Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (18 page)

As George was putting the finishing touches on his gourmet meal, he heard Susan’s car pull up in the driveway, next to his own. Smiling now, really feeling good about things for the first time that day, he sprinted through the living room—where Buck sat on the couch, absorbed in a book—toward the front door and flung it wide. Looking, he thought, cute as a bunny in his apron, anticipating the light in Susan’s eyes at the idea that dinner had been prepared, the homecoming smile on her face now that she was back home with the man she adored.

She responded with neither. She seemed to have dragged herself out of her car, carrying her portfolio in front of her, two hands on the grip, as if it had attained a mysterious dead weight.

“Hi, George,” she said listlessly, patting him on the chest as she squeezed by him.

“I made dinner,” he said, sounding helpless.

“That’s nice, dear.”

And she wearily began climbing the steps to their bedroom.

“It’s quite an elaborate spread, actually,” he called after her.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” she called back. “Did you put your gun away in the usual place?”

“Why?”

“I think I’ll just shoot myself first.”

“What?” said George, whose first instinct was always to take such statements literally.

A fraction of a second later, of course, he realized his wife was being ironic—she could hardly come down to dinner
after
she’d shot herself—but Susan, unaware of his delayed understanding, could only respond to what she’d heard. She looked down on him from the head of the stairs. “Oh, George,” she said, tiredly. “Spin the wheel and buy yourself a clue.”

He didn’t understand the reference, but the meaning was clear enough. And, as Susan entered the bedroom, he heard Emily’s voice call out, “Mom?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Save a bullet for me.”

Petulantly, the expression on his face one of
Well, I never,
George put his hands on his hips and huffed in the direction of the second floor. He shifted his gaze to exchange a look with Buck, who said, simply, “I think they’re bummed.”

Bummed though they were, George and Buck managed to coax them to the kitchen at the same time, and at last, the family was together, around the table.

It was a nice image, a cozy image, the kind of Norman Rockwell image that Matthew would have called “kitchen”—this time, quite appropriately—but it was missing the signature smiles, the sense of anticipation.

George, never one to be insensitive, tried to get to the bottom of things.

“How was everybody’s day?”

“Just long,” from Susan.

“Average,” from Emily.

And nothing else. No one could say he hadn’t asked.

“Well, everybody,” George invited, with forced expansiveness, “chow down!”

Defeated eyes returned his gaze. Buck made a show of taking the first serving, even forking the first mouthful. “Gee, great, Dad,” he said.

“Why, thank you, Buck,” George responded.

Silence. Nothing.

Then, seemingly out of a sense of obligation, Susan and Emily served themselves. One at a time. The serving spoon clanked against the central dish, with the ponderousness of hammer against anvil, the sense of a chore to be done, bereft of delight. The servings they took were small, obligatory.

And when they ate, it was without enthusiasm, the silverware playing with the food in the protracted spaces between listless bites. George managed to clean half his plate, and then even he was unable to continue with the charade any longer. He looked up, dropped his fork onto the table. It made a sharp noise which adequately expressed his disgust.

Vessna, in her high chair, had already been sensing the discomfort around the table, and the sudden sound made by George’s fork startled her into expressing it. She began to cry.

“All right, that’s it,” George announced. “This has become preposterous.” He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, patriarch surveying his domain, as Susan got up, lifted Vessna into her arms, and tried to soothe the baby. When the baby’s cries at last turned to whimpers, soft enough to speak over, George spoke.

“You know, I put both my hearts into this meal. Tonight I felt the need of a reminder that we were proud of who we were, of each other. A traditional Tenctonese affirmation of life. If my timing is so off that it doesn’t warrant some appreciation, even a simple thank-you, I suppose I can live with that—but to behave as if it’s a job to be here . . . that’s a bit much to take.

“Now, how was everybody’s day . . .
really?
We may not be the ideal family, but I thought at least we knew how to
talk.”

The sentiment was too compelling, too true, not to be dealt with.

“Some things aren’t that easy to talk about, Dad,” Emily said, at length.

“Susan?”

“I’m not even sure
how
to talk about it.”

More gently, George suggested, “You ramble until you find your way.”

And then Susan blurted, “They stepped all over my work, George. Distorted it to the point where it’s not even mine—worse still, to where it
makes fun of us.”
As she tended to Vessna—quieting her, continuing her feeding, wiping her little mouth—Susan told the story of her meeting at the ad agency. She finished by saying, “And I feel as if I’ve sold my soul against my will. I agreed before I knew what was happening. And now I feel as if the train’s already left the station.”

In the silence after, Emily blurted in turn, “They hated my work, too.” Her story about the gym club and how her friends had reacted to her came out haltingly, in contradistinction to Susan’s heated frustration. Emily knew the truth of her tale—that her ego and expectations had been unrealistic, unfair—but she had difficulty confronting those issues head-on; so her narrative was clumsy, prone to backtracking over itself, emerging in uncomfortable pieces. But emerge it eventually did. “And I don’t know what to do about it,” Emily concluded.

George got up from his chair, walked to the sink, stood over it a while. He started speaking while looking out the window over the sink into the backyard.

“On the one hand,” he said softly at first, “we should never forget who we are. On the other . . . they will never let us. Maybe . . . maybe there are some situations—some—in which no clear answer is at hand.”

He turned, his voice rising. “But you two, you should know better. When it’s
their
choice—that is when you have to defend yourself. When it’s
your
choice—that is when you have to understand the other side.

“Susan, your job is important to you, to all of us, but it shouldn’t be kept at the expense of your self-worth. Do you think I, or anyone else here, would think less of you for losing it if it meant you could live with yourself? You’ll have to decide how far you’re willing to compromise, but you have more power than you think. At any point,
you can stop that train!

“And Emily, you should cherish and display your Tenctonese heritage and abilities, but not at the expense of your
friends’
self-worth. That kind of pride is only racism in reverse. I know it doesn’t look like it, sound like it or
feel
like it to you, because I know you don’t think in those terms, but every now and again you have to think in terms of how other people are perceiving you. Until our people are truly assimilated, until there is a formula for balance,
everything you do sends a message.
You must take the
responsibility
for it!”

He was reflexively free-associating, of course, to his outrage at
that woman,
because the issues were intertwined. Which, naturally, made him angry again; and just as he hadn’t been able to tell quite when the anger had left him earlier, he wasn’t quite sure how it had crept back in now. He only knew that it must have been fierce, fiercer than he’d imagined, for the aftermath of his speech was met with a deathly silence. Even from Vessna. Emily and Susan were regarding him with something like fear.

Buck’s expression registered a rather milder surprise—if he hadn’t known better, George might have labeled it a bemused detachment—that made him bolder, unafraid to speak. Buck, however, spoke cautiously, like one unwilling to shout at a snow-capped mountain, lest one bring down an avalanche upon one’s smooth, spotted pate.

“And what kind of day have
you
had?”

“Fruitful!” George snapped. Then he exhaled heavily through his nose. Seeing at last that he had been no better than Emily and Susan, conflicted about his feelings and hiding them from the family. The girls had hidden behind silence. He had hidden behind food and a pretext of family ritual. The
real
family ritual, though, was the one that had just occurred, that he himself had set in motion: the open sharing of problems and feelings, the willingness to submit them for discussion.

“Fruitful,” George said again, in a more reasonable tone. “But not good.”

He told the story of Fran Delaney, a.k.a. Fancy Delancey, noting the different expressions on the faces of his listeners. Emily became increasingly rapt, as if being told a whoppingly interesting, brilliantly plotted intrigue. Susan had her mouth open; every now and again, throughout the narrative, her hand went to her chest, above one or the other of her hearts. The story, George thought as he told it, must have been doubly shocking for her—after all, she’d been at the theatre the night before, she had
seen
Fran Delaney’s performance, had admired it greatly along with everyone else in that audience. Had been
fooled right along
with everyone else in that audience.

Buck’s expression, no longer bemused, was harder to fathom. It kept changing in subtle ways George was unable to interpret.

No matter. Buck, ironically, had been the most even-minded member of the family tonight. He’d express his thoughts soon enough. Probably very soon indeed, for George was winding up.

“. . . and so I came home hoping to lose myself in an activity that might reinforce my own grip on who I am—who
we
are—and how we’re supposed to function on this planet. I am sorry to have shouted at you all, it was really not directed at you. I am frustrated by Matthew, for I do not think he is capable of understanding. I am bewildered at Cathy, for
I
am not capable of understanding the enormous sacrifice she is willing to make for one so eager to turn her back on her heritage.”

“Saving a life, isn’t she?” Buck offered.

“A life barely worth saving,” George snorted heatedly. “A life that deserves whatever befalls it.”

“Emily, your father doesn’t mean that!” Susan said quickly.

“Susan, don’t tell the child what I—”

“—Yo, Dad,” Buck interrupted. “We’re being a little . . .
fascist
here, aren’t we?”

“Fascist? How dare you accuse me of that, Buck, you know—”

And now Buck rose, his composure cracked and his temper flaring.

“—What I
know
is that you’re very smart about giving good advice to everybody else, but you have no perspective on your own problems. Gods, Dad, you’re the biggest advertisement for Getting Along with the Man I know! You dress in their suits, you protect their laws, you live like they live, and you never make waves! And all of a sudden you’re hot under the collar about some babe who’s taken all that to the next logical extreme? How the hell can you deem her life worthless, whether she’s right or not?”

“Buck, it was only an opinion, not—”

“Those are the kinds of opinions that
breed
fascism, Dad.” George was fleetingly reminded of having hurled a similar accusation at Matthew not two hours before, but only fleetingly, because Buck was not finished.

“You know what I think, Dad? I think that actress punched your button, I think she reminds you of you, and you can’t take it!”

“That is
not true!”

“Isn’t it? You don’t have the ability to
detach,
Dad. You can’t
abstract
yourself from your own cycles of behavior long enough,
just
long enough to see what’s going on!” Then he expanded his attack to include his entire family.
“None
of you can! And that’s why—”

Buck stopped. Cut himself short. Whap.

Maybe,
George thought,
I’m not as objective as I like to think. But I can certainly tell this much. There is something lots bigger going on in my boy’s head than the purview of this discussion.

“Why what, son?” he asked softly.

Buck shifted his stance uneasily. At length he said, “Why I have to be alone for a while.”

Buck turned to leave, and as he hit the kitchen doorway, George said, “Buck.”

Buck stopped. Didn’t turn, but stopped.

“You’re free to discuss what troubles you, too, you know. I won’t tell you wisdom is always at my command—but between all of us there should be something of value. And it’s here whenever you want it.”

Not looking back, Buck said, “I know that, Dad. Thanks.”

And then he left the kitchen for the sanctuary of his RV.

There didn’t seem to be useful words left after that. Looking at the rest of his family, George spread his hands slightly, dropped them to his sides, where they slapped audibly against his thighs, and returned to his seat at the table.

The rest of the meal was silent, save for basic amenities, but at least now there was some genuine eating going on. As if releasing dilemmas into the air had released hunger. Susan polished off a large portion, pausing every now and then to spoon-feed puree to Vessna, who stayed on her lap. And Emily went for seconds.

George ate methodically, thoughtfully.

Thinking about what Buck had said.

Thinking about what Matthew had said.

Unable to reach any satisfying conclusion.

Chewing over his own thoughts as he chewed his food.

Both having become quite filling—and rather tasteless.

M
ORNING.
D
AY SHIFT.

Albert Einstein belched his way through the police station’s equipment room to get them what they wanted, the electronic gear they’d need to pull off their sting on the bogus Stabilite dealer. As he collected the individual pieces, he placed them in a special, padded carrying case.