This is the Way the World Ends Page 3

The fat boy wanted the tarantula, really wanted it, and his mother seemed far less repulsed by the idea than most mothers would have been. Justine sensed that here, for once, were customers with proper credentials. Normally she took a dim view of those parts of the inventory that had too few or too many legs—the pythons, indigo snakes, scorpions, crabs, and spiders—not because they frightened her (they did not), but because they were gimmicks, bought by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. To look at this boy, however, a loser by all odds—homely, awkward, and shy—was to realize how much he needed the tarantula, and how much the tarantula needed him.

  And so Justine undertook a mission that she saw as, among other things, a test of her acting talent. More than anything else, George’s wife wanted to act. She was no dreamer, though; no visions of Hollywood danced in her head. Her sober and plausible ambition was to be the clown who gave out balloons at children’s parties, the radio voice that told you where to purchase a new sofa, or the pretty lady at the local cable television station who explained why you should patronize the Wildgrove Hardware Store or Sandy’s Sandwich Shop (or, for that matter, Raining Cats and Dogs).

  “What’s your name?” she asked the boy, making your light up.

  “Andy.”

  “Well, Andy, this spider will make you the envy of your friends. You have my guarantee.”

  “I’ve heard that they can kill you,” said his mother, winking humorfully. Without this particular mother, Justine decided, Andy would never survive.

  “Treat a tarantula badly and, oh yes, it’ll bite. Rather like a dog.” Justine unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum and with a histrionic gesture placed it in her mouth. “The venom is unpleasant but never lethal. In fact, far from being savage beasts, tarantulas are quite delicate.”

  “Aren’t they kind of boring?” asked the mother.

  “Not when they’re injecting you with venom, no,” said Justine, and the mother laughed.

  “Can you play with it?” Andy wanted to know.

  “Sure you can play with it.” Justine removed the tarantula from its cage and set its fuzzy body on her shoulder. “See?” As the animal strutted down her arm, Andy’s face gave off equal amounts of light and heat.

  “Wow!” he concluded.

  When a tarantula is dropped, the result is always the same. It blows up. Justine was never sure why the spider panicked and jumped from her forearm, although the disaster occurred simultaneously with, and might very well have been caused by, Harry Sweetser’s sudden, boisterous arrival. “Arrgh!” he screamed as the forty-dollar spider exploded.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Harry.” Pity and remorse swept through Justine. “Poor bugger.”

  “Women should never try to handle these things.” Harry was a balding little fussbudget with a double paunch. “You’re too squeamish.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said Justine, “it only fell because you came over.”

  “New rule,” said Harry. “Anyone who can’t touch the arachnids without panicking has to leave them alone.”

  “Why don’t you go snort a toad, Harry?” she snapped. She thought about the remark, felt astonishingly good, and flashed her teeth theatrically.

  Harry ordered her to clean up the tarantula’s remains. “And then I want to see you in my office,” he announced, giving each word an ominous spin.

  The mother looked at the mess on the floor and said, “I guess we’re not all that interested in tarantulas today.” She steered her bewildered son out of the store.

  Entering Harry’s office, Justine noted with mild surprise that he was not at his desk. He stood in the middle of the rug, thumbs hooked in his belt. “So anyway, I think maybe Raining Cats and Dogs isn’t the place for you, right?” he said. “I’ll mention one thing, though—you were always a pleasure to look at in the morning.” Advancing, he groped toward her face. “You have an inspirational way of feeding the fish.” He stroked her cheek. “In fact, Justine, everything about you is inspirational.”

  She backed off. If I ever stoop to this, she thought, it will be in the name of landing a major role in a cable TV commercial. Harry’s countermove consisted of crossing to the door, closing it, and maneuvering her into a corner.

  “With a little encouragement I could be persuaded to give you your job back.” He placed a practiced, unequivocal hand on her left buttock. “Why don’t we swing by the Lizard Lounge this afternoon for a drink?”

  “You know, Harry”—she slipped out from under his palm and started for the door—“there’s something special about you that you may not be aware of.”

  “What?”

  “You’re an absolutely astounding scuzz-bucket.”

  Harry then informed Justine that she was fired.

  And so when George came home that evening proudly displaying the scopas suit, Justine’s reaction approximated that of the mother in Jack and the Beanstalk learning that Jack had bartered away the family cow for some magic seeds.

  “Six thousand five hundred and ninety-five dollars?” she gasped. “For what?”

  “For civil defense against thermonuclear attack. For Holly’s future. We pay three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents a month—that’s including the tax—and after two years it’s ours. It’s from Japan.”

  Justine listened morosely as George jabbered about individual radiation dosimeters, primus stoves, Lexan screens, and Winco Synthefill. He placed the suit on the sofa and took off his work shirt, showering the floor with granite flakes and aluminum-oxide bits, the detritus of his trade; their cottage was highly tactile: granite, aluminum-oxide, sand, pet hair, pieces of mail too important to throw away yet too trivial to file, clothes that quit their hangers on their own initiative, all subsumed in the endless onrush of Holly’s toys. The Irish setter loped over and sniffed the suit. Lucius the cat jumped on it, curled into himself, and took a nap.

  Justine’s horror of the scopas suit was nonverbal and intuitive, the horror of a mother hen seeing a hawk shadow glide across the barnyard. She could find no flaw in the garment’s design, no error in its execution, no fallacy in its purpose. And yet she knew that Holly must never own one.

  “I think Santa Claus should bring it,” said George, eagerly caressing his purchase, which rested on the sofa like a boy king lying in state. “She’ll be more likely to wear it if she believes it came from him.”

  “George, I lost my job.”

  “You what?”

  “Harry Sweetser fired me. I blew up a tarantula.”

  “Nuts.”

  “I’m glad. Not about the tarantula—but I really couldn’t have faced another day at that place.” She inserted a stick of spearmint gum between her lips like a cigarette, puffed on it. “Noah Webster College has a drama department, I hear.”

  “I thought we were talking about having another kid. This your way of changing your mind?”

  “I’ll take evening courses. By day I’ll be a mother, by night you’ll be a father. Life works out.”

  “Our plumbing is rotten, our car has cancer, we can’t afford life insurance, we’re trying to have a baby, and you want to join the circus!”

  “Not the circus, the drama department!” The gum entered her mouth like a log entering a sawmill.

  “You have no sense of reality!”

  “You have no sense of anything else!” Justine’s anger had thrown her hair across her face, and now she pushed it aside; curtains parted on large brown eyes, high cheeks, abundant lips, a sensual over-bite—to wit, a face that one might easily imagine on the talent side of a cable television camera, a face that was, by all but the most banal criteria, beautiful. “With training I can bring in twice what I was making at Cats and Dogs.”

  “Let’s be honest, Justine. Money isn’t something you and I will ever understand. If it grew on trees, we’d be raising chickens.”

  “You’re worried about money?” She chomped violently on her spearmint stick. “Then stop going around spending seven thousand dollars like it belonged to
somebody else.”

  A fight followed. There was some screaming. Fists were pounded. Resentments emerged like bits of an ancient civilization tossed up by an earthquake. The fight encompassed George’s tendency to assume that the pets were solely Justine’s responsibility, and it included Justine’s tendency to treat her parents shabbily, always forgetting their birthdays. It touched on whether they could really cope with another child, money worries or not, and eventually it even embraced thermonuclear war and strategic doctrine. George believed that the bombs were normally dropped from airplanes. Justine was certain that they would arrive via guided missiles. Whenever the fight began to lull, George demonstrated some additional virtue of the suit.

  “What the hell good are those going to do anybody?” Justine demanded after George showed her the vacuum-packed seeds. “Do you know how long it will take for those to grow?”

  “They’re resistant to ultraviolet light.”

  “Yeah? What does that mean?”

  “It’s like the grasshopper and the ant.”

  “It’s like what?”

  “A bad move that was, Justine, getting fired. Truly dumb. This suit will give us peace of mind. You’ll just have to ask Harry for your job back.”

  “There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, darling,” said Justine with a tilted smile. “Today Harry grabbed my ass.”

  The moment John Frostig saw George standing in the doorway with the little scopas suit under his arm, he knew that he had lost the sale. Taking the contract and the $345.71 check from his briefcase, he rolled them into a tube and thrust it toward George’s belly as if knifing him. He spoke in grim whispers.

  “I’m going to explicate a few things now, buddy-buddy,” He curled his arm in a yoke around George’s neck and led him into the house. “Right now we’re friends, my dear grasshopper, but when the warheads reach their targets, I’m going to be looking out for me and mine and nobody else. That’s the way with us ants.”

  Scopas suits cluttered John’s living room, sprawling on the floor, resting on the couches, relaxing on the chairs. One suit was watching a football game on television. Another played the piano. The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterrestrial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

  “In short,” John continued softly, “anybody who hears that us ants have a few extra suits stored up…anybody who drops by our larders looking to borrow one of those suits…such a person—even if he’s an old buddy—such a person is asking to get his brains dredged out with a Remington 870.”

  Alice Frostig glanced up from her sewing machine—she was repairing a scopas suit glove—and moved her bulbous and balding head with an amen sort of nod. Among other pitiable things, she was the female equivalent of a cuckold. More than once George had seen John approach a vulnerable housewife in the Lizard Lounge and convince her to accept his hospitality at the Wildgrove Motel.

  “Justine lost her job,” said George. “She’s going to take acting lessons. We can’t afford the suit any more.”

  “Tell that to the Soviets,” said the suit salesman.

  “There probably won’t even be a war,” said George.

  Throughout his entire life, George had never discovered a pleasure more complete than reading to his daughter. Food did not go beyond taste and satiation, sex lacked intellectual rewards, but Holly’s bed-time had everything. There was, first of all, the sheer physical enjoyment of swaddling oneself in blankets. Then, too, the process brought out Holly’s adorable side, suppressing the whiny beast that lived in four-year-olds and fed on parental exasperation. And frequently the books themselves were pithy and provocative, the sorts of things an advertising executive might have written in a fit of scruple.

  Father and daughter were huddled together, orienting Holly’s selection for the evening—a bad selection as it happened, a vapidity called Carrie of Cape Cod. A kitten scampered amid the blanketed terrain. Holly’s menagerie of stuffed animals went about their soft habits. George began reading: Outside the cottage harsh winds whipped the lake, giving it whitecaps and a tide. Canadian geese splashed down, squonking loudly.

  Carrie of Cape Cod slogged on. Near summer’s end, Carrie saw a seagull pick up a clam and drop it on a rock. The shell shattered, and the bird ate what was inside.

  “How did the seagull know the clam was dead?” Holly asked.

  I must get her a scopas suit, thought George. I’ll break into Frostig’s truck and steal one.

  “I know!” said Holly. Freckles were sprinkled on her face. Her skin seemed lit from within. “If the clam is alive, he opens his eyes, and then the seagull knows not to eat him!”

  “Yes,” said George. “That’s the answer.”

  She pondered for a moment. “But then how does the clam get a new shell, Daddy?”

  If George could have one wish, he would remake the world as Holly saw it. This Utopia would consist largely of cuddly ducks, happy ponies, and seagulls who spared live clams. “I don’t know how the clam gets a new shell,” he said. Maybe he puts on a scopas suit instead, he thought.

  At the climax Carrie walked the nocturnal beach, gazing toward heaven and identifying the constellations. One of them was the Big Dipper. “Why is it called that?” Holly asked.

  “It looks like a dipper.” George was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around Holly. “Do you know what a dipper is?”

  “What’s a dipper?”

  Instantly George was off to the kitchen. He returned bearing a small saucepan that more or less resembled an ancient Greek dipper. He believed it was for melting butter.

  “I wish I could see the Big Dipper,” Holly said.

  “One night soon we’ll go out and look for it.”

  “Daddy, I have something important to say. This is important. Could we go out and look for it now?”

  “You don’t have any shoes on.”

  “Could you carry me?”

  He seriously considered doing so. “It’s pretty cloudy tonight. I don’t think we could find it.”

  “Let’s try. Please.”

  “No, honey, it’s late,” he said, extricating himself from her little finger. “We’ll look for it some other night. I’ll tell you a story instead.”

  “Goody.”

  He started out with the grasshopper and the ant, then suddenly realized he didn’t like the ending, and so he ad-libbed his way through the chronicle of a clumsy bunny who wanted, more than anything, to be able to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. The bunny tried and tried and kept falling off, covering his fragile body with little bunny bruises. (The wind could hurl you three hundred feet, young Gary Frostig had said.) Then one day the rabbit hutch caught on fire. The determined bunny leaped on his two-wheeler, raced to the fire department, and saved the day.

  “I wish I could ride a two-wheeler,” said Holly.

  “You’ll learn,” said George.

  “I know that,” said Holly, slightly annoyed. She closed the book. “It’s going to be a long world.”

  CHAPTER 3

  In Which the United States of America Is Transformed into a Safe, White Country

  Halloween was coming, the pumpkins were off their diets, and the little cemetery where George worked had acquired a ghost.

  When he first glimpsed the specter, she was contemplating him through the front window of the Crippen Monument Works. Inside the office, barrel-bellied Jake Swann perused a sales contract—a big order set in motion on Columbus Day when Jake’s uncle had come home and shot all of his immediate family dead—and as the customer reached for the pen to write his signature, George looked up.

  Spider webs and arabesques were scribbled on the window in frost. A blood-red October leaf was pasted to one pane. George and the specter locked eyes. While he sincerely doubted that the old woman was in fact a ghost—Unitarians did not believe in ghosts—her every aspect suggested a netherworld address. She wore a mourning ensemble, loose-fitting as a shroud: black cloth, black gloves, and black veil—raised. Her complexion had th
e greenish pallor of mold. Her frame displayed the jagged profile of a dead tree. When she smiled at him, jack-o’-lantern teeth appeared, and one of her eyelids collapsed in a wink.

  Ice formed in George’s gut. His throat tightened like a sphincter.

  “You got the sniffles?” asked Jake Swarm, a phlegmatic man who had not been noticeably affected by the prodigal loss of kin.

  George took the contract, knitting his brow in a manner he thought appropriate to a tomb professional. Furtively, he glanced out the window. The specter was gone.

  But later, as George was leaving the office, she reappeared, kneeling amid the sample stones. Mud spattered her mourning dress; the veil was down. He ducked behind Design No. 3295. The old woman stared at a wordless headstone for several minutes, as if reading an epitaph written in a medium only ghosts could perceive, then reached forward with black velvet fingers and stroked the granite surface of Design No. 6247, the one with the praying Saint Catherine on top. George considered speaking, but the remarks that suggested themselves—“That one has real value,” “We also offer it in Oklahoma pink,” “For whom are you in mourning?”—seemed inappropriate.

  Evening pressed softly on the Crippen Monument Works. The woman uncrooked her back, hobbled forward. “I have a task for you,” she said. A spry voice inhabited her antique body. “You’ll learn of it soon.”

  “Have we met?” he asked.

  “I have always been with you,” she said, smiling, “waiting to get in,” and then she vanished into the dusk.

  As the week progressed, George noticed her a dozen more times—peering through the window, bending over a sample memorial, standing outside the decaying picket fence that enclosed the little cemetery.

  Waiting to get in…?

  On Halloween afternoon she watched from the weed-corrupted field on the other side of Hawthorne Street. She sat on the ground, a basket of apples in her lap. Her dark dress was covered with leaves; she appeared to be stuffed with them. Her weak and decimated teeth had to fight their way into each apple. George wondered why she had selected such an ambitious lunch. Some early trick-or-treaters came past: a witch, a devil, a cat, a preschooler from Venus, a ghoul. When the woman offered the children an apple, they shrieked gleefully and ran off, laughing all the way down Hawthorne Street. At the corner they stopped laughing but kept going, faster now, panting, sweating, trembling with terror, to the far end of Blackberry Avenue and beyond.