I don't blame me, either,
the note said.
Only in this way can we be whole again,
Garp wrote to his mother.
And Jenny Fields padded whitely through the salt-damp house, room to room with her nursing ways and Garp's notes. It was all the writing he could manage.
Of course, the house at Dog's Head Harbor was used to recoveries. Jenny's wounded women had gotten hold of themselves there; these sea-smelling rooms had histories of sadnesses outlived. Among them, the sadness of Roberta Muldoon, who had lived there with Jenny through the most difficult periods of her sex reassignment. In fact, Roberta had failed at living alone--and at living with a number of men--and she was back living at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny again when the Garps moved in.
As the spring warmed up, and the hole that had been Duncan's right eye slowly healed and was less vulnerable to sticking bits of sand, Roberta took Duncan to the beach. It was on the beach that Duncan discovered his depth-of-field problem as it was related to a thrown ball, because Roberta Muldoon tried playing catch with Duncan and very soon hit him in the face with the football. They gave up the ball, and Roberta contented Duncan with diagraming, in the sand, all the plays she once ran at the tight end position for the Philadelphia Eagles; she focused on the part of the Eagles offense that concerned her, when she was Robert Muldoon, No. 90, and she relived for Duncan her occasional touchdown passes, her dropped balls, her offside penalties, her most vicious hits. "It was against the Cowboys," she told Duncan. "We were playing in Dallas, when that snake in the grass--Eight Ball, everyone called him--came up on my blind side..." And Roberta would regard the quiet child, who had a blind side for life, and she would deftly change the subject.
To Garp, Roberta's subject was the ticklish detail of sex reassignment, because Garp seemed interested and Roberta knew that Garp probably liked hearing about a problem so thoroughly removed from his own.
"I always knew I should have been a girl," she told Garp. "I dreamed about having love made to me, by a man, but in the dreams I was always a woman; I was never a man having love made to me by another man." There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta's references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine. There was even a bitchiness about Roberta, when she complained of the other troubled women who came to get well at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny Fields. "That damn lesbian crowd," Roberta said to Garp. "They're trying to make your mother into something she isn't."
"I sometimes think that's what Mom is for," Garp teased Roberta. "She makes people happy by letting them think she is something she isn't."
"Well, they tried to confuse me," Roberta said. "When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. 'Be gay,' they said. 'If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,' they told me. They were all cowards," Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.
Roberta's vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother's house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance--yet most of them he'd met seemed especially intolerant of each other. It was a kind of infighting that made no sense to Garp and he marveled at his mother sorting them all out, keeping them happy and out of each other's hair. Robert Muldoon, Garp knew, had spent several months in drag before his actual operation. He'd go off in the morning dressed as Robert Muldoon; he went out shopping for women's clothes, and almost no one knew that he paid for his sex change with the banquet fees he collected for the speeches he gave to boys' clubs and men's clubs. In the evenings, at Dog's Head Harbor, Robert Muldoon would model his new clothes for Jenny and the critical women who shared her house. When the estrogen hormones began to enlarge his breasts and shift the former tight end's shape around, Robert gave up the banquet circuit and marched forth from the Dog's Head Harbor house in mannish women's suits and rather conservative wigs; he tried being Roberta long before he had the surgery. Clinically, now, Roberta had the same genitalia and urological equipment as most other women.
"But of course I can't conceive," she told Garp. "I don't ovulate and I don't menstruate." Neither do millions of other women, Jenny Fields had reassured her. "When I came home from the hospital," Roberta said to Garp, "do you know what else your mother told me?"
Garp shook his head; "home" to Roberta, Garp knew, was Dog's Head Harbor.
"She told me I was less sexually ambiguous than most people she knew," Roberta said. "I really needed that," she said, "because I had to use this horrible dilator all the time so that my vagina wouldn't close; I felt like a machine."
Good old mom,
Garp scribbled.
"There's such sympathy for people, in what you write," Roberta told him, suddenly. "But I don't see that much sympathy in you, in your real life," she said. It was the same thing Jenny had always accused him of.
But now, he felt, he had more. With his jaw wired shut, with his wife with her arm in a sling all day--and Duncan with only half his pretty face intact--Garp felt more generous toward the other wretches who wandered into Dog's Head Harbor.
It was a summer town. Out of season, the bleached shingled house with its porches and garrets was the only occupied mansion along the gray-green dunes and the white beach at the end of Ocean Lane. An occasional dog sniffed through the bone-colored driftwood, and retired people, living some miles inland, in their former summer houses, occasionally strolled the shore, scrutinizing the shells. In summer there were lots of dogs and children and mothers' helpers all over the beach, and always a bright boat or two in the harbor. But when the Garps moved in with Jenny, the shoreline seemed abandoned. The beach, littered with the debris washed in with the high tides of winter, was deserted. The Atlantic Ocean, through April and through May, was the livid color of a bruise--was the color of the bridge of Helen's nose.
Visitors to the town, in the off-season, were quickly spotted as lost women in search of the famous nurse, Jenny Fields. In summer, these women often spent a whole day in Dog's Head Harbor trying to find someone who knew where Jenny lived. But the permanent residents of Dog's Head Harbor all knew: "The last house at the end of Ocean Lane," they told the damaged girls and women who asked for directions. "It's as big as a hotel, honey. You can't miss it."
Sometimes these searchers would trudge out to the beach first and view the house for a long time before they got up the nerve to come see if Jenny was home; sometimes Garp would see them, single or in twos and threes, squatting on the windy dunes and watching the house as if they were trying to read the degree of sympathy therein. If there were more than one, they conferred on the beach; one of them was elected to knock on the door while the others huddled on the dunes, like dogs told to stay! until they're called.
Helen bought Duncan a telescope, and from his room with a sea view Duncan spied on the trepid visitors and often announced their presence hours before the knock on the door. "Someone for Grandma," he'd say. Focusing, always focusing. "She's about twenty-four. Or maybe fourteen. She has a blue knapsack. She has an orange with her but I don't think she's going to eat it. Someone's with her but I can't see her face. She's lying down; no, she's being sick. No, she's wearing a kind of mask. Maybe she's the other one's mother--no, her sister. Or just a friend.
"Now she's eating the orange. It doesn't look very good," Duncan would report. And Roberta would look, too; and sometimes Helen. It was often Garp who answered the door.
"Yes, she's my mother," he'd say, "but she's out shopping right now. Please come in, if you want to wait for her." And he would smile, though all the time he would be scrutinizing the person as carefully as the retired people along the beach looked at their seashells. And before his jaw healed, and his mauled tongue grew back together, Garp would answer the door with a ready supply of notes. Many of the visitors were not in the least surprised by being handed notes, because this was the only way they communicated, too.
Hello, my name is Beth. I'm an Ellen Jamesian.
And Garp would give her his:
Hello, my name is Garp. I have a broken jaw.
And he'd smile at them, and hand them a second note, depending on the occasion. One said:
There's a nice fire in the wood stove in the kitchen; turn left.