Things Will Never Be the Same

by Howard Waldrop

  Well, the second I heard “Calling Your Name” I knew that was the one for me.

  I wrote it July 10-12, 2002, which means I was still living in Oso, WA, getting ready to move back to TX that September.

  I got of course a nice acceptance letter back in which she said that “Calling Your Name” was what she thought of as her first “grown-up” song. (She was probably sixteen when she wrote it, the little dickens.)

  Well by and by the book goes into production; by and by we get proofs which I send off expeditiously, by and by the great-looking doorstop of an anthology comes out and:

  The page-proof corrections I’d made hadn’t been done—the story was so goobered up parts of it didn’t make sense. I let out a scream and fired off letters.

  I got abject apologies from Janis, from Mike, and from Marty Greenberg (who’d done—silently—what we in the writing biz call “the donkey work”—getting permissions, making things happen, keeping everybody happy and on schedule etc.). In fact, from everyone but the publisher, who pretended nothing was wrong. Everybody else’s stories were just fine, and all their corrections had been made.

  The fact that the story as printed didn’t make much sense didn’t keep people from recommending it for a Nebula etc., etc.

  After the story came out, it was picked up by two Bests of the Year (the editors could see through the fog of wrong words that a story was there, and they got the correct text to set copy from, so what appeared in their books was what should have been there in the initial printing.)

  Anyway none of this was Janis or Mike or Marty’s fault.

  Later—much later—someone brought to my attention that I might have been unduly influenced by The Simpsons’ episode where Homer tried to fix the toaster and ends up time-travelling and into alternate worlds (a brilliant episode—50 SF tropes in 7 1/2 minutes.)

  Well, no: I hadn’t thought about that at all. What I was trying to write was an alternate-world story in which the alternity was personal; most aren’t; they’re cultural, political or military.

  How does a sixteen year old girl’s song about longing and blame become an old guy’s cry of existential pain? It’s just part of the wonder of this thing called SF, folks. Thanks, Ms. Ian.

  THE KING OF WHERE-I-GO

  When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.

  It wasn’t my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight. . . .

  We were at my paternal grandparent’s house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial day and picked up on July 4th, or taken the 4th and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.

  This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three whole months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. A few years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks, and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day laborer apartments a half-mile away.

  Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ Store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.

  But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.

  Every two weeks we would get in our aunt’s purple Kaiser and she would drive us the 45 miles to our maternal grandparent’s farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they’d come and get us after two weeks, and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.

  We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparent’s place. It was after the 4th of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather’s lower field where they’d had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.

  There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparent’s house that divided the lawn in two. The house then was three miles out of town; sometime in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town, and the town made a land-grab.

  On the left side of the lawn we’d set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off.)

  My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years. (For those not raised in the South; in older homes the bedroom was also the front parlor—there was a stove, chairs for entertaining, and the beds in the main room of the house.) The bed my grandmother lay on was next to the front window.

  My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I’d have to come back to the house. Breakfast—made always by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I’d come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I’m sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.

  But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.

  “Hey! You can’t do that!” I yelled at my sister.

  “Do what?” she yelled back.

  “Whatever you just did!” I said.

  “I didn’t do anything!” she yelled.

  “You children please be quiet” yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.

  “You cheated!” I yelled at my sister.

  “I did not!” she hollered back.

  One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet, about as hard as a 6-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball and threw it as hard as I could into my sister’s right kneecap. She went down screaming.

  My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her house-coat.

  “I asked you children to be quiet, please,” she said.

  “You shut up!” said my sister, holding her knee and crying.

  My forehead had swelled up the size of an apple.

  My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the 4-minute mile. Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister’s right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.

  So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm “Don’t-you-ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!”

  She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.

  I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my gr
andmother to shut up.

  I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.

  That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.

  Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.

  My Aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been President through four terms later, through the Depression the grownups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He’d died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the President had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do, and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister’s life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.

  You can’t imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all—rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn’t breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo-and-hyperbaric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn’t set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.

  If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn’t look anywhere else.

  Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn’t want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored school kids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.

  Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn’t hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They’d even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up, again because of polio.)

  Me, I had fishing and I didn’t care. Let the town wimps stew in their own juices.

  But that was all before my sister made Polio up close and personal in the family, and brought back memories to my aunt.

  But Aunt Noni became a ball of fire.

  I couldn’t go into the hospital to see my sister, of course—even though I had been right there when she started getting sick. Kids could absolutely not come down to the polio ward. This was just a small county hospital with about 40 beds, but it also had a polio ward with two iron lungs ready to go, such was the fear in those days.

  My aunt took me to the hospital one day, anyway. She had had a big picture-frame mirror with her, from her house.

  “She’s propped up on pillows and can’t move much,” my aunt said. “But I think we can get her to see you.”

  “Stay out here in the parking lot, and watch that window,” she said. She pointed to one of the half-windows in the basement. I stayed out there until I saw my aunt waving in the window. I waved back.

  Then my aunt came out and asked “Did you see her?”

  “I saw you.”

  “She saw you,” she said. “It made her happy.” Yeah, I thought, the guy who kneecapped her with the croquet ball.

  “I don’t know why,” I said.

  Then my aunt gave me some of my weekly allowance that my parents mailed to her in installments.

  I took off to the drugstore like a bullet. I bought a cherry-lime-chocolate coke at the fountain, and a Monster of Frankenstein, a Plastic Man and an Uncle Scrooge comic book. That took care of 40 of my 50¢. A whole dime, and nowhere to spend it. If it would have been open, and this had been a Saturday, when we usually got our allowance, I would have used the dime to go to the movies and seen 8 cartoons, a Three Stooges short, a newsreel, a chapter of a serial, some previews and a double feature; some SF flick and a Guy Madison movie if I were lucky; a couple of Westerns if I weren’t.

  But it was a weekday and I went back to the office where my aunt Noni was the Jill-of-all-trades plus secretary for a one-man business for 47 years, it turned out. It was upstairs next to the bank. Her boss, Mr. Jacks, lived in the biggest new house in town (until, much later, the new doctor in town built a house out on the highway modeled on Elvis’s Graceland.) Mr. Jacks’ house, as fate would have it, was situated on a lot touching my aunt’s, only set one house over, and facing the other street back.

  He wasn’t in; he usually wasn’t in the office when I was there. Aunt Noni was typing like a bunny, a real blur from the wrists down. She was the only one in the family who’d been to college. (Much later I would futz around in one for five years without graduating.) She could read, write and speak Latin, like I later could. She read books. She had the librarian at the Carnegie Library in town send off to Montgomery for books on polio; they’d arrived while I was having the Coca-cola comic book orgy and she’d gone to get them when the librarian had called her. There was a pile on the third chair in the office.

  I was sitting in the second one.

  “I want to know,” she said as she typed without looking at her shorthand pad or the typewriter, “enough so that I’ll know if someone is steering me wrong on something. I don’t want to know enough to become pedantic—”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  She nodded toward the big dictionary on the stand by the door.

  I dutifully got up and went to it.

  “P-?”

  “P-E-D-A,” said my aunt, still typing.

  I looked it up. “Hmmm,” I said. “Okay.” Then I sat back down.

  “They’re talking like she won’t walk again without braces or crutches. That’s what they told my friend Frances in 19 and 21,” she said. “You see her motorboatin’ all around town now. She only limps a little when she gets really tired and worn out.”

  Frances worked down at the dress shop. She looked fine except her right leg was a little thinner than her left.

  “My aim is to have your sister walking again by herself by next summer.”

  “Will it happen?”

  “If I have anything to do with it, it will,” said Aunt Noni.

  I never felt so glum about the future as I did sitting there in my aunt’s sunny office that July afternoon. What if she were wrong? What if my sister Ethel never walked again? What would her life be like? Who the hell would I play croquet with, in Alabama in the summer, if not her, when I wasn’t fishing?

  Of course, a year later, the Salk vaccine was developed and tried out and started the end of polio. And a couple of years after that came the Sabin oral vaccine, which they gave to you on sugar cubes, and which tasted like your grandfather’s old hunting socks smelled, which really ended the disease.

  We didn’t know any of that then. And the future didn’t help my sister any right then.

  My parents had of course taken off work and driven from Texas at the end of the first week; there were many family conferences to which the me part of the family was not privy. My parents of course went to see her and stayed at the hospital.

  What was decided was that my sister was to remain in Alabama with my grandparents for the next year, and that I was to return to my dead hometown in Texas with my parents and somegoddam
nhow survive the rest of the summer there.

  My sister Ethel would be enrolled in school in Alabama, providing she was strong enough to do the schoolwork. So I fished the Big Pond and the Little Pond one last time, til it was too dark to see and the bass lost interest in anything in the tackle box and I went over the low hill to my grandparents’ house, robbed of a summer.

  Next morning we got the car packed, ready to return to Texas, a 14 hour drive in a flathead 6 1952 Ford. Then we stopped by the hospital. Aunt Noni was already there, her purple Kaiser parked by the front door. My parents went in; after awhile Aunt Noni waved at the window, then I saw a blur in the mirror and a shape and I waved and waved and jumped up and down with an enthusiasm I did not feel. Then I got in the car and we went back to Texas

  Somehow, I did live through that summer.

  One of the things that got me through it was the letters my aunt took down from my sister and typed up. The first couple were about the hospital, til they let her go, and then about what she could see from the back room of my grandparents’ house.

  We’d usually only gone to Alabama for the summer, and sometimes, rushed trips at Christmas, where we were in the car 14 hours (those days the Interstate Highway System was just a gleam in Ike’s eye—so he could fight a two-front war and not be caught short moving stuff from one coast to the other like they had in the Korean War when he was running Columbia University in NYC)—then we stayed at one grandparents’ place Christmas Eve and one Christmas morning and then drove 14 hours back home just in time for my parents to go to work the day after Christmas.

  So I’d never seen Alabama in the fall or the spring. My sister described the slow change from summer to fall there after school started (in Texas it was summer til early October, and you had the leaves finish falling off the trees the third week of December and new buds coming out the second week of January.) She wrote of the geese she heard going over on the Mississippi flyway.