ANOTHER DIMENSION

When what’s-his-name kicked off and left her with the kid, whose name she could never remember because He had named the baby-person, Sylvia thought she had better look for another dimension in her life.

She was only, you know, a decent, mature but not old age and He had stuck her out on the border between Richardson and the Turner Thesis, so the first thing she did was to move in to a nice duplex in University Park so she could be near the university and culture and excitement and so the kid wouldn’t have to, you know, have problems about going to school. That was not the sort of dimension she was looking for.

There wasn’t much excitement there, though. She did almost get smashed or run over several times on Snider Plaza by elderly persons in possession of elderly autos, and one Sunday evening she stashed the kid and dressed scanty and sashayed over to the Tom Thumb in Old Town for a little casual shopping, which she had heard from her friend Ramona could be wildly exciting. Hang around the meat counter, and see what kind of meat the men buy, Ramona advised. Sylvia hung around the counter in her shorts and halter, and even though she was a little skinny, so a large dog could have taken her for his bone, she got a tumble from a distinguished-looking, gray-speckled, obviously still-virile man, just her type. {He had been fat and bald and that’s a myth, about being bald, sister.) She observed him buying a stunning long and luscious tenderloin and coyly remarked upon it to him. He reddened up with pleasure at her remark and apologized prettily for having to hurry away to Check-Out in order to be on time to preach the evening service. Oh darn.

If she wanted to find it with a man, maybe she could find it at one of the gay swinging singles, or whatever it is, swingles, bars that, say, specialized in, ah, mature people, Ramona suggested. She, Ramona, would go with her. Sylvia said she was not interested in a gay bar. Fun, I meant, Ramona said. You had better get your language together, Sylvia said. She knew a thing or two about society and all. (She had always secretly suspected Him, in regard to, well, you know, that.)

Sylvia tried to tell Ramona that mini-skirts and white boots were not the style anymore. She herself wore a simple surplice, without cowl. She felt a little awkward going to the Sail-maker, especially with Ramona. Ramona was a dear and a cool person and kept the kid for her a lot, but she’d had hepatitis real bad and had stayed a dingy yellowish in color and wore her hair a frizzy, funny way and lightened it too much, so she looked like a fungoid peach. They lounged around the bar real casual and got a few looks, too, if you want to know, but no, what you might call, action. After about four hours Ramona, who turned out to be a big baby and a spoilsport, wanted to go home. The only thing that happened was that some toady-looking salesman type with a checked coat and striped pants dropped a motel room key in Sylvia’s pocket as she came out of the John. The meat is always sweeter closer to the bone, or some such gallantry, he murmured to her, winking with the one drunk eye that seemed to work. She dutifully mailed the key back to the motel.

Sylvia and Ramona went for coffee at Kip’s, deciding they had certain standards.

It was time to turn to some cultural advantages. Sylvia went to plays and she went to an SMU piano recital that was pretty good but kind of eerie because only three other people were there. If the Symphony was having trouble it wasn’t her fault. She went and sat up high at the back and shut her eyes and filled up with the music, and that was about the best thing she did. In those moments she felt it really was there somewhere; if she could just find something out there somewhere to attach her inside feelings to. She had a perfectly respectable degree in history or something from Iowa, and now she decided to upgrade her education and maybe meet some people in the process. So she enrolled in an evening literature or something class at SMU and went there the first night full of perfume and high hopes. But there were thirty other women-people and just one man in the course, a fireman-person who was married and lived in Wills Point. After one class she heard a short plump divorcee go up to the professor and whisper to him she could tell that he was looking at her throughout the class. The professor assured her he was simply cross-eyed and God only knew who he was ever looking at. Well, it was a good try, the plump girl said. I’m divorced, you see, and …. Of course, of course, said the prof, I understand, go read some Hemingway. Then he smiled at Sylvia and asked her did she enjoy The Torrents of Spring? She said she hadn’t had any in a long time. He was cross-eyed, too, and wandered around the room a lot, looking for his thoughts.

Dallas is a pretty dead place, Ra-mona said. Maybe you should go some other places. I’ll keep the kid. Ramona was staying in pretty much these days, having trouble with her color.

But before she set out for some more exotic place, Sylvia, again on Ramona’s advice, which by now was wearing a wee bit thin, made an appointment with the famous mystic and mind reader and prophesier Jerry Jeffy McBroom, just to see if her future could be smoked out, or if she had any. The ancient lady looked deep into her eyes and her skinny hand and traced the seven thought-lines (not wrinkles) in her forehead and told her that she was going to meet a strange and wonderful man who would reveal a deep secret about life to her in a setting surrounded by vines and water. Sylvia couldn’t wait, and set out to find him.

She went to San Francisco and then to L.A. and back through Denver and Colorado Springs and Estes Park, but he wasn’t in any of those places, though everybody else was. Then she went to Taos, which she always had thought must be the most romantic, mystical place, and she sat looking out her motel window at the blue mountains and the graygreen valley and thought that there was plenty of dimension for somebody here but it didn’t seem to sing to her soul especially, so she walked around Taos and this was summer and pretty hot and everybody who had been in California and Colorado was now walking around here in cameras and Bermuda shorts, so she had a cold beer. Walking by the plaza something very strange wrapped up in a Pen-ney’s blanket lurched out at her from an alleyway and startled her so badly she shrieked and jumped a mile. It was an old Indian grinning at her, and there weren’t any vines and certainly no water but she wondered if this wise old Indian didn’t have some rare secret to tell her. Hi, he said, me Running Bear, you Little White Dove, no? You got thirty-five cents? You want go home with me? She gave him a quarter and watched as he sat on a bench in the plaza and spat at the tourists walking by. She took that for a sort of a, you know, cross-cultural sign and went back to Dallas.

And Sylvia began to think she wasn’t going to find it and maybe she should get back in her bridge group and just face what her life really was and settle back down and watch her afternoon programs on TV. Come and grow old along with The Edge of Night and The Price is Right.

Then as luck would have it one day when she was just obliviously watching the fountain rise in the mall at NorthPark she met a funny little man who was Lebanese or something and had little spindly legs and green eyes and huge forearms who was an osteopath and took her for coffee after they had admired the fountain together and confided he could help her with that slight curvature. She was excited beyond words when he called her for a date that weekend. They would go to a lake outside Dallas where a friend had a lakehouse and there would be a bunch of weird people there and they would eat and drink a lot and watch the boats go by. Remembering what Jerry Jeffy had predicted Sylvia thought that, after all, fate came wrapped up in odd packages, and while Georgie the osteopath was no prize just on the surface, maybe this was it. She accepted and he drove her that Saturday up to the lake in his Dodge van which he drove one-handed while she let him put his other paw on her knee, embarrassed only because it was so bony.

There were a bunch of weird people there, all right, of every nationality, and Georgie immediately got drunk and took out after a Rumanian beautician who looked pretty ripe, and that was the last she saw of him. They ate roast suckling pig and tomatoes and stuff from the host’s garden, and the host was a huge old fat man who looked like Charles Laughton in a droopy bathing suit, and they drank and drank and drank cold cheap champagne and Rhine wine. He was the weirdest one of all and said she could call him Count Mippipopolous. She was pretty wise, having just had that course, and asked him, well, who does that make me? He laughed and was very, you know, courtly, and carried a stick and wore a bush hat and kept opening the bottles. There were twenty sailboats with white sails out on the lake, which was very pretty, and then a little later there seemed to be twice that many with sails of all colors. Sylvia asked the count did he have a boat? Yes, just a small motor-boat down at the dock. His hostly duties prevented him from coming with her that moment but she was welcome to it, did she know how to run it? Of course, Sylvia had been in a boat before, when she was young. Well, my dear, be careful, for there is a current, and the wind keeps rising.

Clad in her sunbonnet, shorts and halter, Sylvia walked (well, weaved) down to the dock and got tipsily into the little boat and pulled the cord and got the whoozis started and bumped three times into the dock and headed way out on the water, leaving all the revelry behind her. It was getting evening now. She turned the motor-thing up full speed and sailed over the water away from the sailboats and loved it going so fast all alone with the spray spuming over her. She thought, hell, what am I doing here, what am I doing in this life, and thought maybe she would just keep going.

She didn’t see the stump she hit going full speed and then just rose up out of the boat as it hit the stump and kept on going and she came down in the water and was suddenly very much all alone out in the middle of the lake and it was dusk and she couldn’t swim a lick and she really thought she’d found it then.

After she relaxed and didn’t try to do anything but float she was okay though. Sylvia was still floating, her skinny body like a soaked twig, when it grew dark and then she even slept a little and when the early morning light came she was still floating and the waves had carried her in and there was the shore. So she stood up> and walked in to the stony beach and here were some docks and houses and after she walked down the beach a while here was the count’s dock and house. She sat on the beach in front of the fat old man’s house for a while soaking up the early morning sun. It really was a beautiful early morning.

Then she walked up to the house and found Count Mippipopolous or whoever he was out in his bush hat and droopy trunks puttering around in his vegetable garden. Sorry about the boat, she said. Oh that is all right, he said, we cannot worry about such things. Maybe it will come back, he laughed. Here, you take this hose and water these tomato plants, and those cucumber vines. Cucumbers are delicious with white wine. What? Do it, my dear, this is very important, to keep it all living in this heat. He had another hose and was watering his adjacent roses. Sylvia stood there rather stupidly in her scanty outfit carefully watering the count’s stuff. Vines and water. So?

So the count went and got two cane poles and put some pieces of leftover suckling pig on the hooks and motioned her to follow him down to the water. Some ferns were growing in the lake at the edge of the water, and now the lake was absolutely calm and waveless, an opaque sheet of glass. He threw his line out into the water, and she did the same. Neither cork bobbed once in an hour. Do you ever catch anything here, she said, I mean well, are there any fish in there? Oh no, he said, standing there fat and quiet, old eyes glued on his line and bobber. No, my dear, I really do not think so. After another hour or so of standing there with him fishing in the fishless lake she began to feel calm as anything, calmer even than she’d been floating out on the lake at night when she expected to die.

In a while she looked at the strange old man and said, “This is ridiculous.”

He shrugged and sighed and scratched his hairy belly.

“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it?”