The pain that pinned her down through the man’s extended self-excision walked clearly across her face like schoolchildren behind a crossing guard. She had thought, wrongly, that their afternoon walk was itself the audition, not needing the proof of public papers. She had believed, naïvely, that he had no need to double-check. It had seemed to her that for a few hours, they two alone of everyone on earth had experienced simple trust and mutual goodwill. She had imagined them holding back the tide of 1944 between them, unassisted, with a twopenny pail. But he reminded her, cruelly and daily, just by turning into the man he did, that nothing came to pass without the aid of the complicitous moon.
Dad, too, felt the scars of their courtship. Not its bluntness or brevity, but something altogether different. Failing to break himself of his fondness for movies, it irked him that they had met at the cinema, at a morale booster that had insulted them both as well as the memories of their spent brothers. As he saw it, they had both shot the afternoon escaping the horror of the world conflagration, hiding inside the confines of a darkened theater. They had tried to lose their own survivors’ guilt in an afternoon of Ruritania or Shangri-La. They had been no better than the thousands of gold-star mothers who weekly tried to win back their own murdered children through blissful oblivion at Judge Hardy’s. It convinced him of a permanent flaw, both in their marriage and in the capacity of the human mind to recover from annihilation too easily, that while they had found no consolation in the two-hour world, they had discovered one another in a motion-picture lobby.
Much later my father discovered the value of escapism in standing ground against the real. By that time, most of the censuring gold-star mothers were dead themselves. Their losses, debits carried over in public accounting, had been posted so long ago that they were struck from the active book, transferred to the dead ledger. Those who remained, when they thought of the war years at all, remembered that trick with the cigarette Bette Davis always did better than they did Dieppe.
Tara stands out, sharper than Tora. We revive, rebuild, resew our wardrobe like the feisty little Brit girl making that green dress from the draperies. The Blitz becomes its fictional victim, Mrs. Miniver, trapped in a bomb shelter, reading Alice in Wonderland to the kids. Whatever the long-term consequences, we preserve “Night and Day” over “Night and Fog.” And even the casualties themselves wouldn’t have it any other way.
Besides, as Dad himself learned firsthand in the months immediately following his own overnight, cinematic marriage, most of the history we can ever hope to get comes in newsreels. And movies could conspire toward worse things than escape. In a world already lost, we must sometimes pack our keepsakes, keep our heads down, and create a magic kingdom of maxims. My father has disappeared into one, leaving me here. Sometimes we need coaxing to act on our own.
10
I’ve got a great idea,” Rachel said, behind the wheel of Mr. Nader, the Pinto deathtrap. She and Artie tooled their way east on Route 5 back to Chicago, still on the forsaken side of Aurora. They had forty minutes of late evening left, not enough to get them home. “Why don’t you reach over with your left foot and control the accelerator. Then I should be able to handle everything else pretty easily.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Artie answered drily. “Why don’t you just drive like everybody else and get me back to Hyde Park without killing me. Then I’ll give you a little brotherly peck on the cheek as a reward.”
“Jeez Louise. Or as the Espanich say, Heezoo Flooizoo. What’s happened to you, buddy? You’re just no fun anymore. Know that? Absolutely no fun.”
Artie smiled beatifically and nestled deeper into Mr. Nader’s passenger seat. His sister continued to berate him in a variety of dialects and portmanteaus. Listening to her was like watching a French farce: he was amused without really knowing what was going on. Rachel alone had the capacity to turn the East-West Tollway into something more than the world’s most expensive, desolate, opaque, and eventless tour from nowhere to nowhere through nowhere. Artie’s job, on the other hand, in his self-appointed role as acrid older brother, was to provide, less out of fear for his own safety than from a private need for symmetry, a counterweight to her idiocy.
At home, he never hesitated to add his own modest humor to the runaway routine. But alone with Rach, he had to be straight man. Any other combination fouled up her bravura performances. Besides, when Rachel drove, someone had to watch the road and keep everyone alive.
Adopting a tragic mask at the rebuff, Sis pulled an old gag that shattered Artie’s outward, straight-man composure. Ostensibly driving, she yawned, flopped down on his shoulder, drooped her eyes, and said, “Wake me up when we get to Oak Brook.” He lunged for the wheel and jerked them back on the road. Part of Artie knew, even as he overreacted, that her stunt presented no real danger. Theirs was the only car for three counties, and the shoulder, perfectly smooth, black midwestern soil, the richest soil in the country, lay as level and firmly packed as the road itself. Fields, safely gathered in, spread as far as they could see in all directions, an endless, flat landing zone in any crisis.
Nevertheless, Artie countered his sister, ethos for ethos. Completing the rescue, he scowled Wagnerianly and shot back, “Great Scots, woman. You’ll get us all Kilts.”
Rachel, giggling, battered his soft underbelly with both hands; he had no choice but to hold the wheel and steer, under attack, for a hundred yards. He protested, stentorian, “Your mother has told you and told you: play around, and somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
The Pinto veered out of the lane as Artie tried simultaneously to pilot the car and defend himself against this congenial maniac. They were the only motion, the One Thing Wrong in an otherwise eventless picture. Amid the subtle smells of end-of-year manure and nitrates, wrapped in the minimalist architecture of the straight row, bare box, and spare headland, they could have disappeared into flatness, agrarian Judge Craters, and never be heard from again. Or missed, for that matter. Rachel punched him with an abandon inviting disaster. Artie panicked and shouted, “Quit. Grow up, woman. Snap out of it. Take the wheel back. Now.” They played driverless chicken for fifty feet until she surrendered and took the wheel, grinning meekly.
Despite his faked protocol, Artie had the awful thought: We have sprung ourselves, flown off. The rest of our flock are snared back in barb city while we, careless, escape across county lines out of eminent domain. Because our father is back home dying, life has never felt fuller. Never more immediate or real.
But the crime was too terrible for him to take credit for, so he blamed it on his sister. “Your mom has told you and told you, but you know better, don’t you?” The car jerked dangerously and his words, stripped of the game, sounded harsher than intended. He startled himself with the bitterness that slipped in. Rachel drew up abruptly, tipped off by the tenor in his tenor. She did not take offense easily. Ordinarily, only a solid slug could bruise her. But her brother’s sudden turnaround caught her squarely in the face. Her eyes puffed up in rare, hurt questioning, and even Artie’s overeager compensatory attempt to tickle her could not shrink the swelling.
As usual when he mucked things up, Artie’s gums let him know. His body parts were emotional seismographs, recording pens spiking at the least flare-up of bad conscience. Gums and colon were most sensitive to offense. Then came lower back. He had twice been unfaithful to the first and still most important love of his life, a blameless, Nordic thinking man’s woman named Fran, and both bouts left Artie prostrate with what he had been convinced were slipped disks. Now his gums clamped down on broken razor blades. Not because another man’s creeping virus made him bless his own clean lungs for being. That much was not his fault. His gums screamed because he did not allow this equally blameless woman the same way out.
After a minute of silent treatment, he figured out a way of bringing her around. “I’ve got a great idea,” he said, slipping his foot over the transmission hump onto the accelerator. Immediately Rachel brightened. Free forgiveness was Ra
ch’s greatest weakness. Incapable of bearing a grudge, all she needed was that the other fellow play today’s game. She pulled her right foot up Indian-style onto the seat and flashed him a look of complicity: if we both say so, it must be all right to break free from the sickroom, to tear back the curtains and breathe.
Artie’s gums still ached, so he accelerated, flooring it. Rach’s giggles became horselaughs. When Artie did not ease up, her horselaugh became swearing. He turned a deaf ear, saying, “Come on. New game. Particle accelerator.” Out of the expanse of nowhere, from its hiding place in the pastel November evening, came the inevitable siren and flashing lights.
Artie surrendered the pedal, letting kid sister pull the car over for the arrest. Grinning hysterically, Rachel cursed him, hacked at him, laughed, and choked on her spittle. “You bastard. Bass-tard. You did this to me. I’ll finish you. You’ll never co-pilot again!”
Artie talked over her harangue. “It never fails to amaze me how the police can do that. Every time. Absolutely nothing for miles that they can hide behind. Nada. Guaranteed safe. Then whammo. Prison record. That’s the problem with radar. You invent it for a good cause—to go after the Krauts. But you never know when it’s going to bounce back and be used against you.”
Before the policeman could saunter up to the side of the car, Rachel rolled down the window and called back to him, “Officer, here’s your man. He made me do it. Let me explain. Here’s your culprit right here.” With an involuntary twitch toward his holster, the cop carried on with his may-I-see-your-license spiel. Protesting innocence, Rachel dug out her two forms of ID. The officer took them back to his squad car to check her numbers against a nationwide data base of criminal offenders. Encountering the unexpected, a woman of heretofore complete civil innocence, the protector in blue faltered a moment as he came back to the Pinto, unwilling to cast the first blot on her blank slate.
Artie seized the instant of hesitation. He infused his voice with such authority and confidentiality that for a moment he convinced even himself of the counterfeit. “Officer, I wonder if you couldn’t make an allowance for first offense and circumstances. You see, we’ve just found out that our father, back in De Kalb . . . has a teratoma.”
The cop swayed again, and the day would have been won if Rachel had not chosen that precise moment to start snickering. Realizing the setup, the officer changed demeanor swiftly and mercilessly. He slipped a toothpick into his mouth, becoming a Kane County avenging angel, rescuing both the law and his own authority from two shameless punks who would stoop to invent an old man’s illness to get out of a ticket. He intimidated them as if they were delinquent schoolchildren, making them answer degrading questions: “Know what happens to people who drive seventy-five? I don’t like to scrape scum off of the pavement. Is that clear? Answer me.”
Suppressing their giggles, the two Hobsons could not give the desired response. “No. I mean, yes. Right, Artie? Yes.” Furious, the cop asked if they wanted him to double the fine then and there. Artie nodded his U. of Chicago law-school litigant’s nod.
“You do that, sir. Be sure to write your name and badge number at the top. See you in court, friend. Love your shoes, by the way.”
Eighty bucks later, Rach, shaving her big brother’s sideburns with her Moving Violation, announced, “You’re going to pay for this, buddy. As God is my witness, I’ll never eat turnips again until you do.”
“Me? I should pay? You’re the one who blew it. We had that sucker. He was about to apologize for pulling us over. Bought the entire prognosis. Then you have to go and lose it.”
“Gimme that. Who perpetrated this crime, I ax you?”
“Who was driving the car?”
“Who had the hammer down to the floor?”
“Whose idea was the little recreation in the first place?”
“And what the hell’s a teratoma anyway?”
Artie shrugged, and they broke into hysterical fits. When one stopped, the other’s laughter set them off again. At last, collecting himself, Artie said he’d represent her in traffic court. “We might get the money back if you want to go through the hassle of appeal.” Just as suddenly, his hilarity disappeared. He reached that crest of fullness where everything seemed charged, poignant, rich, comic, strange, remarkable, and worth doing. In another minute, he would stare down the escarpment on the other side. Shook back to a sense of their wider catastrophe, Artie clammed up completely, stranded in accusing silence.
But Rachel, bringing him this far, would not let the facts come between them. “Appeal, schlemiel. You might as well kiss the eighty bucks good-bye right now, friendo bendo. One way or another I’ll get it from you. I’ll turn my brothers loose on you. I won’t sleep until justice is done.”
“Hey, just pay it, okay? You’ve made it into the Fortune Five Hundred. You’re on the take. You’ve got a lucrative job, one of Chicago’s young up and coming. You can swing a bloody speeding ticket, I should think. You’d be a disgrace to your class if you couldn’t.”
“Oh, yeah?” She couldn’t keep a broad smirk of retaliatory delight off her face. Nothing matched Artie when he got indignant. “What do you know about the Fortune Five Hundred? You probably think it’s a road race.” She had him where she wanted him: squarely behind a noble cause. Artie for Artie’s sake. “And what do you mean, ‘disgrace to my class’? What class is that, may I ask?”
“Upwardly mobile Boho.” He had to grab the wheel again as Rach went into further fits. Art understood that she did not find the punchline half as funny as she found his righteous indignation. It even amused him to see her eyes water and her brows pinch together as she let loose. He decided that as long as he had her cackling, he would go on a roll, make up for the lost weekend at the folks’ with a spate of inspired nonsense. “Don’t be so American, woman. Your conditioning has left you absolutemente boozjh-wa-zee. You sound like June Allyson, know that?”
“Who dat?”
“Christ, I don’t know. Ask yer old man, while you can. That’s not the point. The point is . . .”
“What’s the point, Artie?” She rotted with laughter.
“The point is, you’d be a goddamn disgrace to the revolution—and don’t you dare ask ‘What revolution is that?’—if you weren’t capable of taking one of these meaningless little speeding-ticket numbers and . . .”
He waved her citation and rolled down the window. Rach flailed at his arms with her free hand, screaming, “No, Artie, no. Pull-eeze don’t. I’ll be your friend for life. I’ll be like a sister to you. I’ll never, never make fun of you again for as long as . . .”
“If you weren’t capable,” Artie reiterated, “of taking one of these and chucking it out the window onto the lone and level interstate stretching far away.” The scrap of colored triplicate danced in the rearview mirror and disappeared. “There. Simple. Paid in full! Vanished. It has, in the face of Eternity, become somebody else’s problem.”
Rach groaned a five-syllable “Why.” The word took several seconds, resembling those primal air-raid drills that used to get a lot of network time when she was a child. “I don’t believe you did that. I’m gonna open my eyes and everything’s going to be back to normal. You know what you’ve done? You’ve ruined me. I’m going to have to defect. I’ll never be able to get auto insurance again.” But in short order, she got into the swing of incendiarism. She began singing the Union Label song and speaking with a goatee. She couldn’t help herself. She was simply built that way. She could feel no anxiety that didn’t shed as easily as late November leaves. “But Artie, eesent trowing dot teeket joos a leetle beet ee-lee-gal?”
“Damn straight. And that’s just civil disobedience act number one. This is the start of a whole new life of political statement for me. The Monk of the Midway turns activist guerrilla. First, a hunger strike until they cut the zip code down to four digits. Then, I’ll mastermind a boycott of all eight-hundred number ads on TV. And if society still refuses to respond: window-bomb all retail outlets that ref
use to turn the Muzak down to livable levels. Don’t want to resort to violence, but if they force my hand . . .”
Artie rarely talked silliness except on the road. And only to Rach, as a general rule. Rachel applauded his last political proposal. “I’m glad to hear that somebody else whom I vaguely respect is hip to Audio Creep. They’ll probably Muzak the libraries in another five years. My friends think I’m off the wall. But I swear the stuff is being cranked up, poco a poco.”
Artie agreed. “You know how to explain that, don’t you? Habituation. They set the sound to level three. After a few years, everybody’s ears adjust to where they don’t register level three anymore. And so, if the magic narcolepsy’s gonna keep doing its stuff, they’ve got to nudge it up another decibel level, to volume four. Then everybody habituates to level four, and on it goes. I think I’ll call it the Law of Increasing Dosages. Credit you with co-discovery.” He broke into an overly authentic rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” bobbling the tune somewhere on the “by-and-bys.”
Rach supplied descant. Getting through the chorus, she returned to the thread. “My favorite joke these days is to go into stores with a bunch of friends. Doesn’t even matter what kind of store anymore; they’ve all got it. Then right in the middle of the conversation, go, ‘Shhhh. I’m trying to listen.’”
Artie added, “You know, the most pernicious part of piped music is how it puts you into unconscious dance steps: One-two, one-two. Your walk turns into a samba.” But it dawned on him that the most pernicious thing about Muzak was that any complaints they made about it remained ineffective, clichéd, and themselves background noise. He saw that social critique, this late in society’s collective game, had become ordinary, established, acceptable.
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