“I don’t know if I’m strong enough to pull her out, but I’ll come and survey the situation,” said Miss Dunston in that polite way that stewardesses have, though her voice cracked a little from the unremitting fear in her heart. Miss Dunston and I walked briskly back to our front yard, and Miss Dunston got a good look at Marina, who was now partially buried under dirt and rubble. There hadn’t been another tremor — not yet — so this was clearly the doing of Dirk and Debbie. Marina was screaming hysterically, and luckily Miss Dunston hadn’t put two and two together thanks to my younger brother and younger sister wearing their most angelic faces.
“I need to get someone with a rope or pulley or something,” said Miss Dunston with some urgency as she ran off.
I gave Dirk and Debbie a disapproving look and they both shrugged as Muffles the cat, having just pooped in the grass next to our very own front yard crevasse, kicked some dirt and a little something extra into that big hole in the ground.
Ten minutes later Miss Dunston returned with a couple of our neighbors, and the worst babysitter in the history of the universe was rescued.
I didn’t learn the extent of the devastation or the death toll from the quake and the tsunami that followed until later that night. Ahead lay weeks of anguish and hardship as the citizens of Anchorage and Valdez and Kenai and Turnagain by the Sea all mourned their losses while struggling to restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy. (To this day, I can’t stand the smell of Clorox, which we used to disinfect the boiled snow that was for several days our only source of drinking water). It would be a long time before Dirk and Debbie and I would return to our old selves again, but we did relish this one brief moment of fine revenge, while denying every word of Marina’s allegations.
I guess looking back, Marina wasn’t that horrible of a babysitter, and I suppose I feel a little guilty now, in my later years, over what Dirk and Debbie and I did to her. It wasn’t her fault that she got scared and ran out of our house. I didn’t know this at the time, but everything frightened Marina. And it got much worse as she got older. Before giving birth to her first baby in 1971, she was so traumatized by the idea of it that she ran out of the delivery room and even out of the hospital. Her family found her at a McDonald’s eating a Big Mac and trying to ignore her contractions.
Although she didn’t fall into any more holes, she did once almost step into an open manhole in Seattle. She missed it by a few inches. And then she turned to her husband and said, “My life isn’t that ironic.”
And that’s my unironical Alaska earthquake story. Take it or leave it.
1965 MISTRYSTED IN NEW YORK
“Two ad men walk into a bar…”
“Oyster Bar.”
“Right. Okay. Two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station.”
“Grand Central Terminal. Grand Central Station is a post office.”
“What are you, the language police? Two ad men walk into—”
“Two Y & R men.”
“Important point. Y & R.”
“Begging your pardon, what are ‘Y & R’ men?”
“The gentleman to my right wants to know the meaning of Y & R men.”
“Account execs from Young and Rubicam: the crème de la crème of New York City ad agencies.”
“I see. Thank you for the clarification.”
“As I was saying — two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar. And then they walk right out. Why do they walk right out?”
“Because the lights went out. But that’s no punchline. It’s just a fact.”
The two Young and Rubicam ad men, both in their mid-thirties, one named McCluskey and the other Selman, sighed, nearly simultaneously. Next to them, a man in his late sixties or early seventies, with a London Fog coat folded neatly in his lap and an umbrella at his side, sighed as well. His sigh came out as a melodious hum. The two ad men to his left, both well-versed in ethnic stereotyping, failed, nonetheless, to register the cliché: a man with a British accent carrying a London Fog coat and an umbrella. All that was missing was the bowler.
“I say, gentlemen, if the entire city is without power and you have no hopes of taking your commuter lines up to Peekskill and Scarborough — Scarborough, now that has a nice English ring to it, doesn’t it? — may I ask why you have deposited yourselves here upon this most uncomfortable bench, rather than do that which I’ve noticed a number of other young executives doing: attempt to secure livery transportation just outside on 42nd Street?”
“Thanks for the suggestion, Pops,” said the man named Selman, “but my colleague McCluskey and I tried that very thing for almost an hour after getting thrown out of the Oyster Bar. Looks like we’re stuck in Manhattan for the rest of the night with all the rest of you stiffs. So we’ve staked our claim to half of this bench for the duration. As — I notice — you have too.”
“I’m rather in the same boat, it seems. I’ve rung up the friends with whom I’m stopping in Croton-on-Hudson and successfully dissuaded them from trying to motor down into the city tonight to rescue me. I survived the London Blitz. I can certainly survive one night on a wooden bench in Grand Central Terminal. Alas, though, my conscience may force me to relinquish this berth.”
The elderly British gentleman now dropped his voice to a whisper and leaned over to speak confidentially to his circumstantial companions. “I note, as certainly you must as well, a preponderance of stranded, wiltingly bedraggled working girls eyeing this bench with looks of the most heartbreaking longing.”
The dapper old man, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the British actor John Williams (forever typecast as proper butlers and proper police inspectors), was right. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of New York commuters — their faces made flat and garish by the emergency police flood lamps that had been rolled in to light the main concourse — sitting, standing, or milling about. The large knot of those who had earlier stood at the information booth and demanded to know when the trains would start running again (only to be answered with apologies and shrugs) had long broken up. The terminal had since settled into placid communal acceptance of the inevitability of the great Northeast power blackout of November 9, 1965, the largest blackout ever to hit both the United States and Canada.
“You’d be a good ad man yourself,” said Selman to the old man. “How deftly you played that guilt card. McCluskey, we’re going to do the right thing and surrender our half of this bench to the ladies. But now the big question: which ladies? I don’t want to invite a female fistfight here. This isn’t a sale at Ohrbach’s.”
McCluskey chuckled. “Ohrbach’s doesn’t have sales. Get yourself married, Selman, and learn a few things about the female species and its natural habitats. Your housewife-loving clients at General Foods will be especially appreciative.”
McCluskey’s searching gaze caught the eye of a shoeless secretarial type. The young woman was carrying her pumps in one hand and a purse and Macy’s shopping bag in the other. He signaled her with an undisguised “come hither” look while stroking the seat that he was in the process of vacating. The woman’s face radiated gratitude.
“Oh, you are a lifesaver!” she gushed as she sat down. “My feet are absolutely killing me!” She referenced her bag with a nod. “I was right in the middle of Macy’s when the lights went out. I paid for all this, by the way. I didn’t loot it in the dark.”
Selman got the same appreciative reaction when he gave up his spot on the bench to an older woman and little girl. “How do you like my twofer?” he boasted.