James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

Justine’s horror of the scopas suit was nonverbal and intuitive, the horror of a mother hen seeing a hawk shadow glide across the barnyard. She could find no flaw in the garment’s design, no error in its execution, no fallacy in its purpose. And yet she knew that Holly must never own one.

‘I think Santa Claus should bring it,’ said George, eagerly caressing his purchase, which rested on the sofa like a boy king lying in state. ‘She’ll be more likely to wear it if she believes it came from him.’

‘George, I lost my job.’

‘You what?’

‘Harry Sweetser fired me. I blew up a tarantula.’

‘Nuts.’

‘I’m glad. Not about the tarantula – but I really couldn’t have faced another day at that place.’ She inserted a stick of spearmint gum between her lips like a cigarette, puffed on it. ‘Noah Webster College has a drama department, I hear.’

‘I thought we were talking about having another kid. This your way of changing your mind?’

‘I’ll take evening courses. By day I’ll be a mother, by night you’ll be a father. Life works out.’

‘Our plumbing is rotten, our car has cancer, we can’t afford life insurance, we’re trying to have a baby, and you want to join the circus!’

‘Not the circus, the drama department!’ The gum entered her mouth like a log entering a sawmill.

‘You have no sense of reality!’

‘You have no sense of anything else!’ Justine’s anger had thrown her hair across her face, and now she pushed it aside; curtains parted on large brown eyes, high cheeks, abundant lips, a sensual over-bite – to wit, a face that one might easily imagine on the talent side of a cable television camera, a face that was, by all but the most banal criteria, beautiful. ‘With training I can bring in twice what I was making at Cats and Dogs.’

‘Let’s be honest, Justine. Money isn’t something you and I will ever understand. If it grew on trees, we’d be raising chickens.’

‘You’re worried about money?’ She chomped violently on her spearmint stick. ‘Then stop going around spending seven thousand dollars like it belonged to somebody else.’

A fight followed. There was some screaming. Fists were pounded. Resentments emerged like bits of an ancient civilization tossed up by an earthquake. The fight encompassed George’s tendency to assume that the pets were solely Justine’s responsibility, and it included Justine’s tendency to treat her parents shabbily, always forgetting their birthdays. It touched on whether they could really cope with another child, money worries or not, and eventually it even embraced thermonuclear war and strategic doctrine. George believed that the bombs were normally dropped from airplanes. Justine was certain that they would arrive via guided missiles. Whenever the fight began to lull, George demonstrated some additional virtue of the suit.

‘What the hell good are those going to do anybody?’ Justine demanded after George showed her the vacuum-packed seeds. ‘Do you know how long it will take for those to grow?’

‘They’re resistant to ultraviolet light.’

‘Yeah? What does that mean?’

‘It’s like the grasshopper and the ant.’

‘It’s like what? ’

‘A bad move that was, Justine, getting fired. Truly dumb. This suit will give us peace of mind. You’ll just have to ask Harry for your job back.’

‘There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, darling,’ said Justine with a tilted smile. ‘Today Harry grabbed my ass.’

The moment John Frostig saw George standing in the doorway with the little scopas suit under his arm, he knew that he had lost the sale. Taking the contract and the $345.71 check from his briefcase, he rolled them into a tube and thrust it toward George’s belly as if knifing him. He spoke in grim whispers.

‘I’m going to explicate a few things now, buddy-buddy,’ He curled his arm in a yoke around George’s neck and led him into the house. ‘Right now we’re friends, my dear grasshopper, but when the warheads reach their targets, I’m going to be looking out for me and mine and nobody else. That’s the way with us ants.’

Scopas suits cluttered John’s living room, sprawling on the floor, resting on the couches, relaxing on the chairs. One suit was watching a football game on television. Another played the piano. The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterres-trial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

‘In short,’ John continued softly, ‘anybody who hears that us ants have a few extra suits stored up… anybody who drops by our larders looking to borrow one of those suits… such a person – even if he’s an old buddy – such a person is asking to get his brains dredged out with a Remington 870.’

Alice Frostig glanced up from her sewing machine – she was repairing a scopas suit glove – and moved her bulbous and balding head with an amen sort of nod. Among other pitiable things, she was the female equivalent of a cuckold. More than once George had seen John approach a vulnerable housewife in the Lizard Lounge and convince her to accept his hospitality at the Wildgrove Motel.

‘Justine lost her job,’ said George. ‘She’s going to take acting lessons. We can’t afford the suit any more.’

‘Tell that to the Soviets,’ said the suit salesman.

‘There probably won’t even be a war,’ said George.

Throughout his entire life, George had never discovered a pleasure more complete than reading to his daughter. Food did not go beyond taste and satiation, sex lacked intellectual rewards, but Holly’s bed-time had everything. There was, first of all, the sheer physical enjoyment of swaddling oneself in blankets. Then, too, the process brought out Holly’s adorable side, suppressing the whiny beast that lived in four-year-olds and fed on parental exasperation. And frequently the books themselves were pithy and provocative, the sorts of things an advertising executive might have written in a fit of scruple.

Father and daughter were huddled together, orienting Holly’s selection for the evening – a bad selection as it happened, a vapidity called Carrie of Cape Cod . A kitten scampered amid the blanketed terrain. Holly’s menagerie of stuffed animals went about their soft habits. George began reading: Outside the cottage harsh winds whipped the lake, giving it whitecaps and a tide. Canadian geese splashed down, squonking loudly.

Carrie of Cape Cod slogged on. Near summer’s end, Carrie saw a seagull pick up a clam and drop it on a rock. The shell shattered, and the bird ate what was inside.

‘How did the seagull know the clam was dead?’ Holly asked.

I must get her a scopas suit, thought George. I’ll break into Frostig’s truck and steal one.

‘I know!’ said Holly. Freckles were sprinkled on her face. Her skin seemed lit from within. ‘If the clam is alive, he opens his eyes, and then the seagull knows not to eat him!’

‘Yes,’ said George. ‘That’s the answer.’

She pondered for a moment. ‘But then how does the clam get a new shell, Daddy?’

If George could have one wish, he would remake the world as Holly saw it. This Utopia would consist largely of cuddly ducks, happy ponies, and seagulls who spared live clams. ‘I don’t know how the clam gets a new shell,’ he said. Maybe he puts on a scopas suit instead, he thought.

At the climax Carrie walked the nocturnal beach, gazing toward heaven and identifying the constellations. One of them was the Big Dipper. ‘Why is it called that?’ Holly asked.

‘It looks like a dipper.’ George was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around Holly. ‘Do you know what a dipper is?’

‘What’s a dipper?’

Instantly George was off to the kitchen. He returned bearing a small saucepan that more or less resembled an ancient Greek dipper. He believed it was for melting butter.