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The
Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could
feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky,
a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless,
temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to
an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing
zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses
with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the
drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower,
the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline
with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning
painting of the wicker love seat.
Three
in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of
St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been
sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news
until five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections,
bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening
in vain for Enid.
Ringing
throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid
could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one
of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren
into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many
hours that the Lamberts no longer heard the message of "bell ringing"
but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure
to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it
resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper
rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular
sequence of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for
so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain
early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and
realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for so long as they
could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way
to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression
waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness
of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather
itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred -- she on her knees
in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous
Ping-Pong table -- each felt near to exploding with anxiety.
The
anxiety of coupons, in a drawer containing candles in designer autumn
colors. The coupons were bundled in a rubber band, and Enid was realizing
that their expiration dates (often jauntily circled in red by the manufacturer)
lay months and even years in the past: that these hundred-odd coupons,
whose total face value exceeded sixty dollars (potentially one hundred
twenty dollars at the Chiltsville supermarket that doubled coupons), had
all gone bad. Tilex, sixty cents off. Excedrin PM, a dollar off. The dates
were not even close. The dates were historical. The alarm bell had been
ringing for years.
She
pushed the coupons back in among the candles and shut the drawer. She
was looking for a letter that had come by Registered mail some days ago.
Alfred had heard the mailman knock on the door and had shouted, "Enid!
Enid!" so loudly that he couldn't hear her shouting back, "Al, I'm getting
it!" He'd continued to shout her name, coming closer and closer, and because
the sender of the letter was the Axon Corporation, 24 East Industrial
Serpentine, Schwenksville, PA, and because there were aspects of the Axon
situation that Enid knew about and hoped that Alfred didn't, she'd quickly
stashed the letter somewhere within fifteen feet of the front door. Alfred
had emerged from the basement bellowing like a piece of earth-moving equipment,
"There's somebody at the door!" and she'd fairly screamed, "The mailman!
The mailman!" and he'd shaken his head at the complexity of it all.
Enid
felt sure that her own head would clear if only she didn't have to wonder,
every five minutes, what Alfred was up to. But, try as she might, she
couldn't get him interested in life. When she encouraged him to take up
his metallurgy again, he looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. When
she asked whether there wasn't some yard work he could do, he said his
legs hurt. When she reminded him that the husbands of her friends all
had hobbies (Dave Schumpert his stained glass, Kirby Root his intricate
chalets for nesting purple finches, Chuck Meisner his hourly monitoring
of his investment portfolio), Alfred acted as if she were trying to distract
him from some great labor of his. And what was that labor? Repainting
the porch furniture? He'd been repainting the love seat since Labor Day.
She seemed to recall that the last time he'd painted the furniture he'd
done the love seat in two hours. Now he went to his workshop morning after
morning, and after a month she ventured in to see how he was doing and
found that all he'd painted of the love seat was the legs.
He
seemed to wish that she would go away. He said that the brush had got
dried out, that that was what was taking so long. He said that scraping
wicker was like trying to peel a blueberry. He said that there were crickets.
She felt a shortness of breath then, but perhaps it was only the smell
of gasoline and of the dampness of the workshop that smelled like urine
(but could not possibly be urine). She fled upstairs to look for the letter
from Axon.
Six
days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front
door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs --
since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here --
Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of herself
as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried matériel
from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By
night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the
breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks,
attempted to decipher Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening
Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22
while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward
and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no
address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First
and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints
under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of
where those other Notices might be on any given evening. She might suspect,
perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person
of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume thunderous
enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning,
and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet
door a cascade of catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous
Merrill Lynch statements would come toppling and sliding out, incurring
Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that the Notices would
not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her depots,
threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of
it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of
it, and in the succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering
semblance of order was lost, and so the random Nordstrom shopping bag
that was camped behind a dust ruffle with one of its plastic handles semi-detached
would contain the whole shuffled pathos of a refugee existence -- non-consecutive
issues of Good Housekeeping, black-and-white snapshots of Enid
in the 1940s, brown recipes on high-acid paper that called for wilted
lettuce, the current month's telephone and gas bills, the detailed First
Notice from the medical lab instructing co-payers to ignore subsequent
billings for less than fifty cents, a complimentary cruise ship photo
of Enid and Alfred wearing leis and sipping beverages from hollow coconuts,
and the only extant copies of two of their children's birth certificates,
for example.
Although
Enid's ostensible foe was Alfred, what made her a guerrilla was the house
that occupied them both. Its furnishings were of the kind that brooked
no clutter. There were chairs and tables by Ethan Allen. Spode and Waterford
in the breakfront. Obligatory ficuses, obligatory Norfolk pines. Fanned
copies of Architectural Digest on a glass-topped coffee table.
Touristic plunder -- enamelware from China, a Viennese music box that
Enid out of a sense of duty and mercy every so often wound up and raised
the lid of. The tune was "Strangers in the Night."
Unfortunately,
Enid lacked the temperament to manage such a house, and Alfred lacked
the neurological wherewithal. Alfred's cries of rage on discovering evidence
of guerrilla actions -- a Nordstrom bag surprised in broad daylight on
the basement stairs, nearly precipitating a tumble -- were the cries of
a government that could no longer govern. He'd lately developed a knack
for making his printing calculator spit columns of meaningless eight-digit
figures. After he devoted the better part of an afternoon to figuring
the cleaning woman's social security payments five different times and
came up with four different numbers and finally just accepted the one
number ($635.78) that he'd managed to come up with twice (the correct
figure was $70.00), Enid staged a nighttime raid on his filing cabinet
and relieved it of all tax files, which might have improved household
efficiency had the files not found their way into a Nordstrom bag with
some misleadingly ancient Good Housekeepings concealing the more germane
documents underneath, which casualty of war led to the cleaning woman's
filling out the forms herself, with Enid merely writing the checks and
Alfred shaking his head at the complexity of it all.
It's
the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve
the ends of other, more desperate games. After Alfred retired he appropriated
the eastern end of the table for his banking and correspondence. At the
western end was the portable color TV on which he'd intended to watch
the local news while sitting in his great blue chair but which was now
fully engulfed by Good Housekeepings and the seasonal candy tins
and baroque but cheaply made candle holders that Enid never quite found
time to transport to the Nearly New consignment shop. The Ping-Pong table
was the one field on which the civil war raged openly. At the eastern
end Alfred's calculator was ambushed by floral print pot-holders and souvenir
coasters from the Epcot Center and a device for pitting cherries which
Enid had owned for thirty years and never used, while he, in turn, at
the western end, for absolutely no reason that Enid could ever fathom,
ripped to pieces a wreath made of pinecones and spray-painted filberts
and brazil nuts.
Copyright
© 2001 Jonathan Franzen
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