Gain

  Profits fell from a monthly high of $39,000 at the beginning of 1870 to losses by September. The board voted to cut prices on soap four times in as many meetings. Douglas slashed the traveling sales force from five to two. The few-thousand-dollar budget for printing and promoting vanished, an unaffordable irrelevance.

  In three massive contractions, the labor force shrank from five hundred to little more than three hundred. Plant salaries fell from twelve dollars a week to nine, and then eight. Those who held on to their jobs felt lucky to have them at any price. Elsewhere, the situation was even worse.

  Two regional wholesalers offered to buy significant shipments of soap stamped with their own names. Clare, lathered but unbowed, proudly refused that sore temptation.

  By ’73, a new panic—or just the latest low point in a four-year extended depression—triggered another round of defaults. Creditors, like an embrace-crazed Pentecostal congregation, suffered their neighbor’s squeeze and passed it along. People from Boston to Chicago began to sing “Good Night! Good Night, Beloved!” with all the gusto they’d recently given that now-lamented toast to the man on the flying trapeze.

  Clare, drained by collateral-secured obligations, threatened to dry up and blow away. Promise had peaked and passed, like some silver-mining boomtown hitting vein’s end. The Spirit of Prosperity Yet to Come now seemed a vaster, less plausible hoax than the Cardiff Giant.

  The Clare Soap and Chemical Company might well have gone the way of the overwhelming majority of human enterprises in any given year. In the end, the only thing that stood between soap and its damnation was the boy genius Peter, the Saint of Hygiene.

  She sits at the empty table, wrapped in the smell of fish sticks. At least, the box said fish. Full of her own chemical preservatives, Laura would have a hard time of it if blindfolded and put to the scratch-’n’-sniff test. The smell is, indeed, deeply familiar, but it is not perch or turbot. Miscued, she takes a minute to name it. But once she places the aroma, it’s unmistakable: chipboard glazed with nail polish remover.

  She started out wanting to make her goulash. The one that Don liked to call the “ragoodest meal on earth.” But the kids haven’t touched it the last three times she made it. They’re into cleaner, more geometric foods: the stick, the cube, the wedge. Keep the green stuff off on the side of the plate, where it can’t complicate anything.

  For the first time since Ellen and Tim were little, she finally has all this time on her hands. Time when she might at last cook all the things for them she never has time to cook. But all they’ll eat is timesaving stuff. There’s nothing left to do but heat and eat.

  All she’s supposed to do with the damn fish sticks is leave them alone. Let them sit on the cookie sheet until golden brown. But she can’t resist turning them over every two minutes, some manual intervention. Responsibility. The radio plays in the kitchen: background tunes for fish-stick-flipping. A woman wails a C and W song about caller ID machines. After the first go-round, the refrain has Laura humming along. “I’ll always pick up for you.”

  As if on cue, the phone rings. Don or Ken, probably, listening to the same C and W station. She doesn’t want to talk to either of them. When she answers, she’s more angry than she means to be.

  In fact it’s Ellen. “Hey, Momish. Can I stay and eat over at Camille’s?”

  “I’ve already started dinner for you guys, sweet.”

  “Well, Mom? To tell you the truth? We’ve already finished eating over here.”

  At least Tim shows. One for two. Mealtime conversation isn’t much, but he does seem to enjoy the meal’s Euclidian perfection. She even gets him to sit down, weight off both legs.

  The phone rings again.

  “Mrs. Bodey? This is the Lacewood Police Support.”

  She hears the word “police” and instantly thinks: Ellen. She’s been expecting this call for weeks.

  “Mrs. Bodey, we’re wondering if you would like to send a child to the circus?”

  She tries to regroup. She looks at the clock: dead on the dinner hour. Of course it couldn’t have been a real call. Real people don’t call between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. Those are the ninety minutes reserved for the telemarketers.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t give out money over the phone.”

  “Mrs. Bodey, we’re talking about an underprivileged child who isn’t going to see the circus otherwise. And the money for the ticket goes toward supporting the police who protect you every day. I’m not saying you won’t get that same level of protection if you don’t help us out. But your contribution does good work two ways.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” She cannot lower the receiver to the hook until she hears the click at the other end.

  She feels guilty after she hangs up. Bad. She doesn’t blame the police. There’s no other way, really. Everything costs money, even doing good. Especially doing good. How else are you going to compete in this marketplace? The money has to come from somewhere. And that means private people. Nobody wants the government telling you what charities to support. And the only time you can catch the private person at home anymore is dinner. When that, too, vanishes, she figures they’ll start paging people at restaurants.

  Tim slips away to his room during the call, all chance of talking to him lost. She clears the table, rinses and scrapes the dishes, sticks them in the machine. Why is rinsing and scraping any easier than washing outright? When you add having to scour off those clumps of ketchup that the machine bakes on, you’re talking a losing proposition.

  She sits down with her favorite courtroom novelist. He has a new one out, and Laura is grateful for the distraction. By page twenty, she starts flipping back to the title page to make sure this really is the new one. Every new page adds to her confusion.

  The phone rings again, a distraction from the distraction.

  “Mr. or Mrs. Laura Bodey?” Of course nobody she knows would actually call her.

  “Yes?” she concedes, past fatigue.

  The otherwise-unemployable-except-for-food-service master’sdegree student at the other end hesitates, waiting for Laura to say which. “Laura Bodey?” the voice finally risks.

  “This is she,” Laura confesses.

  “How are you tonight?”

  Terse, she considers saying. “Fine. How are you?” Why can she never just hang up?

  “Fine, thanks. Thanks very much for asking.” She hears the voice following along on the flowchart. Point II-B-2a in this evening’s script. She is his hundredth cold call so far tonight. He probably doesn’t make minimum wage, even counting commissions.

  The whole country has degenerated into one massive teleconferenced begathon. Police, fire, college, photo studios, tanning salons, save-the-earthers, hospitals, magazine subscription services, African relief outfits—all dependent on catching you at home after dinner. And once you’ve given something, then they really hammer you. The people already on the list are the known best bets.

  She’s ready to scream, but can’t. Can’t be a hypocrite. Everybody’s in telemarketing, one way or another. Don’s only a couple of rungs up in the pecking order, though at least he takes his marks out to lunch. Laura too. Millennium kept her on probation for a year and a half, until she delivered her quota of new clients. For sixteen months she spent her life asking people’s answering machines if they were happy with their current house.

  But it’s reached a point where this seems like a constitutional violation. There ought to be a law, if you could get a law passed without involving government. This setting an alarm off in your living room, just to read you a sales pitch. It’s like running an ad on the inside roof of an ambulance. Catch them while you have their undivided attention.

  “Laura, we’ve noticed that you recently changed long-distance carriers?”

  We? she wants to ask.

  “Tell me, Laura. Did we really screw up somehow, or . . . ?”

  Screw up. Somehow—some blip in her credit rating, the weekly p
erambulations of her charge card, the cut of her house’s jib, how much she still owes on it, her soap opera of an employment history, her last three wildlife fund contributions, all those freebie magazine copies she’s accepted, the number of her kids, her age at divorce—the sum of all her silicon data files must type her as a “casual.” Or maybe everyone in the country is a “casual” these days. Maybe it’s just too expensive to work everyone up separately, and the phone reps are told to go with the breezy best bet.

  “Or . . . ?” she repeats.

  “Or did our competition offer you something that made you think you would be getting a better deal from them?”

  He knows what the competition offered. He knows all about the hundred-dollar check she just got for switching. He knows the exact price at which she’ll sell herself. He’s just waiting for her to name it, so he can tell her how shortsighted she’s being.

  Suddenly she wants out. “You people are evil,” she says, as formally as she can make herself sound.

  “We’re not!” the commissioned salesman insists. “We’ve changed.”

  “Didn’t you just lay off twenty thousand people?”

  “That’s so that we could serve you more efficiently. Give you more quality service at better prices.”

  “I’m sorry,” she lies. And then lies again: “I don’t do business over the phone.”

  “We can give you three free calls on your calling card for each of the next six months,” he pleads.

  The doorbell rings. Saved by it, even if she’s just trading one evil for another.

  “Someone’s at the door,” she says.

  He does not stop talking. It’s keep talking or die. Only the greater rudeness of leaving someone ringing at her door gives Laura the courage to cradle the phone.

  She rushes to the foyer, shouting, “I’m coming!” She opens to a heavyset black woman carrying a stack of pamphlets. The woman wears a bright red button that reads:

  Work

  For the Lord

  The Pay Is Lousy

  But the Retirement Benefits

  Are Great

  The woman takes one look at Laura and says, “You’re real sick, honey.”

  To which Laura can only reply, “Please come in.”

  She stands aside. But the woman seems stuck with doubt. “You don’t need what I got. You need a good doctor.”

  What she needs more than anything at this moment is to talk. Just talk, to a real human who sees she’s sick and isn’t selling anything. Words: weather, the World Series, whatever.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Always,” the woman answers. Shaking her head from side to side: “Always.”

  Dead leaves blow brilliant orange around her ankles. She steps over their swirl and into the leafless house. She follows Laura into the living room and collapses into a chair with the force of one who has been on her feet for a long time.

  “Milk and sugar?” Laura asks.

  “Please. Chemotherapy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “About four months?”

  “My fourth next week.”

  The woman stashes her pamphlets next to the end table where she sits. She nods. “At four months, my husband would bruise every time the wind blew. You heaving a lot?”

  “More than I want to.”

  “Your skin getting thin? Hurts to touch? You bruise easily? All your hair scram at once? Ringing in your ears?”

  Laura nods. It feels good. This stranger has asked her more questions in three minutes than her doctor has in three months. It feels good, if only to be fussing in the kitchen for an appreciative recipient.

  “Are you still working?”

  Laura pulls out the Millennium mugs. “I would be. Except . . .”

  The woman nods harder. “Except healthy people hold all the cards.”

  “Does your husband . . . ?”

  “Did my husband,” the woman corrects. “And yes, he did.” She laughs roundly. “Whatever it was you were asking. He did.”

  Laura’s turn to nod. She transfers the coffee from machine to warming pot. She arranges pot, cream, and sugar on her favorite serving tray.

  “What department, Miss . . . ?”

  “Laura. Bodey. Department?”

  “Janine Grandy. What department they have you in?”

  “Oh. No, well, I’m with a real estate brokerage. Next Millennium?”

  “You’re sick, and you don’t even work for them.”

  “Work for who?” As if anyone works for anybody else in this town.

  “You know who. The Small Wonders people. You got insurance?”

  Laura nods again. She serves them both.

  “Good. Jimmy had insurance, too. Not that they ended up paying for much of anything. Funny about those people. They’re supposed to spread the risks around? But they only want to play if they know they can win. In that bed for more than ten days, and, phhht.” She waves her thumb like a first-base umpire. “Find someone else to catch you.”

  “Your husband worked for Clare?”

  “Operations and Maintenance. Twenty-three years. You know what that means: O and M?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Me neither, sister.” Janine laughs, from way down. “And Jimmy didn’t either, really. It meant do whatever those folks told him to do.”

  “And you think that working there made him sick?”

  Janine curls her neck back, a parody of surprise. “You gotta start reading the papers, honey.”

  “I know. I do. I mean, my daughter showed me . . .”

  The cup wavers at Janine’s lips. “That EPA story? That’s old news. Where was the EPA twenty years ago? Thirty years ago? No. Everybody waits until the last minute. Then it’s ‘Okay, who didn’t wipe their shoes?’ ”

  Janine waves her hand. Human nature. Don’t talk to me about human nature.

  “You think your husband . . . ?”

  “Jimmy was handling that stuff all the time. Chloro this and ethylene that. Pouring out paint cans full of solvent into big old drums. Drums that would sit around out back of the receiving docks until they started to rust. Then Jimmy and his gang would pile them onto trucks and haul them out to some other business’s rented disposal site. Half those men are sick with something or other now. Of course, insurance had them all down as impossible risks long before they started moving drums around for Clare.”

  “What did your husband die of?”

  “He had exactly what you have.”

  Laura laughs. Horrified, but she can’t help it. “Not exactly what I have. Not your husband.”

  Janine joins in. “I hear you, honey. But close enough. Close enough for jazz, horseshoes, or dying.” She looks up. “And I use that word exactly so you don’t get any bad ideas.”

  “Of course not, Janine. I’m doing fine.”

  “Course you are.” She sucks air and smiles again. “Somebody’s got to do fine. Why not you?”

  “But I never worked . . . I mean, my job . . .”

  “You know what I think?” Janine says, riffling through her purse. “I think it’s in the air and in the water, and now it’s in the ground. Builds up in the food. Every year a little more. You don’t have to work for them. They’ll come to you. You don’t even have to live in town.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura demurs. She pours them both another little swig. “They’ve run those studies. The studies never prove anything.”

  “Now, how you going to prove something like that? It’s just a numbers game, girl. You’re what’s called an acceptable risk, to everyone but the insurance companies.”

  Laura looks down, clinks her spoon around in her cup. “Well, we can’t just start shutting the world down without knowing what’s causing what.”

  “Seems to me like we’re just sitting around waiting for proof to poke us in the eye. And it’s going to take a whole lot of proving to make people give up their Clean ’n Neat. Who’s going to throw away all their health an
d beauty products on a maybe? Hell,” Janine says, her eyes widening. “Not me.”

  They sip in silence. “You’re with a church?” Laura asks, at last.

  Janine looks at her askance. Everyone’s with a church. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? “Oh, you mean these.” She touches her stack of pamphlets with an open-toed shoe. “I’ve probably overstayed my welcome, huh?”

  “No, no. Not at all. I was just curious. Stop. Please. Sit.”

  But Janine begins to gather up her stacks and lumber to her feet. Her legs seem to know that the respite was too good to last.

  “Laura, you just take about ten of these, okay? This good-word business helped me out a lot. I can’t begin to tell you. But you don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t even have to read it. This’ll just be our little secret. It would take me about forty minutes to give away another ten of these, otherwise. And a woman’s got to get home sometime.”

  “You have children, Janine?”

  “Have I got children.”

  “Do they eat dinner with you?”

  “You dream.”

  Laura asks point-blank, at her next checkup, just before her fourth chemo. “Dr. Archer. Can cancer have environmental causes?”

  “Cancer, my dear, is not cancer, is not cancer.”

  “Ovarian, then?”

  “What do you mean, ‘environmental’?” He cannot keep the tone of professional irony out of his voice.

  “Can it come from something you eat or drink? Some kind of exposure?”

  Slowly, as if he’s very tired, Dr. Archer reaches above his desk for a large dark binder. Clearly the answer file of last resort.

  “This is the latest NIH consensus paper,” he says. Like she’ll have to take it up with them if she has any further problem. “ ‘Although the cause is unknown,’ ” he reads, “ ‘some women are at higher risk of developing ovarian cancer than others. Risk factors include advancing age; nulliparity; a personal history of endometrial, colon, or breast cancer; and a family history of ovarian cancer. The evidence is inconsistent regarding the use of fertility drugs as a risk factor.’ ”