7 Madness in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  Henry Baker had run the woodworking shop at ALHS, where he developed and taught in trade and vocational programs while I was teaching English. Between us we probably knew every student who passed through the halls of the high school for a span of three decades. We’d been on the same faculty for all those years, but we’d seen each other rarely, in the lounge or at the occasional full faculty meeting. Then our paths intersected in a big way when we met at a reunion of our students, thirty-year alums, in San Francisco. We’d both been through long ordeals as our spouses passed away, and we both had brilliant, adorable granddaughters the same age—that is, not counting the four-month difference that mattered only to preteens. The rest was recent history.

  “I’m giving in to pizza tonight, if you’re interested,” I told Henry.

  “I almost beat you to it, but Taylor vetoed the idea,” he said. “Says she has too much homework. I’m still reeling.”

  “I was afraid of that,” I said, and told Henry of Maddie’s funk when I mentioned Taylor.

  “Trouble in preteen city,” Henry said.

  “Do you have any clue what it might be about?”

  “Nope. I’ll see what I can find out. But I don’t expect a great outpouring of information.”

  “Too bad. I ordered an extra-large,” I said.

  “I could still come over. Kay’s here.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Taylor’s mother, Kay, was a lawyer. Maybe with some time alone with her daughter, she could cross-examine Taylor and let us know what was going on.

  I hung up to find Maddie at my heels. “Is Mr. Baker coming by himself?” she asked.

  Mr. Baker. Bad sign. Not long ago—yesterday—he was Uncle Henry. “Taylor has a lot of homework,” I said. “Funny, don’t you think, since it’s summer vacation?”

  Maddie shrugged. “Nyah.”

  We settled into our dinner routine, setting placemats, napkins, water glasses, knives and forks. I made a salad for two, plus an extra leaf for Maddie.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me, sweetheart?” I asked.

  “Is Mr. Baker going to be invited to Aunt Beverly’s wedding?” she asked.

  “I’m sure he is. Is that your real question? You know, you can’t keep on—”

  Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.

  Either Maddie was lucky or I needed to pay attention to signs from the universe telling me to mind my own business. I felt a little better when I heard Maddie’s, “Hi, Uncle Henry,” and not “Nyah.” “How come you have the pizza?” she asked him.

  “I pulled up at the same time as Sal’s delivery boy. I wrestled him to the ground and stole all the pizza in his car.” He swung the wide flat box up over his head, causing panic and giggles to erupt. “Ta da!”

  We were off to a good start. I was pleased that Maddie voluntarily piled two pieces of lettuce and a curl of carrot onto her plate. We chatted about Maddie’s girl spy movie, our summer projects, and upcoming short trips with great ease, and then Henry tested the waters.

  “Taylor can’t wait to go to Tahoe in August. How about you, Maddie?” he asked.

  Maddie’s face tightened. She sucked in her cheeks and drew in a long breath. “I just wish we had a swimming pool,” she said.

  At least it wasn’t another “Nyah.” But where had that come from? Maddie was much more of a land-based girl, preferring to ride her bike or click away on her mobile devices than splash around in water. I tried to recall discussion of a swimming pool by her parents, but no such talk came to mind.

  “I thought you didn’t care much for swimming,” I ventured.

  “Nobody likes me,” she said.

  Now I was really worried. Where was my self-confident granddaughter, the one who aced all her classes and lit up even a room full of strangers? “Maddie,” I began, at about the same time that Henry, bless him, said, “I like you.”

  “I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t—”

  Rumble, rumble. Rumble, rumble.

  An all-too-familiar thundering noise cut me off. At the same time, the chandelier above us began an ominous swing on its gilded chain; the coffee in Henry’s mug splashed to the brim and over; a hardback book with a slippery cover on a small table slid ever so slightly in the direction of the dining room window.

  Rumble, rumble. Rattle, rattle. Rumble, rumble. Rattle, rattle.

  An earthquake. The only question was: Is this the Big One?

  Maddie gasped and pushed her chair back. “Drop, cover, and hold on!” she yelled, and fell to the floor. A few seconds later, the three of us were crouched under the long dining room table, holding on to its legs. We heard thuds and breaking glass, but no large crashing. Maddie repeated the long form of the mantra she’d been taught. “Drop to the floor, duck under a table or a desk, and hold on even if it moves. Do not run. Do not go outside,” she said, on autopilot. “Keep away from bookcases, windows, or anything that can fall on you,” she mumbled, then announced, “We’re in an earthquake.”

  Maddie had been drilled well, as all California schoolchildren were. But she hadn’t yet experienced enough quakes to take this one in stride. Her eyes were wide, her knuckles white as she held onto her table leg. Henry released his hold on his post and moved over to Maddie’s, adding his body to the protection the tabletop offered.

  “I think we’re clear,” I said. “But it’s so cozy under here, shall we stay for a while?” A better suggestion than reminding Maddie of the possibility of immediate aftershocks.

  Maddie’s laugh sounded like a great release of tension. I could tell she was okay when she began to instruct us in what she’d learned from a significant study unit on earthquakes last year. “They used to use pendulums, like the chandelier, only really big, to measure how the ground shaked”—she waved the word away. It seemed Maddie herself had been rattled—“…I mean shook. And the San Andreas Fault has made the ground move by two inches every year and in fifteen million years, Los Angeles and San Francisco will be next to each other.” She took a long breath, as if she were gasping for air. “I used to live in Los Angeles, Uncle Henry.”

  “I know that,” Henry said. “I’m sure glad you live here now.”

  “Me, too,” I said, from my perch one table leg over.

  “Are we ready to guess what magnitude it was?” Henry asked. “When I was in school, we’d all take a guess and the one who came closest would get a prize.”

  “What kind of prize?” Maddie asked.

  “Well, back then a new ruler or a protractor was a big deal.”

  “Or a composition book,” I offered, remembering how I loved the look and feel of a new, blank notebook.

  “I think it was a five-point-seven,” Maddie said, apparently forgetting that anything that big in magnitude would have caused considerably more disruption. Depending on where the epicenter was, we’d have experienced windows breaking, plaster falling, and even heavy furniture moving. But it made sense that anything that sent us under the table would impress Maddie and be accompanied by a large number.

  “I’ll say two-point-three,” Henry said.

  “My turn?” I asked. “You know me and numbers. I have to think. I hate the Richter scale.”

  “I taught it to you last year,” Maddie said.

  She was right, but it was hard for a math-challenged person like me to comprehend that a magnitude of five was ten times greater than a magnitude of four, a six was ten times greater than a five, and so on for each step up. But each step also represented more than thirty times as much energy. Huh? It went against all the math I learned in grade school. Maybe I’d have caught on more quickly if I’d grown up in California instead of on the East Coast, where hurricanes were the threat. Whoever was in charge for that first hurricane did it right: call them by first names. I remembered Beulah, Camille, Anita. No math involved.

  I screwed up my courage. “Three-point-one,” I said.

  “Okay, everyone remember what their number is,” Maddie said. “I wonder what broke?” s
he asked, but made no move to find out. Neither did she race to her computer to find out the reported magnitude, as she did whenever any kind of question came up, even in casual conversation, from how many games were played in last year’s World Series to how long it took to cook a twenty-two-pound turkey. It occurred to me that she was nervous about making the trip from the north end of the house where we were gathered in the dining room, clear down to the southeast corner where her computer was stationed.

  No sooner were we on our feet—a little wobbly in my case after all that squatting—than:

  Rumble, rattle. Rumble, rattle.

  Brief gasps all around although the little aftershock was much shorter and less intense than the main event.

  “Whoa,” Maddie said, and dropped again anyway.

  Henry and I stood under the doorframe for a minute, just in case. “Once again, I think we’re okay,” Henry said, then shouted in mock–SWAT-team mode, “Clear!”

  The standard post-earthquake drill began, the “Recover” phase, after “Prepare” and “Survive,” the steps in the manual every Californian had read, in one form or another. Henry instructed us to stay put while he inspected the house. He clicked a number on his phone while he walked and I knew he’d be calling home.

  From the noises I’d heard in my home, I expected a few pieces of broken pottery, but no fallen bookcases or large objects. My late husband, an architect, had been religious about earthquake safety. Our bookcases were bolted to the walls; major appliances and the water heater were strapped to studs; our smaller collectibles, potential projectiles, were secured with earthquake putty or gel. Ken knew what he was doing.

  Henry returned from his house tour reporting good news, except for two casualties, a vase that was part of my collection on a table in my atrium, and a large serving bowl on a shelf in my kitchen, both now smashed to smithereens.

  The news would travel fast and I figured I’d be contacted by friends and relatives from near and far. Maddie had already received an “Everything okay?” text from her mother, who was in Los Angeles for an exhibit of her paintings, followed by a phone call from her father, from his office at Stanford Medical; Beverly and Nick, who were at a criminal justice workshop in San Francisco, called with “No movement here for a change”; Henry’s daughter, Kay, the mother of the out-of-favor Taylor, assured him, “We’re okay here”; and several friends on the East Coast, who I know pictured a giant crevasse in our living room floor, suggested, “Come back. At least hurricanes give you warning.” I was constantly telling my Bronx peeps, as Skip called them, that our quakes were of the ground-rumbling kind, not the movie kind where the earth cracks open and swallows up a semi-truck and a family of six in an SUV.

  “Must be a slow news night all over the country,” Henry said. “They’re making a big deal out of a very small quake.” We both noted that years ago, before instant networking and the means to tell the world what we ate for breakfast, news of a small quake wouldn’t even have made it as far as the border between California and Oregon.

  We reassembled in the living room, silently declaring the dinner party aborted since a topping of dust from the swinging chandelier now covered the pizza. I wondered if our new SuperKrafts store survived, but didn’t care enough to make the calls necessary to find out. I hoped that didn’t make me a bad person.

  “Mom says her paintings are on the good wall at the show,” Maddie said, explaining the way seismic waves traveled. We noted that the two items that toppled in my house were on the same side, the west wall of each room, though the atrium and kitchen were overlapping, side by side and shifted with respect to each other. Objects that were hung or shelved on the other walls were undisturbed. Maddie made it clearer than my science teachers in the Bronx those many years ago. But then, the Bronx wasn’t known for its earthquakes.

  When the calls and texts died down, we finally turned our chairs to face the TV and clicked on the news, where already facts and figures were scrolling across the lower edge of the screen. An estimated half million detectable earthquakes occur in the world each year. The largest recorded earthquake in the world was of magnitude nine-point-five in Chile in 1960, when two million people were left homeless. The famous San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was of magnitude seven-point-eight with an epicenter two miles off shore. Moonquakes occur less frequently but at greater depth, on the moon.

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “What about today’s magnitude?” asked Maddie, not a big fan of history. “Who won the prize?”

  “How do they compile the data so quickly?” I wondered aloud.

  “They probably have it all ready for when the Big One comes,” Henry offered.

  Maddie and I shivered at the thought, but reports of local accidents were barely worth a bandage. A man in nearby Sunnyvale had an injury to his toes when his toaster oven fell from the counter, and a retired teacher in Los Altos was hurt when she lost her balance and her arm banged against a file cabinet. I was impressed that the young woman reporting was able to contain herself and kept her smile in check.

  “I hope my teacher is okay,” Maddie said.

  Henry grabbed the remote. “Here it comes.”

  Back at the anchor desk, a middle-aged man with curly locks and glasses informed us that “Today’s earthquake in the South Bay had an epicenter in Cupertino. At six thirty-two this evening, it weighed in at a magnitude of three-point-one.”

  Maddie gasped. “That was exactly Grandma’s guess,” she said, doing a heroic job at being happy for me. “I can’t believe it.”

  I couldn’t believe it either. I remembered a favorite expression of Ken’s: “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  “Didn’t we say the one who was farthest off would win the prize?” Henry said.

  “That’s how I remember it,” I said.

  With not a trace of embarrassment, Maddie held her hands out, ready to accept a prize for coming up with the number that was most off the mark. Henry flipped a dollar bill into her open palms.

  Maddie skipped around with glee. Not a single “Nyah.” So what if it had taken an earthquake to brighten her mood?

  * * *

  “Maybe I should sleep with you tonight,” Maddie said at bedtime. “In case, you know, something happens, and then we’d be together to help each other.”

  No argument from me, as I tucked her into one side of my queen-size bed. She settled on the pillow. “What’s the biggest earthquake you were ever in?” she asked.

  I told her, with some hyperbole, where I was and what I felt during the six-point-nine Loma Prieta earthquake, which famously interrupted the World Series in 1989. That quake, with an epicenter south of San Francisco, lasted fifteen to twenty seconds and was felt as far away as San Diego, five hundred miles south.

  “Wow,” she said. “Did anyone die?”

  “Sadly, yes. Somewhere between sixty and seventy people, but thousands were injured or left homeless.”

  “That part’s very sad,” Maddie said, by which I assumed she meant that all other aspects of earthquakes were kind of fun.

  “What’s this about wishing you had a swimming pool? And that no one likes you?” I asked, hoping to catch her off guard in this special quiet time.

  Smarter than me by far, Maddie stretched her long arms above her head and came out with a wide and loud yawn. “I’m really sleepy, Grandma. G’night.”

  “Sure you are,” I said, and tickled her where I knew it would count. Then I left her alone. We’d both had enough for one day.

  * * *

  A quick buzz, buzz.

  My doorbell. Just when I thought the day was over. I should have known better, since my atrium lights, visible from the street, were still on. I clattered to the front door in my noisy clogs. I checked the peephole but I’d already guessed who’d be cruising about for coffee or tea and my special ginger cookies at eleven o’clock at night. My nephew Skip, another fun-loving Porter family redhead. And I would never shut him out, no matter wh
at the hour.

  “Hey, Aunt Gerry.”

  I looked at Skip’s attire—khakis, a light blue shirt, and a windbreaker, about halfway between “on the job” and “officially off duty.” “Hey, yourself,” I said. “Are you on earthquake patrol?”

  “You could say that. Such a small one, there’s not much damage anywhere, just a lot of spilled drinks and crooked pictures. And false alarms everywhere, like in a bad comedy. It’s almost a joke on Facebook, too. Someone posted a photo of a tipped-over lawn chair, with a caption, ‘We will never forget the Lincoln Point 3.1.’ Like that.”

  “I’d think they’d be counting their blessings.”

  “Not so much. Not my Facebook friends anyway.” Skip had already located the cookies and munched away while he helped me set up and then pour from a pitcher of iced tea. “But you never know about that one little thing, or big thing, that falls over that might be hazardous, and no one is around to check it. So the brass like us to go to selected locales and informally inspect. We look in on empty public buildings, houses where people are on vacation, closed shops, folks who live alone, that kind of thing.”

  “You mean old folks,” I said, exaggerating the motion of my atrium rocking chair.

  Skip smiled. “Sort of.”

  “And even big-shot detectives like my favorite nephew get to help out.”

  “Your only nephew, and it’s better than sitting with my feet up on my desk.”

  “So this is an official earthquake call for your report?”

  “Could be, if I need the points.”

  I smiled. “How comforting. Did you find anything interesting in your rounds?”

  “Not so far. Like I said, unless you count spilled coffee.”

  To illustrate, and to make me nervous, Skip tipped his glass so the tea nearly ran out onto my new area rug. Too bad Maddie wasn’t awake to laugh. In fact, I was surprised the doorbell hadn’t awakened her; usually even her sleeping radar was tuned to the arrival of her first cousin once removed, aka Uncle Skip, day or night.