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I went to stay with a women's group in New York. But I already knew too many Ellen Jamesians. They're all I know; I get hundreds of Christmas cards,
she wrote. She paused for Garp to read that line.
"Yes, yes, I'm sure you do," he encouraged her.
I went to the funeral, of course. I went because I knew you'd be there. I knew you'd come,
she wrote; she stopped, now, to smile at him. Then she hid her face in her dirty brown bandanna.
"You wanted to see me?" Garp said.
She nodded, fiercely. She pulled from the big bag her mangled copy of The World According to Bensenhaver.
The best rape story I have ever read,
wrote Ellen James. Garp winced.
Do you know how many times I have read this book?
she wrote. He looked at her teary, admiring eyes. He shook his head, as mutely as an Ellen Jamesian. She touched his face; she had a childlike inability with her hands. She held up her fingers for him to count. All of one little hand and most of the other. She had read his awful book eight times.
"Eight times," Garp murmured.
She nodded, and smiled at him. Now she settled back in the plane seat, as if her life were accomplished, now that she was sitting beside him, en route to Boston--if not with the woman she had admired all the way from Illinois, at least with the woman's only son, who would have to suffice.
"Have you been to college?" Garp asked her.
Ellen James held up one dirty finger; she made an unhappy face.
"One year?" Garp translated. "But you didn't like it. It didn't work out?"
She nodded eagerly.
"And what do you want to be?" he asked her, barely keeping himself from adding: When you grow up.
She pointed to him and blushed. She actually touched his gross breasts.
"A writer?" Garp guessed. She relaxed and smiled; he understood her so easily, her face seemed to say. Garp felt his throat constricting. She struck him as one of those doomed children he had read about: the ones who have no antibodies--they have no natural immunities to disease. If they don't live their lives in plastic bags, they die of their first common cold. Here was Ellen James of Illinois, out of her sack.
"Both your parents were killed?" Garp asked. She nodded, and bit again her chewed lip. "And you have no other family?" he asked her. She shook her head.
He knew what his mother would have done. He knew Helen wouldn't mind; and of course Roberta would always be of help. And all those women who'd been wounded and were now healed, in their fashion.
"Well, you have a family now," Garp told Ellen James; he held her hand and winced to hear himself make such an offer. He heard the echo of his mother's voice, her old soap-opera role: The Adventures of Good Nurse.
Ellen James shut her eyes as if she had fainted for joy. When the stewardess asked her to fasten her seat belt, Ellen James didn't hear; Garp fastened her belt for her. All the short flight to Boston the girl wrote her heart out.
I hate the Ellen Jamesians,
she wrote.
I would never do this to myself.
She opened her mouth and pointed to the wide absence in there. Garp cringed.
I want to talk; I want to say everything,
wrote Ellen James. Garp noticed that the gnarled thumb and index finger of her writing hand were easily twice the size of the unused instruments on her other hand; she had a writing muscle such as he'd never seen. No writer's cramp for Ellen James, he thought.
