starting to kick in. "It's not really radioactive, is it Dag?" I ask.
"Ra dioactive!" Claire shrieks. This scares Dag. He drops the jar and it shatters. Within moments, countless green glass beads explode like a cluster of angry hornets, shooting everywhere, rattling down the floor, rolling into cracks, into the couch fabric, into the ficus soil—
everywhere.
"Dag, what is this shit? Clean it up! Get it out of my house!"
"It's Trinitite," mumbles Dag, more crestfallen than upset, "It's from Alamogordo, where they had the first N-test. The heat was so intense it melted the sand into a new substance altogether. I bought a bottle at a ladies auxiliary clothing store."
"Oh my god. It's plutonium! You brought plutonium into my house.
You are such an asshole. This place is a waste dump now." She gathers breath. "I can't live here anymore ! I have to move! My perfect little house—I live in a toxic waste dump —" Claire starts dancing the chicken in her wedgies, her pale face red with hysteria, yet making no guilt inroads on a rapidly fading Dag.
Stupidly I try to be the voice of reason: "Claire, come on. The explosion was almost fifty years ago. The stuff is harmless now—"
"Then you can harmless it all right into the trash for me, Mr. Know Everything. You don't actually believe all of that harmless talk, do you?
You are such a victim, you pea-brained dimwit—no ones believes the government. This stuffs death for the next four and a half billion years."
Dag mumbles a phrase from the couch, where he's almost asleep.
"You're overreacting, Claire. The beads are half-lived out. They're clean."
"Don't even speak to me, you hell-bound P.R. Frankenstein mon-ster, until you've decontaminated this entire house. Until then, I'll be s t a y i n g a t A n d y ' s . G o o d n i g h t . "
She roars out the door like a runaway train car, leaving Dag near
comatose on the couch, condemned to a sleep of febrile pale green
nightmares. Claire may or may not have nightmares, but should she ever come back to this bungalow, she'll never be able to sleep there quite perfectly ever again.
Tobias arrives to visit Claire tomorrow. And Christmas with the family i n P o r t l a n d s o o n . W h y i s i t s o i m p o s s i b l e t o d e -complicate my life?
DON'T
EAT
YOURSELF
An action-packed day. Dag is still asleep on Claire's sofa, unaware of how deeply he has plunged on her shit list. Claire, meanwhile, is in my bathroom, dolling herself up and philosophizing out loud through a steamy Givenchy scented murk and amid a counterload of cosmetics and accessories I was made to fetch from her bungalow that resembles the emptied-out contents of a child's Halloween sack: 'Everybody has a
'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you.
Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn
or the woman wearing
White Shoulders who
stamps your book at the
library—a stranger who,
if you were to come home
and find a message from
them on your answering
machine saying 'Drop
everything. I love you.
Come away with me now
to Florida,' you'd follow
them. 'Yours is the blond checkout clerk at Jensen's, isn't it? You've told me about as much. Dag's is probably Elvissa" (Elvissa is Claire's good friend.) "—and mine, unfortunately," she comes out of the bath-room head cocked to one side inserting an earring, "is Tobias. Life is so unfair, Andy. It really is." UTobias is Claire's unfortunate obsession from New York, and he's driving in from LAX airport this morning. He's our age, and Biff-and-Muffy private schoolish like Claire's brother Allan, and from some eastern white bread ghetto: New Rochelle? Shaker
Heights? Darien? Westmount? Lake Forest? Does it matter? He has one of those bankish money jobs of the sort that when, at parties, he tells you what he does, you start to forget as soon as he tells you. He affects a tedious corp orate killspeak. He sees nothing silly or offensive in
"Ra dioactive!" Claire shrieks. This scares Dag. He drops the jar and it shatters. Within moments, countless green glass beads explode like a cluster of angry hornets, shooting everywhere, rattling down the floor, rolling into cracks, into the couch fabric, into the ficus soil—
everywhere.
"Dag, what is this shit? Clean it up! Get it out of my house!"
"It's Trinitite," mumbles Dag, more crestfallen than upset, "It's from Alamogordo, where they had the first N-test. The heat was so intense it melted the sand into a new substance altogether. I bought a bottle at a ladies auxiliary clothing store."
"Oh my god. It's plutonium! You brought plutonium into my house.
You are such an asshole. This place is a waste dump now." She gathers breath. "I can't live here anymore ! I have to move! My perfect little house—I live in a toxic waste dump —" Claire starts dancing the chicken in her wedgies, her pale face red with hysteria, yet making no guilt inroads on a rapidly fading Dag.
Stupidly I try to be the voice of reason: "Claire, come on. The explosion was almost fifty years ago. The stuff is harmless now—"
"Then you can harmless it all right into the trash for me, Mr. Know Everything. You don't actually believe all of that harmless talk, do you?
You are such a victim, you pea-brained dimwit—no ones believes the government. This stuffs death for the next four and a half billion years."
Dag mumbles a phrase from the couch, where he's almost asleep.
"You're overreacting, Claire. The beads are half-lived out. They're clean."
"Don't even speak to me, you hell-bound P.R. Frankenstein mon-ster, until you've decontaminated this entire house. Until then, I'll be s t a y i n g a t A n d y ' s . G o o d n i g h t . "
She roars out the door like a runaway train car, leaving Dag near
comatose on the couch, condemned to a sleep of febrile pale green
nightmares. Claire may or may not have nightmares, but should she ever come back to this bungalow, she'll never be able to sleep there quite perfectly ever again.
Tobias arrives to visit Claire tomorrow. And Christmas with the family i n P o r t l a n d s o o n . W h y i s i t s o i m p o s s i b l e t o d e -complicate my life?
DON'T
EAT
YOURSELF
An action-packed day. Dag is still asleep on Claire's sofa, unaware of how deeply he has plunged on her shit list. Claire, meanwhile, is in my bathroom, dolling herself up and philosophizing out loud through a steamy Givenchy scented murk and amid a counterload of cosmetics and accessories I was made to fetch from her bungalow that resembles the emptied-out contents of a child's Halloween sack: 'Everybody has a
'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you.
Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn
or the woman wearing
White Shoulders who
stamps your book at the
library—a stranger who,
if you were to come home
and find a message from
them on your answering
machine saying 'Drop
everything. I love you.
Come away with me now
to Florida,' you'd follow
them. 'Yours is the blond checkout clerk at Jensen's, isn't it? You've told me about as much. Dag's is probably Elvissa" (Elvissa is Claire's good friend.) "—and mine, unfortunately," she comes out of the bath-room head cocked to one side inserting an earring, "is Tobias. Life is so unfair, Andy. It really is." UTobias is Claire's unfortunate obsession from New York, and he's driving in from LAX airport this morning. He's our age, and Biff-and-Muffy private schoolish like Claire's brother Allan, and from some eastern white bread ghetto: New Rochelle? Shaker
Heights? Darien? Westmount? Lake Forest? Does it matter? He has one of those bankish money jobs of the sort that when, at parties, he tells you what he does, you start to forget as soon as he tells you. He affects a tedious corp orate killspeak. He sees nothing silly or offensive in
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