Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (45 page)

If so, she could see me, of course. But unless I, Mary-Ann, stayed alive long enough—and remembered—to be here at the next Unveiling, or unless they broke the rules and stepped outside the town limits in my presence, causing their instant death, I’d never be able to see or make contact with her or any of them again; for the obvious reason.

Or maybe, now I ponder it, for the less than obvious reason. Looking back through these pages, I see I may have failed to clarify as comprehensively as I might the nature of Russell’s other distinctive feature, and if so I’m sorry. But sometimes it’s hard, or possibly just too likely to bring on my special astigmatism, for me to recall that I’m addressing people who don’t already know the secret. Which is, of course, that our town only materializes, so far as what the rest of you call the real world is concerned, for one day every hundred years.

During that magic twenty-four hours, which we call the Unveiling, outsiders are at liberty to inspect Russell with both the naked eye and the shod foot, should they be in the vicinity and so desire. We will greet you, feed you, and even gladly give a hearing to your political opinions, however outlandish and poorly conceived they may be. But it all vanishes at midnight, and if you’re still inside the town limits, you’ll find yourself confronted with nothing but wheat fields and highway. Don’t worry, though: your cars will still be present. But ours, along with the pickup trucks from the outlying farms, will have disappeared along with Main Street, Dawson’s Drug, and so on.

Not having lived long enough, I, Mary-Ann, had never actually taken part in an Unveiling, the last occurrence having been in 1876. But when I was a little girl, a few people who had been children during that one were still around, and they described it for me. In any case, the lore would be hard to avoid, for when you are a town in this type of situation, it is something your family and neighbors tend to discuss, however laconic they may be by nature. Up to the moment of my return, however, there had been only two Unveilings in all, and the first was witnessed only by some Indians, since relocated elsewhere, and a handful of horsemen on the move west from a small fort called Detroit.

If there can possibly be so much as a single three-year-old child who feels incompetent to figure out the date of Russell’s Unveilings with no help from I, Mary-Ann—and if so, then God protect you, and it will be a full-time job for Him—they happen, inevitably and gloriously, on the Fourth of July.

For the rest of each century, we natives of Russell can go in and out of our town at will, whether the summons in question is a college we’d
like to attend, a war that we’ve heard on the radio we have to go fight in, or simply the lure of Topeka. We’d have to run out on errands in any case, such as fetching back newspapers, movies, TV sets and Sukey Santoit books. But if, on those visits to the outside world, we allow anything to
change
us—except for events in which we have no say whatsoever, such as our then future and now, I believe, former County Attorney’s near death on a rocky hill in Italy, one day in April 1945—then we become outsiders, and cannot return except at the Unveiling. Those who recalled the Second Unveiling in my childhood said that none of those exiled up to then had come back, presumably finding it too painful.

Crouched on the hood of my rental car, looking out at the wheat fields past the
WELCOME
sign, I mulled the possible reasons for my banishment. And considering that, in the interim, I had allowed myself to be penetrated multiple and glorious times by an unshaven, chain-smoking movie critic and aspiring post-modern filmmaker in Paris, France, while attending a summer program at the Sorbonne, you may wonder why I even thought an ambiguity existed. But this is to underestimate Russell, Kansas.

We may have sixteen churches. We may live under a sky so unmoved that it could put the fear of God into God. But even our ministers agree that heck, these things happen. Heck, I knew a couple of girls from Russell High who’d come back from weekends in Topeka pregnant, and everybody dealt with it. Maybe they didn’t get asked to help pass the collection plate during services or lead us all in “The Star-Spangled Banner” at pep rallies for a while, but beyond that they weren’t ostracized, much less banished. Their children were raised with the whole town’s help, just as barns were in the old days.

And by now, I had begun to suspect the true explanation for my own banishment, which was that I had come back not only un-pregnant but mysteriously undeflowered; this despite having allowed myself to be penetrated multiple and glorious times,
See., See.
Clearly, Russell found that too plain weird to fool with.

What had changed me beyond recourse, I now saw, was that I
should
have changed, and hadn’t. Under the circumstances, my continued—or
rather ever-renewable—virginity was abnormal, a mutation paradoxically defined by lack of mutability. Ours may be a town that only magically materializes one day every hundred years, and so forth, but for all that its people are not short on plain horse sense. They knew darned well that something should have happened to me when I went forth out of Russell into this century’s bombs and music. Not unreasonably, they mistrusted the way my unaltered face, re-virginized body, pumping heart, and simple soul all kept insisting nothing had, for all that I myself might have wished otherwise. If I wasn’t a lie of some unprecedented sort, then I was just too strange for them to keep in close proximity. That was that.

Being no fool, although fairly glum at the moment, I, Mary-Ann, did understand I had been given a kind of freedom; albeit one that I had no idea how to use responsibly, or even if it
could
be used responsibly. I could go away, or I could stay in Kansas—anywhere
else
in Kansas, that is, unless I wanted to live in my rental car. (The fees on which would soon be astronomical, were I to opt for this plan; I reconsidered.) I could go where I wanted, do as I pleased, and I would never stay deflowered for more than five minutes. Heck, I could take on a whole class of graduating midshipmen at Annapolis if I felt like it, the night before they all shipped out to fly fighter planes off aircraft carriers and fire sixteen inch shells from battleships at some foreign coast somewhere—and I’d
still
be a virgin in the morning, by golly, and whether or not I cared to be one too.

While I wasn’t sure if this was a curse or just some kind of superpower, one thing you couldn’t call it was
restricting.
Except for one small limitation that a lot of people—maybe most—would likely find negligible, if they even noticed it existed in the fust place.

That was the fact that I, Mary-Ann, the personification of America,

wasn’t ever going to see my hometown again.

At the time that I got back in my rental car and, blinking away my special astigmatism, started he engine up again, that limitation wasn’t yet,
strictly speaking, absolute. I was still only twenty, and the Third Unveiling wasn’t that many years off. Indeed, in my childhood I had often been told that my generation was favored by fortune, as many people’s life spans fell between two Unveilings and they never got to take part in one at all.

Of course, as a sign now reading
EMOCLEW
shrank into a greeting fit only for ants and then atoms before it disappeared entirely from my rear view mirror, I had no way of knowing that I, Mary-Ann, would be in no position to turn up in Russell on that happy day. Since the years and for that matter the decades all tend to be pretty much alike on the island, I was only guessing that it was even 1976 on the bright, hot, enormous morning that, staring out to sea, I decided to pretend it was the Fourth—and then, an astigmatic moment or two later, to pretend instead it wasn’t.

But before I’d turned the key in the ignition, I knew already, and I mean in my bones, why none of those banished had come back for the last Unveiling. Soon afterward, I reached Route 40; and not until then did it sink in that I could turn in either direction, east or west, and not have any more or any less of a destination. Pulling over and killing the engine while I thought, I now mulled two questions, viz.:

1.   Where was I going to go?

2.   What was I going to
do?

No one was around to help me. Nor, with Jean-Luc several thousand sky- and Gauloise-blue miles away, was there even anyone to say he didn’t give a damn—which might have been a goad, if not precisely a consolation. In any case, after new adventures too much like mimeographs of the old ones to be worth passing around, for all that the purple odor of that quaint reproductive process is memory’s umbilicus to any graduate of Russell High, I ended up in New York.

There I found work as a translator at the United Nations, putting my French language skills and command of idiom, both still sharp as tacks then, to good use. While all the other girl translators were equally proficient
if not more so, I had the distinction of being the only American citizen in the bunch, all of my co-workers having been recruited from abroad. Our own government was still reeling from the recent discovery that not one Anglo-Saxon in the United States—all except I, Mary-Ann—spoke a single foreign language anymore, as they found even capable handling of their first one a chore by then. Be that as it may, a second major difference between me and all the other girl translators, obviously, was that none of them had renewable virginities.

As a result, I soon had something of a reputation around the old UN. Still, I’m not sure it was all deserved; is any reputation, ever? The first time I strolled into the lobby of the Plaza, cloaked in a capote from Hats by Audrey and swinging my handbag as if I had a hammer, to see an evidently Latin gentleman in a befrogged and ornate uniform buying up weapons and torture implements at a trade show, I leaped to the same benign conclusion sure to have been lit upon by anybody similarly afflicted with a desire to think the best of people. This was that the hotel’s doorman had just won the lottery, and was naturally of a mind to protect himself from possible desperadoes. Admittedly, as time went on, I did find it odd that the Latin and Asian doormen at both the Plaza and the Sherry-Netherland seemed to win lotteries with such frequency, and always bought weapons, torture implements, and cocktails for me with the proceeds. But then again, America—the land I, Mary-Ann, personify—is a land of opportunity if it’s anything, as my best gal-pal would impishly remind me whenever Holly and I found ourselves bumping gloved elbows in the Four Seasons’ powder room. Or seated together, behind an unforgettably sweet pair of goggling adolescents, at one of the pianist Henry Orient’s madcap Carnegie Hall recitals, as a fractured fuss of whispers around us excitedly spread the gossip of the latest suicide in the Glass family.

At a loss to see a pleasant, polite, and cheerful way of doing so, I never once considered taking that way out myself. That much of Russell I still had in me, impulses to auto-destruction being ruled out not only by our sixteen churches but by our distrust of the hoity-toity and general desire to remain laconic. In Kansas, slashing your wrists is considered one more of the luxuries we’d only be tempted to if we had sophisticated folks’
money and problems, and I was wary of being thought pretentious. Yet I was often bluer than Manhattan’s stony sky.

Among other things, the time lags before my virginity renewed itself after a date had grown longer and more unpredictable. My single most protracted lapse began on a date in late November, 1963, after which I didn’t become a virgin again for almost three whole months. As Thanksgiving’s pilgrim migraine gave way to a coffin-shaped Christmas, a New Year’s Eve without a hat or toot in sight, and then the prison of New York’s bleak February, I wondered, with ambivalence, if this might be It. But one night not long before Valentine’s Day, I was watching television in my apartment with the roommate I had just acquired, who was working on her Barnard master’s thesis—or antithesis, as she oddly called it—and was intellectual but good company. To my surprise, I felt myself turn virginal again while watching
The Ed Sullivan Show;
but for no reason that I know.

Yesterday never knows.

Even after that reprieve—which was, all things said, a doozy—my mixed feelings persisted. In fact, they grew worse. If running around as a girl translator at the UN and waiting for my virginity to kick back in after every halfway memorable date was what personifying America called for, then I, Mary-Ann, was no longer sure that personifying America was my can of Coca-Cola, my jolt of Jim Beam, my mug of Maxwell House or my whiff of airplane glue. In moments of reflection, usually after seeing mine in some chance shiny duplication of a mobbed but briefly paralytic room, I often fell prey to a disturbing notion. In a mental state midway between rage and mirage, most likely induced by the way my New York life’s peculiar flimsiness and generally makeshift air seemed to put out the welcome mat for delirium, I would catch myself more than half believing that everything I’d done since
EMOCLEW
receded in my rental car’s rear-view mirror had been the actions of a painted puppet who bore my face and name, yet whose behavior and general situation were caprices over which I had no more control than did whatever stranger might be next to me. Increasingly convinced that none of this was my idea, I wanted to rebel against my own unasked-for nature, and probably would have if I’d known how to go about it.