Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Page A

it!” The card read,
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    Takeshi Fumimota
    ADJUSTMENTS
    Phone Book, Many Areas
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    â€œThat’s you? Takeshi?”
    â€œLike Lucy and Ethel—if you’re ever in a jam!” He played a few bars on the uke. “At the point in your life when you really need this, you will—suddenly remember! that you have this card—and where you have stashed it!”
    â€œNot with my memory.”
    â€œYou’ll remember.” It was then that he simply faded into the environment, became invisible in what would be a nightlong party that now, with the departure of their visitors, had shifted into high.
    â€œHe-e-e-y,” Zoyd spoke to the room, “I heard of job skills like that, but don’t know that I’d care to associate with that heavy-duty type of a hombre, nothin’ personal understand, that is o’ course if you’re still someplace you can hear me. Hah?” No reply. The card went into a pocket, then another, into a long sequence of pockets, wallets, envelopes, drawers, and boxes, surviving barrooms, laundromats, doper’s forgetfulness, and North Coast winters, till the morning, not knowing if he’d ever see her again, when he suddenly remembered where it was after all the years and gave it to Prairie, as if she were supposed to be the one to have it all along.
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H OME between shifts, Frenesi sat with a cup of coffee at a kitchen table in an apartment in the older, downtown section of a pale humid Sun Belt city whose almost-familiar name would soon enough be denied to civilian eyes by federal marker pens, sunlight streaming in unmitigated by tree leaves, feeling herself, like a tune that always finds its home chord again, drawn, taken in, tranquilized by hopeful rearrangements of the past, many of them, like today’s, including her unknown daughter, Prairie, last seen as a baby smiling half-toothless at her, trusting her to be back that evening as usual, trying to wiggle out of Zoyd’s arms, that last time, and into Frenesi’s own. For years, whenever she and Flash moved in anyplace new, in a reflex superstition by now like sprinkling salt and water in every room, her thoughts would go to Prairie, and to where, in each new arrangement, she would sleep—sometimes the baby, sometimes a girl she was free to imagine.
    Down the block, circular saws were braying metallically
eee-yuh! eee-yuh!
among hammerfalls, truck engines, truck stereos, not much of it registering now as Frenesi entertained images of a nubile teen Prairie, looking something like herself, in some California beach pad, wearing centerfold attire and squirming in the embrace of some surf bum with a downy mustache, named Shawn or Erik, among plastic swag lamps, purring audio gear, stained hamburger sacks, and squashed beer cans. But if I saw her on the street someplace, she reminded herself, I wouldn’t even know her . . . one more teenage girl, no different from any of the mall rats she saw at work every day out at Southplex, one of four shopping malls, named for points of the compass, that bracketed the city, hundreds of these girls a day, whom she watched on the sly, nervous as a peeper, curious about how they moved and spoke, what they were into—that desperate for any detail, however abstractly Prairie so far away might share it with her generation.
    She couldn’t talk about much of this to Flash. Not that he “wouldn’t understand”—two of his own kids were also somewhere denied him—but there was a level past which his attention began to wander. He might have been crazy enough to think she was somehow trying to rewrite all their history, being known to say things like, “Aw, it was just a judgment call, hon. Say you’d’ve tried to stay away, could’ve been even worse,” eyebrows up and cocked in a way he knew women read as sincere, “old Brock come after you then no matter where you took her,