holm was still groping for his glasses; in a blur he saw the white figure—vaguely womanly, perhaps a nurse—and his heart paused at the possibility he had never really believed in: his wife's return, her saying, “Oh, how I've missed you and our daughter!” What other nurse would enter his place of employment?

Helen saw her father's fumbling, she took this to be the necessary sign. She stepped toward Jenny across the blood-warm mats, and Jenny thought: My God, that's a girl! A pretty girl with glasses. What's a pretty girl doing in a place like this?

“Mom?” the girl said to Jenny. “It's me, Mom! It's Helen,” she said, bursting into tears; she flung her slim arms around Jenny's shoulders and pressed her wet face to Jenny's throat.

“Jesus Christ!” said Jenny Fields, who was never a woman who liked to be touched. Still, she was a nurse and she must have felt Helen's need; she did not shove the girl away from her, though she knew very well she was not Helen's mother. Jenny Fields thought that having been a mother once was enough. She coolly patted the weeping girl's back and looked imploringly at the wrestling coach, who had just found his glasses. “I'm not your mother, either,” Jenny said politely to him, because he was looking at her with the same brief relief in his face that Jenny had seen in the face of the pretty girl.

What Ernie Holm thought was that the resemblance went deeper than the uniform and the coincidence of a wrestling room in two nurses' lives; but Jenny stopped short of being as pretty as Ernie's runaway wife, and Ernie was reflecting that even fifteen years would not have made his wife as plain and merely handsome as Jenny. Still, Jenny looked all right to Ernie Holm, who smiled an unclear, apologetic smile that his wrestlers were familiar with, when they lost.

“My daughter thought you were her mother,” Ernie Holm said to Jenny. “She hasn't seen her mother in quite a while.”

Obviously, thought Jenny Fields. She felt the girl tense and spring out of her arms.

“That's not your mom, darlin',” Ernie Holm said to Helen, who retreated to the wrestling-room wall; she was a tough-minded girl, not at all in the habit of emotionally displaying herself—not even to her father.

“And did you think I was your wife?” Jenny asked Ernie, because it had looked to her, for a moment, that Ernie had mistaken her, too. She wondered how long a “while” Mrs. Holm had been missing.

“You fooled me, for a minute,” Ernie said, politely; he had a shy grin, which be used sparingly.

Helen crouched in a corner of the wrestling room, fiercely eyeing Jenny as if Jenny were deliberately responsible for her embarrassment. Jenny felt moved by the girl; it had been years since Garp had hugged her like that, and it was a feeling that even a very selective mother, like Jenny, remembered missing.

“What's your name?” she asked Helen. “My name is Jenny Fields.”

It was a name Helen Holm knew, of course. She was the other mystery reader around the Steering School. Also, Helen had not previously given to anyone the feelings she reserved for a mother; even though it had been an accident that she'd flung those feelings around Jenny, Helen found it hard to call them back entirely. She had her father's shy smile and she looked thankfully at Jenny; oddly, Helen felt she would like to hug Jenny again, but she restrained herself. There were wrestlers shuffling back into the room, gasping from the drinking fountain, where those who were cutting weight had only rinsed their mouths.

“No more practice,” Ernie Holm told them, waving them out of the room. “That's it for today. Go run your laps!” Obediently, even relieved, they bobbed in the doorway of the crimson room; they picked up their headgear, their rubber sweat suits, their spools of tape. Ernie Holm waited for the room to clear, while his daughter and Jenny Fields waited for him to explain; at the very least, an explanation was in order, he felt, and there was nowhere Ernie felt as comfortable as he felt in a wrestling room. For him it was the natural place to tell someone a story, even a difficult story with no ending—and even to a stranger. So when his wrestlers had left to run their laps, Ernie very patiently began his father-and-daughter tale, the brief history of the nurse who left them, and of the Midwest they only recently had left. It was a story Jenny could appreciate, of course, because Jenny did not know an other single parent with a single child. And although she may have felt tempted to tell them her story—there being interesting similarities, and differences—Jenny merely repeated her standard version: the father of Garp was a soldier, and so forth. And who takes the time for weddings when there is a war? Though it was not the whole story, it clearly appealed to Helen and Ernie, who had met no one else in the Steering community as receptive and frank as Jenny.

There in the warm red wrestling room, on the soft mats, surrounded by those padded walls—in such an environment, sudden and inexplicable closeness is possible.

Of course Helen would remember that first hug her whole life; however her feelings for Jenny might change, and change back, from that moment in the wrestling room Jenny Fields was more of a mother to Helen than Helen had ever had. Jenny would also remember how it felt to be hugged like a mother, and would even note, in her autobiography, how a daughter's hug was different from a son's. It is at least ironic that her one experience for making such a pronouncement occurred that December day in the giant gymnasium erected to the memory of Miles Seabrook.

It is unfortunate if Ernie Holm felt any desire toward Jenny Fields, and if he imagined, even briefly, that here might be another woman with whom he might live his life. Because Jenny Fields was given to no such feelings; she thought only that Ernie was a nice, good man—perhaps, she hoped, he would be her friend. If he would be, he would be her first.

And it must have perplexed Ernie and Helen when Jenny asked if she could stay a moment, in the wrestling room, just by herself. What for? they must have wondered. Ernie then remembered to ask her why she had come.

“To sign my son up for wrestling,” Jenny said quickly. She hoped Garp would approve.

“Well, sure,” Ernie said. “And you'll turn out the lights, and the heaters, when you leave? The door locks itself.”

Thus alone, Jenny turned off the lights and heard the great blow heaters hum down to stillness. There in the dark room, the door ajar, she took off her shoes and she paced the mat. Despite the apparent violence of this sport, she was thinking, “why do I feel so safe here? Is it him?” she wondered, but Ernie passed quickly through her mind—simply a small, neat, muscular man with glasses. If Jenny thought of men at all, and she never really did, she thought they were more tolerable when they were small and neat, and she preferred men and women to have muscles—to be strong. She enjoyed people with glasses the way only someone who doesn't need to wear glasses can enjoy glasses on other people—can find them “nice.” But mostly it is this room, she thought—the red wrestling room, huge but contained, padded against pain, she imagined. She dropped thud! to her knees, just to hear the way the mats received her. She did a somersault and split her dress; then she sat on the mat and looked at the heavy boy who loomed in the doorway of the blackened room. It was Carlisle, the wrestler who'd lost his lunch; he had changed his equipment and come back for more punishment, and he peered across the dark crimson mats at the glowing white nurse who crouched like a she-bear in her cave.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” he said. “I was just looking for someone to work out with.”

“Well, don't look at me,” Jenny said. “Go run your laps!”

“Yes, ma'am,” Carlisle said, and he trotted off.

When she closed the door and it locked behind her, she realized she'd left her shoes inside. A janitor did not seem able to find the right key, but he lent her a large boy's basketball shoes that had turned up in Lost and Found. Jenny trudged across the frozen slush to the infirmary, feeling that her first trip to the world of sports had left her more than a little changed.

In the annex, in his bed, Garp still coughed and coughed. “Wrestling!” he croaked. “Good God, Mother, are you trying to get me killed?”

“I think you'll like the coach,” Jenny said. “I met him, and he's a nice man. I met his daughter, too.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Garp groaned. “His daughter wrestles?”

“No, she reads a lot,” Jenny said, approvingly.

“Sounds exciting, Mom,” Garp said. “You realize that setting me up with the wrestling coach's daughter may cost me my neck? Do you want that?”

But Jenny was innocent of such a scheme. She really had only been thinking about the wrestling room, and Ernie Holm; her feelings for Helen were entirely motherly, and when her crude young son suggested the possibility of matchmaking—of his taking an interest in young Helen Holm—Jenny was rather alarmed. She had not previously thought of the possibility of her son's being interested in anyone, in that way—at least, she'd thought, he wouldn't be interested for a long time. It was very disquieting to her and she could only say to him, “You're only fifteen-years old. Remember that.”

“Well, how old is the daughter?” Garp asked. “And what's her name?”

“Helen,” Jenny answered. “She's only fifteen, too. And she wears glasses,” she added, hypocritically. After all, she knew what she thought of glasses; maybe Garp liked them, too. “They're from Iowa,” she added, and felt she was being a more terrible snob than those hated dandies who thrived in the Steering School community.

“God, wrestling,” Garp groaned, again, and Jenny felt relieved that he had passed on from the subject of Helen. Jenny was embarrassed at herself for how much she clearly objected to the possibility. The girl is pretty, she thought—though not in an obvious way; and don't young boys like only obvious girls? And would I prefer it if Garp were interested in one of those?

As for those kind of girls, Jenny had her eye on Cushie Percy—a little too saucy with her mouth, a little too slack about her appearance; and should a fifteen-year-old of Cushman Percy's breeding be so developed already? Then Jenny hated herself for even thinking of the word breeding.

It had been a confusing day for her. She fell asleep, for once untroubled by her son's coughing because it seemed that more serious troubles might lie ahead for him. Just when I was thinking we were home free! Jenny thought. She must discuss boys with someone—Ernie Holm, maybe; she hoped she'd been right about him.

She was right about the wrestling room, it turned out—and what intense comfort it gave to her Garp. The boy liked Ernie, too. In that first wrestling season at Steering, Garp worked hard and happily at learning his moves and his holds. Though he was soundly trounced by the varsity boys in his weight class, he never complained. He knew he had found his sport and his pastime; it would take the best of his energy until the writing came along. He loved the singleness of the combat, and the frightening confines of that circle inscribed on the mat; the terrific conditioning; the mental constancy of keeping his weight down. And in that first season at Steering, Jenny was relieved to note, Garp hardly mentioned Helen Holm, who sat in her glasses, in her gray sweat suit, reading. She occasionally looked up, when there was an unusually loud slam on the mat or a cry of pain.

It had been Helen who returned Jenny's shoes to the infirmary annex, and Jenny embarrassed herself by not even asking the girl to come in. For a moment, they had seemed so close. But Garp had been in. Jenny did not want to introduce them. And besides—Garp had a cold.

One day, in the wrestling room, Garp sat beside Helen. He was conscious of a pimple on his neck and how much he was sweating. Her glasses looked so fogged, Garp doubted she could see what she was reading. “You sure read a lot,” he said to her.

“Not as much as your mother,” Helen said, not looking at him.

Two months later Garp said to Helen, “Maybe you'll wreck your eyes, reading in a hot place like this.” Shelooked at him, her glasses very clear this time and magnifying her eyes in a way that startled him.

“I've already got wrecked eyes,” she said. “I was born with ruined eyes.” But to Garp they looked like very nice eyes; so nice, in fact, that he could think of nothing further to say to her.

Then the wrestling season was over. Garp got a junior varsity letter and signed up for track and field events, his listless choice for a spring sport. His condition from the wrestling season was good enough so that he ran the mile; he was the third-best miler on the Steering team, but he would never get any better. At the end of a mile, Garp felt he was just getting started. ("A novelist, even then—though I didn't know it,” Garp would write, years later.) He also threw the javelin, but not far.

The javelin throwers at Steering practiced behind the football stadium, where they spent much of their time spearing frogs. The upper, freshwater reaches of the Steering River ran behind Seabrook Stadium; many javelins were lost there, and many frogs were slain. Spring is no good, thought Garp, who was restless, who missed wrestling; if he couldn't have wrestling, at least let the summer come, he thought, and he would run long-distance on the road to the beach at Dog's Head Harbor.

One day, in the top row of empty Seabrook Stadium, he saw Helen Holm alone with a book. He climbed up the stadium stairs to her, clicking his javelin against the cement so that she wouldn't be startled by seeing him so suddenly beside her. She wasn't startled. She had been watching him and the other javelin throwers for weeks.

“Killed enough little animals for today?” Helen asked him. “Hunting something else?”

“From the very beginning,” Garp wrote, “Helen knew how to get the words in.”

“With all the reading you do, I think you're going to be a writer,” Garp told Helen; he was trying to be casual, but he guiltily hid the point of his javelin with his foot.

“No chance,” Helen said. She had no doubt about it.

“Well, maybe you'll marry a writer,” Garp said to her. She looked up at him, her face very serious, her new prescription sunglasses better suited to her wide cheekbones than her last pair that always slid down her nose.

“If I marry anybody, I'll marry a writer,” Helen said. “But I doubt I'll marry anybody.”

Garp had been trying to joke; Helen's seriousness made him nervous. He said, “Well, I'm sure you won't marry a wrestler.”

“You can be very sure,” Helen said. Perhaps young Garp could not conceal his pain, because Helen added, “Unless it's a wrestler who's also a writer.”

“But a writer first and foremost,” Garp guessed.

“Yes, a real writer,” Helen said, mysteriously—but ready to define what she meant by that. Garp didn't dare ask her. He let her go back to her book.

It was a long walk down the stadium stairs, dragging his javelin behind him. Will she ever wear anything but that gray sweat suit? he wondered. Garp wrote later that he first discovered he had an imagination while trying to imagine Helen Holm's body. “With her always in that damn sweat suit,” he wrote, “I had to imagine her body; there was no other way to see it.” Garp imagined that Helen had a very good body—and nowhere in his writing does he say he was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing.

It was that afternoon in the empty stadium, with frog gore on the point of his javelin, when Helen Holm provoked his imagination and T. S. Garp decided he was going to be a writer. A real writer, as Helen had said.