Ate It Anyway

Singing Pumpkins

singing pumpkins George was sitting with Life magazine opened to a page that showed Senator Barry Goldwater's face lit from below in the manner of kids in a tent trying to scare each other with flashlights. The sun had gone behind a cloud; he had read all his comic books twice; the foot traffic between the living room and the front hall had receded for the moment to the far ends of George's grandmother's house. Then the living room brightened , and George looked up from his magazine to see that his grandmother had burst into flames. He sat there, staring into a pattern of light as yellow as the fire he would have drawn with a crayon,if he had not outgrown crayons ayear or two before. The fancy quartz-weighted cigarette 163 lighters that his grandmother had been filling stood beside her on the table. He stared and stared. Those fewseconds moved so slowlythat already he seemedto be rememberingthis moment from yearsin the future, the way he would rememberall the other moments in and near this over-insulated house—the icywispsofvapor that a carton of Sealtest icecream gave off when it waslifted out of the deep freeze, the virginalwhite gloss of bowling pins the machine has just set up, or the moment, best on a weekday, when the car would dip down the long ramp to the amusement park, passing through that freakishly ordinary buffer land that exists wherever normal territory borders on amusement park territory. George's grandmother shouted, "Matilda!" and bunched the fabric of her dress together. The flames went out. Only after the firewas out and the maid had hurried in and George's mouth had closed did he begin to think how strange it wasthat hewas already wondering whetherthe day's trip to the amusement park would be canceled or if anybody else would agreewith him that only a family of cowards would postpone a trip to the amusement park because their grandmother had been on fire for three seconds. The next few minutes could best be described as the bustle in a house the moment after someone has been harmlessly on fire.The sun came out, shining through a cut glass punch bowl, throwing spots of light, tricolored like grains of candy corn, across the wallpaper. People came and went around George's grandmother's chair, bringing her various-sized glassesofwater, which she placed on the table beside the cigarette lighters. If you don't know what year it was when something happened, you don't know much—which is why smart people alwayswrite the date and location on the back of their snapshots. There is 164 a chance that George remembered everything wrong, that he was reading nothing, that it wasactually Easter Sunday, and the amusement park was closed for the season. Perhaps he wasreallyhoping that they could gobowling. Ashe sat there across from his grandmother, with or without a magazine , his eyes would have already been warmed by the thought of the red-and-white marbling of the undrilled, grapefruit-size duckpin balls. Perhaps this was the day of his yearly argument with his parents about whether or not people in polite society ever went bowling on Easter Sunday. Across the Potomac from the amusement park, you could have crawled up out of the water, into the same riparian thickness of woods ason the Maryland side, and been arrested. It iswonderful to think how close the southernmost curve of the roller-coaster came to the headquarters of the CIA, its location not yet officially acknowledged—just the distance of a shout across the river into a hundred hard-windowed offices. It is wonderful to think how easily the world could have blown up—and if it had, it would have happened there—how that reach of hills and water might have blinked into flame any afternoon, how the faces of families coming down the ramp toward the parking lot might have been daguerreotyped forever against their black windshields, never to reach the park but always to love that tall, white-painted machinery coming into view over the trees. On an afternoon when he hadn't seen the Potomac for years, when he had flown from Denver into the capital for a meeting of the AmericanAssociation of Private BusinessSchools,George ran into a friend from a previous job who talked him into going to look at some silk...