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"Be serious," Roberta said. "This is important. Don't you see? She wanted you to understand the need, she wanted you to have to deal with the problems."
"And who decides if a woman is 'worthy'?" Garp asked. "Oh boy, Mom!" he cried out. "I could wring your neck for this shit!"
"You decide," Roberta said. "That's what will make you think."
"How about you?" Garp asked. "This is your kind of thing, Roberta."
Roberta was clearly torn. She shared with Jenny Fields the desire to educate Garp and other men concerning the legitimacy and complexity of women's needs. She also thought Garp would be rather terrible at this, and she knew she would do it very well.
"We'll do it together," Roberta said. "That is, you're in charge, but I'll advise you. I'll tell you when I think you're making a mistake."
"Roberta," Garp said, "you're always telling me I'm making a mistake."
Roberta, at her most flirtatious, kissed him on the lips and clubbed him on the shoulder--in both cases, so hard that he winced.
"Jesus," Garp said.
"The Fields Foundation!" Roberta cried. "It's going to be wonderful."
Thus was friction kept in the life of T. S. Garp, who without friction of some kind would probably have lost his senses and his grip upon the world. It was friction that kept Garp alive, when he wasn't writing; Roberta Muldoon and the Fields Foundation would provide him with friction, at the very least.
Roberta became the in-residence administrator of the Fields Foundation at Dog's Head Harbor; the house became, all at once, a writers' colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic--and the few well-lit garret rooms provided light and solitude for painters. Once women knew that there was a Fields Foundation, there were many women who wondered who was eligible for aid. Garp wondered, too. All applicants wrote Roberta, who assembled a small staff of women who alternately liked and disliked Garp--but always argued with him. Together, twice a month, Roberta and her Board of Trustees would assemble in Garp's grouchy presence and choose among the applicants.
In good weather they sat in the balmy side-porch room of the Dog's Head Harbor estate, although Garp increasingly refused to go there. "All the weirdos-in-residence," Garp told Roberta. "They remind me of other times." So then they met at Steering, in the Steering family mansion, the wrestling coach's home, where Garp felt slightly more comfortable in the company of these fierce women.
He would have felt more comfortable, no doubt, to have met them all in the wrestling room. Though even there, Garp knew perfectly well, the former Robert Muldoon would have made Garp struggle for his every point.
* * *
--
Applicant No. 1,048 was named Charlie Pulaski.
"I thought they had to be women," Garp said. "I thought there was at least one firm criterion."
"Charlie Pulaski is a woman," Roberta told Garp. "She's just always been called Charlie."
"I should say that was enough to disqualify her," someone said. It was Marcia Fox--a lean, spare poet with whom Garp frequently crossed swords, although he admired her poems. He could never be that economical.
"What does Charlie Pulaski want?" Garp asked, by rote. Some of the applicants only wanted money; some of them wanted to live at Dog's Head Harbor for a while. Some of them wanted lots of money and a room at Dog's Head Harbor, forever.
"She just wants money," Roberta said.
"To change her name?" asked Marcia Fox.
"She wants to quit her job and write a book," Roberta said.
"Oh boy," said Garp.
"Advise her to keep her job," said Marcia Fox; she was one of those writers who resented other writers, and would-be writers.
"Marcia even resents dead writers," Garp told Roberta.
But Marcia and Garp both read a manuscript submitted by Ms. Charlie Pulaski, and they agreed that she should hold on to whatever job she could get.
* * *
--
