Starting from Happy
Page 12
“A car,” said Imogene. “We’ll buy you a car.”
“If I don’t go to college, I don’t need a car,” said Bounce, as if he were coming up with a helpful solution. “I’ll use your car.”
“A speedboat?” said Imogene.
“How about if we all fill them out together?” said Wally. “We can order Chinese.”
570.
One night, without being prodded, Bounce completed his application to the only college to which he intended to apply. The essay question was: “Creative people often state that taking risks often promotes important discoveries which oftenly occur in their personal or intellectual life. In your opinion, what is the greatest risk you ever took?”
Bounce’s essay consisted of the following two words:
“Up yours.”
571.
The day would come and the day did come when the impeccable LinLin at last gave her mother grief. LinLin, though only a college junior, came home for the winter holidays with a diamond ring. “Maybe you should keep it in the box,” Imogene said when LinLin showed her parents the surprise.
“Oh, Mom,” said LinLin.
572.
LinLin’s betrothed, Igor Flatev, had come to this country from Russia when he was ten, fleeing the oppression of the state and his parents. Iggy had made his way to Minnesota, where he convinced the first Slavic lady he ran into that he was her third cousin twice removed. She and her husband took the immigrant in, and raised him as if he were their son, with one exception: Iggy was required to take out the garbage.
573.
Iggy did as he was told—and told Wally and Imogene of his suffering.
574.
LinLin wrote a poem featuring Iggy’s suffering. Nonrhyming—“but only in a literal sense,” she said.
575.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Tell me if you find my lost …*
576.
Imogene was not inclined to be positive about what would likely ensue. “She’s not even twenty,” Imogene said to Wally in the kitchen one night as they were cleaning up after dinner.
“Just because you don’t want to get married,” said Wally, “doesn’t mean the world can’t. Where does salt go?” Wally looked around, and then, taking a gamble, put the salt shaker in the cabinet with the cereal.
“Why can’t she get into something reasonable?” said Imogene, sorting the silverware. “Like kleptomania.” She handed Wally the steak knives, pointing to the cutlery drawer.
577.
“Or sadism.”
578.
Poor LinLin. It wasn’t long before Igor Flatev left her for an etiquette coach.
578.2
How impolite.
579.
Hadn’t Imogene shown sufficient sympathy? She thought so. Wally had a different opinion. “When your daughter calls to say that she’s just been dumped by her fiancé,” Wally said, perching himself on the edge of the bed, “can’t you think of something to say besides ‘He smelled like canned beets’?”
580.
Bounce was off seeing the world. He’d seen it before.
581.
In the Virgin Islands, of all places, Bounce met a virgin from the Principality of Andorra. Her English was spotty, but so was Bounce’s. They had Not Communicating in common. The young woman’s name was Uxue, which in English means nothing.
Uxue had ended up living in the Virgin Islands owing to an airline mix-up. At the airport, on her way from Andorra to Portugal to study gemology, Uxue had volunteered to give up her seat on an overbooked flight in return for a ticket on a later plane and a voucher for a moist towelette. She did not object when she learned that the later flight was headed somewhere she had not planned to go. Ever.
582.
A pouty-lipped brunette with a bone structure unequaled among the higher primates and a dimple in the right place, Uxue is, hands down, the best-looking character in this book.
583.
No character herein would dare claim otherwise, except maybe Gwen Dworkin.
584.
Gwen has issues.
585.
Not long after Bounce met X, as he affectionately called her, they were “doing it” night and day.
586.
What a difference a few years and good sense make. This time, when Imogene learned that one of her children was engaged, she showed her true colors and continued turning the pages of a magazine. It was not that Imogene had changed her mind about holy matrimony, but with LinLin it had been different. Imogene had had high hopes for LinLin, whereas Bounce …
587.
Also, LinLin had been younger. To be sure, everyone had.
588.
“Nice,” Imogene said to Bounce when he called from a beach in the Caribbean with the big news. Imogene returned to “The Revolution of Mascara.”
Wally beamed as he listened in on the speakerphone. “How about that?” Wally said.
“Yeah,” said Imogene. “That’s pretty great.”
“Um,” said Bounce over the phone. Then Bounce said “um” again.
589.
There was a commotion on the other end of the line.
“Hello there, ancestors,” said Uxue. “Like I much, um, sooner, wow!”
“I may have some ideas about the caterer,” said Imo-gene. “But I don’t know who eats these days.”
After everyone had hung up, Wally said, “Well, she seemed terrific.”
“Wal,” said Imogene, “you think she sounded pregnant?”
590.
591.
In Terminal B, Imogene and Wally collected the happy couple. Bounce was the only passenger in baggage claim who had no baggage. Amended: Bounce had a fiancée who came with loads of lavish baggage. “Where’s your tooth-brush?” Imogene said to her son after she gave him a hug, unrumpled his jacket, and assessed his beard.
“Thailand?” said Bounce.
592.
Relating to grown-up children can be awkward and make you feel old. The parent must disguise her feelings of disappointment, resist the urge to carp, and figure out what words to say to this person who went away as flesh and blood, full of promise, and came back a disgusting stranger, more or less your age.
593.
“So,” said Imogene, sitting across from Bounce and X in the living room, “they must have delicious pineapple in the Virgin Islands.”
Wally appeared with an armful of leather-bound volumes. “Who wants to see photos of the best boy in history?” Bounce’s da-da said buoyantly.
594.
No more pretending it’ll all turn out okay.
595.
Much is made, symbolically speaking, of the significance of weather—not just by poets but also by creators of decorative pillows and by wedding toast-makers, for whom atmospheric conditions are to the future as Ouija boards are to the past. Today was no exception. “And so, let us raise our glasses,” said Bounce’s best man, “to a couple whose life together will be a mix of sun and clouds, which will give way to mainly clear skies in the late afternoon and a high of eighty-two.”
596.
We cannot speak of what happened to Bounce and X in their eighties, for that interval is beyond the scope of this tome—indeed, this tome is beyond the scope of this tome. We can, however, say that this day was a happy day, in spite of anthrax and boils.
597.
Everyone was there, aside from Elsie, who later said she’d never received an invitation, and of course, Ron de Jean.
598.
“Im,” said Wally, after the guests had left and the happy hosts were picking up cashew crumbs on the rug, “now that the kids are gone and it’s just the two of us, won’t you say yes?”
599.
“You’re kidding,” Imogene said.
600.
Imogene would have hesitated, but Patty put her (Imogene and Patty’s) foot down just like that.
601.
Imogene was filing tax returns when her mother’
s housekeeper called. Erna Gilfeather had died in her sleep of something icky. Too suffused with ick to repeat here.
602.
“You’re kidding,” Imogene said to the housekeeper.
Is everything a joke to Imogene?
603.
Yes. You bet. Why not?
604.
“Your mother was a fighter,” said the housekeeper. The housekeeper said that Erna Gilfeather’s last coherent words were: “Not yet. Not until I’ve worn the new clothes in my closet.”
605.
The housekeeper sighed. “Your mother is in a better place,” she said, “I mean, where she doesn’t have to worry anymore about dying.”
606.
Imogene stared at the IRS forms on her desk. She had expected her mother to live well into chaplette 609, maybe even eke it out till 610, if you could call literature a life.
607.
Imogene was trying to sleep, counting the grandchildren in her circle who’d been rejected from the nursery school of “their” choice. She felt certain she could get up to seven, but surprised herself by reaching nineteen.
608.
Could she think of the names of fifty-two candy bars? It was worth a try.
609.
But her heart wasn’t in the game. What was so bad about staying awake, anyway?
610.
Imogene recollected the last time she’d seen her mother. Just months ago, they’d taken advantage of the Arbor Day sales to go shopping for bath mats. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Immy,” Mrs. Gilfeather had said as they waited for the sales associate to find a terrycloth oval in ecru (not cream!), “but were your eyebrows always asymmetrical?”
Imogene had turned and directed onto her mother a juvenile pout. “If I don’t tell you the truth, who will?” Mrs. Gilfeather said.
Remembering this now, Imogene thought, “Good question.”*
611.
Imogene got up early and shuffled into the bathroom. She turned on the dimmer light to minimum dim, and took her chances with the mirror. “You again,” Imogene said into the bevel-edged oval she’d picked up in Venice long before she’d known Wally, even before she knew Ron de Jean. Whom had she gone to Venice with? She could not remember a name, or even a face. She could remember telephone numbers, though.
As Imogene searched for the correct emollient in the medicine cabinet, the door opened and Wally edged into the room. “Want to hear something?” he said with bright eyes.
“I already know,” said Imogene.
“I’m in the mood for mocha mousse,” said Wally.
“It’s going to be an easy transition into senility,” thought Imogene.
612.
At a garden party held in celebration of the Sepkowitzes’ thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Imogene and Wally were sipping cocktails by a splotch of pachysandra while, nearby, a bunch of men argued about which of them had the worst heart.
“Angioplasty?” said a smirking bottling plant magnate. “Brushing your teeth is more invasive. I had an angioplasty with a stent, and then they did a triple bypass.”
“Quadruple,” said a rock-and-roll one-hit wonder, tapping his chest vigorously. “Ripped out the veins from my legs and attached them to my coronary arteries.”
“Pff, I’m on my second heart transplant,” said a professor of human resources. “Legally, I’m seven-eighths dead.”
A woman nobody knew approached the group. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I had a leaky valve before any of you could tell your left nut from your right. Ebstein’s anomaly, and it’s congenital.” The woman bid the men adieu, her stilettos sinking into the pachysandra bed as she departed.
Imogene took Wally’s arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Our hearts are fine.”
613.
Wally was still sleeping. He was dreaming that he was sleeping.
When he woke, not in the dream but from the dream, he was so tired, he decided to go back to sleep and pick up in the dream where he left off. But, whoa, did Wally forget about a little thing called time? Reentering REM, Wally dreamed he’d already shaved and showered and was downstairs eating a muffin for breakfast. That morning in real life, Wally, who had had a muffin for breakfast for the last twenty-seven years, went for the cereal. “Why aren’t you having a muffin?” said Imogene.
“To show them,” said Wally.
614.
This raises an interesting ontological question.
615.
What is an ontological question?
616.
The sum of the collective ages in years of the characters, named and unnamed, at this chaplette in time is 3,769.
617.
Imogene was at her desk, sorting through the mail in what used to be LinLin’s room, and even now was painted in teenage vermilion. Perfect LinLin was off in Africa, being a pediatric hematologist. Wally poked his head in the door to ask whether Imogene had seen his reading glasses and also he was wondering who the love of her life was. “Who’s yours?” she said.
618.
Imogene did not say so, but it unsettled her to acknowledge that she did not have a love of her life. “Want to order in tonight?” Imogene said.
(There was no weather that day. The world was room temperature.)
WALLACE YEZ, STABILITY SCIENTIST, FOUND DEAD
Wallace Yez, a neurobiologist whose work in dizziness led to breakthroughs in balance theory (though some put it conversely), died Thursday of natural causes in front of his refrigerator. He was ninety-two.
Yez was perhaps best known for the experiments he conducted at the Futter-Cohan Institute, in which he dropped herring from great heights. “He got a lot of criticism for that study,” said Dr. Sammy Sokolow, a colleague, “but, ultimately, the work helped a lot of fish and led to the development of the Wall-o’-Fun.” Most amusement park experts consider the Wall-o’-Fun to be the most popular ride currently in operation. It has been associated with three fatalities.
“My dad loved life and it really loved him back,” said Wallace Gilfeather-Yez, Jr. In addition to his son, Yez’s survivors include a daughter, LinLin Gilfeather-Yez, and two grandchildren. His wife, Imogene Gilfeather, a former undercover agent, died in February, of a severe case of everything.
CORRECTION: Imogene Gilfeather was not an undercover agent. She designed underwear. In 2002, her company, Featherware, acquired Down There, Limited. Renamed Featherdown Under, the concern, at the time of Imogene Gilfeather-Yez’s death, was the twenty-seventh-largest maker of thongs in the underwear-wearing world.
END HERE
INDEX
Animals (See also vegetables), 19, 32, 58
dwarf (nonanimal), 151
Sarge, remember to feed, 6435/6
Dogg, Snoop; Hawke, Ethan; Wren, Sir Christopher; Bull, Sitting; Minow, Nell; Spiderman, Mr., -236
Batteries, 70
types, 61
manufacturers of, Ω
included, 02/3
Bedwetting
anti-, 12
psychoanalytic underpinnings, 5649
Bernstein, Ron
as Patty’s wonderful agent in the West, ε
Patty’s shopping expeditions with, 3871/5
Doctors, 78, 120, 164, 175, 180, 193
if this is an emergency, call 911
Drugs
legal, 175
illegal, 161
religion considered to be an opiate, 434
Ferrite rods, curved, 42
Graham, Nan
as Patty’s editor (see how to deal with difficult authors), 273/8
Max Perkins, favorable comparison with, π
Hair, 9
Bounce’s, 180
Wally’s, 23, 72
Imogene’s, 3, 6, 7, 22, 27, 29, 80, 91, 107, 147
Ew, is that a …?, 7052/5
Index
heat, silliness of, 71, 80
what it would be like to share one with Wally, 57
Windex, confusion with, Σ
; , xv, 156
Lish, Gordon, 344/51
as Patty’s authority the English in, of whom that is it protects the preposition then root beer with, R2
see beloved, 14.144
no relation (admitted) to Lillian Gish, 14
Martin, Samantha, ℓ
as Scribner editor who did all the work while Patty napped, 434
Moldow, Susan, 3/4
as Patty’s publisher, 4x3+2
heroic effort to save cats in this book, 449.2
Monaghan, Katie, θ