Authors: Francine Prose
Reading is out of the question. So is thinking, eating, getting out of her chair. Light filters in through the half-shut blinds, casting shadows on the floor; and as one skims past, Vera hallucinates a small, furry, black creature. If she doesn’t get out of here soon, the place will be crawling with furry black creatures. Leave, says a voice in her head. Go anywhere. A voice? From where? Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the sound of her own survival instinct from the first harbinger of psychosis.
What to do? If she had a therapist she could ask, the therapist would answer, “What do
you
want to do?” They’d volley that back and forth for a while. She’d settle for an astrologer, for Karen Karl. No, she doesn’t need a horoscope; she needs a friend. Maybe she should call Lynda and ask
her
what to do, say: “Lynda, you’re right, they’re
all
El Creepos.” What would Lynda say? Buy a new outfit. Get your hair done. Let him go. You’re better off. I told you so. That’s life. Vera knows that herself. Louise! She needs to talk to Louise. She dials Louise’s number, but no one answers, and that, too, seems like an omen as Vera sits there, listening to the phone ring and considering her limited options.
One: She could stay home and clean the apartment, which, after thirty-six hours of Lowell, sorely needs it. But the obvious danger is that she’ll wind up grooming the furry black creatures. Two: She could go up to
This Week
and begin the Herculean task of dismantling her office. In terms of morale, it’s probably the worst move she could make. On the other hand, it’s the only thing that promises that illusory sense of accomplishment she so desires.
So she hangs up the phone, dresses, and on her way out almost stops at Firbank Florists to tell Dick and Kenny the news. Kenny will understand, but Dick will purse his lips and turn Lowell’s leaving into one of life’s wry, bittersweet little jokes. Which it’s not—it’s her
life
. What’s really inhibiting her is the fear that halfway through her story Kenny and Dick, needing reassurance that something similar won’t happen to them, will reach for one another’s hands and unhinge her completely.
She doesn’t stop till she gets to the newspaper stand by the station, where she gives the blind man a dollar and asks for a pack of Camels. She waits for her change, he waits for more money; nothing transpires till he says, “Dollar twenty,” and she counts out four nickels. When she smoked, she was always shocked by how quickly the price went up. Now it seems like a bargain. Consider heroin. Cocaine.
She rips open the pack, leans against the railing, and lights up. The first one feels like she’s filing her lungs with a rasp, the second’s down to fine-grained sandpaper, the third smells like burning flesh, the fourth tastes just fine, so she lights up a fifth. By now the two winos loitering nearby are watching her with awe. “Got a smoke?” one says. “Sure,” Vera says. “Take two.” Then she hurries into the subway and down to the far end of the platform so she won’t have an audience when she throws up. Even in this she’s a model of delicacy and discretion, leaning gracefully over the tracks to spare the platform maintenance crew any nasty surprises. There’s not much in her stomach—smoke, coffee, bile. Mostly what she’s disgorging is the kind of self-pity that makes her wish she were Rosie’s age, with Mommy and Daddy there to hold her forehead and bring her ginger ale.
By the time the train comes, she’s feeling somewhat steadier. When she stumbles on, she finds she must have wandered back up the platform; she’s in one of the middle cars. Maybe it’s all to the good. If she ran into a screamer today, she’d probably outscream him. At this hour, even the middle’s half-empty; plenty of room for Vera to study her fellow passengers. The trouble is, she can’t see them, can’t hear the train noise, can’t feel anything but a vague nausea and pain in her lungs. Perhaps what’s numbing her is a massive dose of endorphins: the brain’s homegrown. If she were sitting across from Lowell’s double or some retarded kid in a hippo sweatshirt, she’d be better off not knowing.
Likewise, in the elevator: she’d rather not know why Hazel’s whistling “Stormy Weather” all the way up. Vera’s sure it’s because she’s been fired, but some lurking curiosity about the bounds of her own paranoia makes her ask, “Why so cheery?” Then Hazel tells her how Monday the doctor removed a growth from her breast. “This mornin’,” says Hazel, “his seckatary calls up, she says, ‘Hazel, girl, you home free!’” A shiver crawls up Vera’s spine. She’s moved by Hazel’s reprieve, which she sees as a sign sent by God to remind her that one can do worse than lose one’s job and send one’s daughter off for two weeks in California. Immediately she feels guilty for appropriating this major chapter in Hazel’s life as an exemplary detail in her own, and then, in some misguided gesture of penance, finds herself thinking that now she can start worrying about lung cancer all over again.
“Who knew he got Labor Day off?” is how Carmen greets her. “Not me, not till last night he lets it slip he’s going to Norfolk with his buddies…”
Vera doesn’t ask why Carmen can’t give Frankie some space. She knows being in love makes you want your lover to want to be with you. Even so, Vera’s finding it hard to work up her usual sympathy for the continuing saga. Frankie and Carmen were lovers, Oh, Lordy, how they could love. She wants to tell Carmen that Norfolk is much closer than L.A., that Carmen will be seeing Frankie long before Vera sees Lowell. Carmen, be thankful he’s going with his buddies and not your only child. Mostly what Vera wants to say is, Forget him. Hold out for someone who’d rather be with
you
. Sure, Vera thinks. Look who’s talking.
Maybe what’s irking her is the
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
sign behind Carmen. Vera reaches into her purse. The crumpled pack is still there, dusting keys and sunglasses with delicious tobacco crumbs. “He’ll come around,” says Vera, knowing how banal she sounds. Carmen does, too. She looks, if anything, more disconsolate than when Vera walked in.
And suddenly Vera feels as if yet another bolster’s been pulled out from under her: the myth of her friendship with Carmen. They’re nothing but a lonely hearts’ club—if Lowell and Frankie didn’t exist, they’d have nothing to talk about. Vera knows this isn’t strictly true. She and Carmen talk religion, matters of the spirit. Meaning what? Soul investigations and angelic cafeterias. When Vera leaves
This Week
, they won’t see each other again, not unless they happen to meet in line for cotton candy at the circus.
Vera goes into her office. Abandoning all pretense of having come in to straighten up—she doesn’t even have boxes to pack things in—she calls Louise and, miraculously, Louise answers. “Awful,” Vera says when Louise asks how she is. “Just awful.”
“Well, hop on the first plane out here.” It’s what Louise always says, what Vera counts on her saying. “We’ll talk. Eat. Get fat. Two happy fat ladies. That’ll cheer you up.”
“I wish I could,” says Vera. “I wish I had the money…”
“God will provide,” says Louise. “Especially if you give Him time to pay it off on the MasterCard.”
Vera thinks of the severance pay she’s supposed to be getting from Shaefer. “Well, maybe…” she says. “I don’t know…”
“No maybe about it. Find some story you can research while you’re out here. Then you can write the whole thing off on your taxes. It’ll be like Uncle Sam’s
paying
you to fly out.”
It’s why Vera so loves Louise: she can talk God providing in one breath and tax write-offs in the next. “Story for where?” she says. “I’ve been fired.”
“Not for that rag,” says Louise. “I mean a
real
story.” And this, even more than the need for Louise’s company, is what finally convinces Vera. Louise knows her from before
This Week
, remembers a time when she wrote real stories, led a real life.
“I’ll call you back,” Vera says. “Let me think.” What she’s thinking is that something about this tax write-off business has sounded a familiar note. And then she remembers: That’s what Ray Bramlett suggested in his note inviting her to the cryptobiologists’ convention. Vera looks for the letter and it’s there, right in the desk drawer where she left it.
Is it possible? Why not? She could write about them, just as she would have when the everyday and the profound drew her so much more strongly than the simply bizarre. Everyone—everyone but the Greens, she reminds herself—loves her cryptobiologist stories, perks up when she tells of retired academics exploring the Congo for dinosaur tracks. What could be more ordinary than a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Carl Poteet or more fantastic than their search for the Mokele-Mbembe? And who could be better qualified to write about it? Five years trekking after the yeti, trawling Loch Ness in Nessie’s wake, seeking Bigfoot in every dream and nearly all her waking hours—it’s time Vera put her own peculiar version of job experience to some practical use.
For a moment she falters, thinking it’s more of the same: more Sasquatch, more giant squid and Mayan treasure, more false hope. More
This Week
. But really, she knows it’s not. These people aren’t looking for magic in the magazine racks by the supermarket checkout line. They’re going out to seek it. Their myths are still vital to them, intact and so important they’ll go almost anywhere to find out if they’re true.
Vera looks down at the conference schedule, headed with the cryptobiologists’ logo: a rather crudely drawn kangaroo that looks for all the world like a potbellied, biped Basenji. It’s a dog, Vera thinks. It’s a sign.
V
ERA LOVES MAKING TRAVEL
plans. Paradoxically, they anchor her in the present, ground her in the physical world. She thinks of those sixties gurus who used to talk about being here now. Maybe the reason they always seemed so calm was that they were always traveling. Even with a retinue, you don’t get far without applying some degree of concentration to some amount of detail. Just having to look at maps and buy tickets and pack keeps you from thinking too abstractly about the future, which is precisely what Vera doesn’t want to do.
Travel plans also keep her from facing her terror of travel, a fear she attempts to control by ritualizing every step. She never deals with agencies, only with the airlines and only certain airlines, always takes the earliest morning flight, will only make connections in warm, hospitable-sounding cities—Atlanta, St. Louis—never in cold, forbidding Chicago or Cincinnati. Meanwhile she’s vigilant in watching for omens—how long it takes her to get through the airline’s busy signals and Muzak, whether a flight’s scheduled when she wants to leave. Once, bound for San Francisco, the zipper on her favorite suitcase broke and she nearly canceled her trip. She’d never have met Lowell.
Today things are going well. The airline answers on the first ring and not only has just the flight for her but volunteers the information that, for twenty dollars over the New York-Seattle round trip, she can buy a Super-See-America fare entitling her to fly anywhere in the continental U.S. At first she’s annoyed, like when she orders Rosie fries at McDonald’s and the cashier asks if she’ll be wanting apple pie with that. If she’d wanted to eat apple pie or see America, she’d have said so. Then it occurs to her: It
is
what she wants. New York–Seattle–Phoenix–Flagstaff–Phoenix–New York.
Connections are smoother than Vera can believe, especially when she decides not to ask the size of the plane to Flagstaff. The intervals between flights are just right. The only rough moment comes when the clerk asks, smoking or non-smoking? and Vera gulps and says smoking—an interchange she makes the best of by telling herself that the back of the plane is statistically safer.
So. Vera’s leaving tomorrow, spending two nights at Louise’s, then on to Flagstaff Friday unless by then the plane’s crashed and helicopters are already combing the Mohave for her bones. In that case she wants someone to know she’s there, to identify the elbow she chipped falling off a swing, the molar she broke on an olive pit. She dials her parents’ number.
“Where?”
Norma says.
“Seattle,” says Vera. “Then the Grand Canyon.”
“And what’ll you do with Rosie?” asks Norma. “Send her down the canyon on a donkey?”
“Rosie’s with Lowell,” Vera says. “In L.A.” The pause that follows this is so long that Vera says, “Hey, are you okay?”
“Sweetheart,” says Norma. “Don’t go overboard.”
Vera likes the conclusion Norma’s jumped to, that Vera’s sent Rosie off to her father’s so she could cover the cryptobiologists. “Going overboard” implies conscious choice, as if Vera’s kicked Lowell and Rosalie off the raft and is thinking of jumping in, too. “Mom,” Vera says, “It’s not like that.”
“What
is
it like?” Norma snaps, then catches herself. “Look, maybe you could take a few minutes, come out here, tell me and your father where things stand, you never know…”
Vera knows what “you never know” means. It means that either of them might be dead by the time she comes back.
If
she comes back. Heart attacks, plane crashes in the Mohave—lightning may strike any minute. If she doesn’t explain now, when will she? Vera used to hate this fatalism, this fear, so different from whatever spirit must have sent Dave off to Spain. It’s only since she’s had Rosie that she’s understood how it’s possible to see the world as the sum of all the disasters that can come between you and your child.
“All right,” Vera says. “I’ll come out.”
But as soon as Vera gets there, she realizes her mistake. She should have waited till dinner. Evening softens the outlines of things. After five, Dave and Norma could be any older couple, relaxing. At two on a weekday afternoon, it’s clear they haven’t been anywhere, have nowhere to go.
Vera decides to ignore the fact that Dave is watching
General Hospital
. In the kitchen Norma’s emptying an apothecary jar of cinnamon Red Hots into the garbage. Vera remembers those Red Hots. She used to get them as rewards for doing household chores. The candy’s faded, crusty, and white at the edges. Still, Vera’s surprised to see them streaming into the trash. What of those Indian children? What would Karl Marx and God have to say?