Working four days a week at the library, she can't watch enough of the midday serials to follow every twist of the plot, but the plots, three or four plots intertwined tiie way they do it now, move slowly enough she doesn't feel left out. It's become a habit with her lunch, to take the sandwich or the salad, or the microwaved leftovers from a few nights ago, Jack never seems to finish what's on his plate any more, and for dessert a bit of cheesecake or a few cookies, oatmeal-raisin if she's on a binge of being virtuous, and settle in the chair and let it wash over her, all the young actors and actresses, usually two or three at a time in one of those sets that look too large, with everything new-bought, to be a real room, with a stagy echo in the air, and that kind of tingling music they all use, not organ music as in die old radio serials but a synthesized, she supposes is the word, sound almost like a harp at moments and then at otJiers like a xylophone with violins, everything on tiptoe to convey suspense. The music underlines the dramatic confessional or confrontational utterances that leave the actors staring at each odier in stunned close-up, their eyeballs glazed with sorrow or animosity, little bridges constantly being crossed in die endless lattice of their relationships: "I really don't give a damn about Kendall's welfare…" "Surely you knew that Ryan never wanted to have children; he was terrified of the family curse…" "My whole life seems just out of my reach. I don't know who I am or what I diink any more…" "I can see it in your eyes; everybody loves a winner…" "You've got to love yourself enough to walk away from that man. Let your modier have him if that's what she wants-they deserve each other.…" "I truly, deeply hate myself…" "I feel lost in the desert…" "I never paid for sex in my life, and I'm not starting now." And dien a less angry, frightened voice, directly at die viewer: "A woman's curves can mean chafing. The makers of Monistat understand this intimate problem, and are therefore introducing a new, wholly unprecedented product."
To Betii it seems the young female actresses talk in a new way, the words curling under at die ends of sentences, back into their throats like die start of a gargle, and they seem more natural, or less unnatural and plasticky, than die young men, who look more like mere actors than the women do actresses-more like Ken, Barbie's opposite-sex partner, than the girls do Barbie. When there are tbree characters on die screen it is usually two women undercutting each other over a boy-man who stands diere squirming with a frozen jaw, and if diere are four, one man is older widi beautifully grayed hair, like the Before head in commercials for Grecian Formula, and the crosscurrents in die air thicken until the swelling, eerie music rescues them momentarily by signalling that it is time for another cluster of "messages." Beth is fascinated to think that this is life, all this competing to the point of murder, sex and jealousy and financial greed driving diem to it, these supposedly ordinary people in the typical Pennsylvania community of Pine Valley. She's from Pennsylvania and never knew a place like it. How has she missed life, so much of it? "My whole life seems just out of my reach," one character on All My Children once said, maybe Erin. Or Krystal. The remark went right dirough Beth like an arrow. Loving parents; a happy though not quite conventional marriage; a wonderful only child; intellectually interesting, physically untaxing work checking out books and looking up subjects on the Internet: the world has conspired to make her soft and overweight, insulated against the passion and danger that crackle wherever people truly rub against one other. "Ryan, I want so much to help you, I'd do truly anything; I'd poison your mother for you if you asked." Nobody says such things to Beth; the most extreme thing that ever happened to her was her parents' refusing to show up at her civil wedding to a Jew.
The men-boys who receive these burning vows are usually slow to answer. There is an eerie, full quality to the silence in the gap of non-conversation. Beth often fears they have forgotten their lines, but then they say the next thing, after such a long pause. To a degree not true of evening programs-cop shows, comedies, news hours with their bantering desk of four (one male and one female newscaster, a peppy sports reporter, and, the butt of their humor and good-natured grousing, the slightly goofy weatherman)- the daytime soap operas take place against a background of thick, teeming silence, a silence that all the erotic declarations, tense confessions, false assurances, and seething animosities cannot blot out, nor can the otherworldly chiming music and the sudden intervention of the lame pop song that does for a closing theme. A terrifying silence is the ground that holds them all there, like magnets on a refrigerator door, the cast in its echoing three-sided rooms and Beth in her extra-wide armchair, vexed with herself because she did not bring quite enough oatmeal cookies on her plate and now the phone won't stop ringing so she must abandon her La-Z-Boy island of perfect padded comfort even as David, the impossibly handsome cardiologist ominously uttering charged words to Maria, the gorgeous brain surgeon whose husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edmund, was murdered in an earlier episode Beth unfortunately missed.
She rises in stages, first pulling the lever to lower the foot-rest and, fighting the rocker motion, transferring her feet to the floor and gripping the left arm of the chair with both hands to tug herself almost up, and finally, with an audible exclamation, heaving her weight onto her braced knees, which slowly, excruciatingly straighten, while she catches her breath. At the start of the process, she thought to place the empty plate on the chair arm safely onto the side table, but she forgot the television remote in her lap, and it falls to the floor. She sees it there, the numbered buttons of its little rectangular panel down with the spots of coffee and spilled food that have accumulated over time on the pale-green carpet. Jack warned her that the carpet would show dirt, but pale wall-to-wall was in that year, the carpet salesman said. "It gives a cool, contemporary look," he assured her. "It expands the space." Everybody knows Orientals are best for spots blending in, but when could she and Jack ever afford an Oriental? There's a place on Reagan Boulevard where you can get them secondhand at a bargain price, but she and Jack never go that way together, it's where mostly blacks shop. Anyway, used, you don't know what the previous people have spilled that's hidden in the fibers, and the idea is distasteful, like carpets in hotel rooms. Beth can't bear to think of turning her body around and bending over to pick up the remote-her sense of balance is getting worse with age-and there must be some urgent reason why the person on the phone doesn't hang up. For a while they had an answering machine attached, but there were so many crank calls from parents whose children didn't get into the colleges Jack advised that they had the machine taken out. "If I'm there, I'll cope," he said. "People aren't so damn nasty when they get an actual voice on the other end."