The Drive Home

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 The Drive Home

An emotional experience

I wished to write a story to do with my workplace, V.E.M. Engineering (components manufacturers for domestic appliances), but when I began to write the subject receded from me and I was left with nothing after even an hour of trying.

And so, I shall press on with other matters, or, should I say, let other matters press onto me, for I cannot say that I have chosen this that I am, nor the things that move me.

As I was driving home I remembered that I had to stop off at the supermarket, because I had arranged to go to Peggy's later on for supper, and I felt it incumbent upon me to bring something. Peggy cooked well, and her larder was well stocked and her fridge too: she liked cooking and had a developed interest in food. The food itself was not the problem.

The problem I was about to solve by going to the supermarket was this: that I felt guilty about our relationship. I felt guilty because I knew I could never love Peggy and I knew she deserved love. I also knew that she had not been loved in her life because her heart was too open, so that she gave to soon and too easily and was taken for granted.

I pitied her for that. And with my pity came a sense of shame, and to compensate for my shame I thought of bringing her some cheese to go with the meal. As if she would not notice that I did not love her as one who truly loved her would have done.

I smiled as I drove and thought of the cheese. I remembered my father then: his image faded into my mind's eye as I drove. He was there at the dining table, proselytising about Italian cheeses. The British had been duped, he pronounced. They had been deceived into believing that French cheese was superior to Italian cheese. But, he remonstrated loudly, they were wrong. What was French cheese, but an endless variation on Brie, with peppercorns or fruit foolishly thrown in for the sake of novelty? And what was Roquefort compared with Gorgonzola? And what could possibly rival that King of Cheeses, Parmesan?

He was from Piedmont, and I think that the issue was partly a matter of patriotism for him.

As I thought of that I felt the need to weep, so I pulled over to the hard shoulder and wept on that evening home, for my father had died the week before.

When I arrived at Peggy's she asked me if the traffic was bad, because I was seldom late.

I said that it was and did not mention the weeping.

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Read to the Decongested Forum, 2010, and to Writers` Workshop, Detroit, March 31, 2021.

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Peggy Screams

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It’s 9 pm. Peggy’s had her usual run of triple whiskies: I watch her as I type.

 The drinks are plainly not good for her; she sways as she crosses the apartment. I imagine her blackened liver and wince. She goes and sips sips sips on the balcony watching the cranes (we -rather I, because it was my idea- bought this waterside place- and it's good to stand on the balcony and watch the cranes and the people milling about from the restaurants below) which is a dangerous place to be if you are solidly drunk: you could so easily just trip and crash over the balcony fencing, tumbling to a certain death, or at best ending up in a hospital forever, showing little more life than a crushed cabbage. 

But Peggy’s so obstinate that when I entreat, “Peggy darling, pleased please take care it’s a long way from the balcony to the ground!” she just shrugs it off with a bland mid-western “mmmmhmm”. She’s listening to Simon and Garfunkel, and I watch her get up- she usually has a bath about this time…she’s got a clean towel, and I see she’s bought some new shampoo. I can’t see what this one is: it’s in a small golden box, which itself probably cost fifty quid to produce. The last shampoo was made of cucumbers and walnuts and ox musk (no kidding).

 The soap Peggy uses isn’t normal either. Instead, she buys this creamy/gritty stuff which is called cleanser. It’s made from moringa seed extract. It’s just for your nose, maybe your cheeks too, though it’s best not to use it at all: I used it to wash my hands once and Peggy didn’t speak to me for a week. If you want to wash the rest of your body Peggy style you have to use another product, which is called Body Cleanser and is made of seaweed and parts of an Amazonian cactus. Anyway, she’s wandering into the bathroom and I hear this terrible piercing scream. “Oh fuck! oh fuck!” she cries.

 “What is it darling!” I respond immediately, leaping out of my computer chair. “Look”, says Peggy, between gasps. She’s rigid with fear, melodramatically tensed up, like one of those petrified forms from Pompeii, and I have to stifle a giggle. “What?” I say, lovingly. “That”, yells Peggy in a cross between a moan and a yell, pointing. I peer in the deep yellow light of the bathroom, scouring with my eyes round the bath, searching. “No there!, THERE!" she shouts. And yes, sure enough, there it sits, miniscule, helpess and meek: a teeny brown spider. I gently scoop it up with my fingertips and free it on the balcony.

 

This is a follow up to these posts: http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/10/giant-bee.html and http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-about-peggy.html

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More about Peggy

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I suppose, like me, being a reasonably sensitive person, you were appalled by Peggy’s heartless response to the gigantic and extremely dangerous insect that landed on my chest when I was sleeping like some sort of nightmarish apparition, threatening the very fundaments of my mental and physical health. Peggy’s family, in the not so distant past, were Germans. The came from Pomerania and settled in Oklahoma, where they opened a small chemists- Bienenzüchter’s- which later translated, not entirely accurately, in a patriotic - or perhaps cowardly, given local pressures? - gesture into “Feelgood’s Drugstore” during the First World War and which still stands, serving ices, coffee, preserved food, and remedies on the corner of 8th and Main Streets, Choctaw, OK. After the World War Two, the cheapness of motor cars facilitating, Peggy’s parents' moved from the cramped flat above the shop to a suburb, where she grew up with two sisters and no obvious misfortunes. They attended the local Lutheran church with clockwork regularly (happily insensate to its teachings), and tried to earn as much money as possible while simultaneously spending as little. The children attended the local high school and graduated with neither honours nor shame. They were not especially respected or liked, nor disliked either- they were quite the sort of people essential to sustain any normal, working community. Perhaps seeing the lines of moaning, malingering Choctawans bleating for cold remedies or listening to them griping about minor complaints, affected young Peggy as she helped in the family shop at weekends, without respite, year after year, all the while her school friends were skipping or constructing elaborate picnics for their dollies, or later experimentally necking with other pustulous adolescents under the bushes of the nearby park? Did the endless work of stocking shelves, breaking down boxes, mopping spillages and running little local errands, while painfully mindful of her schoolchums’ frivolities, make her bitter; unusually indifferent to the distress of others? Did the business at the pharmacy counter teach her to regard human suffering as nothing more than a potential source for commercial gain? I cannot say. And I detected no callous traits in her parents when I met them- indeed, they seemed rather conscientious people: sympathetic, if a little earnest. * I sit here, writing this now on the computer this cool evening. Peggy is over at the drinks trolley (again!): more whisky than ice, that’s for sure. This is a follow up to The Giant Bee, posted here on October 30 last year: http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/10/giant-bee.html