"You didn't tell her that, did you?" Dickie said, pointing toward the house, and Harriet, with his long ax.
"No, no," Garp said.
"That's good," Dickie said. "She don't want to hear nothin' like that."
"I didn't think so," Garp said, and Dickie nodded approvingly. "Your sister is a very nice woman," Garp added.
"She is, she is," Dickie said, nodding fiercely.
"Well, so long," Garp said. But Dickie touched him lightly with the handle of the ax.
"I was one of them who shot him," Dickie said. "You know that?"
"You shot Kenny?" Garp said.
"I was one of them who did," Dickie said. "Kenny was crazy. Somebody had to shoot him."
"I'm very sorry," Garp said. Dickie shrugged.
"I liked the guy," Dickie said. "But he got crazy at Harriet, and he got crazy at your mother. He wouldn't ever have got well, you know," Dickie said. "He just got sick about women. He got sick for good. You could tell he wasn't ever going to get over it."
"A terrible thing," said Garp.
"So long," Dickie said; he turned back to his woodpile. Garp turned toward his car, across the frozen turds that dotted the yard. "Your hair looks good!" Dickie called to him. The remark seemed sincere. Dickie was splitting logs again when Garp waved to him from the driver's seat of his car. In the window of Nanette's Beauty Salon Harriet Truckenmiller waved to Garp: it was not a wave meant to encourage him, or anything, he was quite sure. He drove back through the village of North Mountain--he drank a cup of coffee in the one diner, he got gas at the one gas station. Everyone looked at his pretty hair. In every mirror, Garp looked at his pretty hair! Then he drove home, arriving in time for the celebration: Ellen's first publication.
If it made him as uneasy as the news had made Helen, he did not admit it. He sat through the lobster, the scallops, and the champagne, waiting for Helen or Duncan to comment on his hair. It was only when he was doing the dishes that Ellen James handed him a soggy note.
You had your hair done?
He nodded, irritably.
"I don't like it," Helen told him, in bed.
"I think it's terrific," Garp said.
"It's not like you," Helen said; she was doing her best to muss it up. "It looks like the hair on a corpse," she said in the darkness.
"A corpse!" Garp said. "Jesus."
"A body prepared by an undertaker," said Helen, almost frantically running her hands through his hair. "Every little hair in place," she said. "It's too perfect. You don't look alive!" she said. Then she cried and cried and Garp held her and whispered to her--trying to find out what the matter was.
Garp did not share her sense of the Under Toad--not this time--and he talked and talked to her, and made love to her. Finally, she fell asleep.
* * *
--
The essay by Ellen James, "Why I'm Not an Ellen Jamesian," appeared to engender no immediate fuss. It takes a while for most Letters to the Editor to be printed.
There were the expectable personal letters to Ellen James: condolences from idiots, propositions from sick men--the ugly, antifeminist tyrants and baiters of women who, as Garp had warned Ellen, would see themselves as being on her side.
"People will always make sides," Garp said, "--of everything."
There was not a written word from a single Ellen Jamesian.
Garp's first Steering wrestling team produced an 8-2 season as it approached its final dual meet with its arch rival, the bad boys from Bath. Of course, the team's strength rested on some very well coached wrestlers whom Ernie Holm had brought along for the last two or three years, but Garp had kept everyone sharp. He was trying to estimate the wins and losses, weight class by weight class, in the upcoming match with Bath--sitting at the kitchen table in the vast house now in memory of Steering's first family--when Ellen James burst upon him, in tears, with the new issue of the magazine that had published her a month ago.
Garp felt he should have warned Ellen about magazines, too. They had, of course, published a long, epistolary essay written by a score of Ellen Jamesians, in response to Ellen's bold announcement that she felt used by them and she disliked them. It was just the kind of controversy magazines love. Ellen felt especially betrayed by the magazine's editor, who had obviously revealed to the Jamesians that Ellen James now lived with the notorious T. S. Garp.