The Wonders of the Invisible World (14 page)

“It’ll clean up,” said Sylvia. “You ready for some coffee? I’ll get you a bowl for your cereal.”

“Don’t bother, I can get it.” He went into the kitchen and I thought,
No time like the present.
I took the little pill out of my
shirt pocket, glanced in to make sure neither of them was looking, popped it in my mouth and washed it down with coffee.

Dave Senior came back in with a bowl of cereal and flopped down on the couch. I guess the rule didn’t apply to him. “Five o’clock in the morning.” He put a spoonful in his mouth and started watching the Big Bird dance with a bunch of children. “I didn’t
want
this day. And here it fucking is.”

I said there was no sense in taking two cars this morning—I wasn’t sure what that pill would do to me—so Dave drove us in the Caravan. We dropped the boy back in North Madison for the day, then went on to the hospital.

When the nurse on duty saw us walk into the intensive care, she brightened up. “Hi,” she said. “They’re moving her right now.”

“Oh, shit,” Dave said. “
Now
what the hell happened?”

“Oh, they didn’t tell you?” She was still smiling, they must train them to breeze over any bad words from people under stress. “She was awake and talking this morning, and Dr. Chambers thought she’d improved enough to go into a semi-private. And they might try to get her up for a few minutes this afternoon.”

“Hell
no,
they didn’t tell us.” Dave Senior shook his head. “That’s about par for this place. If she isn’t here, where the Christ
is
she?”

The nurse stopped smiling.

I took a big breath and let it out. “Thank God. Thank
God.
You know, they probably called the house when we were on our way here.
Jesus,
isn’t that wonderful.” It was like the weight of everything lifted up off of me—my arms actually felt light, like there was air under them. And then, just like that, it hit me that this little time, with all of us together, was rushing to an end.

The nurse ran her fingernail up and down a clipboard gracefully, searching. It seemed to take longer than normal. “She’s being moved to five-seventeen B. That’s in the other wing, fifth floor. You can take the elevator by the waiting room.” Dave Senior turned around and tromped out without so much as a thank-you. Sylvia stared at him. I told the nurse thanks for everything, that she’d been a wonderful person to us, then Sylvia and I followed Dave out. He’d been under all that stress for so long, you see, that having it suddenly let up—I don’t know, you can understand how it must have discombobulated him.

The waiting room, where I’d spent so much time the last couple of days, looked strange to me, like some place you haven’t seen in years—it could’ve been that pill starting to take hold. I hadn’t noticed before that it was all shades of green in here: green walls, green carpeting, green couch and chairs. To calm people down. I thought,
With all this green around, plus a Valium pill, you ought to be ready for anything they throw at you.
Dave Senior was over at the elevators; he touched his finger to the
UP
arrow, and it lit up green. The colored couple was there on the green couch—I was pretty sure it was the same couple—and I was going to nod at them except I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. And what for? We were in different boats now: them still here and me just passing through one last time, really a million miles from it.

When Sylvia and I got over to the elevators, Dave Senior pounded the lit-up arrow with the side of his fist. “Let’s
go.
Son of a bitch.”

Sylvia laid a hand on his arm. “It’s all right. She’s going to be okay—thank
God.
”

“Fine.
You
thank God. God’ll shit his pants when he hears from
you.
” He shook loose of her hand and pounded the arrow again.

She took a step back. “What’s the trouble? I should think you—”

“What’s the
trouble?
That’s beautiful. That’s a classic. That should be the family motto. What’s the trouble. You whored around on
him
”—jerking a thumb in my direction—“your daughter whores around on
me,
and you—”

“No, now you’re out of line now,” I said. The colored fellow was looking over at us, trying to make believe he wasn’t. “I can understand if—”

“What brought
this
on?” Sylvia said.

Dave Senior looked at me. “What, you didn’t tell her? That would figure. That’s about par.”

“What didn’t you tell me?” Sylvia said.

“The great peacemaker,” said Dave Senior, shaking his head. “The great cover-up artist. Okay, what happened to your daughter, Syl, she got creamed when she came barrel-assing out of the motel where she was shacked up with somebody
else’s
husband. This shit’s been going on for—”

“Don’t listen to this,” I told Sylvia. “He’s all hipped on this thing because he’s upset. As near as I can make out, she just went in there to use the telephone.”

“Where do you get that crap?” said Dave Senior. “She had her car phone, for Christ’s sake.”

Ding,
and the elevator doors came open and we had to step aside for a gurney with an old, old lady flat on her back, asleep or in a coma maybe. All there was to her, poor soul, was just ragged white hair and poor thin, wrinkled skin over her skull; her closed eyes stuck up in their sockets like knuckles. I had a foolish thought—probably due to that pill, because I could feel it coming over me pretty strong now. I thought that she’d lived a good long life and for that reason she’d been chosen to take Bonnie’s place. I stole a look at Sylvia on the million-to-one chance she might be thinking the same fool thing. But Sylvia
was looking at her watch, and I could tell just as if she was saying it out loud what she was
really
thinking: if Bonnie was truly out of the woods now, what’s the soonest you could get a plane to Phoenix? They wheeled the old lady off toward the intensive care, and we stepped into the elevator. My ears were humming and my legs felt like they had no bones. I fingered the coins in my pocket: okay, if this one’s a quarter, then
this
one has to be a nickel. So I couldn’t be too far out there yet. Dave Senior pounded the 5 button with his fist, the metal doors slid shut on everything that had happened until now, and up we went.

H
e says, “I’m entitled, am I not?”

I say, “Whatever helps.”

The bartender sets a Johnny Walker in front of Tobias and a Diet Coke in front of me; he takes away Tobias’s old glass, drained to the ice cubes. My Diet Coke’s got a slice of lemon, for festiveness and sophistication, like they stick a Maraschino cherry in your ginger ale when you’re a little girl. I am so much not in the mood.

It’s Friday and I’d been looking forward to just going straight home and popping into the tub. But Tobias called me at Helping Hands and said could I meet him at the Little Finland when I got off work, and I just quickly said okay fine since I didn’t have time to get into a big thing with him. He called right in the middle of the preschoolers putting on
The Three Little Pigs
for the toddlers, and Margaret wasn’t thrilled with his timing. Neither was I. But I thought,
Well, he’s had a hard couple of days, apparently.
Something happened yesterday at the march on city hall, from what I could gather over the phone; last night he didn’t get in until after I was asleep, and he was still asleep when I left this morning. So I just thought,
Okay, obviously he needs to talk.
Plus the Little Finland was a place we used to go.

I want to tell him about
The Three Little Pigs,
though this clearly isn’t the time and anyway Tobias makes me feel—well, no, that’s not fair—
I
feel like my stories go on too long for him. The play just sort of evolved in the course of the day; one good thing about Helping Hands is, it’s the kind of place that allows for this. At Morning Story we were reading this junk Disney book of
The Three Little Pigs
that Josh had brought in, and Gwendolyn (who else?) said, “Can we put on a play of it? I have to be the wolf—no, Max has to be the wolf, and I have to be Fiddler Pig.” Nothing seems to drag Gwendolyn down: not the Laura Ashley dresses, not the waist-length hair that’s been trimmed but never really cut, not the moon-child name. Depressing that even Gwendolyn, at four years old, has already gotten it that bigness and badness are male things, but it was brilliant what she did playing Fiddler Pig: absolutely
reveling
in how stupid it was to build your house out of straw. She just completely upstaged poor little Max, who did his
I’ll huff and I’ll puff
in a naggy singsong, and when he blew the house in it came out spitty. I mean, no balls at all. Gwendolyn had decorated her paper-bag pig mask with tiger stripes and glitter glue around the nostrils. (Margaret vetoed strap-on snouts because they’d be too frustrating to make; Gwendolyn argued and got a time-out.) She danced around playing air fiddle as she sang, to the tune of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”:

I thought,
Now, before you go crazy on this, remember this is basically a happy little girl. Maybe her house is okay.
I guess I have an attitude because the mother comes in with her
chopped-off hair and her power suits (so you wonder what weirdness causes her to make her daughter look just the opposite), and the father is this long-haired narcissist in a leather jacket that must have cost eight hundred dollars. He picks her up like once a month, and I have yet to see him drop her off in the morning.

Anyhow. Trying
not
to be a bitch about being in this actually kind of scrimy little bar instead of home in the tub. And trying not to get started on quality-of-life stuff in general: e.g., coming in the door just now, I had to get around this babbling homeless man thrusting a shopping bag at me, God knows why. I thought I knew most of them who hang around the neighborhood, but this one seems to be a new acquisition. Though of course with Tobias the last thing you want to do is complain about what a drag the homeless are.

“Heave-ho,” Tobias says, by way of toasting me, and drains off half the glass. He was here when I got here, and already long gone inside himself. I mean he’s still talking and everything, but I could be anybody, you can just feel it.

“See, this is the thing that kills me,” he’s saying. “Everybody saw the
Times,
right? And so they all assume, I mean I
assume
they assume, that this is the way it went down. I don’t know, everything is like that movie anymore. You know. Oh, fuck. Famous Jap movie.
Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah Mon Amour.
”

This is one of Tobias’s things. Not a joke, exactly. But like the way he calls a yarmulke a Yamaha, or he’ll say, “Whatta we got in the Norhay?” meaning our refrigerator. That one took me weeks.

“See, I was there,” he’s saying. “I mean, not that I was any more there than the
Times
guy. But he came with his agenda, which we all
do.
You know, me the same as anybody.” He takes a smaller sip, like he’s already home free and anything he drinks now is just for the luxury. “But what I saw,” he says,
“what
I
saw, was a bunch of cops just zeroing in on this one black guy and absolutely hammering the living fuck out of him. It was fucking Rodney Two, man.” Back when Rodney King happened, Tobias taped it off the news and for days he’d be playing it over and over, saying,
Unbelievable, unbelievable.

“You mean using their sticks?” I say.

“You better
believe
using their sticks. You know, okay, I can see it, he was yelling shit, all right? But Jesus Christ. I’ll tell you something, it took my breath away.” Sip. “And the fucking
Times
reports it ‘marred only by minor disturbances.’ ”

“Maybe the
Times
person just missed it,” I say. “If you’re one reporter, you can’t be everywhere.”

“Yeah, right. Maybe.
Possibly.
But I also kept checking News 88 and WINS. And they also had jack shit.”

“The
Post
didn’t have it this morning?” I said. “Sounds like right up their alley.”

“You know I won’t buy the
Post,
” he says. “Look. Doesn’t matter. The
New York Times
is what people read who have the power to get anything done.” Sip. “What I’m saying is, all the information about this is being very, very adroitly fucking managed.” Sip. “Fuck it, what are we even talking about it for?” He waves his glass for the bartender.

“It’s just extremely obvious,” he says, “that the word was put out, high up. I call the police guy I’ve been dealing with all week, okay? And suddenly, ‘We have no record of that.’ Imagine this shit? I call the guy in the mayor’s office—and I
don’t
assume he’s a total asshole just because he works for Giuliani—and it’s like, ‘Well, the police say they have no record.’ And so now this becomes the truth. It’s like
There is no war with Oceania. We have never been at war with Oceania.
And of course the way they sell it to the media,
Now we certainly don’t want to have another situation like L.A. on our hands here, DO WE, GENTLEMEN?
So word goes out, everybody gets with the program
and everybody’s happy except some
nigger
who was asking for it anyway.”

“Could you keep your voice down?” I say. I sneak a look around, but there’s nobody black, thank God.

“If anybody had a camcorder yesterday,” he says, “that tape got bought for major, major bucks.
You
’ll sure as shit never see it.” Another glass of whisky arrives, the old glass goes. “Well, hey, not to worry. Bernie’s on the case. Going to blow their whole game wide open. He
thinks.
Anyhow, he was there when I left last night, working on his letter to the
Times.
Bernie Adler, the Undefeated. Faxed it to them and everything so they’d be
sure
to get it in.
Oh, yes, Mr. Adler, certainly.
Another little thing you’re never going to see.
Gee, we had to hold it for space reasons,
or it’s like
Our computer must’ve eaten it.
” Sip. “Fuck it. What I’m going to do, I’m going to get stinko.”