“I haven’t eaten like that in a year,” she said, lighting a cigarette and looking into her empty plate. “I’ll probably heave my guts.”
“What have you been eating?”
“Animal crackers.”
“What?”
“Animal crackers.”
“I thought that’s what you said.”
“They’re cheap,” she said. “And they fill you up. They’ve got a lot of nutrients and stuff, too. It says so right on the box.”
“Nutrients my ass. You’re getting zits, girl. You’re too old for those. Come here.”
He led her into the dining room and opened Mary’s china cupboard. He took out a silver serving dish and pulled a thick pile of paper money out of it. Her eyes widened.
“Who’d you off, mister?”
“I offed my insurance policy. Here. Here’s two hundred bucks. Eat on it.”
But she didn’t touch the money. “You’re nuts,” she said. “What do you think I’m going to do to you for two hundred dollars?”
“Nothing.”
She laughed.
“All right.” He put the money on the sideboard and put the silver serving dish back into the cupboard. “If you don’t take it with you in the morning, I’ll flush it down the john.” But he didn’t think he would.
She looked into his face. “You know, I think you would.”
He said nothing.
“We’ll see,” she said. “In the morning.”
“In the morning,” he echoed.
He was watching “To Tell the Truth” on the television. Two of the contestants were lying about being the world’s champion female bronc rider, and one was telling the truth. The panel, which included Soupy Sales, Bill Cullen, Arlene Dahl, and Kitty Carlisle, had to guess which one was telling the truth. Garry Moore, television’s only three-hundred-year-old game show host, smiled and cracked jokes and dinged a bell when each panelist’s time was up.
The girl was looking out the window. “Hey,” she said. “Who lives on this street, anyway? All the houses look dark.”
“Me and the Dankmans,” he said. “And the Dankmans are moving out January fifth.”
“Why?”
“The road,” he said. “Would you like a drink?”
“What do you mean, the road?”
“It’s coming through here,” he said. “This house is going to be somewhere in the middle of the median strip, as near as I can figure.”
“That’s why you showed me the construction?”
“I guess so. I used to work for a laundry about two miles from here. The Blue Ribbon. It’s going through there, too.”
“That’s why you lost your job? Because the laundry was closing?”
“Not exactly. I was supposed to sign an option on a new plant in a suburb called Waterford and I didn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t bear to,” he said simply. “You want a drink?”
“You don’t have to get me drunk,” she said.
“Oh, Christ,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Your mind runs on just one track, doesn’t it?”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“Screwdrivers are about the only drinks I like. Do you have vodka and orange juice?”
“Yes.”
“No pot, I guess.”
“No, I’ve never used it.”
He went out into the kitchen and made her a screwdriver. He mixed himself a Comfort and Seven-Up and took them back into the living room. She was playing with the Space Command gadget, and the TV switched from channel to channel, displaying its seven-thirty wares: “To Tell the Truth,” snow, “What’s My Line,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Gilligan’s Island,” snow, “I Love Lucy,” snow, snow, Julia Child making something with avocados that looked a little like dog whoop, “The New Price Is Right,” snow, and then back to Garry Moore, who was daring the panel to discover which of the three contestants was the real author of a book about what it was like to be lost for a month in the forests of Saskatchewan.
He gave her her drink.
“Did you eat beetles, number two?” Kitty Carlisle asked.
“What’s the matter with you people?” the girl asked. “No ’star Trek.' Are you heathens?”
“They run it at four o’clock on channel eight,” he said.
“Do you watch it?”
“Sometimes. My wife always watches Merv Griffin.”
“I didn’t see any beetles,” number two said. “If I’d seen any, I would have eaten them.” The audience laughed heartily.
“Why did she move out? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” She looked at him warily, as if the price of his confession might be tiresomely high.
“The same reason I got fired off my job,” he said, sitting down.
“Because you didn’t buy that plant?”
“No. Because I didn’t buy a new house.”
“I voted for number two,” Soupy Sales said, “because he looks like he’d eat a beetle if he saw one.” The audience laughed heartily.
“Didn’t… wow. Oh, wow.” She looked at him over her drink without blinking. The expression in her eyes seemed to be a mixture of awe, admiration, and terror. “Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not working?”
“No.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I ride on the turnpike.”
“And watch TV at night?”
“And drink. Sometimes I make popcorn. I’m going to make popcorn later on tonight.”
“I don’t eat popcorn.”
“Then I’ll eat it.”
She punched the off button on the Space Command gadget (he sometimes thought of it as a “module” because today you were encouraged to think of everything that zapped on and off as a module) and the picture on the Zenith twinkled down to a bright dot and then winked out.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “You threw your wife and your job down the drain-”
“But not necessarily in that order.”
“Whatever. You threw them away over this road. Is that right?”
He looked at the blank TV uncomfortably. Even though he rarely followed what was happening on it very closely, it made him uncomfortable to have it off. “I don’t know if it is or not,” he said. “You can’t always understand something just because you did it.”
“Was it a protest?”
“I don’t know. If you’re protesting something, it’s because you think something else would be better. All those people protested the war because they thought peace would be better. People protest drug laws because they think other drug laws would be fairer or more fun or less harm or… I don’t know. Why don’t you turn the TV on?”
“In a minute.” He noticed again how green her eyes were, intent, catlike. “Is it because you hate the road? The technological society it represents? The dehumanizing effect of-”
“No, he said. It was so difficult to be honest, and he wondered why he was even bothering when a lie would end the discussion so much more quickly and neatly. She was like the rest of the kids, like Vinnie, like the people who thought education was truth: she wanted propaganda, complete with charts, not an answer. “I’ve seen them building roads and buildings all my life. I never even thought about it, except it was a pain in the ass to use a detour or have to cross the street because the sidewalk was ripped up or the construction company was using a wrecking ball.”
“But when it hit home… to your house and your job, you said no.”
“I said no all right.” But he wasn’t sure what he had said no to. Or had he said yes? Yes, finally yes to some destructive impulse that had been part of him all along, as much a built in self-destruct mechanism as Charlie’s tumor? He found himself wishing Freddy would come around. Freddy could tell her what she wanted to hear. But Fred had been playing it cool.
“You’re either crazy or really remarkable,” she said.
“People are only remarkable in books,” he said. “Let’s have the TV.”
She turned it on. He let her pick the show.
“What are you drinking?”
It was quarter of nine. He was tipsy, but not as drunk as he would have been by now alone. He was making popcorn in the kitchen. He liked to watch it pop in the tempered glass popper, rising and rising like snow that had sprung up from the ground rather than come down from the sky.