The Blankouts

You can’t receive a high power transmission on equipment that’s only made to handle the slow poke of meat and not do some damage to the receiver.

In the morning the good looker looks like hell. She comes down late to breakfast, red-eyed, limp-lidded, her sleekest nightgown crinkled, torn fore and aft, and,—could it be?—singed in places. It’s a rare occasion when Sarah lets anyone, even little Gloria, see her without the lightening of her cosmetics. This is one of them. Nothing, however, could smooth over the change in her complexion from marble to maraschino. The pale, juiceless peaches and watered-down cream of the past several months are gone. Her cheeks have turned a lusty, rusty apple red; her lips are stoned, red and wrinkled, like a pair of preserved cherries. And most shocking, her hair, normally combed slick and well-behaved, is as tangled as a mess of vipers. The luster of the goddess crown is lost overnight, gone to a grey dullness. No longer shining like filaments of a soft and smooth white rare metal, it has the common frays and frizzies of cheap aluminum wire.

Sarah doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes have a faraway look, a fervent rapture of mystic exaltation. She walks slowly through the doorway into the dining room, as if she were out of touch with the floor, then stops for no apparent reason with a senseless grin on her face. It becomes clear to her husband, baby, and sitter that her bloodshot eyes can’t see the shock in theirs.

Glory Bee rolls her own, Mummy is so strange.

Harry groans to himself, why did this have to happen to me?

They both have the good sense to leave the problem in the hands of the well-versed nurse Miss Lord. Laudette approaches Sarah, waves her hand in front of her, up and down, back and forth. No response.

“Gangway! Let Sugar sit down and have some breakfast.” Laudette leads her to the table, but cannot make her eat the eggs and toast she offers. The morning-after Sarah sits with both arms crossed in front of her coffee until it gets cold; she shivers and stares blankly, settling deeper into her daydream.

The playboy is uneasy seeing his Cupcake looking so mad, under the weather, and unattractive. He can’t take it for very long and offers his hand and the promise of an Xmas shopping expedition to Gloria. “What do you say, Gee Bee, want to see what this city has in store, maybe watch the ice skaters in the rink, try a spin or two ourselves?”

“I’m with you, Daddy-o. Bye, Mummy. Bye, Lawdy.”

Woman to woman, Laudette puts a heavy arm around Sarah’s shoulder, and pulls her close. “Praying to the devil is not going to change what happened to Mister Corn Dog. Remember, I know what’s bothering you; you know you can always talk to old Laudette about it.”

Abruptly the day begins to dawn on Sarah. A crazed look replaces the dazed one. She comes back from the dark side of the moon and turns sunny side up. “Well, good morning, Miss Lord. Oh, and don’t these eggs look delicious! Mmm. I need a big breakfast. Today I’m going to start putting the rest of this house in order.”

Laudette hears the notes of frenzy in her voice.

“Now you’re chirping like a bird, cheerful. But I’m not convinced, Sugar. Jeepers creepers! Where did you get those red cheeks? Honestly, you look as if you slept on the wrong side of the tracks.”

“One morning I don’t feel like getting dressed and putting on my makeup and you have to make a big fuss about it? I can’t remember when I’ve had a better night’s sleep.”

Laudette holds a compact mirror up to the model. “Take a look, Sugaree … well, is that what you call the effects of a good night’s sleep? And what’s this rash on your neck and down your back? I declare it looks like sunburn!” Sniff. “And what’s this funny smell on you?”

Of course, Sarah would prefer not to face herself this morning in the mirror. What the rest of the world sees in her has always interested her too much, but in the aftermath of the unusual experience she has had, the thrills of having whatever- it-was in bed with her last night, it’s easy for her not to be too uneasy about the way she looks. She sees what Laudette is talking about, though: her hair is horrible, her eyes and cheeks are reddened with inflamed capillaries. “Nothing a little powder and a trip to the salon can’t cure,” she says. “I’m married now. I don’t always have to look perfect, do I?”

“And don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“You just had a blankout! I swear they’re getting worse! Why, right now you seem straight as five to nine, talking to me, but just a minute ago you were further out of your bean than you were at the wedding: you came down and stood in that doorway not showing any daylights at all, grinning like a zombie, as if you were having some kind of hellucination. You only did just come back to life. I’ll bet you don’t even remember seeing Sir Harry and Miss Gloria, do you?”

“Back to life? Blankouts? Harry and Gloria? Why of course I remember them! Whatever nonsense are you talking about?”

In contrary Sarah’s case, every understanding has an equal and opposite urge to deny. Her way of braving the darkness is both extremes, either a depressive, repressive stare, blissfully mindless, or a period of frantic, self-deluding liveliness. A moment ago she was flotsom on the river of oblivion, now she is suddenly, painfully conscious of being the one accountable for a host of horrible sins.

Whatever possessed me to take toads to bed and deny my prince? Was that really me doing tricks for heels while my sweet ear of Corn was waiting in the Bay Area? And how faithless I remain! Even in my act of faith to him I am unfaithful! Not only have I betrayed him in life but, last night, in death as well.

She remembers last night, how she gave herself, openly and eagerly. She is not so far gone from reason that she can’t put one and one together: she knows that it was her prayers to the dogs and that extraordinary bed which brought on the searing blow. She knows there’s no use trying to control her urge to go upstairs and pray for it to happen again. Blacklisted by the Shibbolites as well as the ladies who lunch, she now goes on her own worst enemies list, right under her father and the Lord in Heaven. Self-knowledge hurts. Her mood blackens with thoughts of her inner ugliness, and she condemns herself back into the darkness. She dwells on that bristly muzzle that nuzzled her ears, the sharp teeth on her neck, the strength of the beast, his smell of smoky sage and brimstone. She thinks about being spiked by the incandescent transcendental hot rod. When he struck like lightning, she got wet as rain.

Shame on her, she knows it’s not her brave Corn Dog and that she deserves the fires of hell. And at the same time, heading to hell anyway, she is overcome with the urge to bend over forwards and backwards, using whatever charm she has to get the bustle from beyond again. The day has hardly begun, and she is oozing with the itch to be punctuated by the animal point.

The pea must split in order to come to grips with the opposing directions of her destiny. She does not want to know herself when she cups her mouth with coffee and whispers, calling all dogs, calling all dogs …

Lassie, Laddie, Lucky, Star,

come on, you monkey man, wherever you are!

The little trill she adds ripples the surface of the coffee in her cup. “I feel like putting my feet up again for a little while, Miss Lord. I guess that long train ride wore me out more than I thought.”

“Sugar, don’t fade out again. You’ve got to face your problems. I’m here to help you.”

On-again, off-again, Sarah misreads Miss Lord. She takes the sitter up on her offer. “Help? Oh, why, thank you, Miss Lord,” she says, with a faraway look in her eyes, talking quickly, as if she knows she hasn’t long to say what she has to. “I know I can always count on you. We’re going to have to see about cleaning and fixing this place up. Though we don’t want to change its essential old-fashionedness now, do we? Of course not. Even Harry agrees. But we will need all the electricians and plumbers we can get. We should have the telephone installed first, shouldn’t we, so that we can call for what we need, fixers to fix what needs fixing, cleaners to clean what needs cleaning, painters to paint what needs painting, and so forth. I’ll be upstairs resting in my room. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to answer as you think I should.”

The baby-sitter savors the vote of confidence but does not like the sound of the first person plural in the subject of general contracting. Just when she thought that her job, sitting for queen-to-be Gloria, so agreeably self-sufficient and nicely bonding to her stepfather, would be a cake walk! The thought of the new office, the responsibility for all those home repairs, handling all that money, having to sort out estimates, contracts, and bills, makes Laudette so nervous that she needs to eat before she can refuse her employer’s nomination. Emergency! She puts six slices of crispy bacon on a piece of buttered toast, tops it with a bed of scrambled eggs and katsup, bolts it in two shakes, then a big gulp of milk. She eats fast, but not fast enough to catch the fading Sarah. When the big sitter feels nourished enough to turn down the job, the boss is unhinged, blank as a wet slate, and making her way, dreamily adrift off shore of this ordinary physical plane, toward the stairs that lead up to her new bed and the other world she found in it.