Bigfoot Dreams

by Francine Prose

  The prints go from door to sink, sink to door. The Greens and the cops and Vera keep looking back and forth, as if the tracks were the feet that made them, still moving.

  “I don’t know,” says the younger cop. “Seems like an awful lot of trouble for a lousy glass of water.”

  And then Vera sees what she should have seen all along. Whoever broke in was some larcenous Ponce de Leon in search of the main ingredient in fountain-of-youth lemonade. The only thing she can’t figure out is why the Greens haven’t told the cops about her article or that the neighbors believe the key to health and happiness can be theirs for five cents a glass. You’d think such facts would be key clues in any investigation! Perhaps they’re just sick of the story. Vera can sympathize with that. Maybe they’re afraid of losing the cops’ good opinion, afraid this holy-water business will make them look like a bunch of religious nuts. But anyone could see that’s not true. Has some lawyer enjoined them to keep quiet?

  Here’s the likeliest explanation: There’s no reason to go into it. Because finally, they’re not interested in seeing the water thief brought to justice. They know who the real thief is: This Week. By calling the cops, they’re just registering one more grievance, strengthening their case. Upping the legal ante. A million? Why not make it two?

  The older cop raises his thumb and aims his index finger at the missing door. “How’s your insurance?” he asks.

  “Top of the line,” says Martin Green. “You think I’d be this calm if I wasn’t covered?”

  “Well, then,” says the cop. “I know it’s a lousy thing to come home to. But I wouldn’t worry. Looks to me like kid stuff. Mischief. Saturday night, kids get bored, have a couple beers, dare each other to break in, drink a glass of water, get out. Anyone else would at least grab the TV. It won’t happen again, I can practically guarantee it. Certainly not while you’re here. But look, if it’d put your minds at ease, I’ll tell you what. How often you think the guys drive by here, John?”

  “Gee, Angelo,” says John. “Once an hour, maybe?”

  “All right, look,” says Angelo. “I’ll ask the guys in the patrol car if they’d mind rerouting a little, drive by here every half hour or so for the next couple weeks. How’s that?”

  “Thank you,” says Stephanie. “We’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” says John. “I know how you feel, I got kids myself. Seven of ’em.”

  There’s a moment of silence, and then little Megan says, “Seven! Holy shit!”

  “Megan!” says Stephanie, but she’s laughing, the cops are laughing, even Martin’s laughing; the kids are giggling hysterically as they walk the cops to the front door and wave while they get in their car. It’s all so chuckly and convivial, it is like the coda of a Roy Rogers show, only where are the newborn puppies? Suddenly Vera doesn’t want them to leave; she feels like some thriller victim whose captors have just managed to send the cops away, convinced nothing’s wrong. Now the police are gone, all that camaraderie gone with them; and Vera’s alone with the Greens.

  Vera’s so busy looking at everything but the Greens, anyone walking in would think she was the upholsterer, checking the art and the furniture with an eye toward a suitable match. There must be a name for this style, she thinks—polished wood, exposed brick, fine Oriental rugs, good furniture, a dot-printed velvet couch. The pile on the Persian carpet is so thick she could lose her mind in it, and all at once she remembers: the party Louise went to dressed as garbage was in a house like this. When Louise tossed her play trash on the rug, the hostess brought out a vacuum, though the room was full of masked revelers and the hostess was dressed—in a trampy pilgrim getup with a giant red cardboard A—as Hester Prynne. The painting above the Greens’ couch is an original that must have set the doctor back a couple of triple bypasses, by that painter whose name Vera forgets: an American flag, half-erased. She’s always valued his work, not for its artistic but for its instructive value. Once when Rosie came home in tears because her second-grade teacher scolded her for spoiling her papers with too much rubbing out, Vera marched her to the museum and stood her in front of a similar picture and told her it was worth twice what her teacher made in a year.

  Once more the phone rings. “You answer it,” Martin tells Vera in a tone which makes Vera go and answer it.

  “Hello?” Vera says.

  “Hello?” says a voice so quavering and cracked it sounds like an imitation old person, a kid disguising his voice. The voice has no sex, only age and illness as it spins out its history of degeneration, operations, masses, lesions, organs repaired and removed and given up on, death sentences and reprieves. No frightening detail of the body’s mutiny is omitted, yet the telling has the weary, oddly mechanical quality of business calls requiring one to repeat the same story again and again until the right person comes on the line. “One drop,” the voice says, thinning now to a not-quite-human scratch, like the dry cry of certain newborns. “Water’s free…Anything’s worth a try…send my boy…”

  “I’m sorry,” Vera says. “It’s all a mistake, it’s not true.” How tempting to confess everything to this anonymous, ancient voice: Believe me, I wrote it, I know it’s a lie. Except that this caller has even more at stake than the Greens—and less desire to believe her. How tempting just to hang up. But Vera can’t, no more than she can stop thinking she’s getting what she deserves. The voice knows how selfish she is, asks, “What would it cost you, what?”

  By the time Vera hangs up and goes into the living room, she’s so upset she’s yelling at the Greens. Why don’t they get an unlisted number? An answering service at least!

  The Greens are perched on the edge of their couch, side by side and so wrought-up they could be two teens she’s just interrupted necking. The children are gone—bribed to stay in their rooms, if Vera knows anything about kids. Stephanie starts to answer but Martin jumps in for her. “Stephanie’s Mom’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I assume you know what that is.”

  “Sure!” Vera prattles on, as if possessed. “Do I know Alzheimer’s? I think I’ve got it. Plain old-fashioned senility, only now it’s got somebody’s name, Herr Doctor Professor Alzheimer immortalized, you’d think he invented it. Like everything else these days—everyone wants to take credit.” She’s horrified and entirely out of control. Is this how screamers perceive themselves?

  The Greens just look at her. Could they possibly not have heard? Well, God isn’t that merciful. Now Martin is rounding his vowels, pronouncing his consonants very distinctly as if Vera does indeed have Alzheimer’s or worse:

  “My mother-in-law’s neurologist thinks it’s a tricky time to make changes. Particularly the phone. Calling here’s her lifeline…” This sounds to Vera like exactly the sort of lame, temporizing plan a doctor would come up with. Six months from now the poor woman will still be able to call, she just won’t remember who she’s calling. She wonders if Martin felt compelled to tell his neurologist buddy why they needed a new number. How embarrassing, confiding in your colleague: the whole neighborhood thinks you’re raising Lazarus from the dead. If it were her mother, thinks Vera, she wouldn’t be sitting here quoting some neurologist, she’d be pouring fountain-of-youth lemonade down her throat by the gallon, praying for it to dissolve that arterial plaque…

  “I’m sorry,” says Vera, who’s sorrier than she can say. She’s sorry for Stephanie’s mother, sorry for being in this dark living room on a bright August afternoon. She’s sorry for writing that story, and sorry that even now, despite everything, she wishes it were true.

  “You goddamn well ought to be,” says Martin. “Why would anyone pull a nasty stunt like that? You people must be pretty goddamn hard up for news.”

  “We don’t report news,” Vera says. “We write fiction. We make it all up so things like this don’t happen.”

  “Of course it’s made up,” Martin says. “You think we’ve got the fountain of youth flowing in our goddamn backyard? My question is, why you would write that? And the picture
, the photo of my kids. Is that made up, too?”

  “The picture’s real,” Vera says. “But I made up the rest to go with it.”

  “Then what does that make us?” demands Martin. “Figments of your imagination?”

  This is what it means to lock horns, Vera thinks. Heads lowered, bash, bash. Then Stephanie graces them with a smile so literally disarming, they’re just as suddenly unlocked, left gazing at her with the awe due St. Francis or the Bird Man of Alcatraz or any of those peace-making animal magicians.

  “Martin,” she says. “Remember when the kids used to run around saying, ‘We’re Fig Newtons of your imagination’?”

  “Sure,” says Martin. “The hippie babysitter taught them that, the same one who used to make Josh change Meggie’s diapers so he wouldn’t be uptight about his sister’s bodily functions.”

  “Oh, what a mess,” says Stephanie, laughing. “Baby shit everywhere!”

  Vera feels a prickle of envy: marriage, even marriage to controlling, hairy Martin Green. Such envy’s nothing she can’t transcend. Besides, she’s just noticed: something about Stephanie—her smile perhaps, or her laugh, that bony, angular grace—reminds her of Louise. It’s possible that under other circumstances, she and Stephanie might have been friends, making plans to pick up the kids after school, after dance class, drinking coffee and gossiping while Rosie tolerated and occasionally lowered herself to play with Megan and Josh. Stephanie rises abruptly and leaves the room, then comes back with a pack of low-tar cigarettes. When she lights up, Vera eyes the smoke so hungrily Stephanie asks if she wants one, and it takes every ounce of will Vera has to say, “No thanks. I quit.”

  “So did Stephanie,” says Martin. “Up until last week. And I’ll tell you something else. Steph’s father died of lung cancer when he was forty-five.”

  Vera’s “I’m sorry” is less an expression of sympathy than another apology. Is this her fault, too? Perhaps she should start counting: when she’s said she’s sorry a hundred times, she can leave. Perhaps by then she’ll have a better idea of what she’s sorry for. She’s come out here to apologize to the Greens; she still wishes she’d never written that piece. But that voice on the phone has saddled her with a new set of regrets—responsibilities for hopes raised and dashed—and a vision of heartbreak to make the Greens’ troubles look like everyday inconvenience. It almost makes her feel better. In six months, the Greens’ life will be back to normal, lawn thriving, kids in school, patients lined up for their pacemakers and vein grafts. But where will the phone caller be in six months? That makes her feel worse.

  “Can I hold one?” she says, sliding a cigarette out of the pack and rolling it between her fingers. “I know this story may be hard for you to believe,” she begins. Imagine Clarence Darrow convincing the jury with that one. “But it’s true.”

  Somehow she expected telling it to be easy; she’s certainly had enough practice. But after a sentence or two, she stumbles. This is uncharted terrain. She’s talking about their house, their kids, their lives—it’s their story too, a dubious distinction no one else she’s told it to can claim. They’re all together in this: Martin and Stephanie. Megan and Joshua. Vera.

  Finally she’s finished. Stephanie stubs out her cigarette; Vera counts three in the ashtray. Could so much time have elapsed, or did she smoke them all at once? Vera’s own unlit cigarette is broken in half. Martin’s giving her the kind of attention she imagines him giving a housefly he’s sneaking up on to swat. After a while he says, “You know, you’re wrong. I don’t find it hard to believe at all.”

  “You don’t?” says Vera. “Oh, I’m so glad…”

  “I find it fucking impossible.”

  Vera’s cheeks flame the same red they turn when she’s just spent five minutes smiling at the subway flasher, chatting up the obscene phone caller, the same shade they must have turned the first time some playmate said, Guess what? and Vera said, What? and the kid said, That’s what. Meanwhile she’s casting wildly about for oaths to take. Is there a Bible in the house? The only lasting symbol she can see is that rubbed-out Stars and Stripes. Should she lay one hand on her heart and point to that?

  “Listen,” she says. “You can’t imagine how often this happens when you write for an outfit like This Week.” Outfit? She’s never used that word in her life, except to mean clothes. “Write a story about anything—Bigfoot, say—the next week you get a letter from the cryptobiologists telling you it’s old history.”

  “Cryptobiologists?” Stephanie goes for the bait. For years now, Vera’s been dining out on the cryptobiologists; she’s never known it to fail. So she’s more than a little discouraged now when Martin looks very obviously at his watch. Then, in case Vera’s missed that, he turns toward Stephanie and rolls his eyes.

  “Now you listen,” he says. “Let me tell you about my day’s work. I go into the hospital to make my rounds, the nurses are so busy snickering I can’t get a dressing changed. I can’t get one of my patients a bedpan—the orderlies are in on it, too. You don’t know what a grapevine is till something like this happens. Then it’s unbelievable. The janitor knows, the chief of cardiology knows, the president of the A.M. fucking A. probably knows. Now I’ll tell you something else. There’s going to be some kind of inquiry. All very discreet and professional, no reason to get alarmed, just a procedural matter…so next month I get to go before the board and explain. And what am I supposed to tell them: some two-bit sleazo Lois Lane made me up?”

  That’s what he calls her and this is what Vera says: “I’m sorry.” Can she leave now? She can’t understand why she’s come here. In light of the damage she’s done health care and the doctor’s career and medical science in general, she wouldn’t dream of being so small as to ask them not to sue.

  Stephanie takes a long drag on her cigarette. “We have a neighbor,” she says. “Betty Anne.”

  “Please,” says Martin. “Betty Anne stories. Spare me.”

  “A horror story for every occasion,” says Stephanie. “You know the type. When we moved here, I was pregnant with Meggy; Betty Anne came over and introduced herself and got going about how her second cousin just gave birth to a kid with no arms and legs and its head growing out of its liver. Lately it’s mostly stories about kids who seem okay till they’re Josh’s age, then wake up one morning with forty-pound tumors in their stomachs.

  “A couple of weeks ago, the doorbell rings and it’s Betty Anne, batting a newspaper in my face. When I saw what it was, I thought, Well, it’s just the kind of junk she’d read. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” says Vera. “Go on.”

  “‘Look!’ Betty Anne’s saying. ‘Look!’ And there’s a picture of the house. The kids. My heart just sank. ‘Betty Anne,’ I say. ‘Why would someone write this?’”

  “‘People will do anything for a buck,’ she tells me. ‘I got you an extra copy.’ She’s waiting to be asked in. But I say, ‘Excuse me,’ and practically shut the door in her face and go inside and call Martin…who needless to say is in surgery. So I make myself a glass of iced tea, a Swiss cheese sandwich on French bread with fresh tomatoes from the garden…”

  Vera trusts people with that kind of memory for food. Like Carmen. It makes her forgive Stephanie her kitchen equipment and think once more how in another lifetime she might have been friends with Stephanie, who’s saying:

  “By now I’m talking to myself like I’d talk to the kids: ‘There, there, don’t worry, nothing will come of this, no one will read it…’ Just then the doorbell rings. It’s Mrs. DiPaolo from down the block, a real sweetheart, Martin takes care of her for free. She’s always bringing presents, afghans, dolls with crocheted dresses for Meggy, those hard little anise cookies—”

  “I tell Steffie, ‘Watch out, they’re Mr. DiPaolo’s gallstones,’” says Martin.

  Vera forces a smile. Does that count as another apology? It’s an effort not even Stephanie makes, but she does say, “Mrs. DiPaolo worships the ground Martin walks on. Now Mrs. DiPa
olo’s got some kind of crocheted square. A doll blanket? A potholder? It’s tiny, the stitches are crooked. You’d burn your hand off.

  “I thought, Oh, God, Mrs. DiPaolo’s going downhill. Still I invite her in, sit down. She sits down and faints dead away at the table. Mrs. DiPaolo, wake up! After a minute or so she comes to. I ask, can I get you anything, brandy, a glass of water? Yes, she says, a glass of water. There’s something peculiar about how she says it. Plus she’s being very careful not to look at the newspaper on the table. Still I don’t get it, not till she’s gulped down three glasses, all the time looking at me very weirdly, and finally it hits me. The dolly blanket was an excuse. She’s come for the water! And then, to make things even clearer, she takes a handkerchief out of her bra, dips it in the water, stands up straight, says thanks for the water, and splits.

  “And still I’m not absolutely positive. I mean, it would’ve been too embarrassing to say, ‘Mrs. DiPaolo, are you here for the water?’ Immediately I wish I had, because then I could’ve said, ‘Mrs. DiPaolo, there’s nothing in the water.’ Which is just what I tell Mrs. Grossman from across the street when she rings the bell a few minutes later.

  “Poor Mrs. Grossman’s apologizing a mile a minute, but she’s talked to Mrs. DiPaolo; she doesn’t even believe in these things, holy water’s for the goyim, but maybe she could have a drop, see what all the fuss’s about, maybe take some home to her husband, anything’s worth a try. Mrs. Grossman’s husband has cancer. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs. Grossman,’ I say.” And now Stephanie’s looking hard at Vera, who’s thinking that “anything’s worth a try” is what the voice on the phone said.

  “But you try telling Mrs. Grossman she can’t have a glass of water for her husband. So you give her some, as if you think it might work, too. And that’s when it really begins.

  “The doorbell keeps buzzing. You didn’t know you knew so many people on the block. By the time Martin and the kids get home, the phone’s rung forty times. Just to eat you have to take the phone off the hook and stuff it under a pillow, and you can still hear that computer voice scolding you…”