Yet from the curdled political outlook that led her father to vote — enthusiastically, and twice — for Nixon, to mutate from a New Deal Democrat into the sort of man who casts a ballot in the spirit of retribution, from the disconnected fear and anxiety that have netted her mother a set of annoying habits, a penchant for imagining the worst, and an open prescription for Miltown, from all these things she can see that somewhere down the line everything went to shit for them too. They were still the same people, fair and loving, nothing had changed to turn them into monsters, but they radiated disappointment, this sense that somehow American life was basically just a bust. It makes her sad for her father, all of a sudden. Sad for him that he knows something, has intuitively fathomed it even from way out in that scrubbed high desert country, knows the same thing that she knows and can’t quite figure out what to do about it. Votes for Nixon and buys a porch light that responds to shadowy movement, out there in the dark, snapping on abruptly.
And she’s figured out what to do about it?
They’re not a kissy-kissy family. They do not effusively express their affection for one another. Deep Scandinavian reserve, tempered on the bitter plains of America’s hinterlands. But Susan seizes her father now, throws her arms around him, kisses him again and again.
Someone cornily applauds. Someone cornily says, “Hear, hear!”
“I love you, Dad,” she says.
“Well,” he says, his face lit with a kind of bashful pleasure, “that’s just fine.”
Ho Chi Minh Park, June 2, 1974:
“Keep fighting! I’m with you! We’re with you!”
Susan saw flashbulbs popping, the Mickey Mouse — eared profile of spring-loaded Bolexes fitted with four-hundred-foot magazines and the bosomy swelling of Canon Scoopic 16s, cameras panning across the hirsute crowd, the short-sleeved, short-haired men who operated these devices looking as incongruous as nature photographers amid a flock of agitated exotic birds.
She felt the thrill of fame.
Roger shakes her awake; they’re parked outside her apartment building. She thanks her cousin and turns away to climb the outside staircase to her apartment, groping in her handbag for her keys. She sees the package leaning against her door. It’s a book in a brown paper bag, The Art of the Stage. She’s pleased with its familiarity, and then she opens it and sees Angela’s equally familiar writing, the name Angel DeAngelis (a little halo over the first g) and a Bloomington, Indiana, address. A slip of paper falls from between the book’s pages.
Are you with us?
Meet me in the park tomorrow.
“Oh, yes,” says Susan.
GUY MOCK HAS A way of bouncing into a room like Tigger. That’s whom Randi thought of once, trying to compare the man’s energy to someone or something, an effortless flash of similitude that her brain awarded her, another small fraction of the distance toward understanding this person she’d been dealing with since, oh, 1963. It was, yes, Kennedy was president.
She’d told him this and he said that the man who did Tigger’s voice was a fascist.
He said, “You have to watch out for that voice because it’s all over the place in disguise.”
Randi thought about that one, about watching out for a disguised voice.
“Would you need special equipment, Guy, or what?”
A dismissive wave. “It’s Cap’n Crunch, it’s Toucan Sam, it’s the Pillsbury Doughboy, and for all I know it could be the little guy in the rowboat stranded in the middle of the toilet bowl, or Armstrong on the moon with his giant step and his baby step unless you actually believe they managed to shoot something with that kind of a payload into space, which is a physical impossibility. But he is a total fascist, and a stool pigeon to boot. An undercover informer.”
Randi wondered if there was any other kind of informer.
“He lulls people into this total lack of suspicion, granting command performances. Doing the nostalgic breakfast voices of these sugary cereals that set off some pinball array of lights in your brain.”
The voices of cereals? And what about the man in the toilet? thought Randi. But she hadn’t said anything.
Now he bounces into a room, specifically a kitchen, filled with cardboard boxes, each bearing a label of woolly specificity, “KITCHEN STUFF.” Three of them are open on the floor, islanded away from the greater stack amid snarls of paper tape and crumpled pages from The New York Times. These were where the skillet and spatula and silverware and plates and cups and coffeepot and salt and pepper shakers came from.
Guy and Randi have just moved back from New York, where they went to live after Guy had gotten shit-canned by Oberlin. For a while Oberlin could quasi-deal with a so-called radical director of athletics, but when Guy opened that big mouth of his to attack Bear Bryant, the shit really hit the fan.
Picture, like, a million angry alumni chanting imprecations from a hilltop.
It took a while, but the new president and the trustees finally sidled up to Guy with an offer to buy out the two years remaining on his contract. Second time that had happened. The first had been up at the University of Washington, where they paid him off without his having worked a single day. So they moved to New York. A little apartment on West Ninetieth with exposed brick walls and upstairs neighbors who had a washing machine that made the windows rattle in their frames when it hit the spin cycle. You could hear the machine moving across the floor overhead until it reached some apparently impassable groove in the wide pine boards and then the windows started moving, shuddering with a vehemence that made Randi think of earthquakes, of seismograph needles going berserk, every time. And they washed a lot of clothes upstairs.
But let’s face it, you can blame the shaky windows and the flaky brick walls all you want, plus the parking problems because like a pair of dopes they brought the car with them to the city and then like a singular dope Guy refused to get rid of it — but let’s face it, Randi is not a New York person. Nothing against the place at all. It is unique and vital and stylish and blabitty blah blah blah. Whatever it’s necessary to say to keep hysterical N.Y.C. partisans from flying at her face like birds with talons or whatever. They can get pretty weird with the whole Manhattan fetish thing. Even here you run into ex — New Yorkers of fierce loyalty who always refer to themselves as expatriates for some dimly romantic reason. And all you have to do is mention California, and they’re on you; it’s like you issued an invitation to your own autopsy. Your life is stupid, your motives are stupid, and the very thing that maybe ought to redeem you, the moving to New York, is the stupidest thing of all plus makes you totally unwelcome. She couldn’t figure it out. Say you’re from Detroit and they love you to death, pat you on the head, and give you ice cream.
“So say you’re from Detroit,” said Guy.
“What’s for breakfast?” says Guy.
“I had some eggs.”
Guy’s eyes are roving, looking around for an alternative. They come to rest on a box of All-Bran atop the fridge. Direct connection between Guy and this dowdy box of fiber. It was amazing to watch, a joy for Randi to behold. Whatever else he is, the man is in touch with himself and his needs; he is a conduit to some future time when hypochondria is bred into the genome. Imagine living with an evolutionary link. Better start having some kids.