A good anagram for diazepam was “zap media.”
Though everything seemed to have a reason nowadays. She was always being presented with reasons for appearing before television cameras, for permitting reporters into her home, for providing emotional responses to “the situation” on demand, for traveling to places she had no wish to visit, for speaking, all the time, to policemen with their roving eyes. paid maze
She understood perfectly well that the reasons had been made up. If you were told why you had to do something, there was a greater chance you’d shut up and do it. Damned simple. In the end, of course, if you had any sense, you shut up and did it just to shut up the people intent upon providing you with all those good reasons they cooked up. It was why she’d married Hank, for God’s sake. She’d become so tired of hearing about him that she’d guessed it would be simpler just to live with him. Eighteen years old, and all she knew for certain in this world was that she’d rather hear anyone’s voice every day than her mother’s when she was mounting a campaign. The campaign to turn Lydia Daniels into Mrs. Henry Hubbard Galton, into an entirely different person, had been the last Lydia endured at her hands. And now here it was thirty-seven years later, and Lydia was an old lady, and her mother was dead and buried, and now all the good reasons that were presented to her each day as solid, practical, and virtually self-evident were to explain things, situations, that hadn’t existed even as possibilities back then. She imagined that hers was a shared perception, a fairly common take on the times: Where had the world gone?
Hence the remark that had made it into the papers, that had become notorious, scandalous, that had begun the process of turning her into a dotty joke. She’d suggested to Eric Stump — in passing, so she’d thought, a mere observation — that if Clark Gable had been in the house with Alice, those hoodlums couldn’t have taken her. “Where are all the real men?” she’d asked rhetorically. If Stump were a “real man,” he would have taken it in good part and laughed with her. If he’d been capable of understanding who Clark Gable had been, what he had meant, then the implication of the remark would have been obvious. But to Stump, to all these ignorant young people, Gable was merely something obsolescent, a superseded precursor of some contemporary creature like Jack Nicholson holding food between his legs. If she could begin to explain why a Jack Nicholson, or a Dustin Hoffman clouting wedding guests over the head with a crucifix, was not a patch on Clark Gable’s ass, for all their easy gestures of defiant contempt, she would be a professor of movies (something she was always astonished to note actually existed). It was a nostalgic remark: that’s all. A man who is jealous of movie stars is no man at all; he is a nitwit. If Stump had possessed the good sense to realize that she was not directly comparing him with Gable, that Gable was incomparable and that that was precisely the point, she might have forgiven him everything (though she doubted it). But instead Stump had scuttled off, looking all wounded, straight to the reporters, who naturally distorted the remark. When it appeared, the story had become Can you believe what the silly old bat had to say? Clark Gable, imagine that. Direct from the days of the wind-up Victrola!
Her nostalgia was not only out of place but out of style as well. The young people had their own synthetic nostalgia: a television show, Happy Days; a Broadway musical, Grease; and a movie, American Graffiti, all of which concerned a sentimental 1950s past. Men, women, and children alike seemed to accept these spectacles as the truth of the era, its absolute limit. Lydia sometimes watched the television program in the kitchen with the cook (it was Tuesday night, it was eight o’clock, it was Hank hiding from her in his study, so why the hell not sit watching the kitchen portable beside a woman with the last name of Núñez?). The lettered cardigans and pomaded hair, the snickering references to backseat sex that all of the nation, in the year 1975, seemed to find titillating. This was the first time Lydia could remember when there seemed to be a strong communal will to reverse the clock, an attempt beyond nostalgia actually to construct a living imitation of the past from the shinier and more durable pieces of its debris and then to dwell in it. There was of course the inconvenience of people her own age, not to mention the thousands still walking the earth who could vividly recall something as distant as the last century. While the conventional take on the ascendancy of Happy Days etc. was that these diversions provided an “escape” from the “perplexing” “reality” of a “turbulent” era, Lydia had little doubt that around the 1990s there would be a television comedy all about the trigger-happy days of the seventies. All this would be funny in the distant future!
Though to Lydia the fifties didn’t really seem all that distant. Just yesterday, really. Certainly nothing much had changed in Hillsborough. And what else? Walter Winchell was gone, but Herb Caen was still writing. Gunsmoke was still on the air. Mutual funds were very popular now. Willie Mays had joined the Country Club. Paperback books were respectable. So were California wines. Ann Landers suggested divorce occasionally now. The United States lost Vietnam, but who’d really wanted it? People drove little toy cars from Japan and had machines that answered their telephones. The people who called to talk to them talked to these machines instead. They still stocked Mallomars in cooler weather only. Israel was still there, and people seemed just as angry about it as they ever had.
Well, the anger. That was the difference. She couldn’t remember the anger, from back then. She was certain that it had been out there, somewhere, but it hadn’t been right here. There had been boredom and fear, there had been some terrible photographs in Life, there had been plenty of boorish people, most of whom seemed to end up in the United States Congress, who arrived with their wives for dinner or cocktails and who’d had strong notions about Negroes, Communists, taxes, labor unions, and young men who played the guitar. And then they left and you didn’t think anymore about Negroes or guitars or what have you. But now you couldn’t buy a house big enough or build it on a hill high enough to get away from the anger. It was an angry age. Restraint had been swept out of fashion. People working in the grocery store and the filling station were angry. The man skimming the pool. They were angry about their jobs, or about not having jobs, or about having jobs when other people didn’t seem to need to have jobs. They were angry about preservatives in food, about air pollution, about miniskirts, about college tuition, about property taxes, about there not being enough left-handed scissors in the world. They were angry about things people never even used to talk about. Had they always been angry?
The people who’d taken her daughter were angry with her, and she had no bloody idea even who they were. She could imagine perhaps kidnapping the daughter of someone who had, say, run over one’s dog. That she could imagine. A dog was, in many ways, more valuable and satisfying than a daughter. But to kidnap your daughter simply because you lived in a nice house and belonged to a prominent family? It was difficult to understand. There were certainly plenty of people in the neighborhood with more money than they had. Yet their daughters were dressing nicely and keeping up with their studies and preparing to become leading citizens. If these revolutionaries were such marvelous democrats, they damned well should have driven to Woodside and Atherton and Portola Valley and Los Altos Hills and kidnapped everyone’s daughters. Let everyone open the Chronicle in the morning and have to read about himself, “Mrs. Galton briefly appeared in the luxuriant front garden before her impressive home. She waved to reporters but declined to answer their polite questions. At ten in the morning, she sported a costly-looking string of pearls around her neck and a large diamond glittered from one finger.” In the end it came down to anger. They were angry with her. Take a number. Certainly Hank was angry with her, and she was beginning to think she had no idea who he was either. Alice was angry with her, and she’d never quite known what to make of her. Lydia was pretty convinced that the reporters below were angry with her.