Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Lydia was the one wearing black.

“How do they get onto the grounds?” she wanted to know. She meant the food, the people who brought the food.

Grounds. Lydia forcefully insisted that it was merely a six-bedroom house, the sort of home anyone with a large family might own, but if it suited her to speak of “the grounds,” she wouldn’t hesitate.

Every day, black.

Family snaps. Distribute pictures to the press but the press did them no justice. This was where Hank felt what the other parents felt, what Lydia denied them. The press turned it all into something else, something Hallmark. Here was a picture of her First Communion. A picture of her seated in a tiny bloated airplane at an amusement park, just tucked in like someone going on a long and mysterious journey, her unreadable look fixing the camera. Here she was with Stump, with her grandmother, in Europe, up at Wyntoon. And the press said tiny hopeful. The press said aglow with. The press said happier times. The press said no hint of. A bad translation, but why would you bother. To what end could the nuance be applied?

The story — such as it was — was as simple as “she went through a screaming period.” Screamed her displeasure at everything. Just seemed to scream until he’d felt it necessary to approach her on his knees, to embrace her softly, gather her into his arms, and whisper requests that she just stop. The story was how do you please a little girl who demands juice but throws across the room the cup you’ve filled and kept cool in the fridge, anticipating her return from an afternoon’s adventures? The story was she stepped off the sidewalk once, turning back to give him a look of hopeful noncompliance before he lurched forward, arms and legs working automatically, his mouth saying no. The story was she sat on his lap while he read to her and he got an innocent erection. The story was she never really liked having her hair washed. The story was what would all these wise second-guessers say if their own daughters took up with an Eric Stump? No? Stay home? The story was the same for everyone: There were the sixties, here were the seventies, and it had seemed so certain that the whole thing was going to blow over, leaving them untouched.

GRAND CHILDREN PLAY IN THE backyard. Shouts and tumult, tears and anger, amid the long shadows. Occasionally an adult will break from one of the groups clustered on the redwood deck to descend to the swing set, jaunty, ice tinkling in a glass, offering assistance or arbitration, an apparition of middle age materializing among the weepy kids.

Susan Rorvik’s mother watches with a sort of cringing posture that all but says, Where are my grandchildren? A cigarette burning constantly between the first two fingers of her right hand. Though it would be a comfort to Susan if this were her major concern. Her mother browbeat her and her cousin Roger to show up here in Palo Alto for this family reunion, to demonstrate to the world at large, or to the relatives at least, that they were living, healthy, not particularly treasonable members of the clan. Because although Susan had been gratified, enchanted, even, by the minor celebrity brought about by her recent appearance on the evening news, she hadn’t anticipated the possibility that these exact same broadcasts might have reached the members of her own extended family. Her mother set about to disabuse her of her ignorance: She may be more well-known than the average weirdo on Telegraph Avenue, but in this South Bay backyard she is nothing less than a superstar! She wants an existence in Berkeley separate and distinct from the rest of her life? Particularly the life that she enjoyed (which is the only word for it you have to admit) until she’d “run off” to Isla Vista? She wants to say what she says and do what she does in the service of her ideals as a so-called independent adult, but she wants it all to be completely irrelevant, forgotten, when she saunters into the bosom of her family? Well, guess again.

Susan’s offered no rebuttal to her mother’s viewpoint or advice or whatever it had been intended to be, which was delivered to her via two telephone calls and one of her mother’s famous letters. She’s been too exhausted, having left a nice, quiet, but poorly paying job working at a bookstore to wait tables at the Plate of Brasse, a restaurant located in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, where the doormen wear shoddy-looking Beefeater uniforms.

The reunion is not huge. Dad’s three siblings, the spouses, children, grandchildren. A few cousins who remain scattered throughout the upper Midwest, technical relations. A handful of neighbors. All at Uncle Jerry’s.

Her father stands by the barbecue grill with Roger. He holds long, sturdy tools and wears an apron, and Roger’s hands are covered by two insulated mitts that extend to just below his elbows. They look as if what they’re doing is forging chicken and spareribs, reaching into a furnace for the product of heavy industry instead of for dinner. But, as is normal, they appear absolutely united in this task, as close as father and son. Outwardly, it’s been the most normal of afternoons. Only her mother, still aggrieved, her hands busy with her drink and her smoke, seems to pierce the placid surface of things.

And Uncle Jerry. Susan goes inside the house to pee and when she comes out through the kitchen door to make her way to the broad backyard, there he is, waiting in the shadows by the side of the house. A long garden hose is coiled loosely on the grass beside a small inflatable pool. A single plastic flip-flop floats in the center of the pool. Susan is startled at first, wonders what Jerry wants. There’s something in the dewy glint of his eyes, their steady, intent gaze. The drink in Uncle Jerry’s hand definitely is not his first, and it is dark, dark; lots of booze in there, she’s mixed enough drinks in her vocational lifetime to know.

“I’ve been meaning to look you up,” he says. “How’ve you been? How’s the acting?”

Susan shrugs noncommittally.

“Practically neighbors all this time too.”

“I guess I don’t get down here much.”

“Not much excitement down here in Palo Alto. Not like Berkeley. No revolution here.”

“Not really one where I am, either, Uncle Jerry. I’m working as a waitress.”

Uncle Jerry shakes his glass, rattling the ice cubes. “D’ja know. Ho Chi Minh worked as a pastry chef in London. Malcolm X waited tables at the famous Parker House hotel, home of the famous Parker House rolls. Trotsky was a bookkeeper. Mao Tse-tung was a library assistant. Everybody has to start someplace.” He rocks on his heels and grins.

“Why, Uncle Jerry. These are not facts I would’ve expected you to have right at the tip of your fingers.”

“I have lots of facts at the tips of my fingers. Signal processing, pattern recognition and picture processing, solid-state fabrication technologies, computer-aided design, computer architecture, logic design. All the aspects of the future I’m currently working toward in my humdrum technical way. Enough facts about this type of thing to put you right out. But I’m not entirely out of the touch with all the old ideas and sympathies.”

Old ideas and sympathies? Uncle Jerry? Jerry, aka Lucky Jerry; skipped the war and went to work for Hewlett-Packard in the late forties, laboring in the old Redwood Building. HP’s future had been so iffy that the structure was designed so that it could be converted into a supermarket in the event that the company folded. But when HP went public in the fifties Uncle Jerry received a stock grant and options, and he was on the road to the riches he has on conservative display here. Susan’s mother appears.

“There you are.”

“Hello, Rose,” says Uncle Jerry.