Heavy-Set

      The woman stepped to the kitchen window and looked out.

      There in the twilight yard a man stood surrounded by barbells and dumbbells and dark iron weights of all kinds and slung jump ropes and elastic and coiled-spring exercisers. He wore a sweat suit and tennis shoes and said nothing to no one as he simply stood in the darkening world and did not know she watched.

      This was her son, and everyone called him Heavy-Set.

      Heavy-Set squeezed the little bunched, coiled springs in his big fists. They were lost in his fingers, like magic tricks; then they reappeared. He crushed them. They vanished. He let them go. They came back.

      He did this for ten minutes, otherwise motionless.

      Then he bent down and hoisted up the one-hundred-pound barbells, noiselessly, not breathing. He motioned it a number of times over his head, then abandoned it and went into the open garage among the various surfboards he had cut out and glued together and sanded and painted and waxed, and there he punched a punching bag easily, swiftly, steadily, until his curly golden hair got moist. Then he stopped and filled his lungs until his chest measured fifty inches and stood eyes closed, seeing himself in an invisible mirror poised and tremendous, two hundred and twenty muscled pounds, tanned by the sun, salted by the sea wind and his own sweat.

      He exhaled. He opened his eyes.

      He walked into the house, into the kitchen and did not look at his mother, this woman, and opened the refrigerator and let the arctic cold steam him while he drank a quart of milk straight out of the carton, never putting it down, just gulping and swallowing. Then he sat down at the kitchen table to fondle and examine the Hallowe’en pumpkins.

      He had gone out earlier in the day and bought the pumpkins and carved most of them and did a fine job: they were beauties and he was proud of them. Now, looking childlike in the kitchen, he started carving the last of them. You would never suspect he was thirty years old, he still moved so swiftly, so quietly, for a large action like hitting a wave with an uptilted and outthrust board, or here with the small action of a knife, giving sight to a Hallowe’en eye. The electric light bulb filled the summer wildness of his hair, but revealed no emotion, except this one intent purpose of carving, on his face. There was all muscle in him, and no fat, and that muscle waited behind every move of the knife.

      His mother came and went on personal errands around the house and then came to stand and look at him and the pumpkins and smile. She was used to him. She heard him every night drubbing the punching bag outside, or squeezing the little metal springs in his hands or grunting as he lifted his world of weights and held it in balance on his strangely quiet shoulders. She was used to all these sounds even as she knew the ocean coming in on the shore beyond the cottage and laying itself out flat and shining on the sand. Even as she was used, by now, to hearing Heavy-Set each night on the phone saying he was tired to girls and said no, no he had to wax the car tonight or do his exercises to the eighteen-year-old boys who called.

      She cleared her throat. ‘Was the dinner good tonight?’

      ‘Sure,’ he said.

      ‘I had to get special steak. I bought the asparagus fresh.’

      ‘It was good,’ he said.

      ‘I’m glad you liked it, I always like to have you like it.’

      ‘Sure,’ he said, working.

      ‘What time is the party?’

      ‘Seven thirty.’ He finished the last of the smile on the pumpkin and sat back. ‘If they all show up, they might not show up, I bought two jugs of cider.’

      He got up and moved into his bedroom, quietly massive, his shoulders filling the door and beyond. In the room, in the half-dark, he made the strange pantomime of a man seriously and silently wrestling an invisible opponent as he got into his costume. He came to the door of the living room a minute later licking a gigantic peppermint-striped lollipop. He wore a pair of short black pants, a little boy’s shirt with ruff collar, and a Buster Brown hat. He licked the lollipop and said, ‘I’m the mean little kid!’ and the woman who had been watching him laughed. He walked with an exaggerated little child’s walk, licking the huge lollipop, all around the room while she laughed at him and he said things and pretended to be leading a big dog on a rope. ‘You’ll be the life of the party!’ the woman cried, pink-faced and exhausted. He was laughing now, also.

      The phone rang.

      He toddled out to answer it in the bedroom. He talked for a long time and his mother heard him say ‘Oh for gosh sakes’ several times and finally he came slowly and massively into the living room looking stubborn. ‘What’s wrong?’ she wanted to know. ‘Aw,’ he said, ‘half the guys aren’t showing up at the party. They got other dates. That was Tommy calling. He’s got a date with a girl from somewhere. Good grief.’ ‘There’ll be enough,’ said his mother. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There’ll be enough for a party,’ she said. ‘You go on.’ ‘I ought to throw the pumpkins in the garbage,’ he said, scowling. ‘Well you just go on and have a good time,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been out in weeks.’

      Silence.

      He stood there twisting the huge lollipop as big as his head, turning it in his large muscular fingers. He looked as if at any moment now he would do what he did other nights. Some nights he pressed himself up and down on the ground with his arms and some nights he played a game of basketball with himself and scored himself, team against team, black against white, in the backyard. Some nights he stood around like this and then suddenly vanished and you saw him way out in the ocean swimming long and strong and