We had three televisions in our house: the family-room Motorola with wood cabinet and gold speaker cloth, a smaller console in my parents’ room, and a tiny black-and-white portable in the kitchen — breakfast invariably meant The Today Show, crunching toast, “foaming cleanser,” grumbling about the Berlin Wall. No mere furniture, beyond any appliance, they had secrecy, these three. They seemed alive to me even when dark, vigilant behind blank gray faces, reaching into unimaginable distances, and sometimes I’d be scared of them in silent night, just for an instant, till I could say don’t be a baby. Obsolete qualms, so far have we moved in so short a time, incurious now, blending into our machines and tapping the power. The third-grader here, solemn in his programmable sensory helmet, plays 3-D Nova Wars with an invisible opponent, little-boy blips hopping from relay station to relay station, droplets in the data stream. And back there, thoughts of secrecy. Obsolete gestures from the past, as I once interpreted old film shot at twenty-eight frames per second and played back at standard twenty-four, custard pies flying, everyone hurried, a worried-stiff style of movement abandoned in our age of comfort. Obsolete even as memory itself, the mass attention span shortened into near-disappearance, here and gone, a blip.
Carla would have been ten that fall. She was tense for her age, grim, an assemblage of bone rods threatening to snap. Dark things appealed to her, and she never wanted to watch what I wanted to. After a documentary on the Great Depression, she took to wearing a stained jumper and a sweater gone out at the elbows. She picked at her dinners, preferring white bread and soda pop, and afterward sat in the driveway gazing up into the sky. Arriving at school barefoot, she told a teacher her family was too poor to buy shoes.
Mother restrained Gordo in favor of reason. She said it wasn’t at all fair to those who suffered through the Depression to make a game of it. And what about all the families who’d seen it all through? Carla’s grandfather hadn’t stopped treating patients just because they paid with popovers and baskets of eggs. Mother had new dresses whenever she needed them and went right on with her flute lessons. Out came the brown family photographs, but Carla slapped them away.
“Liar,” she yelled. “I know what I saw.”
But did we know what we saw, in the sense of recognizing a thing previously met? Were we innocent as farm animals and in danger of being misherded? Was there any use in lecturing Carla about “facts”?
For children arrived since Hiroshima, the lines have been fine. Nothing but clarity would do, while contradictions dropped all around like leaflets urging surrender. Nostalgia was forced on us. We learned not to learn by example.
Dictum: In our world, nothing would ever be simple. The very best methods were required, each of us a little project separated one from another by fine lines. Everything in the technique.
“When you wish upon a star…” And they said for us all to sing together.
We learned from the evidence: It was all a job. We had to imagine furiously, find room inside those lines. Even that was a job, to be somewhere else. And scary sometimes, like you might not come back around. But the clarity was there. We knew what we saw.
5
SOMETIMES, WITHOUT RECOGNITION OF how or when, I will find that a tiny cactus spine has worked its way into my hand. I clench my teeth and feel sand grinding on my molars. I live in the desert now, but it is in no way novel. Here is the same quiet geometry of the suburb I come from; only the scale is different. Climate, topography — these things are interchangeable as wallpaper. I recognize the stunned atmosphere of this place, its heavy padding of silence, its isolation.
Lake Success. The name itself suggests a real-estate swindle, some collection of placards and surveyor’s stakes at the edge of an alkali pit. In truth, we were only minutes from the city limits. Airline pilots lived there, and pharmaceutical researchers, and even a member of the state legislature. The streets were bright, lined with cars, and humid winds blew in from Little Neck Bay. But just the same, Lake Success was a ghost town waiting to happen. And waiting still.
I choose a typical Friday evening of twenty-five years ago: My sister and I are supine before the television in our flannel pj’s, a bowl of cheese twists between us. A smell of cologne clings to the white shag carpet and the mighty thrumming of the furnace sends a buzz up through the floor to our bellies, recently packed with peas and lamb chops and spumoni. After the usual finagling with the sitter, we have been permitted to seal ourselves into the parental bedroom and watch their set. They are dining with friends at the country club, Mom in a brand-new dress. The thin, striped box and gray tissue are still on the bed behind us. I throw a cheese twist in the air, catch it in my mouth, and Carla giggles. The cartoon show is over and Carla gets up to change the channel. There are no arguments; we have canvassed TV Guide during dinner and agreed on what to watch.
Here, then, in all its triviality, is the lush life aspired to in those years. So it went in a thousand other suburban fastnesses across the land — the lamb chops, the new dress, the freshly bathed children safely encapsulated.
We were really at no great remove from the L.A. sound-stages where the households of Ozzie Nelson and Donna Stone and Beaver Cleaver carried on their bloodlessly engineered relations. There we were in achingly white Cape Cod Colonials, each with tidy hedge and lawn, and inside the same vast Formica surfaces that Harriet polished so tirelessly, the same wide staircases down which Wally and Dave and Ricky scrambled on their way to baseball practice, the same spacious dens where Ward Cleaver tamped his pipe over actuarial tables. Surely my own family was as deserving of renown as these others.
I suggested this once to my mother, that we ought to have our own show. “You’re prettier than Donna Reed,” I said.
“And a hell of a lot better actress,” she said, and drifted outside to sweat and pull weeds.
What we wish to believe is this: that all those shows were worse than ridiculous, that they presented idealized, dangerously illusory figures, and that our inability to live up to them brought on guilt and disappointment. (How eager we were some years back to accept the specious rumor that Jerry Mathers — the actor who portrayed Beaver Cleaver — had died a mud-sucking grunt in Vietnam.) But this is fatuous, self-flattery at its cheapest.
No need to look elsewhere for disappointment. That predetermined Maple Street existence was very much our own, in all the canned events through which we moved like chess pieces, in the good cheer we displayed so methodically, in the very drabness of our squabbles over report cards, dating etiquette, crunched fenders.
What, if anything, can be concluded from all this? That I can no longer make distinctions, cannot see the differences between desert and suburb, video village and hometown? That I am a purveyor of counterfeit analogies? Very well, then, shove all aside for realism. Clear the decks for truth, and I will fill in the rest of that Friday night twenty-five years ago.
The movie we have chosen is a bore: too much dialogue and not enough of the giant clams. Carla tinkers restlessly with tubes and jars on Mom’s cosmetics tray. I remind her that we aren’t supposed to touch anything in the room. Carla is two years older and says so what to that. She sprays herself with an atomizer, smears her lips red. She opens a drawer, ties a scarf around her neck, and dangles off the end of the bed, waving her tongue like a lizard. All right, this is more interesting than the movie. We bounce on the heavy mattress awhile, then she paints me too. We rub mouths, wet and slick, tasting of soap, until the oily red is spread over our cheeks. There’s even a streak on the coverlet and that means trouble. So I pretend to be mad, wrestle past her kicking legs so I’m on top, tickling her stomach till Carla begs me to stop or she’ll wet herself, so I do.