The Broom Of The System Part 20

"Sshh," Alvin said.

"I'm standing here with the brilliant Soviet-former Soviet gymnastics coach Ruble Spasov," said the announcer, "and with the equally brilliant former Soviet gymnast and certainly not former Olympic and World Championship gold medalist Kopek Spasova, Mr. Spasov's daughter." The camera panned down from the adults' heads to their stomachs to get Kopek Spasova in the shot. She was a thin, blond-haired, hollow-cheeked girl with enormous black circles under her eyes.

Clarice came in with a load of masks and cardboard cut-outs and some personal items in a box.

"Well, at least she's not pretty," said Alvin.

"Sshh," said Spatula.

"Ruble, Kopek, how did it feel to win all the big ones?" asked the announcer.

"Who is this person?" asked Ruble Spasov, looking to someone behind and off to the side of the camera.

"It felt good to win," said Kopek Spasova.

3 September

Monroe Fieldbinder, a successful six-foot estate attorney with a fine lawn and a two-hundred-pound body as fit and taut as it was exceptionally attractive, returned one Wednesday night from the home of his gorgeous Wednesday mistress to find his house in flames and his house surrounded by the pulsing lights of fire and police engines of fire engines and police cars and saw that his house was in flames on fire and that his bird, Richard the Lionhearted, who lived inside, was probably dead, in his iron cage.

As Monroe Fieldbinder watched his house burn, he felt all the order and unity of his life melt away into chaos and disorder. He grinned wryly.

How explicit need we make this burning? Need we a reference, or just a picture? "Grinned wryly" seems most potent when used in reference to a picture. Pictures do things. Show, don't tell.

Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the ma.s.s of white gulls around Vance's outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V's. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child's hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing, shrieking, s.h.i.tting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don't even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, currents swirling at my feet. When I awoke-alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream-I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.

"... have asked Kopek to recreate that stunning uneven-parallel-bar routine that won her the all-around gold, and we'll remind the audience that her performance is now made possible by the generosity of the folks over at Gerber's Quality Brands, the infant food that helps your child chew."

"Yes," said Ruble Spasov. He and the announcer, trailing a snake of black microphone cord, accompanied Kopek over to the bars as she mounted and began to twirl and spin and let the bars bend her into strange shapes.

"Ruble, I notice you've got that cattle-prod, there, in your hand, while your brilliant daughter and pupil does her really superb routines," said the announcer. "Any story behind that."

Ruble Spasov pulled his eyebrows up. "Is what you call a blanket of security. Kapelika feels more secure and confident and happy to know that when she performs routines cattle-prod is always nearby her."

"And what a performer she is," said the announcer.

"Guy's nuts," Alvin Spaniard said. "Guy's a fascist."

"She's just super, though," said Lenore. "Watch her do the thing with her toes ... there. there. Wow." Wow."

"So she's got prehensile toes, big deal," said Alvin. "Take you to a zoo, show you cages full of prehensile toes."

"I smell sour grapes," said Clarice.

Lenore sniffed at her armpit.

"Family theater in one and a half minutes," Clarice said.

"She's almost done anyway," said Lenore. "It's the dismount where she lands on just one finger that's the killer ... right there. Believe that? And she's coming to Erieview in like a week."

"Tell me about it," said Alvin.

"I'm anxious to go," said Lenore.

"Spatula sweetie, you want to get the audience-disc? Any questions from anybody about any lines? Alvin, think about your job on your own time." Clarice moved the coffee table out of the center of the living room.

"Ruble and Kopek Spasov and Spasova: quite a team, and just if I may interject a personal note a fine addition to this great country," said the announcer. "Ruble and Kopek Spasova."

"Please go away now," Ruble Spasov said. Ed McMahon reappeared. Stoney got up and switched the television controls to Laserdisc input.

Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mache and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people's faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore's father, cans of tennis b.a.l.l.s in which each ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these b.a.l.l.s. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head b.a.l.l.s that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head b.a.l.l.s.

The audience-disc was inserted, and on the huge television screen there appeared a view, as that from a stage, of rows of theater seats, being filled by people dressed to the nines, with programs. As the house filled up on the screen, Clarice got masks on the children. Life-size cardboard cut-outs of Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula were positioned on either side of the television, so as to form part of the audience.

"Is this the last time we're going to do this one, Mom?" Stoney asked, his voice a bit m.u.f.fled. "We've done this one five times in a row."

There was pleasant pre-performance mood music playing for the audience on the television screen. The house was now nearly full. The cardboard cut-outs were the standing room.

"Last time. Next week a new thing."

The rubber band that attached Spatula's Spatula-mask to her head got twisted and snagged in her hair, and she began to cry. Alvin soothed her from behind his Alvin-mask. The audience on the television made murmured noises; according to Laserdisc timing, family theater had already started. Clarice reinserted the disc and got an earlier point, in which the theater seats were just filling up. She distributed a Spiro Agnew watch to Alvin, a Richard Scarry cut-out book to Stoney, English m.u.f.fin the teddy bear to Spatula, and Clarice herself brandished a Visa Gold Card. Lenore took her seltzer and peas to an easy chair next to the television and sat down beside the Alvin cut-out.

Clarice checked the watch on the underside of her wrist. "Go ahead, babe," she said to Stoney. Stoney moved closer to the television as Clarice and Alvin and Spatula grouped in close tight behind him.

The audience stopped coughing and looked on attentively. Clarice prodded Stoney in the back with her finger.

"There once existed," Stoney recited behind his mask, "a unit called the Snapiard family. The family was close and very tightly bound together by feelings of family love." All four Spaniards now kissed each other through their masks and hugged each other. "What is more," Stoney continued to the television screen, "the people who were in the family thought of themselves more as ... more as..."

"Members of the family," Clarice whispered behind him.

"More as members of the family than as real people who were special individual people. All they thought about was the family, and all they thought of themselves as was family-parts."

Clarice picked up from the floor four red masks that had just generic features and the words FAMILY-MEMBER stamped in white across the forehead, and the Spaniards all put one of the masks on, which was c.u.mbersome, given the presence of the original masks, too.

Stoney stepped back and Alvin stepped to the television. "This was both a good thing and a bad thing, apparently. It was a good thing because each family member felt a strong and secure sense of ident.i.ty and identification with a unit larger than he. Or she. His or her concerns were not his or her concerns alone, and he or she could count on the things and ideas and feelings he or she valued as having value not merely for him or her, but also for the whole organic/emotional unit of which he or she was a part. There was sense of identification, of unaloneness, in short one of security and warmth, emotional shelter. Four individual people were a unit." The audience applauded warmly.

Spatula stepped forward. "But it was a bad thing, too. Because everybody in the ... family felt like all they were were parts of the family. So in case anything bad happened that was bad and made the family not as much a family anymore, it also made the people in the family not as much people anymore, and then they were alone and invisible and unhappy, and things exploded very fast in bad ways." The Spaniards took off the FAMILY-MEMBER masks and put on plain white featureless masks with red cracks down the middle, and very tiny holes for breathing, and they all took three steps away from each other and turned their backs. The audience whispered. Lenore began to eat her lime. She could see Stoney discreetly picking his nose under his mask.

I am in receipt of the following communication, dated 1 September 1990, from a Mr. Karl Rummage, of the legal firm of Rummage and Naw, Cleveland, acting at the corporate behest of Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products: Dear Mr. Vigorous: Having been exposed to and in admiration of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing Inc.'s performance with respect to the publications "Norslan, Big Iron, and You" and "Norslan: The Third-World Herbicide That Likes People," etc., for some time, Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, Cleveland, Ohio, has authorized me to extend to you an offer to undertake for us the publication of three product-information packages concerning a new infant benefit service currently in the final stages of development at Stonecipheco Baby Food Products. Initial drafts of said informational packages have been composed and compiled by Stonecipheco's Division of Advertising and Product-Perception-Gauging, and are enclosed under separate cover.

Mr. Beadsman has authorized me to extend to you an offer of significantly generous compensation for the firm of Frequent and Vigorous, and an even more significantly generous personal bonus for you, Richard Vigorous, for the acceptance of and satisfactory realization of the goals set forth under the proposed contract (see also enclosure).

Stipulations attached to the tender of such an offer include, but are not necessarily exhausted by, the following: (1.) The retention by the firm of Frequent and Vigorous of some personnel familiar with the culture and language of the inhabitants of the island of Corfu (see enclosure); (2.) The withholding of information concerning the tendering of and details concerning any part of the proposed contract from Ms. Lenore Beadsman, East Corinth, Ohio, with whom you are known to enjoy some personal connection, until such time as such withholding is deemed inadvisable by Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III; (3.) The firm of Frequent and Vigorous's granting Ms. Lenore Beadsman a leave of absence of two (2) days from switchboard duties, for a trip to see her brother, Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman IV, on Beadsman family business at Amherst College, Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts, an inst.i.tution of which I am given to understand you are an alumnus. Your accompanying Ms. Beadsman on this trip, with travel accommodations provided and all legitimately incurred expenses absorbed by Stonecipheco, Inc., would be welcome, but should not be regarded as a stipulation attached to the tendering of the original contract offer. Etc. etc. etc. etc.

What are we to make of this? I have yet to open the enclosure. I can feel the Erieview shadow creeping over and through the lamps behind me, at the licorice window. It is noon. Today Lenore and I do not lunch. Tonight she goes to visit her sister. Another day of missing.

Stoney was addressing the television audience. "Since every member of the Snapiard family thought of themselves just as family-members, it meant that if there was less of a family, they were less people, and if there wasn't a family, they weren't people."

"... in the full sense."

"Weren't people in the full sense."

Alvin stepped to the television. "Each family-member, then, in a natural and understandable attempt to preserve individual ident.i.ty and efficacy of will ..."

Spatula made knee-motions indicating that she needed to go potty. Lenore continued eating her now not quite so frozen peas.

"... sought to restore ident.i.ty, and a sense of belonging, by attaching themselves to things in the world, extrafamilial objects and pursuits; they sought ident.i.ty and shelter in things. Alvin held up his Spiro Agnew watch; Spatula hugged English m.u.f.fin the teddy bear to her chest as she bobbed; Stoney made motions as if to kiss his Richard Scarry cut-out book, while Clarice made as if to tango with her Visa Gold Card. The cracked white faceless masks came off, and so everyone was back to his or her original mask. The audience made soft sounds. And now extremely tiny but still accurate Clarice-, Alvin-, Stoney-, and Spatula-masks were affixed to the objects by their owners.

"h.e.l.l of a lot of masks, here," Lenore muttered.

"The problem, again, however," Alvin continued, "was that in making their own sense of self and rightness-with-themselves-as-people depend on things outside them, the family-members were letting themselves in for riskiness and trouble. Things couldn't be people, not even the people they belonged to." The tiny masks on the objects were taken off and discarded with wide arm-motions. Alvin said, "And now a lost or a misplaced thing meant what, for the Snapiard family?"

"What?" shouted the audience on the television.

There was silence. Alvin took Clarice's Visa Gold Card, and she the watch, and they traded masks. Alvin's nose had been sweating heavily, and Clarice was clearly less than pleased about putting his mask on. Clarice took English m.u.f.fin and gave Spatula the Alvin-mask. Soon each member of the family was wearing an incorrect mask and was twirling around, symbolizing disorientation and despair, although the despair-effect was compromised somewhat by the fact that Spatula really liked to twirl, and was giggling.

Lenore's sister is ravingly lovely, if one likes the ravingly lovely type, with soft honey hair and dark blue eyes and b.r.e.a.s.t.s like artillery; but she is c.o.c.ky and serious and dull and utterly (and un-attractively unaware that she is utterly) dependent on the Latest Thing for her sense of direction and worth. Her husband is a civil man, though that he l.u.s.ts after Lenore I do not for one second doubt. Alvin Spaniard is randy. My understanding-which is arrived at via Lenore and so is of course vague-is that on four occasions early last year Alvin Spaniard had s.e.xual intercourse with his Georgia peach of a receptionist. Clarice Spaniard found out about the incidents from Sigurd Foamwhistle, Stonecipher Beadsman III's executive aide and possibly the half brother of Lenore's younger brother, and in any event a man about whose unsavory desires with respect to Clarice and Lenore both I am in no doubt whatsoever. So Clarice found out, and there were, for a while, various kickings of emotional a.s.s. They subsided, and Alvin and Clarice finally sat down and conferred, and it was decided marriage therapy was needed, Alvin agreeing vigorously, obviously-loving his wife, also liking his job. Marriage therapy degenerated into family therapy. G.o.d knows what all went on. I know there were stages concerned with human sculpture, in which each member of the family molded the others into those positions reflecting perceived relationships, etc. There were fights involving toy clubs made of Nerf material. The Spaniard vogue now is apparently drama, carried on in front of a fabricated audience; rather, at least tonight, at least one real person-regardless of what that person herself may happen to think. Lenore and Clarice are not close. As are not Monroe and I. She says she avoids going over. But where does she go, then?

A bad day. The urine dream has so upset me that I find it hard to function. As it were. I miss Lenore. I feel physical pain, now, when I am absent or apart from Lenore Beadsman. Which is, of course, always. Too bad a day to think actively of what her father might be trying to do. On the face of it I must say that it seems to me that whatever I can do to establish connections with Lenore's family, to deepen and strengthen the personal bonds that join Lenore and me, can only hasten that day when I am able truly and completely and finally to take Lenore Beadsman inside myself.

A bad, bad day. Dark, soaring feelings of important tasks yet undone. Yet unknown. I am afraid to go to the bathroom.

All the excitement of the twirling and giggling, and the tension of live performance, but especially the twirling, had been responsible for a slight crisis with respect to Spatula. Things were quickly put right again, though, with Lenore helping with paper towels, and the audience was put in a FREEZE mode, and finally unfrozen, and things got back underway.

Stoney: "Disorientation and sadness resulted when the family-members tried to depend on things that weren't them and weren't the family for their own happiness and being-themselves-ness."

"Sense of self."

"Sense of self. So they ... they ..."

Clarice stepped forward and gently pushed Stonecipher out of the way: "So they did what any smart family-members would do. They talked with one another, and aired the things they weren't comfortable with as people right then, and meaningful dialogue and personal interaction was established, and the family-members began to grow emotionally both as individuals and as members of an emotional network of shared interests and values and emotional commitments, and then the growth and development and dialogue was facilitated by their going and seeing an outside party whose whole life was directed toward helping family-members grow and see themselves clearly both as selves and members, and so come to a fuller and happier sense of self."

The invisible orchestra on the television now struck up a tune, and in the living room in Cleveland Heights there took place a sort of dance, with involved connections and motions and gestures, each directed by family-members at other family-members, while the audience clapped its hands. The dance would have been better, except Alvin wasn't partic.i.p.ating with full enthusiasm, and kept gravitating back to the sofa and looking down through his mask at his notes from the Kopek Spasova interview.

The dance ended. Lenore looked at the clock on the mantel. Spatula, damp but cheerful, stepped forward.

"And after a long time of trying, the Snapiards ...," she giggled, "... discovered the easiest thing in the whole world. They all discovered that they couldn't try to depend for their feelings of being themselves on just the whole family, because they each weren't the whole family." The Spaniards all went and stomped on their FAMILY-MEMBER masks. "And they couldn't get their feelings of themselves from things, because they weren't things." They all pretended to stomp on their things, but didn't really, especially Alvin and his Spiro Agnew watch. "They found out that what they needed to get their feelings of being themselves from was, themselves themselves ... ," Spatula smiled wonderfully at the television as a murmur went through the crowd, "... because that's what they were. The easiest thing in the world is what they saw." And Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula took off their Alvin-, Clarice-, Stoney-, and Spatula-masks, and stared deeply into the empty eyeholes of their own faces. Through one of her eyeholes Spatula said to the television, "The End." The television audience rose as one. ... ," Spatula smiled wonderfully at the television as a murmur went through the crowd, "... because that's what they were. The easiest thing in the world is what they saw." And Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula took off their Alvin-, Clarice-, Stoney-, and Spatula-masks, and stared deeply into the empty eyeholes of their own faces. Through one of her eyeholes Spatula said to the television, "The End." The television audience rose as one.

"Dum de dum de dum de dum."

"La de da de da de da."

"Jesus shall not want."

"Jesus shall not want."

"What?"

"Pardon me?"

"What in the Lord's name?"

"The Lord is my supper. Jesus shall not want."

"Sweet Mother McCree."

"You fill me up."

"It's a miracle."

"Lay your sleeping head, my love."

"Dear Father in heaven."

"Human on my faithless arm."

"The bird has been touched by G.o.d."

"The bird has been touched by G.o.d."

"Yes."

"I have to do what's right for me as a person."

"Thank you Lord. Thank you for touching this house. Oral, I did, I expected a miracle."

"The sins of the fathers."