Bigfoot Dreams

by Francine Prose

  BY MORNING VERA FEELS better. Sunlight’s streaming in; there’s coffee to be made. Her head’s found a comfortable place on Lowell’s chest, and they’re both faking sleep. Even this seems a luxury; when you’re by yourself, there’s no point pretending.

  Nor is there much now. Vera knows she’ll get up, and why not? What’s to lose? No wintry cold floors, and it’s long past that dreary predawn hour when Rosie used to patter in, demanding breakfast or a bottle. Some days Vera couldn’t wait to see her, would jump out of bed. Some days she’d dig in, muttering at Lowell, knowing that one drop of spilled syrup, one petrified, stuck-on Cheerio would drive her into the street to scream her message of thankless overwork and the suffering of the innocent to the subway, the city, the world.

  Would things have been different if someone had promised Vera that one day she’d lie here deciding to let Rosie sleep, skip summer program, spend the day with Lowell? Had told her that the morning after Lowell’s return would be one of those mornings when he couldn’t wait to see Rosie? She’d never have believed it, nor can she quite believe it now as she peers over the covers to see Lowell zipping his jeans.

  He’s almost out the bedroom door when he turns back and kisses her. Vera rolls over into the warm spot he’s left. She needs all the warmth she can get as she hears them in the kitchen, hears Rosie saying more in five minutes than she has in the last two years.

  Crafts counsellors, gym teachers, Carl, Elijah, names Vera doesn’t recognize—Rosie’s life has a cast out of Cecil B. DeMille. Her world will always be wider than all Vera’s eavesdropping can encompass. Vera’s trying not to mind that Rosie’s saved her summer up in interesting bits to tell Lowell. Vera used to do that, too. She knows things would change if Lowell lived with them. Then Rosie’s view of him would broaden to include all the smaller human emotions: vexation, impatience. She might even stop talking to him for a while and start talking to Vera. Imagining this is almost as hard as imagining life with a baby when you’re pregnant, as looking at your infant daughter and picturing her at ten.

  Vera heads straight for the coffeepot and pours herself a cup. Mimes it, that is. The pot’s empty. It’s not that Lowell doesn’t love his morning coffee, nor is it laziness, exactly. He simply forgets. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he says, so casually you’d think he’d been saying it every morning for ten years. Another difference between them: Not only can Lowell imagine anything, he can convince himself it’s true.

  Vera watches the teakettle. Lowell and Rosie watch Vera. At the kettle’s first tentative whistle, Lowell says, “Rosie, hon, remember. A watched pot does boil. It just takes twice as long.”

  “I like things to take a long time,” says Vera. “At least when the meter’s not running.”

  “Well, now,” says Lowell.

  “What are you guys talking about?” says Rosie.

  Pouring water through the filter, Vera has another one of those low-altitude, out-of-the-body flights. This time she sees her own shoulders, their martyred, weighed-down curve, the slope of St. Sebastian’s shoulders, of Norma’s when she’d stand at the stove wolfing down coffee when Dave was between jobs and could dawdle over breakfast with Vera. McCarthy isn’t enough, he used to say. I’m on your mother’s blacklist, too. Woman at the stove, man and child at the table, the same configuration—where’s the dialectic now? Maybe history isn’t a spiral but one closed circle after another. Vera used to believe her marriage was better—looser and more imaginative, if nothing else—than Norma and Dave’s. Now she’s not sure. She thinks this is unnatural, a sign of something awry. In the proper order of things, each generation sees its love life as a giant improvement over that of its parents.

  “I’m going to be late,” says Vera.

  “Late for what?” says Lowell. “The whole plant’s on hold till you get there. Stockpiling the confetti and balloons for National Vera Day. Champagne and coke on the house. You went over the top, darlin’. Saved the whole platoon.”

  “Champagne and coke?” Rosie wrinkles her nose as if it’s a mixed drink.

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” says Lowell.

  What is he telling her? Maybe Rosie should go to summer program. Has Vera said this aloud? Because what Rosie says is, “Do I have to? It’s not like we do anything. Volleyball tournaments, jewelry boxes out of popsicle sticks. Everyone knows they’re just giving us lame stuff to keep busy so we don’t smoke dope and break windows and shoplift from Tape and Record City. Plus I never get to see Dad…”

  “Sure,” says Lowell. “Maybe we’ll take in the Museum of Natural History. Check out the giant squid.” Lowell waves his arms and bulges his eyes. Vera can’t argue with that.

  “Yay!” says Rosie. “There’s a Muppet show at the planetarium.”

  Wait a minute. Not only has Rosie seen it, she was calling it garbage Friday night at Dave and Norma’s. Vera looks at Rosie, then looks away, afraid of glimpsing some troubling reflection of her own face faking interest so some boy would think her agreeable. Though maybe it’s not that; maybe Rosie’s pretending to be younger, Sesame Street age, so Lowell won’t feel so bad about all those years of growing up he’s missed.

  Lowell stretches as if he’s just now waking up and says, “Goddamn if this place isn’t cozy. Ladies, take notice: I’m cashing it in. These thin old bones are just too brittle to be grinding night after nightmare-wracked night on C.D.’s cold cement floor.” Vera wonders if he still plays the guitar and sings songs with titles like “All My Goodtime Friends Are Gone” and “Trials, Troubles, and Tribulations.” He used to make fun of this cornpone self-pity. Now it’s no joke. He is too old to be camping out in some retro hippie leatherworker’s studio.

  “I’ll bring you home a lottery ticket,” says Vera.

  “I’d appreciate that,” says Lowell.

  HERE’S WHAT KIND OF day it is: Vera can’t find a seat. Blinking dazedly at her fellow passengers, she feels foolish, exposed, as if she’s stumbled in on a surprise party they’re giving in her honor. But no one’s welcoming or even sympathetic. She’s the only one standing, and they seem to think she deserves it. Once more Vera imagines a party, this one full of monstrous, bratty children who’ve just trounced her at musical chairs.

  Who are these trespassers? Foreign tourists or out-of-town Baptists who’d assumed the front car was safe and now by their presence have made it so? No such exotica, not today. Just your garden-variety Gotham working stiffs, perhaps a shade more pleased for having gotten a seat at rush hour. Surely there’s some simple explanation: a few brave souls at Brighton Beach made others along the line take heart. It’s how Dave’s always explained the revolution: first one person gets the nerve, then another. Come the revolution, the whole subway will be safe, each car with its equal share of passengers. But what will happen to the screamers? Will they adjust their schedules to travel only outside of normal working hours? Contemplating this, Vera feels like a poet facing exile, the loss of her homeland, her muse.

  Already adrift, she takes the wrong exit onto Herald Square and surfaces in front of the New Napoli. What a surprise. If she’s the pointer on some immense, invisible Ouija board, what’s tapping it now is the heavy hand of her not-very-subtle unconscious. It’s obvious what she’s after. After a night and a morning with Lowell, she wants one of Vinnie’s smiles more than the Pulitzer Prize.

  At nine A.M., the New Napoli’s a different place. A sparse and desultory late-breakfast crowd hunches over the counter, mopping up eggs with the gloomy preoccupation of barflies at last call. Vinnie’s halfway back, shoving bacon around the grill as if he’s mad at it. Away from his window, his floury circles of dough, he’s practically unrecognizable. Vera’s out of context, too. Vinnie’s nod has a certain lingering unease, as if she’s someone he’s having trouble placing.

  “Coffee to go and a cruller,” she says.

  “In early today?” says Vinnie. Is she imagining it, or is he eyeing her strangely? Perhaps he’s surprised that her life extend
s beyond lunchtime. Though she knows she’s overreacting, she can’t help thinking he’s staring at her as if he’d sighted Dracula flying around at high noon.

  Vera’s so happy to find Hazel back at her post, she nearly kisses her. How pitiful to be so hungry for some sign of continuity, you’ll jump at the person who despises you most. Vera feels like a prerevolutionary Russian muzhik kneeling to kiss the hand that’s snapped the whip all these years. Oh, it’s the least she can do. How much more has been promised and forgotten. Was it yesterday that Vera took an oath: If Hazel returned, she’d apologize for writing about that rogue elevator’s fatal flight? But how to begin? All the way up, Vera rehearses, tries opening gambits, starts to speak, thinks better of it, starts again. They’re nearly to Vera’s floor when Hazel looks at her and grunts. “Hunh,” she says. “You look like one of them dogs.”

  Vera knows which dogs she means. And what can she say to that? Forgive me. I deserve it. But Vera says nothing, lets reticence and false pride cripple her resolution, leaves good intentions trailing behind her as she jumps from the elevator to her floor.

  Carmen looks a little wild-eyed. For an instant Vera weighs the possibility that the Washington Wild Child’s problem was catching. “Come on,” Carmen says. “I got something to show you.” Her manner is so stealthy, her grip on Vera’s arm so insistent, that were it anyone else, Vera would think this had something to do with drugs. But Carmen doesn’t even smoke cigarettes or drink coffee. The Lizard, however, does everything—something Carmen and Vera have often discussed. Carmen says he’ll give it all up after marriage. Vera and Carmen’s family say he won’t. Once, in a fit of companionability, Vera told Carmen about the happy ending to Lowell’s history of substance abuse. Later she wished she hadn’t, regretted having given her friend another typical This Week nostrum of false hope.

  In the coffee room, Carmen opens the refrigerator and takes out a grocery bag full of radishes, not the little radish-stuffed cellophane pillows one gets in supermarkets but huge bunches still attached to remnants of chopped-off greens. Carmen must have gone all the way to Hunt’s Point to buy them.

  “One thing they don’t tell you,” she says. “This diet makes you nuts. First it takes so much eating your jaw’s tired all the time. With all that noisy crunching, you get where you don’t want to eat around people any more. Plus it gives you crazy dreams.” Last night Carmen dreamed she was standing at the pearly gates with a group of her Seventh-Day Adventist friends and St. Peter waving them through. “You children are free,” he kept saying. And what was heaven but a foggy cafeteria, the angels in their golden wings hovering over steam trays, dishing out plates of Swiss steak and turkey tetrazzini and gummy institutional stuff like that? “You know what?” says Carmen. “After four days of radishes it looked terrific.”

  “That’s a wonderful dream,” says Vera.

  “It didn’t make me happy,” says Carmen. “If heaven turns out to be high-school lunch, lots of people are going to be very disappointed. Another thing, Frankie wasn’t there.”

  Vera thinks, DIETER OVERDOES IT, SEES GOD. “Carmen,” she says. “You of all people should know better than to believe what you read in This Week.”

  “It works,” Carmen says. “I lost four pounds in four days.”

  “That’s too fast,” says Vera. Is she Carmen’s mother? One can’t be too careful about appetite loss these days. When Vera first heard about anorexia, she didn’t believe it; then she started seeing them everywhere, displaying their emaciated figures in short shorts and skimpy tees, taking more pride in their bodies than Vera will ever have—oh, the beauty of bone, of balls rotating in sockets.

  “Careful,” she says. “You’ll turn into a radish. How long you think Frankie’s going to stay engaged to a root vegetable?”

  Carmen seems to have thought of a dirty reply that she stifles with a speak-no-evil hand to her mouth and a giggle. “Frankie?” she says. “’Bout two seconds. Anyhow,” she adds dreamily, “Aunt Gloria’s barbeque’s Labor Day. You think I’m going to eat radishes with everyone packing in ribs, you got another think coming.”

  “Labor Day’s two weeks off,” says Vera. “Eat nothing but radishes till then, you won’t live to taste Aunt Gloria’s salsa.”

  “Next week I add celery,” she says. “All I can eat.” Vera’s tempted to tell her about Solomon and the chicken salad. But that will lead to Carmen saying for the hundredth time that she and Solomon should get married. Then Vera will have to announce that Lowell’s here, which means that when he leaves again she’ll have to tell her that.

  Forgetting that she’s already carrying coffee from the New Napoli, Vera pours herself another cup. Carmen laughs good-humoredly, but with a knowing Seventh-Day Adventist edge: that’s what caffeine does to the brain.

  Vera goes to her office, paces awhile, then roots around in her papers without any definite plan. When she comes up with the Bigfoot story, she understands that what she’s been looking for is an excuse to go see Shaefer and find out what’s happened with the Greens. On the way she clutches her manuscript just as she clutches her housekeys on certain bad nights when she comes home late, imagining she’s being followed. The relief she feels locking her apartment door behind her is not unlike the feeling she has now when Shaefer says, “Come in.”

  “Got something for you,” she says. Then, off-handedly, “Heard anything from the lawyers?” She’s trying to make it sound like some casual office pleasantry.

  “Ha!” says Shaefer. “I thought the guy was going to start blubbering when I hit him with the news. You could tell he’d already spent his fee a couple times over in his head. But as soon as this new evidence came up”—Shaefer raps his pen on the desk—“case dismissed!”

  Still grinning, Shaefer reaches for the paper Vera’s holding out. He looks disappointed to see it’s a story. “Bigfoot lights up what?” he says. “A joint? BIGFOOT GETS HIGH, LOCALS GET GOING. I’d get going, too. How’d you like to run into Bigfoot when he’d just smoked a load of pot and he’s seeing big green snakes wriggling in the trees? Not much, right?”

  Shaefer likes to joke about marijuana, but Vera’s pretty sure he doesn’t smoke it. At the same office Christmas party at which Esposito talked about his melancholy working vacations, Shaefer told her how once, between newspaper jobs, he’d managed a jazz bar in Northampton. “I used to smoke in back with the musicians,” he said. “This was before you were born. You know what they called it then? Boo!”

  “Read it through quick,” Vera says, not as an order but meaning he doesn’t have to spend much time. There’s something wrong here. Ordinarily Shaefer would have read it by now without prompting. Now he skims it, then files it apparently at random in a folder on his desk.

  “Sure,” he says. “I know how the guy felt. When I first quit smoking, every second I was on the edge of pulling some crazy stunt like that. That’s what I can’t stand about that bastard Solomon: the guy’s got no heart, smoking those little cigars that smell like every ashtray you’ve ever emptied, and so delicious, when he offers you one, you want to take it and eat it.”

  Is this some roundabout way of discussing her story? That, too, seems wrong. Shaefer is nothing if not direct: I like this. That stinks. Take it back and redo it. How thrilled she was that first time he told her they might use DEMENTO DENTIST as a front-page head. Over the years, Shaefer’s comments have come to mean less—though it’s still flattering, still seems like something of a coup to have written something crazy enough to meet his exacting standards for front-page news.

  “What’s the banner head this week?” Vera asks, thinking how much of the morning she’s spent trying to sound casual.

  Shaefer takes a sheet of paper out of a folder—which, Vera notices, is nowhere near the one in which he’s filed her story—and hands it to her. 91-YEAR-OLD MOM BEARS BOUNCING BABE.

  Doctors at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital got the surprise of their lives this week when 91-year-old Sara Beckley checked into the emergenc
y room with symptoms of acute indigestion and proceeded to give birth to a healthy 8-pound-12-ounce baby boy. “That’s a new one on us,” commented nurse Julia Clarkson, who attended the delivery.

  Albert Beckley, 86, apparently had no idea of his normally hefty wife’s condition. On hearing the good news, the wheelchair-bound proud papa had attendants wheel him to the hospital gift shop, where he bought blue bubblegum cigars. Meanwhile Mom, presented with her brand-new bundle of joy, began to laugh.

  According to hospital spokesmen, mother and child are doing well and will return home after a routine stay of two to three days.

  Vera has to turn away so Shaefer won’t see the tears in her eyes. Moved by the realization that 91-YEAR-OLD MOM BEARS BOUNCING BABE is the quintessential This Week story, Vera’s filled with more love for this shoddy, sensationalist rag than she could possibly say. There’s nothing but hope in this story, hope and goodwill: hope for all the women who want children and can’t have them, for women like Vera who already have a child and regret that they probably won’t have more. Ninety-one! There’s still time! False hope—but what’s the harm? It’s unlikely that any old woman reading this story will redo the spare room as a nursery or that any woman of child-bearing age will read it and postpone pregnancy for another fifty years.

  In another mood, Vera might have sensed scorn and contempt, ill will toward women and their aging bodies behind this vision of drooping stomachs heaving in labor, babies suckling at withered, ancient breasts. But today she can’t see it, doesn’t think it’s there. Three cheers for Sara Beckley, who didn’t even need a cesarean but pushed him out herself! Between the lines of this story is everyone’s longing for miracles, the hope that goes against all odds, beyond synchronicity and breaks in the natural order. The promise that your suffering leads to heaven and the cafeteria of your dreams, your forty years in the wilderness to glades of milk and honey…Only now—how slow she is!—does Vera realize that Sara Beckley laughing at her newborn son is Sarah in the Bible.