The Water-Method Man

Let's Not Lose Track of Certain Statistics

IT GRIEVES HIM to remember lovely little Lydia Kindle, enraptured with freshman German, wanting ballads, or even opera, hummed to her in the Muttersprache. He obliged her; he made a tape for her of her very own. Deep-throated Bogus Trumper lulling her senseless with his favorite songs. It was to be a surprise.

He gave her the tape one afternoon in the language lab.

'Just for you, Miss Kindle. Some lieder I knew of ...'

'Oh, Mr Trumper!' she said, and scurried off to her earphones. He watched her big-eyed little face concentrating over the rim of the listening booth. At first she seemed so eager; then she crunched up her pretty face critically; she stopped the tape - broke his rhythms! - played it back, stopped it again. She took notes. He went over to ask what was wrong.

'That's wrong, isn't it?' she asked, pointing to her elfin scribbles. 'It's not mude, it's mude. But the singer missed the umlaut sound every time.'

'I'm the singer,' he said in pain. It's so hard to be criticized by the young. And he added quickly, 'German isn't my best foreign tongue. I'm really involved more in the Scandinavian languages - you know, Old Low Norse? I'm afraid my German is a bit rusty. I only thoug

ht you'd like the songs.' He was bitter with the heartless child.

But she said, then, so high and birdlike, as if her throat were pinched, or being kissed, 'Oh Mr Trumper. It's a beautiful tape. You only missed mude. And I just loved the songs. You've such a nice big voice.' And he thought: A big voice?

But all he said was, 'You may have the tape. To keep.' And retreated, leaving her stunned in the listening booth. Under the earphones now she dreamed.

When he closed the lab for suppertime, she skipped after him - careful, though, that she didn't touch him with her silky little clothes.

'Going to the Union?' she chirped.

'No.'

'I'm not going there either,' she said, and he thought: She eats her supper in birdfeeders, hopping from one to the other all over town.

But all he said was, 'Where are you going?'

'Oh anywhere, nowhere,' she said, and tossed her light, fine, nervous hair. When he said nothing, she coaxed him: 'Tell me. What's Old Low Norse like?'

He said some words for her. 'Klegwoerum, vroognaven, okthelm, abthur, uxt.' She shivered, he thought. Her shimmery little dress hugged her snug for a moment, then breezed loose again. He hoped she was sincere.

Being so frequently insincere himself, Trumper suspected the motives of others. His own motives struck him as bottomless. To be diddling this farm child in his mind while his own wife - Lady Burden, the Mistress of Cope - suffers more banal encounters.

Biggie waiting in line at the A & P, in the check-out aisle marked, eight items or less. She has less than eight items: she couldn't afford more. She lolls over the sparse cart, feels something old and athletic stirring her: an urge for the giant slalom. She puts her feet close together, one slightly ahead of the other, and shifts her weight to the downhill ski and bends her knees into a springy lock position. Still leaning on the market cart, she wedels ahead in line. Behind her, a soft and shapeless housewife glowers indignantly at Biggie's broad waggling; through Biggie's stretch pants, her rump is round and taut. The housewife's husband tries not to look, pretends he's outraged, too. Inside Biggie's cart, Colm has already opened a box of Cheerios.

Now the confrontation with the check-out girl, tired and sweaty this Friday-night rush to consume. She almost doesn't notice Biggie's check, but the name is a hard one to forget. Trumper is one of the suspicious ones. The girl checks an ominous list and says, 'Hang on a second, will you, ma'am.'

Bring on the manager, now, in a short-sleeved, drip-dry summer shirt, the kind so thinly materialed that a few of the pubic-like hairs on his chest are poking through the loose weave. 'I got your name on my list, lady,' he says.

Biggie wedels. 'Huh?' she says.

'Got your name on this list,' says the manager. 'Your check's no good here. Better empty that cart ...'

'Of course my check's good here,' Biggie tells him. 'Come on. You're keeping all these people waiting.' But they don't mind waiting in line now; something ugly is being revealed. Perhaps the staring housewife and her husband are somehow feeling vindicated. That shapeless lady is probably thinking, maybe my ass is running down my legs, but my checks are good.

'Please empty your cart, Mrs Trumper,' the manager says. 'You're welcome to shop here - with cash.'

'Well, then, cash my check,' says Biggie, who never grasps things right off.

'Now, look, lady,' says the manager, encouraged; he feels the line of shoppers is on his side. Colm pours the Cheerios on the floor. 'Have you got the cash to pay for that cereal?' the manager asks Biggie.

And Biggie says, 'Now look, you, yourself ... I've got a good check ...' But the manager elbows himself up next to her and starts emptying her cart. When he separates Colm from the Cheerios, the child starts to howl, and Biggie - a good two inches taller than the manager - grabs the bossy bastard by his short-sleeved, drip-dry summer shirt, probably tugging the crispy hairs on his chest. Biggie shoves him hard against the counter, shovels Colm out of the cart and mounts him side saddle on her good high hip; with one hand free, she takes back the Cheerios.

'Last time I shop in this dump,' she says, and snatches her checkbook away from the check-out girl.

'Now get out of here,' the manager whispers, but he's addressing himself to Colm, not Biggie.