The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride Read Free Page B

excellent progress in resolving toward conventional norms the original handicap of birth. Irredentist impulses not to be taken too seriously. As cosmetic use of wigs gains community-wise, subject’s sense of unity with the general population will increase. Subject’s quasi-humorous diagnosis of her sublimation to be taken as a real testimonial to our profession, fine objectivity from one of the solidest gals in the office.
    And down in the corner of our biannual personality sheet I could even read a handwritten scrawl from my immediate supervisor: Mildly bizarre thoughts a good sign of nonrigidity. Do I detect a sign that my quiet one may be getting espoused? Hats off!
    With all the abstract sociological kindness going about the world, it’s hard to get a true story listened to on the level, even by oneself. What could I say, for instance, of my brother, become that perennial movie star whose trademark is hairlessness (in his case not however like old Von Stroheim, a villain, or a horror man like Peter Lorre, but cast as a straight romantic hero). Rumor has it that he is forbidden by contract to show so much as a single hair, some saying that he complies only by means of terrifying sessions of electrolysis, others that he keeps a young valet-of-the-tweezers ever by his side. When first out in the world, we used to envy one another, I him for his public baldness, he me for my disguise. Now we no longer saw each other, having usefully agreed, like enemies in entente, that we no longer had anything in common. Like many ties of love, ours was too painful to eat dinner with.
    And so—I looked at my watch—I was back to love again, only twenty minutes out of Logan. And I had two more rings to dispose of in memory.
    On the fourth finger of my right hand, where unmarried women often wear a parental diamond or an engagement ring that hasn’t worked out, I had worn, until yesterday, a small blue-white Tiffany in platinum, of the size given virgins by young men on modest budgets, as indeed it had been, by the one all hands would have said I should have married, the medical student, childhood friend and sole remaining witness of all my real changes, who had followed me East—and who had declined to make good his promise of marriage if I aborted the child he had already engendered.
    “We could adopt some,” I said.
    “No,” he replied, “I want our own first, if you don’t mind. I’m going to become a gynecologist.”
    And so he has done, fat as a woodchuck too, and full of Christmas cards. But he was thin then, and staunch, and what he said sounded unanswerable. I wanted to answer it, at the time still believing that the apogee of life would be to have one secret witness forever at my side.
    “ But I mind!” I said. “I should mind forever. For them. ” He shrugged, and I caught him looking with distaste at the wig I had just bought—the first one.
    “Children can learn to be bald,” he said.
    I was wounded beyond reason by this coldness.
    “Already we differ,” I said. “Not mine.”
    I handed him his ring back, strange gesture across the child I still carried (and stranger miscalculation?) for I understood his intent now—to bring me with it, out into the open.
    “Keep the ring at least,” he said. “Keep it until you marry. Until you do, girl with your looks and plans might find it useful. You can always tell them I died in a war.”
    Though I never did, it’s true that both colleagues and lovers have sometimes murmured to me that one should not cling to the past, so perhaps his ring had been part agent of what he would never have done himself—helped me to hide the present that clung to me.
    When I tried again to return the ring, he grasped me, shook me, even repeated his cold remark.
    “Ours could learn!” he added, shouting. He stood there, hirsute and flawless, as his cards show him yet, the rufous glints all over the backs of his hands, not a spot of baldness in him anywhere, far as I could see,