Early Warning

1980

WHEN JOE GOT the flu after Christmas, he was in bed for a week, throwing up, lost in a fever of 103 or more, and waking at odd times from dreams about snow. And there was plenty of snow — Lois and Minnie let D’Ory and D’Onut in the house. After his fever was gone, he slept for another week, and when he finally woke up, on January 7, he had lost ten pounds and was as hungry as a hog. Lois thought this was funny, and made his favorite dishes for a few days; all in all, Joe was glad that he’d gotten sick in the middle of winter and that no one else came down with it. Apparently, Annie, who was home for a few days, oversaw the quarantine and would not under any circumstances let Lois go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, not even to be safe, because flu was a virus and that was that. She even called a couple of times after she went back to her job at a hospital in Milwaukee, to make sure that Lois wasn’t “going for the cefaclor behind her back.”

“So bossy,” exclaimed Lois, but they all knew she was right.

When he managed to get himself into the Volkswagen and go into town for lunch, he was the only person in the Denby Café who wasn’t up in arms about Carter’s grain embargo. Marsh Whitehead had a paper with him, not The Des Moines Register or The Usherton Post, but The Christian Science Monitor, which had an article by two men from over in Kansas about why the embargo would fail. Joe read it over while he was drinking his coffee and listening to all the other farmers bitching about it. Here they’d thought Carter — well, peanuts, what kind of a crop was that? But hadn’t his sister ridden a tractor back in December of ’77, two years ago, when those farmers protested? And Russ Pinckard said, “Well, I didn’t see anyone from around here down there at Terrace Hill, driving their John Deeres over the lawn, did I?”

According to the article, you could tell by the thickness of tree rings how much rain there was in the course of a year, which Joe knew, and, furthermore, these rings went in a twelve-year cycle: for six years, the rings were fatter, which meant more rain, and then for the next six years, thinner rings, less rain. Those years when the Russkies needed more grain because of less rain were over, so there was no reason to think they needed to import much this year. In addition, indications were that they had plenty on hand, left over from ’78, which they were hiding in brand-new and very enormous grain-storage facilities.

Joe looked up and said, “Why is he having a grain embargo anyway?”

“Oh, you were sick as a dog,” said Marie. “Lois told me all about it.”

“Well, I guess they invaded Afghanistan,” Russ Pinckard said, “wherever that is!”

“Kinda like us invading Mexico,” said Marsh Whitehead. “Piece I read said Carter should leave ’em alone, they’re gonna regret it soon enough without us lifting a finger.”

George, who was manning the register, looked up, and Marie looked over at him. George almost never said anything, but now he said, “You think he wants them to call him a sissy all over again? Those folks in Iran pulled his pants down; now the Russkies are doing the same thing.” Everyone shut up at the reference to the Iran hostages — it was something like two months now. The women and some minorities had been released, but there were still fifty-two men stuck there. Forgetting about them had been another privilege of his illness.

“And we got to pay,” said Russ Pinckard. No one rose to the bait; everyone knew that Carter’s response to the crisis was a ticklish issue. Russ looked at Joe. “You pay any attention to the markets lately? Surely you weren’t that sick.”

Joe shrugged. “I thought it was the middle of winter.”

“Well,” said Marsh Whitehead, “don’t have a heart attack when you do, because prices are way, way down. He suspended trading for a couple of days right after the embargo, but when they opened again, the price dropped as far as it could go, and it still hasn’t recovered. Best thing I think we can do this year is—”

“Shut the place and take off for Florida,” said Russ Pinckard.

Everyone laughed, but not cheerfully.

Ricky Carson, who had just come in and sat himself at the counter, said, “That’s where Dickie Dugan went. They got themselves a lemon grove down there by Tampa somewhere.”

At this, everyone fell silent again. Life surely was unfair if the Dugans were thriving.

A couple of weeks later, Reagan got in trouble for telling a joke that Joe thought was harmless enough—“How do you tell the Polish one at a cockfight? He’s the one with the duck. How do you tell the Italian? He’s the one who bets on the duck. How do you tell when the Mafia is there? The duck wins.” A lot of people went bananas, though no one at the Denby Café. In the New Hampshire debate, which Joe watched on television, Joe wasn’t impressed by him until he got to the grain issue — when he said that Carter’s move was “for domestic consumption and it actually hurt the American farmer more than the Soviet Union,” Joe had to agree, and then when he said that “there could be a confrontation down the road if they continue,” he had to agree with that, too. Of course, Reagan wasn’t a serious candidate, but he was pleasant — what he said about Carter came out in a genial way, as if he were chatting in your living room or something. Yes, Carter did more or less dare the Russians to cross the Afghan border, and then when they took his dare, he didn’t do a thing about it, and how could he? Maybe no one in Iowa, or in Washington, either, was quite sure where Afghanistan was. At any rate, the Russkies took Carter by surprise and everyone knew it.

Of course, this guy John Anderson stood right up to Reagan, and what he said was true — why were we afraid of the Soviets taking over Iran and Saudi Arabia? Well, if they did, where would the oil come from? But Reagan smiled — the camera caught this — as if he expected that sort of talk from a guy like Anderson. (And who had heard of Anderson? Not Joe.) But that was all they said about farming issues. Mostly it was about taxes and inflation, whether the economy needed a little shock therapy, and whether the secretary of the treasury should be investigated. Not even much about Iran. None of this helped Joe decide what to plant when he had to go to the bank a few days later and apply for his loans to buy seed. The best rate he could get was 14 percent, and if the ships full of grain were already looking for places to store the corn, beans, wheat that had been intended for the Russians, maybe shutting down the farm for a year wasn’t a bad idea. If he were rich, he would plant clover and plow it under in the fall, just stay out of the market altogether. When he said this to Minnie, she laughed as if he were joking, so he didn’t dare say it to Lois. All he said to Lois was that God would provide, and of course she nodded, and even quoted a Bible verse, “Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all.” Although Joe didn’t often go to church with her, and didn’t quite know what he believed, he found this verse comforting, and asked her to repeat it.

—

LILLIAN WAS vacuuming. She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Now she was pushing it under the bed. It was heavy, it was loud, it made her feel as though she were sucking every microbe out of the carpet and smashing it to atoms. When she bent down to push it farther under the bed, she realized that the phone was ringing in her ear. She turned off the vacuum cleaner, worried instantly that someone was calling about Arthur.

But the caller was Janet, long-distance, from Iowa. Lillian looked at the alarm clock. It was only eight there. She said, “Hi, honey, everything okay?”

Janet sniffled.

Lillian sat down on the bed. She said, “How’s Emily?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Jared? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Jared had to stay at work all night to send some file to somewhere. He’s okay.” Then she said, in a low voice, “I’ve been up all night, worrying that there is going to be a nuclear war.”

Lillian said, “You have?”

“Well, and so I’ve done this thing.”

Lillian felt a jolt of real fear. She said, “What thing?”

“Is Uncle Arthur there?”

“He went to work already.” Arthur was going to retire very, very soon, unless he could persuade them to keep him on against everyone’s better judgment.

“Does Uncle Arthur think there is going to be a nuclear war?”

“No, he hasn’t mentioned it. But what would cause it?”

“The Iranians.”

“But tell me what thing you’ve done?”

Janet started crying. In the two and a half years since Janet escaped those Temple people, Lillian had been thinking something was going to happen. She and Eloise had talked it over a dozen times. Eloise was more sanguine, especially since this young woman Marla someone had turned up not dead, but first in Paris, and now working in New York, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Janet seemed to have moved on pretty well; Jared was a straightforward, kind person; Emily had had an amazing effect on Andy, who had then warmed up to Janet — they got along like sisters now. But Lillian trusted nothing, and believed far more than Andy and Eloise that underground poisons could surface unexpectedly. She shifted her position on the bed and adjusted her bra. Janet said, “I keep looking out the window. We have this window that faces west, and I keep looking out the window and imagining a mushroom cloud.”

“Why west?” said Lillian.

“Des Moines.”

“You are living in Solon, Iowa, and you worry there’s going to be a nuclear explosion in Des Moines?”

“The prevailing winds are westerlies.”

Lillian didn’t dare to smile, even though they were only talking on the phone. She said, “Who is going to bomb us?”

“The Iranians.”

“Oh yes, so you said…but the Iranians don’t have the Bomb.”

Silence.

Lillian said, “Did you talk to your mom about this?”

“She said she wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Lillian. “That is just like Andy.”

“She said I used to have nightmares about nuclear war.”

“I never knew that.”

“I didn’t have them at your house.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

There was a pause. Janet said, in a lighter tone, “She thought it was a sign that I was precocious.”

They both chuckled.

Lillian said, “In 1961, you were right to be worried. Not so much anymore.”

“But I can’t get it out of my mind. I look at Emily walking around, and I am just terrified something will happen.”

Lillian thought of giving her a list of terrible things that were more likely to happen, but refrained. Instead, she said, “Ask your dad about the time he went to Iran.” Lillian had gotten to the point in her life where she would talk about almost anything.

Janet said, “What?”

“Arthur sent him. There was disagreement about…” She should not have started this. “I think you were three? Anyway—”

“When I was three was when the U.S. reinstalled the Shah and overthrew the democratic election of Mossadegh.”

Of course, Lillian thought, Janet would know this. Not Debbie or Dean or Tina or 90 percent of the American population. Ninety-five, maybe. She adjusted her bra again, then said, “Mossadegh was courting the Soviets. We really couldn’t take the chance. I could see it at the time. When Frank first came home from the war, he said that the Russians defied the law of probabilities — anything was possible. Arthur seemed to…” Her words trailed off.

“What did my dad do there?”

Lillian thought, Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “He accompanied some money, some bags of money.”

“Bribery.”

“You need to get over your idealism about how the world works.” Lillian hadn’t meant to sound so sharp.

“Okay,” said Janet. “Okay. So we get what we deserve.”

“Oh, honey,” said Lillian. Then she said, “We do, but only if we’re lucky.” She held the phone to her ear for a long time, even though neither of them said anything. Finally, Janet seemed to turn away from the receiver, because her voice got distant. She said, “There’s Emily. I have to go get her.”

Lillian said, “I love you, Janny.”

Janet didn’t reciprocate, just said, “Bye, Aunt Lillian.”

Lillian hoisted herself off the bed and went back to vacuuming, but her heart was no longer in it. After five minutes, she turned off the Kirby and rolled it down the hall to the closet where it was ensconced with all its many unused accessories. She could not get comfortable. She went back into her room and rummaged in the underwear drawer for a more forgiving bra. It was when she was putting it on that she felt the swelling, low and to the outside of her right breast, not quite painful but unmistakably present. She went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, something she, a formerly vain young woman, now did as little as possible (and when she did, she made a practice of smiling at herself, so as not to seem judgmental). But there was no smiling now. The swelling was firm and visible, and it was evident that she was not destined to be alive one day and dead the next, Arthur’s ideal.

—

FOR HER PART, Emily Inez Nelson did the best she could with the materials she was given. She did not hold hands if she could help it, and she screamed when Mom put the harness around her. She found it easier to run without a diaper on, or any clothes, for that matter, and she cared nothing about whether she was cold or not, but when her diaper was heavy and her shoes were tight, she ran anyway. She could not yet climb over the side of her crib, or the end panel, but when she awakened at daylight, she got up immediately, gripped the railing, and lifted her feet as best she could, first the one and then the other; some mornings, she managed to hook her big toe, the one that went to market, over the top. She knew she was making progress. It was also important to make marks on flat surfaces. If she had to put her hand in her diaper to get something to mark with, so be it. However, color was better — she liked blue, red, orange, and yellow; she knew the names of all four of them, and could say “boo.” Her favorite things could only be done when Mom wasn’t in the room.

She knew what a book was, and that pages were for turning. She preferred books she wasn’t allowed to touch, with many pages for turning. She put her finger very carefully on the corner of the page, pressed it down, and pushed it back — then it would turn. She liked a certain tub with water in it, and cups. She liked to fill the cups and pour the water out, and she never poured it on the floor — she preferred to see it go into the other water and smooth itself out.

The only things that tasted good to her were breast milk and hard scrambled eggs. She did not like anything that slid through her fingers when she squeezed it; if it could be squeezed, she refused to eat it. She did not care to remain covered up in her crib or to keep a hat on outside or to be strapped into the seat of the grocery cart. She did not like it that Mom was everywhere, all the time. She never had a moment’s peace. Mom’s face leaned toward her and said, “Are you all right, honey?” Mom picked her up and carried her places when she was right in the middle of something. Mom set her in the high chair, in front of food, when the last thing in the world that she wanted to do was eat. Mom leaned over the bathtub the entire time she was in the bath; Mom held her one arm tightly while washing her, and this happened every day. Every time she said something, no matter to whom, Mom answered her, as if she were talking to Mom. Even when she was lying quietly in her crib, Mom leaned over her and listened to her. Emily tried the doors every single day, more than once. She knew some other people — most notably “Dad,” “Grandy,” “Eva,” who was like herself, Emily, but did nothing but stand and stare, and Eva’s “Jackie,” but none of them were like Mom. Emily did not know what to make of it all.

—

BETWEEN THE TIME Lillian made her appointment with the doctor and the appointment itself, she went through all of the five stages of grief, but she went through them on her own — there was nothing in the book about the stage of “telling your worried husband,” and so she did not address it. “Denial” was as easy as could be — she got Arthur to take her to see American Gigolo; afterward, they went for ice cream, and Arthur had her laughing until her sides hurt every time he mimicked Richard Gere saying, “Helloo, Judy, you are a virry sexi leddy. Verri good lookn woman. Yu lak mi. Ah giv plejeur.” Then she would say, “How do you do it, Arthur, how do you seduce all those women? I think you’re guilty as sin.” Then he would stare at her very seriously and wiggle his head. It was harder when they got home, and she had to steer his hand subtly away from her right breast, but she was good at it, and even as they fell asleep, they were still giggling.

“Anger” happened the next day, when she chanced to see a woman she knew at the supermarket, a woman who made a point of gossiping equally about everyone they knew. She was friendly to Lillian in the canned-goods aisle, and happened to remark that she had seen “Mary Jo Canton’s new hairdo. Well, darling, hair don’t.” In the parking lot, when Lillian was pulling out and this woman was walking behind the boy pushing her very full cart to her very ample Mercedes-Benz (and who had one of those? Lillian would like to know), Lillian could not help reflecting that this woman was six years older than she, drank heavily, and was poisoned by malice. Surely she should be the one having a lump in her breast?

Obviously, Sunday was the day for “bargaining.” While they sat up in bed, reading articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times about Reagan and Ford being too old for the presidency and Bush having swiped all of Ford’s voters, and now this John Anderson fellow, whom Arthur rather liked — but at any rate, the Republicans had overcome the contentiousness between the right wing and the rest of the Party (they passed sections back and forth) — Lillian did quietly wonder what she would give up in order to avoid the coming ordeal. Maybe the house? No eggs? No steak? No Brie? No buttery popcorn? She shifted around on the bed, and Arthur offered her an article about the difference between people who draw the drapes and people who throw up the blinds: light-house people, dark-house people. Lillian enjoyed the article, but was there anything she should have done differently? Detergent? Breast-feeding? She could think of nothing else that was not human sacrifice, and if you came right down to it, that did seem to be the bargain that religion dealt in, didn’t it? Someone must die so that others may live. Mary Elizabeth? Tim? Lillian sighed, and Arthur said, “You okay, honey? You want another cup of coffee?”

Lillian said, “No, thanks. One’s enough today.” Really, she did want another cup of coffee, and when Arthur came back into the bedroom with his second, the fragrance was seductive. But giving up coffee was a start. Maybe.

Monday, she pretended to be asleep with her head buried in the pillow, and then, after Arthur left, she sat up and let the tears and sobs flow. It was all too easy to imagine herself dead, and it wasn’t good. She herself would be beyond sensation, she was pretty sure, and if not, then she felt she had done nothing to deserve punishment (through no virtue of her own — she had been taught to be a good girl, and she had been a good girl). But what Arthur and Debbie, especially, and maybe Janet and Dean would do without her, she literally could not imagine. Debbie called her every day; Arthur followed her around whenever he was not at work, and when he was at work, he called her in the morning and in the afternoon. Dean called her when he was worried about something, and Tina called her when she was excited about something. There was nothing oppressive about these calls — she loved them. They were the currency of news flowing freely, buoyed with jokes and funny stories, bits from TV, magazines, school. As soon as she thought of something funny or strange, she thought of who might enjoy it more, and called them — they did the same. But they would not as readily call one another. She was the switching station, the spot where information flowed to and from. Claire’s situation was shocking, now that Paul had refused to sign the papers and accused her of destroying her children and threatened to find a judge who would make sure she ended up without a penny, but wouldn’t Lillian’s own departure be even worse in its way, something her family could not make the best of? It seemed like this all day, all the way up to the moment when she mixed the mashed potatoes from the night before with an egg yolk and formed them into little patties, which she then breaded and fried, and then she thought maybe she was making too big a deal of this.

She dreamt all night about a scene she might have seen in a movie, though which one she could not remember. A man is sleeping while his sheepdog is driving his sheep over a cliff. He keeps looking over the cliff at the dead sheep, again and again; how he woke up was not in the dream. She dreamt it, then she dreamt herself telling about it, then she dreamt herself telling herself that it was only a dream. But she kept looking over the cliff at the corpses of the sheep.

When she woke up, she knew there was nothing to be done, and she felt okay all that day. She cooked Arthur’s breakfast and kissed him on his bald spot while he was eating and did the dishes and put some laundry into the machine and sorted through packets of flower seed from the year before and exclaimed with Debbie about Carlie’s putting together a twelve-piece jigsaw puzzle all by herself. Then she got in the car and drove to the doctor.

Lillian’s doctor was an experienced gynecologist — older than she was, and possessed of a competent, reassuring manner, neither forbidding, like Paul (and they should have foreseen how he was going to treat Claire by the way he upbraided parents whose babies got ear infections), nor at death’s door, like Dr. Craddock, whose nicotine-stained fingers Lillian still remembered with a shudder — and he hadn’t been much of a one for washing, either, Lillian thought. But Dr. Champion was simultaneously clean as a whistle and reassuringly smooth. With his wife and nurse, Kathryn, standing nearby, clucking gently under her breath, he carefully but firmly felt the swelling and also the surrounding tissue, and also the other breast. He looked in her file and quizzed her about a few things, including her mother and grandmother. Then he tapped his pencil on the desk and said, “I am sure this is a fibroadenoma — a harmless and common thing. It feels like that to me. All we have to do, really, is keep an eye on it for three to six months. Try not to think about it, and certainly don’t worry. Eileen will make you an appointment for the summer.”

So, Lillian thought as she drove home, this was the death-and-resurrection part. She felt nothing for the moment, but she knew that when she got home she would walk out among the tulips, which were brilliant and profuse this year, all colors, but especially the purple ones whose petals came to a slight point and opened outward. Among the tulips, she would take a deep breath, and plan dinner, maybe steak and caramelized sweet potatoes, and she would be very glad when Arthur got home, and probably she would laugh even more at his jokes and kiss him a few more times and hold his hand during The White Shadow. But though she might tell Arthur about her visit to Dr. Champion, she would never tell him what she had imagined so vividly these past five days.

—

IT WAS DEBBIE who arranged the intervention. Looking back, Lillian could see that her daughter had planned it for a while, and Lillian had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. First Debbie talked them into renting a house for August on Fire Island; she had gotten Henry to find the place. It would have been expensive, Lillian didn’t know how much, but it was near the beach, and certainly cooler in its ocean-swept way than McLean. Then, apparently, on their first evening, Debbie sent Lillian with Hugh and the children out to the beach for a sunset stroll, during which she ambushed Arthur and confronted him. He admitted that he knew that Lillian was supposed to go back to the doctor, but he hadn’t pushed her — he hated doctors himself and felt she should be free to choose, just like with anything else. But of course all of his arguments fell to rubble when faced with Debbie’s blazing righteousness. That night, in bed, he didn’t say a word to Lillian about what was coming. She should have been suspicious when Henry came for the weekend — when had he ever been a fan of family life? If Carlie or Kevvie neared him, he extended a hand and shifted his legs so that they wouldn’t touch his perfectly pressed trousers with dirty fingers. For presents, he brought them books—Oliver Twist and The Borrowers, not entirely suitable for a five-year-old and a two-year-old, however well meant. Then, Sunday night, no one got up after supper except, at a signal from Debbie, Hugh, to put the kids to bed (it was a late supper), and when Lillian made a move to take her plate to the kitchen, Debbie said, “Mom, we all need to talk to you about something.”

Lillian could not imagine what this was, given Debbie’s highhanded tone, but she did sit down.

Arthur, who was around the corner of the table from her, wouldn’t look at her, but he snaked his hand under the table and grabbed hers. Debbie said, “We all have talked about it, and we agree that you have to go back to the doctor.”

“Whatever for?” said Lillian; honestly, she didn’t right then know what they were talking about. She had gotten used to the lump, in the sense that she never let herself either think about it or touch it, and though Arthur had found it once and asked her about it (which was why she did tell him about her appointment with Dr. Champion), she never let him touch it again. What was withholding sex for, if not abjuring pointless worry?

“You know what for,” said Debbie, and of course now she did. This was where Henry took over. “Really, Lillian, I can’t believe you’ve let this go this long, and even though normally I would not consider it any of my business, I do think it’s critical that you see someone.”

“We’ve made you an appointment,” said Debbie.

“How dare you!” said Lillian, but that was what an intervention was for — the same thing had happened to Betty Ford, though about drinking, not about going to the doctor. Lillian said, “Arthur has to go, too.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Arthur.

“No, I mean, you have to go for a checkup, too.” She said, a little self-righteously, “He hasn’t had a checkup in a decade.”

Then, seeing his downcast face, she was flooded with regret.

The doctor was in the city; they took the ferry the next morning. Hugh was to keep the kids, and Debbie was to wrangle Lillian, as if she were a rogue calf heading for the back pasture. But Lillian gave her no trouble. As long as Arthur was along. And of course the whole experience was torture, starting from the moment they squeezed her left breast and then her right one into that machine, the way the nurse kept pushing her in more tightly until the platform was digging at her ribs, the way she had to hold her breath and stand absolutely still, and the nurse barked at her every time she had a stray thought — stray thoughts apparently caused her to twitch. Her breasts ached — not equally, but equally enough so that Lillian convinced herself for about five minutes that nothing was wrong with the one that wasn’t wrong with the other. The nurse wouldn’t allow Arthur into the mammography room, and then the doctor came out and invited him into the consulting room, looking him in the eye, but not Lillian. That was the clue right there. Young doctor — Neil Feigenbaum. Maybe forty, maybe not. Debbie remained in the waiting room, as if guarding the door. Yes, there was a large mass; yes, they needed to do a biopsy. Today was Monday. Would she mind coming back the next day? He was associated with NYU; they could have the biopsy done there. Arthur, that old betrayer, kept nodding, and saying they would be there at eight in the morning. Finally, Lillian said, “That means a six a.m. ferry.”

Arthur gave her a long, strict, and affectionate look. He said, “We’ll think of something.”

When they returned to the waiting room, after signing some papers, Debbie was just hanging up the phone the nurse’s station had let her use, but Lillian didn’t think to ask whom she had been calling — no doubt Hugh. It was not Hugh, though — it was Andy. As soon as they emerged into the heat of First Avenue, here came Andy, and Lillian realized that Dr. Feigenbaum must be Andy’s gynecologist. Andy gave her one of her limp hugs and said, “Oh, let’s have lunch.” She walked them along, chatting the whole time about Emily and Janet and Michael and Loretta (“My goodness, she keeps him in line”) and Richie and “that nice Jewish girl.” (“So ambitious. I’m sure our bloodlines could stand an invigorating infusion of Jewish blood. But I say nothing. I just bite my tongue.”) The restaurant was dark and old-fashioned, with elderly waiters who did everything with a napkin folded over one arm; Lillian half expected their attentive eighty-year-old to wipe her chin. So it was true, she thought, and now she would have to go through the five stages of grief all over again, or maybe only four of them, because she didn’t foresee any opportunity for denial, now that Debbie knew, and Andy, and soon Henry and Frank and Claire and Janet and Hugh and Jared. Arthur did not let go of her; even sitting at their table, he was practically on top of her without perhaps realizing it. Andy and Debbie kept talking — Andy about Emily, and Debbie about Carlie and Kevvie. They sang a sort of chorus. Everything Andy said about Emily reminded Debbie of something about Carlie or Kevvie, and so they traded solos. Lillian ordered the crab cakes with aioli, and Arthur (she watched him closely) ordered the scampi, and it was good, so he ate almost all of it. Debbie ordered something and wolfed it down. Andy ate a single artichoke, very delicately grasping each leaf between her fingernails, plucking it off, and dipping it in pure olive oil with just a little sea salt added. For dessert, she did a kind thing, Lillian thought — she ordered two helpings of the crème brûlée and four spoons. Crème brûlée seemed designed to promote denial.

They put Debbie in a cab to Penn Station — she wouldn’t get back to Fire Island now until after four. Then Andy said, “Oh, heavens, you should stay at the Waldorf,” and Arthur said, “Why not?” and gave her a big smile, and Lillian was already into the grief part by the time they were walking through the lobby.

—

RICHIE ROLLED OVER and nearly fell out of bed, because Ivy had disappeared. He stopped himself, though — his reflexes were pretty good even when he was mostly asleep. He thought about three things before he thought about the election: He thought that he had to get up right now and take a piss, which he did. He thought that it was already seven-thirty and he was supposed to be at work by nine. He wondered whether Ivy had made coffee. Then it occurred to him to wonder who had won, so he wandered into the living room. Ivy was standing in front of the TV, her robe hanging open, weeping. He said, “Reagan really won, huh?”

Ivy could only nod. After a moment, she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have voted for Barry Commoner.”

In the kitchen, the last bagel was gone, but there was bread for toast and a piece of apple pie, always good for breakfast. He had adopted the safest course, given the friction between Ivy and Michael — he had not voted at all.

The phone rang — Loretta, who sounded happy, although she said nothing about the election, only, “You guys want to come over for dinner?”

Richie got along pretty well with Loretta, who had a better sense of humor than either Michael or Ivy. He said, “Well, we haven’t heard from you guys in a month. You going to rub our faces in the dirt?”

“Not right away.”

“When?”

“When you least expect it.”

“What are you serving?”

“Humble pie.”

“We don’t like that.”

“Okay. Lasagna.”

“Still in the Italian-cooking class?”

“Eighth week.”

“I need something more Tuscan than lasagna.”

Loretta was silent for a minute, then said, “Tagliolini with new olive oil and fresh herbs? Then some veal medallions with a walnut sauce?”

Richie said, “I’ll work on her.”

“You should know that I forgive her.”

“The question is whether she forgives you—” But then Ivy appeared in the doorway, and he said, “Bye,” and hung up. Ivy didn’t ask who it was, but he volunteered, “Mom says hi.”

“Hi, Andy,” said Ivy.

Richie went over and put his arms around her. He gave her a very good hug — she melted into him. He said, “You feel cold. Your feet are freezing.”

“I’ve been up since four. I should have gone to bed before the results were in. I might have at least gotten one last good night’s sleep.”

“You think he’s going to start a war right now? He doesn’t get inaugurated for another two months.”

“Stop joking.”

“Did you talk to your mom?”

“Mom and Dad. At about six.”

This was a bad sign. Ivy had met his aunt Eloise, so he did not criticize her parents, who, although very left, had never actually belonged to the CPUSA or been questioned by HUAC, and anyway were twenty years younger than Eloise. But they had both gone to City College, though they now lived on Long Island. They acted as if social programs like food stamps were automatically good and Wall Street was automatically bad. Like Aunt Eloise, they tossed around terms like “working class” and “bourgeoisie” and “capitalism.” Their messy house was littered with old copies of The Nation, Dissent, and Mother Jones. Both Alma and Marcus liked to finish every family dinner with a cigarette and a political discussion; they were aggressive about making everyone at the table, including Richie, define and refine their arguments, and Richie had to admit that, usually, his arguments boiled down to “mere instinct,” as Alma put it, shaking her head. They were fervent believers in rationality. Alma was harder on him than Marcus, who most often ended up saying, “Alma! Leave the boy alone! She likes him, then she likes him!”

“How can I leave him alone?” Alma would exclaim. “That’s his problem. He’s been left alone for all his life!”

He had to admit that, for all her eye rolling, Ivy agreed with her parents’ views. The problem was their style — Ivy thought they were loud, messy, and rude. She loved them in private, but would go nowhere with them in public, not even to a deli.

He kissed her on the forehead, then more slowly on the lips, then took the corner of a dish towel and dabbed lightly at her eyes to wipe the tears. He said, “The only reason Reagan got elected was because Carter was such an incompetent. My uncle Joe, who is the nicest guy in the world, thinks this grain embargo is going to bankrupt him. It’s like every single thing Carter did was wrong. That was Reagan’s point.”

“He’s too smooth! He’s just a mouthpiece for big business, like when he was on that show and then he was a governor! My God, he was awful in California.”

Richie said, “Give him a chance. Let him be the best of a bad lot, okay? Just let him be that for a while.” But he didn’t dare bring up the dinner invitation. For all her good nature, he knew that Loretta would, indeed, demand some humble pie — she was like that. And they couldn’t just put it off: Loretta never forgot, and she kept score. The election, say, gave her ten points, but not showing up for dinner and “taking your medicine” would give her a point, too.

When he called Ivy at lunchtime, she said, “Okay, we can go.”

He said, “Go where?”

“Their place.”

“They invited us?”

“Richie, I know she called you this morning and invited us for dinner. She called me at the office just to make sure you told me.”

“She really is like the CIA, isn’t she?”

Ivy laughed, which meant she was getting over the election.

Richie said, in a wheedling voice, “What difference does it make who won? They’re all the same, really.”

“You’re hopeless,” said Ivy.

“We only see them four or five times a year. It’s like a penance. Or maybe like interest payments. We may both hate to visit our families, but we owe something every so often, don’t we?”

Ivy said, “Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four hours. I can take it.”

When the argument started (after the veal, before the Sambuca), the girls were like trained debaters, and Richie and Michael kept exchanging looks. Ivy went first: “Whatever you say, just don’t start with me about Adam Smith. He did not trust merchants. He thought they would get together and shit on everyone else if they possibly could.”

Richie said, “I would rather talk about the hostages in Iran than this.” They ignored him.

“Adam Smith?” said Michael. “Was that the guy you slept with last summer?”

Richie kicked him under the table — rather hard, in fact. Michael said, “Ouch.”

The girls were used to their shenanigans.

Loretta said, “I don’t need a theorist. No one does. I just have to look around and see what a mess all of these agencies I pay for are making of the country. People want to do stuff, and they can’t, because there’s too much paperwork.”

“Like set fire to the Cuyahoga River.”

Point for Ivy, thought Richie.

“If people wanted it cleaned up, they would have cleaned it up,” said Loretta.

“They did want it cleaned up, and it has been cleaned up,” said Ivy, “by EPA regulations. Not by the invisible hand.”

At this point, Michael ran his fingertip lightly up the back of Loretta’s neck. She laughed, but grabbed his hand. She said, “You wanted it cleaned up. But maybe those people living there were willing to make the tradeoff between jobs and a little pollution. There’s no proof that pollution is bad. Maybe it’s just stuff that’s in the wrong place.”

Michael said, “When Loretta was little, her room was papered in DDT-impregnated wallpaper. Just for kids. Donald Duck pictures on it.”

Loretta spun around. She said, “What was wrong with that? It was a good idea. It killed the mosquitoes that landed on the wall.”

Meanwhile, Ivy was staring.

Loretta said, “If you ban DDT, and then millions die from malaria, you haven’t done anyone any good.”

“Let the market kill them,” said Ivy.

“At least it’s their choice.”

“How about full warnings on the roll of paper, saying what is known about DDT?”

“We know it will kill mosquitoes. We don’t know it will hurt kids. Anyway, I guess the market decided about DDT-impregnated wallpaper, and that was that. I haven’t seen it lately. Or lead-based paint, or X-ray machines in shoe stores. Things come and go. If you don’t let them come and go, then you get like Russia.”

Richie thought maybe she had Ivy there.

But then Ivy said, “Russia isn’t the only alternative. Banks in the U.S. used to print all the money, and now the government prints it, because a free market in dollar bills didn’t work and was chaos. There are things that the government should do, and things that companies should do. I don’t want Russia, but I don’t want the Mafia, either.” Michael was beginning to look bored, and Richie sympathized. Michael said, “I loved The Godfather Part II. Pow-pow! Let’s have the Sambuca. You do this thing — you put a coffee bean in it and set it on fire. Burns off all the alcohol. Pow! Pow! Oh, you got me.” Michael fell to the floor.

Loretta said, “Reagan is tough. The Iranians know it, and the hostages will be released.”

Ivy said, “We’ll see.”

Richie thought, “Uncle.”

Loretta said, preening just a bit, “Yes, we’ll see.”

On the way home, Richie and Ivy agreed, no more Michael and Loretta until at least the end of January.