Don DeLillo - Americana

Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them-a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she'd be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that's all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.

Writing to Wild on the slope I did not mention her. I made no reference to the flaming engine and his soul's need for crisis. I said nothing of his mock-epic poem, which was obviously just another scenic dream. In fact I wrote just one line: I didn't get your letter. Then I sipped beer for an hour. I thought of adding something about his desire for less sanity. Wild truly believed that he would never be a great poet because he was not sufficiently insane. I tended to agree with him but I didn't bother getting into it. I was on the third can of beer by this time and it tasted warm and flat. The sun had set and it was time to be getting home.

Even from this long way off, in the magnet-grip of an impending century, it is painful to write about her. It has taken me this long just to organize my thoughts. And although I think I have come to terms with everything, it will be interesting to see whether I can put it on paper clearly and openly. Or whether I must blow some smoke into this or that passage-some smoke to hide the fire.

One summer she bought two dolls, one for Jane and one for Mary. Jane put both dolls on her dresser. But my mother objected and so Mary's doll was put into Mary's abandoned room. Jane was always trying to discuss these things with me. In her confusion she was comforted by the sound of voices. It was an article of her faith that tragedy could be averted, or at least detained in the sweep of its tidal and incomprehensible darkness, by two reasoning people sitting in a familiar room and discussing the matter. I didn't want to talk about it. I feared silence less than the involvement of words. Distance, silence, darkness. In the vastness of these things I hoped to evade all need to understand and to cancel all possibility of explaining. Jane came into my room with a pot of tea and closed the door behind her.

"What are we going to do?" she said.

"About what?"

"You know what."

"There's nothing to do," I said. "We should see about a doctor. Some shrink on Park Avenue. But that's up to daddy, isn't it? I'd like to finish this book and get it back to the library before they close."

"What are we going to do about the dolls?"

"Leave them where they are and forget it."

"What do you think it means, David?"

"How the hell do I know? Now let me finish this book in peace."

"You can finish the book tomorrow."

"It'll be overdue."

"It must have something to do with our childhoods," Jane said. "She must be trying to make up for something."

"Sure. Childhood. Absolutely."

"I'm trying to remember whether I had any dolls like this when I was little. Maybe we wanted this particular kind of doll and she didn't buy them because they were very expensive. They look expensive. I wish Mary was here."

"Look, she bought a couple of dolls. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. All I can say is I'm hurt that she didn't get anything for me. I wanted a fire engine. No fire gingin for Dabid. Dabid want big wed fire gingin. Dabid want to play with Jane and Mary. But mommy no buy him pwetty toys. Jane go way now so Dabid can wead his wíttle book. Go way, Jane. Bye-bye. Jane go way. See Jane go. Jane is mad. See how mad Jane is. Jane slam Dabid's door. What a bad wittle girl. Jane all gone. Bye-bye, Jane."

The following April, at school, I was summoned to the telephone. It was my father. I remember what I was wearing. I was wearing white Top-Siders, white sweatsocks, a pair of olive chinos, and an old basketball jersey, white with blue trim and lettering, bearing the number nine. While we spoke I studied these articles of clothing intensely, as if keeping a mescaline vigil, my eyes seeking those immense explosions of beauty which are known to occur in the swirl of a grain of cloth.

"Bad news," he said.

"What is it?"

"Your mother's come down with something bad."

"She's sick? What is it?"

"I think she's dying, kid. They found it too late."

"What?" I said.

"What?"

"What did they find?"

"It looks like cancer. She doesn't want to go to the hospital."

"Cancer where? What part?"

"Take the first plane you can get. Wire and I'll meet you at the airport. You need money, I'll send it right out. But, look, hurry it up if you can. I should have called you weeks ago but I couldn't get myself to believe it. Everything's caving in. How the hell am I going to get in touch with Mary?"

"Where's the cancer?" I said.

"It's inside. It's in the female region. Look, can't we talk about it later? The doctor can tell you these things better than I can."

"Who's the doctor?"

"I got Weber."

"Get him the fuck out of there," I said. "I don't want Weber in there with her. Get another doctor. Anybody. Just get Weber out."

"It's all my fault," he said. "I've done everything wrong. I should have had her examined years ago. I should have had her examined for the other thing. Now there's this thing and it's too late. It's funny, kid, but she said the same thing you did. She said to get Weber out."

The plane, smelling vaguely of a child's vomit, ranged through stormclouds over the mountains and then broke clear into a calm blue afternoon. When I came out of the toilet a man stopped me to introduce himself. He said his wife would like to have my autograph. He said she had recognized me and he wondered if I would say hello to her on the way back to my seat. I told him she had mistaken me for someone else. He said it didn't matter; sign any name. And I did, I signed Buster Keaton, and when I stopped at her seat she took my hand and told me how very nice it was to meet me, how kind I was to interrupt my busy flying schedule in order to say hello to an admirer. An hour before we landed, the man came to my seat and offered me a twenty-dollar bill. Throughout the flight I kept getting mental pictures, against my will, of a growth inside my mother's womb.

The vase held seven wizened zinnias. My father whispered to me as she slept. It was the cervix. It had been discovered at an advanced stage. The doctor had wanted to take everything out. She had refused. She told my father that she had known about it for a long time. There had been unexplained bleeding and she told him she had felt the thing spreading, a radial plague, spreading like medieval death. Only her collapse had told him that something was wrong. And she had refused to let them take anything out. God has been defeated, she said. And nothing anybody could do with their knives and clamps could ever change the fact of this defeat. He was in my body and I let Him out. He was the light of my body and I blew Him out. I believe in the Middle Ages. Fire for witches and plague for the sins of the world. I believe in ancient Egypt. These things were read to me in a garden full of sunlight by a beautiful and shining woman.