The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (41 page)

"I want to see the damn thing work!" she yelled over the
screeching.

"Certainly, ma'am."

I'd developed a technique: whenever I turned on the machine I'd
let one hand rest on it as though was just a natural place to let a hand
take a rest, disguising the fact the Kitchen Whirrrr liked to take a stroll
when switched on. With my free hand, I picked up a turnip, thinking this might impress her for turnips are tough little customers and much
opposed to being cut into bits. I dropped it in, heard the sucking noise
and out popped four turnip slabs glistening with juice. For a brief second I was actually proud of the Kitchen Whirrrr and my role promoting it. The boy shrieked and wiggled and slapped, and the woman
stared regretfully at the turnip sections as though I'd done something to
offend her. She didn't even take her eyes off them when she asked,
"How much?"

"It's $19.99."

"Damn rip-off, that. The Slice-Master over in the corner's only
$17.99, and I like the colour better."

"Does the Slice-Master come with a puree blade?"

"Uh, don't know."

"Well, see, there you go. You're obviously a woman with children, and believe me a puree blade'll come in handy."

This set the woman to thinking, which she seemed to find hard,
either because she was naturally stupid or because she had a thirtypound toddler smacking the side of her head.

"Plus," I said, "how many settings does the Slice-Master have?"

"Uh, I dunno. Three?"

"Three? Three settings? Far be it from me to tell you which
processor to buy, madam, but most housewives find three settings inadequate for even the most basic chopping requirements. The Kitchen
Whirrrr, as you can see, has seven: Thick, Medium-Thick, Medium,
Medium-Thin, Thin, Wafer, Paper."

Here I motioned like a twit and smiled brightly. Halfway through
my arm sweep I realized what a mistake I'd just made.

"Lemme see," she said.

"Let you see what, madam?"

"I wanna see the Paper setting. Graham only eats his carrots if
they're so thin you can see through 'em, isn't that right Graham?"

At the sound of his name the boy stopped howling and pounding the side of his mother's head long enough to wipe the back of his arm
against his nose, smearing all that snot and dried pudding into a smudge
that ran diagonally over the bottom half of his face. Turned my stomach, he did. Having had a momentary break he started screeching and
slapping with renewed vigour.

"I'm afraid I'm out of carrots, madam."

"Well, spuds then. I like to get them thin before I fry 'em."

"Of course, ma'am, right away ... oh, darn, the Kitchen Whirrrr
works best with peeled potatoes and I don't seem to be able ... where did
I put my peeler?"

Her face went stiff. She grabbed both the brat's hands, which
caught him off guard and shut him up. Then she looked straight at me
for the first time since she'd showed up at the table.

"Listen, lady," she said, "you jerking me around for any specific
reason or is it just your nature?"

I set the Kitchen Whirrrr to Paper, turned it on, took hold, stuck
in an unpeeled potato the size of a football, and aimed. Caught the ugly
little goblin right in the eye. I don't think he even got his lid closed in
time, for his eye turned pink and drippy and he started screaming in a
way that made his previous yowling seem calm by comparison. The
woman got mad as a furnace, and through a curtain of greasy hair
yelled, "What did you do?"

"Taught your brat a lesson you trashy excuse for a human," I
replied, and from there our salesman-customer relationship deteriorated. A commotion ensued, until finally there was a crowd around the
All-New Stainless-Steel Slicing and Dicing Ronco Miracle Kitchen
Whirrrr, though not for the reasons the Ronco people might've hoped
for. My day ended with my telling a spitting-mad Theresa Gains what
she could do with her crappy processing machine. Then I stormed out,
feeling like exactly what I was: a useless old lady wearing a silly costume fifty years too young for her.

The weather was the way it always is in March in southern California: hot and beautiful. I forced myself to concentrate on the way
the sun warmed my face and on the coolness of the breeze blowing over
the parking lot and how that coolness is so often a feature of the coast.
At the same time, I forced myself to think how lucky I was to live in a
place that wasn't freezing cold nine months out of the year. Then I
forced myself to consider my health, my house, my big old car, my
memories of criss-crossing this big old glorious country called
America so many times I know it the way most people know their own
bathroom.

Had to.

I stayed reclined for the better part of a week. Only got up to pee and
drink down the occasional Hamm's and swallow my sleep medicine. If
the phone rang I let it go on ringing, and if someone came to the door
I let their knuckles get raw. I even moved the black-and-white into the
bedroom so I could switch on Gilligan or the news if the mood hit me.
Generally, it didn't.

Finally, one afternoon I awoke and instead of feeling listless and
wan I felt raring to go. Vengeful, you might say. This presented two
options. The first was getting up and doing whatever it took, no matter
how desperate, to get my kitties back. The second was to roll over and
wait patiently for another neurasthenic lapse. Both had their attractions
and their drawbacks, but after a few minutes of staring up at the ceiling
I figured I better pursue the first-if I lay around much longer my
muscles would start to go, and then doing anything requiring the slightest bit of vigour would be permanently out of the question.

So I pounced. Threw back the blankets and jumped to the carpet.
It felt good moving my body again, so I gave a little whoop along with
it. Then I dressed in clothes befitting a woman my age and jumped in
the old Buick. Tore onto the Ventura Freeway, and for the first time in
my life took the center lane instead of the slow lane, all the while thinking, You've got to strike while the iron's hot. Plus I figured driving faster than normal would keep my mind off the fact that I didn't have a plan,
or leastways not exactly.

What I did have was possible courses of action. The first was
barging into Jeb and Ida's office and demanding they give me my tigers
back. While it's hard to describe why I thought this might work, it has
to do with my having been adulated once. Another was getting Jeb
alone and then out-and-out begging, something that probably wouldn't
work either and had the additional drawback of being a humiliation.
The other idea I had was somewhere in the middle: I'd find Jeb or Ray
Labbat and I'd say, all right, you win. You hire me back and I'll sign on
legit and any increase in your insurance premiums you can deduct
straight from my salary. That'll make me happy and that'll make the
Omahamians happy and you can keep on advertising you've got yourself the oldest living tiger trainer, two shows daily.

Yet as I tore along the freeway, the needle on the senseless side of
seventy, I willed myself not to make any decisions. Sometimes when
you enter an arena full of animals made grumpy by weather or bad hay
it's best to let instinct get you through. If I had a definite plan, it was
only to put myself in the moment and then see what determination and
a talent for survival would do for me.

So I pulled into the JungleLand parking lot and immediately got
mad when I saw someone else parked in my favourite spot beneath the
big oak tree. Instead of calming myself down, I let myself get good and
enraged, for that car being in that spot was a part of the moment, and if
my being mad as a polar bear was part of the equation, then so be it. So
I hit the steering wheel and leaned heavily on the horn and cursed out
the window. When this didn't accomplish anything other than make
me go hoarse I parked in the grass lot used on busy days. Walked all
the way across the lot, and when I reached the entrance Wanda the
ticket girl got all wide-eyed and curious about the details of my life
since retirement.

"Mabel!" she said. "How're you doing?"

Though Wanda was a decent person with problems that merited
sympathy-her son was in prison, and over the past year her husband
had bloated with gout-I lowered my chin and held up my palm as if to
say, Sorry, Wanda. Not right now. Then I walked on in, feeling relieved
she hadn't asked me to pay admission.

For a second I stood in the midway, getting my bearings, feeling
the way you do when you return to a place you once belonged-i.e.,
awkward. Which is not to say people weren't coming up to me and asking me how I was doing. They were, only I was feeling stupid being on
the lot without any work to do, so I used body language to indicate I
was too busy for idle chat but I'd come by later for a proper hello.

Mostly I wanted to keep up a good head of steam. Though I still
had no idea what I was going to do when I finally tracked down my old
bosses, there was a better than even chance I'd do it in a voice gone
sharp as a mowing tine. I stormed past the games of skill and the coin
rides and Annie's hamburger shack. Pigeons cawed and fluttered into
my face. (Who did they think they were, saying I was too old?) I
turned a corner onto the connection leading to the menage. Pulled up.
Was as if some furious god with big lungs had taken the wind from my
sails with a single sharp inhale.

Henry Tyndall, doddery as ever, was leading Daisy the
Dromedary to the show arena. He moved so slowly it was more like the
damn camel was leading him.

So. My heart pounded, my eyes brimmed, my stomach went fluttery and I suffered a sudden weakness in whatever muscles decide
whether you do or do not go to the bathroom. Seeing Tyndall was something I wouldn't've predicted in a million years. Instead of reacting and
being in the moment and running on instinct and doing all the things I'd
pictured myself doing, I stood there thinking, Why? Why me?

Seeing as there's no more stupefying a question, I knew my
first priority was to make it stop bouncing around my head. In other
words, I got my legs going before I figured where it was they were going to go to. Meanwhile, I sort of left my own body and imagined
how I must've looked trying to run, and that way was: arms crooked
and tensed, fingers splayed, head stuck out like a turtle's, splinted
legs moving at the hips, a stiffness caused by the fear of breaking
something. An expression hoping for dignified but not quite making
it. I don't think I'd ever been madder at my own self for getting
so old.

I'd travelled a few dozen steps when I figured out I was heading
in the direction of the monkey house. I kept on going. The monkeys
were inside that day, so when I pulled open the door I was met with a
steamy rankness. Fought my way through schoolchildren all pointing
at the king gorilla, who was fond of vomiting into his hands and then
slurping it right back up again, something he was doing that very
moment. There was a stretch of daylight between the gorillas and the
orangutans, at which point there was another cluster, Gerald the papa
orang giving a show by twirling his privates with a forefinger and grinning like a pervert.

By the time I made it to the chimps, I was sweating like a ewe on
slaughter day. For a second I stood with my eyes down. I couldn't look.
Couldn't even bring myself to lift my head-just sort of angled my
eyeballs upward and felt my throat seize tight. Sure enough, that old
Indian chief was in there, hunched over and sweeping pellets, his face
a thousand red nooks and crannies and crevices.

Had to've been ninety if he was a day.

I put my head down and walked quickly out of the monkey house and
if anyone called out, "Hi Mabel how you doing?" I ignored them and
kept going. Shaky with regret, I was, and that's a bitter way to feel:
even the dumbest eighteen-year-old elephant groomer knows enough
to be nice to the boss. Truth was, I'd been too big for my britches. I'd
deserved everything that'd come my way, and here I'm talking about
more than my firing from JungleLand.

By the time I stopped at Snack Bar Annie's I was pale and shaky
and sweaty.

"Jesus Christ, Mabel," Annie said. "You look like you seen a
ghost."

"Hamm's."

She gave me one and I popped the pull tab and drank it straight
down while she watched. I slammed it against the tabletop, scaring
some flies huddled around spilled ketchup.

"Another," I said, and repeated the process. By the time I finished
Hamm's number two, I was light-headed and wobbly, two shotgun
beers being a lot for an old woman whose weight and age are closer
than she'd ever care to admit.

"Thank you kindly," I said. Then I stumbled off and made the
entrance and when the ticket girl Wanda said, "Nice to see you again,
Mabel," I waved a saggy forearm without looking at her.

I got in my big old Buick. Backed out and made sure I took out
the headlight belonging to the car that'd had enough nerve to occupy
my spot under the oak tree. Then, so my final departure would be
dramatic, I did something I'd heard one of the cage boys brag about
once: I pushed my left foot against the breadloaf-sized brake pedal
while revving the engine hard with my right.

Understand, my Buick has a fair-sized engine, 425 cu. inches to
be exact, and though this doesn't mean a whole lot to me I've been told
that's a sizable bit of liveliness under the hood. The engine roared like
a lion wanting to fight. I let my left foot slide off the side of the brake,
the pad springing upward with a thwock. The tires spun like a son of a
bitch, the front of the car staying in one spot while the back swung in a
sideways arch. It came crashing against a big old woody station wagon
that'd been parked next to the car in my spot. There was the sound of
breaking glass and crumpling metal and screeching tires. The air was
filled with black smoke. The smell of rubber was something awful. I
drove slowly on out.