The French Revolution Read online

  “Go to your room,” she ordered. He walked past her obediently, his face devoid of thought.

  After a liquid afternoon of coffee and gin, she went to see Esmerelda. She was cranked back on her double-king bed, watching a game show and munching a plateful of gingerbread cookies. “Ma,” Esmerelda said, her eyes locked on the television, “wanted to run something by you. I’m not going heavy on gifts this year, since I’m saving for the down payment and all. Was hoping you’d pick up some slack in the stocking-stuffer department.”

  “That boy, Marat. Trouble.”

  “Well, they’re both a little troubled. Dad’s gone, you know?”

  “Not troubled. Trouble. A policeman just dropped him off. They claim he stole from a dollar store.”

  Esmerelda flopped onto her side like a sunning sea lion. “That so? Huh. What’d he take?”

  “Underwear,” Fanny admitted, the word tasting of copper and failure and dirt singed to toxic gas.

  “Ha!” Esmerelda’s face blasted into pink, her chest bouncing long and slow like a backyard trampoline. “Can’t blame the guy, really.”

  “Of course we can. It is theft. Illegal. We cannot condone that behavior.”

  On television the game show host suddenly doubled the prize money, and Esmerelda upped the volume accordingly. “He’s got no money and wearing shit-stained clothes from a lifetime ago. I can understand.”

  “Those are Harold’s clothes,” Fanny insisted, feeling herself fall into a deep sludge, decades boiled down into gooey bad memories.

  “Yeah, well. Harold’s gone, mom. Times have changed.” Esmerelda looked up from her show and over at her mother, who was kneeling on the floor, forehead against the carpeting, back trembling, her braided hair switching like a happy dog’s tail, the exact same position in which Esmerelda had found her on the morning of April 2, 1979, and April 3, 1979, and clear through the rest of the month and most of May until Memorial Day, when Fanny had gone to march in the parade down Market Street on Harold’s behalf, falling in with the Vietnam vets with his service picture pinned to her blouse. “Ma,” Esmerelda blubbed, “come on.”

  “The boy must be disciplined,” Fanny coughed, “he will not disgrace the Van Twinkle good name.”

  “What good name?” Esmerelda asked. “We got a lard-ass and a do-nothing and a couple kids you tell what to do all day. Not a whole lot worth defending, in my opinion.”

  Fanny got up quietly and walked out of the room. She left the door wide open intentionally, which she knew would force Esmerelda to roll on her side and throw cookies at it until it closed enough to give her some privacy. Both spited, they didn’t speak for the next two days, until Christmas morning dropped and the kids were leaping on Fanny’s bed, singing Christmas jingles and tickling her toes. Slowly they splashed her awake, creaked her upright and walking, still quarter drunk, her hangover not fully formed, an act of Jurassic reanimation. After a pit stop for her morning menthol, they pulled her down the stairs and into the living room, where Esmerelda was sleeping on the floor as a Christmas present to herself, so she wouldn’t have to clomp over from her room in the morning.

  “Hiya, kids. Know what? It’s 3 AM. Wanna give this another shot in, say, four hours?”

  “Mom!”

  “Esmerelda, I could tell some stories about Christmas morning if you like,” Fanny said. They both thought back to how Esmerelda had pulled some extreme early-morning stocking raids in her day, many of which had technically gone down on Christmas Eve.

  “Let’s make this quick,” Esmerelda huffed.

  The boughs of the slanted fir, overloaded with decades-old dime-store tinsel, creaked perilously. A pyramid of presents covered in rosy snowman designs served as support, half the gifts wrapped professionally, with sharp corners and smooth edges and crimson high-weight paper, the other half covered in reddish tissue paper scraps, hastily patched, entire sides of gifts left uncovered. Next to the hill of presents were a couple of CopySmart plastic bags taped shut and a pair of Harold’s old tube socks.

  Fanny nodded and the kids pounced. Robespierre unpeeled her bulging sock and dumped out an hourglass filled with perfume, a slim bottle of cologne, two bags of miniature chocolates, a rolled-up Raiders T-shirt, and a set of gilded barrettes. Marat’s stocking was limp aside from the knot in the toe, which he clenched with both hands and shook like he was mixing margaritas.

  “Santa forgot me,” he observed in a watery, doleful voice.

  “That is not quite true, Marat,” Fanny said. “I think there is something in that toe.”

  Nodding, Marat loosened his grip on the ball in the corner and started worrying the hulk downstream with his thumbs. Two minutes later his prize rolled out, hitting the carpet with a sooty thunk.

  “No, you didn’t,” Esmerelda growled.

  “What’s this?” Marat asked. “Chocolate?” He lifted the lump to his nose and sniffed.

  “There better be a barbecue grill to go with that,” said Esmerelda. “Or a miner’s helmet.”

  “Here, Marat,” Robespierre said, “have some of my candy.” But her run across the room bearing Hershey’s kisses was blocked by Fanny’s monolithic profile.

  “Santa left that candy for you, Robespierre. Good children receive presents, and bad children receive coal. And stealing means you are a bad boy.”

  “Well, it’s my present to my brother.” Robespierre stutter-stepped, head-faked, and spun past Fanny to hand the kisses to her brother, who instantly threw the candies in his mouth and swallowed, foil wrapping and Hershey’s flags included.

  “Ma, I can’t believe you. For crying out loud, it’s Christmas!” Esmerelda said. She turned onto her side and tried to make her face angry, hard glass eyes and a treacherous mouth seconds away from spewing flames, but in practice she reminded everyone of an overinflated sheep’s head, not intimidating anyone.

  Robespierre went to Fanny and hugged her hip. She’d noticed how Gramma’d been cursing dollar stores and Marat’s criminal tendencies the past few nights while making dinner, observed how the poison baked into her flavorless roasts and burned holiday gingersnaps, a failing government ripe for overthrow. “Marat’s a good brother, Gramma,” she said. “He’s nice to me.”

  Fanny shook the girl off. “Santa told me that all the gifts in red wrapping paper are for Robespierre,” she announced. “You may open those, dear.”

  Years later, what they remembered was the time involved. Even working at a speedy clip, Robespierre needed the entire predawn to tear through the gift wrap, untie ribbons, do away with puffy bows, pry open boxes, dig through foam peanuts, and unpack newspaper lining to get the end gift in her hands, at which point she beamed and hooted thanks, commented on the thoughtfulness of the item, its perfect color and size, imagined its many useful applications in her daily life, then bundled the wrapping into a garbage bag and moved on to the next package. Fanny didn’t try to pretend the gift-giving was even, as pacing the disrobement of Robespierre’s mountain of presents to match the lone plastic bag with Marat’s name scrawled across it in his mother’s hand was blatantly absurd. So the rest of the family waited while Robespierre peeled open gifts of boys’ sweaters and khaki pants that were too big for her and polo shirts of assorted sleeve lengths, and then she found the microscope she really wanted and got quiet and delirious and hugged her mother and her grandmother and her brother, despite his position lying face-down on the floor in cryptic silence. The first hour elapsed with the pyramid only half deconstructed, vertically speaking, meaning that the voluminous base still awaited Robespierre’s tiring hands—not that she wasn’t thankful, but a lot of the haul wasn’t really her speed (boxer shorts, moccasins, tank top undershirts, even a gray polyester suit matched with a silver sailboat bolo tie). The relationship between shoddy wrapping and boy-appropriate gifts sailed over the children’s heads, but Esmerelda saw ample evidence of hasty regifting: smatterings of non-red wrapping paper stuck to 49ers-themed pajamas and belt buckles, the off-white of corrective fl
uid over gift labels, the queer smile from her mother each time Robespierre reached for one of those redirected presents, like she was trying to force her teeth through sealed lips.

  Marat remained on his stomach, motionless as a truck-rammed deer with the exception of a ten-minute interlude filled with screaming of such tempestuousness that three neighbors called over to check if everything was groovy. Fanny cooked up excuses of nightmares and food poisoning, then settled in on the couch and watched Marat blub incomprehensibly as rug burns developed on his pounding knees and forearms. Even as his thrashing lapsed into eerie stillness, she did not change the flow of gifts from the dwindling pyramid beside the tree nor alter her pinched smile, which seemed more appropriate on a semiconscious patient enduring exploratory surgery than on a grandmother with her family on Christmas morning.

  “Here, Marat,” Robespierre said after opening what felt like her ten-millionth present and thanking her grandmother with another tired embrace and cheek peck, “you can have this.” She tossed over a green turtleneck in Marat’s size.

  “Fanks,” Marat said hoarsely. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his faded Giants jersey and rose to his knees.

  “I am sorry, dear.” Fanny scooped the shirt off the floor and stowed it in her considerable cleavage. “These presents are for you, not for your brother. That is how Santa wants it, and he told me to make sure that each child got the correct gifts.”

  “But I’m allowed to give my own presents, right? So I’m giving this to Marat. Actually, he can have this other stuff too,” Robespierre pointed to a sweatshirt covered in race cars, two pairs of boys’ blue jeans, a navy blazer, one-pocket T-shirts in all the primary colors.

  “No.” Fanny stood above her granddaughter, her silhouette deranged by blinking strings of Christmas lights. “Marat is not to receive those gifts.”

  Robespierre turned to her mother, who was snacking on a package of beef jerky the grandkids had chipped in for. Esmerelda chewed for a few seconds, then said, “Oh, lighten up, Ma! Is this helpful? Let him have some new clothes for crying out loud. You’ve made your point, whatever it is.”

  Marat touched Fanny’s shin, his mouth knotted and grim. “Gramma, I’m sorry for taking the underpants,” he said.

  “No!” Fanny cried. “And that’s final!”

  Cracks of morning light struck from the east, refracting through the kitchen window and across the dining room in brilliant lines of orange. The moment caught: Robespierre’s calculated grimace; Fanny’s faded nightgown more than two decades old, her bosom plumped with the rangy olive turtleneck; a cigarette of beef jerky hanging from Esmerelda’s cud; Marat a hunched iceberg on the horizon, his face cratered and purple. The sun rose another centimeter, and the portrait was obliterated by Marat’s tattered San Francisco Giants jersey streaking toward the base of Robespierre’s present pile like a wrecking ball at a dilapidated building, although in this instance the dilapidated building was responsible for propping up the Christmas tree, seeing as the tree stand dated from 1978, was missing a lug nut, and was coming apart at several joints.

  He blasted through, scattering the presents across the living room like unpredictable atomic particles. Immediately the tree plummeted, whistling speed, a tipped tombstone caroming directly into, as karma would have it, Fanny Van Twinkle’s head.

  The blow knocked Fanny into her daughter’s belly padding and sent Esmerelda’s beef jerky flying. Dozens of antique Christmas ornaments fractured on impact: San Francisco-themed cable cars and Spode sourdough loaves, a collection of miniature trawlers, tugs, fishing rods, bait, even a few actual fish that Harold had captured in his green nets and stuffed for the holidays. The decorative light strings, fragile from more than thirty-five years of use, shattered decisively against the floor. Marat wailed in the corner, his invective against his evil grandmother obfuscated by an unintelligible, sob-drenched throat blockage.

  Robespierre climbed over the fallen tree and bent over Fanny as she woozily worked herself upright. “That was wrong, Gramma,” she declared, and ran up to her room to examine toilet water under her new microscope. Marat followed her upstairs carrying a personalized notepad from his mother, his only gift aside from the coal.

  The room fell quiet with the sunlight, absence illuminated.

  Esmerelda broke the emptiness with a slap against her thigh. “We gotta get out of this place,” she declared. “Robespierre’s right. This is no way to raise kids, with a nutjob at the helm. I need a new job, something challenging and high paying like the good ol’ days. Gotta swim with the sharks if you wanna catch fish.” She lifted her belly between her palms, let it bounce into her lap. “For Chrisssakes, look at me, big as a walrus. This eating’s got to stop. And exercising, that’s part of the equation too.” She concluded the rally with a firm double clap, then spat out her beef jerky and spent the next half hour performing three slipshod holiday sit-ups and coughing up green brine.

  Fanny went to the kitchen and whipped up her special Christmas morning breakfast, biscuits and gravy and omelets, listening to hymns on the radio and trying to forget the ugly rebellion her grandkids had fomented. But nobody responded to her sing-song call for omelet orders; there was no movement when she announced breakfast was ready and on the table; quiet whooshes of notepad scribbling and microscope adjusting greeted her when she rapped her wedding band on the doors to bedrooms and warned she would throw out their meals if they didn’t come to the table. Even her daughter, a human garbage disposal, refused to eat a single slice of glazed ham that Fanny fried up special just for her.

  “Nah, already had me some jerky. I’m gonna see about losing a few. Call it a New Year’s resolution a week early.” Esmerelda pawed against an armchair, threw up an elbow, and leveraged herself up and standing within minutes. “C’mon kids! Christmas walk!”

  The kids skittered down the staircase and into threadbare purple jackets from Esmerelda’s childhood. “Way to go, mom!” Robespierre called.

  “Yeah, mom! Ba-wah!”

  Esmerelda turned her head at Marat’s odd cheer, thinking for a second that he wanted a drink or something until Robespierre translated: “wheelbarrow.” Then Jasper Winslow was everywhere: in Robespierre’s big feet, Marat’s crooked grin, Robespierre’s resolve and cheerful outlook, Marat’s gutsiness and enormous lung capacity. And even when Esmerelda was so out of breath she had to take five at the end of the driveway, catch a standing catnap at the next house, and demand in uncompromising terms to be taken home upon reaching the corner, she couldn’t help but see Jasper Winslow’s kindness blossoming in her children as they guided her over unevenly laid blocks of sidewalk and clumps of litter, down the narrow walk and up the five bowed steps leading to the front door and through the house back to her double-king bed, where they lay for hours updating her résumé and watching holiday specials on television while Fanny drank gin at the kitchen table and relived the great family Christmases of the 1970s in her head.

  COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY

  [T]he Convention nominated that first “Committee of Public Safety,” which . . . was henceforth the true despotic and military centre of revolutionary government.

  —HILAIRE BELLOC, The French Revolution

  The Committee of Public Safety . . . did not much care who were executed as long as a considerable number went to the scaffold every day.

  —HENRY MORSE STEPHENS, Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

  At the millennium two-digit computer clocks threatened to crash airplanes, freeze elevators, shut down hospitals, put traffic signals on the fritz. Rioting was anticipated, and the cops were on full alert, supplemented by vigilante security teams formed by antsy shopkeepers. Marvin Ahn led the defense effort at his strip mall on Georgia Avenue, recruiting a mall militia to defend their eight-store complex and negotiating with the army surplus store for a donation of batons and dud grenades. They distributed walkie-talkies for the likely event of telecommunications failure, stockpiled spring water, topped off lawnmower gas cans, swapped
out flashlight batteries, stashed canned food and dried fruit. On New Year’s Eve, Marvin filled the station wagon with supplies and went upstairs to grab his eldest foster son.

  “HELLS no!” Murphy yelled through the bedroom door from the unfolded futon, his foster siblings ringing him like a tribal council. “I’m watching Michael Jackson!” MTV was playing the top 100 music videos of all time, he screamed, and there was Dick Clark and the Three Stooges marathon too. Besides, what use was his runty ass in fending off crack-crazed looters?

  Marvin chuckled. “Murph—think of it as an adventure. You like cop movies, right? The cop TV shows?”

  That was well documented. Murphy watched every police reality show on television, had memorized all five Dirty Harry films, the four Lethal Weapons, the three Beverly Hills Cops, Robo-Cop , Bullitt, even the Police Academy series, often quoting entire multipart scenes verbatim at the dinner table—though the boy’s underlying motives for watching police-oriented programming (to study their methods, learn their tricks, and one day beat them at their own game) weren’t even evident to Murphy himself.

  “You gonna let us put up a tree house?” Murphy asked, winking to the other boys huddled round.

  “We can talk about that later.”

  “How about some candy? For dessert? For everyone?”

  Marvin huffed at this, the nagging that never ended, how somebody had wanted something from him every two minutes for the past ten years. “Not now!” he shouted.

  “I wanna see Michael Jackson!” Murphy threw back. He kept Thriller on his Discman at all hours, bonded to the star by irregular childhoods and insecurity about their appearance. The all-time music video countdown was a critical bellwether for the new century, he informed Marvin; if the King of Pop didn’t win, the conspiracy was on, no one could be trusted, and he’d be forced to take it out on the furniture.