Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  13

  Millennium Party

  I was excited on the night of the party—my first time appearing in public as Jackson’s … What? Mistress? Friend? Lover? Significant other? Who cared? Nobody. I was excited nonetheless.

  Despite my protests Jackson had invited my professors: Madame Arnot; Cramer; Professor Henry, who taught Western Civ. I’d refused to convey the invitations in person, but Jackson had called them.

  I was the hostess. Jackson didn’t seem to understand my fears. “It’s a potluck, that’s all, just like a church supper.” Jackson and I had fixed a large cassoulet, with venison and venison sausage, which had taken all day, and cooked a venison roast on the grill. A dozen wine bottles stood at attention on the kitchen table. Two cases of beer were keeping cold on the deck. Jackson said that people would bring lots of stuff. I pictured casseroles, fried chicken, meatloaf, catfish.

  We’d built a huge bonfire down by the stream. I kept looking at it from different windows.

  I didn’t put on my outfit till after the first guests had arrived. When I did, it seemed to emit light, like the bonfire. The light washed over me. I could feel the earth turning beneath my feet.

  Everyone brought food and wine and hard liquor too, and everyone was having a good time. It really was like a church supper, but with better food. Claude’s big French table was loaded down with shrimp, pasta salads, guacamole, cheeses, all arranged around the big cassoulet, which we had cooked in a terra-cotta pot. Claire had put her special New York Chocolate Cheesecake out on the deck to keep cold.

  Everyone was very agreeable. Not just agreeable, but making it clear that they were happy to be here and not somewhere else. And these were the people Earl would consign to Hell.

  Even the good-natured argument about when one millennium ended and another began didn’t upset the apple cart. I listened with pleasure. Cramer maintained that the old millennium wasn’t over till the year 2000 had been completed. “When are you ten years old? At the end of your tenth year, not at the beginning.”

  “In China,” someone said, “you’re one year old the day you’re born.”

  I didn’t see how it made a difference.

  “A millennium is a thousand years,” Claire said, agreeing with Cramer. “A thousand years won’t be up—completed, finished—until the end of the year 2000.”

  Someone else said, “But there was no year zero.”

  Cramer was getting annoyed. “Stephen Jay Gould made that point on television the other night,” he said, “but so what? Of course there was no zero. There’s no zero year in a human life. You go from zero to one, and at the end of your first year, you’re one year old.”

  Claire, who had already moved into the apartment over the garage to work on her novel, had to leave because her husband was celebrating a special New Year’s Eve mass at nine o’clock. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Ray’s coming too.”

  I walked her out to her car. “That argument about the millennium,” I said, “makes about as much sense as the debate about which way to put the roll of toilet paper.”

  “Which way is that?”

  “Either way. Who cares?”

  “A lot of people care. Just read Ann Landers. But you must be freezing in that outfit,” Claire said. “You better get back inside.”

  “Feels good,” I said.

  “You want to go to church with me? I’ll bring you back afterward.”

  I shook my head and laughed.

  I tried to avoid my professors, but didn’t have much luck. They seemed to be drawn to me, as if I were a magnet. Maybe it was because I’d gotten A’s in all my courses and was radiating excitement. Or just maybe it was because I was wearing my spaghetti-strap camisole under my cache-coeur wraparound blouse. And my putty-colored skirt.

  But maybe not.

  I didn’t want to have to speak French to Madame Arnot, but what could I do? “Enchantée,” I said.

  “Bonsoir,” she said.

  “Bonsoir,” I said.

  “Quel joli ensemble. Très chic. But it’s for spring, non?”

  I was the first time I’d heard her speak English.

  “I’m tired of the winter weather,” I said. “I wanted to make a statement.”

  “Vous Américains!” she said. “Quelle idée.”

  “Pourquis pas?” I said. “Amusez-vous bien!”

  “A plus.” She laughed.

  Professor Henry hadn’t come to the party, but I had to talk to Cramer. I was a little afraid of him, though we’d already started working together in the herp lab, and I’d already joined ASIH—the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists—as a student member, and he’d invited me to go to the annual meetings in Baja California, in June. Laura Gridley, a graduate student who’d been one of the lab assistants in Bio 120 and who’d be in the training program, would be going too.

  The training program was required by the Federal Animal Welfare Act. There were Public Health Policy and USDA regulations governing just about everything: waste disposal, feeding, housing, and so on. Every member of the team—which included Laura Gridley and Frank Benson—would have to be familiar with animal welfare laws, and especially with the special procedures for handling venomous snakes: what to do in case of escape or envenomation, whom to call, what to report, what hospitals had the CroFab antivenin used to treat all envenomations by pit vipers (water moccasins, rattlesnakes, copperheads). We would have to master a complicated system of record keeping—how to keep a real-time inventory for each specimen, how to maintain a cage-card notification system for the Office of Research Compliance. Cramer had ordered new equipment—hooks and tongs, the plastic cages—and we were going to practice on the two old timber rattlers in the lab. These snakes were left over from someone else’s experiment. They’d been hanging around for ages. If they hadn’t had their venom sacs removed, the lab would have had all sort of restrictions.

  I’d forgotten about my outfit till Cramer commented on it.

  “Do you like it?” I said. “It’s French.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I’m not sure. It looks like somebody else’s idea of who you are.”

  “Maybe it’s just not your idea.” I was annoyed.

  “That dress,” he said, “is totally wrong for you. It’s false. Like everything French. Phony, artificial. A tease. Like pornography. Sex coming out of your head instead of out of your body. You don’t need a dress like that. You’re a blue jeans girl. Woman. A pickup truck woman. Natural. Unaffected. Down to earth. You’re a herpetologist, not a French whore. You don’t need a dress like that. Is that who you think you are? A French whore?” He laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny. It wasn’t the first time I’d been called a whore, but it was the first time I’d been called a herpetologist.

  “Who do you think bought and paid for the dress?” I asked. My only comeback. It was weak.

  “If I had to guess I’d say Jackson. I’d say it was a Christmas present from Jackson.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, shit,” I said. “I’m sorry I asked for your opinion.”

  I went into the kitchen and when no one was looking poured some red wine down my front so that I had a good excuse to change my clothes. Upstairs, looking in the mirror on the closet door, I was mortified. Somebody else’s idea of who I am.

  By the time Jackson found me, sitting on the edge of the bed, I’d settled back into my old self, in jeans and a turtleneck.

  “What happened?”

  “I spilled some wine down my front,” I said.

  “We need you to play the piano,” he said. I could hear a guitar. The singing was about to begin.

  Claire came in as I was coming down the stairs. Ben Wagner was picking out “Amazing Grace” on a twelve-string guitar. He was what Jackson called a real band in a box.

  I sat down at the electric Yamaha.

  Jackson
had his harps in a belt around his waist. I’d given him six new Lee Oskars for Christmas and he’d taken them all apart and tinkered with the reeds.

  The music was familiar—the only music we all had in common. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” “The Old Ship Of Zion,” and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” I didn’t really feel like playing hymns, but I knew they’d annoy Cramer, who’d devoted most of one lecture to the adaptive value of illusions like religion.

  When the roll (when the roll)

  Is called up yonder,

  When the roll (when the roll)

  Is called up yonder,

  When the ro-oh-oh-oh-ll is called up YON — der,

  When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there.

  Cramer wasn’t a singer, but Claire, who’d come back to the party with Father Ray, had a beautiful alto voice and sang the “when-the-roll” echoes. I turned up the volume on the electronic piano, and we made so much noise that the owls started calling, as if they were joining the singing. Or protesting. Someone opened a door so we could hear them better, and Maya went out.

  I was amazed at Jackson’s harp playing. We’d played together a few times, but this was different. I realized that he’d just been backing me up.

  I tried to teach everyone “La Gui-Année” and got some help from Madame Arnot:

  Bon soir le maître et la maîtresse,

  Et tout le monde du logis:

  Pour le dernier jour de l’année,

  La Gui-Année vous nous devais.

  When the singing died down Claire went out on the deck to get her chocolate cheese cake. The next minute she was back inside, furious: “The dog ate the cheesecake.”

  The cheesecake was out on the deck. I’d told her to put it out there, thinking she’d put it on the table. But we’d carried the table inside, so she’d put it on the floor. Maya had poked her nose through the foil covering.

  Jackson reacted quickly and picked up the phone to call the vet. “Chocolate is poison for dogs,” he shouted. But he was only pretending to call. I could see he had his finger on the button. Pretty soon he had Claire apologizing for poisoning Maya.

  “You can’t eat that,” Claire said, when Jackson started to take the foil off the cheesecake.

  “Why not?”

  Maya had made a hole in the foil but hadn’t managed to eat much of the cheesecake. Jackson cut around the hole in the center and served small pieces of cheesecake on paper plates. It was delicious.

  After another round of singing, some people started to leave. Coats and a few children were brought down from the bedrooms upstairs. About a dozen of us settled down in the living room with a bottle of Irish whiskey. Jackson put more wood on the fire and filled the cast-iron humidifier on top of the wood stove. Some water splashed on the stovetop and sizzled. At eleven thirty the phone rang. It was for me.

  It was Earl. He was worried about me. He was worried about the end of the millennium, about the end of the world. I tried to explain to him that the new millennium wouldn’t really start for another year. He wouldn’t believe me, and I was too tipsy to explain it very well. “Earl, Sweetie, that’s nice that you’re worried about me, but I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be okay.”

  “Let me talk to Jackson,” he said.

  I handed the phone to Jackson and listened while he explained to Earl, in language that Earl could understand, why it was impossible to predict the Second Coming. No man knows the hour, he kept saying. Christ himself didn’t know. He’ll come like a thief in the night.

  “It’s my ex-husband.” I had to shout to make myself heard. “He thinks the world’s going to end at midnight. It’s going to happen tonight.” I looked at my watch, but I could barely read it. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven forty-two.”

  “We’ve still got eighteen minutes.”

  “Eighteen minutes.”

  “It’s been two thousand in Greenwich for five hours already,” somebody said.

  “All the computers are going to crash,” I said. “The government will have to shut down. Businesses won’t function. It’s going to set the stage for the Antichrist. First world government, then the Antichrist.”

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “He wants me to pray. We could all pray. Somebody pass the whiskey!”

  Laughter.

  Jackson lit a Coleman lantern, one of the big ones with two mantles, and turned out the electric lights. Mellow. The bottle of Irish whiskey was making its rounds. It was time for ghost stories, and I had some good ones, but Cramer started in on Y2K. What if? What if?

  It was Cramer who scared the pants off everybody, I suppose because he spoke with the authority of a scientist: What if the computers do crash? The planes are grounded? Credit cards don’t work? Emergency communications break down? Power fails? Telephones don’t work? Tax records are unavailable? Military defense systems go down? No traffic lights?

  “How long could we last without electricity?” someone asked. “That’s the real question.”

  “Jackson’s okay out here,” Claire said. “At least he’s got plenty of wood, and plenty of food. And he’s got these nice Coleman lanterns.”

  “What about water?” Cramer asked. “How do you get your water?”

  “Well.”

  “Pump.”

  “Electric pump?”

  Jackson nodded.

  “Got a generator?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about the stream?” Madame Arnot asked. “There’s a stream in the back, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Would you drink that?” Cramer asked. “All the runoff from the soybean fields? Phosphorus, sulfur, herbicides? You wouldn’t last long.”

  “You could boil it.”

  “Wouldn’t take care of the herbicides.”

  “Well,” Jackson asked, “what are we supposed to do?”

  “How long do you want to plan for? Two weeks? Two months? A year? Two years?”

  “How about two months.”

  “You can bring up water from the stream to flush the toilet, but you’re going to need sixty gallons of water per person just for drinking and cooking. And you’re going to need food.”

  “I’ve probably got enough beer and wine for a month.”

  It was like the ghost stories folks used to tell back home. But scarier.

  “The United States has six thousand electrical generating units,” Cramer said, “twelve thousand major substations, and half a million miles of bulk transmission lines. Thousands of low-voltage transformers are linked together in a grid. There’s a lot of built-in redundancy and a lot of fail-safe mechanisms, but there are still problems. In 1965. In 1977. You probably remember 1996. A million and a half phones out; people stuck in elevators for hours, half a million customers without power in California.”

  “I was on the subway in San Francisco,” Madame Arnot said.

  “The grid is controlled regionally by computers in a hundred separate control centers. If these computers fail …” He shrugged. “And what are you going to do for money? Have you got enough cash? There’s going to be a massive run on grocery stores. They won’t be able to restock. The inventory management systems will be down. And you won’t have your freezer or your refrigerator. You’ll need bottled water and powdered milk. You’ll need to stock up on canned goods. But it will be too late.”

  It was 11:54.

  “Let’s get back to Jackson, here. He’s got Coleman lamps. Already burning. Let’s say he stockpiles. But his neighbors don’t. How long do you think it’ll be before they show up on his doorstep? Then what’s he going to do?”

  “I’ve got a pistol,” I said, “and Jackson’s got a .22 and a 30.06 and a .35 and a shotgun.”

  “Two thousand is a leap year.”

  “So? What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

  “I wondered if that made a difference.”

  Cramer was distracted. “The problem is that
the computer will read ‘zero zero’ as ‘nineteen hundred.’ That’s what will screw everything up. It doesn’t matter about the millennium. Besides, two thousand is not a leap year.”

  “A year is a leap year if it’s divisible by four, unless it’s divisible by a hundred.”

  “Yes, but there’s an exception to that. If it’s divisible by four hundred, then it is a leap year.”

  Another argument broke out, like the argument about toilet paper in Ann Landers.

  Jackson didn’t have a television, but we turned on the radio and listened to a countdown on the local NPR station.

  It had been midnight in London since six o’clock, midnight in New York for an hour. No reports of plane crashes or power outages. It wouldn’t be midnight in California for another two hours. If anything were going to trigger the end of the world, that would be it. California. But most of us were satisfied that nothing bad was going to happen.

  Cramer’s crack about my dress still rankled, but I made room for him on the piano bench as we sang “Auld Lang Syne,” and then another argument broke out: about the correct pronunciation of “Syne.” Should it be “sine” or “zine”?

  Nothing was settled that night. Not the actual starting point for the new millennium; not the proper position for toilet paper rolls; nor the correct pronunciation of “syne.” But we had a good time. Jackson hooked up his eight-track digital tape recorder and we sang some more and he recorded “The Old Ship of Zion.” Jackson played the piano this time and led the singing. After a few verses he asked us to add the name of someone dear to us, and I put in Warren’s name.