'Persevere. Emulate fine writing. Find a workable pace and stick to it. I write in a variety of forms--short fiction, the novel, the essay, poems, translations from the Chinese, and I try to emulate the compassion Eudora Welty advises of her subjects. When history grabs you by the throat, find a way through in writing.' - Jodi Varon |
The slogans on Burma Shave signs broke the monotony along the highway outside of Fort Morgan, with abbreviated fictions about characters called Ben and Anna, the unwelcome stubble of Ben's beard sprawled out mile by mile on signs with one, two, or three words per sign, "Ben/ met Anna/ made a hit/ neglected beard/ Ben-Anna split/ Burma Shave."
The corny puns kept my father in good humor and my younger sister and me diverted in the back seat until the more serious signs arrived on the dangerous, monotonous straightaway outside of Brush, where the white letters on squat signs became something bigger than fiction--eerie reminders of our mortality, our dependence on my father's driving skills. The signs doled out warnings, reminding us that the "Angels/ who guard you/ when you drive/ usually/ retire at 65/ Burma Shave." After the last sign, all of the mirage water on the highway would be sucked up to heaven in a horrible rush of wings, even the silly "Burma Shave" refrain not enough to chase away the grim hazards of the highway. Whatever tension or fear or misgiving was in the car because of those signs would be replaced by the sight of the bleached-out town of Brush, looming in the distance like the Hollywood set of an old western.
On many of those junkets, my parents sat silent in the front seat, no radio, no air conditioning (it was 1960), too much hostility already passing between them. Though my mother is Irene, my father was Benjamin, and so the "Ben-Anna split" sign had unnerving resonance as my sister and I watched our parents' discord from the back seat. To keep my younger sister and me from interrupting the silence that coated the front seat like black ice, we had a game called Quizzac that my mother had purchased with books of S & H Green Stamps, dutifully pasted together after each of her visits to the grocery store. Quizzac was a compendium of facts presented as questions: What is the name of the earth's tallest underwater mountain? Where do giant sea turtles lay their eggs? To what species do marsupials belong? There were lists of short answers, A through E, which accompanied each question. The questions and answers were organized all around magnetized cardboard discs with a hole cut in the center of each disc. The disc was placed on a magnetic spindle the shape of a triangle with the pinnacle shorn. Once the questions were asked and a response chosen, the disc slid on a cardboard platform into the maw of Quizzac's black face, which mysteriously spewed the correct answer in a little red box recessed along the top edge of the game.
| I adored my father, and his opinions and politics became my own, not because I could possibly know what was right or just, but because I took from him all the cues of his indignation, still unable to distinguish history from histrionics. |
Quizzac did not tell me the answers to the questions I longed to ask, like why my mother had begun to sleep in the cold basement or why my father, a pacific man, began a rant against Red baiting every time we drove east out of town towards Brush. Each time we passed the sublime gilded image of Gautama Buddha floating, as it seemed, atop an emerald green velvet cushion in the window of Sarkisian's Imports on Speer Boulevard, my father took up the torch for another maligned citizen. The store had been closed and Sarkisian himself was in jail, my father said, for trading with the Red Chinese in violation of the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. I was interested in the store only because of the gilded Buddha in the window, an icon more tangible than the holy darkness inside the Arc of the Covenant that housed the Torah, the Buddha--a graven image of peace, beauty and tranquillity, the most exotic thing I had ever seen as a little girl growing up in a Denver still a few years away from its cataclysmic population boom. What Sarkisian had done wrong I could not tell, but the tone of my father's invective said that whatever Sarkisian had done in order to vend the serenity of the Buddha and the mysterious teak and lacquered luxuries of the East, his crime did not merit his punishment, at least according to the system of justice my father had delineated. Why my father cared about that particular miscarriage of justice is unclear--he was not a Buddhist nor did he traffic in exotic objects from any culture. The exchange set up a dangerous precedent for all of us in the car, especially my father and me, both of us compelled--by some secret that Sarkisian and his business represented--to enter into a fictional world of characters we could not shake--my father the chest-beating liberal, me his docile audience--each role complete with postures, dialogue, and gratuitous silence, each role surrounded with the rightness of historical moment as backdrop. I adored my father, and his opinions and politics became my own, not because I could possibly know what was right or just, but because I took from him all the cues of his indignation, still unable to distinguish history from histrionics.
Sarkisian's Imports, its Buddhas dusty, its rattan furniture dulled and cracked by the sun beating into uncovered windows, seemed pathetic rather than dangerous. Its empty driveway and the small, innocuous black sign in the corner of the window near the Buddha's long, slender, meditative fingers explained Sarkisian's absence with a simple, Burma Shave monosyllable: "Closed." Like the elliptical fiction of Ben and Anna, there was nothing in the showroom window to belie the evidence of Sarkisian's treachery, nothing in the surroundings particularly Red. Sarkisian's exterior was wedged between Watson's Memorial Stones and Purity Creamery. The former had a gaudy marble statue of the winged angel Gabriel lunging from a massive headstone out over Speer Boulevard, his muscular angel arms almost touching the row of Dutch elms along the banks of Cherry Creek. The latter was an old dairy outlet with a very full Holstein as its logo. Buddha graced the angel and the Holstein and all the traffic that sped by, with perfect composure, though his serenity did not rub off on my father. The sight of the "Closed" sign in Sarkisian's window electrified my father's ire at Joseph McCarthy, who was bent on redefining and identifying all our enemies, real and imagined, and the sign sparked a recitation of the frenzied paranoia that absorbed the country in the years around the date of my birth. Though I could not then fathom the meaning or impact of McCarthyism or how it affected my father's life, I could see the dust motes gathering in the nap on the emerald velvet cushion of the Buddha in Sarkisian's window, and thought how wrong it was that Sarkisian should be made absent from his family merely for wanting to vend Buddhas like the one in the window of his store. How honorable my father seemed for wanting to defend a family man!
Quizzac did not ask questions about Joseph McCarthy, but the Sarkisian rant inevitably brought forth McCarthy's name- "McCarthy" hissed the way Haman's name was defamed in the Megillah, with my father adding an odd caveat at the end of his recitation. He would shake his head, flick a long stream of sagging ash off the end of his Camel, and curl the upper left side of his lip when he reminded us that McCarthy died of a broken heart, drowned in a gutter filled with his own bile.
In those days language was a delicious, undulating sea with literal and figurative islands, and so Reds (what a Red Chinese might possibly be), gutters, and broken hearts formed a triad of complexity the solution to which Quizzac did not deliver. No matter how I combed each disc, Quizzac did not offer up an explanation for Reds, though that was what my mother called me (in the singular) in the summer time, and what strange, rude men called my sisters and me (in the plural) when we walked downtown on Sixteenth Street summer afternoons with our red hair blowing in the breeze. Quizzac did not offer up antonyms for Reds, pinkos, or communist sympathizers, nor did it define democracy or say if democracy meant that everyone would buy their red pedal pushers at Sell-o as my mother did.
I spent countless hours in the car on the way to Brush asking Quizzac to divulge answers, and more hours alone in the basement with Quizzac, hiding my ubiquitous summer sunburn from the mile high sun: What is the capital of Rhodesia? Who was the Prime Minister of England during World War II? For what purpose was the Eiffel Tower erected? So many hours, in fact, that Quizzac's magnetic core began to go awry. By the time I was eleven, the Red Scare in the U.S. military, in the media, and in the performing arts, with all the accompanying dirges like "Who Promoted Peress" and the refrain "who was his Secret Master?" were replaced by the Red Scare in Southeast Asia. My father fixated on all of Roy Cohen's so-called facts gathered for Senator McCarthy, especially the facts on Irving Peress, "The Pink Dentist," because Irving Peress, like my father, was a Sephardic Jew. The assumptions and accusations about Peress' loyalties and allegiance reminded my father of other accusations and inquisitions, one recent, one over 500 years old, both similarly fed by fear and frenzy, all historical fictions. Quizzac could not explain that psychological connection between Sarkisian, Peress, and McCarthy, and even worse, Quizzac began to give me wrong answers even to the simple questions it did ask. I knew the answers were wrong because I had memorized all the right ones so that when my sister and I played the game, I would always win. What was it that led me to believe the first set of answers- when Quizzac was cherry--were the correct answers?
| Quizzac did not ask who had been a Red in the Thirties, because as far as it was concerned red was only a primary color used to highlight the right answer in Quizzac's maw. |
I had no reason to doubt the veracity of Quizzac. We were Orthodox Jews, and we all (except for my agnostic father), believed in the omnipotence of God (and Quizzac). We had faith. We knew God--we kept kosher. John Kennedy was three years from assassination in 1960 when Sarkisian went to prison for trading with the Reds. Certainty was our birthright, even as conspiracy theories built like the summer thunderheads east of town, words and worries like the massive clouds that whirled from the Rockies out over Denver and on to the plains farther east than Brush even, then back in close to the mountains to gather force and explode. Quizzac did not ask why Salisbury (Harare) was the capitol of Rhodesia or why Rhodesia was Rhodesia. Quizzac did not ask who had been a Red in the Thirties, because as far as it was concerned red was only a primary color used to highlight the right answer in Quizzac's maw. Besides, geography and idealism were neatly delineated on its discs like the crisp lines on a good political map. As far as Quizzac was concerned, the Soviet Union did not exist. Quizzac was not interested in nationalism, patriotism, or imperialism, it claimed, but the overt questions on Quizzac's innocent discs belied ideas about "important" facts, "real" facts in the same way a book I loved as a child, The Epic of Man, was really only the epic of skin-clad Europeans who "evolved" to build resplendent cities of quarried stone, magnificent cathedrals with gold leafed domes, great meeting halls with dadoed pillars--all of it achieved with the labor of lesser individuals whose tribal histories were not chronicled in The Epic of Man's large, glossy pages.
Even with these flaws, I loved Quizzac. I loved the way the yellow arrow that pointed to the correct answer would equivocate, slip between letters, fooling my sister and me into the veracity of our random responses for all the delicious seconds we could have been right. The box was black with gold and red lettering like the laquerware Sarkisian sold, and the utilitarian lid to Quizzac once crushed a very large wild bee I had mistaken for one of Barbie's wigs during one of our trips to Brush.
My father had a penchant for another kind of fact, the indisputable record of the stopwatch. All the raceforms from Brush had his annotations in two colors of ink--black and blue. Real times in blue ink; notes on each horse's form, start, gait, endurance, finish for each of the races he witnessed, in black ink. He printed his letters in a neat hand, 'e's like backwards threes, notation he learned in radio school during the war. On the inside cover to the race form he recorded the track conditions and wind velocity, but the science of all the factual records was augmented by my mother's always betting the birth dates, ages, anniversaries, and yortzeits of the family so that the science of numbers overlapped kabbalistically with faith. Each of them tried to keep in check the random possibility of event and hope--each acknowledged that fact and chaos exist simultaneously, but the fiction of their good marriage was undercut by the fact of my father's disappearance.