It was sad when people tried to control the future by killing everything they cared about, Alice thought. Still, the future was a dangerous place. That’s what made it the future. But how could you shoot a cockatoo with a rifle? That wasn’t really appropriate. Her poppa must have heard that one wrong.
After supper they turned on the television. The best thing about the set, in Alice’s opinion, was the panther lamp on top of it. The panther had a little chain around its neck that had engrossed Alice for long minutes as a child. She had fiddled and fiddled with that chain. She wondered what she’d been imagining.
“This is a rerun,” her granny announced.
“I haven’t seen it before,” her poppa said.
“You most certainly have.” Her granny tapped the screen. “All these women here, they’ve eaten their mothers’ ashes. That’s what they have in common.”
They were an earnest assemblage, heavy, for the most part, in big-collared dresses. Some had taken just a taste before the internment, others were gradually consuming the entire box. They cited their mistrust of authority, their desire to take responsibility for their own grief, their determination to wrest control from the middleman.
“It’s coming back to me now,” her poppa said. “They talk about that pilot in California, at the end of it, the one who was supposed to be scattering ashes over the Pacific at the behest of families and was instead stockpiling them in one of those franchised Cubby-Holes.”
“Saving on airplane fuel, I guess,” her granny said. “Found two thousand boxes of cremains in one of those storage lockers. Been getting away with it for years.”
“That one,” her poppa recalled, “two in from the left … camera doesn’t pay much attention to her, but she’s the one who found out she’d been working her way through the wrong ashes after an investigation uncovered gross carelessness at the crematorium.”
“It’s a rerun,” her granny said. “We’ve seen it all before.”
33
What are you reading now?” Ginger asked.
He put the book on the night table and carefully placed on the open pages a heavy strip of leather with his initials embossed upon it. It was a gift from Donald. Carter couldn’t imagine how he’d ever marked his place before. It reminded him of a cestus, that leather contrivance Roman boxers used to wear around their hands.
Ginger seemed a little twitchy, the way she used to behave when she had the Smirnoff flu. Surely she couldn’t have taken up that business again.
“Reading is so inconsequential, Carter.”
“I enjoy it, darling.”
“You’ll be shocked when you realize exactly how inconsequential.”
“I was reading about Darwin and just came across a charming anecdote. When he took his child to the zoo and they looked into the cage of a sleeping hippopotamus, the little boy said, ‘Daddy, that bird is dead.’ ” Carter chuckled.
“And you find that funny?”
Ginger found very few things amusing. People falling, slipping, or sprawling inadvertently used to make her laugh, but that was about it. Once Carter had pitched forward at breakfast in an attempt to avoid dribbling some honey from an English muffin onto his shirt front, an event that had put Ginger in a sparkling mood for the rest of the morning. Had she thought he was having a heart attack? In any case, she’d found it quite funny.
She moistened the tip of her finger with her tongue and smoothed her eyebrows. At least that’s what it looked like she was doing. “There’s a woman here who saw herself before she died,” she said. “Her exact double.”
“Really?” Carter said. This sounded rather gossipy, and Ginger had never been one for gossip. Carter did not know if this signified a promising development or not. Was she settling in there?
“Yup,” Ginger said. “Her exact double. Rooting through the sale panty bin in an outlet store.”
Carter picked up the bookmark, which was lobbed and weighted at both ends. Maybe he’d get Donald a belt for his birthday next month. A belt was a good idea. A belt for one thing, absolutely.
“Don’t we look all a-bubble,” Ginger snarled. “Thinking of Donald again?”
“Jealousy is a base emotion, Ginger, it’s not good for you.”
“Not good for me! You haven’t once thought about what was good for me, ever since I died. You’re not even grieving, for godssakes. You didn’t even lower the flag back in Connecticut. Not even for one measly month did you lower it.”
“Darling,” Carter said. “People feel sad, they grieve, because when someone they love dies, this person, this loved person, is no longer to be seen. But in our situation, our unusual situation, I do see you. You’re very much seen by me, which makes it impossible to give you the grieving that’s very much your due.” He offered one of his most sincere smiles.
“Don’t you feel badly about the flag?”
“You have to be in politics or something, don’t you? So I thought.”
“You infuriate me.”
“It never occurred to me that you would want the flag lowered, Ginger. What do you think about what I just said, darling?”
Ginger said nothing.
He should recite Lucretius to her, a tantalizing punishment. “Cease thy whinings, know no care.” You are dead, Ginger, dead! Give up! The intentions of the man’s words, exactly. “Nor can one wretched be who hath no being!” Not that she seemed wretched, exactly; she was merely, as in life, making him so. Where was On the Nature of Things, anyway? A little book whose dark blue cover was warped a bit from getting tangled up in a damp beach towel once. He was beginning to misplace everything.
“I’m going into the other room,” Carter said.
“The other room is crowded,” Ginger said. “I believe Annabel’s in there with those girlfriends of hers. Girls who haven’t enjoyed the advantages Annabel has, Carter. I don’t know why you allow her to associate with them.”
“You can come along if you’d like,” Carter said slyly. She had never shown up outside the bedroom. He’d always attributed her appearance to a certain relaxation of his defenses, those moments of unfixed reverie before sleep that, when she got her teeth in them, morphed into detumescence and dismay.
“You’re not going to walk out on me, Carter.”
“Come along, then,” Carter turned, too quickly perhaps, and suddenly had a dreadful headache. He wondered if he could make it to the door. But with the headache came a quickening sense of urgency about his untenable situation.
“Headache?” Ginger suggested. “Didn’t you used to have headaches as a little boy? That gradually increased in frequency and severity until they were pronounced incurable by a number of doctors? And then they went away. Isn’t that right?”
“Ginger, you simply have to stop talking for a moment, darling, please,” Carter said, crouched in awe before this headache, a Visigoth of a headache, a Cat tractor of a headache, a sucking tornadic funnel of one.
“I’m surprised you weren’t asthmatic as well. Like half those teacakes at St. George’s.”
He couldn’t hear her now over the roaring in his head. Then the pain receded, ebbed like a wave sliding back with a slight hiss from the beach it had darkened.
“Couldn’t find your bolt-hole for a minute, could you? Always good to know where your bolt-hole is when things get overwhelming, when there seems to be no escape,” Ginger said complacently.
What was a bolt-hole, for heaven’s sake? She was palling about with Australians, Louisiana fisherfolk, and women who went to discount stores for their underwear. If this had been an ordinary party, she would have made Carter take her home long ago. Did Cole Porter and William Blake have their own area or something? He supposed they might. There might be some multisectional partitioning of the Beyond. Why not?