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"I'm sorry about your mom," Jillsy said.
"Thank you very much," Garp said, but he could see--they all could see!--that Jillsy Sloper was seething about something.
"She was worth two or three of you!" Jillsy suddenly cried to Garp. There were tears in her muddy-yellow eyes. "She was worth four or five of your terrible books!" she crooned. "Lawd," she muttered, leaving them all in John Wolf's office. "Lawd, Lawd!"
Another person with a limp, thought Duncan Garp, but he could see that his father did not want to hear about his body count.
* * *
--
At the first feminist funeral held in the city of New York, the mourners appeared unsure how to behave. This was perhaps the result of the gathering's being not in a church but in one of those enigmatic buildings of the city university system--an auditorium, old with the echo of speeches no one had listened to. The giant space was slightly seedy with the sense of past cheering--for rock bands, and for the occasional, well-known poet. But the space was also serious with the certain knowledge that large lectures had taken place there; it was a room in which hundreds of people had taken notes.
The name of the space was School of Nursing Hall--thus it was oddly appropriate as a place of tribute to Jenny Fields. It was hard to tell the difference between the mourners wearing their Jenny Fields Originals, with the little red hearts stitch
ed over the breast, and the real nurses, forever white and unfashionable, who had other reasons to be in the environs of the nursing school but had paused to peek in on the ceremonies--either curious or genuinely sympathetic, or both.
There were many white uniforms among the enormous, milling, softly mumbling audience, and Garp immediately cursed Roberta. "I told you I could have dressed as a nurse," Garp hissed. "I could have been a little less conspicuous."
"I thought you'd be conspicuous as a nurse," Roberta said. "I didn't know there'd be so many."
"It's going to be a fucking national trend," Garp muttered. "Just wait and see," he said, but he said no more; he huddled small and garish beside Roberta, feeling that everyone was looking at him and somehow sensing his maleness--or at least, as Roberta had warned him, his hostility.
They sat dead-center in the massive auditorium, only three rows back from the stage and the speakers' platform; a sea of women had moved in and sat behind them--rows and rows of them--and farther back, at the wide-open rear of the hall (where there were no seats), the women who were less interested in seating themselves for the entire ritual, but who'd wanted to come pay their respects, filed slowly in one door and slowly out another. It was as if the larger, seated audience were the open casket of Jenny Fields that the slow-walking women had come to observe.
Garp, of course, felt that he was an open casket, and all the women were observing him--his pallor, his hue, his preposterous disguise.
Roberta had done this to him, perhaps to get even with him for his bullying her into letting him come at all--or for his cruel crack concerning her chromosomes. Roberta had dressed Garp in a cheap turquoise jump suit, the color of Oren Rath's pickup truck. The jump suit had a gold zipper that ran from Garp's crotch to Garp's throat. Garp did not adequately fill the hips of the suit, but his breasts--or, rather, the falsies Roberta had fashioned for him--strained against the snap-flap pockets and twisted the vulnerable zipper askew.
"What a set you have!" Roberta had told him.
"You animal, Roberta," Garp had hissed to her.
The shoulder straps of the huge, hideous bra dug into his shoulders. But whenever Garp felt that a woman was staring at him, perhaps doubting his sex, he would simply turn himself sideways to her and show off. Thus eliminating any possible doubt, or so he hoped.
He was less sure of the wig. A tousled whore's head of honey-blond hair, under which his own scalp itched.
A pretty green silk scarf was at his throat.
His dark face was powdered a sickly gray, but this concealed, Roberta said, his stubble of beard. His rather thin lips were cherry-colored, but he kept licking them and had smeared the lipstick at one corner of his mouth.
"You look like you've just been kissed," Roberta reassured him.
Though Garp was cold, Roberta had not allowed him to wear his ski parka--it made his shoulders look too thick. And on Garp's feet was a towering pair of knee-high boots--a kind of cherry vinyl that matched, Roberta said, his lipstick. Garp had seen himself reflected in a storefront window and he'd told Roberta that he thought he looked like a teen-age prostitute.
"An aging teen-age prostitute," Roberta had corrected him.
"A faggot parachutist," Garp had said.
"No, you look like a woman, Garp," Roberta had assured him. "Not a woman with especially good taste, but a woman."
So Garp sat squirming in School of Nursing Hall. He twisted the itchy rope braids of his ridiculous purse, a scraggily hemp thing with an oriental design, barely big enough to hold his wallet. In her large, bursting shoulder bag, Roberta Muldoon had hidden Garp's real clothes--his other identity.
"This is Manda Horton-Jones," Roberta whispered, indicating a thin, hawk-nosed woman speaking nasally and with her rodential head pointed down; she read a stiff, prepared speech.
Garp didn't know who Manda Horton-Jones was; he shrugged, enduring her. The speeches had ranged from strident, political calls for unity to disturbed, painful, personal reminiscenses of Jenny Fields. The audience did not know whether to applaud or to pray--whether to voice approval or to nod grimly. The atmosphere was both one of mourning and one of urgent togetherness--with a strong sense of marching forth. Thinking about it, Garp supposed this was natural and fitting, both to his mother and to his dim perception of what the women's movement was.
"This is Sally Devlin," Roberta whispered. The woman now climbing to the speakers' platform looked pleasant and wise and vaguely familiar. Garp felt immediately the need to defend himself from her. He didn't mean it, but solely to goad Roberta, Garp whispered, "She has nice legs."
