315: Ella was adorable ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 10 continues
ELLA WAS ADORABLE from birth. She had the robust good health and pink plumpness that one sees in rubber baby dolls, a resilient firmness that real flesh doesn’t ordinarily exhibit, the rubber-doll bounce of bouncing babyhood. Herb was hugely proud of her. At work, he recounted each of her little triumphs. Several times. The small occurrences in our lives sometimes mean the most to us, and offering to share them is an invitation to the most intimate friendship, but because they don’t make exciting stories, they don’t often interest other people, not even people we think of as friends. Everyone at Babbington Studebaker thought of Herb as his friend, wisecracked with him, slapped him on the back, but Herb with a story to tell about Ella, Herb with that glow on his face, Herb with his proud-papa look, was someone to avoid.
Take, for example, the morning when Ella seemed to wink at Herb. Herb rushed to work, practicing the story of her winking as he drove. He parked in the lot behind the showroom, and trotted toward the door. Hal Tripp saw him coming.
“Uh-oh,” he said, tapping Dick Barber on the shoulder, “here comes Herb, with that little grin on his face, and he’s talking to himself. You know what that means.”
“Yep,” said Dick, “he’s got a story about some damned cute thing Ella did.”
“What say we scoot out back and see how Old Randolph’s doing?” suggested Hal.
Herb came through the door exclaiming, “Wait till you hear this! She winked at me!” There was no response. No one was in the showroom. A Dictator, a Commander, and an Erskine sat there alone. Herb went to his desk, disappointed. He hung his coat and hat and stood for a while with his hands in his pockets.
“Old Randolph!” he said suddenly. He dashed out to the service area, where he found Old Randolph in the grease pit, under a Big Six. “Wait till you hear this!” he exclaimed. “She winked at me! Little Ella winked at me!”
“No kiddin’,” said Randolph.
“Nope, no kidding,” said Herb. “She was so cute! Lorna had just changed her, see, and she was lying on the rug in the dining room — Ella was — while I was drinking my coffee, and I looked down at her and I made that little sound out of the side of my mouth, the way you do with babies, chk-chk, like that, chk-chk, and she giggled the way she does when I do that, and then — she winked at me! Just like that! It was the damnedest thing I ever saw!”
From somewhere in the grease pit, but not from Old Randolph, came snickering. Curious, suspicious, Herb tiptoed around the Big Six. He found Hal and Dick huddled together, bent over, trying to keep from laughing aloud. Herb trudged off, his heart hardened.
In later years, whenever Herb began an anecdote of the small and personal variety, the kind that might be taken as insignificant, he would say, first, “You might want to slip off to the grease pit before I start this story.”
[to be continued on Friday, August 12, 2022]
In Topical Guide 314, Mark Dorset considers Fear: Fear of Being Ridiculous; and Studebaker: Babbington Studebaker from this episode.
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