"Move along, hair pie," the kid said to Garp. In the kid's expression, Garp thought he recognized the leer of the world. On the kid's upper lip was the insipid evidence that he was growing another mustache.
It was years later when he saw the child, a girl grown up; it was only because she recognized him that he recognized her. He was coming out of a movie theater in another town; she was in the line waiting to come in. Some of her friends were with her.
"Hello, how are you?" Garp asked. He was glad to see she had friends. That meant, to Garp, that she was normal.
"Is it a good movie?" the girl asked.
"You've certainly grown!" Garp said; the girl blushed and Garp realized what a stupid thing he'd said. "Well, I mean it's been a long time--and it was a time well worth forgetting!" he added, heartily. Her friends were moving inside the movie theater and the girl gave a quick look after them to make sure she was really alone with Garp.
"Yes, I'm graduating this month," she said.
"High school?" Garp wondered aloud. Could it have been that long ago?
"Oh no, junior high," the girl said, laughing nervously.
"Wonderful!" Garp said. And without knowing why, he said, "I'll try to come."
But the girl looked suddenly stricken. "No, please," she said. "Please don't come."
"Okay, I won't," Garp agreed quickly.
He saw her several times after this meeting, but she never recognized him again because he shaved off his beard. "Why don't you grow another beard?" Helen occasionally asked him. "Or at least a mustache." But whenever Garp encountered the molested girl, and escaped unrecognized, he was convinced he should remain clean-shaven.
* * *
--
"I feel uneasy," Garp wrote, "that my life has come in contact with so much rape." Apparently, he was referring to the ten-year-old in the city park, to the eleven-year-old Ellen James and her terrible society--his mother's wounded women with their symbolic, self-inflicted speechlessness. And later he would write a novel, which would make Garp more of "a household product," which would have much to do with rape. Perhaps rape's offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself--with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilty by association.
In Garp's own case, he likened his guilt for the seduction of Little Squab Bones to a rapelike situation. But it was hardly a rape. It was deliberate, though. He even bought the condoms weeks in advance, knowing what he would use them for. Are not the worst crimes premeditated? It would not be a sudden passion for the baby-sitter that Garp would succumb to; he would plan, and be ready when Cindy succumbed to her passion for him. It must have given him a twinge, then, to know what those rubbers were for when he dropped them in front of the gentleman from the city park and heard the old man accuse him: "Looking for innocence to violate and defile!" How true.
Still, he arranged obstacles in the path of his desire for the girl; he twice hid the prophylactics, but he also remembered where he'd hidden them. And the day of the last evening that Cindy would baby-sit for them, Garp made desperate love to Helen in the late afternoon. When they should have been dressing for dinner, or fixing Duncan's supper, Garp locked the bedroom and wrestled Helen out of her closet.
"Are you crazy?" she asked him. "We're going out."
"Terrible lust," he pleaded. "Don't deny it."
She teased him. "Please, sir, I make a point of never doing it before the hors d'oeuvres."
"You're the hors d'oeuvres," Garp said.
"Oh, thanks," said Helen.
"Hey, the door's locked," Duncan said, knocking.
"Duncan," Garp called, "go tell us what the weather is doing."
"The weather?" Duncan said, trying to force the bedroom door.
"I think it's snowing in the backyard!" Garp called. "Go see."
Helen stifled her laughter, and her other sounds, against his hard shoulder; he came so quickly he surprised her. Duncan trotted back to the bedroom door, reporting that it was springtime in the backyard, and everywhere else. Garp let him in the bedroom now that he was finished.
But he wasn't finished. He knew it--driving home with Helen from the party, he knew exactly where the rubbers were: under his typewriter, quiet these dull months since the publication of Procrastination.
"You look tired," Helen said. "Want me to take Cindy home?"
"No, that's okay," he mumbled. "I'll do it."