Turn of the Century (10 page)

Crossing a quiet stretch of Kenmare Street at sunset, a backlit old wino comes toward her through the gloaming, pushing a packed, smoky shopping cart and chanting, in a turn-of-the-last-century oystermonger singsong, “
Flaming
potatoes! Now.
Flaming
potatoes! Now.” From a good four feet away, Lizzie reaches into her pocket and tosses all her change at the box hanging from his cart handle. (Performance folk art: only $1.37.)

On Broadway, she stops in a Korean deli to buy milk, and notices that the rack of produce is oddly speckled. Looking closer, she picks up an avocado and sees that the speckle is a tiny red, star-shaped sticker that says GORE 2000. It’s a campaign ad. She looks around and sees now that almost every piece of fruit and every vegetable in the place has one of the little stickers. On the apples, the GORE 2000 stars are embossed directly into the skins. (Pop art: $2.50 a pound.)

As she gets closer to home, Lizzie automatically turns to glance up at St. Andrew’s School, thinks of LuLu and Max, and feels relief. Heading east toward Water Street, she breathes deeper, as usual, and feels calmer, even cheery, as if she’s had half a beer. Two buildings down
from theirs, she glances in at the rococo parlor and sees something new—filling the room is a giant television screen, on it an intense electronic cyan background with foot-high letters that say NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN LEADERS. She is bewildered and delighted (Installation art: free), but a moment later, as she pulls her keys out, she realizes what she’s seen, and thinks that if she were the
Jeopardy!
contestant she definitely would have picked a different category for $300, Alex.

She tosses her leather backpack on the kitchen table, and the scrape of the metal Prada tag across the zinc surface scares the cat off its window seat. “Hello, Johnny,” Lizzie says to the cat. “Where is everybody?” She sees that Max has brought home this year’s school pictures, twelve unsmiling Maxes on one sheet, plus two big five-by-seven unsmiling Maxes. The cheap generic portraits always give Lizzie a chill. The pictures make her children look like any children, like pathetic children in the newspaper or on milk cartons, like victims. She turns away.

She scans the mail. Do other people get real letters? The only personal correspondence George and Lizzie receive regularly are invitations (three today: a Roger Baird and Nancy McNabb “Remember the 1980s?” costume party at the Frick Museum to raise money to supply T1 internet hookups for the fifty poorest schools in New York, a party celebrating the Philip Morris Corporation’s sponsorship of the upcoming Jean-Genet-and-Jim-Morrison season at Brooklyn Academy of Music, one addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Zimbalist” from Bennett Gould reminding them about the grand-opening party at BarbieWorld in Las Vegas next week); thank-you notes (one today from her friend Beverly for a Tiffany’s silver teething ring); and those quasi-celebrity chain letters (the last one from Angela Janeway, soliciting ten dollars for clinics in southern Mexico—copies of which also were sent by Danny Goldberg to Courtney Love, to Pete Hamill by Ken Kesey, to Bianca Jagger by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., by Mort Zuckerman to Tony Blair, by Patricia Duff to Harold Mose, and by a hundred other quasi-celebrities to five hundred other quasi-celebrities who are all pleased, in the name of a good cause, to make you aware that they know one another). Nowadays even thank-you notes and Christmas cards have addresses laser-printed on an adhesive label. The last piece of absolutely bona fide
personal mail Lizzie received was a note in December from George’s mother that included a recipe for Szechwan Christmas succotash (“
Very zippy!!
”) and a Minneapolis
Star Tribune
clip about a coven of suburban teenage computer hackers, all girls. (“Thought you’d be interested regarding female computer ‘progress’ out in these parts! Tell George one of these gals from Edina is the daughter of his high school friend Jodie—small world!”) The note, the recipe, and the newspaper clipping were all included with their 1999 Christmas present, a “media-storing ottoman,” which had an upholstered plaid hinged top and a drawer. It could hold three hundred compact discs or a hundred videos. Max said LuLu could use it as a mausoleum for her Barbies. Lizzie gave it to the cleaning lady the Monday after Christmas.

Louisa, sounding like a dropped piece of carry-on luggage, comes tumbling down the three flights of stairs. During the brief pause at each landing Lizzie hears the slow, even footsteps of Rafaela, their new baby-sitter. (Lizzie won’t use the word
nanny
.)

“Hello, baby-duck!” Lizzie says, mail in hand, as Louisa finally stands before her.

The six-year-old, zipped into her snowsuit, looks past her mother, bows her head, frowns, and says, “Hello, Missus.”

“What?”
Lizzie says, startled, smiling, staring at LuLu, who runs out to the tiny backyard. (Lizzie won’t use
garden
as a synonym for yard, even though it would be more accurate.)

Rafaela arrives in the kitchen. She is wrapped in an old Missoni cardigan of George’s and a prop DEA jacket from
NARCS
, with a WIRED watchcap pulled way down.

“Hi, Rafaela.”

“Hello, Missus,” she says, not quite making eye contact, following Louisa outdoors. She turns. “Missus, the store don’t have whole-wheat Mega-Cheerios you want. Store brand only.”

“The children will survive, Rafaela. That’s fine.”

“Okay,” Rafaela says, and pulls the back door shut.

With Margaret, the previous and perfect baby-sitter, who went home to St. Kitts at Christmas and decided to remain there with the husband she’d abandoned eleven years earlier, George and even Lizzie enjoyed the Anglo-Caribbean bits Louisa and Max had picked up—saying “straightaway” instead of “immediately,” pronouncing the first syllable of “radiator” with a broad
a
. A few years back, however, Max
required heavy persuasion to stop referring to black people as “colored,” even though Margaret, who was black, would continue to do so. “Is Margaret bad for saying ‘colored’?” LuLu asked then. Now she will need to be told why she shouldn’t call her mother “Missus,” even though Rafaela does.

“Mommy?” comes a voice from all the way upstairs.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Hi,” Sarah yells down. “Sir spilled the perfume, not me. Penelope and I already had dinner. Can you get
firm
tofu next time? Can we use one of your old cigarette lighters for our video?” Max changed his name to Sir almost two years ago, in second grade, after seeing some old war movie on television. At about the same time, it seemed to Lizzie that half the boys in school were named Max, and she felt some regret that they had given their son the name: too trendy too late in the wave. So she and George decided to let Max call himself Sir. Everyone but his parents and grandparents now called him Sir, and even Lizzie sometimes does, for fun. “And, Mom?” Sarah yells. “What time are we leaving for Minneapolis tomorrow?”

“Eleven. What’s the lighter for? Sarah, I don’t want to shout.” She and her classmate thunder down the stairs like a 1970 drum solo, recklessly fast and loud, almost virtuosic.

Sarah and Lizzie hug. “Is he okay?” Sarah says softly into her mother’s neck.

Lizzie feels her sinuses sting. Her eyes water. “Yes, I think. Yeah.” They decouple. “What do you want to burn?”

“Well, in the southern part, the sheriff is going to torture Penelope while she’s in jail? Put a cigarette near her face and burn her hair.”

“Really just
singe
it, more,” Penelope says, looking from Sarah to Lizzie. Penelope has magnificent hair, tiny glistening labor-intensive coils that Sarah has informed Lizzie are
not
to be called dreadlocks, but simply ’locks or microbraids. “I promised my mom.
And
my locktician,” she adds with a smile that could indicate either embarrassment or pride.

“Be very careful. Who plays the trooper?”

“Sir,” Sarah says.

“Interesting casting,” Lizzie says. “Make sure he’s
really careful
with the flame.”

“We’re not, like, cretins.”

“Where did you get the cigarette?”

“Penelope’s brother. I was going to ask George to play the trooper, but—”

“No,” Lizzie said.

“I know.” Lizzie feels a pang whenever Sarah calls her stepfather “George,” which she is doing more and more. It seems to be one of those small adolescent cruelties passing as grownup sophistication. Sarah’s biological father is a man named Buddy Ramo, whom she and Lizzie haven’t seen in years, and who lives somewhere north of Malibu. Buddy Ramo was a child actor managed by Lizzie’s father, Mike. His biggest break was the title role on
Li’l Gilligan
, a
Gilligan’s Island
prequel series that was canceled after two episodes. He was a crush that lasted fifteen years and ended only after he and Lizzie finally slept together a few times the summer before her last year of college. Buddy is the stupidest man with whom she has ever had sex. Once, when she heard Emily call Timothy Featherstone “the second-stupidest man in television,” Lizzie actually wondered for an instant if Buddy Ramo was well enough known to be considered the stupidest.

“Your brother’s on the computer?”

“Yeah. I have to go force him to stop.”

Without another word, Sarah, wearing a blood-red U.S. OUT OF MEXICO NOW T-shirt, and Penelope, wearing a lavender Ralph Lauren alpaca turtleneck, start back upstairs, two steps at a time, to continue shooting their Unfortunate American History docudrama.

Lizzie turns on the computer in the kitchen—the musical chord that Macs play as they boot up pleases her, as always, like a little electronic dawn—and she sends a message to her son, who is upstairs. As a surprise housewarming present last year, Bruce, from the office, wired the family’s five computers together into a local-area network, which George and Lizzie at first regarded as a joke conversation piece but now find themselves using.

HI. DINNER IN 20 MINUTES WHEN DADDY GETS HOME
.

Max replies instantly.

I ATE WITH SARAH AND PENELOPE ALL READY. BYE
.

When George walks in, Lizzie is sitting in the big, ratty old leather armchair in their bedroom looking at pictures of their wedding, of George dancing with his mother, of his mother dancing with her father, of the Laura Ashleyed toddler Sarah on George’s shoulders.

“Did you just sneeze?” he asks from the hallway. “I thought I heard you sneezing from out on the street.” Lizzie always sneezes violently, without restraint. George finds it sexy. He reaches their room and sees her. Her eyes are red. Her cheeks are wet. She hasn’t been sneezing.

“Aw, sweetie,” he says.

“I miss your mom.”

“Sweetie.”

“I hate people dying. I know that’s stupid to say. But I hate it.”

Lizzie continues crying. Kneeling in front of the chair, George puts his arm around her. He doesn’t cry.

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

From upstairs they hear Max shout, “We got ways of making you show a little respect, you uppity nigger girl!”

George pushes Lizzie back from his shoulder and looks at her.

They hear the girls laugh and Sarah says, “Great! That was awesome, Sir.”

“Sarah’s video. About civil rights,” Lizzie says, and then gives a long, loud, sinus-clearing snort. “God.” She chuckles through her final sob. “How was your meeting with Mose?”

“I think we sold the
Reality
show.”

“I think I queered my Microsoft deal.”

“Mose didn’t like
My People, Your People
.”

“Good. I’m sorry. But I didn’t want our life to be a sitcom.”

George smiles. “It’s not a sitcom, it’s a”—George makes quick little midair quotation marks with his hands—“ ‘dramedy.’ Emily wants to take it to ABC. What happened with Microsoft?”

“I say
fuck
too much.” George smiles. “According to some anti-Semitic sexist asshole in Seattle. But I do swear too much. I’ll tell you about it later.” She stands up. “I need a big drink. The kids have eaten. You want to order sushi in? Hiroshima Boy?”

They had martinis on their first date, almost twelve years ago. She was twenty-four and he was just thirty-two and drinking martinis was still, for people their age, a self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek act, playing grownup. They’d met at a Dukakis fund-raiser at Bennett Gould’s triplex on East Thirteenth Street, and they left together for a drink at a noir-in-outer-space-themed bar in the East Village called Blue Velveteen. The olives were plastic. Sometime after their second martinis,
Lizzie did a Kitty Dukakis impersonation that made George laugh so suddenly he sprayed gin out his nose all over baby Sarah, sleeping next to him on the tatty velvet banquette.

Twelve years later, the martinis in Manhattan are sipped without olives or irony. Martinis for two remains a residual romantic ritual. George has punched on the television, and it plays its turn-on music, the five-note Intel-inside jingle. That started when they installed the cable modem. He sits next to Lizzie on the couch in the living room, looking down on Rafaela playing with Louisa outside in the dark.

“…  the actress denied the allegations, and spokespeople for both Senator Kennedy and the White House declined to comment.”
One, one thousand.
“Are humans about to become bionic?”

“Oh, lose the smirk, asshole,” George says. “I still can’t figure where they all learn to smirk.” He turns to Lizzie. “Does any actual person switch between a frown and a smirk all the time like that?”

“…  at the University of Washington, where a controversial scientist reported today that he has succeeded in establishing a direct communications link between two living mammals’ brains by means of computer chips.”

“As opposed to dead mammals’ brains,” George says.

“Although computer industry observers agreed the feat was exciting, they—”

“ ‘Industry observers agreed,’ ” George says. “God, TV news sucks.”

“Shhh,” Lizzie says, waving the remote toward him like a giant black index finger.

“—that the practical applications of the so-called mental modem are years away. In Mexico, a spokesman for the American embassy denied allegations that an American military attaché had participated in the torture of civilians in the Chiapas village of Taniperla. Calling the charges—”