by Carson, Tom
Peculiarly, she raised her voice again. “I take it that’s no longer the case,” she called out. But there was no one there for her to be talking to—just the wall, which had now become so thin and translucent that endless parallel lines of regimented black markings showed through it from the far side.
“Well Here we God Damn go again,” I raged. “Will SOMEONE please tell me what is going on?”
As no doubt goes without saying, no one did. Instead, even as it visibly inched closer to us and the room began to grow more shallow and confining as a result, the wall became slightly concave—and I, MaryAnn, would not be getting out of here a minute too soon, I told myself. When I got back from my vacation, I was definitely going to be in the market for another apartment; so I thought.
“I’m glad you tried to understand,” Sukey Santoit told whoever she was talking to. “You know I didn’t want you to find out the way you did, or God knows on the day you did. But Ginger’s right: these things happen. Sometimes it just works out that way.”
However, she no longer had to raise her voice to do this, as the room was now sufficiently narrow to make that unnecessary. At this rate, in only seconds more, whatever it was we were inside would be completely flat; and I had just seen the writing on the wall.
EMOCLEW, it said.
“For God’s sake, stop yakking and get me the hell out of herel” I shrieked at Sukey Santoit. “Can’t you see he’s got us trapped?”
“Don’t worry, Mary-Ann,” she said. “We’ve both been gone a long time.”
Apparently not the least perturbed that the room was now virtually two-dimensional—and we with it, I realized with a consternation I can only ask you to imagine, for now I could see through us both—she reached down with a shrug and picked up the typescript that she’d been comparing against her antithesis. To my utter stupefaction, and most un-Mary-Ann-ish rage.
“What are you talking about?” I screamed at her at the top of my lungs. “Who are you? What are you? What are WE, for gosh sakes?”
Tender, eager, mocking and amused, her eyes’ twin vestiges of dilute green light—now all that was left of her—looked up from the last pages of her book.
“Memories,” she said.
Dear Roadrunner,
Yes—and here I sit among my Acme traps and gizmos, watching you dash away. But you have somewhere to get to, and unlike my beloved master—the great Wile E. Coyote, whom we knew—I wasn’t trying to catch you. You know I only wanted to see you one more time. And make you laugh, because you’d have to have changed a lot not to get a smile or two from this—especially since you know that the real story was so different.
Anyhow, this is all I really wanted to say: bless you. I started making up these jokes not long after they dropped the Times Square wrecking ball on the century you and I grew up in. Looking out of the small window that I had on it at sixteen—when you above all things were glad and young, as your favorite poem put it—I realized that the reason your eyes were green was that all of you was.
You see, in my memory, you were standing in New York Harbor. Back then I didn’t understand what freedom meant to you, and of course I couldn’t see why anyone would want to be free of me—even though I sure did, which should probably have been some sort of tip-off. But everything I ever thought you did to me has turned out to be what you did for me, and I’m grateful. As is the woman I’m married to, who sends your youthful ghost bemused regards.
So it’s thirty years later, and what do you know? I’m a middle-aged fathead staring at a computer screen, still thinking about a girl I used to know in high school. Congratulate me, Susan—or S usa Ν, as I used to write it: that must prove I’m a real American at last.
Since I know you were fond of her, you’ll probably be pleased to hear that my mom did rejoin the Consular Corps eventually. She served in many lands. I guess that’s about it, except to say that I hope you like Daisy. I did, both times I was privileged to know her. With old affection, G.
Whatever.
The next morning, doing my best to shake off my complete bafflement as to why I’d ever dreamed I had a roommate, much less why she had been Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective—and unable to see a smidgen of rhyme or reason in the bizarre conversation we’d had—I, Mary-Ann, flew to Los Angeles. That was my first stop on what turned out to be the vacation that never quits, and there I changed planes.
On the next leg of the trip, my seatmate on the aisle was showing some. As the Pacific appeared under the slanting wing outside my window, I got to gabbing with her about how exciting it was for me to see my second ocean’s blue for the first time; somewhat ironically, as it turned out, as she was a trashy-looking but entertaining redhead whose peculiar idea of appropriate traveling togs was a sequined white evening gown.
Guess who.
After we landed, both of us being at loose ends until nightfall and enjoying each other’s company, we set out to look for, as the sign above the arcade on Main Street in my hometown of Russell, Kansas, used to and may still put it, Something to Do.
Guess what.
Soon after we put out to sea, just as the coastline dropped from sight, a gray and moving bulk showed up on the horizon. As it drew nearer and grew larger, Ging grabbed my as yet untanned forearm with one red-nailed, clattering-braceleted hand. “Hey, that’s a troopship]” she exulted, and started to whoop and wave.
“How can you tell?” I asked, peering hard, for it was still quite far away and partly veiled in mist.
Ginger gave me a look. “Mary-Ann, how the hell you think my Momma taught me to swim, and why?” she drawled. We both laughed.
It kept swelling until it loomed over us. The railing was packed with what looked like a thousand young Marines in crewcuts and combat green. They whooped and waved. We whooped and waved, and Ginger gave them a few shimmies from the Minnow’s little deck, in her white evening gown. It was silly, since she could see perfectly well that they were just kids—probably all of nineteen. But that was what made it fun for them and us both, since we all knew how innocent it was.
Then we sailed away this way, and they sailed away that way. Soon they were gone, and we never did find out where they’d been going.
As for us, you know where we all washed up. And yes, the island is beautiful; especially at night, when the sky unveils its stars. But we have now been here, so far as we can compute, for going on forty years.
We try to make the best of things. But it’s a downhill slide.
The reunion movies were a pack of lies. “A complete violation of the original’s artistic integrity, as incredible as that sounds” according to the newspaper article about us, apparently written by one of my old boyfriend Jean-Luc’s epigones, by which I learned of those movies’ existence. Escorted there by her pet crabs, Ging found it lying on the beach at low tide a year or two or three ago, rolled inside an empty jar of Maxwell House instant coffee.
Oddly enough, one of the men said that the accompanying photograph of the reviewer reminded him of an old student of his. He couldn’t place the name, though. Even so, when I’m done writing this, I’m going to put it all inside the jar and toss it back out to sea, and maybe it will find its way back to whoever sent it in the first place.
It did Mary-Ann Thank you
But anyway: we didn’t escape from the gosh-darn island. We didn’t return to the gosh-darn island. We never got off the gosh-darn island.
We never will get off the gosh-darn island.
We are the island. The island is us.
We have never gotten any older. Then again, we sure aren’t getting any younger.
On top of which, as we have not been united in years, the prospect of being re-united holds few charms for us here.
Needless to say, it was Ginger who was the first to figure out that we must be fictional characters of some sort. Besides having the most prior experience of this kind of thing, she’s also the smartest of us by miles. That’s one reason why I, Mary-Ann, am proud to call her my friend.
/>
But we don’t know our purpose. We don’t know when or how our unveilings take place, which may be why, for decades now, I’ve had recurring dreams. In these, a wry-faced, dry-voiced man with salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in a suit and tie and most often holding a cigarette, steps out from behind a palm tree at twilight and delivers a caustic yet somehow genial summary of our situation, which seems to be exemplary in some way. But I don’t know who he is and can’t make out what he’s saying or reconstruct its import after I wake up, so I have no idea what the dreams signify.
Ging’s theory is that we’re some kind of refuge from the century that was just passing its two-thirds mark when we all washed up here. And yet, perhaps just because we’re available to anyone who has a mind to, we all seem to have been equipped with histories that would make us instead, in however incomplete and veiled a way, that century’s incarnation.
Her taste for philosophical conundrums having been whetted rather than sated by decades of nothing to do, Ging often likes to speculate at length on whether we’re an incarnation that became a refuge, or a refuge that became an incarnation. But as I say, she’s a lot brainier than the rest of us, and that includes me. So she usually loses me in her logic pretty fast, and I get up and wander off and go look at the mountains for a while as she continues talking to the crabs.
You should know it’s understood between us that no offense will be taken—for all that, having been raised to be unfailingly pleasant, polite and cheerful and still remembering those lessons, I, Mary-Ann, nonetheless felt some discomfiture at wandering off to go look at the mountains during the first fifteen years or so. But we’ll all be here forever, and my old friend will happily tell her theories to the crabs, who may be an audience more insightful than her human one, until night comes and the sky unveils its stars, and we build our separate fire here up at our end of the camp.
I need to hear Ging’s voice behind me to keep looking at the mountains very long, because they frighten me; as they do all of us. Early on, the men got the bright idea of planting Old Glory on the island’s southernmost peak—to signal passing ships, they said, although even back then Ginger and I already suspected that they simply needed to have projects and ambitions to keep themselves occupied. But we were all still one group then, and so we got the flag from the boat, put it on a pole that one of the men had made, and started climbing, Ginger leading the way in her white and starry evening gown. But we never got more than a couple of hundred yards up the slope, and when we turned to go back, we soon found ourselves running.
As we don’t actually know the name of this island, assuming that it has one, we may have feared discovering that it had been done before. Or hadn’t, but would seem completely pointless once we did. In any case, whatever the true reason for our fear of the mountains may be, now we all stay near the beach. We tell ourselves the ships will be more visible to us and we to them, and they more likely to come in and pick us up, if we’re all closer to the water.
These days, however, Ging and I don’t spend a lot of time with the others. Up at our end of the camp, we tend our own fire; we keep to our separate sisterhood. While I’m frankly not sure when we began to live apart from the other five, the day the Maxwell House coffee jar washed ashore was the first time we’d all clustered in one group in ages.
Even the non-egotists among us were eager to read about ourselves, in no matter how distorted and travestied a version. But that scrap of newspaper was also the first word we’d had of the outside world, or anyway America, since 1964, the year we all washed up here.
When one of the men finally turned the page over to see what was on the flip side of the review, he couldn’t glean all that much from it, since it was mostly advertisements. There was a public notice announcing that Gang-A-Gley Pharmaceuticals was discontinuing the manufacture of its medication Laggilin, having determined that the condition it alleviated wasn’t worth curing, and an ad for summer rentals in Provincetown. An antiques store specializing in things nautical announced a vintage Royal Navy spyglass for sale, and a recently unearthed bushel of genuine PT-109 tie clips from the 1960 Kennedy campaign. From an alarmingly blue-eyed commemorative plate offered by an apparent charitable organization for emotionally disturbed watercolorists calling itself the Franklin Mint, we gathered, with sorrow, that Frank Sinatra had passed. A local car show promoted itself as featuring an authentic Duesenberg, and so on.
In fact, the only actual news item on the page was part of a story about a young woman named Parvita Singh who, despite being confined to a wheelchair, had been elected to the county board in Arlington, Virginia. There was a picture of her flashing a victory sign on election night. Crouched next to her was her beaming father, identified as a Washington, D.C., cab driver.
He was flashing a victory sign, too.
“What the hell’s going on back there, anyhow?” whichever one of the men had been reading complained. In fact, in his irritation and perplexity, he had almost started to crumple the paper up when I stopped him. He never knew that, behind his back, Ginger and I had looked at each other—with, as I believe the saying goes, a wild surmise.
Or that the unaccustomed tears in my friend’s eyes were only prevented from dripping by the thickness of her false eyelashes, which caught them like bugs in amber.
Otherwise, you can probably see how it is from wherever you are. Too many for bridge, too few for football, and not much I care to say about any of them except Ging. Little boy and fat man; Mr. Magoo. The old dame with the empty spaces in her eyes that youth and then morphine once filled in, and a three-toed sloth in search of a mirror. It all got boring pretty fast.
If we were a medieval morality play, our names would be Youth, Clumsiness, Wealth, Cowardice, Hubba-Hubba, and Self-Love. Plus I, Mary-Ann, who am or may be all these things and more and yet am still and forever virgin; and still waiting, in my unfailingly pleasant, polite and cheerful way, to find myself pregnant with Jesus.
As I believe I have noted, current opportunities for this event to get rolling would appear to be nil. But to tell the truth, I’m not even sure we’re alone now, not that the evidence is any great cause for huzzahs and champagne. One day not long ago, under ten years I would guess, I went out walking far from our camp, and saw something I thought was disgusting: a pig’s head on a stick.
I don’t believe that any of the men would have done that, although I can’t be sure and don’t really give a damn that I’m not. Nor do I see how any animals could, not even monkeys with their reversible thumbs and undoubted talent for mimicry. In any case, I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen, even Ginger. To be honest, things are plenty bad enough.
The men, of course, still have their plans and projects, and getting the next one settled can keep them contentedly arguing and bellowing for hours, down at their end of the camp. Then, with monotonous regularity, as I roll my eyes and she her eyelashes, Ging and I will have to overhear the following conversation, reprised now for decades with only modest variations:
Hitching up his pants and brushing the sand off them, the fat one claps his hands together and says, “Okay, men! Let’s gol”
“Oh, no—ljust remembered,” the sloth will moan. “We can’t.” “Why on earth not?” says Magoo, in his unfailingly puzzled voice. Pulling off his cap, the fat one dashes it to the ground, or beach. “Because God damn it, as usual, we’re waiting for-”
That’s when he shows up, shuffling hurriedly along the beach toward them in his sneakers and the red sweater that he always wears now, with that hurt and jumpy look in his eyes. Sometimes, as he shambles past our fire, he glances guiltily over at the two of us, as if hoping that he’ll get invited to stop at our end of the camp for once, to settle down among the crabs and listen to my old friend spin her fabulous philosophy and her tales of brave Ulyssia, which is what Ging calls Amelia Earhart—our possible neighbor in this archipelago; or else to wander off hand in hand with I, Mary-Ann, to go look at the mountains for a while. But a yell comes from the men, and h
e trots on. Without knowing why, although God knows I am used to that by now, I sometimes blink to stop myself from picturing a tiny Stars and Stripes in his fist; and have to blink auditorily as well, since I could swear that I’ve just heard him call, in piping French, “Oui, Papa, j’arrive.”
When night comes and the sky unveils its stars, and our two campfires wink in the dark like the widely spaced headlights of a gigantic, stationary car, I don’t know or care what the men talk about at their end. But every so often, Ging and I will reminisce about the old days, and try to unriddle the nature of what, taking my cue from her, I have begun to call our century—the one whose refuge, incarnation or both my friend believes we were. On occasion, tottering vaguely over to our campfire from the one she normally prefers, either although or because they pay her scant attention there, the old dame with the empty spaces in her eyes that youth and then morphine once filled in will let drop some cryptic, addled, sad remarks, apparently unsure of what if anything they mean, but always about something she lost; sometimes it’s a manuscript, and sometimes a bouquet.
Once she’s gone away again, and I, Mary-Ann, stare at the embers I’ll have to kick out in a minute, I wonder if any of us—even Ginger—ever understood what it was all about before we washed up here. As I think back on it, what I come back to most is how often we were dimly surrounded by all sorts of people struggling for more of one or another kind of freedom, using strange or nonexistent weapons and sometimes not even able to name a goal that would have frightened them if they had. But even when they couldn’t name it, they insisted on defining its meaning for themselves; and maybe they have named it now, too.