The French Revolution (17 page)

Esmerelda plowed on with her flawless final courses, incorporating effervescent neon fluids into cake batter, chattering blithely about genus and species, installing an electron microscope by the baking prep station and tying a copy of the periodic table to her waist. After a few months in second place her face turned sodden, she began ignoring all conversation aimed at her, a smell of sour peaches and decomposing tires installed itself in her armpits. Her staff assumed she’d started drinking, maybe cocaine, but that couldn’t account for all the food she was eating, two or three entrées per hour, trays of appetizers, at least 10 percent of the pastries she made. She ballooned and lost mobility, she tired easily, the mistakes flamed up, her work regressed, her spirit was crushed like a beer can. Six months later, when she was still kind of hanging in there, Bruce ran wild on her at a citywide bake-off, the Mandibles stampeding her once-beloved oatmeal cookies by unanimous decision.

Incognito soon shut its doors, dethroning the pastry queen and exiling her to her mother’s house to eat and expand. Esmerelda’s first estate continued to grow fat and loathsome, first feasting on unemployment checks and bulk cartons of ramen noodles and, years later, on coupon-discounted snacks funded by Slippy Sanders’s venture into the world of discount copying. Yet the history remained, intractable, and close observers like Slippy and Fanny could see that the fundamentals of her empire were intact, its traditions of passion, imagination, and hard work still functioning, and that maybe, with a major upheaval, the situation was salvageable.

The spirit of insurrection infiltrated her days. It wasn’t obvious—Esmerelda fell mired in loneliness, her waistband expanded steadily, her disposition hit bottom. But this has always been intrinsic to the cycle of revolution, to fall so far that plodding on is nonsensical, better to burn the fields and reseed. Desperation sets in; turmoil is inevitable. And as hindsight crystallizes, it becomes evident that cosmic karma played a major role here too, the bedevilments of her painful journey cycling through in the brutal, necessary acts to follow.

The period from the 31st of May, 1792, to the
9th Thermidor
, 27th of July, 1794, when Robespierre and Marat usurped more than sovereign power, was very aptly designated THE REIGN OF TERROR. At that period, virtue and nobility were certain ties to proscription or the guillotine; debtors paid their debts by renouncing their creditors; criminals punished by the law denounced their prosecutors and judges; those who had not places denounced those who had; heirs denounced those whose fortunes would descend to them; husbands found it a commodious way of getting rid of their wives; and children denounced their parents.

—
The Reign of Terror: A Collection of Authentic Narratives of the Horrors Committed by the Revolutionary Government of France Under Marat and Robespierre, Written by Eye-Witnesses of the Scenes

Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.

—Maximilien Robespierre

 

 

On the afternoon of
September 11, 2001, after a day of sitting around while frightened teachers whispered into cellphones in the hall, a day in which mysterious televisions materialized from closets and broadcasted the same catastrophic images and humbled voices over and over, an absentee day of independent textbook review and worksheets and extended recess, Marat set off a pile of M-80s in the boys’ room and a smoke bomb in the teachers’ lounge and ran down the hallway screaming like a freshly
scalped prairie woman until an assistant principal took him out with a shoestring tackle.

Two weeks later, upon completion of a wriggling, energy-blasted, house-wrecking suspension, Fanny informed him that he was no longer permitted to leave the house without first performing one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups, in front of the fireplace, naked. “Marat, I am sorry that it has come to this,” she explained in a judicious voice. “But how else are we to get through to you that this is unacceptable? We are fortunate you were not shot on the spot. Exercise and shame are required to put you back in line.”

Marat smirked and shrugged. “I was just trying to, you know, make a joke.”

“You have grown too chubby and yet retain too much pointless energy. An exercise regimen will take the edge off and trim off that fat,” Fanny explained. “And the nudity will serve as motivation to end your shaming and behave better.”

“What if I don’t do it?” he barked.

“You will experience a pain you have never known,” Fanny said sweetly, receding into the hallway, the divot in her forehead deep enough to hide a quarter.

The next morning, Marat and Robespierre crammed toast into their mouths, kissed Esmerelda goodbye, and made a coordinated break for the door while Fanny was in the bathroom with her third cigarette of the morning. As they grappled with the complex array of locks, Fanny strolled toward them laughing. “Children,” she wheezed, “I may have been born at night, but not last night. Now Marat, strip!”

“Hold the phone, Ma,” Esmerelda piped up, unaware of her son’s new exercise requirements. “Not cool.”

“Silence, dear. Would you prefer to sleep on the street? Marat, please, get to it.”

“I ain’t kidding, Ma!” Esmerelda rattled her cereal spoon menacingly. “Lay off the kid!”

“Esmerelda Van Twinkle, I have had enough out of you. The
boy committed a terrorist act. He does not respond to grounding. He does not respond to child psychologists. He does not respond to the rescinding of television privileges. Perhaps he will respond to physical exertion and embarrassment. Enough squabbling, Marat, drop them!”

Fanny jerked down Marat’s sagging jeans to reveal his bare, fleshy bottom, and spanked him with her open palm. “Hit the deck,” Fanny ordered, “now!”

Marat aimed his decimated pupils at his grandmother and inched open his lips. Quietly but clearly he hissed:

“Fuck.

“You.”

The ensuing blast took him to the ground and into a nap. He woke up in bed, pants refastened around his waist, a drag race roaring in his head. And for the rest of his life, through his adolescent revenge and adult regret, he always believed that it was his grandmother who’d laid the haymaker on him. She was the offended party, already steamed up, well within striking distance, with a track record of screwing him over. Even though Robespierre insisted that it was their mother who’d risen from her chair like a viper and hurled her breakfast plate across the room at him, eggs and bacon splattering across walls as the porcelain pigeon clocked him in the forehead, he refused to accept it—it didn’t make sense. For he had divined, correctly, that Fanny Van Twinkle had cracked.

Even with a daughter and two grandchildren at home, Fanny felt a dearth of love so penetrating that she found her only moments of warmth from her daily slate of soap operas. They provided her with reliable attention, featuring juicy love triangles with handsome men who commanded large fortunes and cogently discussed world events, scripted into trustworthy hour-long blocks and timed for predictable commercial breaks. Whereas her home life had descended into Hobbesian chaos: Marat, the nasty one, Esmerelda brutish; and Robespierre—her one hope, the girl—unbearably short.

What went wrong with Robespierre? Already she had taken to issuing orders and ignoring advice, a subtle dictatorship, her understated disgust at Fanny’s copious and free home cooking ticking Fanny off in a major way; and she was condescending, with an enormous vocabulary Fanny couldn’t decode. “That meal was really dyspeptic,” she announced after Fanny prepared her classic fava bean casserole. “Thank you,” Fanny replied, thrilled to have earned such an unusual compliment. A stupid, elated grin stuck to her face for the next few hours, until Esmerelda asked what was making her so freakin’ silly, and Fanny told her, and Esmerelda provided the definition. “Damn,” Fanny growled, her smile vaporized, “that girl has too much peacock in her strut.”

Fanny cleaned, she cooked, she shopped, she mended. She tried to help with homework and occasionally took a shot at physical contact: a handshake, a high-five, dipping in for a hug once a year. But her daughter was sullen, Marat cold, and Robespierre a goody two-shoes too calculating to be seen sucking up. The isolation was total. And yet despite the complaints, the animosity, and the resultant marginalization, Fanny never seriously considered that she might have been too rigid in her contract enforcement, too persnickety about the little things, particularly with regard to the boy’s clothing options, and that the girl was only doing what she could to increase her general popularity among the household, to build her political capital.

And Harold wasn’t coming back. She knew this. There was no secret rescue mission or mystery vortex or explanation for his absence other than a boiling sea, swirling rain, nautical collisions, gale winds, and bone-crushing waves. At least he had gone with the ocean. It was where he belonged, she thought, and when it stormed against her bedroom window she imagined his body banded with water and drizzling back to her as rain. Her love, trickling through her flowerpots; her love, leaking between her shingles. Her love filling her stomach when she drank from the tap. As the younger generations quickly figured out, Fanny fell apart during storms.

She was lonely. She heard the rain but could not kiss it. She drank her husband’s love but could not feel it.

Her mind was melting with love.

“Gramma?” Robespierre was at her knee.

“Wha?”

“You were yelling in your sleep.”

“I was?”

“Yes.”

“What was I saying?”

“‘Batten down the hatches! Storm coming!’ You said that over and over again. And you yelled a bunch too.”

“Well. Too much pizza before naptime I suppose.”

“Really?”

“No.” Her face flinched, nearly a laugh, and she privately reveled in her superior handle on sarcasm.

“This naked exercise thing, Gramma. It’s stupid,” Robespierre declared. “And wrong.”

Fanny’s sinuses churned. “It is my house, dear. And in my house, you must obey my rules.”

“Your rules are stupid,” Robespierre said simply. “They’re just getting everybody mad at you.”

“And how do you expect me to react, Robespierre?” Fanny’s skin was orange, her hands shivering crabs. “You helped your brother disobey my rules; you are no better than him.”

Robespierre glided back toward her room, soundlessly unpacking comebacks. Already she knew she was far better than her brother in nearly everything. “Cool it, Gramma,” she said as she climbed the stairs. “We’re all you have left, and you should treat us better.”

Fanny sat back in her husband’s recliner and did not move. She did not chide the children to turn off the cartoons they watched on the wood-paneled television set that sat on the living room floor; she did not return her daughter’s perfunctory “Hey, Ma,” when she came home at 5:30. She did not make dinner. She did not react to Esmerelda’s queries as to what in the
heck was shaking, how was the boob tube treating her, was there any chance she’d be cooking up some food in the near future or what. The sun set, and she sat alone in the dark while they ordered Chinese, the kids trundled up to bed, Esmerelda took her nightly shower and plunked onto her double-king mattress. Fanny sat with her eyes open and watched the wall, watched the window, watched the shadows droop across the street, watched the past fade into oblivion.

At 5 AM she rose from her chair, went to the kitchen, and warmed herself some mu shu pork. Then she drank a beer and went to sleep, leaving the dishes dirty, lunches unpacked, the kids sleeping through their alarm clocks, her daughter without someone to pull her muumuu over her mountainous body and help her out the door. In early afternoon she got up and walked to the beach, through the fog, to the sea. She took off her clothes and waded into the water. Harold’s cold wet kiss lapped at her ankles, her knees, her thighs. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her toward him, his stubble against her cheeks, his breath on her neck. She longed to be touched, to be his wife, and she let him run his hands through her hair and rub her back and blow bubbles in her ear. They made love softly, rolling in the waves, until she fell asleep.

She awoke on the beach, fists pounding her chest. “She’s up, dudes!” a voice called.

Salt water spilled from her mouth. “Fuck-a-doodle-doo,” the voice said. “Hang on, lady, ambulance on the way.”

Ice locked up her muscles. She had lost him.

She pushed herself up and walked silently through the pack of surfers, dog walkers, dogs, joggers, and kite flyers, over the dunes and back across the Great Highway to her house. She sat naked in the kitchen drinking gin until the liquor was gone and Harold was gone and there was nothing to do but lie down and die.

But in the morning she found herself in her own bed, dressed in a nightgown and covered in quilts, both grandchildren huddled beside her. “Is this hell?” she screamed. Marat opened an
eye and shook his head. “Is there a reason you people refuse to let me die and be done with it? Why the tricks? Save yourself the time and trouble; please, let me go!”

Robespierre crawled up the bed and pushed her lips against Fanny’s ear. “I love you, Gramma. I don’t want you to go.” And then she began to cry.

For the rest of her bewildered life, Fanny Van Twinkle spent her days uncoiled across Harold’s old leather armchair, watching her soaps, offering unsolicited negative opinions, never leaving the house, transmitting devil rays across the universe. She brushed her teeth with gin and spat blood on the carpet, murmuring her wedding vows over and over again.

Yet before she descended into the lair of madness where she would reside the rest of her days—so Robespierre’s attorneys argued—Fanny revised her last will and testament. She transferred assignments, swapped out names; the total text was shortened considerably. After the executors compared drafts and the legal battles wound themselves out, the list of losers ran as long as Esmerelda’s beefy arm, superseded by a lone winner atop the pile, the last words of love Fanny Van Twinkle ever heard reverberating as far into the future as she could make them.