The Best of Pickering

Patterns

Patterns “john,” the letter from the dean began, “if you are going to jog during the day, two pm., 3/8/86, don’t do it where you will be seen (Route 195). It presents a very negative view of university to the public.” My friend John is a neat, orderly man. Although his running shirts usually have something like “Tony’s Pizza” or “The Baker’s Dozen” printed on the back, they are always clean, and his shorts are unrevealingly baggy and smack of 1958 and the country club. “The dean’s right,” I said when John showed me the note. “An old guy like you shouldn’t be on the main road. Imagine what people think when the ‹rst thing they see at the university is your big behind. Only thin faculty under forty should even be allowed to walk near one ninety-‹ve.” Although the dean’s attempt to control jogging was silly, culture is based upon the general acceptance of patterns of behavior. Rarely are the patterns stated or consciously agreed upon, and often people are aware of them only when they are broken. Even those who imagine themselves outside society and thus untrammeled by convention are usually tightly bound to propriety. I am not one of the faithful, but even now I become upset when I remember what a banker said to me in Sunday school thirty-‹ve years ago. On the day the banker visited the class, the subject of racial segregation arose. I was nine years old and lived in a world ‹lled with black people. Although there were certain things, like attending school, that black and white people did not do together, I was unaware of subtleties and spent little thought on such matters. Black people were in all the places I liked best, out-of-doors in the dairy barn or in the house in the kitchen. They took care of me, picking me up when I fell down and cleaning my knees when I skinned them. I liked nothing better than watching Mealy churn milk or “helping” Bessie or Lizzie make a chocolate pie. And so when the banker said that black people were inferior and should not be allowed to eat in restaurants with whites, I was puzzled. What the man said did not seem right, and raising my hand like a good little boy who had studied his Sunday school les-
287 son, I said, “Sir, you must be wrong because the Bible says, ‘All men are created equal.’” The man glared at me, obviously angry, and I wondered what I had done. “Do you think,” he ‹nally said, “that some nigger in north Nashville is equal to you?” Most violations of propriety involve manners. Although they do not sear like the banker’s words, strangely enough they cling to memory with a tenacity far exceeding their signi‹cance. Eight years ago I attended a performance of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit at the National Theater in London. At the time I was writing a book, and life was drab. Except for buying food, I rarely left my room, and two weeks often passed without my speaking to anyone but grocers. A light comedy like Blithe Spirit, I decided, was just the thing to pick me up, and on arriving at the theater I settled happily into my seat, gleefully anticipating magical pastels and seltzer bottles. Until the ‹rst intermission everything ‹zzed along frivolously; immediately in front of me, however, sat two young women. During the break between acts they removed brushes and ‹ngernail ‹les from their purses and spent the intermission brushing each other’s hair, then cleaning their ‹ngernails. Tweezers appeared at the second intermission, and the girls plucked each other’s eyebrows, paying close attention to hairs growing above the bridge of the nose. A curly hair over one girl’s nose proved particularly pesky, and I was about to suggest her friend hire a backhoe for the job when suddenly the hair tore loose, bringing with it a long taproot and a ball of skin. Instead of chuckling over Coward’s comedy of manners, I left the theater fuming. Later I realized I should not have been upset. Like the girls’ behavior, manners themselves are arbitrary and, if not comic, are often absurd if examined closely. Why, for example, should a man stand when a woman enters a room or give up his seat on a bus? Once upon a time when women were...