American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  Adrian didn’t go home. He sat for a long time in the restaurant, reading the paper, drinking coffee, waiting for the end of American Bandstand. Benny would be surprised to see him on his day off. Angela and Kirk would too. They knew that he wasn’t supposed to be in the store on Thursday afternoons. They would be unprepared for what he intended to do there. Today he would sit down and watch Sally Starr with them. The whole two hours. And then he’d walk them home. He wanted to make sure they got home safe, this day and every other day they might happen to show up at the store.

  The days were getting shorter. Someone needed to be there for them in the dark.

  1964

  NEARLY INTERRED IN ALASKA

  It was my younger sister Debbie who looked out the window and said that Marina, our babysitter, had just fallen into a hole. I didn’t know what Debbie could possibly mean and didn’t have time to give it much thought. I was trying to hold up the china cabinet, which wanted to come crashing down to the floor, and I was also far too busy yelling at my younger brother Dirk to get away from the television, which seemed about to bounce off its stand.

  Dirk had been sitting in front of the TV watching Fireball XL5 when the earthquake started. The booster rockets on Colonel Steve Zodiac’s World Space Patrol spaceship had just ignited when the picture went out and Dirk, being six, was having trouble disconnecting what had just happened on the screen of our family’s Zenith black-and-white television from the first few seconds of the most powerful earthquake to hit North America in recorded history.

  “Debbie!” I cried, as loudly as my twelve-year-old vocal cords could manage. “Grab Dirk and get out of the house! Where’s Marina?”

  “I told you! She fell into a hole!”

  Debbie went for our brother. Walking was difficult. The floor was rolling like something in a funhouse. I was losing my battle with the china cabinet and had started to worry that in my defeat, Mama’s proudest possession—inherited from her grandmother, along with all the fine china inside—would fall right down on top of me and flatten me like a pancake.

  I had been helping Marina make spaghetti. Dad, who was an SFC with the Alaska Army National Guard, was supposed to go straight from Fort Richardson to pick Mom up at the J.C. Penney’s store, where she was buying some new shoes for Easter, and then they were going to celebrate their anniversary, first by having dinner at the Red Ram and then going to see The Fall of the Roman Empire.

  I told Mom and Dad that it was humiliating not being allowed to babysit my own brother and sister when my friends were already babysitting other families’ kids, but Mom said she didn’t like the idea of the three of us being left by ourselves so late into the night. The Fall of the Roman Empire was supposed to last more than three hours.

  So who did she choose? Somebody only four years older than me, who was probably the worst babysitter in all of Anchorage. Mom chose somebody who, when the floor starting rolling and the TV went out, and all the telephone poles up and down Beech Street started whipping from side to side and power lines started snapping and throwing sparks all over the place—somebody who, when the world seemed to be coming to an end (and not in a fun way like with the Roman Empire), got out of the house quicker than you could say “boo” and left her three charges to fend totally for themselves. Nice work, Mom.

  And now Debbie said that Marina had fallen into a hole.

  I watched as my younger sister grabbed our brother just as the television came crashing down on the floor, right where he’d been sitting, and then, fearing for my own safety, I stepped away from the china cabinet and looked on in horror as it toppled over and smashed to bits all the things my mother held dear. In the kitchen, the pan of spaghetti sauce flew off the stove and splattered the walls and floors with blood-red splotches, while all the cans in the pantry knocked themselves off the shelves and started rolling all around like the way things do on ships in stormy seas.

  Alaska’s worst babysitter had left the front door open, and I watched as Muffles, our tabby, went dashing out. Once I’d gotten Debbie and Dirk outside, I pulled them away from the house, which seemed to be shaking itself into something that we probably wouldn’t even be able to live in anymore, and Dad’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, which he couldn’t drive until the transmission got fixed, started looking like Colonel Steve Zodiac’s space rocket ramping itself up to blast right off. What surprised me the most, though, was what the ground around the house was doing. It was cracking right open just like it did in that movie, The Last Days of Pompeii, even though my teacher, Miss Sabatini, said that earthquakes aren’t supposed to make crevices big enough for people to fall into. I later learned what my eyes had already told me: earthquakes of 9.2 magnitude can rip the ground open like a can opener, and this one was doing just that, as Debbie and Dirk and I hung onto the big tree in the front yard and waited for what seemed like an eternity (four minutes is a very long time for an earthquake to last) until everything got still and quiet again.

  Once it stopped and I could hear the sound of my own voice, I said to my sister, “What hole?”

  Debbie pointed to the obvious choice: a five or six-foot-wide trench that had suddenly appeared in the front lawn.

  “You stay right there.” I’d read about aftershocks that could be almost as strong as the original quake. (What I didn’t know at the time is that the ’64 Alaskan quake would be followed by an almost record number of them). I walked with unsteady legs over to the trench and looked down into it. It was eight or nine feet deep and there, sitting at the bottom, was Marina. She was rubbing her knee and looking up at me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I think I broke my leg.”

  “It’s broken?”

  “That’s what I just said. Can you go find somebody to get me out of here? I think I have to go to the hospital.”

  I didn’t say anything. As upset as I was from the terrible quake, I was enjoying seeing this World’s Worst Babysitter (who I hated more than anyone in the world—and that includes Soviet Communists, who my dad says are going to overrun this country someday and steal our liberty) sitting at the bottom of a big hole. In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I almost smiled. This was where she deserved to be. Why? Because she had abandoned the three children SHE WAS BEING PAID GOOD MONEY TO TAKE CARE OF just to save her own sorry self.

  “Why are you just standing there looking at me?” asked Marina. I hated that name: Marina. It wasn’t a name for a person. It was a name for a boat basin.

  “I just wanted to say, Marina, that you wouldn’t be in this predicament if you hadn’t abandoned your post. What if this had been an attack by the Siberian Communists? Debbie and Dirk and I would be taken prisoners by the Red Guard and you would be entirely to blame.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re irresponsible.” I folded my arms. Debbie and Dirk, in spite of my orders, now came over to look down into the hole with me. I wondered if my brother and sister thought that Marina looked as stupid as I thought she did.

  “If you don’t get somebody to come and pull me out of here, Darlene, you are going to be in the worst trouble of your life. My parents are probably worried sick about me right now, and they don’t even know that I’m sitting underground with a crippled leg.”

  “I’m not going to go and get you help, Marina, unless you tell me why you ran out on the three of us. We lost my mom’s china cabinet because of you, and the TV set almost fell on top of Dirk.”

  “I was scared.”

  “That doesn’t cut it, missy.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that.”

  “You’re a terrible, rotten babysitter. You talk on the phone to your boyfriend for hours and hours and your spaghetti tastes awful and I don’t think you deserve to get rescued.”

  Marina fumed in silence for a few seconds while she rubbed her knee. Then she started moaning. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”

  “I could be dead, Marina. That china c
abinet must have weighed a ton.”

  “Suit yourself. I can only imagine what kind of punishment awaits you for leaving me down here.”

  I was about to say some other things that Marina did and didn’t do that got my goat, when my little brother Dirk picked up a clod of dirt and threw it at Marina. It hit her in the shoulder and she cried out, more in surprise than in pain.

  “Don’t throw dirt down on the babysitter, Dirk,” I reprimanded him.

  Now Debbie picked up a handful of soil and dropped it down into Marina’s lap. She screamed again.

  “Enough of that, Debbie,” I said in a mature, responsible voice—the kind of voice I would naturally have used if my parents had done the right thing and entrusted to me the care of my two younger siblings, instead of bringing in this awful teenage girl.

  “I think my brother and sister want to bury you alive, Marina. What do you think of that? Because they happen to agree with me that you’re perfectly awful.”

  “Please get me out of here.” Marina wasn’t whining anymore. Now she sounded genuinely distressed. Maybe she was thinking just what I was thinking at that moment: that there might be a bad aftershock that would close up the fissure and bury her alive. “You’ve had your fun,” she pleaded. “Now please help me!”

  I turned to Debbie and Dirk. “What do you think we should do? Do you think we should get Marina some help, even though she only thinks of herself and her boyfriend and John and Paul and George and Ringo?”

  Dirk shook his head. Then he picked up a handful of dirt and threw it down on Marina’s head so quickly that some of the hard perma-frosty soil got in her eyes. She cried out and I felt really bad for her. I felt bad again when Debbie picked up a pinecone and threw that. It missed Marina’s arm by a few inches but it might as well have hit her for how much she shrieked.

  “You need to stop doing that,” I said to my brother and sister. I looked around to see if anybody was coming to check on us. I figured that somebody would show up soon, but for the time being we were still on our own. It looked like I really would have to go and get help. “You two promise me that you’ll be good and if the ground starts shaking again, you’ll go over there and hold onto that tree?”

  Dirk and Debbie nodded. Then Dirk kicked some more dirt into the hole. I remembered that Marina had said that Dirk couldn’t watch Fireball XL5 until he’d cleaned up his room, and then the time came for the show to start and his room still wasn’t straightened up, so there had been a shouting match and Marina was just about to go and turn off the set when the earthquake started and she felt a sudden need to run like a dastardly Communist right out of the house.

  I went to the Chigniks’ house next door, but nobody was home and I figured that they were either lying crushed beneath their own china cabinet or were off at Good Friday services. I was about to go to the Pottersons’ house across the street, but at just that moment a young woman came up to me. She was wearing a stewardess’s uniform and looking frightened. She said her name was Miss Dunston, and that she worked for Flying Tiger Airlines. She said she was on her way to the hospital to see if they needed any help, since she had some nursing experience, and I explained that our babysitter had slipped into a crack in the ground and could use her help if the stewardess really wanted to make herself useful.

  “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to pull her out, but I’ll come and survey the situation,” said Miss Dunston in that polite way that stewardesses have, though her voice cracked a little from the unremitting fear in her heart. Miss Dunston and I walked briskly back to our front yard, and Miss Dunston got a good look at Marina, who was now partially buried under dirt and rubble. There hadn’t been another tremor—not yet—so this was clearly the doing of Dirk and Debbie. Marina was screaming hysterically, and luckily Miss Dunston hadn’t put two and two together thanks to my younger brother and younger sister wearing their most angelic faces.

  “I need to get someone with a rope or pulley or something,” said Miss Dunston with some urgency as she ran off.

  I gave Dirk and Debbie a disapproving look and they both shrugged as Muffles the cat, having just pooped in the grass next to our very own front yard crevasse, kicked some dirt and a little something extra into that big hole in the ground.

  Ten minutes later Miss Dunston returned with a couple of our neighbors, and the worst babysitter in the history of the universe was rescued.

  I didn’t learn the extent of the devastation or the death toll from the quake and the tsunami that followed until later that night. Ahead lay weeks of anguish and hardship as the citizens of Anchorage and Valdez and Kenai and Turnagain by the Sea all mourned their losses while struggling to restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy. (To this day, I can’t stand the smell of Clorox, which we used to disinfect the boiled snow that was for several days our only source of drinking water). It would be a long time before Dirk and Debbie and I would return to our old selves again, but we did relish this one brief moment of fine revenge, while denying every word of Marina’s allegations.

  I guess looking back, Marina wasn’t that horrible of a babysitter, and I suppose I feel a little guilty now, in my later years, over what Dirk and Debbie and I did to her. It wasn’t her fault that she got scared and ran out of our house. I didn’t know this at the time, but everything frightened Marina. And it got much worse as she got older. Before giving birth to her first baby in 1971, she was so traumatized by the idea of it that she ran out of the delivery room and even out of the hospital. Her family found her at a McDonald’s eating a Big Mac and trying to ignore her contractions.

  Although she didn’t fall into any more holes, she did once almost step into an open manhole in Seattle. She missed it by a few inches. And then she turned to her husband and said, “My life isn’t that ironic.”

  And that’s my unironical Alaska earthquake story. Take it or leave it.

  1965

  MISTRYSTED IN NEW YORK

  “Two ad men walk into a bar…”

  “Oyster Bar.”

  “Right. Okay. Two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station.”

  “Grand Central Terminal. Grand Central Station is a post office.”

  “What are you, the language police? Two ad men walk into—”

  “Two Y & R men.”

  “Important point. Y & R.”

  “Begging your pardon, what are ‘Y & R’ men?”

  “The gentleman to my right wants to know the meaning of Y & R men.”

  “Account execs from Young and Rubicam: the crème de la crème of New York City ad agencies.”

  “I see. Thank you for the clarification.”

  “As I was saying—two ad men walk into the Oyster Bar. And then they walk right out. Why do they walk right out?”

  “Because the lights went out. But that’s no punchline. It’s just a fact.”

  The two Young and Rubicam ad men, both in their mid-thirties, one named McCluskey and the other Selman, sighed, nearly simultaneously. Next to them, a man in his late sixties or early seventies, with a London Fog coat folded neatly in his lap and an umbrella at his side, sighed as well. His sigh came out as a melodious hum. The two ad men to his left, both well-versed in ethnic stereotyping, failed, nonetheless, to register the cliché: a man with a British accent carrying a London Fog coat and an umbrella. All that was missing was the bowler.

  “I say, gentlemen, if the entire city is without power and you have no hopes of taking your commuter lines up to Peekskill and Scarborough—Scarborough, now that has a nice English ring to it, doesn’t it?—may I ask why you have deposited yourselves here upon this most uncomfortable bench, rather than do that which I’ve noticed a number of other young executives doing: attempt to secure livery transportation just outside on 42nd Street?”

  “Thanks for the suggestion, Pops,” said the man named Selman, “but my colleague McCluskey and I tried that very thing for almost an hour after getting thrown out of the Oyster Bar. Looks like we’re stuck in Manhatt
an for the rest of the night with all the rest of you stiffs. So we’ve staked our claim to half of this bench for the duration. As—I notice—you have too.”

  “I’m rather in the same boat, it seems. I’ve rung up the friends with whom I’m stopping in Croton-on-Hudson and successfully dissuaded them from trying to motor down into the city tonight to rescue me. I survived the London Blitz. I can certainly survive one night on a wooden bench in Grand Central Terminal. Alas, though, my conscience may force me to relinquish this berth.”

  The elderly British gentleman now dropped his voice to a whisper and leaned over to speak confidentially to his circumstantial companions. “I note, as certainly you must as well, a preponderance of stranded, wiltingly bedraggled working girls eyeing this bench with looks of the most heartbreaking longing.”

  The dapper old man, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the British actor John Williams (forever typecast as proper butlers and proper police inspectors), was right. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of New York commuters—their faces made flat and garish by the emergency police flood lamps that had been rolled in to light the main concourse—sitting, standing, or milling about. The large knot of those who had earlier stood at the information booth and demanded to know when the trains would start running again (only to be answered with apologies and shrugs) had long broken up. The terminal had since settled into placid communal acceptance of the inevitability of the great Northeast power blackout of November 9, 1965, the largest blackout ever to hit both the United States and Canada.

  “You’d be a good ad man yourself,” said Selman to the old man. “How deftly you played that guilt card. McCluskey, we’re going to do the right thing and surrender our half of this bench to the ladies. But now the big question: which ladies? I don’t want to invite a female fistfight here. This isn’t a sale at Ohrbach’s.”

  McCluskey chuckled. “Ohrbach’s doesn’t have sales. Get yourself married, Selman, and learn a few things about the female species and its natural habitats. Your housewife-loving clients at General Foods will be especially appreciative.”