Daniel Galef
— Sign posted on the gate of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island by the owner, George C. Tilyou, the morning after the attraction burned to the ground in 1907.
“A hundred-and-fucking-six. Fuck. She must see the world in brown like an old photo or something,” Marc said.
“Sepia, yeah.” I was checking my makeup in the car mirror. Marc drove because the rental place wouldn’t let me. “You think we’ll get a decent couple minutes on this?”
“Fuck no. We’ll get a sound bite — ’That darling Mr. Hitler had such a charming laugh’ — and then Lenny will say ‘Thanks, Viv, what a story! The Oldest Living Woman in the County. Golly. Now to other boring shit.’”
Marc’s impression was flawless, while also sounding exactly like Walter Mondale like all his other impressions. He was my cameraman. When we were on assignment like this we shared beer and hotel rooms and secrets that could have destroyed us.
“Here’s the place,” I said.
There was no question which house. It was like something out of Scooby-Doo. I said. Marc hopped on it off the bat. “Ruh-roh, Raggy. It might be huh-huh-huh-haunted!” A nurse answered the door, and she led us back through the shotgun hallway so it felt we were climbing down into a cave.
She looked a hundred and six. She looked a million and six. The segment was fake-real-time, a prerecorded interview that would get Frankensteined into whatever thirty-second snippet Len needed to fill space, but she seemed to think we were live. Or a newspaper, sometimes. I stopped correcting her. Then I stopped asking questions.
It was a matter of will. The only time I could wedge in was when she breathed from the glass of sickly-sweet tea the nurse brought out a pitcher of for all of us, though I prefer coffee and Marc doesn’t do sugar.
She had lived a whole stack of living. She’d been in Texas for the worst years of it and in California for some. Minneapolis. Long Island. She had a daughter who didn’t respect who died on the haul to California. Now she was presenting an infinite progression of deceased husbands, picking them out invisible in photographs of television snow and telling how they died. “This is Milt. Wonderful cook. He was crushed between two trolleycars. Harry. Voice like an angel when he wasn’t drinking. Spanish Flu. Gavin. Plumber. U-boat.”
I noticed all the deaths were period-specific. They were cartoons, but I imagined them all as me so not to smile. Marc was too professional to ruin a shoot, but everyone has a breaking point. I saw he was tight-lipped, with his free hand in his pocket.
“Have you got a husband? Or is that an old-fashioned question? You’re young. You have time.”
My eyes flickered to Marc, but shouldn’t have. Len thought Marc and I were Going, which I guess was a thing people did when Len did, if Len did. But Marc knew about Lorelei. And I knew about Vance. Hell, we’d all snuck into the studio after midnight and filmed a guerilla program together. We were more mature now. I only looked to him to see if he was going to laugh.
It was a blink — nothing at all in a century-and-six of the A-Bomb and the Charleston. But old people see things. They’ve had all the time in the world to figure people out, the great psychological mysteries like What They’re Hiding and Why Don’t You Eat Something. I said “No.” Her eyes changed. If I’d expected followup, I found none. She steamed on.
“When I was your age I was married, of course. But I can remember before that, being a child. Once we went to a brand new city the railroad had built just to crash two trains together and sell tickets. I sat on my brother Newt’s shoulders, and I saw the beautiful flying fire and metal. It was a sensation. A few people even died. The only thing like it was Coney Island. True spectacle or lie spectacle, I loved it the same.
“That was only a couple years before Spain, which is what killed Newt. ‘Remember the Maine’ and all that. I think I knew it was all the same trick, even then. All spectacle. And now me. I expect everyone in the county would like a ticket to this collision.”
She took a sip of her tea but otherwise didn’t pause for a second. “That’s a lie, by the way. All of it. You’ll very much want to print this. I’m eighty-four. My mother died on the way to California, and she was always so pretty, and I smoked. You couldn’t hardly tell the difference. Daddy didn’t mind. My oldest memory, I mean one I didn’t steal, is him telling me so. Do you want more tea?”
Marc took the tape out of the camera on the way to the car and looked at it like it would crumble to sand. We’d been in that Scooby-Doo house for an hour and a half. And all of it her talking. You could’ve chopped that tape into anything, Methuselah, Munchausen, or Marilyn Monroe.
“And this is my eighty-eighth husband Jehosephat,” Walter Mondale said, but Marc’s heart wasn’t there. “He poisoned himself with Al Capone’s bathtub gin when he found out I’m a fucking fraud. Why, I’m only this many years old!” He held up his fingers. “Why don’t you print that in your radio show?”
The car was farther than we parked it.
“Have you got a husband?” Mondale persisted, “Or am I being old-fashioned?”
I thought about changing my age so next time I could drive the rental. Or maybe everything else but my age. I didn’t notice Marc until I was already round the side of the car. The ring was tiny, of course, but considering what he made weekly it was a monument.
“So,” he asked in the voice of the vice-president. “Which kind of spectacle do you want to be?”
DANIEL GALEF has written a gaggle of short stories, a gallimaufry of poems, four and a half plays (including a musical), crossword puzzles, comic strips, ransom notes, a dictionary definition (Merriam-Webster, “interfaculty,” adj.[2]), and the only true fortune cookie in the world which happens to be the fortune you’re going to get the next time you get a fortune cookie. His most recent fiction appears in the American Bystander, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Barnhouse, and Bull & Cross.