Reunion (16 page)

No, he wouldn't have recognized any of them on the street.

Except maybe Mary Jane. She was the least changed of them all.

All true to their genetic codes, thisnesses, haecittatises … if, when you were fourteen, you could only see it WHOLE … but even then …

“Buzzzzzzy! A soft, low rumble of a voice, suddenly thinking of the little dwarf in the woods in Hansel and Gretel, “I saw a little man in the wood alone …” the music spiraling around inside him … It was Fred. “Come on, Buzz, curtain time … ”

As if Fred were reading his mind … emotions …

“OK, OK.”

Coming over and helping Fred up, this sudden pain in Buzz's own back. Which he ignored. He wasn't going to start getting delicate now, although over the last few years all sorts of sharp little radiating pains had been spurting up in obscure places in his groin, shoulder, even thumb, Malinche always wanting to have him get them all “checked out.” But he never did. Was really simply waiting for some sort of final verdict to be declared as to how he should die, bladder cancer, prostate (like his mother's brother), a heart attack (like his father), lymphoma (like Sidney Bernard) … a million obscure viruses and dysplasias just waiting to materialize into some sort of Disneyish monster with claws and fangs, all the codings inside him just waiting to miscode, all the structures just waiting to dissolve, blood cells waiting to clump together, ligaments to snap. Sixty-four, the year of his life when his father had had his massive heart attack. had survived eleven more miserable crawling, suffering years, Buzz not wanting to survive as part person, nine-tenths or two-fifths or ten percent there. He wanted to go like Menke Katz had
gone. “I've got a little pain in my chest.” And he stretched out on his bed and simply died. The Kiss of God, that's what the Rabbis called it. The Kiss of God.

“OK, here we go!”

Old soldier Fred heavy as lead on Buzz's shoulder. You'd have thought he would have kept a spare whatever-it-was in his pocket somewhere. It obviously wasn't the first time. Or how about no gymnastics in the cloak room?!?! Stopping for one last minute and looking back at Our Gang all busily still talking, still not recognizing half the faces. Maybe half. But not recognizing in the slightest at least a third. Strangers they were, had been, and would always remain. Realizing as he stood there that brief instant that he'd never ever see any of them again. He would go through the doorway and that would be it, never look back, no calls or letters or next reunions, this was it. It would be the same as if they all were dead, like all his aunts and uncles were dead, his parents, Ted Erlandson, his old boss out in California, all his old professors, scores of his old friends. And turn the timedial just a little more, and the annihilation would be universal,
aharic hreem oogkozot vkal ashobam okeesh
/and I will make waste mountains and hills … and make the rivers islands and dry up all the pools. His Hebrew a wasteland, his Arabic (and Urdu-Hindi) much better these days. His own scripture flowing out of the secret caverns of his soul—and we come and carve out our lives and mate and have our children and buy and sell and accumulate and everything looks solid and we have the illusion of permanence and then one day there's others in our houses and if we're remembered at all it's in the past tense, all the little decorative touches we did in our rooms, all our little vanities and
careful selections of coats, shoes, ties, hats, everything wiped out, gone, for a moment a big hole where we were, and then the hole filled with other people and other vanities and we simply AREN'T … wanting to believe in any Heaven and Hell, any ANYTHING beyond that final ending, but not really believing in anything more than ashes to ashes and dust to dust, breathing out a mute, unspoken SO LONG, and then walking down through the maze of corridors to the front. A deep breath. The manager at the door as sleek as Rudolph Valentino, “Thanks a lot folks, come back!!”

Out the front door, everything covered with another foot of snow. At least! Understanding a little what Scott must have felt while he waited to freeze to death at the South Pole.

“Isn't there a hotel around here somewhere. Hotel. Motel. Something. We could wait until morning,” said Malinche, the voice of reason.

“No, we'll be OK,” said Ellen firmly, the old Americanski pioneer coming to the fore inside her, “Let's just get Freddie over to the car and safely inside and then we can dig our way out. I've got relatively new tires. Lots of tread.”

Finding the car, getting Fred inside, getting out the scrapers and brushes and a little scoop-shovel out of the trunk, starting the car up, putting the heat up to full blast. Minus ten or twenty or—with the wind-chill—who knew or wanted to know. Slowly liberating the car from its white cocoon, Ellen back at the wheel, Malinche and Buzz in the backseat, pulling out of the lot, Fred instantly asleep, looking like he'd had a stroke or something, the snow still coming down, but lots of traffic, a snowplow battleshipping by them, Buzz putting his arm around Malinche's
shoulder, putting his head back and letting happen whatever was going to happen, like jumping out of a plane and waiting for the chute to open, nothing he could do now, it was all in the hands of the (if only he believed in them) GODS.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
they were up by ten and Ellen made them this purposefully tropical breakfast. Guava juice and papaya, an omelet chockfull of bits of red and green peppers, Kiwi-bits, a little Guacamole on the side.

“It's all so … equatorial,” said Malinche, already on her second cup of amaretto-flavored coffee.

“Just to make you feel at home!” said Fred looking terrible. Like a statue at Tiawanaku weathered by three thousand years of altiplano winds and rain.

“Remind me, when the next reunion notice comes,” said Ellen cynically, still fussing around at the stove, more omelets, some hashbrowns, one concession to the fact that they were in the snowed-in middle of mid-America, “to just ignore it. If I'm still capable of being able to ignore or not to ignore anything.”

“You'll live to be a hundred!” said Buzz, with an attempt at animation.

He'd slept the whole night on the floor and his back was all just a screaming skeleton. The beds (twin) were tiny little hard-mattressed parallelograms way up on delicate wood frames that Buzz was afraid he would fall off of. Like he had the last time
he'd been there, what, ten years before, waking up the whole house, not to mention the damage he'd done to his still somewhat young(er) back. He liked big beds just barely off the floor, layers of soft mattresses and feather beds and comforters, comforters on top, comforters on the bottom, enclosed in a cave of comforting. But everything here was American Neo-Classical, Yankee Duncan Phyfe, kind of Age of Enlightenment delicacy and reasonableness, straight and neo-Grecian—but not the Greece that Buzzy identified with, peasant, magic Greece, before the Greeks had even gotten there …

“It wasn't that bad,” said Fred, “although that Mary Alice would drive me up a wall. This Grandmother-it is … ”

“I really felt like getting up and telling them all my kids are divorced except the gay one who never got married, that seeing my grandchildren is very iffy at best … I don't know,” Ellen sitting down to her own (cold) omelet, taking a long desperate drink of Guava, “I wish I could get French TV full time, make it a little more of a challenge. Or move to Italy. I loved the Midi last summer. I never thought I'd like being baked, but … which reminds me, the corn bread!”

“Really, Ellen,” Buzz protesting.

All he usually had for breakfast was a banana and a glass of milk. Not that any sort of dieting could keep back the genetic inevitability of his ending up as a big-bellied slob, although, like he always said, if he'd given in to “FOOD” (like it was some sort of vicious, habit-forming drug) he could “always look a hell of a lot worse.” All these women down at the hospital where Malinche did her surgery, with stomachs that practically dragged on the floor, plodding-along pumpkin-bodied total “cases” of
out-of-control gluttony, one look at them and you could see why gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins …

“I had/have it all planned out, and that's the way it's going to be!” said Ellen, going into the refrigerator, taking out a heavy glass baking dish full of dandelion-colored goo and sticking it in the microwave.

“Everything's a production number. And it's a lot worse since she retired. Putting out an ant trap becomes a regular safari. And you feel like she shot the lambchops on the Matterhorn,” said Fred kind of all crumpled up and looking like a trash basket in a sewing class, all rumpled, crumpled pajamas and robe, socks, slippers, what was left of his hair all tousled and topsy-turvy.

“Well, it's hard to have structure in your life when you really don't have any structure at all but what you impose on yourself. I mean I'm glad to not be working, but sometimes the days assume these cosmic proportions, you know what I mean?”

“Well, I don't know, I'm always … ”

“Dancing on the head of a pin. That's what he does all day!” laughed Fred, reaching over and giving Buzz a slap on the shoulder, almost falling out of his chair.

“What I'd like to do is make a killing on a book,” said Buzz, “like
The Celestine Conspiracy
or
The Bridges Over the River Kwai
… ”

“Madison County,” laughed Ellen, “Jesus! Although it's true, sometimes I turn on the TV and it's Candice Bergen selling phone companies and I want to watch Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy … ”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah … you guys,” said Joe, breaking into low falsetto song, “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing, where have all the flowers gone, long time ago. Get
used to it, huh. It's all in the actuarial tables. Life expectancies. As if we hadn't seen it. All our parents gone. We're next on the conveyer belt, and there's not a fucking thing we can do about it … except maybe move to Key Largo and sit and watch tropical storms instead of fucking SNOW … ”

Looking out the window. Not snowing any more but the sky overcast, this huge bowl of raw grey clay curved over them, like an endless replay of all their collective childhoods. Not that Grand Junction was any better. All part of the same meteorological conspiracy.

“Yeah, why did you ever leave California?” Ellen asked Buzz.

“I wasn't really leaving California, I was leaving Maria del Carmen. I loved L.A., there was always something to do … ”

“There's always something to do here too, if you can afford it!” said Fred, “and if you'd got the stamina to go all the way downtown. Which, anyhow, I kind of feel is like a War Zone. All the streetpeople selling their little streetnewspaper. Why don't they just beg for crissake?!? I'm sure that I want to spend five or ten bucks to find out all the latest street news … ”

Big joke, a deep, hoarse cackle that terminated in a resonant, hacking cough. Buzz could just image-up those enormous old lungs all congested with phlegm, like caverns under Kentucky filled with cobwebs and bat droppings.

“Whatever went wrong with your marriage to Mitzi?” asked Ellen.

“In fact,” Fred back in the ring slugging away, “whatever happened to the whole first three?”

“He's changed,” Malinche entering energetically into the fray, “I've changed him. Islam has changed him … ”

“Age has changed him,” said Fred, “honestly, I shave in the bathtub every morning just so I don't have to face Mount Rushmore in the mirror.”

“Mount … ?” asked Malinche.

“The big stone faces,” explained Ellen, “they carved up this whole mountain. Freddy thinks of himself as an eroding Abraham Lincoln … ”

“Lincoln's melancholy and Teddy Roosevelt's weight,” laughed Fred. More phlegm, hacking, “It's funny, though, Lincoln, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt. Who the hell was Teddy Roosevelt anyhow? What club did he found?”

“Did you see that show on … what's his name … in the fall?” asked Ellen.

“What's-his-name!?!? Imagine her teaching history! ‘And then What's-His-Name and his armies invaded Where's-It-At and the Age of Whatever-It-Was was born … or Art History, ‘What's-His-Name was the most prominent representative of the What's-It-ist Movement, born in Wherever-It's-At in Whenever-It-Was.”

Ellen getting mad.

“Come on, Fred, I'm sixty-four, for god's sake!”

“Where have all the memories gone,” Fred breaking into frog-voiced song again, “Long time passing, where have all the memories gone, long time ago …” more merciless, jack-hammer coughing.

Buzz wouldn't have been surprised at a little (a lot of) blood, a hemorrhage, anything. Sixty-four like eighty-four. And eighty-four seemed so far away, so ancient, rest-homeish, Olympian, unattainable … and it was only twenty years away, and Buzz was
already in Michigan for thirty years and it felt like it was just yesterday, just yesterday that Pepe and Conchita were born and he'd left California and come into his first class in Michigan and there was Mitzi, fresh out of Korea, an anthropology graduate student who felt she needed to learn how to write scholarly papers, and one of the first things she had said to him was, “Koreans are endogamous, we never marry non-Koreans,” and he'd answered “and the Lox family is totally exogamous, so watch out,” ha, ha, ha, ha, she'd been as fresh as the year's first strawberries, caught, cut and fried salmon, that interesting curved-out face, hardly any nose, wide forehead, such a bundle of black hair and she always wore clumpy black platform shoes Like David trying to play Goliath. What had gone wrong with their marriage? Or, more honestly, what had been wrong with him? And was it Malinche or simply “weathering” that had made it all right with him now?!?! Or—the hardest question of all—was he really alright, or did her long-suffering, submissive patience just make it look that way … ?