A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don’t even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, currents swirling at my feet. When I awoke — alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream — I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.
/c/
“… have asked Kopek to recreate that stunning uneven-parallel-bar routine that won her the all-around gold, and we’ll remind the audience that her performance is now made possible by the generosity of the folks over at Gerber’s Quality Brands, the infant food that helps your child chew.”
“Yes,” said Ruble Spasov. He and the announcer, trailing a snake of black microphone cord, accompanied Kopek over to the bars as she mounted and began to twirl and spin and let the bars bend her into strange shapes.
“Ruble, I notice you’ve got that cattle-prod, there, in your hand, while your brilliant daughter and pupil does her really superb routines,” said the announcer. “Any story behind that.”
Ruble Spasov pulled his eyebrows up. “Is what you call a blanket of security. Kapelika feels more secure and confident and happy to know that when she performs routines cattle-prod is always nearby her.”
“And what a performer she is,” said the announcer.
“Guy’s nuts,” Alvin Spaniard said. “Guy’s a fascist.”
“She’s just super, though,” said Lenore. “Watch her do the thing with her toes… there. Wow.”
“So she’s got prehensile toes, big deal,” said Alvin. “Take you to a zoo, show you cages full of prehensile toes.”
“I smell sour grapes,” said Clarice.
Lenore sniffed at her armpit.
“Family theater in one and a half minutes,” Clarice said.
“She’s almost done anyway,” said Lenore. “It’s the dismount where she lands on just one finger that’s the killer… right there. Believe that? And she’s coming to Erieview in like a week.”
“Tell me about it,” said Alvin.
“I’m anxious to go,” said Lenore.
“Spatula sweetie, you want to get the audience-disc? Any questions from anybody about any lines? Alvin, think about your job on your own time.” Clarice moved the coffee table out of the center of the living room.
“Ruble and Kopek Spasov and Spasova: quite a team, and just if I may interject a personal note a fine addition to this great country,” said the announcer. “Ruble and Kopek Spasova.”
“Please go away now,” Ruble Spasov said. Ed McMahon reappeared. Stoney got up and switched the television controls to Laserdisc input.
Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which each ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.
The audience-disc was inserted, and on the huge television screen there appeared a view, as that from a stage, of rows of theater seats, being filled by people dressed to the nines, with programs. As the house filled up on the screen, Clarice got masks on the children. Life-size cardboard cut-outs of Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula were positioned on either side of the television, so as to form part of the audience.
“Is this the last time we’re going to do this one, Mom?” Stoney asked, his voice a bit muffled. “We’ve done this one five times in a row.”
There was pleasant pre-performance mood music playing for the audience on the television screen. The house was now nearly full. The cardboard cut-outs were the standing room.
“Last time. Next week a new thing.”
The rubber band that attached Spatula’s Spatula-mask to her head got twisted and snagged in her hair, and she began to cry. Alvin soothed her from behind his Alvin-mask. The audience on the television made murmured noises; according to Laserdisc timing, family theater had already started. Clarice reinserted the disc and got an earlier point, in which the theater seats were just filling up. She distributed a Spiro Agnew watch to Alvin, a Richard Scarry cut-out book to Stoney, English Muffin the teddy bear to Spatula, and Clarice herself brandished a Visa Gold Card. Lenore took her seltzer and peas to an easy chair next to the television and sat down beside the Alvin cut-out.
Clarice checked the watch on the underside of her wrist. “Go ahead, babe,” she said to Stoney. Stoney moved closer to the television as Clarice and Alvin and Spatula grouped in close tight behind him.
The audience stopped coughing and looked on attentively. Clarice prodded Stoney in the back with her finger.
“There once existed,” Stoney recited behind his mask, “a unit called the Snapiard family. The family was close and very tightly bound together by feelings of family love.” All four Spaniards now kissed each other through their masks and hugged each other. “What is more,” Stoney continued to the television screen, “the people who were in the family thought of themselves more as… more as…”
“Members of the family,” Clarice whispered behind him.
“More as members of the family than as real people who were special individual people. All they thought about was the family, and all they thought of themselves as was family-parts.”
Clarice picked up from the floor four red masks that had just generic features and the words FAMILY-MEMBER stamped in white across the forehead, and the Spaniards all put one of the masks on, which was cumbersome, given the presence of the original masks, too.
Stoney stepped back and Alvin stepped to the television. “This was both a good thing and a bad thing, apparently. It was a good thing because each family member felt a strong and secure sense of identity and identification with a unit larger than he. Or she. His or her concerns were not his or her concerns alone, and he or she could count on the things and ideas and feelings he or she valued as having value not merely for him or her, but also for the whole organic/emotional unit of which he or she was a part. There was sense of identification, of unaloneness, in short one of security and warmth, emotional shelter. Four individual people were a unit.” The audience applauded warmly.
Spatula stepped forward. “But it was a bad thing, too. Because everybody in the… family felt like all they were were parts of the family. So in case anything bad happened that was bad and made the family not as much a family anymore, it also made the people in the family not as much people anymore, and then they were alone and invisible and unhappy, and things exploded very fast in bad ways.” The Spaniards took off the FAMILY-MEMBER masks and put on plain white featureless masks with red cracks down the middle, and very tiny holes for breathing, and they all took three steps away from each other and turned their backs. The audience whispered. Lenore began to eat her lime. She could see Stoney discreetly picking his nose under his mask.