I wrote this story a few years ago during a short-story class. I thought it was appropriate to share this with the rest of the world during this anniversary weekend.
It is semi-autobiographical. I had just turned 2 and I really do remember sitting on my mother's lap as she listened to the news.
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Don't They Know It’s the End of the World?
Marty walked
towards the living room when she heard the static coming from the TV. At first she had thought that the TV reception
had gone out again. It was their first TV and Frank had not wanted to buy the
one she had wanted. Instead, he bought
the lower-end RCA, telling her that it was just as good and it was cheaper. But
she was the one that had to put up with the static all day long.
When Marty
heard the static before that long, siren sound, she'd thought it was just
another reason to add to the growing list of reasons why they should have
picked the TV she had wanted.
Tina was in
her playpen turning a hard, plastic orange piece over and over again in her
hand, not paying any attention to the TV. She looked hard at the piece, as if
asking herself, did it go this way? Or did it go this way? She puzzled over the
piece, sometimes looking down at a big book by her side, a big shiny apple
smiling from the center of the page.
"Apple," she said. "Apple-apple-apple."
Tina continued
to turn the orange piece over and around, looking at it until she, too, had
heard the "sh-sh-sh-sh" from the TV. When it stopped and a loud,
blaring beep started, Tina clambered to her feet and looked over the bars of
her playpen at the chalky picture on the screen. It looked like the piece in her hand. Then she looked at her book. She turned the piece upside down.
Marty left
the dinner dishes behind, dropping the frayed dish towel on the linoleum table
before picking up Tina from her playpen. Tina was a good baby, but she moved
around too much, her bare feet slapping up and down the cheap wooden floor
boards, poking her pudgy little fingers into the outlets.
"A,"
said Tina to her mother as Tina lifted her from the playpen. "A."
"That's
right. A. A," said Marty.
"A, A,
A," said Tina, as she held the letter above her head like a torch.
"A."
"A.
Yes, good baby. A," said Marty.
Marty looked
at the television screen, mildly curious from the broadcaster’s emergency
signal. She was used to those—Hiroshima, Orson Welles, what else could it be?
With Tina
sitting on Marty's hip, they went into the kitchen and walked over to the song
coming out of the radio.
" . . .
Don't they know it's the end of the world
. . . ," Tina knew that song. It made her feel lonely inside and she
wrapped her arms around her mother's neck as Marty turned it off.
Marty liked
that Skeeter Davis song. It wasn’t as
"Dick Clark" as all of that Beach Boys stuff they were playing
now. She really liked country and western and, truthfully—although she would
never admit it to anyone around here—she really liked Mexican music. That's what she and Frank listened to back
home where they grew up. But you would never find that music here, or anywhere
else, in Pennsylvania.
She didn’t
talk about being from New Mexico much. If she didn’t say anything, no one would
ever know. All they really wanted to know about her was that she was Frank's
wife. And she found out that most people
were satisfied knowing her by her first name: Marty. They didn't need to know it was short for
Martina. Or that her last name was Cavalleros.
Besides, she didn’t look like she was from New Mexico. Most of the time,
people mistook her for Italian. For one
thing, she was tall. Nearly as tall as her husband, Frank, and he had almost
played pro basketball. Sure, she had
dark hair but her skin was milky, turning butterscotch in the summer if she
didn’t burn first.
She and
Frank always caused a stir when they went out. Everyone always said how
glamorous they looked—as glamorous as you can look at church in a three-year
old dress. She knew that she was pretty.
But back home, in New Mexico, she was pretty like all the other pretty girls.
She never won a beauty contest. Really; she had tried. But despite she and her
friend's insider deal, she had failed to win the title of "Dairy Maid
Queen." But here, in Pennsylvania, she and Fred stood head and shoulders
above the sturdy, barrel-chested, Dutch-blooded natives. Here, they were
treated with a little bit of awe that people unwittingly gave to the beautiful.
She wore her
hair short like she did when she was young. Then, it made it easier when she
was riding bareback and running barrels with the boys. Later on, one of her
friends pointed out to her after a Saturday matinee that she had her hair cut
just like Audrey Hepburn’s. She hadn’t even noticed. She just knew it was
easy. And easy was always the way to go.
More time for fun. Faster to get ready for school. Easier to get away.
Marty hadn’t
been a very good student, which was a disappointment to her mother and father.
Well, maybe not so much to her father, which was strange since he was the
principal of the only public school in town.
But her mother cared. Deeply. Pinch-you-in-the-back-of-your-knees
deeply, like she did when Marty rested her butt on the edge of the bench
instead of kneeling ramrod straight against the pew. Her mother was a teacher at the only private
Catholic school in town.
“You have to
set an example. For you. Your sister. For God. For your mother and father,” her
mother would say in that sing-song voice of every grade school teacher that
Marty had ever known.
Marty still
heard that voice every Sunday when she would call her father and her mother.
And every Sunday her mother would make her cry. She wasn’t feeding Tina enough
vegetables. She wasn’t washing the dishes with hot enough water. She wasn’t
using the right starch on Frank’s shirts. Marty would only hang up the phone
after she had talked to her father and he had made her hiccup with a little
laugh, calling her his sweet Georgia Bell Jones.
Frank, at
first, tried to tell her to ignore her mother, telling her to quit listening to
what her mother said. But then it seemed like he must have been listening to
her mother because pretty soon he started telling Marty that she wasn’t feeding
Tina right, she wasn’t washing the dishes right and there wasn’t enough starch
in his shirts.
And the
house that she had left in New Mexico seemed to have moved to Pennsylvania and
shrunk a little bit.
Moving to
Pennsylvania, at first, was the advent of an answered prayer. After she left nursing school and returned
from Las Cruces, she and her friends would commiserate over beers pinched from
their fathers and cigarettes stolen from their mothers. She had explained to her friends how
different things were in Cruces. She
didn't have to go to Mass every Sunday.
She could drink as much as she wanted on Fridays and Saturdays because they
had more than one bar and no one knew who she was. She went out with a different
boy every weekend because there were so many boys to choose from. She and her friends cruised up and down the
streets until all hours of the night.
She told them, more adamantly with each beer, that she was going to
leave Nowhere, New Mexico, and move to where the rest of America lived.
And she did
it. She had actually done it. She found
the brightest boy she had ever met right there in Nowhere, New Mexico, and her
mother actually liked him. She couldn't
believe her luck; Frank had grown up down the street from her mother's family
up in northern New Mexico. She even
remembered playing with him when they were little. But she hadn't really liked him then. His brother Joe was a lot more fun; Frank had
been too serious. They used to call him
"Francisco The Monk" because he was always acting so holy when their
grandparents were around. But as soon as they left, he threw rocks at her and
her sister.
But when
Frank came to her town to go to college, his mother told him to call on her
mother. And one Sunday when he got
hungry enough, he did. After he stuffed
himself with tortillas and beans and spinach and empanadas, Marty showed him
around town. She drove her daddy's
pick-up truck; Daddy let her drive it most any time she wanted and Mamma had
liked him right away since he was so smart (he was on a scholarship) and so
polite. And that was that. She let him kiss her in the quarry that very
night and let him get almost too far.
And she knew she had hooked him but good.
Over the
next two years, they spent too much time together. Driving to Albuquerque, going to rodeos,
drinking and smoking, they drove down the dirt roads in her dad's pick-up truck
and then, later, in Frank's big bruiser of a Buick. She would wear that wide,
black circle skirt embroidered in silver and trimmed with matching rickrack and
she'd slather on red lipstick. He would wear his Levis and boots. But he would never dance with her. She would have to dance with Shorty, but she
didn't care. He was a good dancer and Frank wasn't. He just liked to drink and watch her dance,
his eyes following her hips around the room.
If Frank hadn't been so smart, he would have failed out, too. But he got his degree and they got married.
And then they moved.
She had
talked Frank into applying for a job outside of New Mexico. It hadn't been too hard; his family was just
as bad as hers, maybe worse, with his truck driver dad and his own school-teacher
mom. One time when they were sliding
across the dirt road away from the road-house, Frank had told her about the
time his mother dragged him to Santa Fe to go to this lady's house where his
mother made him ask the woman that answered the door if she was married to
Francisco Cavalleros. Marty was too
afraid to ask Frank about it the next day as they sat side by side in
Church.
When the
phone call from manufacturing company finally came in from Pennsylvania, she
listened to Frank's end of the call. When he slammed down the phone, he grabbed
her face, both of them looking wide into each other's eyes. Then he spun her
around, lifting her off her feet. And they danced.
They crammed
everything they owned, Tina included, into Frank's new little red Triumph and
drove 2,000 miles in two days.
The house
was nothing: two bedrooms, a bathroom a kitchen and a living room. Compared to
her parent's house it was a shack. And she thought of it that way: a hillbilly
shack. But it was far away from home: too far to travel; too far to fly.
At first,
Marty had loved having her own house. Alone, an adult, she spent hours
organizing, planning, dreaming of furniture, wall colors, gardens. Frank would
come home from work and she was start to tell him over dinner, her voice high
and happy. He would listen to her and
she would watch his face flatten; his mouth go still. She would talk faster, pointing to the walls
and the magazines she had spread out on the table.
"We
can't afford that. You know we don't have any money. We only have $10 after
rent for groceries. And what if Tina gets sick and you have to go to the
doctor? What if the car breaks down. We don't need all that stuff."
And she
would shut her mouth, eyes wide and looking at him like she had never seen him
before. Finally, she quit talking about
it and showing him the pictures she had saved from the magazines. Instead, when
she went to buy groceries, she would buy the cheapest food she could find,
pocket the left-over grocery money and go to the little junk store and buy a
vase, maybe. Or a little set of red leather books. Or an old frame to hang a pretty
picture from one of her magazines.
She
didn't think that Frank meant to be
mean, but he was. He told her that after she had Tina that she looked fat; that
she didn't look the same that she used to when they first got married. And she had started wearing glasses. But that had happened right after they were
married; not afterwards when she got fat. But she was different. She had had a
baby for God's sake. She had gained fifty pounds with Tina. She had lost most
of the weight but her body had changed.
Not him. He
still looked good—if anything, he had gotten better looking. He wore suits
every day, with a white shirt and a thin, black tie. He combed Brylcreem
through his hair so it would stay flat and shiny; otherwise, his cowlick would
show. His body and his face was getting
more angular, his cheekbones had lost their baby fat and his features were more
defined. Someone told her one time that
he reminded them of a young Gregory Peck.
They still
looked good together; she still held her own. But she sometimes wondered about
his secretarial pool.
The beeping
from the emergency broadcast signal had finally stopped. A man started talking. Both Marty and Tina turned towards the TV.
As the television screen wavered
between images of a news room. She sat down on the edge of the couch with Tina
on her lap. Tina had never
seen this man on TV. Only Captain
Kangaroo or Mr. Green Jeans. She tugged on
the buttons of her mother's shirt and starting to chew on one. Watching the screen, Marty stuck her finger
into Tina's nearly toothless mouth and wiped her fingers on her jeans as Walter
Cronkite began to speak.
"There
as been an attempt, as you know now, on the life of President Kennedy."
"My
God," Marty said out loud. What was
going on, where had she been? She hadn't heard a thing on the radio. She had
let Tina watch the Mickey Mouse Show and the Captain Kangaroo Show that
morning. Then she had read Tina a few
books and they had played with her blocks. After she'd fed Tina her lunch, she
had put her back in her playpen and she switched on As The World Turns. Marty
didn't like soap operas but the voices seemed to keep Tina quiet while she
looked at her magazines.
"As you
can imagine there are many stories coming in now on the condition of the
President," as a voice spoke over an image of a large room filled with men
and shrouded tables.
Marty
wracked her brain trying to remember where the president was supposed to
be. She didn't really follow the news,
it didn't interest her. She liked hearing about Mrs. Kennedy. Jackie. Sometimes
people said that she and Jackie looked alike: wide set eyes, short hair. She
sometimes imagined they were the same age; they could be, she had two small
children, too. They were both Catholic. Marty liked to think that her taste was
as elegant as Jackie's; she could be just as sophisticated if she had the
money.
She watched
the images of men and negroes, dismantling tables, removing placards. Where was
he? Why couldn't she remember?
"It has been rumored that the president is dead."
Tina gnawed on the buttons of Marty’s blouse. Her gums hurt her and it helped when she
chewed. Marty’s absently soothed the
baby then stood as she and planted
Tina on her hip. They stood by the backdoor while
Marty pulled out
yesterday's newspaper from the grocery bag where she saved all the papers. Tina looked out
the door, looking at all of the little squares all across the gray sky. Marty walked back to the table and spread the
paper across the top. Both Marty and Tina looked down at the paper.
Running her
eyes down the page, Marty looked at the headlines.
"A. A. A," Tina pronounced each A louder with
each discovery. Everywhere on that paper Tina saw As.
"Good baby. Yes, A. Apple. A,"
Marty repeated.
There it
was. The Kennedys were in Texas, both of
them, Jackie and the president. That's right, Frank said last night that one of
his classmates from UNM now worked at the air force base where the President
had spoken yesterday. And Jackie was with him.
Frank had
said something about how it was going to get ugly down there; she had
half-listened while Frank talked over last night's newscaster about how Dallas
was full of a bunch of racists who hated Kennedy and that he was going to be
walking into a shit-storm of trouble.
She liked President Kennedy. He was smart and handsome. She was glad that a Catholic was finally in
the White House.
Marty really
didn't understand what the big deal was about being Catholic. She didn't get
why people always said that Catholics were idol worshipers. If they had ever met Mamma they would know
that the only person Mamma loved was Baby Jesus. God, that woman could make her nuts with her
nightly rosary routine. Everyone she knew
was Catholic; well, at least in New Mexico.
She wasn't so sure about what President Kennedy said about negroes and
civil rights, though. She hadn't really
ever known any negroes until she was in college. She supposed she didn't care. They just didn't have enough negroes in New
Mexico for her to care. In Pennsylvania
there were a few more but still not too many so it didn't really matter much to
her. The ones that she had met seemed nice enough and she didn't really
understand why they made them sit at different tables anyways. Wasn't it just
like the Indians back in New Mexico?
There, she thought, the Indians didn't want to sit with us, was more
like it.
President
Kennedy was a good president, she thought. And he was our president and he was
due our respect. But it looked like
Frank was right and somebody down in Texas really didn't like him. Enough for some cowboy to start shooting.
Oh, it
couldn't be true. It just couldn't be
true. He was the President for God's sake.
"It was
just an hour ago that the incident took place. We have just learned howev--,
however, that Father Hubert, one of the two priests called into the room has
administered the last sacrament of the Church to President Kennedy."
Oh my God,
she thought, Oh my God. The President is dead? No. They must be wrong. They are
wrong. She didn't believe it. They were wrong.
What do they know. Walter
Cronkite keeps saying it wasn't confirmed. It’s only a rumor. I don't believe
it. It's a mistake. Walter Cronkite
would say so, if he was dead or if he wasn't. So it isn't true until he says
so. She just noticed how much he looked
like Daddy. She wondered if Daddy is
watching this now. She wondered if Frank would get mad if she called
Daddy. Of course he would get mad; it
was during a weekday.
She sat on
the edge the sofa, the nubby fabric zipping against her jeans. Marty felt saliva drenched her shirt where
Tina had been teething on her buttons.
She cradled Tina against her. But Tina wasn't a baby any more and Tina wanted
down. But Marty didn't want to let her go; instead, she held Tina
closer, so close that Tina felt Marty's heartbeat—she felt dark, like sun had left. She knew Mommy was sad. Tina heard the man's voice again but she
couldn't see him. Something wet fell onto Tina's cheek. She looked up and saw that Mommy was
crying. She patted Mommy's heart and
sang their bedtime song. Tina quieted down, petting Marty's breast and
singing her breathy song to herself as Marty rocked away.
Marty
thought about Jackie alone in the halls of the hospital, alone with none of her
family. Her father and mother so far
away. Would she be able to stand it if
Frank died? Could she go on even though
she thought that maybe he didn't love her as much any more? She wondered if Jackie felt the same way
because of Marilyn Monroe. She had heard
the rumors and the girls used to talk bad about the President. She didn't like
to listen to that garbage. But she knew
how men were, too, and she wondered if it made Jackie love her husband any
less. She didn't think it would; if
anything, for Marty, her mind racing towards Frank, she was half-afraid to look
into his eyes and not see them shine.
Marty saw
Cronkite lift those thick, Grouch Marx glasses--they looked so much like
Frank's--and wipe his upper lip with his thumb as he lifted a sheet of paper
before him.
"From
Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, the President died at 1 p.m.
Central Standard Time. Two o'clock Eastern Standard Time. Some thirty-eight
minutes ago."
Marty
watched and she couldn't believe her eyes.
He was starting to cry. Walter
Cronkite was just about to cry.
Red heat
rose from the back of her head, pushing into her brain, bleeding into her
tears. She held Tina too close, scaring her and she started crying, too, her
tears escalating above Marty's into a wail.
And that was when Marty began sobbing, causing Tina's cries to crescendo
until their cries rose to the heavens all around the world.
