Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

The worst thing was that the arch-freak, Elizabeth Tuttle, chair of the school board and a “homemaker” married to a venture capitalist, was the mother of Ali’s best friend. At the time it had felt to Tad, staying up till all hours talking with Lucy, advising her on strategy, like the War between the States.

They’d debated as to whether to remove Ali from the school in protest. But Ali was happy and settled there and hardly deserved to be a pawn in this grown-up feud.

Lucy had heard that Mr. Quigley’s wife had taken wing soon after his dismissal, and that he was now an every-other-weekend parent to their two kids. Perhaps the miserable-looking spaghetti Bolognese was meant for them. That Tad had so empty-headedly added to the luckless Mr. Quigley’s indignities made him take it out on the Beetle. Wrestling the car angrily into reverse, he came within an inch of slamming into a harmless elderly couple jointly maneuvering their shopping cart across the lot.

“WELL,” AUGIE WAS SAYING over dinner, “I suppose you’d be for the Equal Rights Amendment? Gay marriage? A woman’s right to choose?”

“Guilty on all counts,” Lucy said, digging into her pink and tender rack of lamb.

“Which is exactly why we have to fight the war on terror, don’t you see?”

“ Animal rights?” Alida looked up from her untouched chop, though she was cleaning the plate of the vegetables around it.

“Sure, animal rights. We’re talking all rights here. Rights I happen to believe in, along with a whole bunch of rights I don’t. It’s what living in a democracy is all about. You have certain rights, you want others, you argue people around to your way of thinking, you vote — well, you’ll be able to vote quite soon. You make the laws — you and all the millions of other Americans who exercise their democratic freedoms. And that’s why we’re fighting now, against people who want to take away our freedoms, like our freedom to lobby for animal rights. Here, let me get you a fresh Pepsi.”

Alida, fork in the air, was looking grave. Still at the age when adults tended to talk to her in voices they used exclusively on children and dogs, she’d warmed to Augie’s grown-up-to-grown-up earnestness.

“I’m so sorry about the lamb, Alida,” Minna said. “I used to be a vegetarian once, so I totally understand. If there’s anything else…like eggs?”

“It’s okay. I really liked the potatoes and beans and carrots, thank you.”

Lucy said, “It may be short-sighted of me, but…Like if I could see grand ayatollahs in the governor’s mansion and the White House, if I could imagine the spread of sharia law across the state of Washington, and Pike Place Market filled with American women in burkas, I’d sign up for the National Guard tomorrow morning. Me and my AK-47. But I guess I’m misunderestimating the power of the enemy.”

Augie treated Lucy to a momentary, sardonic flash of cracked-china blue, and turned to Alida. “What do you think?”

“Well…” Alida said. “(A)…”

This (A) and (B) business was a new ploy she’d been practicing a lot lately on Lucy and Tad, and meant to stake out in advance a broad acreage of conversational space.

“(A) I think we’re too freaked out by the terrorists. I mean, like just about every country in the world has got terrorists blowing up stuff. You know, like it happens. Like airplanes crash, and tsunamis, and earthquakes — stuff like that. Like what if I was a kid in Africa or India? But in America all we act scared of is the terrorists — and it’s not true ! And(B) I think the president spends all his time thinking about terrorists when he ought to be thinking about so much other stuff, like emissions. I’m really, really scared about emissions. We did this project once — but America won’t even sign the Kyoto proto-thing. It’s like we don’t care about the world at all, we just want to fight a bunch of stupid terrorists. It just doesn’t compute to me. It’s like two plus two equals five.”

Lucy had never heard Alida talk like this before. Did it come from Tad? From Bill Quigley’s class? Surely it didn’t come from her, though she found herself rooting for her daughter’s argument, holding her own against Augie Vanags, even as she felt an unsettling pang, half loss, half pride, at seeing Alida as this articulate stranger on the far side of the dinner table — someone whom Lucy ruefully thought she’d be glad to get to know.

“I take your point,” Augie said. “Or points, rather. But—”

To Lucy, Minna said, “It’s not too rare for you?”

“No, it’s perfect. I’m going to grab Alida’s, too, if that’s okay.”

Minna laughed, the first laugh Lucy had ever seen from her. “I’ll tell you my secret recipe for rack of lamb. If Julia Child ever caught me doing it, I’d probably get sent to cookery jail. But what I like to do is turn the oven to Self-clean, then I put the rack of lamb in, and when smoke comes out the oven door I know it’s done.”

“That’s the kind of recipe I can follow.”

“I like to cook,” Minna said. “I don’t know why. My mom used to hate it — she always thought everything tasted best if it came out of a can. I was in high school when they invented frozen TV dinners. Mother loved those. Sliced turkey, cornbread dressing, peas, sweet potatoes, and gravy. We’d have that four, five nights in a row.”

“What did your dad do?”

“He was an engineer. At Boeing.”

They were still talking politics at the other end of the table. Lucy heard Alida say, “This like scenario…” Scenario?

“That totally makes sense to me,” Lucy said. “You’re a gourmet cook because your mom cooked out of cans. I’m a lousy cook because my mom was so into haute cuisine — she had whole shelves of French cookbooks — but never had the time to do anything properly. She’d come in with this casserole and say in her two-packs-a-day-of-Tareytons contralto, ‘It’s just a simple daube de boeuf provençale —and it was horrible , like chunks of saddle leather floating in a lake of grease and vegetables. But it was from France, not Montana, so we had to sit down and say how brilliant she was to have found the recipe. God, we had so much cassoulet, and carbonnade, and noisettes of this and noisettes of that, that I’d’ve died for one of your frozen turkey TV dinners.”

It was fun to make Minna smile. Her face lost its usual mistiness and came into sudden focus, again putting Lucy in mind of Marilyn Monroe. In her teens, she must’ve been like flypaper to the boys, and even now it was hard to credit that she must be only a couple of years younger than Lucy’s mother. Thinking of her mom, turtle-faced, peering short-sightedly from behind the chained door of the Coral Gables condo, Lucy said, “I only have to get near the stove to start feeling I’ll mutate into her and produce something utterly inedible with a fancy French name.”

Augie was saying, “That’s just not a biggie for me. The way I see it, the gut issue—”

“Politics!” Minna said. “You know we lived once in Washington, D.C.? Augie loved it, of course, but I just couldn’t wait to get back to the Pacific Northwest. That awful climate. Summer in D.C. — it’s like a sauna! And the people there, they’re so different from Seattle people, they didn’t hardly seem real to me.”

Lucy tried to imagine Minna hanging out with National Security Council types and their wives in the age of Nixon and Kissinger.

“Martians!” Minna said with a conspiratorial giggle.

She’d’ve been — what, in her early thirties? — in those chauvinist days, and a prime piece of cocktail-party prey. “You had to fight them off — the men, I mean?”