Beth takes another step, leaving the people on television to stew in their own abundant juices, and totters to the table by the wall and plucks up the telephone. The new style of telephone stands upright in its cradle, and a little panel below the perforations to listen at supposedly gives you the name and number calling. It says out of area, so it's either Markie or her sister in Washington or some telemarketer calling from wherever they call from-it can be as far away as India. "Hello?" The perforations at the other end of the receiver don't come to her mouth the way the old phones did, the hefty simple ones of honest black Bakelite that rested face-down in a cradle, and Beth tends to raise her voice because she doesn't trust it.
"Beth, it's Hermione." Herm always sounds ostentatiously brisk, busy, as if to shame her younger, indolent, self-pampered sister. "What took you so long? I was about to hang up."
"Well, I wish you had."
"That's not very nice to say."
"I'm not like you, Herm. I'm not still fast on my feet."
"Who's that talking in the background? Is somebody there?" Her words jump on things, one after another. Yet her bluntness, almost rude, is a welcome leftover from the Pennsylvania-Dutch manner of their girlhood. It reminds Beth of home, of northwest Philadelphia with all its humid greenery and trolley cars and corner grocery stores stacked with Maier's and Freihofer's bread.
"It's the television. I was looking for the clicker to turn it off"-she doesn't want to admit she was too lazy and unwieldy to bend over and pick it up-"and couldn't find the gosh-darn tiling."
"Well, go find it. It can't be far. I can wait. We can't talk with all that babbling. What were you watching anyway, in the middle of the day?"
Beth puts the receiver down without answering. She sounds like Mother, she thinks, plodding over to where the remote-curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters-lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall. The salesman called it celadon. With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with die other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an arabesque penchee, learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimi-trova's Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where As the World Turns is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off. They turn into a little star that lingers less than a second.
In ballet class she had been the more lithe and promising sister; Hermione, Miss Dimitrova would say in her scornful White Russian way, lacked ballon. "Light, light," she would shout, the ligaments jumping in her scrawny throat. "Vous avez besoin de legerete! Conceive that you are des oiseauxl You are the creatures of air!" Hermione, gawkily tall for her age and already, it was clear, destined to be plain, was the heavy-footed plodder then, and Beth the one who felt, enfaisant des pointes, birdlike, whirling with her skinny arms extended.
"You're panting," Hermione accuses her when Beth returns to the phone and drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents. A maple reproduction Shaker, the chair has such a narrow seat that she has to aim her bottom at it; a few years ago she half missed and the chair tipped and dumped her onto the floor. She could have broken her pelvis if she weren't so well upholstered, Jack said. But he wasn't amused at first. He rushed over to her horrified and, when she made clear she wasn't injured, looked disappointed. Hermione asks sharply, "You weren't watching some special announcement, were you?"
"On the television? No-is there one?"
"No, but"-her hesitation is fraught, like the pauses in soap operas-"there are leaks. Things get out before they should."
"What's getting out?" Beth asks, knowing that bland ignorance was the way to open up Hermione, with her itch to lord it over her sister.
"Nothing, darling. I of course can't say." But, unable to bear Beth's silence, she goes on, "Internet chatter is up. We think something's brewing."
"Oh, dear," Beth says docilely. "How's the Secretary taking it?"
"The poor saint. He's so conscientious, the whole country on his shoulders, I'm honestly afraid it might kill him. He has high blood pressure, you know."
"He looks pretty healthy on TV. I wonder, though, if he could use a slightly different haircut. It makes him look belligerent. It puts the Arabs and the liberals on the defensive." She can't chase from her mind the image of one more oatmeal-raisin cookie-how it would crumble in her mouth, her saliva leaving the raisins for her tongue to find and fiddle with before she bites down. She used to settle with a cigarette for a phone chat; then the Surgeon General kept telling her it was bad for her, so she gave it up and gained thirty pounds the first year. Why should the government care if the people died? It didn't own them. That many less to govern, she would think they'd be relieved. But, oh yes, lung cancer was a drain on Medicare, and cost the economy millions of productive work-hours. "I suspect," Beth offers helpfully, "a lot of this chatter is just high-school and college kids making mischief. Some of them, I know, call themselves Mohammedans just to annoy their parents. There's this boy at the high school Jack has been advising. He thinks he's a Muslim because his deadbeat father was, at the same time ignoring this hardworking Irish-Catholic mother he lives with. Think of what our parents would have said if we'd brought home Muslim men to marry."
"Well, you did the next-best thing," Hermione tells her, paying her back for the haircut criticism.
"Poor Jack," Beth continues, rising above the slur, "he's been knocking himself out to get this boy out of the grip of his mosque. They're like Baptist fundamentalists, only worse, because they don't care if they die." A born peacemaker-maybe all younger sisters are-she reverts to Her-mione's favorite subject. "Tell me what he's especially worried about these days. The Secretary."
"Ports," came the ready answer. "Hundreds of container ships go in and out of our American ports every day, and nobody knows what's in a tenth of them. They could be bringing in atomic weapons labelled Argentinean cowhides or something. Brazilian coffee-who's sure it's coffee? Or think of these huge tankers, not just the oil, but, say, liquid propane. That's how they ship propane, liquefied. But think of what would happen in Jersey City or under the Bayonne Bridge if they got to it with just a few pounds of Semtex or TNT. Beth, it would be a conflagration: thousands dead. Or the New York subways-look at Madrid. Look at Tokyo a few years ago. Capitalism has been so open-that's how it has to be, to make it work. Think of a few men with assault rifles in a mall anywhere in America. Or in Saks or Blooming-dale's. Remember the old Wanamaker's? How we used to go there as children with such happy hearts? It seemed a paradise, especially the escalators and the toy department on the top floor. All that's gone. We can never be happy again- we Americans."
Beth feels sorry for Hermione, taking everything so much to heart, and says, "Oh, don't most people just bumble along still? There's always some kind of danger in life. Plagues, wars. Tornadoes out in Kansas. People keep going. You go on living until you're made to stop, and then you're unconscious."