THE LESTER TRAIPSE MEMORIAL PULSE, as Maxine will come to think of it, barely gets onto the local news upstate, forget Canadian coverage or the national wire, before being dropped into media oblivion. No tapes will survive, no logs. Misha and Grisha are likewise edited from the record of current events. Igor tosses hints that they might’ve been reassigned back home, even once again inside the zona, some numbered facility out in the Far East. Like UFO sightings, the night’s events enter the realm of faith. Hill-country tavern regulars will testify that out to some unknown radius into the Adirondacks that night, all television screens went apocalyptically dark—third-act movie crises, semifamous girls in tiny outfits and spike heels schlepping somebody’s latest showbiz project, sports highlights, infomercials for miracle appliances and herbal restorers of youth, sitcom reruns from more hopeful days, all forms of reality in which the basic unit is the pixel, all of it gone down without a sigh into the frozen midwatch hour. Maybe it was only the failure of one repeater up on a ridgeline, but it might as well have been the world that got reset, for that brief cycle, to the slow drumbeat of Iroquois prehistory.
AVI DESCHLER IS COMING HOME from work in a cheerier frame of mind. “The upstate server? No worries, we switched over to the one in Lapland. But the even better news,” hopefully, “is I think I’m gonna get bounced.”
Brooke gazes at her stomach like a geographer with a globe of the world. “But…”
“Nah—wait’ll you hear about the compensation package.”
“Look out for ‘enhanced severance’ language,” Maxine advises, “it means you can’t sue.”
Gabriel Ice, not too mysteriously, has gone silent. Distracted at least, Maxine hopes.
“Tallis ought to be a little safer,” she tries to reassure March. “She’s a good kid, your daughter, not the nitwit she initially comes across as.”
“Better than I ever gave her credit for,” which does come as a surprise, Maxine having assumed that March doesn’t even know how to do remorseful. “Too good for the shitty parent I’ve been. Remember when they were little and still held your hand in the street? I used to pull them along at my speed so they had to skip to keep up, where was I going in such a hurry I couldn’t even walk with my kids?” About to go off into some act of contrition.
“Someday shitty-parent skills will be an Olympic event, the Mishpochathon, we’ll see if you even qualify, meantime lose the holy face, you know you’ve done worse.”
“Much worse. Then I refused to think about it for years. Now it’s like, how can I even—”
“You want to see her more than anything. Look, you’re just nervous, March, why don’t you both come over to my place, it’s a neutral corner, we’ll have coffee, order in lunch,” as it turns out from Zippy’s Appetizing down on 72nd, where a person can still find for example a gigantically overstuffed rolled-beef and chicken-liver sandwich with Russian dressing on an onion roll, a rarity in this town since deep in the last century, in on the paragraph allotted it by the take-out menu Tallis instantly zooms.
“You would actually eat something like that?” March despite a warning glance from Maxine.
“Well, no Mother, I thought I’d just sit and gaze at it for a while, would that be all right?”
March thinking fast, “Only that if you do get one… maybe I could try just a small piece of it? Only if you could spare?”
“How long you been Jewish?” Maxine out the side of her mouth.
“Where do you think I got my eating profile?” Tallis passive-aggressively making with the fingernail. “The meals you would order in, I’d go to the door and find a small crew of delivery kids holding sacks—”
“Two. Maybe. And only that one time.”
“Obesity, cardiac issues, tra-la-la who cares, as long as the quantity’s right, eh Mother?”
This may call for some subtle intervention. “Guys,” Maxine announces, “the check, we’re gonna split it, OK? Maybe before it gets here, we could… March, you ordered the Sunrise Special with double beef bacon and sausage, plus the latkes and applesauce, plus the extra side of latkes and—”
“That’s mine,” sez Tallis.
“OK, and you have the rolled beef… the potato salad on the sandwich is another 50¢…”
“But you ordered that extra pickle, so call that an offset…” Degenerating, as Maxine hoped it might, into the old bookkeepers-at-lunch exercise, God forbid there should be real cash on a real table, which, while consuming energy useful elsewhere, is still worth it if it keeps everybody grounded, somehow, in reality. The downside, she admits, is that neither of these two is above playing this lunch strategically, trying to create anxiety enough to dampen or destroy somebody’s appetite, which better not be Maxine’s is all, as she herself is expecting the Turkey Pastrami Health Combo, whose menu copy promises alfalfa sprouts, portobello mushrooms, avocados, low-fat mayo, and more, in the way of redemptive add-ons. This has drawn looks of distaste from the other two, so good, good, they agree on something at least, it’s a start.
Competitive math, mistakes real and tactical, figuring out the tip and how to divide up the sales tax, go on till Rigoberto buzzes up. It turns out to be only one delivery kid, but he does seem to be wheeling the food down the hall on a dolly of some kind.
Presently the entire surface of the table in the dining room is covered with containers, soda cans, waxed paper, plastic wrap, and sandwiches and side orders, and everybody is intensely fressing without regard to where, besides into mouths, it’s all going. Maxine takes a short break to observe March. “What happened to ‘corrupt artifact of…’ whatever it was?”
“Yaycchhh gwaahhihucchihnggg,” March nods, removing the lid from another container of coleslaw.
When face-stuffing activities slow down a bit, Maxine is thinking of how to bring up the topic of young Kennedy Ice, when the mother and grandma beat her to it. According to Tallis, her husband is now looking for custody.
“OH, no,” March detonates. “No way, who’s your lawyer?”
“Glick Mountainson?”
“They got me off from a libel beef once. Good saloon fighters basically. How’s it looking so far?”
“They say the one bright spot is I’m not contesting the money.”
“It doesn’t, uh, interest you, the money?” Maxine curious more than shocked.
“Not as much as it does them—they’re working on contingency. Sorry, but all I can think about is Kennedy.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” sez March.
“Actually I should, Mom… keeping you guys apart all that time…”
“Well, full disclosure, actually we’ve been sneaking a couple minutes together when we can.”
“Oh, he told me about that. Afraid I’d be angry.”
“You weren’t?”
“Gabe’s problem, not mine. So we kept quiet about it.”
“Sure. Wouldn’t do to provoke any patriarchal anger.” Maxine, seeing the further but not always useful phrase “fucking doormat” taking shape, preemptively grabs a somehow overlooked pickle and inserts it into March’s mouth.
On through lunch and the fall of the afternoon, through a daylight-saving’s evening too bright for the winter most NYers still think they’re in. Maxine, Tallis, and March move into the kitchen, then out of the house, out onto the street, through slowly deepening streetlight over to March’s place.