"I've already got wrecked eyes," she said. "I was born with ruined eyes." But to Garp they looked like very nice eyes; so nice, in fact, that he could think of nothing further to say to her.
Then the wrestling season was over. Garp got a junior varsity letter and signed up for track and field events, his listless choice for a spring sport. His condition from the wrestling season was good enough so that he ran the mile; he was the third-best miler on the Steering team, but he would never get any better. At the end of a mile, Garp felt he was just getting started. ("A novelist, even then--though I didn't know it," Garp would write, years later.) He also threw the javelin, but not far.
The javelin throwers at Steering practiced behind the football stadium, where they spent much of their time spearing frogs. The upper, freshwater reaches of the Steering River ran behind Seabrook Stadium; many javelins were lost there, and many frogs were slain. Spring is no good, thought Garp, who was restless, who missed wrestling; if he couldn't have wrestling, at least let the summer come, he thought, and he would run long-distance on the road to the beach at Dog's Head Harbor.
One day, in the top row of empty Seabrook Stadium, he saw Helen Holm alone with a book. He climbed up the stadium stairs to her, clicking his javelin against the cement so that she wouldn't be startled by seeing him so suddenly beside her. She wasn't startled. She had been watching him and the other javelin throwers for weeks.
"Killed enough little animals for today?" Helen asked him. "Hunting something else?"
"From the very beginning," Garp wrote, "Helen knew how to get the words in."
"With all the reading you do, I think you're going to be a writer," Garp told Helen; he was trying to be casual, but he guiltily hid the point of his javelin with his foot.
"No chance," Helen said. She had no doubt about it.
"Well, maybe you'll marry a writer," Garp said to her. She looked up at him, her face very serious, her new prescription sunglasses better suited to her wide cheekbones than her last pair that always slid down her nose.
"If I marry anybody, I'll marry a writer," Helen said. "But I doubt I'll marry anybody."
Garp had been trying to joke; Helen's seriousness made him nervous. He said, "Well, I'm sure you won't marry a wrestler."
"You can be very sure," Helen said. Perhaps young Garp could not conceal his pain, because Helen added, "Unless it's a wrestler who's also a writer."
"But a writer first and foremost," Garp guessed.
"Yes, a real writer," Helen said, mysteriously--but ready to define what she meant by that. Garp didn't dare ask her. He let her go back to her book.
It was a long walk down the stadium stairs, dragging his javelin behind him. Will she ever wear anything but that gray sweat suit? he wondered. Garp wrote later that he first discovered he had an imagination while trying to imagine Helen Holm's body. "With her always in that damn sweat suit," he wrote, "I had to imagine her body; there was no other way to see it." Garp imagined that Helen had a very good body--and nowhere in his writing does he say he was disappointed when he finally saw the real thing.
It was that afternoon in the empty stadium, with frog gore on the point of his javelin, when Helen Holm provoked his imagination and T. S. Garp decided he was going to be a writer. A real writer, as Helen had said.
4
GRADUATION
T . S. Garp wrote a short story every month he was at Steering, from the end of his freshman year until his graduation, but it wasn't until his junior year that he showed anything he wrote to Helen. After her first year as a spectator at Steering, Helen was sent to Talbot Academy for girls, and Garp saw her only on occasional weekends. She would sometimes attend the home wrestling meets. It was after one such match that Garp saw her and asked her to wait for him until he'd showered; he had something in his locker he wanted to give her.
"Oh boy," Helen said. "Your old elbow pads?"
She didn't come to the wrestling room anymore, even if she was home from Talbot on a long vacation. She wore dark green knee socks and a gray flannel skirt, with pleats; often her sweater, always a dark and solid color, matched her knee socks, and always her long dark hair was up, twirled in a braid on top of her head, or complexly pinned. She had a wide mouth with very thin lips and she never wore lipstick. Garp knew that she always smelled nice, but he never touched her. He did not imagine that anyone did; she was as slender and nearly as tall as a young tree--she was taller than Garp by two inches or more--and she had sharp, almost painful-looking bones in her face, although her eyes behind her glasses were always soft and large, and a rich honey-brown.
"Your old wrestling shoes?" Helen asked him, inquiring of the large-sized, lumpy envelope that was sealed.
"It's something to read," Garp said.
"I've got plenty to read," Helen said.
"It's something I wrote," Garp told her.
"Oh boy," Helen said.
"You don't have to read it now," Garp told her. "You can take it back to school and write me a letter."
"I've got plenty to write," Helen said. "I've got papers due all the time."
"Then we can talk about it, later," Garp said. "Are you going to be here for Easter?"
"Yes, but I have a date," Helen said.