White Noise

and wanted a clue. But she looked straight ahead as if fearful that any change in the sensitive texture of sound, movement, expression would cause the crying to break out again.

At the house no one spoke. They all moved quietly from room to room, watching him distantly, with sneaky and respectful looks. When he asked for some milk, Denise ran softly to the kitchen, barefoot, in her pajamas, sensing that by economy of movement and lightness of step she might keep from disturbing the grave and dramatic air he had brought with him into the house. He drank the milk down in a single powerful swallow, still fully dressed, a mitten pinned to his sleeve.

They watched him with something like awe. Nearly seven straight hours of serious crying. It was as though he'd just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges-a place where things are said, sights are seen, distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.

17

Babette said to me in bed one night, 'Isn't it great having all these kids around?'

'There'll be one more soon.'

'Who?'

'Bee is coming in a couple of days.'

'Good. Who else can we get?'

The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking, hoping to trick Babette into a confession, an admission or some minimal kind of flustered response. This was not a tactic the girl and I had discussed but I couldn't help admiring the boldness of her timing. All six of us were jammed into the car on our way to the Mid-Village Mall and Denise simply waited for a natural break in the conversation, directing her question toward the back of Babette's head, in a voice drained of inference.

'What do you know about Dylar?'

'Is that the black girl who's staying with the Stovers?'

'That's Dakar,' Steffie said.

' Dakar isn't her name, it's where she's from,' Denise said. 'It's a country on the ivory coast of Africa.'

'The capital is Lagos,' Babette said. 'I know that because of a surfer movie I saw once where they travel all over the world.'

'The Perfect Wave' Heinrich said. 'I saw it on TV.'

'But what's the girl's name?' Steffie said.

'I don't know,' Babette said, 'but the movie wasn't called The Perfect Wave. The perfect wave is what they were looking for.'

'They go to Hawaii,' Denise told Steffie, 'and wait for these tidal waves to come from Japan. They're called origamis.'

'And the movie was called The Long Hot Summer,' her mother said.

'The Long Hot Summer,' Heinrich said, 'happens to be a play by Tennessee Ernie Williams.'

'It doesn't matter,' Babette said, 'because you can't copyright titles anyway.'

'If she's an African,' Steffie said, 'I wonder if she ever rode a camel.'

'Try an Audi Turbo.'

'Try a Toyota Supra.'

'What is it camels store in their humps?' Babette said. 'Food or water? I could never get that straight.'

'There are one-hump camels and two-hump camels,' Heinrich told her. 'So it depends which kind you're talking about.'

'Are you telling me a two-hump camel stores food in one hump and water in the other?'

'The important thing about camels,' he said, 'is that camel meat is considered a delicacy.'

'I thought that was alligator meat,' Denise said.

'Who introduced the camel to America?' Babette said. 'They had them out west for a while to carry supplies to coolies who were building the great railroads that met at Ogden, Utah. I remember my history exams.'

'Are you sure you're not talking about llamas?' Heinrich said.

'The llama stayed in Peru,' Denise said. ' Peru has the llama, the vicuna and one other animal. Bolivia has tin. Chile has copper and iron.'

'I'll give anyone in this car five dollars,' Heinrich said, 'if they can name the population of Bolivia.'

'Bolivians,' my daughter said.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can't possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it's true.

In a huge hardware store at the mall I saw Eric Massingale, a former microchip sales engineer who changed his life by coming out here to join the teaching staff of the computer center at the Hill. He was slim and pale, with a dangerous grin.

'You're not wearing dark glasses, Jack.'

'I only wear them on campus.'

'I get it.'

We went our separate ways into the store's deep interior. A great echoing din, as of the extinction of a species of beast, filled the vast space. People bought twenty-two-foot ladders, six kinds of sandpaper, power saws that could fell trees. The aisles were long and bright, filled with oversized brooms, massive sacks of peat and dung, huge Rubbermaid garbage cans. Rope hung like tropical fruit, beautifully braided strands, thick, brown, strong. What a great thing a coil of rope is to look at and feel. I bought fifty feet of Manila hemp just to have it around, show it to my son, talk about where it comes from, how it's made. People spoke English, Hindi, Vietnamese, related tongues.

I ran into Massingale again at the cash terminals.

'I've never seen you off campus, Jack. You look different without your glasses and gown. Where did you get that sweater? Is that a Turkish army sweater? Mail order, right?'

He looked me over, felt the material of the water-repellent jacket I was carrying draped across my arm. Then he backed up, altering his perspective, nodding a little, his grin beginning to take on a self-satisfied look, reflecting some inner calculation.

'I think I know those shoes,' he said.

What did he mean, he knew these shoes?

'You're a different person altogether.'

'Different in what way, Eric?'

'You won't take offense?' he said, the grin turning lascivious, rich with secret meaning.

'Of course not. Why would I?'

'Promise you won't take offense.'

'I won't take offense.'

'You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy.'

'Why would I take offense?' I said, paying for my rope and hurrying out the door.

The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls,