Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,39

cannot see. Then, in the main row, we see the family’s father getting a demanding phone call from the wealthy owner of the mansion telling him to come back and start priming the large, expensive, gas-driven industrial snowblower for the mansion’s long driveway with lines of small colored lights all along its length like a runway, because the owner’s personal meteorologist has said that it’s getting ready to snow again like the absolute dickens. Then we see Ruth Simmons’ mother—whom we have already seen take several pills throughout the day from a small brown prescription bottle in her handbag, by way of another upper row’s backstory—relieving the father and driving the battered family car aimlessly up and down the seedy neighborhood’s streets, very slowly and weaving a bit, as a dense, persistent snow begins to fall and the streetlights begin to glow and the panel’s light turns ashy and sad, the way late afternoon in Columbus in winter so often makes the light seem sad.

ESSENTIALLY, I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON.

Just which specific aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights were being covered by Mr. Johnson while this story of Ruth Simmons and her lost Cuffie filled in panel after panel of the window I cannot say, as by that point it is fair to say that I was absent in both mind and spirit. This tended to happen throughout this period. To be fair, this was the reason why Mrs. Roseman and the administration were determined to keep me away from distractions of all kinds—prohibiting Caldwell and I from sitting near each other, for instance. I do not remember even noticing just when it was that the exterior’s dogs broke off their initial attachment and began moving in circles of somewhat different size, sniffing at the ground and the mud of the ballfield’s infield. The temperature outside was an estimated 45 degrees; it was melting that winter’s second to last snow. I do remember that it snowed heavily the next day, March 15, and that, as school was closed on the day after the trauma, we were able to go sledding after several interviews with the Ohio State Police and a special Unit 4 psychologist named Dr. Biron-Maint, who had a strangely configured nose and smelled faintly of mildew, and that later on that day Chris DeMatteis’ sled had tipped to one side and struck a tree, and his forehead had had blood all over it while we all watched him keep touching his forehead and cry in fear at the reality of his own blood. I do not remember what anyone did to help him; we were all likely still in shock. Ruth Simmons’ mother, whose name was Marjorie and had grown up admiring herself in different dresses in the mirror and practicing saying, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘My, what a funny and amusing remark!’ and dreaming of marrying a wealthy doctor and hosting elaborate dinner parties of doctors and their wives in diamond tiaras and fox wraps at their mansion’s beautiful burled walnut dining room table in which she looked almost like a fairy princess under the chandelier’s lights, now, as an adult, looked puffy and dull-eyed and had a perpetually downturned mouth as she drove the battered car. She was smoking a Viceroy and had the windows rolled up and was not even rolling down the window to call, ‘Cuffie!’ as the kindly, long suffering father before her had done. There was backstory above, in which the blind infant Ruth Simmons was lying in her bassinet in her tiny dark glasses holding out her arms and crying for her mother while the mother would stand with a glass with an olive with a toothpick in it and a downturned mouth looking down at the blind baby and then turning and looking at herself in the room’s ancient, cracked mirror and practicing giving a bitter, sardonic little curtsy without spilling her glass. Usually the baby would give up and stop crying after a while and just make small whimpering noises (this occupied only two or three panels). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Ruth Simmons’ Playdoh figurine looked almost disfigured, less like a dog than a satyr or Great Ape which something heavy had run over. Her beautiful little snow white face with its dark glasses and hair ribbon is seen tilted upwards several degrees as she offers innocent, childlike prayers for Cuffie’s safe return, praying that her father has perhaps spotted Cuffie huddled inside a