Last night Tammy slept in the hideous recliner beside her mother’s hospital bed. Around two A.M. her mother turned on the television.
“What are you doing?” Tammy asked. “You need to be sleeping.”
“I would if I could,” her mother said. She flipped through the channels and stopped on a home shopping network. Tammy swiveled her chair toward the television. They watched a woman model some clip-on earrings. The woman looked a little bit like Tammy in the face, her mother pointed out, “Just around the nose. Don’t you think?” Tammy didn’t answer that. The woman on the television had an ugly little snub nose.
Tammy couldn’t get back to sleep after that. They watched prices for more clip-on earrings flash onto the screen, and then they watched a bald man with a thin mustache show off a vacuum that could suck up wet stains.
“That could come in use around here,” Tammy said, and patted the end of the bed.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” her mother said.
When the nurse came into the room, around four A.M., her mother asked Tammy to leave the room for a minute.
“What for?”
“Because I need to ask the nurse something in private.”
“Mom, don’t be silly.”
“You can come back in a few minutes.”
“Fine,” Tammy said, “I need to get going anyway.” She grabbed her overnight bag out of the closet and left the hospital. On the drive home she stopped by a coffee shop for lattes to go. Billy was just waking up when she came into the bedroom and stepped out of her shoes and shimmied out of her underwear in front of the closet. She went into the bathroom for a shower. He followed her in to sit on the toilet lid and drink the latte she’d brought him.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
She said she didn’t. The steam curled over the shower curtain rod. The vanilla bar soap, from a farmers’ market, turned to goop in her hands. Billy stripped down and stepped into the shower with a hard-on.
“Not now,” she said. “Tonight maybe.”
“Just because I have an erection, doesn’t mean I’m asking for sex.”
She laughed and left him in the shower. She got to work early but then fell asleep with her head on her desk. The supervising producer came in to nudge her awake. She’d missed the morning editorial meeting. He gave her the assignment.
“But listen,” he said. “You don’t have to go. Take a few more days. Go be with your mother.”
Tammy didn’t want to take any more time off from work. She would do the story.
Standing in front of the crime scene, she collects her thoughts and waits for the cue from her cameraman. The air is muggy and her hair frizzy. Their van is parked down the street.
“Details are sparse, Gary, but it’s here that—” As she says this, she twists, ever so slightly, to reveal more of the house, and her heel sinks deep into a bed of soft pine needles. She falls, not at all gracefully, her legs opening wide, skirt sliding up toward her waist, her black underwear and panty hose and who knows what else exposed to the camera. The microphone rolls.
The network, thankfully, cuts away to her prerecorded story.
“Are you all right?” the cameraman asks Tammy, extending a hand. He’s relatively new to the station. His name is Mike or Mel or Matt maybe. He helps her off the ground and swats away the dirt from her skirt and jacket.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she says, her face flushed red.
On the ride back to the station, he sticks out his pinkie. “I pinkie-swear that I’ll delete that footage as soon as I get back.” She hooks her pinkie in his, amused by the gesture despite the fact that thousands of viewers already saw her fall.
“Could you see my underwear?” she asks, doing her best to smile.
“Yeah,” he says. “But just a little. Not much. Nothing X-rated.”
Fatty Kids Falling Watch N Laff
A slightly pudgy boy in his white underwear slides across a blue tarp on his belly. Dish soap keeps the tarp slippery. There’s a garden hose positioned at the top, the chilly water gurgling out of it and streaming around his small body. The boy, Adam Fitzgerald, has tight curly hair, wet-dark, and he’s sliding headfirst. He didn’t bring a bathing suit to the party. Nobody told him there would be a Slip ’N Slide! Why didn’t anybody tell him? If they had, he would have brought his suit. Back home he’s got a blue one with a pocket that has another pocket inside of it. He keeps coins in there, and shells, and sharks’ teeth, and his house key.
He’s still sliding. The girls at the party in their pink and purple swimsuits, the red coolers with the white tops, the green blanket over the card table, the tall creamy brown birthday cake and the white plastic forks — everything is a colorful blur as he slides downhill. Time falls away. Space too when he squishes his eyes shut. He imagines himself like a bolt of lightning. Bodiless. An electrical current, sharp and fast. This is his third slide of the day, but it’s as glorious as the first. The sunlight warms his back. When it goes cool, he knows he has moved into the second half of his journey, the half under the shadowy cover of the oak trees. Is his heart even beating? Is he breathing?
But then his slide comes to an end. Half of his body goes over the edge of the tarp. His chest and arms land in the scratchy green grass. He stands and wipes his palms across his bare legs. Grass blades stick to his skin like a disease. He picks off each one and flicks it away with his pruned thumb and index finger.
Adam sees Madeline too late. She was next in line, and she’s sliding fast. She knocks out his legs. He falls forward and face-plants on the sudsy tarp. Madeline is pinned beneath him. She’s kicking and shoving. She’s crying. Mr. Bell comes running. Adam rolls over onto his side. Mr. Bell helps up Madeline, his hands under her soapy armpits. Adam can hear other kids laughing behind him. He runs his tongue along the bottom of his teeth. One of his front teeth is chipped, its edge so sharp it slices his tongue.
If you were watching America’s Funniest Home Videos on October 9, 1993, then you saw Adam Fitzgerald’s fall on the Slip ’N Slide at his friend’s birthday party. His video was seven seconds long and appeared in a montage of children getting mildly hurt in a variety of ways — on bicycles, on jungle gyms, with hammers, with sprinklers. His friend’s father submitted the home video, though Adam’s mother had to sign a release form before it could air. She signed the form without really thinking much about it. She assumed it would be cute. She’s always been impulsive that way, and she regrets it.
All grown up now and living in another city, her son doesn’t always answer her calls. It rings and rings, and she has to leave two and three messages before he ever calls her back. It’s not the worst arrangement. In truth she has an easier time saying I love you to a person’s answering machine than she does to the actual person.
SCARY — Elevator FAIL
Adam Fitzgerald shed his baby weight in grade school, and now he runs one of the most influential right-wing Listservs in the country. What he writes in the morning often winds up in the mouths of certain cable news anchors that evening. He keeps an office in an ancient building with ancient elevators.
The elevator doors ding open in the lobby, and a group of people rush inside together, a confluence of hot breath, bad breath, mouthwash breath, wool suits, cotton tops, warm flesh, sweaty flesh, perfumes, and colognes. One of the passengers bundles mortgage-backed securities. Another one believes the Bible should be read literally, that Jonah really did get swallowed by the whale, that there really will be four horsemen with steaming nasty breath at the end of days. A man and woman near the back, both of them married to other people, are in love with each other and sometimes sneak into the out-of-order men’s bathroom on the twenty-first floor.