Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose Page B

storytellers, and that her parents would see that Lowell was, in his own hillbilly way, as deeply in love with the spirit of the people as they were. But all that came of her hopes was one silence after another. It wasn’t easy steering the dinner conversation in a middle-class Jewish household to polo, but Vera kept turning it till Lowell could tell his buzkashi story: hordes of mounted Afghans playing free-for-all polo with no rules and a dead goat with its head whacked off instead of a ball. Norma got up from the table, leaving them to Dave’s disapproval; in his day, you traveled to save the world from Fascism, not to watch the lumpen play ball. Vera served up Lowell’s cornflakes from heaven, but had to tell Dave’s Russian cornflake story for him. Which was why he got angry and called her up; and she told him the news about Rosalie, which she hadn’t been able to squeeze into all that silence.
    Afterward she felt so sorry for announcing it that way, she sat down and read Karl Marx. All her friends had read Marx in college, searching their Modern Library Giant Das Kapital for some clue to Vietnam. But Vera was glad she waited till she was pregnant, with all her emotions so close to the surface. She remembers reading with tears streaming down her face, moved by that enormous, unshakeable faith in the coming of the Revolution, its comforts so similar to what she knew of faith in the Messiah. Some things can be done to hasten its arrival, but not much; and besides, it will come no matter what.
    This is what she wants to tell her father: “Dad, don’t worry! You and the boys in the Lincoln Brigade, you did what you could! History will resolve itself; the prisoners of starvation will arise without us!” But she knows it’s false comfort, false cheer, the same misguided impulse that makes her want to write Bigfoot nicotine-fit stories for that kid craving cigarettes on the subway.
    “Guess what happened to me today,” she says, then stops, afraid they’ll think she’s imitating Norma and unsure of what she intends to say next.
    “What, dear?” asks Norma.
    “Here’s another good one,” says Rosie. “Now Mom’s going to tell you how she’s got ESP.”
    “Hardly,” says Vera, aware that the silly smile on her face could be mistaken for modesty, as if Rosie were praising her excessively.
    Norma leans forward, Dave leans back. Vera wonders why they signify interest with opposite motions and whether this is what Plato meant by finding your complementary half.
    “What’s the story?” says Dave.
    And Vera tells them. Dave and Norma keep interrupting, making her explain. When she gets to the part about the lemonade stand, they play their own version of Where-Did-This-Story-Come-From? “You had your little lemonade stand,” says Dave. “Little Miss Entrepreneur at five cents a glass.” Norma’s in her element, extracting information, though Vera feels less like a troubled student than a witness at a trial. So Vera testifies on, and by the end is almost satisfied—if not by the logic, at least by the conviction of her story.
    Not so her parents. When she’s done, they both have the foolish irritated looks of cashiers who’ve totaled and retotaled every item and still can’t get it right.
    “I’m not surprised a bit,” Dave says. “I’ve always said your mother has ESP. When you were off traveling and I’d be sick with worry, she’d know just when you were going to call. Years ago, forty-five years ago to be exact, she’d wake up in cold sweat here in New York; and later it would turn out we’d run into some fighting.”
    Vera wants to say that sensing when your daughter is due to call or sweating when your husband’s fighting in Spain is nothing like looking at a photo of a house and guessing the names of its occupants. But now it’s Norma smiling that silly, flattered smile and neither of them are listening.
    “So,” Dave says at last. “What’ll you do about it?”
    “Nothing!” Vera