Standing in front of her team, dressed in the prim blue slacks and blue blazer she invariably wore on game days, was Ellen Silverman. She was smiling and holding up a handmade sign that read I LOVE YOU WESLEY.
Wesley thrust his hands, one still holding the newspaper, over his head and let out a yell that caused a couple of kids on the other side of the street to look around.
"Wassup?" one of them called.
"Sports fan!" Wesley called back, then raced upstairs. He had a call to make.
Thinking of Ralph Vicinanza
On July 26, 2009, a woman named Diane Schuler left the Hunter Lake Campground in Parksville, New York, driving her 2003 Ford Windstar. She had five passengers: her five-year-old son, her two-year-old daughter, and three nieces. She seemed fine--the last person to see her at the campground swears she was alert and had no liquor on her breath--and equally fine an hour later, when she fed the kids at a Mickey D's. Not long after that, however, she was observed vomiting beside the road. She called her brother and said she did not feel well. Then she turned onto the Taconic Parkway and drove the wrong way for nearly two miles, ignoring the horns, waves, and flashing lights of those who dodged around her. She eventually hit an SUV head-on, killing herself, all but one of her passengers (her son survived), and the three men in the SUV.
According to the toxicology reports, Schuler was processing the equivalent of ten drinks at the time of the crash, plus a large amount of marijuana. Her husband stated that his wife wasn't a drinker, but toxicology reports don't lie. Like Candy Rymer in the previous story, Diane Schuler was loaded to the max. Did Daniel Schuler really not know, after at least five years of marriage and a period of courtship, that his wife was a secret drinker? It's actually possible. Abusers can be incredibly sly, and hide their addictions for a long time. They do it out of need and desperation.
What exactly happened in that car? How did she get drunk so fast, and when did she smoke the dope? What was she thinking when she refused to heed the drivers warning her that she was going the wrong way? Was it a booze and drug-fueled accident, a murder-suicide, or some weird combination of both? Only fiction can approach answers to these questions. Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable, and perhaps obtain some sort of closure. This story is my effort to do that.
And by the way, Herman Wouk is still alive. He read a version of this story after it appeared in The Atlantic, and wrote me a nice note. Invited me to visit him, even. As a longtime fan, I was thrilled. He's pushing a hundred now, and I'm sixty-seven. Should I live long enough, I might just take him up on the invitation.
Herman Wouk Is Still Alive
From the Portland (Maine) Press-Herald, September 19, 2010:
9 DIE IN HORRIFIC I-95 CRASH
Spontaneous Mourning at Scene
By Ray Dugan
Less than six hours after a one-vehicle accident in the town of Fairfield took the lives of two adults and seven children, all under the age of ten, the mourning has already begun. Bouquets of wildflowers in tin cans and insulated coffee mugs ring the scorched earth; a line of nine crosses has been placed in the picnic area of the adjacent rest area at Mile 109. At the site where the bodies of the two youngest children were found, an anonymous sign, words spray-painted on a piece of bedsheet, has been erected. It reads, ANGELS GATHER HERE.
I. BRENDA HITS PICK-3 FOR $2,700 AND RESISTS HER FIRST IMPULSE.
Instead of going out for a bottle of Orange Driver to celebrate with, Brenda pays off the MasterCard, which has been maxed like forever. Then calls Hertz and asks a question. Then calls her friend Jasmine, who lives in North Berwick, and tells her about the Pick-3. Jasmine screams and says, "Girl, you're rich!"
If only. Brenda explains how she paid off the credit card so she can rent a Chevy Express if she wants to. It's a van that seats nine, that's what the Hertz girl told her. "We could get all the kids in there and drive up to Mars Hill. See your folks and mine. Show off the grandchildren. Squeeze the home folks for a little more dough. What do you think?"
Jasmine is dubious. The glorified shack in Mars Hill that her folks call home doesn't have room, and she wouldn't want to stay with them even if it did. She hates her parents. With good reason, Brenda knows; it was Jazzy's own father who broke her in, a week after her fifteenth birthday. Her mother knew what was going on and did nothing. When Jaz went to her in tears, her ma said, "You got nothing to worry about, he's had his nuts cut."
Jaz married Mitch Robicheau to get away from them, and now, three men, four kids, and eight years later, she's on her own. And on welfare, although she gets sixteen hours a week at the Roll Around, handing out skates and making change for the video arcade, where the machines take only special tokens. They let her bring her two youngest. Delight sleeps in the office and Truth, her three-year-old, wanders around in the arcade hitching at his diapers. He doesn't get into too much trouble, although last year he got headlice and the two women had to shave all his hair off. How he howled.
"There's six hundred left over after I paid off the credit card balance," Brenda says. "Well, four hundred if you count the rental, only I don't, because I can put that on MasterCard. We could stay at the Red Roof, watch Home Box. It's free. We can get take-out from downstreet and the kids can swim in the pool. What do you say?"
From behind her comes yelling. Brenda raises her voice and screams, "Freddy, you stop teasing your sister and give that back!" Then, oh goody, their squabbling wakes up the baby. Either that or Freedom has messed in her diapers and awakened herself. Freedom always messes in her diapers. To Brenda it seems like manufacturing poop is Free's life's work. Takes after her father that way.
"I suppose . . ." Jasmine says, drawing suppose out to four syllables. Maybe five.
"Come on, girl! Road trip! Get with the program! We take the bus to the Jetport and rent the van. Three hundred miles, we can be there in four hours. The girl says the rugrats can watch DVDs. The Little Mermaid and all that good stuff."
"Maybe I could get some of that government money from my ma before it's all gone," Jasmine says thoughtfully.
Her brother Tommy died the year before, in Afghanistan. It was an IED that took him. Her ma and dad got eighty thousand out of it. Her ma has promised her some, although not when the old man was in hearing distance of the phone. Of course it may be gone already. Probably is. She knows Mr. Fuck-A-Fifteen-Year-Old bought a Yamaha rice-rocket with some of it, although what he wants with a thing like that at his age Jasmine has no idea. And she knows things like government money are mostly a mirage. This is something they both know. Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never colorfast.
"Come on," Brenda says. She has fallen in love with the idea of loading up the van with kids and her best (her only) friend from high school, who ended up living just one town over. Both of them on their own, seven kids between them, too many lousy men in the rearview, but sometimes they still have a little fun.
She hears a thunk sound. Freddy starts to scream. Glory has whopped him in the eye with an action figure.
"Glory you stop that or I'll tear you a new one!" Brenda screams.
"He won't give back my Powerpuff!" Glory shrieks, and she starts to cry. Now they're all crying--Freddy, Glory, and Freedom--and for a moment grayness creeps over Brenda's vision. She's seen a lot of that grayness lately. Here they are in a three-room third-floor apartment, no guy in the picture (Tim, the latest in her life, took off six months ago), living pretty much on noodles and Pepsi and that cheap ice cream they sell at Walmart, no air-conditioning, no cable TV, she had a job at the Quik-Flash store but the company went bust and now the store's an On the Run and the manager hired some Taco Paco to do her job because Taco Paco can work twelve or fourteen hours a day. Taco Paco wears a doorag on his head and a nasty little mustache on his upper lip and he's never been pregnant. Taco Paco's job is to get girls pregnant. They fall for that little mustache and then boom, the line in the little drugstore testing gadget t
urns blue and here comes another one, just like the other one.
Brenda has personal here-comes-another-one experience. She tells people she knows who Freddy's father is, but she really doesn't, she had a few drunk nights there when they all looked good, and besides, come on, how is she supposed to look for a job anyway? She's got these kids. What's she supposed to do, leave Freddy to mind Glory and take Freedom to the goddam job interviews? Sure, that'll work. And what is there, besides drive-up window girl at Mickey D's or the Booger King? Portland has a couple of strip clubs, but wide loads like her don't get that kind of work.
She reminds herself she hit the lottery. She reminds herself they could be in a couple of air-conditioned rooms tonight at the Red Roof--three, even! Why not? Things are turning around!
"Brennie?" Jaz sounds more doubtful than ever. "Are you like serious about this?"
"Yeah," Brenda says. "Come on, girl, I'm approved. The Hertz chick says the van is red." She lowers her voice and adds: "Your lucky color."
"Did you pay off the credit card online? How'd you do that?" Freddy and Glory got fighting last month and knocked Brenda's laptop off the bed. It fell on the floor and broke.
"I used the one at the library." She says it the way she grew up in Mars Hill saying it: liberry. "I had to wait awhile to get on, but it's worth it. It's free. So what do you say?"
"Maybe we could get a bottle of Allen's," Jaz says. She loves that Allen's Coffee Brandy, when she can get it. In truth, Jasmine loves anything when she can get it.
"No doubt," Brenda says. "And a bottle of Orange Driver for me. But I won't drink while I'm behind the wheel, Jaz. I have to keep my license. It's about all I got left."
"Can you really get any money out of your folks, do you think?"
Brenda tells herself that once they see the kids--assuming the kids can be bribed (or intimidated) into good behavior--she can. "But not a word about the lottery," she says.
"No way," Jasmine says. "I was born at night but it wasn't last night."
They yuk at this one, an oldie but a goodie.
"So what do you think?"
"I'll have to take Eddie and Rose Ellen out of school . . ."
"BFD," Brenda says. "So what do you think, girl?"
After a long pause on the other end, Jasmine says, "Road trip!"
"Road trip!" Brenda hollers back.
Then they are chanting it while the three kids bawl in Brenda's Sanford apartment and at least one (maybe two) are bawling in Jasmine's North Berwick apartment. These are the fat women nobody wants to see when they're on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there's nobody better in sight. What men think when they're drunk--Brenda and Jasmine both know this--is that thunder thighs are better than no thighs at all. Especially at closing time. They went to high school together in Mars Hill and now they're downstate and they help each other when they can. They are the fat women nobody wants to see, they have a litter of children between them, and they are chanting road trip, road trip like a couple of cheerleading fools.
On a September morning, already hot at eight thirty, this is the way things happen. It's never been any different.
II. SO THESE TWO OLD POETS WHO WERE ONCE LOVERS IN PARIS HAVE A PICNIC NEAR THE BATHROOMS.
Phil Henreid is seventy-eight now, and Pauline Enslin is seventy-five. They're both skinny. They both wear spectacles. Their hair, white and thin, blows in the breeze. They've paused at a rest area on I-95 near Fairfield, which is about twenty miles north of Augusta. The rest area building is barnboard, and the adjacent bathrooms are brick. They're good-looking bathrooms. State-of-the-art bathrooms, one could say. There's no odor. Phil, who lives in Maine and knows this rest area well, would never have proposed a picnic here two months earlier. In the summertime, the traffic on the interstate swells with out-of-state vacationers, and the Turnpike Authority brings in a line of plastic Port-O-Sans. They make this pleasant grassy area stink like hell on New Year's Eve. But now the Port-O-Sans are in storage somewhere and the rest area is nice.
Pauline puts a checked cloth on the initial-scarred picnic table standing in the shade of an old oak, and anchors it with a wicker picnic basket against a slight warm breeze. From the basket she takes sandwiches, potato salad, melon wedges, and two slices of coconut-custard pie. She also has a large glass bottle of red tea. Ice cubes clink cheerfully inside.
"If we were in Paris, we'd have wine," Phil says.
"In Paris we never had another eighty miles to drive on the turnpike," she replies. "That tea is cold and it's fresh. You'll have to make do."
"I wasn't carping," he says, and lays an arthritis-swollen hand over hers (which is also swollen, although marginally less so). "This is a feast, my dear."
They smile into each other's used faces. Although Phil has been married three times (and has scattered five children behind him) and Pauline has been married twice (no children, but lovers of both sexes in the dozens), they still have quite a lot between them. Much more than a spark. Phil is both surprised and not surprised. At his age--late, but not quite last call--you take what you can and are happy to get it. They are on their way to a poetry festival at the University of Maine's Orono branch, and while the compensation for their joint appearance isn't huge, it's adequate. Since he has an expense account, Phil has splurged and rented a Cadillac from Hertz at the Portland Jetport, where he met her plane. Pauline jeered at the Caddy, said she always knew he was a plastic hippie, but she did so gently. He wasn't a hippie, but he was a genuine iconoclast, a one-of-a-kinder, and she knows it. As he knows that her osteoporotic bones have enjoyed the ride.
Now, a picnic. Tonight they'll have a catered meal, but the food will be a lukewarm, sauce-covered mess o' mystery supplied by the cafeteria in one of the college commons. Possibly chicken, possibly fish, it's always hard to tell. Beige food is what Pauline calls it. Visiting poet-food is always beige, and in any case it won't be served until eight o'clock. With some cheap yellowish-white wine seemingly created to saw at the guts of semiretired alcohol abusers such as themselves. This meal is nicer, and iced tea is fine. Phil even indulges the fantasy of leading her by the hand to the high grass behind the bathrooms once they have finished eating, like in that old Van Morrison song, and--
Ah, but no. Elderly poets whose sex drives are now permanently stuck in first gear should not chance such a potentially ludicrous site of assignation. Especially poets of long, rich, and varied experience, who now know that each time is apt to be largely unsatisfactory, and each time may well be the last time. Besides, Phil thinks, I have already had two heart attacks. Who knows what's up with her?
Pauline thinks, Not after sandwiches and potato salad, not to mention custard pie. But perhaps tonight. It is not out of the question. She smiles at him and takes the last item from the hamper. It is a New York Times, bought at the same Augusta convenience store where she got the rest of the picnic things, checked cloth and iced-tea bottle included. As in the old days, they flip for the Arts & Leisure section. In the old days, Phil--who won the National Book Award for Burning Elephants in 1970--always called tails and won far more times than the odds said he should. Today he calls heads . . . and wins again.
"Why, you snot!" she cries, and hands it over.
They eat. They read the divided paper. At one point she looks at him over a forkful of potato salad and says, "I still love you, you old fraud."
Phil smiles. The wind blows the gone-to-seed dandelion puff of his hair. His scalp shines gauzily through. He's not the young man who once came roistering out of Brooklyn, broad-shouldered as a longshoreman (and just as foul-mouthed), but Pauline can still see the shadow of that man, who was so full of anger, despair, and hilarity.
"Why, I love you, too, Paulie," he says.
"We're a couple of old crocks," she says, and bursts into laughter. Once she had sex with a king and a movie star at pretty much the same time on a balcony while "Maggie May" played on the gramophone, Rod Stewar
t singing in French. Now the woman The New York Times once called America's greatest living female poet lives in a walk-up in Queens. "Doing poetry readings in tank towns for dishonorable honorariums and eating alfresco in rest areas."
"We're not old," he says, "we're young, bebe."
"What in the world are you talking about?"
"Look at this," he says, and holds out the first page of the Arts section. She takes it and sees a photograph. It's a dried-up string of a man wearing a straw hat and a smile.
Nonagenarian Wouk to Publish New Book
By Motoko Rich
By the time they reach the age of ninety-five--if they do--most writers have retired long ago. Not Herman Wouk, author of such famous novels as The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Marjorie Morningstar (1955). Many of those who remember the TV miniseries presentations of his exhaustive World War II novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), are now drawing Social Security themselves. It's a retirement premium Wouk became eligible for in 1980.
Wouk, however, is not done. He published a well-reviewed surprise novel, A Hole in Texas, a year shy of his ninetieth birthday, and expects to publish a book-length essay called The Language God Talks later this year. Is it his final word?
"I'm not prepared to speak on that subject, one way or the other," Wouk said with a smile. "The ideas don't stop just because one is old. The body weakens, but the words never do." When asked about his
Continued on page 19
As she looks at that old, seamed face beneath the rakishly tilted straw hat, Pauline feels the sudden sting of tears. "The body weakens, but the words never do," she says. "That's beautiful."
"Have you ever read him?" Phil asks.
"Marjorie Morningstar, in my youth. It's an annoying hymn to virginity, but I was swept away in spite of myself. Have you?"