by Tom Hanks
The machines were in a separate little room shared with a small buffet table that held bowls of apples and dispensers of breakfast cereals. I took some of each. One of the vending machines sold pizza by the slice, another offered toiletries, including a few cold remedies. After four tries at getting the machine to accept my crinkled twenty-dollar bill, I bought some capsules, some pills, a few single-dose liquids and something in a small bottle called Boost-Blaster! that bragged of its megadose of antioxidants, enzymes, and whatever good stuff is in Swiss chard and certain fish.
Back up in the room, I made a cocktail of two of every purchase, tearing off the safety foil, figuring out the childproof caps, and chugging down the Boost-Blaster! in one pull.
DAY 18
I woke up with no idea where I was. I heard a shower running. I saw a crack of light from under a door and a stack of textbooks on the nightstand. The bathroom door flew open in a flash of illuminated steam.
“He’s alive!” Anna was naked, drying herself off. She had already been out for a run.
“Am I?” My cold was no better. Not at all. The only new feeling I had was wooziness.
“You took all this stuff?” She waved at the small desk littered with the debris left over from my self-medication.
“Still sick,” I said in feeble self-defense.
“Saying you are still sick makes you still sick.”
“I feel so rotten your logic actually makes sense.”
“You missed it, baby. Last night we went out for organic Mexican food. It was Ricardo’s birthday. There were about forty of us and a piñata. After, we went to a racetrack and drove miniature hot rods. I called you, texted you, but nothing.”
I grabbed my phone. Between 6:00 p.m. and 1:30 in the morning AnnaGraphicControl had called and texted me thirty-three times.
Anna started getting dressed. “You better pack. Gotta check out of here, and then go to Ricardo’s office for a meeting. To the airport from there.”
Anna piloted the PonyCar to an industrial park somewhere in Fort Worth. I sat in the reception area, feeling horrible, blowing my nose again and again, trying to focus on a book about astronaut Walt Cunningham on my Kobo digital reader, but I was just too foggy. I played a game on my phone called 101, answering true/false and multiple-choice questions. True or false: President Woodrow Wilson used a typewriter in the White House. True! He hunted and pecked a speech on a Hammond Type-o-Matic, hoping to drum up support for World War I.
After a long sit I needed some air, so I took a slow walk around the industrial park. Every building looked the same and I got lost. I found my way back when, luckily, I spotted a parked PonyCar that turned out to be ours.
Anna was there, cooling her heels with her clients, waiting for me. “Where were you?”
“Seeing the sights,” I said. She introduced me to Ricardo and thirteen other textbook executives. I shook hands with none of them. I had a cold, you see.
Returning the PonyCar was as effortless as promised, but the courtesy bus to the airline terminal took forever to show up. To make our plane, Anna and I had to run through the DFW airport like two characters from a movie that was about either wacky lovers on vacation or federal agents trying to stop a terrorist attack. We did make the plane, but not in time to get seats together. Anna sat up front, I was way in the back. My clogged ears were killing me on departure and hurt even more hours later on descent.
On the way to my house, she stopped at a liquor store for a small bottle of brandy. She had me drink a large shot of the booze, then put me into bed with a pillow tuck and a kiss on my forehead.
DAYS 19 and 20
I was ill, pure and simple, with bedrest and liquids being the only remedies, as has been the case with colds since the first Neanderthal came down with the sniffles.
Anna, though, had her own ideas. For two days she was on a mission to cure me sooner rather than gradually. She had me sit naked in a chair with my feet in a tub of cold water. She wired up my limbs to something akin to an EKG machine, made me take off any metal I was wearing, which was none, then flipped a switch. I felt nothing.
But in time, the water around my feet turned first murky, then brown, and then began to congeal until the tub looked like the most unappetizing Jell-O mold imaginable. The goop was so thick that pulling my bare feet out was like extracting myself from swamp mud. And the stuff stank!
“That’s the bad juju coming out of you,” Anna said as she flushed the slop down the toilet.
“Out of my feet?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s proven. The bad food you eat, the body poisons and fats. They leach out of your feet.”
“Can I go back to bed now?”
“Just until your steam shower.”
“I don’t have a steam shower.”
“You will.”
Anna installed a series of plastic curtains in my shower with a portable steam maker set on high. I sat in it on a footstool, sweating, until I was able to polish off three big bottles of weak tea of some kind. This took some time, as the tea tasted like gutter water and a man’s bladder can only hold so much gutter water.
An exercise bicycle was delivered. Anna had me ride it every hour and a half for exactly twelve minutes, until I had worked up a sweat to prove I had raised my body temperature.
“This is to cook out the mucus and such,” she said.
For three meals in a row she fed me bowls of watery stew with chunks of beets and celery.
She had me do one-hour, slow-stretch sessions from her iPad, but I had to move exactly as did the instructor on the video.
She plugged in this thing the size of an electric bar of soap that made a humming sound and vibration, a bit of homemade medicine with Russian lettering on the box. She had me lie naked on the floor and rubbed my entire body, both sides, with whatever that thing was. The Commie machine made different sounds over different parts of my body.
“Atta baby!” Anna said. “We’re getting to it now!”
Without telling her, I chugged some NyQuil and chewed up a few Sudafeds just before I crawled back into my bed to disappear into the Land of Nod.
DAY 21
I felt better in the morning. My sheets were so damp with my night sweats I could have wrung them out like a chamois.
Anna had left a note taped to my percolator.
Left you sleeping deep and silent. I like you like that. You will no longer be ill if you finish the soup in the refrigerator. Drink it cold in the morning, hot at lunch. Do the exer-bike twice before noon and take an hour for the stretch routine on the link I emailed you. And RE-STEAM, until you’ve downed three bottles of distilled water! Leach that sodium! A.
I was alone in my house on my own terms, so I immediately ignored Anna’s instructions. I had coffee with hot milk. I read an actual print copy of the Times—not the online version, which Anna preferred because newsprint paper was a sin against the earth, regardless of my recycling. I treated myself to a nutritious breakfast of eggs with fried slices of linguica (a Portuguese sausage), a banana, a strawberry Pop-Tart, papaya juice from a carton, and a large bowl of Cocoa Puffs.
I did not do any stretching. I did not get on the stationary bike nor did I go into the plastic steam stall. I did not open her email link, thus stretched not a whit. Instead, I spent the morning doing laundry—four loads, including the bedsheets. I played my mixtape CDs and sang along. I reveled in obeying not a single one of Anna’s commands. I lived the best life imaginable.
Which meant I had answered the question Anna had put to me two weeks earlier: No. I did not think I was the man for her.
When she called to ask how I was, I confessed to ignoring her instructions. I also said that I felt healthy, rested, and like myself and despite how wonderful I thought she was and what a dope I am and blahditty blah-blah dittity-blah.
Before I could muster the vocabulary to actually break up with her, Anna did it for me.
“You are not the man for me, baby.”
There was not a smid
gen of rancor in her voice, neither judgment nor disappointment. She said it straight out of her face in a way I couldn’t. “I’ve known for a while,” Anna said, chuckling. “I was wearing you down. Would have destroyed you over time.”
“When were you going to let me off your hook?” I asked.
“If you hadn’t backed out by Friday morning, we’d have had the Talk then.”
“Why Friday morning?”
“Because Friday night I’m going back to Fort Worth. Ricardo is taking me hot-air ballooning.”
A bit of my man-pride had me instantly hoping that this Ricardo fellow would not be the man for Anna, either.
—
He wasn’t. Anna never told me why.
For the record, I did get my scuba certificate. Anna and I joined Vin and a dozen other divers, offshore in the kelp beds. We breathed underwater, swimming through what looked like a tall forest of sea trees. There’s a great picture of Anna and me, on board afterward, our wet-suited arms around each other and big smiles on our cold, wet faces.
We leave for Antarctica next week. Anna arranged a big shopping spree, seeing to it that we have all the necessary gear. She spent extra time with MDash, making sure he was going to have enough layers to stay warm. He’s never been to a place cold enough for chinstraps and crabeaters.
“Antarctic Circle, make way,” I hollered, modeling my green parka and shell. Anna laughed.
We’ll fly to Lima, Peru, then change planes for Punta Arenas, Chile, where we’ll board a boat to make the crossing from South America to the old science station at Port Lockroy, our first stop. The seas in the Drake Passage can get pretty rough and tumble, they say. But with a strong sail, a firm wheel, a true compass, and a reliable clock, our ship will journey south, bound for the Antarctic Circle and adventure galore.
Oh, yeah. For B15K, as well.
Christmas Eve 1953
Virgil Beuell didn’t close the shop until nearly dinnertime, when a light snow began falling. The road back home was slick and getting slicker so he drove slowly, wonderfully easy to do in the Plymouth with the PowerFlite automatic transmission. No clutch, no shifting, an engineering marvel. Skidding off the icy road and getting stuck in the snow would be a disaster tonight; in the Plymouth’s trunk were all the treasures due in the morning from Santa, kept hidden and undiscovered there since the kids had declared their wishes weeks ago. Those presents had to be under the tree in a few hours, and transferring them from the trunk of a snowbound car to the cab of a tow truck would alter Christmas Eve horribly.
The drive home took longer than usual, sure, but the length of the trip did not bother Virgil. The cold was what he hated. PowerFlite or not, he often cursed the folks at Plymouth, who were unable to build a car with a heater worth a damn. By the time he slowly pulled up to the house and the yellow spread of the headlamps played on the screen of the back porch and there was the hush of tires coming to a stop on the gravel drive, he was aching slightly from the cold. Virgil had to be extra careful not to slip on the front walkway, as he had done too many times before, but he still got inside the house as fast as a working man could.
As he stamped the snow off his overshoes and hung up his layers of warm clothing, Virgil’s body softened in the warmth pumping up from the cellar through the grates. After buying the house, he self-installed a furnace that was far oversized for the modest home. He put in, too, a beast of a hot-water heater, a commercial unit that never, ever ran out of the liquid heaven that allowed for the kids’ baths and his own long showers. The winter fuel bills were worth the comfort, as was the price of two cords of firewood every winter.
A fire was going in the family room. He had taught Davey how to build one by stacking the wood the way he did his toy Lincoln Logs, like a square house around the kindling, never a pyramid. The kid now viewed making the fire as his sacred duty. Come the first frosts of November, the Beuell home was the warmest place for miles and miles.
“Dad!” Davey came running from the kitchen. “Our plan is working great. Jill is completely fooled.”
“Good news, Big Man,” Virgil said, giving his boy the secret handshake known in the entire world only by the two of them.
“I told her we’d write the Santa letters after dinner, then lay out some snacks, just like you did with me when I was little.” Davey was turning eleven in January.
Jill was setting the kitchen table, her specialty being the straightening of napkins and silverware. “My daddy is home, hooray hooray,” the six-year-old said, lining up the last of the spoons.
“He is?” Delores Gomez Beuell asked, standing as she cooked at the stove, baby Connie straddling the nooks of her elbow and hip. Virgil gave each of the women in his life a kiss.
“So he is,” Del said, pecking him back, then dishing fried potatoes with onions onto a platter and getting it to the table. Davey brought his father a can of beer from the new, huge Kelvinator and ceremonially levered the two opposing openings in the top with a church key, another sacred duty.
Dinnertime with the Family Beuell was a show. Davey was in and out of his chair—the kid never sat through a meal. Connie squirmed in her mother’s lap, content with a spoon she worked around in her mouth or banged on the table. Del cut food for the kids, wiped up spills, placed bits of mashed-up potato into Connie’s mouth, and, occasionally, had a bite herself. Virgil ate slowly, never repeating a bite of any one food, but working his fork around his plate in a circle as he enjoyed the theater that was his family.
“I’m telling ya, Santa needs only three cookies.” Davey was explaining, for Jill’s sake, the facts surrounding the evening’s expected visitor. “And he never finishes a whole glass of milk. He’s got so much to do. Right, Dad?”
“So I hear.” Virgil gave his son a wink that Davey tried to return, but he could only scrunch up the one side of his face to force one eye closed.
“Anyways, everyone leaves him the same snack.”
“Everyone?” Jill asked.
“Everyone.”
“I can’t figure out when he comes. When does he show up?” Jill needed to know.
“Not at all if you don’t touch your dinner.” Del tapped Jill’s plate with her fork and separated some of her potato from her meat. “Bites get Santa here sooner.”
“Right when we all go to bed?” Jill asked. “We have to be sleeping, right?”
“Could be anytime between bedtime and when we wake up.” Davey had answers for every one of his sister’s queries. Since he had figured out the deal with Santa over the summer, Davey had assigned himself the task of keeping his little sister a believer.
“That could be hours. If his milk sits out too long, it’ll go bad.”
“He can make it cold with just a touch! He just sticks his finger in a glass of warm milk and does a whooshy thing and boom. Cold milk.”
Jill found that fact amazing. “He must drink a lot of milk.”
After dinner Virgil and the kids did KP, Jill standing on a chair over the sink drying the forks and spoons one by one while Del was upstairs putting the baby down and grabbing a short, much-needed nap. Davey opened his father’s final can of beer for the night and set it on the telephone table right beside what was called Daddy’s Chair in the front room, by the fire. Once Virgil was sitting and sipping, Davey and Jill lay in front of the phonograph and played Christmas records. With the room lights off, the tree threw colored magic onto the walls. Jill found Virgil’s lap while her brother played the Rudolph record over and over until they knew all the words and started adding their own.
Had a very shiny nose.
“Like a lightbulb!”
Used to laugh and call him names.
“Hey, Knothead!”
When it came to the line about going down in history, they yelled out, “And arithmetic!”
Del came downstairs, laughing. “What would you goofballs make of ‘Joy to the World’?” She took a sip from Virgil’s beer before sitting in her corner of the sofa, tapping a cigarette from he
r leather case with the snap clasp, and lighting it with matches from the ashtray set beside the phone.
“Davey, poke that log a bit, would you?” Virgil said.
Jill perked up. “Lemme poke the fire!”
“After me. And don’t worry. Santa’s boots are fireproof.”
“I know. I know.”
After Jill took her turn stabbing the fire, Del sent the kids upstairs to change into their pj’s.
Virgil finished his beer, then went to the hall closet to pull out the portable Remington typewriter. Delores had bought the machine brand new for Virgil when he was in the Army hospital on Long Island, New York. He had typed letters to her with his one good hand until the therapists taught him to use what he called five-and-a-half-finger touch typing.
He took the writing machine out of its case on the low coffee table and rolled in two sheets of paper, one on top of the other—always two sheets so as not to damage the platen.
“Leave your messages for St. Nick or Father Christmas or whatever his name is,” he told the kids when they came back downstairs smelling of toothpaste and fresh, clean flannel.
Jill wrote hers first, one clack at a time, letter by letter, key by key.
dear santaa clas thank you for coiming again and thank you for the nurse kit and my Honey Walker I hpoe you give me bothh merry chirstmas I love you JILL BEUELL
For his letter Davey insisted on his own separate piece of paper. He told Jill that he didn’t want to confuse Santa. Getting the two pages into the typewriter and lined up straight took him a few tries.
12/24/53
Dear Santa Clause. My sister Jill believes in you and so. Do I. still. You know what I want for this chrismas and believe me you have NEVER DISAPPOINTMED ME..!’’Hear is some cold milk of course and ‘snack cakes’ thar tar also called cookies. Next year you have to bring presents for baby Connie beecause she will be old enuogh by then Okay????? if the milek is warm make it cold with yuor finger.
