Pages 85–87
A foggy, colorless early-November day — same Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment as the April attaché scenes; the book moves around inside its year. Tiny Ewell, "an elf-sized U.S. male" with a white goatee and size-6 wingtips, is a first appearance: a small businessman fresh out of two weeks in St. Mel's Hospital detox, riding a taxi east through East Watertown — the district he grew up in and normally routes around — toward a halfway house in Enfield. A rehab staffer escorts; a cabbie drives; and mid-ride the scene cuts back to Ewell's detox roommate, still in the room they shared.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Florsheim wingtips (p. 85) — real brand of businessman's dress shoe.
- D.T. (p. 85) — delirium tremens, the tremors-and-hallucinations stage of alcohol withdrawal; here a verb, "perhaps D.T. a little."
- Librium (p. 86) — real sedative (a benzodiazepine), standard issue for alcohol detox.
- Burl Ives (p. 86) — real folk singer and actor: round, ruddy, white-bearded.
- skallycap (p. 86) — local spelling of scally cap, the wool flat cap.
- rose window (p. 86) — a church's big circular stained-glass window; this one unlit from either side.
- rodney (p. 87) — cigarette, in the local argot; the sentence's context does the defining.
- screaming meemies (p. 87) — real slang: the jitters, the creeps.
- Enfield Marine VA Hospital Complex, Unit #6 (p. 87) — the destination; an address and the words "halfway house" are all the scene gives.
After you read: three things
1. The first line tells you how to read the name — and the objects tell the story. "There is no jolly irony in Tiny Ewell's name." From there the exposition rides entirely on things: the half-ironed shirts his wife packed, the white scuff from kicking a front door whose locks had been changed, the restraining order and mail-slot notes folded inside a sentence about a shoe. The Florsheims themselves get traded to the nurses for Librium mid-D.T. Inventory as biography.
2. The roommate is watching the air conditioner the way you watch a screen. Dial turned 4, 5, 3, 7, 8, then all the way to 9 — "He is deeply engaged by whatever he sees on 9" — his face making "the little smiles and grimaces of a person who's being thoroughly entertained." Six pages ago you left a man in a recliner staring at a cartridge-viewer, unresponsive and ecstatic (pp. 78–79); this sounds a lot like that posture, burnt out and relocated to a detox ward.
3. Note the geography, and the exit line. The halfway house sits in the Enfield Marine complex "just off Commonwealth Ave. in Enfield" — the same town, and the same avenue, as the tennis academy of pp. 79–85. The gray ride there is filtered through day-one sobriety: motionless street-hockey boys, trees making "spell-casting gestures." And when the cabbie looks at the neat little man and asks if he's sick or something: "So it would seem" — diagnosis accepted, at arm's length.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.