Product research scientists looked great on television, conscripted into advertising’s new arms race. And market research was there to help Clare pick the best spots of the emerging national folklore to sponsor. Narrative’s mafia, Clare bought up huge pieces of Jackie Gleason and Lucy, Crimebusters, Quiz Me, and the Flying-A Ranch. Snowdrop babies mobbed The Steve Allen Show. One could not see talent without thinking Talent Hour, and one could not think Talent Hour without thanking today’s modern toothpaste, with Fluoroguard. “Speak your piece without a care. Sing your song out, anywhere: Glow, glow, glow!”
Clare’s sixty-second spots ran the gamut from animated, chattering cream canisters to anguished sufferers from chap, psoriasis, or worse. The saga of grease and grime passing through the kitchen pipes or the epic journey of indigestion through the esophagus were much more entertaining and elegantly produced than the twenty-odd minutes of prosaic filler they came wrapped in. The ads took more takes, more tech, more ingenuity than the shows they hosted. They crammed into half a minute more implicit history and adventure than their parasite shows lingered over for the better part of half an hour.
All day long, these free streams of surplus delight flowed into the homes of any worker who could afford a set. Clare’s jingles and cartoons weren’t a tariff. They weren’t even a luxury tax. They were little lagniappes, much-loved gratuities that people chuckled over together at work the next day. One hundred million notions, planted every evening and harvested each a.m.
Market science also made the surprise discovery that ad outlay had to remain proportionate to sales, or the product would wither in the surrounding shouts for attention. The leading brands required more promotion, simply because they were the leading brands. Whole new television shows had to be invented and filmed just to provide a showcase exciting enough to goose an aging product.
Being seen cost orders of magnitude more than being heard, a truth Clare discovered even as it abandoned its onetime savior, radio. Now and then Clare VPs got together with their P&G or Colgate equivalents to hash out informal cost-holding armistices. But such cartels were unstable and tended to be broken by any party that thought it could get ahead. By the time the hatless boy President took office, Clare’s TV expenditure exceeded all other promotional budgets combined.
Unprecedented plenty and perpetual low-level panic produced fertile hybrids. A spate of Korean War hoarding spiked the company’s revenues. Groundless buying seemed driven by the desire not to be caught soapless following a nuclear exchange. When the Soviets exploded their first thermonuclear device, sales of household goods surged by 12 percent. Peaceful, prosperous, precarious beyond comprehension, Americans turned to the only safety left. Clare products were just the thing to stock that second, underground larder.
Panic’s windfall provided the foods division with the cash to buy a broader toehold in new food entries. Clare’s seed-crushing experience earned it a place in the heated arena of cooking and salad oils. From edible oils to peanut butter was but a small hop, leaving Clare positioned to charge into the erupting snack food market.
Upper-level executives, keen to make their mark on company history, repeatedly faced the same decision: to buy or to invent? With its massive distribution and promotional arms, Clare could make a go with just about any item that a sufficient number of humans wanted. The question was whether to start a new life up from scratch or reach down and animate some sleepy, stunted, mom-and-pop brand that enjoyed only local presence.
This dilemma was part of the larger, philosophical challenge of an expanding commission. Should Clare concentrate on doing what it did best, steadily refining its technological expertise? Or should it plunge ahead into new challenges, learning, as it went, how to make newer and better things?
Kaufman’s answer, formulated in executive chambers, became official corporate policy. “A company that stops growing is dead. Clare has a charter to go make whatever people want and need. More than a charter: we have an obligation. We will find out each niche where we can compete, and apply our proven methods to making our contribution.”
As Clare’s new anchor product proclaimed, Awe works wonders. Sales crept steadily up the staircase of fiscal quarters. Earnings tripled in the fifteen years following Hiroshima. Capacity at Lace-wood alone was up a hundredfold since its inception. And the number of new factories doubled every other presidential election.
Television made for mass demand, which led to larger factories, which led to cheaper goods, which led to more consumption, which paid for more broadcasts, which led to a lower cost per consumer message, which brought all the accoutrements of a freer, fuller life. Profits boomed, though margins shrank to nothing. The whole trick was done on volume.
A hundred years before, a family’s soap cost twenty days of work each year. Now two days of effort paid for the whole year, leaving pots of cash for purchasing cleaners whose mere existence lay beyond the power of bygone ages to conceive. Half of Clare’s profits, by decade’s end, came from products that hadn’t even been on the market before the First World War.
A share of stock purchased at the end of the previous century was now worth two hundred times its initial offering. Group life insurance, retirement funds, the forty-hour week made life better at every level of corporate existence. Round and round the wheels of human effort ran, the enhanced circular flow leaving a little surplus for more improvements each time through the loop. The human race had graduated from a handful of extra seed corn to extraplanetary satellites, all on the simple trick of compounding reinvestment. Mankind had all but won.
WE’RE WAGING WAR ON THE WORKING CLASS
Not that we want to hurt anyone. Just the opposite. As far as we’re concerned, most people have been working too darn hard for too darn long. And we’re fighting to change all that …
Wouldn’t it be nice to put your feet up for a spell? Let a machine lift that barge or tote that bale. Let a robot do that dangerous welding. Make a thinking machine manage those books. It’s a dirty job, but who says some body has to do it?
Thanks to remarkable changes in human industry, we’re now embarking on a new age of free time and opportunity. Rising salaries and lightening loads, greater automation and smarter factories mean that we are getting more and more work done with less and less…well, work. And that’s a very good thing, whatever class you’re in…
The last few hundred years have witnessed the advent of unparalleled labor-saving devices, each helping to lift mankind’s oldest burden. And the more we come out from under the yoke, the more energy we have left over to make the next generation’s lives a little lighter and more interesting. Modern business is intent on freeing people for what they do best: thinking, creating, relaxing, enjoying . . .
Class warfare? You bet! And we won’t stop fighting until everybody’s a member of the leisure class.
(ANIMATED FILM, 1963)
The hospital sends a nurse to her home every afternoon. It’s an afterthought, a kind of apology. Why they call it managed care. First a scared one named Maria, then a brisk one named Catherine, then a condescending one named Hope.
Overnight, the sciatica in her leg shuts down all walking. The least weight shoots a column of liquid fire up her spinal cord into her brain. Her doctors cannot say why this is happening, and she doesn’t make them guess. One week later, her left arm no longer has the strength to roll its side of the wheelchair. She can still move, but only in slow counterclockwise circles.
They install a hospital bed in the den. Motor-controlled: the head rises, propping her until she can look out on the newly turned earth where her daughter has scattered an awkward potpourri. She sits up in bed and watches a squirrel unbury a nut from a tiny pothole in the middle of the road, a hiding place so cagey even he forgot about it all winter.
They outfit her with a Porta Potti. She reads or listens to the radio or dozes. Ellen sits at her bedside, amusing her with tales from the vortex of high school: who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out.
The room turns into a crazed curatorial collection before her eyes. All day long, she names the eight hundred objects she can see. She excuses each one, ticks them off against the checklist of her existence: wedding gift, birthday, emergency replacement, mail order, free sample, garage sale, something the kids dragged home. The world is her spent purchase, by turns sweet, sour, pointless, urgent, refreshing, dull . . .
She studies this plenty. She looks on it at dawn, midday, dusk. Vertical light filters in through the blind slats at 4 p.m., settling the hodgepodge into a still life of inscribed beauty. Each thing, a mute and vulnerable need awaiting its annihilation, and how can she go on breathing?
She presses the button on the bed motor and lowers her head to the horizontal. Then she can see nothing but her own confinement and a thin crack of sky through the window’s corner. She studies the little patch of sky, searching it for clues, for additives that shouldn’t be there: diffusing, invisible, a stealth air force.
Bored, frantic, amused, appalled, miffed, distracted. Why this odd persistence of expectation, these bursts of unthinkable pleasure? Nothing seems to add up, to join itself to anything bigger, anything large enough to keep pace with what’s happening. The sheets chafe her skin. The metal springs of the hospital bed cut into her rump. Her body feels like an impulse purchase, two days after the free return period.
People call. Some people even come by. If they call first, she tells them it’s not a great day. Maybe next week, when she’s feeling a little better. “Keep your spirits up,” people tell her. She tells them she will.
She watches the daytime soaps, but she cannot follow them. In the station breaks, she collects herself. Human temperament is not only its own jury and executioner. It also writes the criminal code, runs its own slate of judges, and railroads them into office on bought votes.
The hospital installs a device to load and unload her from the bed. A personal crane, an ingenious combination of design and new alloys. Don comes by to learn the seventeen steps required to lift her from lying to upright. He slips the canvas sling under her, hooks the rings, winches her upright, locks the cross braces, raises her from the bed, removes the wheelchair arm, swings her in a gentle arc, and lowers her down into the chair, shaking from the ordeal.
He wheels her into the front room, now farther than Paris. So many exhausting diversions. By the time they get her staked out in a corner, ready for a chat, talking has become too great an effort. The words don’t catch anymore. They slide out of her throat on little bubbles of phlegm. Don tries not to make her repeat anything, although she knows he’s not catching all she says.
They try to eat dinner together. Don rushes around preparing, dolling up the TV trays with sprigs of parsley and pocket carnations. She grows hungry again, against her will. She struggles to balance the tray on the arms of her wheelchair. She cranes the food to her mouth, each bite a labor of complex engineering.
The spoon falls from her hand, of its own accord. She watches it in slow motion, tumbling end over end, cascading down her front, bouncing off her immobile leg, and delivering its payload of gazpacho to the ivory rug. Don is up in a flash, chasing remedies, cold water, salt, stain removers. She watches him, a comedy of manners whose plot she can no longer follow.
“Don. Don.” She feels her face from the inside, wet, slurried, broken. Forget about the rug. Fix my hand.
The outing is over. Don cleans up after her as best he can. He wheels her back to her bower. In the room, he stares despondently at the personal crane, all the steps it will take to get her back into bed.
“To hell with it,” he says. “Who needs this piece of crap?” He slats his arms under her and lifts her, over the edge of the bed, as he once did. They bump against each other like strangers on a bus, despite themselves, forced together by circumstance.
He has lifted her before, no end of times, back when there was some substance to her. But he underestimates how much harder it is to dead-lift a rag doll that cannot adjust its center of mass, cannot assist even by shifting. Harder than a sprawled sack, for she is splayed. He scoops her from the chair, takes two steps, staggers. They start to go down together. He pins her to the side of the bed, his back ruptured. He struggles underneath to hoist her, half–fireman’s carry, back to safety.
She lies where he manages to place her, furious with shame. What are they waiting for? She’s sick of the long lesson. She knows everything; she’s ready to graduate. She looks up, fixing him in her gaze. Her eyes are big, inverse to what they can see now.
“Why does it have to be this hard?”
She has felt pain before, but never like this. Tenderness flares into a gouge grinding deep into her bone. Each breath is a band saw; there’s no longer enough space in her chest for any more air. Some hours, agony blinds her: in her leg, in her belly, her lungs, throat, brain. Soon enough, she loses whole afternoons to sharp crescents of black. The pain digests her. It smelts her words back down into a slag of vitreous thought. She calls out in her sleep, biting her pillow when she comes to, to keep from waking anyone.
A little Baggie of diced oregano materializes one morning on her bedside table. She whiffs it; it smells like college. It seems to be there for a reason, the postscript of an ancient conversation she can’t retrieve. It must have come from Ellen. All the old nightmares about her daughter revive: the various slides to disaster. Even worse, her girl might settle into her mother’s naïve good citizenship. No place, no useful, middle place to live. She puts the Baggie in a bedside drawer, for safekeeping.
Instead, at Dr. Archer’s suggestion, she skips right to morphine. Doseless doses at first; 5 mg orally in the morning, when things get bad. And then again at night, if she needs it to sleep. Somehow, despite everything, she still wants to be clear. But untreated pain is even harder on clarity than the drug.
She tries to reach Dr. Archer, but cannot. She leaves a message with the nurse. Some lives later, the nurse gets back to her: she can go as high as 10 mg every four hours, if she needs to.
She saves it up. She takes to counting. All sorts of calculations. Times since her last pill. Since her last bowel movement. Minutes until the nurse or Don will show. Seconds until the kids get home. How many miles, how many feet she is away from her mother’s grave, her father’s. Calculates for as long as she can, to prove to herself she is still lucid. She asks for a calculator and a number two pencil, keeps them ready on the equipment rack, next to the Porta Potti that Don has rigged up for her.
She watches TV, but cannot concentrate on it. The news stories don’t make sense. People who blow up buildings to keep them out of the hands of Big Government. A conditioner that knows exactly how much conditioning your hair needs. Even her beloved old films, a jumble: Hope and Crosby on the Road to Damascus.
Don seems to be around a lot. “Are you sleeping here?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes.”
“Where?” she asks, amazed.
He bares his palms. “Upstairs.”
That’s right; she doesn’t sleep there anymore.
“Don’t worry,” he assures her. “I’m changing the sheets.”
Where did we think we were? What did we think we were doing? She issues all the parts of a laugh, but her throat won’t assemble it.
She learns to save her voice for the essentials. “Is it time for my pill?” she whispers to Don one evening. She’s pushing it, but hopes he’ll spring for the fifteen minutes.
“Say again?”
“Is it time for my pill?”
“You just took it.”
“Just? No. Are you sure?”
“Maybe an hour ago.”
She gets lost on that word, “hour.” Soon enough, she loses the day. She’s pretty sure about the month, still. Then she’s not sure about anything.
“Laura?” Don says to her, another evening. So politely, she knows she doesn’t want to de
al with it. But it’s not what she thinks. “Lo? Clare . . . has offered a settlement. Out of court. It’s not . . . not what it should be. And there’s no . . . admission. But they’ve mentioned a significant sum.”
“Settled? What does that mean?”
“It means they want to stop things. It means they don’t think they can beat the suit in court.”
It means no such thing. It means that the common stock has fallen to unacceptable levels. It means an offer is the more cost-effective solution.
She looks at this man, his diligent dispatches. He wants her to be happy. Has worked for this. Lobbied. She wants to be happy for him. The survivors always have the hardest row.
“Thank you,” she tries. “For everything.”
Outside, the night is howling. A night that makes you bless the invention of houses.
“Don’t you want me to tell you how much?”
She cannot. Cannot want to know. Even for him. Even for the children. She’s done with how much. She lets her head rock from side to side, like a lullaby. It hurts her throat to move, even a little.
“I don’t understand you,” he whispers. “What do you want?” Gentler still: “What do you need, Lo?”
She thinks how she would say it, if she could still say things.
“I want the president . . . I want the . . . chief to come sit here. In my house. Tell me why this happened.” She wants what it promises, in that naturalist’s log: the wrongful users of the magic plant, answering to her.
Hock it, Shock it, Squeeze it, Tease it!
Infiltrate, Confabulate, Equilibrate, Defibrillate!
Knead it, Pleat it, Seed it, Eat it:
K N I C K - K N O C K E R S !
(Now with a quarter of your RDA of Beta Carotene,
not to mention a whole grit brickload of other celebrated antioxidants)
Throughout most of the 1960s, Clare faced a persistent cash flow problem. It did not know what to do with all the cash flowing in. And for most of the 1960s, the best answer anyone could come up with was to spend it.
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