She regarded the piece of pie for a long time. Her mother and father were both dead, she knew. Her mother had died in the Sanford Hospital and her father, who had once made a little girl feel welcome in his shop, was lying dead in bed above her head. Why did everything have to keep coming in rhymes? Coming and going in such dreadful cheap jingles and jangles, like the idiot mnemonics that recur in fevers? My dog has fleas, they bite his knees -
She came to her senses suddenly, and a kind of terror twisted through her. There was a hot smell in the room. Something was burning.
Frannie jerked her head around, saw a skillet of french fries in oil she had put on the stove and then forgotten. Smoke was billowing up from the pan in a stinking cloud. Grease was flying out of the pan in angry splatters, and the splatters that landed on the burner were flaring alight and then going out, as if an invisible butane lighter was being flicked by an invisible hand. The cooking surface of the pan was black.
She touched the handle of the pan and drew her fingers back with a little gasp. It was now too hot to touch. She grabbed a dish-towel, wrapped it around the handle, and quickly carried the utensil, sizzling like a dragon, out through the back door. She set it down on the top step of the porch. The smell of honeysuckle and the droning of the bees came to her, but she barely noticed. For a moment the thick, dull blanket which had swaddled all her emotional responses for the last four days was pierced, and she was acutely frightened. Frightened? No-in a state of low terror, only a pace away from panic.
She could remember peeling the potatoes and putting them into the Wesson Oil to cook. Now she could remember. But for a while there she had just … whew! She had just forgotten.
Standing on the porch, dish-towel still clutched in one hand, she tried to remember exactly what her train of thought had been after she had put the french fries on to cook. It seemed very important.
Well, first she had thought that a meal which consisted of nothing but french fries wasn't very nutritious. Then she'd thought that if the McDonald's down on Route 1 had still been open, she wouldn't have had to cook them herself, and she could have had a burger, too. Just take the car and cruise up to the take-out window. She would get a Quarter Pounder and the large-size fries, the ones that came in the bright red cardboard container. Little grease-spots on the inside. Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. And besides-pregnant women get strange cravings.
That brought her to the next link in the chain. Thoughts of strange cravings had led to thoughts of the strawberry pie lurking in the fridge. Suddenly it had seemed to her that she wanted a piece of that strawberry pie more than she wanted anything in the world. So she had gotten it, but somewhere along the line her eye had been caught by the knife-rack her father had made for her mother (Mrs. Edmonton, the doctor's wife, had been so envious of that knife-rack that Peter had made one for her two Christmases ago), and her mind had just … short-circuited. Motes … beams … flies …
"Oh God," she said to the empty back yard and her father's unweeded garden. She sat down and put the apron over her face and cried.
When the tears dried up, she seemed to feel a little better … but she was still frightened. Am I losing my mind? she asked herself. Is this the way it happens, the way it feels, when you have a nervous breakdown or whatever you want to call it?
Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her ability to focus mentally seemed to have gotten fragmented. She would forget things she had been doing, her mind would go off on some dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage.
After her father died she had sat beside his bed for a long time. At last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV. No particular reason; like the man said, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. The only station broadcasting had been the NBC affiliate in Portland, WCSH, and they seemed to be broadcasting some sort of crazy trial show. A black man, who looked like a Ku Klux Klansman's worst nightmare of headhunting Africans, had been pretending to execute white men with a pistol while other men in the audience applauded. It had to be pretend, of course-they didn't show things like that on TV if they were real-but it hadn't looked like pretend. It reminded her crazily of Alice in Wonderland, only it wasn't the Red Queen yelling "Off with their heads!" in this case, but … what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince.
Later in the program (how much later she could not have said), some other men broke into the studio and there was a fire-fight which was even more realistically staged than the executions had been. She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy-caliber bullets, thrown backward with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps. She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that warned parents to put the kiddies to bed or change the channel. She also remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted all the same; it really was an awfully bloody program.
She switched it off when the camera swung up, showing only the studio-lights hanging down from the ceiling, and lay back on the couch, looking at her own ceiling. She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in Alice, things just got curiouser and curiouser.
There had been a special town meeting which her father had attended even though he had been getting sick by then himself. Frannie, feeling drugged and unreal-but physically no different than ever-had gone with him.
The town hall had been crowded, much more crowded than it was for town meetings in late February or early March. There was a lot of sniffling and coughing and kerchooing. The attendees were frightened and ready to be angry at the least excuse. They spoke in loud, hoarse voices. They stood up. They shook their fingers. They pontificated. Many of them-not just the women, either-had been in tears.
The upshot had been a decision to close off the town entirely. No one would be allowed in. If people wanted to leave, that was fine, as long as they understood that they couldn't come in again. The roads leading in and out of town-most notably US 1-were to be barricaded with cars (after a shouting match that lasted half an hour, that was amended to town-owned Public Works trucks), and volunteers would stand watches at these roadblocks with shotguns. Those trying to use US 1 to go north or south would be directed up north to Wells or down south to York, where they could get on Interstate 95 and thus detour around Ogunquit. Anyone who still tried to get through would be shot. Dead? Someone asked. You bet, several others answered.
There was a small contingent of about twenty which maintained that those already sick should be put out of town at once. They were overwhelmingly voted down because by the evening of the twenty-fourth, when the meeting was held, almost everyone in town who was not sick had close relatives or friends who were. Many of them believed the newscasts, which said that a vaccine would be available soon. How, they argued, would they ever be able to look each other in the face again if it all turned out to be just a scary close call, and they had overreacted to it by putting their own out like pariah dogs?
It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then.
The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town's schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn't break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.
By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. Some of them went back to York to get on the turnpike willingly enough, but others were too crazy to understand and tried to either ram the barriers or swing around them on the soft shoulders of the road. They were dealt with.
But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died.
By yesterday morning Frannie's father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, had taken to his bed and Frannie was staying in to nurse him. He wouldn't allow her to take him to the infirmary. If he was going to die, he told Frannie, he wanted to do it here at home, decently, in private.