by Kit Reed
“We told you. Traveling. Grandparents love traveling.”
“And yours?”
“They love it too.”
“Have you seen them?”
Betz is uneasy now. “Not lately.”
“Are you sure they’re OK?”
“Sure they are,” Danny says, “we just don’t see them. They’re out going around the world!”
“Yeah, right,” Gloria says. “The postcards. Have you gotten any postcards lately?”
“I, uh.” At a nudge from Danny, Betz says, “Not a lot. Well, there was one.
“And the handwriting?”
“It didn’t have handwriting, it was the menu from this special restaurant but, hey. We did get a picture.”
“And the picture?”
“It was a picture of the restaurant.” Betz can hear her voice sink. “And somebody typed the names.”
“My point.”
“Oh, maaaan.”
Dave covers her hand with his.
Protected by shadows, Betz turns her hand so she can close her fingers around his and cling; she subsides, quiet for now, and profoundly grateful.
“See,” Gloria says into the silence that follows, “in the world according to the perfect body, grandparents don’t look so good walking around. Even if they do take care of themselves. In fact, after a certain point, old people have gotta be unsightly. It’s built into the operating system, which didn’t used to be such a huge problem. But now.”
Long pause. She is stringing them out on long pauses.
“When you have a perfect world, there’s no room in it for old people.” It’s an effort for her, but she goes on bravely. “I mean, old people like me.”
“You’re not old.”
“Thanks, sweetie. I’m old, even though I try like hell not to look it. But you can’t wash the gray away, not really, and you can only have so many nips and tucks before you run out of face to work with. The whole thing starts to go to hell on you and that looks bad, and you can only take so many vitamins and work out for so many hours a day and that is a holding action only and no matter how hard you try or how hard you work, sooner or later your body starts going to hell and that looks bad.” She goes on in a brave little voice that doesn’t quite make it. “When you start looking bad, there is no stopping it. You can only hide it for a little while. I hate to tell you, but sooner or later the world out there is going to notice and when it does, well, that’s when you …”
She doesn’t need to finish. The sense of what she’s telling them rolls over her and for the moment, knocks her speechless.
For a long time nobody speaks. Finally Dave lays out a path of words like stepping-stones. “Then you. Um. Go traveling.”
“That’s what they call it, yes.”
“But they want to go traveling. They save up for it all their lives and we give them parties,” Betz says, “the grands, I mean. They sell the house and move into condos and we give them housewarming parties and going-away parties and—”
“Right,” Gloria says. “It starts with the condos, next it’s the colonies like Scottsdale and West Palm, so they’ll be free to travel, and then there are the cruises.”
There is a moment when they think she’s done talking forever. Like guests at a funeral, they fidget. Out of Right Things to say.
As it turns out, Gloria is only gathering herself. “Take, for instance, Carnival Cruises. Did you ever hear of the Ship of Fools?”She is talking over their heads and she knows it. She stops and starts again. “OK, where are your grandparents now?”
“They’re, um. On a trip.”
“Yeah,” Betz says. “They’re on a trip.”
“A trip. Right.” Danny’s voice is falling downhill and their hearts go with it. “They have to be.”
“OK.” Gloria clears her throat with a fake cough and starts the motor. “OK. I’m finished.”
They drive back to the Crossed Triceps without speaking. There are too many unanswered questions bobbing around in the hermetically sealed car.
As they roll into the pink glow of the sodium-vapor lights, Gloria puts on the brake and clears her throat for the Farewell Address. “I just want to thank you kids—sorry, people! I want to thank you people for coming with me on trust and thanks for listening and now I guess we’ll just go back inside and then I’ll have to … Oh, never mind.”
“Wait a minute,” Betz says. “This is terrible, and everything, and when we get home I’m calling Grandma Abercrombie right away to make sure she’s all right, and if she isn’t … If something awful’s happening we’ll call the FBI! We’ll get help and all, I promise, but Ma’am, when you stopped us, we were in the middle of something else.”
“But you came with me!”
“Maybe we thought you were …” Betz is trying to think of a safe way to say it, but there isn’t one. She shrugs. “But I guess you aren’t.”
“I’m not what?”
“Part of it.”
“Part of what?”
Something in Gloria’s tone makes Betz turn to Dave.
Grinning, he shrugs. It’s worth a try.
Oh, Dave, she thinks with a little shiver. We’re practically telepathic! With her heart lifting, she says to Gloria, “The. Um. You know, and if you don’t …” She is thinking hard. How to put this, in case this woman Gloria’s—what, not really old? Not really old and working for whoever are the bad guys? Some kind of counterspy. But she has to proceed, she thinks. They’ve been stalled at the Crossed Triceps for too long and they’ll be here forever if they don’t do something. At the flimsy motel back in Mexican Hat Sister Philomena warned, Good or bad, your allies and enemies won’t reveal themselves all at once, so proceed carefully. “Have you ever, um. Does this mean anything to you? This word?”
“What word?”
She still has the aspen bark Theophane gave her. At the Carmelite hideout, Sister Philomena handed it back to her with a Greek word burned on the back. Password, she guesses. “Um.” God, am I saying it right? “Like.” She closes her eyes and pronounces it phonetically, sort of the way Philomena said it: ick-thoos. “Ichthus?”
“Holy Flowbie. You’re the ones!” Gloria guns the motor and, electrified, roars out of the parking lot and takes them hurtling along the southbound road. “Why in God’s name didn’t you say so up front?”
25
When Earl Sharpnack’s mother died they had to take out the side of the house to remove the body; they did it on one of those hydraulic platforms that comes in on a flatbed truck and it took four firemen to roll her off the bed, where she had spent all her days and nights for as long as little Earl could remember, where he could go in any time he wanted and she was everything to him. Because she was too big to walk Mom took her meals there, and elimination? He was too young to know but he thinks there was something about tubes and drains. Mom was always sweet and clean in spite of the amount of food she brought into the bed, which was prodigious. She liked company when she ate and the atmosphere Earl grew up in was dense with the rich, complex aromas of mealtimes and the sweet, kind words of his loving mother, and the best part? The very best part? When he was sick or miserable because of something at school, she would take him into the bed with her, all warm and comfy and soothing. He never slept so well.
In the end, of course, her body got so big that it killed her. The weight of her breasts and belly piled up and gathered momentum and rolled in on her. Over time the big, soft parts of her body pressed so hard on her lungs that for years, every breath was an effort. That particular night, they compressed one last time and never expanded again. They in the family who had lived with her for so long told each other that it must have happened instantly, and that it was peaceful. Usually his big sisters went in and got her up but that morning they had things to do and left the house early, escaping into their jobs. They weren’t even home when she died. It was Earl who found her. He went in to kiss her good morning and she was dead. If he’d slept in her room last night, if he’d
been there to hear her next-to-last gasp when it came, could he have called the doctor in time to save her? Could he have saved her life? For years, the question has haunted him. I’ll make it up to you, he promised her, has promised on his knees beside the bed at bedtime every night of his life since then. Guilt rolled in and rattled him to the foundations. I’ll make it up to you.
Guilt is a mighty catalyst. Earl Sharpnack’s financial empire is built on it. Oh sure he started out vowing that he would change the world so that terrible murder of a person by that person’s own body would never happen to anybody ever again. He thought of his first crusade as an altruistic gesture. He would make them safe! HAPPY, he promised, BEAUTIFUL, and most important, THIN. He preached and they came. Good, he thought, I am doing the people everlasting good. Who knew it would make him rich?
Of course he owes it all to Mom. It’s growing up with Mom that made him such a passionate and potent speaker, because she had a gift for words and an amazing power of speech. Musical, the woman was musical. In the day, which was well before Earl was born but went on long after she stopped walking, Mom wanted to be a country music singer. Long before she hit puberty and married Ogden Sharpnack and got pregnant and ruined her figure, little Roberta Chappel was a hit. Even after she had the babies and gained the weight and their father that bastard left her, she had a beautiful voice. By the time they got the divorce she was too big to go out and get work in any club but she made a couple of singles and Earl Sharpnack has them still. When she stopped going out and no more record offers came she sang for her family, Earl remembers that sweet voice curling up through the trees in the soft summer nights, the siren song of his childhood. Mom sang for her husband and when he left she sang for poor little Earl and his angry big sisters. When she didn’t have enough breath to push one more song out of that tremendous belly, she told stories and she told them beautifully. She spoke of men and angels and places she had been and places she’d wanted to go ever since she had begun singing. She spoke like an angel, and curled in her shadow, little Earl learned how to enthrall and captivate and lure the world to his door without even realizing that she was teaching him. He just breathed it in.
He can still hear her in his head when he goes to bed most nights.
When they took her away on that sad morning, every kid on his street turned out to watch, the removal was on TV and hundreds of people the Sharpnacks had never seen or heard of before turned out for the funeral, which was even harder to bring off because of the size of the excavation and the bulky, custom-made coffin and the fact that casting a casket big enough had occupied the foundry for days, a special gift from the town fathers. They came from as far as the next county to watch. For weeks afterward, Earl walked to school with a brown paper bag over his head, like, if the other kids couldn’t see his face, they wouldn’t know it was him and if they did, they would never guess that underneath the brown bag, he was red with shame.
Protected by the bag, ‘Earl went along sobbing and promising, Mom. Oh, Mom! humming a little threnody of grief and guilt. I promise I’ll make it up to you.
In the night he still sees his mother’s sweet, dead face and the look in her glazed, dead eyes the last time he saw her. The complete failure of light. The light of his life, and she went out. She turned into clay! How could he do that to the woman he loved more than anybody? How could he let her die while he slept in another room? Now that he is grown himself and a major figure in the world, the Reverend Earl knows that it’s not his fault that Mom died. It was never his fault. In a way, it was hers, for letting herself get that way. She gave in to the desires of her body and her body killed her, and this is what troubles him even now: could he have stopped her? So this is the double-edged sword he takes into battle. The blade is sharpened by his sense of mission and the disgust.
Nobody has to be like that.
Nobody.
Still raw on the inside and aching with loss, Earl Sharpnack went to divinity school, but that wasn’t God sitting heavily on his mind. It was an interest in evangelical methods. He needed the tools to do what he needed to do. Issue the call. Make them listen. Make them come. Make certain nobody ever again lets themselves get that way. At least nobody you will ever see out there walking around loose in America as we’ve come to know it, all of you customers squirming in the flesh of your excesses and anxious to run to the gym so you can atone.
Nobody has to be like that. You hear that, Mother? Nobody has to be like that.
Fresh out of divinity school, he took up the cry. It was his holy, sacred mission. Interesting, how right he was for the culture, in which a collision of messages brings you franchise food featuring fried everything, ads for all good things that happen to make you fat, peopled with model-slim actors to prove that you can eat everything you want and still be buff and perfect, like them. The right man came out of the wilderness at the right time and began speaking his mind to the people at exactly the right time.
And this is the surprise. Earl Sharpnack didn’t need to think twice about pitching to the right people. When it comes to body image, everybody starts on the same page. HAPPY was his mantra and his rallying cry. BEAUTIFUL. And before that or above it, streaming over his head like a banner, THIN. As it turns out, it’s everybody else’s too. The Reverend Earl—when did he become a reverend?—the Reverend Earl spoke and the world listened. He made promises and they came.
“Thin?” they asked.
“Thin.”
“Really, really thin?”
And the Reverend Earl promised, “Really, really thin.”
“Thinner than we are now?”
“Thinner than everybody!” His eyes swept the middle-sized crowd of oversized followers and a slogan was born. His eyes caught fire and his voice cut through to the heart of them. He thrilled as he said it. “THINNER THAN THOU.”
A hundred voices shouted, “Thinner than thou!” Before long the chorus would swell to millions.
From the smallest sparks great enterprises spring.
This one is huge.
In the States alone, there is Sylphania. There are the day spas and distribution points for the formula and the infomercials that spawned the virtual Church of the Afterfat, but that’s just nickel-and-dime stuff to the Reverend Earl. There are also the franchises. The installations, and more. Like an iceberg, only a fraction of the business is visible above the surface, and like icebergs, it’s hard to see until you’re too close to turn back: Then, of course, there is the new firm the Reverend Earl is mounting, right now it’s called Solutions, but depending on demand, that may change. It’s still in the experimental stage, but it’s going to be big. In the pilot groups alone, he’s hearing from some thousand satisfied clients, and this is only the beginning. There are as well the volunteers, and their legacies alone … The possibilities are staggering.
What he does with it—what happens next, is his to decide.
Precarious and wonderful, being at the top of the world.
He, Earl Sharpnack, is the master of the enterprise, and the enterprise girdles the earth. And in this world according to the Reverend Earl everyone is thin and beautiful for a reason, and nobody has to get ugly because nobody ever gets old. There are no unsightly people and no unhappy ones. And—this is huge. In the world according to the Reverend Earl everyone is perfect. They are perfect for a reason. And the reason is …
Don’t ask. He got where he is today because he came up in the crevice between the rock and the hard place, he struggled out single-handed and unaided, and no matter what comes down in what he thinks of as life after the Afterfat, he is never, ever going back. This, then, is the key. You don’t argue with the force that can move that rock and you don’t get in its way because once he’s moved the first rock, nothing can stop him.
You are in the presence of a man who can move the earth.
If this frightens you, remember, everything the Reverend Earl does is born of love. Poor little Earl loved his mom and he lost her anyway, but she is the last thi
ng he will lose, no matter what the cost.
From a standing start he is worth billions, and this is only the beginning.
Naturally, the pressures are tremendous. Tonight he’s like to die of them.
So many notes coming due, and all at once. So many demands on his time. Gavin Patenaude may help, now that he’s an archangel, but that tone he came in with when he reported, can he be trusted? Can any of them that he’s brought into the clubhouse and elevated in rank? He thinks his people are loyal, but for all he knows they’re like sharks circling the tank, waiting for the first sign of blood because it is well known that if you falter, if the first hint of blood stains the water, the sharks will fall on you in seconds and tear you apart.
Bad thoughts. Bad thoughts come in disguised as dreams, just when you imagine you’re protected, warm and comfortable in your very own bed.
Safe in satin sheets in his circular water bed, bobbing on the waves between two of his Earlettes in their sweet little satin chemises, the Reverend Earl shudders in his sleep and wakes up screaming. Electrified and sweating, he sits. Turns on the light. On either side of him tonight’s girls bob in their lacy purple shifts, sleeping like a pair of little angels, which is what they are. They are also not enough. They should be, he understands, but they never are. He lies down with these cute little girls and no matter what they do together, he gets up bereft. OK, he still misses her. He still feels bad. If only he could make it up to her he could lay the guilt and be free!
Trembling, he slides out of bed on a ground swell of warm water rolling under plastic, and like Crusoe leaving the island, takes a moment to look back. Still jiggling from his departure, the gelatinous bed seems to be breathing in and out. In and out. One of the girls stirs. Earl stands without breathing, waiting for her to settle again. Then he drops his satin pajamas and sinks to the rug. He knows what’s coming and he tries to stave it off, but how do you forestall something as basic as need? Naked, he sits on the polar bear rug for a long time, gripping his knees, because in the presence of temptation you have to proceed slowly and after careful thought. Then he reaches for the button in the side of the console bed frame.
