Galatea Read Free Page B

one like Duke’s and take the rest of it back. I shouldn’t have that much, and besides it’s too thick to broil.”
    “Broil? I’ll bake it!”
    “But it’s three pounds of meat and—”
    “You’ve been down to St. Mary’s, and after that mule meat they eat down there, you need something to stick to your ribs.”
    I thought to myself: “Is he giving her all the rest of that chunk? Doesn’t he know it’s practically murder, considering that weight she carries?” That was the answer, though, as came out when she waddled back and sat down to wait. She said: “Duke, he tries his best to make me happy—but he’s like all the others—he can’t understand—what this affliction is . It’s glandular! If the food is there on my plate, I have to eat it, I can’t help myself. No overweight person can. Not saying I don’t need a lot, else I get so terribly weak. But—all that meat—”
    An electric stove cooks fast, and in a few minutes he was back, saying we’d eat in the nook. We went in there, and I caught the light in his eye as he served the meal, so pretty it was like an ad in the Saturday Post . I also caught how she ate, very dreamy, once she tasted that steak. She cut each piece off slow, sopped it in blood, and closed her eyes as she chewed. So as not to be caught looking, and more or less make like sociable, I put it on with a squirtgun, how wonderful everything was.
    Even for goose grease he didn’t seem to have time, and took it over himself, smearing it the way he wanted it. He said: “The steak I admit is O.K. But my real contribution, Duke, is the lunchbox I gave you today. Mr. Val’s Take-Out, I call it, and it’s a revolution on behalf of the American wife. All she does, Duke, is ring us, and she gets it—a unit, to fit other units. One person, one box, that goes in one stove, complete as is, without even breaking the string. When it’s hot she opens it, and it’s ready to eat, there on its plastic plates. When it’s eaten, the plastic burns, it’s all gone, and she’s free. She’s spent five minutes at the stove, and five more at the incinerator—ten minutes out of her day, and the whole family is fed. She has leisure, she can play, she can hold a job, for cash! I tell you, it’s tremendous!”
    I piled more compliments on, and for perhaps a minute he listened. Then, in the middle of a word, he cut me off. He said: “O.K., Duke, let’s get at it.”
    “ ... Get at what, sir?”
    “All of it. What led you astray, the whole story. Wait a minute, while I put these dishes in the washer, and we’ll sit in the other room. I want to go into this. Thoroughly.”
    The dishes took some minutes, my fire some minutes more. I said I was proud of my wood, but actually wanted to stall, because how I wanted to go into it was practically not at all. But at the end of a half-hour or so she was camped on the sofa, in close to the flames, he on the other end, his knees under his chin, I on the love seat across from them, with the cocktail table between. He said: “Now!”—and I couldn’t stall any longer. I said: “ ... I wanted to be a fighter.”
    “Why did you?”
    “Well—why not? I’m six feet high, strong as a bull, and weigh a hundred and seventy. As a light heavy I looked like a natural. And in the Army it helps. With—whatever you’re bucking for.”
    “Army? Where was this?”
    “Germany.”
    I edged it to the hitch I’d served, how I got to be technical sergeant, and got my honorable discharge. I worked back to my very young days, when I was a kid out in Nevada, to the car crash that killed my parents, and how I was raised by my grandmother. He asked if she was still living, I said no, and he seemed to be sidetracked. But then: “All right, let’s get to the point. You wanted to be a fighter. What then?”
    “I found out I couldn’t hit.”
    “What then?”
    “ ... I found out I could.”
    “Listen, Duke, stop gagging.”
    I said I wasn’t gagging at all, and