Grand Union by Zadie Smith

Author:Zadie Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

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The sun was setting on the deep-orange polyvinyl-chloride blinds in their booth, and Michael felt strongly that his new role as the Decider must also include some aspect of spiritual guidance. To that end, he passed Marlon the maple syrup and said, in his high-pitched but newly determined tones, “You know, guys, we’ve driven six hours already and, well, we haven’t talked at all about what happened back there.”

They were sitting in an IHOP, just the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, with their mirrored shades on, eating pancakes. Michael had decided—two fast-food joints and eighty miles ago—to leave his usual disguise in the trunk of the car. It had become obvious that it wasn’t necessary, no, not today. And now, with an overwhelming feeling of liberation, he removed his shades, too. For as it was in KFC, in Burger King, and beneath the Golden Arches, so it was in this IHOP: every soul in the place was watching television. Even the waitress who served them watched the television while she served, and spilled a little hot coffee on Michael’s glove, and didn’t say sorry and didn’t clean it up, nor did she notice that Marlon wasn’t wearing shoes—or that he was Marlon—or that resting beside the salt shaker was a diamond as big as the Ritz.

“I feel like one minute we were in the Garden, and it was a dream,” Elizabeth said, slowly. “And we were happy, we were celebrating this marvelous boy”—she squeezed Michael’s hand—“celebrating thirty years of your wonderful talent, my dear, and everything was just beautiful. And then—” She hugged her coffee mug with both hands and brought it to her lips. “And then, well, ‘the tigers came’—and now it really feels like the end of days. I know that sounds silly, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s a childlike part of me that just wants to rewind twenty-four hours.”

“Make that twenty-four years,” Marlon snapped, but with his classic wry Marlon smile, and all you could do was forgive him. “Scratch that,” he said, hamming it up now. “Make it forty.”

Elizabeth pursed her lips and made an adorable comic face. She looked like Amy in Little Women, doing some sly calculation in her head. “Come to think of it,” she said, “forty would work out just swell for me, too.”

“Not me,” Michael said, letting a lot of air out of his mouth in a great rush so that he would be brave enough to say what he wanted to say, whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was the normal kind of thing you said in abnormal times like these. But perhaps this was his only real advantage, in this moment, over every other person in the IHOP and most of America: nothing normal had ever happened to him, not ever, not in his whole conscious life. And so there was a little part of him that was always prepared for the monstrous, familiar with it, and familiar, too, with its necessary counterbalancing force: love.

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