“Boys always want to get it over with,” she says. “Getting it over with is for pussies.”
He hits her hard in the arm with his middle finger bent and protruding through his glove. Without thinking, she swiftly turns and hits him back.
“The movie is called The Beginning of the End,” Captain Casket is saying. He has climbed onto his coffin and straddles it like a kid balancing on the rim of a bathtub. “And you’ll want it to end before it even begins, guys and ghouls. Giant grasshoppers munch, munch, munching the Empire State Building. Is it a government experiment gone awry? What might you find, little ones, wriggling under your covers tonight, or lurking beneath your pillow, waiting to gnaw the roots of your hair and lay their eggs in your ear while you’re dreaming your sweet, sweet dreams …?”
“What’s your problem with me?” Jasper asks.
“I’m just sick of you bossing me around. How did you get a job here anyway?”
“I sucked up to Captain Casket.”
“I know what you suck,” she says.
“Jealous?”
“You’re disgusting,” she says. “I don’t know why I bother being nice to you.”
“You’re not nice to me,” he says. “You’ve been a cunt ever since I moved into your house. A spoiled little cunt.”
“And here’s a little lullaby to get your nightmares flowing …” Captain Casket says, reaching back into his coffin for his signature saw and bow. Jasper tugs on a length of fishing line and a chair placed off in the wings magically glides across the stage. The Captain takes his seat, pressing the saw handle between his knees, and lightly bends the blade. He draws the bow and high-pitched eerie notes float over the stage, mingling with the fog. Sweetly, he chants:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Across my scalp the bugs will creep.
If I should die before I wake,
I trust the bugs my crumbs will take …
“When my mother was in the hospital the last time, I couldn’t sleep,” Jasper is saying. “My dad had already checked out by then and he didn’t care what I did. I used to stay up and watch the Creepshow. I didn’t care about the movie. I wanted to see what shit would come out of the Captain’s mouth.”
“You think my dad is really like that?”
“He says what we’re all thinking. What everyone else is too chickenshit to say.”
She laughs out loud then stops herself because the microphones might pick her up.
“Captain Casket might be. But Eddie is a middle-aged weatherman in a bad costume. He’s a dad, for chrissakes.”
Jasper shoots her a look of pity. “You’re so blind. Give him half the chance and he’s just like me, both of us out there on a rampage, ready to saw the pretty girls to bits then go out and wreck the city.”
“You’re both so lame,” Wallis says. “Everyone wants to be the bad guy. It’s easy to be bad.”
“Easy for you, maybe. You’re already a cunt.”
“Will you stop it with that word,” she says. “You think it makes you sound cool? Why don’t you smoke? Or go get drunk and wreck your car? Oh wait, your dad did that already.”
He walks away. Good, she thinks. Onstage, Captain Casket cues the movie.
She has only one job to do. Eddie laughs three times and she tosses him the cat. He plays mad scientist after the first commercial break; they wheel in the cauldron after the second. He adds the ingredients one by one for his family recipe, Captain Casket’s Primordial Stew. Old oxford shoe. Jug of moonshine. Finger twist of earwax. Seasoned with a sprinkling of straight pins. And then it’s her cue. She leans against the back wall offstage right, wrapped in his weatherman’s sports jacket against the chill, and she hugs the cat to her chest. She has only to stay awake for this one thing, but the movie is so long. A pretty man and a pretty woman with knitted brows. Was it the Russians or could their own government be keeping secrets from them? And the grasshoppers multiply and grow. She has an itch on the back of her leg. And another one on the back of her neck. Offstage left, Jasper and Eddie huddle with the stagehands, talking through the tech cues for the next commercial break. They don’t need her, they turn their backs even, and who cares, it’s just a stupid movie and a recycled skit he’s done in one version or another for years. She slides down the wall. It is so cold and her eyes are so heavy and she would give anything to just close them right now. She shuts them, just for a tiny rest, it feels so good, and there is Mom in the living room sitting up watching on their red gingham sofa, Here’s a blanket darling, come snuggle up beside me. Her party lists are spread before her. In two even columns, Mom’s handwriting is small and precise; she gave Wallis a fountain pen when Wallis was ten and Wallis used to practice making her letters flow like her mother’s, the thick loops and the thin connections. Mom is going over the list of hors d’oeuvres for the party, calculating how many she’ll need based on a complex algorithm of men to women to dropped on the ground to pinched by children who shouldn’t be allowed so near a buffet when there are obviously bowls of chips for them out on the patio. She told the caterer not to bring toothpicks because she had bought an entire case from a seafood restaurant that was going out of business. They’re just adorable, sporting skulls and crossbones. Pirate flags, really, but she hopes no one will notice. She found black napkins and black paper plates, and a man who is willing to do an ice sculpture of Captain Casket based on an old photograph from back before he looked so dissipated.
Even when she’s so tired she’d like to crawl in bed without doing the dinner dishes, Mom makes herself stay up on Saturday night. She glances up often enough so that she can say something nice about Eddie’s skits when he comes home, to let him know his work is important to her. She gets every third sentence or so. We’re back, guys and ghouls … The mysteries of creation … Don’t try this at home … As if “home” were some frozen sanctuary where nothing interesting should ever happen. Still, she winces at the Bunsen burner, an open flame on set, it would be so easy to burn the whole place down. And, of course, she knows. Before Captain Casket, back when they had their own cooking show, she was flipping an omelet for the kids, something she’d done dozens of times at home, when the edge of her apron brushed the open flame of the camp stove they were using and caught fire. She knows it couldn’t have been the case, but in her memory she burned for a full thirty seconds, dropping the skillet, slapping at her dress with her dry pink palms. She remembers thinking, Where is Eddie? Why isn’t he helping? And then suddenly, she was soaked. He’d pitched the pan of water where the hardboiled eggs were cooling, and it was like being stoned in the center of the town square, all those hard, white things coming at her and rolling under the table, across the set, away. Eddie was laughing and the cameramen were laughing, and Eddie lifted the hen puppet Ann had sewn and clucked it at her, saying, “Whenever you’re using the stove, boys and girls, be sure to ask Mom for help.” She was furious he went for a sight gag when she could have gone up in flames. But she couldn’t let on. Not when everything was live.
If she’s perfectly honest, she has to admit she doesn’t much care for horror movies. There, she’s said it. She doesn’t understand why people would want to put themselves through something so unpleasant. It’s not that she’s squeamish; no, she used to pore over Butler’s Lives of the Saints in the library at school and wish she’d been born Catholic so that she might so much as light a candle, even at the dinner table, without feeling like a character in a play. Breasts on a plate and a body pierced by arrows; she didn’t turn away from violence, she just felt it shouldn’t be purely recreational. They’d tried to keep their cooking act together once the Captain Casket job offered itself, but this philosophical difference kept coming between them. When Eddie wanted her to play his mother, a body in a rocking chair he might dismember every Saturday night, she balked. The great thing is, you’ll be resurrected every week. Doesn’t that appeal to you, darling? I would think it would.
A hundred and twenty people will be coming to the par
ty next Friday night and she has work to do. Eddie has so many friends. She’s never heard him utter a single unpleasant word to anyone except family, but, after all, we’re hardest on those we’re closest to. This tedious movie, Mom closes her eyes. When will it ever end? Whenever a story becomes too scary, he’s there with a joke to keep you from hiding under the covers; and when it’s like this, banal and grinding, he adds just enough darkness to keep you awake. He is the perfect balance, this husband of hers, a little bit of antidote and poison in a single pill. She wishes others appreciated him as much as she, and didn’t find him silly. One shouldn’t have to take up one’s husband as a cause. It certainly would be easier to be married to a dentist or an orthopedic surgeon. Which reminds her—she reaches for her guest list—Dr. and Mrs. Neumark.
Wallis opens her eyes. It is after one in the morning and Captain Casket is juggling test tubes. The flame onstage is leaping blue with sparks of orange around the tip. Jasper stands in the wings on the other side of the soundstage, in the purple gel of the kleig lights, his hair glows as if painted on black velvet. She hasn’t missed her cue. She shuts her eyes again.
Mom is telling her about the first show she did with Dad.
“It was Frankenstein, you know,” she whispers. “The poor thing. He didn’t know what he was doing, just got in front of the camera and sputtered. He didn’t have a costume, he was trying to say something serious about the movie, like he was a film critic. He talked about the novel and a ghost story contest with Lord Byron, and he almost put everyone to sleep before the movie even started. Other men in other markets were becoming big stars with these packages. Zacherley was on the cover of TV Guide. And here was dear Dad, trying to be an expert on something he knew nothing about. It was just too sad.
“Frankenstein,” Mom sighs. “I’ve had to sit through that movie over a dozen times.” Her lists are forgotten, they’re on the couch in the sunken living room, across from a fire guttering in the fireplace. Mom cradles Wallis in her lap, running her fingers through her hair. “And do you know who I always feel for? Not that awful scientist or his stupid monster, but poor Elizabeth. Elizabeth, his fiancée, pale and worried in her wedding dress, her veil so long it stretches across the room to the doorway and tugs her nearly off balance with every step she takes. All those guests outside feasting and making merry, waiting for her to appear and the wedding to begin. It was supposed to be Elizabeth’s day, but instead there was a monster on the loose, and a dead and dripping child took center stage and all that planning and organizing and care was ruined. And when the movie’s over and we see her through the doorway, nursing broken-down Henry, who really should have known better, she’s still not married. That dress must be hanging in a closet somewhere, I suppose, out of sight. And she’ll just have to put it on again, all stale and rumpled, and pretend it’s good as new.”
Wallis’s eyes fly open at the boom of a loud prolonged explosion, clouds of smoke like the finale of July Fourth fireworks. Captain Casket is performing his last skit after the final commercial break of the night. His soup pot is stirred, dinner is ready. Through the clearing fog, the creature is born—a corona of red rises, then pale flesh, two narrow eyes, the long nose, the parted lips. The cauldron with the false bottom and Jasper’s head swiveling, his eyes imploring—Master—a velvet rose between his teeth. She is still holding the skeleton cat, no one bothered to wake her. And here’s her father’s nighthoarse laugh echoing through the soundstage, the station, the dark dens and bedrooms beyond. Oh, the spark. Oh, the glory. Mine! All mine!
Eddie slathers his face with Vaseline until it is a soft gray slurry then, burying it in his towel, he gives it a violent rub and Captain Casket comes away in a single swipe. No matter how many hypoallergenic lotions and cotton balls Mom packs, he insists on doing it this way. His face is red and angry for several minutes before it settles again into just a face. Wallis leans her head against the file cabinet.
“No way!” She jumps at Jasper shouting down the hall. “No motherfucking way!”
Eddie sticks his head out of the door in alarm. “Cowards!” Jasper is shouting. Now she hears another voice, too. Fat, bearded John the cameraman arguing with him. Jasper rounds the corner, his face red and mottled. Besides Captain Casket’s weekly stack of fan mail, he’s clutching a sheet of paper and a torn envelope. John follows close behind, holding an identical envelope.
“After twenty years, this is how they tell us?” Jasper demands. You’re barely fifteen, Wallis is thinking. What are you talking about, twenty years?
“What’s happened?” Eddie asks.
“I checked your box just now,” Jasper says. “They waited until everyone else was gone. It’s fucking disrespectful.”
He passes the paper to Eddie, who begins to read.
“They’ve canceled us,” Jasper says.
“It’s not just us,” John says. “Memo says they’re looking for a buyer for the station.”
“They can’t do that,” Jasper insists.
Eddie had pulled the top half of his unitard down to his waist and now steps out of his costume. Wallis is aware of Jasper and John both watching her dad for his reaction, waiting for him to tell them how to feel about it. Eddie is aware, too, and takes his time stuffing his unitard into his duffel bag for Ann to wash.
“Twenty years is a good run,” Eddie says at last. “Now I can become that male prostitute I always wanted to be.”
Jasper stares at him, incredulous. “I’m not hearing this.”
John says, “Shit, Eddie. Used to be Ann’s daddy’s station. I bet she’ll take it pretty hard.”
Her father hadn’t considered that. Wallis thinks of Mom at home with her lists and menus, unaware she’s planning a wake. Eddie says, “We don’t have to tell her right away.”
Yes, let’s put off the inevitable, Wallis thinks, turning away from her father’s bare shoulders and graying chest hair and the tight white briefs which seem too full to her. She’s seen it all before, but she doesn’t want to have to see it now, not in front of Jasper and John, so she leaves them in the dressing room and wanders back to the soundstage where the ghost light sits on its solitary pole, casting a pale blue glow. Captain Casket’s laboratory has been put away, the news desk rolled in, and the cheery orange a.m. sunrise flats have been lowered for the morning broadcast. Only the old wooden coffin is left, awaiting its return to their carport. She once asked her father where he got this casket and he said his mother had sent it as a wedding present. Will you give it to me when I get married? she’d asked him. It depends, he said, on who’s willing to marry you. She lifts herself into its hollow belly: no splinters, but no real comfort either. If sex is bloody knuckles, this is what marriage feels like. She lies back, staring into the rafters at the PARs and Fresnel lamps on the beams overhead. The disco ball is tucked out of sight and the skeletons rolled up in their nooses. Will they really sell the station? What will six o’clock be without Eddie announcing the weather, and Sue and Adam reporting the daily shootings and travesties of the school board? Adam has been hosting the local news since before she was born. He gave her a ballpoint pen every time she came onto the set. Sue had arrived ten years ago, swept in, Mom said, with Women’s Lib. Who would Wallis be if her father were no longer Captain Casket, if he was just Eddie Alley? She tugs the lid closed like pulling up a blanket on a cold winter night and the inside of the coffin smells like greasepaint and sweat and the fried onions her father always orders with his dinner.
Rest. It’s so late and it’s all she wants. Her heavy eyes adjust and in the right-hand corner of the lid, she spies the raised head of a coffin nail that has worked loose. It’s an old russet square head, narrow and straight like a spike for a miniature railroad. It feels valuable and important to her, at this late hour; this nail should be magnified by its flake and decay if only because it has endured. The space is too tight to raise her arm, but she hinges at the elbow and picks at it with her fingernail until gradually she works it loose. It could have drop
ped at any moment and put out her father’s eye, she is doing him a favor. She holds her breath, listening for the sound of footsteps. As she touches the point to the lid and scores the initials, she tells herself there is a one in twenty-six chance of what each might become, she can’t be certain, and yet they are becoming exactly what she feared they might, a W plus a J. As soon as she sees them, she wants to scribble them out, but her hand and the nail trace a heart instead, a shallow little heart.
“Wallis!”
Eddie is calling from the hallway. He hates it when she runs off. “It’s late. Let’s go.”
Wallis doesn’t answer, hiding like she did when she was a little girl. Hide-and-seek was always over so fast in her house. There was only her to search for and she always hid in the same place. She shoves the nail deep in her pocket.
Her father knocks on the coffin lid. “I know you’re in there.”
“Carry me,” she says, muffled.
“Stop playing around,” Eddie says.
“Carry me. You’re strong.”
No one says a word, then, with a jerk, the foot of the coffin is lifted off the ground. Her head is brought even and she is weightless, bobbing through the soundstage and down the darkened hall.
“Okay, stop,” she says. “You’re going to drop me.”
But her pallbearers keep walking, taking their rights and lefts, their feet shuffling along the granite floor. They are trying to scare her now, letting the coffin drop an inch or so, then bouncing it up again.
“Where are you taking me?” she asks. She lies with her arms folded across her chest, trying to stay dead center in the casket so that her shifting weight doesn’t cause her to tip over.
“We’re going to put you in the ground,” her dad says. “And cover you with dirt.”
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,” sings Jasper.
They are grunting and laughing as they heft her down the back steps and into the parking lot. The light from the transmitter tower blinks red through the air holes. She is getting used to the powerless feeling of floating in the dark.