Authors: Francine Prose
Vera knows which dogs she means. And what can she say to that? Forgive me. I deserve it. But Vera says nothing, lets reticence and false pride cripple her resolution, leaves good intentions trailing behind her as she jumps from the elevator to her floor.
Carmen looks a little wild-eyed. For an instant Vera weighs the possibility that the Washington Wild Child’s problem was catching. “Come on,” Carmen says. “I got something to show you.” Her manner is so stealthy, her grip on Vera’s arm so insistent, that were it anyone else, Vera would think this had something to do with drugs. But Carmen doesn’t even smoke cigarettes or drink coffee. The Lizard, however, does everything—something Carmen and Vera have often discussed. Carmen says he’ll give it all up after marriage. Vera and Carmen’s family say he won’t. Once, in a fit of companionability, Vera told Carmen about the happy ending to Lowell’s history of substance abuse. Later she wished she hadn’t, regretted having given her friend another typical
This Week
nostrum of false hope.
In the coffee room, Carmen opens the refrigerator and takes out a grocery bag full of radishes, not the little radish-stuffed cellophane pillows one gets in supermarkets but huge bunches still attached to remnants of chopped-off greens. Carmen must have gone all the way to Hunt’s Point to buy them.
“One thing they don’t tell you,” she says. “This diet makes you nuts. First it takes so much eating your jaw’s tired all the time. With all that noisy crunching, you get where you don’t want to eat around people any more. Plus it gives you crazy dreams.” Last night Carmen dreamed she was standing at the pearly gates with a group of her Seventh-Day Adventist friends and St. Peter waving them through. “You children are free,” he kept saying. And what was heaven but a foggy cafeteria, the angels in their golden wings hovering over steam trays, dishing out plates of Swiss steak and turkey tetrazzini and gummy institutional stuff like that? “You know what?” says Carmen. “After four days of radishes it looked
terrific
.”
“That’s a wonderful dream,” says Vera.
“It didn’t make
me
happy,” says Carmen. “If heaven turns out to be high-school lunch, lots of people are going to be very disappointed. Another thing, Frankie wasn’t there.”
Vera thinks,
DIETER OVERDOES IT, SEES GOD
. “Carmen,” she says. “You of all people should know better than to believe what you read in
This Week
.”
“It works,” Carmen says. “I lost four pounds in four days.”
“That’s too fast,” says Vera. Is she Carmen’s mother? One can’t be too careful about appetite loss these days. When Vera first heard about anorexia, she didn’t believe it; then she started seeing them everywhere, displaying their emaciated figures in short shorts and skimpy tees, taking more pride in their bodies than Vera will ever have—oh, the beauty of bone, of balls rotating in sockets.
“Careful,” she says. “You’ll turn into a radish. How long you think Frankie’s going to stay engaged to a root vegetable?”
Carmen seems to have thought of a dirty reply that she stifles with a speak-no-evil hand to her mouth and a giggle. “Frankie?” she says. “’Bout two seconds. Anyhow,” she adds dreamily, “Aunt Gloria’s barbeque’s Labor Day. You think I’m going to eat radishes with everyone packing in ribs, you got another think coming.”
“Labor Day’s two weeks off,” says Vera. “Eat nothing but radishes till then, you won’t live to taste Aunt Gloria’s salsa.”
“Next week I add celery,” she says. “All I can eat.” Vera’s tempted to tell her about Solomon and the chicken salad. But that will lead to Carmen saying for the hundredth time that she and Solomon should get married. Then Vera will have to announce that Lowell’s here, which means that when he leaves again she’ll have to tell her
that
.
Forgetting that she’s already carrying coffee from the New Napoli, Vera pours herself another cup. Carmen laughs good-humoredly, but with a knowing Seventh-Day Adventist edge: that’s what caffeine does to the brain.
Vera goes to her office, paces awhile, then roots around in her papers without any definite plan. When she comes up with the Bigfoot story, she understands that what she’s been looking for is an excuse to go see Shaefer and find out what’s happened with the Greens. On the way she clutches her manuscript just as she clutches her housekeys on certain bad nights when she comes home late, imagining she’s being followed. The relief she feels locking her apartment door behind her is not unlike the feeling she has now when Shaefer says, “Come in.”
“Got something for you,” she says. Then, off-handedly, “Heard anything from the lawyers?” She’s trying to make it sound like some casual office pleasantry.
“Ha!” says Shaefer. “I thought the guy was going to start blubbering when I hit him with the news. You could tell he’d already spent his fee a couple times over in his head. But as soon as this new evidence came up”—Shaefer raps his pen on the desk—“case dismissed!”
Still grinning, Shaefer reaches for the paper Vera’s holding out. He looks disappointed to see it’s a story. “Bigfoot lights up what?” he says. “A joint?
BIGFOOT GETS HIGH, LOCALS GET GOING
. I’d get going, too. How’d you like to run into Bigfoot when he’d just smoked a load of pot and he’s seeing big green snakes wriggling in the trees? Not much, right?”
Shaefer likes to joke about marijuana, but Vera’s pretty sure he doesn’t smoke it. At the same office Christmas party at which Esposito talked about his melancholy working vacations, Shaefer told her how once, between newspaper jobs, he’d managed a jazz bar in Northampton. “I used to smoke in back with the musicians,” he said. “This was before you were born. You know what they called it then? Boo!”
“Read it through quick,” Vera says, not as an order but meaning he doesn’t have to spend much time. There’s something wrong here. Ordinarily Shaefer would have read it by now without prompting. Now he skims it, then files it apparently at random in a folder on his desk.
“Sure,” he says. “I know how the guy felt. When I first quit smoking, every second I was on the edge of pulling some crazy stunt like that. That’s what I can’t stand about that bastard Solomon: the guy’s got no heart, smoking those little cigars that smell like every ashtray you’ve ever emptied, and so delicious, when he offers you one, you want to take it and eat it.”
Is this some roundabout way of discussing her story? That, too, seems wrong. Shaefer is nothing if not direct: I like this. That stinks. Take it back and redo it. How thrilled she was that first time he told her they might use
DEMENTO DENTIST
as a front-page head. Over the years, Shaefer’s comments have come to mean less—though it’s still flattering, still seems like something of a coup to have written something crazy enough to meet his exacting standards for front-page news.
“What’s the banner head this week?” Vera asks, thinking how much of the morning she’s spent trying to sound casual.
Shaefer takes a sheet of paper out of a folder—which, Vera notices, is nowhere near the one in which he’s filed her story—and hands it to her.
91-YEAR-OLD MOM BEARS BOUNCING BABE.
Doctors at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital got the surprise of their lives this week when 91-year-old Sara Beckley checked into the emergency room with symptoms of acute indigestion and proceeded to give birth to a healthy 8-pound-12-ounce baby boy. “That’s a new one on us,” commented nurse Julia Clarkson, who attended the delivery.
Albert Beckley, 86, apparently had no idea of his normally hefty wife’s condition. On hearing the good news, the wheelchair-bound proud papa had attendants wheel him to the hospital gift shop, where he bought blue bubblegum cigars. Meanwhile Mom, presented with her brand-new bundle of joy, began to laugh.
According to hospital spokesmen, mother and child are doing well and will return home after a routine stay of two to three days.
Vera has to turn away so Shaefer won’t see the tears in her eyes. Moved by the realization that
91-YEAR-OLD MOM BEARS BOUNCING BABE
is the quintessential
This Week
story, Vera’s filled with more love for this shoddy, sensationalist rag than she could possibly say. There’s nothing but hope in this story, hope and goodwill: hope for all the women who want children and can’t have them, for women like Vera who already have a child and regret that they probably won’t have more. Ninety-one! There’s still time! False hope—but what’s the harm? It’s unlikely that any old woman reading this story will redo the spare room as a nursery or that any woman of child-bearing age will read it and postpone pregnancy for another fifty years.
In another mood, Vera might have sensed scorn and contempt, ill will toward women and their aging bodies behind this vision of drooping stomachs heaving in labor, babies suckling at withered, ancient breasts. But today she can’t see it, doesn’t think it’s there. Three cheers for Sara Beckley, who didn’t even need a cesarean but pushed him out herself! Between the lines of this story is everyone’s longing for miracles, the hope that goes against all odds, beyond synchronicity and breaks in the natural order. The promise that your suffering leads to heaven and the cafeteria of your dreams, your forty years in the wilderness to glades of milk and honey…Only now—how slow she is!—does Vera realize that Sara Beckley laughing at her newborn son is Sarah in the Bible.
What an inspiration, going through the Bible, adapting its stories for
This Week
readers. A whole new source of plots.
BROTHER KILLS BROTHER AT SADO SACRIFICE SCENE. GROOM WAITS SEVEN YEARS, MARRIES WRONG WOMAN. BOY SOLD INTO SLAVERY, TRACED VIA COLORED COAT.
This last might need some work, but still! Not for nothing do they call it the greatest story ever told, though she can never remember if that’s just the New Testament or the Old as well.
TALKING SNAKE CONS WIFE, HUBBY HOMELESS.
What kind of message of hope is that? She’s all the way up to
SEA DIVIDES, SWIMMERS SPRINT TO SAFETY
when it occurs to her that this ninety-one-year-old laughing mom can’t just be coincidental. Someone’s thought of this already.
“Whose is it?” she asks.
“Mort’s,” says Frank.
Vera thinks of Mort, his stick-figure scribbles turning into Bible illustrations, growing more and more fantastic, charged with meaning, intensity, faith. She thinks of a painting she once saw by a woman named Sister Gertrude Morgan, Adam and Eve standing dejectedly by the tree of knowledge and underneath the caption, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Suddenly she has that feeling she gets sometimes about a person—she’s missed something, some unsuspected depth of spirit. Suddenly she wants to talk to Mort, to say, “Where did this story come from?”
Then Shaefer clears his throat and says, “Look, this is going to be a little rough; fasten your seatbelts and hang on to the rails, we’ll be back on the pavement in no time.”
And that’s all it takes for Vera to know: she won’t be talking to Mort, or anyway not much and not for very long. She’s being fired. It’s a good thing she senses what’s being said, since she can’t hear a word. Her first response is disbelief, then anger. She’s been so good, worked so hard, given her
brain
for
This Week
!
“This is rough for me, too,” Shaefer’s saying. “I was up all night thinking about it.”
Right, Vera thinks. Tonight you’ll sleep fine and
I’ll
be up. “I don’t get it,” she says. “They’re not even suing us.”
“I know that,” says Shaefer. “It’s the whole thing. I can’t figure it. And I don’t like things I can’t figure. What it boils down to is, either you’re lying—” He holds his hand up like a traffic cop to stop her from interrupting. “
I
don’t think you’re lying. Or you’ve got some kind of ESP, and frankly it gives me the willies.”
“I
don’t
,” says Vera. “It can’t possibly happen again. And what if I did? Karen Karl’s supposed to have ESP and she’s
syndicated
, for Christ’s sake; she can buy and sell us both.”
“Maybe you should apply for her spot,” Shaefer says. “That bimbo wouldn’t know the future if it sat on her face.”
“I don’t want her job,” says Vera. “Anyway, I told you. Lightning doesn’t strike twice—”
“Try and understand my position,” says Shaefer. “This time was too goddamned close. Next time we won’t be so lucky. Every word you write will have to be checked. To make sure it
isn’t
true. I’ll wind up with another coronary.”
Vera can’t believe she’s pleading for her job when what she should be doing is punching him in the snoot or, better yet, firing off some perfectly devastating remark and stalking out. “I’ll stick to medical bits,” she says. “Columns. You and Your Kitty Kat. Parakeet Doctor. How can you get in trouble doing doggie diagnosis? You’re
supposed
to get that stuff right.”
“Vera,” says Shaefer. “Don’t make this any lousier than it is.” Vera wants to shout out loud, to call up everyone she knows and say, “How
could
they? I did nothing!” So when Dan Esposito walks in, she almost tries it on him, then realizes it’s pointless. Dan’s been cued to interrupt if her talk with Shaefer seemed to be taking too long.
The thought of them planning this makes Vera’s heart start to pound. She hopes it’s not really possible to die of shame. She feels doubly betrayed by Dan, who was always so much gentler than Frank. This morning his features look slightly blurred. Vera wonders if they get that way in love and in those campgrounds echoing with the underwater murmurs of idle UFO gossip.
“Believe me,” says Shaefer. “We’ll do whatever we can. Stay on for a month or so while you job hunt. We’ll send you off with two weeks’ pay, everything but the gold watch…”
“Three weeks’ pay,” says Esposito. It’s the first time Vera’s ever heard them disagree.
“Keep the month,” she says. “I don’t think I’d enjoy it. Just give me the three weeks’ pay.” Oddly enough, what she really wants is her Bigfoot story back. What would she do with it? Who would print it? Judging from the way Shaefer filed it, they won’t be using it here. They’re probably afraid that running it will bring Bigfoot out of his lair and down to the nearest Texaco station. Could they be held liable? Does it matter? All that matters to Vera is making a full turn and some sort of exit without falling flat on her face.