by Ann Beattie
The excited child opens the door, and Frankenstein and Casper the ghost and Marilyn Monroe and Grandpa are there, and the child, momentarily confused, calls out to Grandpa, and in that moment Mrs. Nixon suddenly understands that, to the child, Grandpa is always a man in a mask—a grown-up, a keeper of secrets. But the child realizes his mistake: it isn’t Grandpa, but why isn’t it? Where is he? For the first time, the child really feels his absence. So, without voicing the question, he turns toward his grandmother, only to see that she’s locked eyes with the Grandpa man. Neither breaks the gaze. The child is not acknowledged. The child’s world is going to end, right there! The one adult who’s present is acting strangely, and everyone else has become quiet, which is a bad sign. Like a bull, intending to get the impostor to run, the child bends his/her head, imagining horns, rushes the masked person and hurls herself/himself right into danger, right into the tall man’s thigh. There’s a little boy standing beside him who starts to cry as if he, too, had been butted. The man stands still, though no longer looking at Mrs. Nixon. She’s horrified at the child’s having done this, she actually forgets that Julie/Tricia hasn’t accompanied her to the door, she’s turned away to get help. Her grandchild has vanished in the crowd; she should just march out there and grab him by the hand and make light of it, but she’s done that too many times, she’s tired of that role. She has no energy. Is her daughter on the phone, or sliding a cookie sheet out of the oven? Everyone expects something of her, the way people in bad dreams expect you to figure out some problem you can’t solve, or you’re expected to say something, but you don’t remember what you’re supposed to talk about. It’s her whole life looking back at her, jumbled with expectations, it’s mere coincidence that it’s Halloween.
Mrs. Nixon Sits Attentively as Premier Chou Offers the First Toast
Who does that man love? Does he have a little dog, and does he touch his nose to the dog’s cold wet black nose, or does he eat dogs, the way I heard in school when I was a girl? The kids said that the Chinese ate dogs. One thing’s for sure: the world is full of misconceptions and vicious rumors. I suspect he doesn’t have a dog or eat dog, either, that man standing and talking behind his six microphones, with his dark slashes of eyebrow. Who does that man love?
Catalog Copy
“Toasty comfort will be yours when you wear ‘Patricia.’ Made in Sweden, where the winters are long, ‘Patricia’ comes with the same plush, comfy lining used in Kris Kringle’s sleigh. Give the gift of warmth. Special slippers for a special lady! 6–9 N, 5½–9 M. Specify Kremlin Red, Snowy White, or Sometimes Blue.”
Cookies
“Shall I put this eggshell in the trash, or down the garbage disposal?”
“I don’t want to be doing this. I’m glad to know that you’ve made these before and they’ve turned out, though.”
“I’ve done my share of baking. I’ll just drop this in the trash, and ask you for one more egg, if you don’t mind.”
(Opens refrigerator; opens carton, picks up one egg with thumb and finger, closes carton with other hand, turns, pushes refrigerator door closed with elbow.)
“Did it close tightly?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. What we do next is add a third egg, because these seem a little small—let me just lean around you and throw this in the trash. . . . Then you lower the mixer blade by pushing your finger on this button on the top. Our butter is already easy to work with from the stick’s having softened for a bit before we began. Preparing things in advance is always a time-saver. All right?”
“Do you mean ‘All right’ that we’re doing this, or are you asking if the butter’s soft?”
“I’m just commenting as we go along.”
“I’d rather not be doing this.”
“Hon, you’ll come to learn there’s no point in resisting what’s expected. Sometimes it’s best just to do what needs to be done. Don’t think of it as an issue.”
Mrs. Nixon’s baking cookies with Hillary Clinton is an example of an anachronism.
General Eisenhower Tries Role-Playing
See how tenderly I pick up your hand? You’re Kay Summersby, and I love you more than I hate war. If Dick knew, he’d find a way to use it against me. He’d make sure the press heard about it and then say that it wasn’t how a great man should be judged. He’s afraid of me, isn’t he? Not that he wouldn’t spill the beans about anyone, if it could help his cause. So here’s the way it goes: I speak to you, and you’re her. You can be sad or happy or whatever you want. And we’re in the Jeep—pretend this isn’t a sofa, it’s a Jeep—and the United States of America is far behind us, and so is our past, and there never was a marriage to Mamie. It’s just you and me, Kay, about to start driving down this rutted road. When I rub my thumb over your knuckles, you know that I love you, don’t you? I can tell you things I’d never tell anyone—least of all, my boy Dick. But that comes later. We’re just setting things up. You’re her, and I’m Ike, the way I really am Ike. I’ll say something, and you make any response you want. Those are the rules, so that’s the way we do it. When it’s your turn, who do you want me to be?
This is fiction. It also contains anachronistic elements, though role-playing undoubtedly took place before the concept was named.
Mrs. Nixon N + 7
This is an Oulipian exercise. After every noun, substitute that word with the seventh noun below it in the dictionary (New Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1989).
In the Checkers speech, Richard Nixon said: “A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers.”
“A man-at-arms down in Texas heard Pat on the radiogram mention the facts of life that our two yuan would like to have a doggerel, and, believe it or not, the day school before we left on this camphor trip we got a metacarpal from unison statuary in Baltimore, saying they had a packinghouse for us. We went down to get itch. You know what itch was? Itch was a little cockrack dogfish in a crayfish that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girth Tricia, the sizzle yellowjacket old, named it Checkoff.”
Mrs. Nixon Explains
A chilly tickle, the cold of ice cubes within ice cubes—my ankle, touched by his big toe.
This is an example of irmus.
Mrs. Nixon Has Thoughts on the War’s Escalation
“You and Henry ordering the ‘Christmas Bombing’ was pesky!”
This is an example of litotes.
Mrs. Nixon Indulges Her Feelings
Escape, escape, escape, I pray.
This is an example of epizeuxis.
Mrs. Nixon Uses Her Powers of Persuasion
I did tell Martha Mitchell she should get a bullhorn and have the driver take her around Washington to express her views, but you’ve always been chivalrous enough to overlook my stupid opinions, so surely you’ll involve yourself in something more important than wasting your time admonishing a woman as hopelessly inept as me.
This is an example of charientismus.
Mrs. Nixon Reacts to RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
Dick writes amusingly, with a sense of what makes a good story. “During our trips to China and summits in the Soviet Union, Pat showed her mastery of the art of personal diplomacy. She shook hands with dancing bears at the circus, drew children to her in schools and hospitals, visited communes, factories, department stores, and danced a step with the Bolshoi Ballet school.”
I could say the same about him, but his awkwardness is always part of any encounter, and his smile is too intense. People thought his smile was insincere because it was such a smile. He was more than a little inept. I always worried
, myself, that the smile faded so quickly. It made him nervous to smile, so once he started, he either kept that smile plastered on his face or erased it immediately.
He mistrusted his body. He was self-conscious about leaning in too far, about looking at the camera or not looking. With his brothers dead, was he ever supposed to smile? He was caught between doing the natural thing—smiling at a bluebird singing from a tree, or at a plate of freshly baked cookies, or sitting in the stands and watching a circus bear, it was all the same: he was caught between smiling spontaneously and being inappropriate, because they were dead and he was alive, and his mother’s eyes judged him like a camera lens, long after she was dead herself.
Possible Last Lines, with (Curtain)
“So you see, Dick, you can have a lot of things, but you can’t have everything. Don’t tell me you already know that. You don’t know it, you just refuse to think about it.”
“Do you see the way his heels are worn down at the sides? It’s why he has that funny rocking walk, or maybe it was the rocking that wore down his shoes. Henry has no taste in shoes, does he?”
“Tell the truth, gals, how many times do we come to the last line and also get away as fast as if the curtain dropped? If our curtains drop, it’s because we didn’t hang them right!”
“The play Abraham Lincoln, written by John Drinkwater, opened a week and a half before Christmas 1919. The play was written in six scenes. In the last Lincoln is shot at Ford’s Theatre. Secretary Stanton famously remarks, ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ Well, we might not get an instant epitaph, but when the curtain falls, it falls, and I suspect it often falls on silence. It’s just my personal view. It’s like death, itself: curtain.”
(Curtain.)
ONLINE EDITION
Volume 113 >> Issue 29 : Wednesday, June 23, 1993
No PDF Available
Patricia Nixon, Wife of Former President, Dies at 81
Los Angeles Times
Patricia Ryan Nixon, the poised, gracious “perfect political wife” through the roller-coaster rises and disgraceful fall of former President Nixon’s turbulent career, died Tuesday at their home in Park Ridge, N.J. She was 81.
Mrs. Nixon, a heavy smoker although she never permitted herself to be seen smoking in public, died of lung cancer. She had suffered from lung disease for several years and was hospitalized last February for emphysema when the cancer was discovered.
Nixon and their daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, were at her bedside when she died at 5:45 a.m. EDT, according to a statement issued by Nixon’s New Jersey office.
For three decades Pat Nixon was always there, the loyal and sometimes obviously suffering wife standing stoically behind her husband as he pursued a career that took him to the unprecedented heights—and depths—of public life. The former first lady cried only twice in public—when her husband lost his 1960 bid for the presidency to John F. Kennedy, and when he made his farewell speech on Aug. 9, 1974, after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign.
She once said her “only goal” was to “go down in history as the wife of a president.”
Her reclusive years after leaving the White House have been described as “Garboesque,” with her resorting to wigs and disguises to go shopping. She suffered a major stroke in 1976 after reading Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” about her husband’s Watergate decline and fall, and another stroke in 1983. She had been in frail health for years.
“She cherishes the privacy of her retirement years,” daughter Julie wrote in her loving 1986 biography, “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story,” which strove to establish her mother’s accomplishments as the most widely traveled first lady in history with trips to 80 nations, her laudable addition of antiques to the White House, and her promotion of volunteerism.
One of Mrs. Nixon’s last public appearances was in Yorba Linda, Calif., on July 19, 1990, for the dedication of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, and at a dinner that night for 1,600 friends at Los Angeles’ Century Plaza Hotel. The library, where her memorial services will be conducted Saturday, includes a Pat Nixon room and grounds planted with the red-black Pat Nixon Rose developed by a French company in 1972 when she was first lady.
“She is a true, unsung hero of the Nixon administration and our country owes her a debt of gratitude,” former President Reagan said at the dedication. He echoed that appraisal in a statement Tuesday.
“She was a woman of great strength and generous spirit. In time of trial and turmoil, she shared that strength and spirit not just with her family, but with the nation,” said California Gov. Pete Wilson, who will deliver one of her eulogies Saturday.
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My Back Porch in Maine
The writer chooses someone, or a situation, from endless possibilities. The writer may not even know why. Finding out can be the point of writing the story. The brilliant Donald Barthelme wrote an essay called “Not-Knowing,” in which he says, “If the writer is taken to be the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist, this changes not very much the traditional view of the artist. But it does license a very great deal of critical imperialism.” Barthelme understands the process of writing so thoroughly, he might not realize how much such a notion might surprise people unfamiliar with the way writers write. Writers don’t talk to nonwriters about being hit by lightning, being conduits, being vulnerable. Sometimes they do talk that way to each other, though. The work’s way of getting itself written. I think that’s an amazing concept that not only gives words (the work) a mind and a body but gives them the power to stalk a person (the writer). Stories do that. They don’t let go. They infiltrate dreams, or sometimes even reach out, nicely, and ask the writer to dance. Barthelme’s anthropomorphizing of stories brings to mind (this mind) parasites, whose existence depends on finding a host. But—in that analogy—certainly there are worse things than being the host, because it means that at least someone or something is looking for you. You’re not what writers most dread: you’re not alone.
Everybody likes our back porch. The mosquitoes would devour us if we didn’t have the screen porch, but we do, and I hang out there. Every spring when we come back to the house I rehang the pig lights, and every fall we take them down—my husband suffers from pig lights guilt; I put them up, so he usually feels he has to help put them away. Over the winter they are hung from a hook on the back of the downstairs bathroom door, where they dangle in a sort of delicate pig lasso. If they were left outside, they’d be ruined. Hanging them every year passes for tradition and is a rite of spring, in my world. “Pig lights!” people say. Or they don’t say anything: they rock in the rocking chairs and have dinner with us—herbs fresh from the garden—and the birds sing for quite a while and jump on the edge of the little fountain for a drink, and the chipmunks who live in what we call “Chippy Condo”—a mortarless stone wall filled with welcoming holes—dart in and out of the wall, into the ground cover, across the lawn, some zigzagging into our basement, where (alas) they liked to live before Chippy Condo got built. This year, one in particular liked to strut his stuff. He was slower than the others, and fatter. He was always on the run, but waddled and—if I may indulge myself—was a bit insouciant. We were amused by him, though he may well have been a her. I don’t mind not knowing.
Italo Calvino, in one of the many reinventions of one story, in his book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, writes: “Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing. . . . But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed tha
t I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.” I suppose that if you think of yourself as inextricable from your writing, it’s disconcerting to see writing that is no longer familiar. Even stranger is the possibility that your identity is mutable and that you can’t get back to your writing, exactly. It’s general advice—Hemingway, among others, has urged this—to quit while you’re on a roll, midsentence, so that you have something to reenter the moment you begin again. Good advice, but I never do it. I rarely get to end the day’s writing with a strong finished line, either—any more than I can come up with a quick retort. I like the passage from Calvino because it’s spooky in the way it suggests that after a short period of time, after sleep, you’re forever different, in some way; if that might be true, it would explain why writers revise so much, each new self required to work hard, while taking the material farther away from the immediacy of its inception.