Turn of the Century (16 page)

Down in her late mother-in-law’s kitchen, Lizzie is improvising a chef’s salad from Safeway cold cuts—“Luncheon Meat” is the name of the product, not salami or bologna or olive loaf—Safeway-brand cottage cheese, and water chestnuts, and heating up quarts of Campbell’s tomato soup. As George passes through on his way to the basement, she says, “It’s like a time warp. I really thought canned green beans and canned carrots had sort of been phased out. How was the attic? It must stir up memories.”

“Memories of memories, more like. Nostalgia for nostalgia. I used to sit up there as a kid for hours, rifling through Mom and Dad’s stuff. What a snoopy little fuck I was.”

She smiles. “You were curious. You are curious.”

Lizzie chops. George stares. He feels vague and stupefied. Is it his mother’s death? Is it being away from work, being in St. Paul, in his parents’ house? George sees that it’s 5:22 on the digital clock—the original kind of digital clock, circa 1970, with the sequential black-and-white metal numerals that flip down as each minute and hour
pass, like the scoring mechanism on
What’s My Line
that the sly host had to flip by hand, which even in 1962 seemed strangely, unnecessarily primitive to six-year-old George. In retrospect, of course, that also seems charming now, like everything from the middle of the last century. Lizzie is too young, just, to remember the original
What’s My Line
. John Daly: that was the host’s name. Harold Mose is John Dalyesque, except manlier, more North American. And richer.

“What’d Mose want? Did you call him back?”

Lizzie is trying and failing to twist off the encrusted top from an elderly bottle of soy sauce—not soy sauce, in fact, but Safeway-brand “Super-Oriental Sauce.” She stops, and holds the bottle toward George. It is so old it has no nutritional information chart on the label.

“Oh, he doesn’t understand streaming video, exactly. What the proprietary technology is. I don’t really, either, but I know enough to make him think he could have a conversation with Gates and not seem like a moron.

“How long did you talk?”

“Not long. Five minutes. Ten.”

Ten minutes?
George can’t help himself. “What else did you talk about?”

“Nothing. He asked me about people at Microsoft. It was small talk. Boring computer business small talk.”

Using his teeth, the right molars, George finally gets the soy sauce bottle open and hands it back to his wife, who takes it with two hands. He stretches his jaw open wide, clicks it from side to side, and heads for the basement.

At the foot of the stairs are two pairs of sneakers. The white P F Flyers with blue trim are the kind George wore almost every day of his life until junior high; the blue Nikes, which he sent his father for his sixty-fifth birthday, look like they’ve never been worn. All four shoes are carefully placed on the bottom step, as though they’re about to walk up. His mother wouldn’t have put them there like that. This must be some cryptic unconscious sign from Alice. She spent last night and this morning going through the house, unplugging, stacking, organizing. The basement, it looks like, is the depot for mint-condition footwear and small appliances.

So many gadgets! So much hundred-dollar-a-pop uselessness masquerading as usefulness! Her old weather station. “George,” she
would say in the course of several phone conversations a year, “is the barometric pressure there in New York City still as
terrible
as it was last time I visited?” Here’s a newer weather machine, which she must have bought after Uncle Vance died and melanoma anxiety became one of her hobbies. The Health EnviroMonitor, George sees, displays the levels of ultraviolet intensity, solar radiation, heat stress, wind chill, and
seventy-five
other measurements of climate-derived dangers. It let her know on any day precisely how many minutes it would take her to get a sunburn. “I’m so fair, you know,” she said. “You’re lucky—oh, and Lizzie, with
her
skin, she’s
so
lucky.…” “Them Jews sure do tan up real good, don’t they, Mama?” he teased. She hated it when he did that.

Alice has piled all the emergency equipment together in one corner. The carbon monoxide detector—which Edith Hope had owned for years and years, she called to tell George the day after Vitas Gerulaitis died from carbon monoxide poisoning. And something called a Beep Seat. With which prospective emergency situation does it cope? George reaches down for a closer look. The Beep Seat, he reads, is an alarm that goes off if the toilet seat is raised for more than sixty seconds. The Beep Seat box is unopened, shrink-wrapped, and dusty. She must have bought it just before his father died, and never needed to install it. George wonders if the prospect of electronic toilet-seat monitoring contributed to his stroke.

“Well,” he says, flipping off the basement light, climbing the stairs slowly back to the kitchen, reminding himself of his father, “that was depressing.”

Lizzie tastes her salad. “Did you know she doesn’t have any herbs? No spices whatsoever. Except for salt and pepper and something called ‘Not-Too-Spicy South of the Border Flavoring.’ ”

“No! No, no.” George goes to an out-of-the-way cabinet and opens the door, revealing a complicated yellow plastic device that looks like a scale-model grain elevator. He gestures in the manner of a magician’s assistant. “It’s the
Spice Carousel
, dear.
Fourteen
different herbs and spices. Just dial the particular herb or spice you want, and press the button.”

“Don’t be mean about your mother, George.”

“I think the
ethnic
spices are probably somewhere back here,” he says, reaching in and twirling the thing. “In this flavor sector.”

“
Stop
it,” she says, laughing, her eyes still red from crying. Behind the Spice Carousel, he spots something that, Lizzie sees, sucks the levity out of him. “What is it?” she asks.

He pulls out a clear plastic cylinder, fatter than a tennis-ball can, with slits in the lid. At the bottom is a fresh-looking poppy-seed bagel. On the side is a big purple Star of David and purple letters: 1946–1996
MAZEL TOV! FRIENDS OF TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL, ST. PAUL
. It’s a commemorative bagel canister. George and Lizzie look at each other.

“She wasn’t a bad person, George.”

As George puts it back, Sarah shuffles in and looks at the salad skeptically. “When’s dinner?”

“I know she wasn’t,” George says. “I know.”

“Daddy!”
Sarah says suddenly. She has not called him Dad in weeks, maybe months. She has not called him Daddy for a year. “
Where
did you get
those
?”

George holds up his old P F Flyers and the Nikes his father never wore. “Which?”

Sarah’s mouth is agape. She looks at the size eight P F Flyers, then takes a Nike in both hands and inspects it as gently and carefully as George and Lizzie have ever seen her do anything.

“These are first-edition Nike Air Jordans!
1985!
Mint! In
Carolina blue!
Heather Harper’s father paid
sixteen hundred dollars
for a pair last year. I’m serious! He buys and sells to all the big Japanese collectors in Scarsdale. And I know he’s got a pair of those,” she says, pointing to the P F Flyers. “Was Grandma a collector?”

Shit. He missed the turn onto the Eugene McCarthy Parkway. As Lizzie says, daydreaming is his true disability. He’ll have to do a U-turn, which means he’ll have to grip the wheel with the prosthetic left hand, which he wears only for driving. He calls it “the hook,” although it is not a hook at all, or handlike. It looks like a very high-tech titanium bicycle part. George has been stopped for making illegal U-turns three times in the last fifteen years, twice in New York and once in L.A., and each time, when the cops saw his prosthesis, they let him go without a ticket.

George has never been to Alice’s new house. Her “new” house: she married Cubby in 1991, and they moved here right after the wedding.
It looks as if it was once handsome, a Prairie-style bungalow, but a second story added in the seventies has turned it into a freakish raised ranch, like an old man with a huge blond toupee. As George gets out of the car, he sees that the original detached garage has a new addition too, doubling its depth into Alice and Cubby’s backyard. Knowing his sister, George figures they probably keep freezers filled with discount sides of beef back there, pallets of generic toilet paper and paper towels, hundred-pound bags of fertilizer and salt pellets stacked to the rafters, God knows what dreary and prudent stores.

“Hello, Daddy!” Louisa says, jumping into his good arm the moment he steps into the Koplowitzes’ family room.

The eight-year-old Koplowitz twins are sprawled on a
Losers
beach towel in front of a thirty-five-inch TV, watching
Entertainment Tonight
, both chewing on Slim Jims and sharing the same large, realistic-looking stuffed opossum as a pillow.

“Hi, Roddy and Rance!” George shouts to the twins, who wave but do not look over or get up.

“Hi, Alice.”

“Hello, George.”

“You did a terrific job at Mom’s house. Organizing. You’ll have the lawyer call me. Okay? At the office.”

“I will.”

Cubby puts his hand on George’s shoulder. “You’re not getting out of here without seeing my layout, George. The Project.”

“Your layout?”

“Uncle Cubby’s got the fanciest toy train set in the
world
, Daddy! It’s like a real city!”

It’s in the garage.

As they go in, entering a little foyer, Cubby presses a lighted button—one of a column of tiny rectangular plastic light-switch buttons, each like a cherry Pez candy split in half lengthwise. Dozens of different lights inside the garage power up slowly, smoothly.

“Ta-dahhh,” Cubby says, proud but not too proud. “I’ve been working on it since I was eighteen.” Cubby is forty-seven. “No wonder the first marriage flopped, right? Let me go switch on the breeze.” He walks toward a darkened, closet-size control room, turning back to tell George, “Everything else cycles on automatically.”

The space is twenty feet by forty feet. The smooth walls and domed ceiling (fiberglass? plastic?) are blue—a startling, complicated, authentic-looking sunny sky blue. The bottom couple of feet of the room are a lightless pool, so dim that George can’t see his feet. A narrow walkway, thick rubber from the feel of it, apparently extends in an oval around the perimeter. The rest of the room, from two feet off the floor to well over George’s head, is a perfect downtown, a city of dramatic topography and streets and alleys, and complex, meticulous architecture. His gaze fibrillates back and forth, back and forth between the whole city and its thousands of details—the inch of pink steam wafting up from a pinhole in a cobbled street, the fingernail-size LCD billboard flashing its message (
QUATRO MINUTOS
 … FOUR MINUTES … 
QUATRO MINUTOS
) inside a mass-transit station, a TV set the size of a corn kernel, illuminating its tiny room with a blue-gray video light that changes its hue and intensity every few seconds, simulating the rhythm of TV cuts. It is a city evidently some hundreds of years in the future, apparently semitropical but not Miami or Rio or any particular city, as nearly as George can tell.

It is a place concocted entirely out of Cubby Koplowitz’s imagination. Bits of the architecture are familiar. In the “old” neighborhood, a pseudo-mid-twentieth-century skyscraper, a clunky imitation Empire State Building that Philip Johnson might have designed in Houston in 1985, is half demolished, in the process of being torn apart by a little robot wrecking crew. But mostly the buildings are of two or three distinct new styles, glassy or metallic, and all “futuristic” enough to sell the idea but unlike any depiction of the future George has ever seen in books or movies. The largest building, about the size of a small air conditioner and decorated like a circus tent or a painting by Howard Hodgkin, is apparently some kind of cathedral or temple. It’s lit by a circle of pivoting, thimble-size searchlights, and seems to emit a kind of warbling hum, as if a chanting chorus were inside. The cathedral is in a neighborhood that could be religious or industrial, with buildings that resemble both power-plant cooling towers and temples at Angkor Wat. The city looks as if it’s grown over many years (and so it has, George remembers) but also as if it’s been designed by different hands—like a real city. All but a few of the individual streets and parks and skyscrapers are unheroic—exotic certainly, but regular, disparate, plausible. Some of the oddest and newest buildings have gridded skins
in an opalescent gray-turquoise that looks like no color George has ever seen. The mood is neither
Blade Runner
scary nor World’s Fair perky. It seems like the center of a very specific metropolis, an actual place that’s quirky and a little dreamlike but not intending to be quirky or dreamlike, a city that’s surreal by accident, only to viewers from a different century. It is magnificent. It is an unimaginably beautiful creation. George doesn’t know what to say to Cubby. He feels like crying.

“Isn’t it neat, Daddy? Look! In that tunnel behind the little waterfall! Here comes the neatest train!”