Page 112 of Playworld
“You do,”Mom shouted.“You do, you do, you do, you do!”
“I’m going to Matt’s,” Oren said. He got up and began stuffing clothes in his book bag. He did this with great force, so that his haste was closer to anger than fear, had more fight in it than flight. He scanned the room. He pulled several cassettes from his tape collection and, from the shelf where I’d placed the books Mom had bought me, grabbedMoby-Dickand opened it to reveal a fat stash of crisp twenties, which he folded and placed in his pocket, and then glanced at me, so that I could take inhis disappointment—in the fact that he could hide something valuable from me in plain sight.
“Please don’t go,” I said.
He was riffling through our sock drawer, tossing out pairs with abandon, with disgust, until he found his Ray-Bans case. “You did the same thing to me,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“The fire,” Oren said. “You just left me there, in that closet.”
I sat up in my bed. “I don’t remember that,” I said, “at all.”
“Of course you don’t,” Oren said. “Nobody here does.”
He was grimacing. Packed now, he lingered, observing me as this information registered.
“I fucking crawled out under that coat, and where were you? Gone.AWOL.And who’s gonna find the fucking cat after that, Griffin? Not you. Not me either.”
He was furious, his lower lip shaking. Tears sparked in his eyes. He’d held this in for so long, and it had erupted so suddenly he couldn’t contain his emotions. What made it worse was that the revelation did not land, that my bafflement was genuine, and this obliterated his composure before he fled. While I, left alone—Oren let the apartment door slam—once again found myself being told something that was true but could not for the life of me remember.
—
When I got home from work the following night, Mom was in her bedroom, watching the news. She was dressed up in a nice blouse and skirt. She was standing in front of the television, drinking a glass of wine. The bottle rested on her dresser. They were replaying Reagan’s press conference from earlier that day. He wore a smart gray suit. Ever since he’d been shot, he’d sloughed off the salesman’s slickness, the B-list actor’s knack for overemphasis. In this new, no-nonsense mode, he seemed more like a commander in chief. And this made me more appreciative and skeptical of him all at once.
…on the South Lawn,Reagan gave the following statement:
“This morning at seven a.m., the union representing those who man America’s air traffic control facilities called a strike. This was theculmination of seven months of negotiations between the Federal Aviation Administration and the union. At one point in these negotiations, agreement was reached and signed by both sides, granting a forty-million-dollar increase in salaries and benefits. This is twice what other government employees can expect—”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said.
“Hush, please,” Mom said.
“Now, however,”Reagan said,“the union demands are seventeen times what had been agreed to—681 million dollars.”
The president went on to assert that the tax burden on Americans for such an amount would be too high, and that while the system was not operating at capacity, a number of air traffic controllers and supervisors across the country had quit their union to return to work.The president went on to clarify the administration’s position.
“Let me make one thing plain,”Reagan continued.“I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike. Indeed, as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union—”
“What union?” I asked.
“Screen Actors Guild.”
“Really?” I said.
Mom pressed her index finger to her lips.
“But,”Reagan said,“we cannot compare labor-management relations in the private sector with government. Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide without interruption the protective services which are government’s reason for being.”
Mom slowly, bitterly shook her head.
“It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees…”
Mom took another sip of wine as if she might take a bite out of the glass.
“It is for this reason,”Reagan continued,“that I must tell those who fail to report for duty this morning they are in violation of the law, and if they do not report for work within forty-eight hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.”
Mom snapped the TV’s knob and the screen went dark. “Even your grandfather saw this coming. And he was appointed to the NTSB byNixon.” Which explained nothing, so far as I was concerned. She poured herself more wine. “Who didn’t fire the postal workers when they went on strike, I might add.”