Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York.

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2018 by Diane DeSanders

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: DeSanders, Diane, author.

  Title: Hap and hazard and the end of the world / Diane DeSanders.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017005067 (print) | LCCN 2017021016 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dysfunctional families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Family Life. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.E75485 (ebook) | LCC PS3604.E75485 H37 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005067

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-37-5

  To Dick and Jane

  and for Molly, Kris, Nora, and Ieuan

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, while based on fact, are partially products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Therefore, resemblances to persons living or dead, to events or locales, while not coincidental, have resulted in this: a work of fiction.

  As Edward Albee once said, “fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

  —Diane DeSanders

  How much more they might accomplish

  if only they could talk to each other.

  —Jane Goodall

  CONTENTS

  Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac

  The Age of Reason

  Once Upon a Time There Was the War

  When He Saw Me

  Lennox Lane

  Clubhouse

  A Moth, a Toad, a Bat

  The Sheik of Araby

  At Granny’s House

  The Braid

  Word Study

  The Sewing Room

  Like a Drawing

  I Call Him Nathan

  The Fish Pond

  Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

  The Light Falling Across It Just So

  Summer

  Summer Legs

  The Heart of Texas

  Bees

  Cottonmouth—August 16, 1948

  Dapper Dan

  The Kid Show

  Snow White

  Chicken Shack

  Hunchback Girl

  Caveman

  Skaters

  The Bullfrog

  Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac

  “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Daddy shouts, glaring across to the other car as if to pick a fight. “Just look at that piece of junk!”

  We rotate our gazes to the maroon Lincoln beside us at the traffic light to the tune of Daddy’s ongoing “What a pile of horseshit! The streamlining is all wrong! Just look at that line! Look at it, Jane, look at it!”

  Streamlining. Stream-lining. What is that?

  The three people in the Lincoln look over at us round-eyed, as if to say, What?

  It’s the end of summer now and car windows are down. Mama looks straight ahead out the front window.

  “Please, Dick . . .” she says.

  Daddy lets the Lincoln pull away first, urging us all to consider the car’s rear end.

  “Look at that!” He’s yelling to Mama now. “They just don’t get it! The whole thing is out of balance, no sense of proportion, absolutely no grace!”

  I’m leaning out into the wind, looking, trying to figure out what balance, proportion, and grace might mean.

  “The fittings are trash! They say you can’t get one that doesn’t have a right front door rattle! And you should see the dashboard! The glove box door doesn’t fit! Parts are not flush! How could they let a thing like that leave the factory? It wouldn’t happen at General Motors, I can tell you that! And what kind of an idiot would be seen in something like that?

  Daddy believes in General Motors.

  Mama glances back at me. “Please, Dick . . .” she starts weakly. But there’s no stopping him now. Daddy hits the gas.

  “And that color! Pretentious! And murky at the same time! It has no class at all! It doesn’t know the meaning of class!”

  A Studebaker glides by, and then he really starts to yell.

  We power-roar past the Lincoln and the Studebaker in our shiny sea-green Cadillac, me still leaning out the window, pigtails slapping my cheeks, squinting back at the Lincoln and the Studebaker, trying my best to detect their inferior qualities. And what is the meaning of class?

  I turn around and lay my elbow out the window, my face into the wind, the same as Daddy’s, listening to everything said between the two of them, me in the back with Annie, our legs sticking to the warm leather seats.

  Annie sits frozen, staring wide-eyed at Daddy like a small animal in danger. The baby, up front with the two of them, starts to fuss and cry. Mama’s keeping what she has to say to herself.

  Daddy keeps looking over at Mama, his chin thrust forward over the steering wheel, as if he’s saying and doing all this for her reaction. But Mama keeps her face blank.

  We’ve been at Brook Hollow Country Club for an early dinner. Daddy’s still talking as we pull into the A&W Root Beer stand near Love Field on the way home.

  “But we just ate, Dick,” says Mama.

  “Well, I’m thirsty, Jane, do you mind?”

  “No, okay, let’s all have root beer.” She opens her door.

  “Besides, it’s hot!”

  He’s still talking as we all get out. We always get out to eat or drink, as our cars are always for sale. Mama says everything we have is for sale, and she’s lucky she’s not for sale, as well.

  We drink our root beers standing up, the creamy foam running down the heavy cold mugs. Annie spills hers down her dress and cries, and Mama cleans her up. No matter how hot it gets, Mama looks cool. We hold the frosty mugs to our faces and arms. It’s September but still almost as hot as summer now, when everything both cold and hot is sticky and dripping into drive-in dust.

  Daddy’s still talking about how General Motors management is so sharp, so forward-looking, so ahead of the pack, how the new Oldsmobile will sell like hotcakes in the fall, such a step forward, so streamlined, such great new colors. How he hears everything from a designer up there, a pal of his from General Motors Training Institute, what a draftsman this man is, and what a slick guy. How this is only the beginning of the new things to come.

  “Jane, am I boring you?” Daddy says all of a sudden, putting his face up close
to her face. She moves away.

  “No, Dick. I’m listening. I’m always listening.”

  Annie jumps up and down, saying, “Tell ME, Daddy, tell ME!” She flings herself onto Daddy’s legs in a way I can’t do, as I’m too big, and you never know when you might accidentally knock him off balance, or hurt his bad feet—and she’s looking up in the way I’d like to be able to throw my head back and look up into a Daddy face that looks down and smiles into my face in a way that I’ve only glimpsed, in the small salute.

  Annie knows how to be cute for them and make them like her. I’ll get her later.

  Daddy spins around and starts clump-CLUMPing across the parking lot to the car. We put down our root beers and run after him the way we always do, in a long line strung out, with Daddy way ahead, clump-CLUMP hurrying, then me skipping and trotting, trying to keep up while looking back at Annie running to catch up, then Mama and the baby, her yelling, “Dick! Dick! Slow down! Wait for us!”

  As we pull onto the parkway grass at Love Field, he’s saying how Ford could never come up with innovations like these, how the whole world’s going to see how General Motors is the best with the new models this fall. How Oldsmobile and Chevrolet make the Great American Cars, and how Cadillac is the Very Pinnacle of American Style and Class.

  We often drive around just to feel the breeze, to put off going back to the still air of the house. We often park out at high and windy Love Field on a sultry evening to watch planes fly in and out, propellers whirring, against the setting sun. A few other cars are out there doing the same. There’s a crowd of retired small fighter planes from the war lined up on the edge of the field, painted with bared-teeth faces and pinup girls. Uncle Ted owns one of those and took Daddy and me in it once to fly up all over the city, high and low, looking down over our house, buzzing Mama and May-May, who were out in the yard hanging clothes on the line, waving at us. People came out and looked up, the way people always did at this time whenever a plane would fly over. Dogs ran in circles and barked.

  A high-flying skywriter over the airport spells out a puffy-dissolving Drink Dr Pepper, white, then pink against the darkening blue-and-orange-striped sky. The stripes fade to pale and gray; the blue darkens. Stars come out, crickets, lightning bugs, a crescent moon.

  I keep thinking of the word streamlined. Stream-lined. A line that’s streaming, that’s moving through air like a stream of water, like a streamer over Fair Park, not zipping, not lunging forward, not wavering, confused, not jerking out of balance, or hurrying, or falling, but a line dancing through air easy as a breeze, knowing where it’s going, and going there with style and with grace.

  I keep thinking of the Girl flying like Wonder Woman in her own personal streamlined plane, knowing where she’s going, high up, away from people, looking down at their tiny dollhouse lives, doing whatever they do, and then just flying away to somewhere else with ease. Small, and visible only to me.

  Now Daddy’s saying it’s part of a world of new inventions on the way! He speaks names of inventors, the smart guys making these new things, how we’re getting air conditioning in the whole house soon, and after that, television!

  “You just don’t care, do you, Jane? You don’t care a helluva lot about anything I say to you!” he says.

  “Oh, please, Dick . . .”

  “Why do you sit there looking like that?”

  “I don’t see why you have to act so extreme about everything,” she says. “Can’t we just have a quiet conversation?”

  “You don’t get it,” he says, “You don’t get it! You’re living right in the middle of it, and you don’t get it!”

  It’s completely dark now, other cars pulling out. Daddy starts the car, talking again, how those GM guys say air conditioning can’t be done but that it absolutely has to be done for down here, how he knows he could figure good working car air conditioning, no matter what they say! “They’ll see! It’ll be a new world now! This whole country will be completely changed!”

  Mama keeps nodding her head. But all the way home, her face seems to say that all of whatever it is he’s talking about isn’t going to change a thing.

  FOR YEARS, I TRIED TO GET BACK into bed with Mama, but she would not let me in, no matter how I would beg and cry and tell about nightmares and shadows and being scared.

  She’d roll over and make sounds. I’d wonder if she knew I was there, I’d beg to stay, and then we’d have one of those whispered arguments, with me crying and pleading, and her finally walking me back to my own room. We would not want to wake Daddy.

  Daddy’s breathing would stay the same. He wouldn’t move, hunched under the covers, at the top end, his freckled red face mashed to the mattress in the venetian blind–striped moonlight, slight voiced snores threading in and out like scratchy violins.

  At the other end of Daddy, the white scarred feet would stick out off the bed, having kicked off the covers and the metal blanket brace placed to keep the covers from weighing on his pained, fused-ankle-stiff feet, which would seem to glow like frighteningly knife-sharp greenish white fish in the submarine gloom.

  I wondered if the feet were hurting while he was asleep. I wondered if he dreamed of hurting feet.

  The feet-fish seemed to look over and nod to me in some sly understanding, in spite of that scrunched-asleep face on the other end, helpless and different from when the black bird-eyes were awake and looking at me. I never got into or even touched Daddy’s bed. I sat down between the two twin beds. The floor cold, the carpet itchy, I crawled around like a dog, making myself a spot.

  Daddy’s blanket fell off on the other side, not touching the feet, so I crawled over, eased the blanket down, wrapped it around myself, and stretched out on the floor there between their beds, then looked up at the venetian blind–striped night sky. I could see one star, one star to wish on, a lone star.

  We lived in the Lone Star State, which sounds like The Lone Ranger I heard on the radio every week. Lone Star Oldsmobile and Cadillac was GranDad’s business where Daddy went to work at the office with the cars. There was something special about Lone Star, something special about us, it seemed to me.

  But Daddy was unhappy about something at Lone Star. Even though he loved hanging around with the guys in the service department, the guys on the sales floor, sometimes joining in on jokes and pranks they would do, even things that would go seriously wrong and cause trouble, still there were things at Lone Star that made him come home upset—things that people would not talk about.

  He liked to bring cars home and do custom work—change things on them. He would sometimes go up to Detroit and talk to people, then come home saying, “General Motors is worse than the goddamned army.”

  And Mama would say, “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

  “Don’t you realize what this means?” Daddy had shouted as we stood in the showroom, waiting for our car to be brought around, one day, his hand on Mama’s elbow, pushing her closer, as if to force her to look in and appreciate the new and revolutionary importance of the gleaming arrangement of pistons, valves, belts, wires, and tubes that was before us, our fun-house mirrored faces looking back from every curving chrome surface, a big placard saying PROTOTYPE—COMING NEXT YEAR—ROCKET V-8 ENGINE—CAR OF THE FUTURE!

  “Don’t you see how important this is?” Daddy’s pointing nose and finger, his red freckled face, so eager, black eyes leaping as if at something to eat, his hand pushing her.

  “Don’t you see everything is changing now?”

  Mama pulled away.

  “Don’t you realize, Jane?” He seemed to want to clutch her arm and dive right into the shiny insides of that engine, but she did not want to go in there with him.

  Mama liked to go to Lone Star for the courtesy car, when we went shopping downtown for school clothes or for Christmas. She parked her station wagon in front, and all the salesmen would come to greet us as we walked around the bright, modern showroom, so friendly to my elegant mama and to scabby-kneed me, in our dressed-up
downtown clothes, and they would point out the newest of the big gleaming cars on display, cars everywhere, the parking lot, the used-car lot, cars and more cars everywhere you looked, and photographs and drawings of cars on the walls, and even a little toy red car for me that I never actually got to play with, that had pedals inside.

  Daddy would be there, clump-CLUMPing around, looking at papers in his office, talking on the phone, kidding around with the mechanics in back in the service department, the men in uniforms with names on the pockets, working on engines with hoods up, or with cars up high on those big cranking things, and calendars and pictures of ladies in bathing suits on the walls above the big boxes of tools.

  I would slip away from Mama and follow Daddy around the service department, listening to the men banter and talk about Kettering and Burrell and Skinner, about Pete Estes, names I didn’t know. They’d stand looking into engines, talking cylinders, crankshafts, and what “they’re working on up there!”

  Daddy loved working on cars, showing off cars, polishing and looking at and selling cars, and driving cars as fast as he wanted to, just as GranDad loved the cars, bicycles, motorcycles, boats, planes, tanks. His study was full of models.

  When he’d bring cars home to work on in our garage for an entire weekend, he’d act so happy, pacing with shirtsleeves rolled up, clump-CLUMPing around the garage where the car lay belly-up as he peered into the clean, shiny engine as if at something alive, thrilling, and good to eat, saying, “Is that slick or what?” and holding grease-stained hands away from the white shirts and business clothes he’d always wear, because he hated to have dirty hands, as he hated to be hot. Sometimes he’d shower and change clothes, then go back to the garage to work again, then do it all again, never wearing shorts or jeans or going shirtless.

  Aunt Lee always said you couldn’t love things that couldn’t love you back. But in our family we did.

  Down at Lone Star, Uncle Ted would be there, but rarely would he talk to us. He’d say hello and hurry away.

  GranDad, always a snappy dresser, would be sitting in his big front office with its modern leather chairs and framed pictures of old-time Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, with his dark wavy hair, wide silky tie, gold tie clip and cuff links. We’d sit around while he seemed not to know what to say to us, and then he’d tell the courtesy car man to drive us downtown.