Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

And the lesson is this:

Life goes on. Life goes on even in the chase scenes. Life goes on even as Grant and Stewart and Kelly and Bergman run for their lives. They would have Kleenex in their pocket, lipstick in their purse. In the climates calling for them they would have Chap Stick, sun block, insect repellent. They would have diarrhea equipment. They would need batteries for their transistor radios, stamps for their mail. Life goes on. They would need a place to cash their checks. They would have to get haircuts. Life goes on. They would require reservations, they would have to stop at the gate to obtain a boarding pass. Life goes on, life goes on. If they were religious they would be saying their prayers. They would continue to watch their salt intake and think twice before accepting an egg. They would laugh at good jokes, whistle, hum, wipe themselves, scratch where they itched, obey the laws of gravity and try not to use the strange, immediate pressures of their new situations as an excuse to start smoking again. They would, irrelevantly, dream. A glorious drudgery, life goes on. It goes on and goes on.

Then he moves to the bed and gets in beside his wife, dead to the world. It’s — what? — almost five in the morning. It must be a scientific fact, not noted until just this moment, that Rose Helen, whose snores (If I had a dollar, etc.) he’d always been able to extinguish simply by reaching out and touching her shoulder and saying “No Snoring,” easy as that, as if the words carried exactly the same municipal weight as his City Commissioner of Streets directives on signs (“No Parking,” “No Standing,” “No Loading“), doesn’t snore at this time of day. Druff is certain he’s uncovered a law of nature. It must be something in the five a.m. nasal atmospherics, or that snorers leave off when the birdies start up their songs, some symbiotic sound/silence deal — din physics.

Druff, moved to the bed, slipped in beside Rose Helen, dead to the world himself, sleeps, putting everything he’s got into it, with nothing left over, not even an ounce, with which to dream, let alone make speeches or sketch from the edges of his consciousness his fabled Lincoln-Douglases.

It was almost noon when he woke. He showered and dressed quickly. There was a possibility, he thought, that he might have missed Rose Helen, something, given the nature of his behavior, that was not entirely unwelcome. But he was wrong. She was in the kitchen, rubbing red seasoning into the carcass of a raw turkey. Mikey, beside her, sat on a stool peeling potatoes, pretending they were onions. He drew his shirtsleeve across his eyes, wiping away imaginary tears, pretending to flick them onto the floor. He whined. He wailed. He went boo-hoo. Conjugating noises in a toy grief. Rose Helen was laughing. Druff walked into the room. “Mama, look,” said his son, breaking off, “it’s Lazy Mary.” Rose Helen laughed even harder.

Druff suspected something was terribly wrong.

“You’re all dolled up,” Rose Helen said.

The times were out of joint was what. Druff suddenly understood it was Saturday. He’d mistaken the weekend for a workday and couldn’t have felt more like Rip Van Winkle if all the appliances in his kitchen had been invented since he’d gone to bed. If he’d placed his hands on a long gray beard or seen in the paper that the government had changed hands overnight. It was the weekend and he felt as deprived of time as a jailbird, cheated as any prodigal crying over the spilled milk of a misspent youth, or money down the toilet of a bad husbandry.

“I overslept,” he said. (Thereby losing a piece, too, of Saturday.) “Jeez,” he said, examining his suit coat, plucking his tie, “I’m dressed for downtown.”

“Did you think you had to go to work today?” his son asked.

“Sure did.”

“Bank dividend in your favor.”

“Error,” Druff said. “If the allusion’s to Monopoly, ‘Bank error in your favor’ is the quote you’re looking for.”

“I’ll fix breakfast,” Rose Helen said. “Pancakes? We have Canadian maple syrup. I’ll squeeze oranges.”

“It’s ‘dividend,’ Daddy, I think.”

“How could it be dividend? A dividend’s something already coming to you,” Druff said.

Mikey looked down at the potato he was holding, considering. “I should be done with my chores by the time you finish your breakfast. We could play some Monopoly and settle it like men.”

“Coffee and toast,” Druff said. “Don’t bother squeezing any oranges. Frozen’s all right. Where’s the All-Bran? God damn it, Mikey, I opened up a new box just yesterday. How many times do I have to tell you? All-Bran is not a snack food. It’s medicine.”

“For God’s sake,” Rose Helen said, “are you going to start in with him over a box of cereal?”

“He goes after it like it was potato chips!” Druff said irritably. “He puts it away like popcorn! Oh,” Druff said, “now I understand the pancakes and syrup bit. Now I see what the fresh orange juice was all about. You knew he’d eaten up my All-Bran.”

“Your All-Bran. Really,” she said.

“Well, I hope you enjoyed it,” he told his son. “I just hope you found it a tasty treat. Because my colon cancer is on your head, young Mikey. My colostomy bag’s just one more piece of matched luggage you’ll have to learn to live with.”

“Fine breakfast table conversation,” Rose Helen said.

“Just who does he think he is?” Druff demanded. “Who gave him the right to scarf down all the roughage and high fiber in this house?”

“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Dad,” Mikey, deadpan, said.

“Toilet humor, very nice,” Druff said. “Thirty years old and he still makes ca-ca jokes. Mikey, do you understand that when Jesus Christ was crucified he was only three years older than you are right now?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Mike said.

“No,” said Druff, “I don’t suppose you do. All right, Rose Helen,” Druff said, “I see I’m going to have to go with the pancakes and maple syrup after all.”

“Make your own goddamn breakfast,” Rose Helen said.

“I will then,” he said. Then, more softly, “Of course, any idea I may have had of playing Monopoly with Michael here has entirely left me.”

“You wouldn’t have anyway,” Mikey said.

“No? How can you know that?”

“Because you’re always trying to fool me,” he said.

“Oh please,” Rose Helen said, “the both of you!”

Well, it was the weekend, Druff thought. He was at an age when weekends spelled nothing but trouble. When they were no longer the big payoff they once had been. Baths, for example. Grooming. There was a time, he recalled, when the jokes on the radio had it that Saturday night was the night universally observed by Americans for taking their baths. Maybe it was farmers, factory workers, people in cold-water flats whose hot water was rationed, doled out on weekends. He wasn’t blue collar himself, none of his people had been. His father, a traveling salesman, made good money, had been a stickler for the personal hygienes — shined shoes, soap behind the ears, haircuts and fingernails. Even dancing lessons — fox-trots, the waltz — had been high on his father’s list as a kind of personal grooming, a preparation for feats of business linked in his dad’s mind with the mens sana in corpore sano of cleanliness and presentability. So he couldn’t imagine he’d ever been let off from taking baths on weekdays. Yet it was all a blur in his mind, and he had a sort of racial memory of long, ritual Saturday night baths when he lay soaking in his tub with, in effect, an entire country. Getting themselves up, sprucing.