Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  “So what’s wrong, Garber?”

  “I keep telling you, I don’t know!” He frowned again, then shook his head vigorously from side to side like some mangy, whitened bear, and smiled. It’s Garber’s favorite trick for erasing trouble, for reorienting himself to some inner, serene world. The anxieties just shake out of his ears or something, and poof! they’re gone. It’s what he did when the doctors told him about the cancer; it’s what he does after each virotherapy session; it’s what he did after he told me all those years ago that he was divorcing my mother. Shake, shake. God, I envy him.

  “Have dinner with me, Mary. I’ll take you to Cellini’s.”

  “I can’t, Garber. Susan’ll be home.”

  “I thought Tuesday she had Star Scouts.”

  “She quit. ‘Too babyish.’”

  “Then bring her along. She’ll like Cellini’s.”

  I was tempted. Discreet service, good wine, the illusion of space and leisure in the midst of New York’s steel caves. Cellini’s incomparable beef Wellington. The relaxed luxury of inconsequential shop talk away from the pressing decisions of an actual shop. Garber was wonderful at that; in the pampered atmosphere of a good restaurant he seemed to expand and glow, like the rosy potbellied candles on each table, into a genial incandescence that shone benignly on all. The quality of mercy.

  But Susan would object when Garber and I talked shop; I would object when she insisted on having a cocktail; Garber would object, with genuine if genial distress, that Susan and I were battling yet again. He would remind us how well we used to get along when Susan was a baby. Susan would say that she was not a baby and would thank everyone to remember that. I would reply, with some heat, that Garber hadn’t said she was, and Garber would look from Susan to me and back again with pained, puzzled incomprehension and ask Susan how her teacher was. Then we’d listen for forty minutes to the wonders of the handsome Mr. Blake, who understood young women perfectly even if he didn’t try to publish babyish books for them.

  “I can’t, Garber. Really.”

  “Well, next week then. We’ll do it next week.”

  “Love to.”

  “Anyway, you promised to read Greta tonight.”

  Damn.

  “You will read it, Mary?”

  “I’ll read it.”

  He kissed me good-bye, giving me one of those measuring glances that always seem out of character. I just missed the subway. While I was waiting for the next one, a thin anemic-looking kid pushed another one of the poison-green leaflets into my hand. C-AUD: A DEAD END FOR HUMANITY. I tore it into little pieces, threw it on the subway tracks, and got slapped with a fine for malicious littering.

  ~ * ~

  “I got a D,” Susan announced over the spaghetti. She widened her eyes at me and held her fork upright, like a spear. “Ms. Lugo gave me a D.”

  “Ms. Lugo? What happened to Mr. Blake?”

  Susan rolled her eyes heavenward. “I told you, he’s been out because his mother died. Ms. Lugo is the sub. And she gave me a D on my family-tree assignment!”

  “Why?”

  “You should know! It’s your fault!”

  “My fault?”

  “You know it is. And when Mr. Blake comes back on Friday, he’ll see that D and ask me about it, and I just can’t bear it!”

  I twirled spaghetti on my fork with great, calm deliberation.

  “And just how is this D my fault, Susan?”

  “We’re suppose to have all this oral history to go with the family tree we had to do. I told you. And all I had to put on my cassette was those things you told me about Grandpa Garber, because you were so busy writing or whatever that you wouldn’t hardly even talk to me. So Ms. Lugo marked “skimpy content” and “lack of effort” on the checklist and gave me a D.”

  “Honey, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing!”

  “Don’t call me ‘honey’! I hate it when you call me ‘honey’!”

  Twice in one day. I put down my fork and forced myself to speak calmly to the hysterical, overgrown prosecutor sitting in my daughter’s chair. J’accuse.

  “Susan, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing. It wasn’t that at all. It was because ...” Because what? Because the family tree I gave her was Garber’s, and I don’t know any more about it. Because I don’t know what her father, that anonymous donor of sperm, might have had for his oral history. Because I don’t want to give her mine, don’t want her to look at herself as the cast-off granddaughter of a rich bitch whose notorious cruelties revolted even the mostly unrevoltable set that spawned her. Because I don’t want Susan to look at me in the lurid and violent light that any recitation of my own childhood would have to, in Susan’s eyes, set me in now and forever, world without end.

  “Because of what?” Susan demanded. “Because of what didn’t you tell me more for the project?”

  I couldn’t answer her.

  Two large tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. She jumped up, dashed them away, and screamed at me across the spaghetti. “You don’t have a reason! You know you don’t! You just don’t care if I get a D on my project, you just don’t have time to talk to me about it, you just have time to lock yourself in your room and scribble your own things! You don’t understand me at all!”

  She ran from the room. A second later I heard the door slam, catch on something in the way, then slam again, this time successfully enough to shake the pictures on the wall. Victoria Falls shuddered and slid to the floor.

  I pushed away the plate of congealing spaghetti. All right, I told myself again, it’s just normal preadolescent mother-daughter wangling. Her body’s under a lot of stress, it’s changing too fast, this is all normal, the tears, the lightning highs and lows—all would pass. I understood. Didn’t I? I did. I had been that age once; I knew what it felt like to be Susan with her “D” or Nellie Kay Armbruster with her fashion braids; I knew what—

  No. I didn’t know what it felt like. Not from where Susan was standing. I only knew what it had looked like from where I had been, such a vastly different and splintered place that I’d been an emotional mutant, adapted to fit an alien landscape, and thus alone. I couldn’t reach my daughter that way, through the tunnel of a common experience. There wasn’t one. My childhood was useless for that.

  But I could do something else with that childhood, and had been doing it, for months now. I could transform the whole abusive nightmare into something that made sense, perhaps even beauty. Dickens had done it for his childhood of grinding poverty, in Oliver Twist. Rashi had done it for hers, in Gremlin. If the private past could be transcended, transformed into the public vision . . .

  I left the spaghetti on the table. I left the unread copy of Greta on the floor, next to Victoria Falls. I left the fine for malicious littering of the poison-green pamphlet in my coat pocket. I left Garber’s mysterious worry about Jameson’s mysterious worry, and Susan’s worry about her D, and my worry about Susan, and I went into my bedroom and scribbled some more on the secret manuscript I had been scribbling on every night. The manuscript that I knew would make it all hang together, turn it all into some kind of integrated sense, make it all worthwhile.

  I wrote until I fell asleep, sometime after two, still slumped at my desk. When I woke a few hours later, the light cube had burned out. My shoulders and arms felt stiff, circulation had stopped in one leg, and my mouth tasted foul. It was nearly dawn. In the half-light from the window my writing lay lightly on the crumpled pages, a lacy pattern of dim shadows.

  ~ * ~

  AND SO LITTLE AGNES CAME HOME AGAIN, MUCH THE WISER FOR HER ADVENTURE. AND HER MOTHER MET HER AT THE DOOR, AND HER LOVING BROTHERS, AND, BEST OF ALL, TAGS. HE BARKED AND ROMPED, AND LITTLE AGNES KNEW SHE COULD NEVER, EVER LEAVE HIM AGAIN!

  I stared at the monitor screen in disbelief. Alpha waves— four of the individual curves showed alpha waves! Leaning around the edge of the computer, I searched for the four kids. All of them had their eyes closed. Kids still staring at their scr
eens were slumped in their seats, and a slump is hard to do when your head is held immobile. The evoked potentials were low and monotonous, the acid curves flat, the subliminal stimuli not even registering. Only the evals showed activity, a high curve that didn’t need my training to be interpreted: they hated it.

  At the master console the proud author typed the last period and beamed through her bifocals.

  Garber, I thought. Let Garber handle it. Garber would tell her better than I.

  I released the helmets and the kids scrambled out gratefully. The author bustled up, patting lavender curls squashed by a net so carefully arranged that I fought a sudden urge to play tic-tac-toe in its symmetrical squares.

  “Well, it went splendidly, didn’t it, my dear? Just splendidly. My, I find a c-aud studio so interesting!”

  I stared at the printout as if it were the Rosetta stone, and hoped she couldn’t read graphs.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead to Mr. Garber’s office, Ms. Tidwell, and I’ll be along as soon as I sort these out.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind waiting for you, dear. Not at all.”

  “Well, it’s just that it might take a while.”

  She laughed brightly, a kind of chuckle around big horse teeth. “Oh, I guess I can wait, all right. I’ve waited twenty-two years, you know. That’s how long I’ve been working on Little Agnes’ Adventure. On and off, of course. You can’t rush inspiration, you know—what’s that, dear?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . cleared my throat.”

  “Would you like a cough drop? No? You have to take care of yourself, dear, a young woman like you. I learned that, I should hope, in all my years of teaching—did I tell you I was a schoolteacher, dear? Retired, now, as of last year. Taught forty-four years. And then I said to myself, I said, Ida Tidwell, if you’re ever going to take that book and publish it, now’s the time. So I just pulled my savings out of the bank—you sure you don’t want a cough drop? That does sound bad!”

  “No ... no.”

  “Well, you know best, of course. So I just pulled my savings out and came to Mr. Garber with my manuscript, and here I am, a real live author! My, I can’t wait to see Little Agnes in print.”

  Garber. Yes. Let Garber do it.

  “Can I help you roll those up, dear?”

  “No. No, thank you. Ms. Tidwell, may I ask you something?”

  “Certainly, dear. About Agnes? Was some part not clear?”

  “Not about Agnes. Ms. Tidwell, what was it all those years?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What did you teach? Was it English?”

  “Oh, my, no, dear!”

  “Not literature?”

  “I taught algebra.”

  I smiled gratitude on behalf of forty-four years of literature classes. “Tell you what, Ms. Tidwell, I know you must be tired from this long session. If you’ll just run along”—oh hell, I never say things like “just run along”—”to Mr. Garber’s office . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t mind waiting, dear.” She smiled at me with baby-blue eyes, serene and flat as an empty sky. “This is all so very exciting for me. It’s always been my dream, you know, to write a book. And I knew I could do it. I knew it would make everything all worthwhile.”

  “What?”

  “What . . . why, dear, what’s the matter?”

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said I knew the book would make it all worthwhile. All those years of teaching algebra. Why, dear, you look so—”

  “I’ve finished here. Let’s see Mr. Garber now, shall we?”

  I ushered her into Garber’s office, put the printouts on his desk, and pleaded my bladder. When I returned from the toilet, twenty-five minutes later, she was gone, but the office still held the unmistakable feel of disaster. There’s a theory that any monitor’s repeated experiences of seeing brain waves related to graphic interpretation leads to a slight rise in natural sensing of electromagnetic auras. Nobody’s ever proved it. But Garber’s office was soggy with ineffectual disillusionment, wadding up the air like damp tissues.

  “Was it very bad?”

  “If you’d stayed, you’d know.”

  “I’m sorry, Garber, really I am. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  He swept the rolls of printout off the side of his desk and toward the wastebasket. They missed.

  “Garber, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but about her contract . . . her life savings—”

  “I already refunded it.”

  I walked over and kissed him. “I should have known you would. Then there’s no real harm done, is there? She’ll get over it. Don’t look like that—people have to learn every day that they don’t have talents they’d hoped for.”

  He looked at me with a sudden intensity.

  “After all,” I said, too loudly, “the city is swarming with would-be writers, everyone knows that. Scratch a schoolteacher and you find a c-aud applicant, right?”

  “Right,” Garber said. “Yes. Well.” He reached for my hand and began playing with the fingers, crossing and uncrossing them. A silence stretched itself too long, then went on even longer.

  “Mary ...”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what were you going to say?”

  “Nothing.” With the hearty air of a man skillfully changing the subject, he added, “Hey—did you look out the window yet? Look down there. They’ve been at it all morning.”

  Ten stories below, pickets marched. I could just make out the block lettering on the poison-green signs.

  C-AUD ARTIST FRAUD

  GIVE BOOKS BACK TO HUMANS!

  CHILDREN DESERVE MORE THAN MECHANICAL MINDS

  “They had a bunch of children marching with them earlier,” Garber said. “Tots of about six or seven.”

  “Are they all nonviolent?”

  “So far.”

  I shrugged. “Then let them march. What does it matter?”

  Garber swiveled his chair back toward his desk and said, as though it were an answer, “Jameson videoed me this morning.”

  “He called you?” G-M Press is definitely not accustomed to getting videos from famous critics.

  “He’s sending me a manuscript to read.”

  I sat on Garber’s desk. “What kind of manuscript?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. But he made me promise to drop everything else and read it instantly. He looked disturbed, rumpled, and upset, but in an odd sort of way.”

  “What sort of odd sort of way?”

  “Like a journalist with an exclusive on the Titanic. Mary, what do you think art is for?”

  I blinked. Abstractions are not Garber’s style. No one at G-M Press asks what art is for, unless he’s being high-camp humorous; Garber was not. It was a question I hadn’t even heard spoken aloud since lecture classes at college. Garber was looking at me with the rumpled half embarrassment of a man who knows he’s just said something faintly impractical and ridiculous, and I looked away and fumbled.

  “Garber, I couldn’t—”

  “No, forget it. Stupid question.” He shook his head from side to side, the old mind-cleaning bounce, and came up smiling.

  “Dinner at Cellini’s?”

  Susan’s oral-history project hung in the air, joining Ida Tidwell’s tears and Garber’s abashed rhetoric.

  “No, you can’t, I know,” Garber said. “But next week? For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  As I left, he went back to the window, watching the picketers with mild geniality. Ms. Tidwell’s printouts unrolled a little more on the carpeted floor.