World's Fair

by E. L. Doctorow

  I rang the bell and Meg opened the door. She stood there smiling. She wore a white dress and white shoes newly polished and a blue-ribbon bow in her hair. Behind her, Norma in a flowered dress was putting on her hat while looking at herself in the mirror. She stood tugging at it until she found the right angle. It was one of those hats with a wide brim that throw shade on the face. As I stepped in the door and Meg closed it behind me, their phone rang and Norma answered. “Oh, hello,” she said, “this is she.” Norma threw a glance in my direction, and I realized that my mother, not to be deterred, was on the other end of the line. “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Norma said, and smiled at me. “We love having him, he’s a joy to be with.” She paused. “Well, fairly late, I should think. Yes. Right to the door. Of course.” She listened some more. “No, I quite understand,” she said, “I would make sure too. It does get a bit cool in the evening. I see he has his sweater with him. That should do him fine, I think.”

  My mother went on for a while and Norma sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette as she held the phone cradled in her shoulder. She blew smoke and looked at me through the smoke. I was embarrassed about this but didn’t know what to say. When Norma hung up she said, “Your mother likes you a lot, Edgar.” I agreed. “But why would anyone like a monkey face like you?” Norma said, and we all laughed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Even from the elevated station I could see the famous Trylon and Perisphere. They were enormous. They were white in the sun, white spire, white globe, they went together, they belonged together as some sort of partnership in my head. I didn’t know what they stood for, it was all very vague in my mind, but to see them, after having seen pictures and posters and buttons of them for so long, made me incredibly happy. I felt like jumping up and down, I felt myself trembling with joy.

  I thought of them as friends of mine.

  We came down the stairs right into the fairgrounds. Banners flew from the pavilions. The wide streets were painted red, yellow and blue. They were absolutely clean. The buildings were mostly streamlined, with rounded edges, as I supposed buildings of the future should be. We walked on Rainbow Avenue. The day was fine. Thousands of people were here. They smiled and chatted and pointed things out and consulted their guidebooks. We walked along Constitution Mall. Brilliant tulip gardens were in bloom. The Fair had its own buses. It had its own tractor trains, and Norma decided we should have a ride. An orange-and-blue electric-powered tractor pulled a dozen rubber-wheeled cars behind it, and when the driver blew his horn it played the opening measures of “The Sidewalks of New York”: “East side, west side, all around the town.” Norma wanted us just to look around and get our bearings. We sat on the last car of the train, so that it whipped around a bit at the corners. Of course it was very tame, nothing like the roller coaster we could see in the distance in the amusement area; it had to go slow because it moved among great crowds of strolling people. Everywhere people walked in family groups and stopped to take their pictures in front of exhibit buildings. There were lady guides in grey uniform jackets and hats. The shuffle of feet was like a constant whispering in my ears, or what I imagined a herd of antelope would sound like going in great numbers slowly through high grass. We went around Commerce Circle and through the Plaza of Light and right around the Trylon and Perisphere, which, up close, seemed to fill the sky. The pictures of them hadn’t suggested their enormity. They were the only white objects to be seen. They were dazzling. They seemed to be about to take off, they looked lighter than air. A ramp connected them, and I could see a line of people silhouetted against the blue sky. We passed the statue of George Washington. I had my map, which I consulted. But with Norma it wasn’t really necessary. She knew everything. “Let’s make our plans,” she said. She had been so happy to have me with them that she’d arranged to join the fun. “I don’t have to go to work yet, so I thought we’d start with a little education. I thought we’d look, for instance, at the interesting foreign pavilions like Iceland or Rumania.” My heart sank. Meg said, “Norma, stop your kidding!” and I looked up and saw Norma laughing and realized she was funny for a mother, and she knew what children liked and what they hated. I laughed too.

  We rode across the Bridge of Wheels and got out, of course, at the General Motors Building. That was everyone’s first stop. We took our places on a long line that went up a ramp and turned a corner and up another, alongside this great streamlined building of rounded corners and windowless walls. It reminded me of the kind of structure I would make by turning over a pail of wet sand at the beach and pounding the bottom of the pail and lifting it off the sand mold. The General Motors exhibit was the most popular in the whole Fair, and so I didn’t mind the long wait we had, practically an hour. We inched along. Meg held my hand, and Norma just behind us smoked her cigarettes and fanned herself with her hat. We were quiet. In the momentousness everyone was quiet. It was the quiet World of Tomorrow, everyone all dressed up.

  Finally we got inside. My stomach tightened and my heart beat as we prepared for the exhibit. We ran and took seats, each of us in a chair with high sides and loudspeakers built into them, they faced the same direction and were on a track. The lights went down. Music played and the chairs lurched and began to move sideways. In front of us a whole world lit up, as if we were flying over it, the most fantastic sight I had ever seen, an entire city of the future, with skyscrapers and fourteen-lane highways, real little cars moving on them at different speeds, the center lanes for the higher speeds, the lanes on the edge for the lower. Cars were regulated by radio control, the drivers didn’t even do the driving! This miniature world demonstrated how everything was planned, people lived in these modern streamlined curvilinear buildings, each of them accommodating the population of a small town and holding all the things, schools, food stores, laundries, movies and so on, that they might need, and they wouldn’t even have to go outside, just as if 174th Street and all the neighborhood around were packed into one giant building. And we passed bridges and streams, and electrified farms and airports that brought up airliners on elevators from underground hangars. And there were factories with lights and smoke, and lakes and forests and mountains, and it was all real, which is to say, built to scale, the forests had real tiny trees, and the water in the tiny lakes was real, and around it all we went, at different levels, seeing everything in more and more detail, thousands of tiny cars zipping right along on their tracks as if carrying their small beings about their business. And out in the countryside were these tiny houses with people sitting in them and reading the paper and listening to the radio. In the cities of the future, pedestrian bridges connected the buildings and highways were sunken on tracks below them. No one would get run over in this futuristic world. It all made sense, people didn’t have to travel except to see the countryside; everything else, their schools, their jobs, were right where they lived. I was very impressed. No matter what I had heard about the Futurama, nothing compared with seeing it for myself: all the small moving parts, all the lights and shadows, the animation, as if I were looking at the largest most complicated toy ever made! In fact this is what I realized and that no one had mentioned to me. It was a toy that any child in the world would want to own. You could play with it forever. The little cars made me think of my toy cars when I was small, the ones I held between my thumb and forefinger, the little coupes and sedans of gunmetal whose wheels spun on axles no thicker than a needle as I drove them along the colored tracks of my plaid carriage blanket. The buildings were models, it was a model world. It was filled with appropriate music, and an announcer was describing all these wonderful things as they went by, these raindrop cars, these air-conditioned cities.

  And then the amazing thing was that at the end you saw a particular model street intersection and the show was over, and with your I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE button in your hand you came out into the sun and you were standing on precisely the corner you had just seen, the future was right where you were standing and what was small had become big, the scale h
ad enlarged and you were no longer looking down at it, but standing in it, on this corner of the future, right here in the World’s Fair!

  That dazzled me. Perhaps it might only have been the sudden passage from darkness to daylight, but I actually wobbled on my feet. I had the feeling that I too had changed size, and it only lasted a moment but it was quite strange. It alerted me to the sizes of everything at the Fair. Norma took us to the Railroads Building. We sat in an auditorium facing a stage with a scenic diorama of O-gage trains and locomotives rolling through hills and valleys and over rivers and through cities. So we were big again. A model freight train would disappear around a bend just as a model passenger train came over a bridge. An announcer told us they had laid the tracks for this exhibit on seventy thousand tiny railway ties that were fastened with a quarter of a million tiny spikes. And then outside, in the daylight behind the exhibit hall, was a real railroad yard with ancient steam engines on display, “The General,” the “Daniel Nason,” and the newest most modern locomotive of all, a sleek and monumental monster of dark green whose wheels were taller than a man. So there it was again!

  And then at the Consolidated Edison exhibit, again everything was shrunk—it was a diorama of the entire City of New York, showing the life in the city from morning till night. We could see the whole city and across the Hudson River to Jersey, the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. We could see up in Westchester and Connecticut. I looked for my house in the Bronx, but I couldn’t see it. Norma thought she saw Claremont Park. But below us were the great stone skyscrapers, the cars and buses in the streets, the subways and elevated trains, all of the working metropolis, all of it sparkling with life, and when afternoon came there was even a thunderstorm, and all the lights of the buildings and streets came up to deal with the darkness.

  Everywhere at the World’s Fair the world was reduced to tiny size by the cunning and ingenuity of builders and engineers. And then things loomed up that were larger than they ought to have been. The Public Health Building had an exhibit showing the different parts of the body, each of them depicted many times their real size. An enormous ear, and nose, with their canals and valves and cellular bone marrow exposed—big pink plastic organs, bigger than I was. The eye was so big you walked into it! You walked into this eye, saw through its lens, which changed to make you nearsighted or farsighted. We all grew dizzy with that one. And then an enormous man made of Plexiglas, I suppose, with all his giant internal organs visible, but no visible penis, a mistake in representation about which I said nothing to Meg and Norma, thinking it was not polite.

  And everywhere outside were stone statues of men and women in various poses, wrestling dogs, or bulls, swimming with dolphins, or standing on one foot, or carrying farm tools. They wore stone dresses or stone pants, or they were naked with stone breasts and backsides. You could see the muscles in their legs or arms, you could see their ribs and spinal columns of stone. They stood or lay about in pools or atop pylons or rose up from shrubbery. Some of them were pressed into the sides of buildings, so only the front halves of them showed, sculptures of concrete pressed in like sand molds. The same kinds of expressionless people were painted on the sides of buildings, enormous murals of them holding beakers of chemicals or blueprints in their hands. They looked like no one I knew, parts of them were immense, other parts were small. They intermingled, so you didn’t know which arms belonged to which bodies. I was made light-headed by the looming and shrinking size of things.

  We wanted to go everywhere, do everything. “Whoa, whoa, hold your horses,” Norma said. We were getting wild. She took us to a dairy counter and we sat down and had egg salad sandwiches on white bread and malted milks, an excellent lunch. We sat at a little metal table under an umbrella and ate and drank while Norma leaned on an elbow and smoked a cigarette and watched us. She had bought a buttermilk for herself. When we had finished, she leaned forward and gently wiped with a paper napkin the malted milk around Meg’s mouth, who lifted her chin and closed her eyes while this was done.

  Then we were off again. It was late afternoon. We saw a rotating platform on which real cows were milked by electric pumps. The cows stared at us as they turned past. They were like the cows on that farm in Connecticut. That they had to be milked by machines while they were rotated I did not question. I thought this was a new discovery; perhaps it kept the cream from rising. We saw in the General Electric Building hall an artificial lightning generator. This was truly fearsome. Bolts of lightning shot thirty feet through the air. Meg screamed and people around us laughed. You could smell the air burn, the thunder was deafening. This was part of the exhibit showing General Electric Appliances for the home. There was so much to see and do. We watched Coca-Cola being bottled and Philadelphia Cream Cheeses wrapped and we saw France and Spain and Belgium. In the Radio Corporation of America Building, which was shaped like a radio vacuum tube, we saw a demonstration of wireless telegraphy saving a ship at sea, and a new invention, picture radio, or television, in which there were reflected on mirrors tilted over a receiver actual pictures of people talking into microphones at the very moment they were talking from somewhere else in the city, not the World’s Fair.

  We were tired now and stopped to rest on a bench, and to watch the people walk by. All you had to do was turn around and wherever you were you could see the Trylon and Perisphere.

  “OK, kids,” Norma said, “now I’ve got to go to work. I have it all planned out. If you’re going to make it through this evening, you’ve got to rest awhile.”

  She took us on another tractor train to the section of the Fair where she worked. The Amusement Zone. This was very familiar to me. It looked like the boardwalk at Rockaway, with the same penny arcades and shooting galleries and scales to stand on while the concessionaire guessed your weight. But there were big rides too and showplaces like Gay New Orleans and Forbidden Tibet. Meg tugged my arm. “Look, Edgar!” We were going past what I had thought was only another building. But on the roof was a truly amazing sight, a gigantic red revolving National Cash Register, seven stories high. It showed the day’s Fair attendance as if it were ringing up sales. Clouds floated peacefully behind it.

  Norma’s place of work was a wooden theater building with a platform and a barker’s lectern in front. The doors were still closed. It was some sort of nautical show. An underwater scene with an octopus was painted on a curtain. Nothing was going on. Behind this building, in a little backyard with a broken-down fence, with towels and women’s underwear hanging on a clothesline, was a canvas tent. The flaps were down. Norma found us deck chairs and told us to rest. When she raised the flaps and went into the tent, I saw women sitting at dressing tables.

  The afternoon was turning dark now, a chill was in the air here in the shade behind the wooden building. I put on my sweater. Meg sat in her chair all asprawl with her legs hanging over the sides. She looked at me as her eyes glazed over. These chairs were old. The colored stripes were faded. Even two light children sank back into the old canvas—I saw the outline of Meg’s back in her chair, the weight and roundness of her in the chair sling. It was very quiet here behind the World’s Fair. I heard the murmur of voices but couldn’t hear the actual words said. I heard a woman’s laughter. I heard calliope music—a circus march that I recognized and that at any other time would have made my heart pound with excitement. I closed my eyes.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Norma’s job was to wrestle with Oscar the Amorous Octopus in a tank of water. First she stood outside with five or six other women on the platform stage in front of the building. The women wore bathing suits and high-heeled shoes and stood up there while a barker, in a straw hat and holding a cane, told the people who had gathered what they would see inside. Norma looked down and smiled at us. Her bathing cap was turned up on the back of her head. Her one-piece woolen bathing suit was dark blue.

  When the doors were opened we pushed inside and got right in front of the glass tank; it was like a small swimming pool made of glass. People pushed b
ehind us. Inside the tank, on the floor, was an octopus. I could tell immediately it was not real. First of all, I had read that octopuses were smaller than people generally believed, their heads were not much bigger than grapefruits; their tentacles were seldom more than a few feet long. This was a rubber model, with a head the size of a sack of potatoes; the tentacles rippled along the floor of the tank in a kind of mechanical way. The eyes ogled us, and the creature moved to the glass and pressed against it as if it wanted to get at us. The audience laughed. He had eight tentacles, and they swished around in more or less independent searching patterns. Occasionally one of the tentacles curled back and touched his mouth, as if he had found something to eat and was eating it, the way an elephant will bring its trunk to its mouth. But it was always the same one. I didn’t believe the octopus was real. The little suckers at the end of each tentacle looked molded. The whole thing was the amber color of a rubber nipple.

  We could see the women now. They were kneeling at the back edge of the tank on a kind of deck or standing with their hands on their knees and peering in. They were in shadow. The light was in the water where Oscar was. He lifted that one tentacle and curled it back toward himself, like someone saying “Come here” with his index finger. The crowd appreciated this. Then music began, an electric organ playing “The Blue Danube Waltz,” and Oscar began to sway in time to the music. One of the women dove in smartly and rose up past the tank window and looped over herself neatly and touched Oscar on the top of his head and then hoisted herself out of the tank. Another dropped in and Oscar grabbed for her, but she eluded him and swam past us, smiling with her eyes open, even though she was underwater, kicking her legs right past us, and she too climbed out of the tank just before the octopus almost grabbed her foot. They were all playing a game with him. Norma dove into the tank now, she dove well. She did the bravest thing of all, she actually allowed Oscar to put his tentacles in her hands and they did an underwater dance together, swaying in time with the music, an underwater ballet, although Oscar looked out at us while he danced and one tentacle came up behind Norma and attached itself to her backside while he ogled at the audience, rolling his eyes, and his mouth curled back in a kind of leer. The audience laughed.