Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [66]
“All right,” he said. He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Maybe it was a trick question. He thought for ten seconds. Problem after problem presented itself to him. He thought of poverty, of the assaults on the earth, of the awful complexities of love. “I can’t think of one,” Fenstad said. His hands went into his pockets.
“That’s because problems aren’t personal,” Fenstad’s mother said from the back of the room. “They’re collective.” She waited while several students in the class sat up and nodded. “And people must work together on their solutions.” She talked for another two minutes, taking the subject out of logic and putting it neatly in politics, where she knew it belonged.
The snow had stopped by the time the class was over. Fenstad took his mother’s arm and escorted her to the car. After easing her down on the passenger side and starting the engine, he began to clear the front windshield. He didn’t have a scraper and had forgotten his gloves, so he was using his bare hands. When he brushed the snow away on his mother’s side, she looked out at him, surprised, a terribly aged Sleeping Beauty awakened against her will.
Once the car had warmed up, she was in a gruff mood and repositioned herself under the seat belt while making quiet but aggressive remarks. The sight of the new snow didn’t seem to calm her. “Logic,” she said at last. “That wasn’t logic. Those are just rhetorical tactics. It’s filler and drudgery.”
“I don’t want to discuss it now.”
“All right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”
They rode together in silence. Then she began to shake her head. “Don’t take me home,” she said. “I want to have a spot of tea somewhere before I go back. A nice place where they serve tea, all right?”
He parked outside an all-night restaurant with huge front plate-glass windows; it was called Country Bob’s. He held his mother’s elbow from the car to the door. At the door, looking back to make sure that he had turned off his headlights, he saw his tracks and his mother’s in the snow. His were separate footprints, but hers formed two long lines.
Inside, at the table, she sipped her tea and gazed at her son for a long time. “Thanks for the adventure, Harry. I do appreciate it. What’re you doing in class next week? Oh, I remember. How-to papers. That should be interesting.”
“Want to come?”
“Very much. I’ll keep quiet next time, if you want me to.”
Fenstad shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s fun having you along. You can say whatever you want. The students loved you. I knew you’d be a sensation, and you were. They’d probably rather have you teaching the class than me.”
He noticed that his mother was watching something going on behind him, and he turned around in the booth so that he could see what it was. At first all he saw was a woman, a young woman with long hair wet from snow and hanging in clumps, talking in the aisle to two young men, both of whom were nodding at her. Then she moved on to the next table. She spoke softly. Fenstad couldn’t hear her words, but he saw the solitary customer to whom she was speaking shake his head once, keeping his eyes down. Then the woman saw Fenstad and his mother. In a moment she was standing in front of them.
She wore two green plaid flannel shirts and a thin torn jacket. Like Fenstad, she wore no gloves. Her jeans were patched, and she gave off a strong smell, something like hay, Fenstad thought, mixed with tar and sweat. He looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing penny loafers with no socks. Coins, old pennies, were in both shoes; the leather was wet and cracked. He looked in the woman’s face. Under a hat that seemed to collapse on either side of her head, her face was thin and chalk-white except for the fatigue lines under her eyes. The eyes themselves were bright blue, beautiful, and crazy. To Fenstad, she looked desperate, percolating slightly with insanity, and he was about to say so to his mother when the woman bent down toward him and said, “Mister, can you spare any money?”
Involuntarily, Fenstad looked toward the kitchen,