These days, even wrong facts become the truth. They put them into those machines and then they can’t get them out. That’s why dead people get magazines in the mail, and notices of white sales forever.
Nora’s lie about her age is not a recent one. It was made up for the purpose of her seduction of and marriage to John Nolan McBride more than eighty years ago. Eighty-three years, she thinks. He was a severely moral, albeit passionate, man, and would not have wanted to rob the cradle. Nora was the youngest of a dozen children, and her tired parents didn’t thwart her fearful wish to marry at fourteen. They might have lost track of her age themselves—there were so many children. And the older girls were the ones they’d held on to.
Lying awake now in the middle of the night, Nora remembers, no, feels, the rough pull of her sister Catherine’s hand on the way to school, to church. And the way Agnes brushed Nora’s hair until it almost caught on fire, as if she wanted to yank it all out and be done with the chore forever. Well, most of it’s gone now, and so is poor Agnes. Nora’s fingers follow the bony definitions of her own skull and she thinks of Agnes, toes up in her coffin, and how she hated to get out of bed on those Boston winter mornings. Everything was luck—your placement in the family, your sex. The boys were sent off to school, the younger girls allowed to break away. Nora is the only surviving member of that large, urgent family. All that noise, once, and the food!
The meals here are bland and watery. When the new girl, the one who wears so much perfume, brings supper, the soup tastes like Evening in Paris. How can Nora be so ravenous, even want such food? How can she still want?
In one respect, at least, she remains the way she was as a girl and a young woman. She cannot believe, for more than a stricken moment at a time, in her own death. The stubborn forces of life, will, and denial all distract her, just as they did when she was a fourteen-year-old bride and a twenty-nine-year-old widow. Maybe it’s because she never had any children, and has lost the logic of the generations.
But she must make herself know it soon, and be prepared; otherwise, she might be taken by surprise, something she’s always hated. A frail, dreamy girl, she would beat her brother Henry with a wild infusion of strength whenever he jumped from behind a door and screamed “Boo!” at her. Pay attention, she orders herself as she falls into those abrupt and frequent daytime naps. She sleeps less at night, though, is often awake like this, and thinks, against all reason, that death will only come in filtered darkness, if ever. Fool. She has seen them trundle off enough bodies in the heart of the day, while meal carts rattled down the corridor in the other direction, and elsewhere in the world people boarded buses. There’s no “Death” to come and get you, anyway, Nora knows, having tried on and cast off religion, mysticism, and any other possible form of consolation. It is you who go, ready or not. She should be ready, even eager, to fly from this body with all its traitorous parts, to be gone from this place with its dreary bingo games, the various therapies that only absorb time and don’t fix anything. In PT she travels halfway across a long room, using a walker, and then she comes back. Perhaps it takes a whole day. In RT she’s a constant winner of bingo, lotto, and keno. They tell her she wins, anyway; she can’t make out the cards anymore. That blur of noise and numbers gets her fuzzy until someone shouts “Bingo!” into her ear, and raises her dozing arm to claim a prize. Every Christmas, Nora gives little gift packets of plastic rain hats, ballpoint pens, and sewing kits to the aides who awarded them to her in the first place. In OT she’s making a multicolored potholder on a child’s loom, but her wrist will never be bent again by an iron skillet.
Oh, butter, eggs! Jack McBride at the edge of a vast white bed, suspenders down, taking off one shoe. Certain images return with a physical rush and hot clarity, although she keeps losing and finding recent events, ideas, people. During all her years in this place, she’s had so many roommates. Forty? Fifty? There were some early intense friendships, and a few wars, but most of the time it’s like sharing a train compartment with a series of strangers on a distant, uncertain journey. Too many of them want the television, even when they’re turned away from it, even when the picture rolls and rolls like the wheels of a train. Television is worse than life.
Now it’s starting to be morning again; the sun isn’t bored yet with its work. It rises in the east and throws light into the room, revealing the sleeping form of Nora’s current roommate, an obese woman who’s suffered a stroke. She hasn’t been here long—a week or a month. Nora can’t remember her name, and probably the woman can’t either. She’s aphasic, confused, heartbroken. As soon as she wakes, she starts to wail. Those who have lost everything but single phrases recite them now. Next door the Oh, God man begins his first lamentation of the day—“Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” There are other voices from other rooms—Nora hears only those at the highest decibels—the crowing calls of morning need and complaint: hunger, thirst, pain, toilet! Everybody wants something.
As the oldest, Nora is strangely like the youngest again. Her bare gums ache as if they’re going to yield a third harvest of teeth. This bed has bars, the way her first one did, and she is cared for with the same grudging sense of duty. But the caretakers here are nursing aides, usually Chicanos or blacks who address every elderly female patient as Mama. They urge rattleboned behinds onto bedpans, crooning, “Come on now, Mama. Do it for me, Mama.” And they press heaping spoonsful of food against lax or greedy mouths, sometimes when the old women are still propped on their pans or commodes. In and out, the first law of the body. “That’s right, Mama. That’s good.”
Nora’s last roommate, or the one before that, was a Jewish woman in her eighties. She was senile, but had transitory moments of a kind of lucidity. She would come to, astonished and not displeased to find herself the mother of such dark and exuberant children. She must have given birth to them in some twilight sleep of her old age, like Sarah. But how good they were to her. “Ziseh kinder!” she would exclaim, and blow kisses after them, using both hands. In less rational times, she would inquire suspiciously of her handler, “Du bist a Yid?”
Seen through the bars of Nora’s bed, the people in the hall go by in flickering motion, like dancers in those little books you flipped through.
The new roommate, who is crying now, will probably cry until she loses the ability to do that, too. Her broken sounds are like the bleats of a newborn lamb, or the noises from that radio down the hall someone keeps dialing and dialing.
What am I doing here, Nora wonders, her meaning as unsure as ever.
If the weather is good, her birthday party will be on the lawn. “Ahhh, Mama,” she tells her roommate. “Cheer up, will you? What’s the use?”
5
THE RED LIGHT BEHIND the bed glows like the end of a cigarette. Neither Kenny nor Joy smokes, although both of them did at one time. In those days, after lovemaking, the cigarette they shared burned like a firefly in the darkness, at her lips, at his. Now they don’t smoke, they don’t make love.
She had been such a passionate girl once, almost comically so, wanting more and more, shouting her demands and her satisfaction. “Oh, do it, do it, I said! That’s good, that’s wonderful. Don’t stop, my darling, don’t stop or I’ll kill you!” Even several months ago, just before things began to go really bad, there was clear evidence of a hard, leftover lust—quieter perhaps, maybe less violent, but certainly there.
They lie far apart on the large bed, as far as they can without falling off. The distance between them is like a desert, or an unswimmable body of water, and Kenny wonders for the first time if Joy, too, has taken a lover. It’s been weeks since they’ve touched one another, except by accident, sparking only embarrassment then, or the electric current of their tempers. Has she been doing it with someone else? He cannot imagine the reality of that, although the idea takes hold, with tentacles, in his head and chest. Another man, meeting Joy elsewhere in utter secrecy, as he meets Daphne. Discovering that lovely skin under the lovely skins of her extravagant clothing
. What does Kenny feel? So many things at once that he can’t define his reaction as a single feeling. Unreasonable fury, denial, a moment of cold detachment, culpability … relief? Maybe she’s simply doing without it, uncharacteristic as that may be. People change. Their moods change, the intensity of their needs.
Tonight, Joy’s parents are asleep just down the hall, in the guest room. They’d arrived that afternoon from New York for a two-week vacation. On other, earlier, visits, Gus and Frances’s presence in the house seemed to stimulate Kenny and Joy into sexual action. A carryover from the parental taboos of their courting days, probably. The danger of committing the forbidden act in the unknowing/knowing nearness of Mother and Father. Then Joy had usually been the instigator—they were her mother and father—but Kenny’s fervor was heightened, too. He just had the good sense to keep the noise level down.
Now the house is very quiet. The children are sleeping. Gus and Frances are out of it, too, tired from their flight, from the excitement of reunion. Kenny thinks again of how much he cares for them, and how they, like the children, have come into his life by the merest chance. And could be lost the same way.
Joy is motionless on her side of the bed, Kenny on his. The red light behind them locates the panic button for the burglar-alarm system. It was an option he had argued against, in vain. In fact, he had not wanted the whole system installed, at first. Jesus, she bought so much stuff it needed a bodyguard! Joy’s her name and acquisition’s her game, he’d say to himself, almost aloud. But he was already involved with Daphne then, and too beset by nervous guilt to provoke strong new quarrels about money. And maybe a burglar alarm was a good idea. The crime rate in Los Angeles was rising with phenomenal speed. There had been numerous break-ins in their general neighborhood, and finally one right next door. Pros, apparently, who went directly to the jewelry, the silverware, the money. Scary. Except that material goods were not what Kenny worried about—only the physical safety of his family. He was old-fashioned in that he’d always enjoyed fantasies about protecting Joy and the kids against attack from the world of crime and perversion. Pow! Bam! Take that, you creeps! He wouldn’t admit this to anyone because it was so childish, an extension of those secret boyhood games in which he saved his parents and brother from outer-space creatures, from imaginary enemy bombs. Sometimes he let his brother be the only one killed.
Joy made an appointment, and one Saturday afternoon in February a man from On-Guard, Inc., came to demonstrate his wares. There were choices to be made: wired alarms, or wireless ones; keys, or computerized panels; direct police dialing, or a connection to a central switchboard whose operator dialed the police for you. And a variety of ludicrous options, like the panic button behind the bed. Joy was pre-sold before the guy’s arrival, but he showed them everything anyway, using a psychological sales pitch that was careful not to challenge Kenny’s ability to defend his own household, single-handed—bare-handed, if necessary. It was as if the salesman could see into those dumb fantasies, or even had them himself. He called Kenny “sir,” although, balding and potbellied, he was at least fifteen years older. It made Kenny smile. The salesman smiled back, encouraged, and opened an oversized attaché case to reveal a heavy cardboard replica of the front of a ranch-style house. It reminded Kenny of Molly’s dollhouse, in which, with her baby’s vision of domesticity, she would bed down the doll family along with toy elephants, trains, loose crayons, and her brother’s lead soldiers.
“This is your average unprotected home, sir,” the salesman said. “Oh, you’ve got your cylinders, your double bolts, and your dead bolts; your chains, your police locks, and your window screws … even your watchdog. You feel safe. In fact, you don’t even think about it too much. I mean, it’s your house, right? And the bank’s, heh-heh. So who’s gonna violate it?”
You, asshole, Kenny wanted to say, but it had only been a rhetorical question. The salesman took a deep, wheezing breath and went on. “In L.A. County alone, in 1980, there were 170,289 illegal entries. Reported, that is. Because of the nature of some of the crimes, plenty of them don’t get reported, if you know what I mean. The crook, crooks enter the house—middle of the night, broad daylight, you name it. They get in through a window, a door, the basement … No alarms go off, no warning to the man of the house, to the police, to nobody.”
Kenny peered into the attaché case and saw, near the lower left corner of the house façade, a black metal box with two exposed wires dangling from it—one red, one blue.
“But,” the salesman said, deftly twisting the red and blue wires together, using only one hand, “with an On-Guard Protect-All System, the family is safe. Let the intruders enter!” He said that last with the corny overkill of a kid in a school play. With his free hand, he lifted the housefront to reveal a realistically drawn and painted interior of a living room. A woman was seated at the piano in the picture, her hands poised gracefully above the keys. A man stood just behind her, a proprietary arm around her shoulders. His mouth was open in the perfect O of joyous song. Two children, a boy and girl about the ages of Steven and Molly, were frolicking on the rug with a large German shepherd. A lively fire danced in the hearth behind them.
“Thirty seconds after entry,” the salesman said, “the alarm is sounded.” Right on cue, there was an earsplitting series of screams from the attaché case. It was one of those maniac whooping sirens, and Kenny winced, while Joy held her hands over her ears. Thank God the kids were playing down the street at a friend’s house; it would have scared the hell out of them. The salesman let the siren continue for several seconds after his point was obviously made. “The police are there in no time!” he shouted over the din. “If the homeowner has private weapons, he’s ready in a flash!”
It was such a relief when the wires were disconnected and the siren cut off in mid-wail. Kenny wondered briefly if homeowners with guns ever kept them in piano benches. He was grateful that the demonstration was over.
But it wasn’t. “Now,” the salesman said, “here’s the same house, without the System.” Again, he lifted the cardboard facade, but this time he revealed a scene of mayhem and plunder. It was only another page, only another richly colored painting of the same living room. Again the rendition was terribly realistic, especially the blood. The woman was still seated at the piano, but at a strange, unnatural angle. Her sheet music was scattered all around her, and splattered red. Cupboards and drawers hung open, their contents tangled and spilled. The man was undoubtedly dead; no one could possibly be alive with such extensive wounds, with wide-open, staring eyes like his. The O of his mouth was shock, not song. The children were still alive. Their eyes were wide open, too, but with unmistakable terror. They were in the clutches of two masked men. There were four or five masked men in the room, one of them holding a smoking gun over the felled dog. Before the salesman let the housefront drop over this scene of carnage, Kenny noticed that even the fire in the hearth had gone out.
He argued with Joy about a few of the options—the panic button, for instance, and ignition cutoff devices for both of their cars—but gave in finally on the whole package. In truth, he could afford it. Kenny is in business for himself, and business has been good. He knew what he was really buying, anyway, understood the bargain he was making with fate. And maybe when he and Daphne were deliriously fucking some afternoon, the burglar alarm would actually save his family from disaster. He thought about getting a dog, too. The On-Guard demonstration had been imbecilic, as hard-sell as possible. But you only had to open a newspaper to know that you couldn’t invent anything more terrible than reality.
He hates that glowing button, though, the last image on his eye before sleep. It triggers dreams in which the siren goes off in the middle of the night, and the police don’t come, and the central switchboard doesn’t call demanding the code word to signal a false alarm. How Joy had agonized over choosing the right code word, one they’d both easily remember, and one an intruder, like Rumpelstiltskin’s maiden, could never guess. Her procrastination
drove him crazy. “It’s not your goddamn mantra, for God’s sake!” he’d cried, and they finally settled on Gus, her father’s name.
One night Kenny did set the alarm off himself, by opening a window without disengaging the system first, and when the operator at the central switchboard promptly called, he answered and said, “It’s okay, only a little accident. This is Gus.” He felt like such an impostor. Gus is one of the nicest men he knows. He and Frances had taken Kenny on immediately as the son they’d always wanted, and offered unconditional love that thoroughly pleased and amazed him. After all, Joy was their only child, their golden girl, and he had carried her three thousand miles away. His own parents, who live on Long Island, and who are divorced but still at war, had never accepted him without the insidious imposition of judgment. Frances calls him Kenneth, or “dear”—a rare mixture of respect and affection. Once, a long time ago, he’d mentioned that he missed the sand tarts from William Greenberg’s bakery on Madison Avenue. Since then, she always brings a box of them in her hand luggage when she and Gus come to L.A.
Gus, who is a dentist, brings a small case of his tools, and checks out everyone’s mouth by the light of the gooseneck lamp in Kenny’s study. “Ah, beautiful. Great,” he murmurs, peering inside, gently sounding each tooth like a chime. Two years ago, he’d had an operation for lung cancer, had “beaten the big C,” as he put it. Without self-pity or misplaced rage. “No sweat,” Kenny told the operator after the second false alarm. “I opened the window again. Sorry—this is Gus, signing off.” But he was only himself, far less than the hero whose name he took.
Sometimes he dreams that the siren is screaming and he is screaming with it, frozen, of course, unable to act. The painted intruders come to life in those stupid masks. There is a dog that won’t or can’t bark. Kenny is helpless, too, as impotent in his horror as he has been sexually with Joy. Or in his dream the phone rings and rings, and he can’t answer it to say that he isn’t Gus, we’re all in trouble, in danger, come save us! He wakes, unconsoled for minutes by the silence, by the way he can move his quivering arms and legs if he needs to. And he feels ashamed. He is, after all, responsible for his own dreams, isn’t he? How long it takes for his breathing to become normal once more, for his pulse to calm.
In the Palomar Arms Page 4