A. Homes - Safety of Objects - Stories

Frank stood in front of the jeep, dreaming of a different kind of life, the kind he’d read about in stories of men outdoors, fishing trips and cabins in the woods. He dripped a bit of frozen custard onto the jeep and blotted it off with his napkin, leaving a smeary place on the hood. He fantasized buying a second home somewhere by a lake.

The jeep was wrapped in plastic tape that looked like the stuff police use to rope off crime scenes. It had Z-100 printed all over it.

“What’s Z-100?” he asked a kid standing next to him.

“Great metal station,” the kid said.

It was as if the child had spoken in code. What the hell was a metal station, Frank wanted to know.

“What’s Z-100?” he asked again.

“A radio station. They’re giving it away, in about fifteen minutes,” an older woman said.

He walked in circles around the jeep. He checked the sticker: fourteen thousand six hundred bucks; AM/FM radio, cassette deck, rustproof, good tires, mud flaps. He finished his cone and planned a new life. As he ran over the figures in his head and realized that any life other than the one he already lived was a complete impossibility, he became furious. Who were all the people in the mall, carrying around big shopping bags full of who knows what? They couldn’t all be shoplifters. They were buying things, big, important things. Where did they get the money? They couldn’t all be millionaires.

A crowd formed around Frank and the car. People started setting up folding beach chairs and plastic coolers, like what you’d put in the backyard or by the pool, in a ring around the car. The contest hadn’t even started yet and already a bottle of two hundred and fifty aspirins had been opened and was lying next to a can of Diet Coke.

The contest, I want to be in the contest, Frank thought. He imagined how proud Mary and the kids would be if he actually won something, especially something large like a car.

“Sign me up,” he said to someone wearing a judge’s hat.

“What’s your name?”

“Frank Mann.”

She looked down at her list. “Your name’s not here.”

“But I want to be in the contest,” he whined like a child.

“Did you call in and win?”

Frank gave her a confused look.

“The first twenty people who were the one-hundredth callers when we played the Poizon Boiz ‘Roll My Wheels’ are in the contest. Obviously you’re not one.”

“There has to be some way.”

“Sorry,” the judge said, walking away.

Frank continued to accost anyone in a Z-100 T-shirt until another judge pulled him aside and explained in extreme detail how the entrants had qualified. There was no way to sign up late.

Frank was so upset it was all he could do to contain a tantrum. He pictured himself screaming and pointing and calling everyone names until the security force, the boy with the gun, came for him, and like a civil disobedient he went limp and had to be dragged from the mall.

“Sore loser,” some girl with very big hair would say as they swept him past her.

Frank saw Julie on the other side of the car, sitting in one of the lounge chairs. He worked his way over to her.

“Are you a winner?”

“Yeah, but I had to pretend I was my mother. You have to be twenty-one to get the car. She’s doing the contest.”

Julie pointed at her mother, who was in a huddle with the other contestants and the judges from the radio station.

“How’s it work?” Frank asked.

“You have to keep your hands on the car all the time, except five minutes an hour. No other part of your body can ever touch the car, and like, if you want, someone can stay here with you overnight.”

Without thinking, Frank offered to stay overnight. He imagined himself prowling the corridors at three A.M.

“That’s okay,” Julie said. “I’m staying.”

A short ugly man with permanent acne began speaking into a megaphone. His voice was like chocolate mousse, deep and smooth; he was obviously a disc jockey. The contestants arranged themselves around the car, scurrying for what they thought was the best place, the hood versus the side, and so on.

“Are your hands ready?” the D.J. asked.

The contestants and Frank nodded.

“Put your paws on the car.”

The contestants seemed to surge forward as the contest began, rocking the jeep slightly, perhaps raising it off the ground a halfinch or so before they settled into the poses they would have to hold for the next fifty-five minutes.

Within five minutes most of the crowd dissipated. As far as they were concerned there was nothing to look at.

By the time Mary showed up at the Twistie Freeze forty-five minutes late, Frank was morbidly depressed, filled with a second ice-cream cone and a complete hatred for the American way.

“All done?” Mary asked.

“I didn’t get to the tires yet,” he said.

“Another time.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Frank said.

She handed him her packages to carry and they walked back towards where they had originally come from.

They passed Julie’s friends, standing outside the record store smoking. Mary stopped. “You shouldn’t be smoking,” she said.

Frank stood behind her feeling incredibly bloated: part of a large Coke, half an order of fries, a couple of bites of one of the girls’ burger, and two ice-cream cones. He stood in back of Mary, his stomach jutting out in front of him, not believing that he’d let himself get to this point.

Behind Mary’s back, he lifted a finger to his ear and spun it in circles. Nails and Tina didn’t respond. He did the bit where he took a make-believe grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin, threw it, plugged his ears, and ducked his head to escape the explosion. Still nothing.

The two girls stood there staring, listening to Mary as though they were used to listening but never taking anything in.

Frank didn’t resist when Mary reached behind her, took his hand, and led him away.

“I’ll have to come back tomorrow,” he told Mary, twisting his head around to see if they were laughing at him.

“I have a meeting. I won’t be able to come with you,” she said as though there were some rule about Frank going to the mall alone.

“So?”

“Sew buttons,” she said.

It was what she always said when there was nothing left to say.

* * *

The next evening he waited until Mary left for her meeting, then said good-bye to the kids and took off for the mall. He drove fast, imagining that if he didn’t get there soon, he would begin to shrivel like a helium balloon, slowly dropping down, sinking lower and lower, until he hovered six inches above the floor. By morning he’d be airless, dead, on the bucket seats.

The Pyramid Mall floated in a sea of parking spaces, laid out thirty deep so that on any given day or evening, with the exception of Saturdays, a person could find a place within ten spaces of the end and enter the mall feeling somehow lucky. The only thing pyramid-like about the place were pyramid-shaped planters filled with half-dead geraniums.

He pulled into a good space near Sears feeling what he called the guilt of necessary purpose. He had come here for a real reason. Tires. Before he could do anything, he had to go directly into Sears. He had to accomplish something so that later he could tell Mary how wonderful he was.

There were no salespeople in the tire department, and Frank was too distracted to hunt one down. Frank had a certain pale nonexistence to him, like Casper the Friendly Ghost. He could fight it if he wanted to. He could summon his energy and make himself a kind of lifelike pinkish purple that could get a fair amount of attention, but he couldn’t sustain it. In Sears, he couldn’t even bring himself up to a kind of light flesh tone. He just didn’t have it in him. He took heart in knowing it was highly unlikely he’d ever be taken hostage in a bank robbery or hijacking.