Help Phone Thirteen
Synopsis: Shackled to two young daughters and his wife’s chronic depression, Dee McBride
suddenly moves his family from New York to Idaho—to teach business writing and
communication at Eastern Idaho Technical College, but mostly to put some insurmountable
distance between himself and his in-laws’ snobbish criticism, his wife’s most recent ex-lover,
and his own sense of failure. During a forced shopping trip with his wife, Renee, Dee picks
up the MegaMart “Help Phone No. 13” to ask for help in office supplies and finds coming
from the other end what amounts to feel-good New Age therapy from an invisible in-store
guru who claims to be able to solve all of Dee’s real-life issues. Angry, curious, then
psychopathic, Dee spends months trying to discover the identity of the mystery store worker
who offers him painful but healing directives through the help phone—all as his marriage
falls apart, his daughters become frightened, and his job performance crumbles. Only when
Dee releases his existentialist grip on the plausible does he discover the true identity of the
voice behind “Help Phone 13,” a revelation that delivers to Dee and Renee a renewed sense
of vision and enlightenment.
Matthew James Babcock
180 Rigby Hall
English Department
BYU-Idaho
Rexburg, ID 83460-4540
208.496.4367
babcockm@byui.edu
Word count: approx. 22, 000
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to my shop of clowns
for all your help
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Our author tonight has tried to apprehend a chapter from real life, with its laughter and
sorrow. But not to say, as in the past: “The tears that we shed in our play are false. When
we agonize, you must not be alarmed; everything’s make-believe.” No! No! The author
instead has attempted to bring you a slice of naked reality, and his story’s a true one. A host
of buried memories sang in his listening heart one day a bitter song, and he wrote it down
with burning tears, his sobs and sighs beating the time. Come then, here you’ll see a story of
lovers as real as your neighbors, the sad fruits of hatred and passion. You’ll hear their cries
of rage, their agony, their curses. And cynical laughter! . . . Ah, think then, sweet people, we
are like you, men and women of meat and bone, and of this orphaned world. Like you, we
breathe equal air! It is the same broad heaven above us, the same wide lonely world! Well,
I’ve told you the plan. Now, if you please, watch it unfold. Let’s go!
--Tonio
I Pagliacci
I came in looking for an angel
passion eyes and longing hair
in mirrors made of water
But what’s this wrack of civilization
I’ve fallen into
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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1.
As August spins and fades over the intersection of 17th Street and Hitt Road, Dee
McBride slouches in the passenger seat of his gray Dodge Stratus, chin notched in his chest.
His wife, Reneé, drives. The traffic light glares red. Vehicles barricade them on all sides.
With her foot on the brake, Reneé leafs through a bouquet of Sherwin-Williams paint
sample strips. She wears a tense smile, as if assessing the paprika in a bite of Bratislava
Chicken.
And it begins with sarcasm.
Again.
“Shaker Sunrise,” she says, rearranging the strips like playing cards. “Kilmarnock.
Dionysian Decadence.”
“How about Pink or Yellow?” Dee says.
“Shut,” she says, prodding an eyelash with her pinkie, “up.”
In the back, Colette and Rae McBride, ages four and twenty-two months, slump like
drugged abductees in safety seats. A bacchanal of cherry Icees and free Chocodile slices
from the “Crazy Days” grand opening at the MegaMart in Ammon has rendered them
unconscious. Each maintains a catatonic grip on a jumbo “Pretzel ‘n’ Cheese” and a cactusgreen MegaMart balloon. Reneé, on leaving the store, asked the clown outside—“Doogins
the Clown”—to give the sisters balloons of the same color so they wouldn’t squabble.
“Everything,” Dee mutters.
Reneé gasps. Her hands flap together in her lap. Dee clamps his jaw, ashamed she’s
caught him talking to himself again. He rolls to his right, displaying the hooded defense of
his back.
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Everything, he thinks, is wrong. Out the window, a pink bubble wobbles behind dirty glass
and gets sucked into the pucker of a teenage girl. The girl blinks and looks away. Her jaw
works the gum. Her fingers tap the steering wheel of her poisonous orange Monarch. She
wears a red sweatshirt with a Highland High School patch on the shoulder. Black dye claws
her rusty hair. Handcuff earrings swing from her earlobes. She swallows a bulb of
discomfort, and wet beaver teeth peek over her bottom lip.
“Including you,” Dee says.
Dee doesn’t look to see if the intended barb has stuck his wife. He knows it has by the
way she harrumphs and shifts in her seat. Outside, a haze of yellow chaff, lingering from an
earlier windstorm, chokes the horizon, blurs the mountains and hills. The low sun surges
over the traffic, draping shopfronts and sidewalks in musty scarlet. For all Dee knows, he
and Reneé could be driving on Mars. He sighs. Turning from Monarch girl, he reads a line
of business signs, which strike him as a jumble of apocalyptic warnings: J. J. North’s Family
Chuckwagon. Carl Grey Michelin Tires. Soapy’s Auto Wash. Teton Storage.
“You could see somebody about that,” Reneé says, speaking to the rearview mirror. She
bats her eyelashes, sucks in her cheeks.
“Maybe I just need a second coat. Daddy Deluxe. Crystalline Career. Husband Happy
with Hormones.”
Through the intersection, beyond the shopping district, waits Dee’s new job, the one he
loathes—without having worked a day. From his fetal curl, he can see the campus of
Eastern Idaho Technical College. The buildings resemble penitentiaries bristling with black
steel ladders and antennae. Aquamarine hamster-tunnel viaducts arch from roof to roof.
Dee imagines himself on his first day, burrowing through cedar chips for food pellets,
running himself to death on a squeaky wheel. He closes his eyes and sees concertina wire,
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searchlights, orangutan guards with M-16’s in chrome-plated watchtowers. He looks beyond
Monarch girl’s car, to the MegaMart parking lot, where shoppers wander through a maze of
vehicles, a beaming cabaret of humanity lugging bowling balls, toilet plungers, and spools of
steel cable.
“When do all these people work?” he says.
He lifts a copy of the Yellow Pages from the floor and opens it to the map section. The
map shows the city of Idaho Falls and the town of Ammon sharing the border of Hitt Road,
the road on which he and Reneé are driving.
“Entering Idaho Falls,” he says, as the light turns green and Reneé eases them through
the intersection. The girl in the Monarch chugs ahead. Dee waves. Reneé eyes him then
snaps her attention to the road. “Population forty-four thousand something. Look here.”
“I’m driving,” she says.
Dee holds up the Yellow Pages map. “Hitt Road,” he intones, “splits Idaho Falls and
Ammon. They’re separate towns.” Reneé scowls.
“What’s Ammon?”
“Where MegaMart is, officially. Where we just—”
“So?”
“Didn’t you see the sign?” Dee says, pointing.
“I’m driving.”
“Ammon City Centre,” he says. “Right in front of—what?—Washington Mutual Bank?
City centre, whatever! It’s a parking lot for crap’s sake.”
“So—”
“City centre! What, the town council meet in the McDonald’s Playland?”
“Why are—”
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“If I get caught speeding, who gives me the ticket? Cop in a half-Ammon, half-Idaho
Falls uniform? Okay, so—” Reneé raises a hand and inclines her head away.
“How about you stop talking so you don’t wake the girls?”
“How about you show me a scrap of decency once in a while?” Ahead, reins of brake
lights ripple toward their front bumper. Dee grabs Reneé’s arm. “Watch it!”
“Off,” she says, shirking off his grip. “You’re treating me like I’m two again. I’d
appreciate it—”
“I was just showing you the weird place we live—”
“Kinda figured that out—”
“It’s weird. Two towns back there. Ammon and Idaho Falls, divided by Hitt Road.”
“Killer info that could save your life.”
A Life Flight helicopter roars overhead, blades whopping. They look up to see starlings
scatter from a wasted telephone pole.
“I’m just talking, Reneé,” Dee says, sitting back. “Married people do. It breaks up the
monotony—”
“Your point?”
“That MegaMart isn’t even in Idaho Falls. It’s in Ammon—”
“Really?”
“They should make it one town. Why’d you say ‘really’?”
“I thought—”
“I’m not lying.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“You said ‘really,’ like I was. You should be more cognizant of your language,” Dee says.
He smirks at a boy who stands near a strip mall entrance and dances in a sandwich sign that
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says Pizza Bomb Blastoff 7.99! “I hate it when I say something and people say ‘Really’ or ‘Is
that so?’ or ‘Did you?’ like I’m not telling the truth—”
“Really?”
“You know I hate going to MegaMart, so I’d appreciate it—”
“I’d appreciate a little help,” Reneé says, glancing at him. “Input on the house.”
“Why always the house?”
“We need the right paint for the girls’ bedrooms.”
“Way I see it,” Dee says, palms raised. “It’s a toss up between Aquablaze and
Appalachian Cinnabar.”
“Think it’s a joke,” she says, hitting the brakes. The car lurches. They inch forward,
filtering through a four-way intersection near a Chevron station. “It’s me who—”
“Oo,” he says, snatching the booklet of Sherwin-Williams samples from her lap.
“Lookee.”
“—hangs out, chasing the girls all day—”
“Siesta,” he warbles, flipping through the samples. “Moonlight Macaroon. Mazatlan.
Saratoga Spring.”
“Lower your—don’t wake the girls!”
“Yeah,” Dee says, fingering the paint cards with mock lust. “We walk in their rooms, and
thanks to the paint, we’ve got wedding reception cookies, parasailing—” Reneé swivels her
head to look in the back seat.
“They’re awake now—”
“We walk in, see the paint, and what?” Dee says, hand to his mouth like a megaphone.
“Bounding Boy’s coming through in the stretch!”
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In the back, Colette and Rae whine and wriggle out of cocoons of sleep. Damp swirls of
hair plaster their cheeks. Colette, the oldest, is all copper and curls. A spritz of nutmeg
freckles dusts her pug nose and round cheeks. Rae is thinner and darker, a frail stalk of
skinny joints and dainty doll teeth with a blond Dutch boy haircut. Her bangs hang to the
bridge of her nose, obscuring eyes of blue crystal.
“Great,” Reneé says. She smacks the wheel. “You’re welcome to rock them to sleep.”
“Hi, babies,” Dee says, smiling back.
“I’m not a baby,” Colette replies. “I’m a girl!”
“Daddy?” Rae chimes.
“Yes, baby?”
“I peed.”
“Thank you, baby.”
“Rae peed,” Colette says, blinking out the window.
Across the street from the Chevron, a battered line of cars and trucks coils around an
Arctic Circle. A wedge of clouds breaks apart. Scarlet sunlight floods the Play Place. The
McBrides squint and watch gangs of hyper children tumble through multi-colored crawl
tunnels. The kids laugh and leap through an aquarium of fire as their exhausted parents talk
on cell phones. Greasy handprints and smooches dot the glass walls. The clouds slip over
the mountains and douse the sun, cooling the Arctic Circle crowd in purple shadows. Dee
clears his throat and sits up. At the base of a stop sign, the wind jimmies a placard stapled to
a wooden stake—a bake sale to fight a teacher’s cancer.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Reneé says, pulling through the intersection.
“Nothing new there,” Dee says.
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“I just wish you’d help with the painting because it’s me who—” Dee cocks his body
forward, looks at her.
“Why are you so freaked out about paint?”
“Don’t shout in front of—”
“It’s trappings, externalities,” Dee says, flailing limp hands. “It’s not Alaskan Archipelago
or Chaparral or Tudor Blue. It doesn’t make us any happier—”
“It makes me feel clean,” Reneé says. “Finished.”
“Superficially.”
“I’m superficial?”
“Sometimes, maybe. But so am I—I mean, everybody’s—”
“You’re a real charmer, honey,” she says, tapping her sternum. “I’m all warm and fuzzy.”
“I’m just saying it’s easy to focus on paint and furniture and ignore life at home, us, the
people—”
“Stop talking to me like I’m one of your little students,” Reneé says, her face pinched.
“Daddy,” Colette calls.
“Hey, sorry,” Dee says, hand over his heart, “for wanting to talk about our marriage—”
Reneé hunches her shoulders like a threatened cat.
“Why would we need to talk?”
“Daddy,” Colette sings, tugging her balloon string.
“Reneé, people talk all the time, especially married people who—”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fine. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but—”
“Mommy,” Colette says.
“Would you take care of her?” Reneé snaps.
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“What honey?” Dee calls. He lifts his chin and closes his eyes. He misses seeing the jet
contrails that criss-cross in the sky, the flashing red lights that turn the wind turbine towers
on the hillside into a giant roller coaster.
“Rae peed,” Colette says, bouncing her balloon.
“I peed,” Rae echoes.
“So am I,” Dee says.
Reneé “isn’t speaking” to Dee. It’s the third time in two days that they’ve driven from
their house—a white gabled two-story fixer-upper in Thornton, twenty minutes away—to
the Ammon MegaMart to return shoes Reneé bought for the girls. During this last trip back,
Reneé accused Dee of “hovering” while she tried to shop. He replied that her moods had
more swing than Glenn Miller. At this, Reneé’s whole body sagged and she told him she
wished he would die. Then she stalked out of toddler apparel and into kitchenwares,
pushing Colette and Rae in an orange MegaCart.
Dee’s ill-timed bon mot fed him the usual dose of shame. But he wasn’t surprised at his
wife’s death hex, her death fixation in general. Weeks previous, he returned home early
from his department confabs at EITC—where, in September, he’ll officially start teaching
interpersonal communication and business writing—and walked in to catch Reneé
screeching threats at Colette and Rae. Reneé, looking sassy, sexy, and insane in her jeans and
denim shirt, slathered white primer on the ceiling with a telescoping roller brush and
thundered that if Colette and Rae didn’t give her some peace she’d drown them in the
bathtub.
So nowadays, nothing surprises Dee: Reneé’s tense jaw, her acidic glare, the butter-yellow
bottle of St. John’s Wort capsules from MegaMart’s botanicals section rattling like magic
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beans in her purse. He lives every day in a bell jar of isolation and strain, a naked pheasant
waiting for the knife. Two years into their marriage, Dee saw that his wife’s depression was
not a temporary condition. He felt then, as he feels now, its blue whale heft and scale. He
sees her emotional hell as a holy cross she carries before her, like Joan of Arc. Only with
more flames.
To Reneé, Dee is the evil iconoclast. The dung-smeared infidel trying to snatch her
passport to higher enlightenment. As far as Dee can tell, Reneé sees her blend of moodiness
as divine. A second eyesight envied by others, especially those Doubting Thomases,
husbands included, who refuse to truckle before her and kiss the rood of her melancholy.
By all counts, she’s declared war on anybody who tries to tromp across her depression’s
splendor, or to trivialize it by “wanting to talk.”
Talk is pain for the McBrides. They’ve come to fear talk and its galling chains. The
painful stones of failed talks rattle in the roots of their teeth. Much better to stare out the
window and drive through an anesthetizing code of silence, they have come to believe.
Much tidier to just drop it. Much nobler in the eyes of others to speak of weather and food
and shoes for the girls and what color to paint their rooms—Coconut Grove or
Michelangelo. To Reneé, she’s not as bad as she used to be. To Dee, his wife’s immortal
moods bear dagger fangs. Her hysterical rants and unrelenting spates of mute rage have
driven him to the brink, where he teeters daily, unsure if he should jump or wait for
something to nudge him over.
He doesn’t live. He copes. He tries to spot rifts of sunshine in the inky storm clouds
possessing Reneé. It’s a dance across razor eggshells, though, because when he slips and
mentions how she’s “doing better,” she explodes. Then it’s two weeks before the emotional
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tundra between them thaws and they can cautiously broach on the subjects of grocery
coupons, property values, and utility bills.
Dee has given up on finding help. There’s nowhere to turn, he tells himself, except the
spiked vortex of his inner loss. He fears his daughters are already scarred, which has pushed
him closer to them. A clawed desperation makes him want to throw his body over them,
daily, to shield them from attack. There have been moments—and they have increased in
recent days—after Reneé has told him she loves him, and she’s rolled over and gone to
sleep, that Dee has arisen and tiptoed in pinstripe boxers and T-shirt down the hall into the
girls’ room. He’s wept and rocked their sleeping bodies in a daddy wolf hug. Their faces
have glowed with tears and moonlight.
But Reneé isn’t the only problem. Recently, Dee’s manic alter ego infiltrated the McBride
home in full battle regalia. In fact, their move from New York to Idaho was the result of
Dee’s latest professional and personal crisis. After years of slaving away as a sales rep for a
small publishing house—Brownstone Books, Inc.—and enduring the humiliating
comparisons Reneé’s parents, Jillian and Harv, kept making between Dee’s salary and the
salaries earned by Reneé’s siblings, he cracked.
In terms of respectability and reputation, Dee sees himself bucking some feisty
competition, even though he’s the only adult in the extended family keeping score. Reneé’s
oldest brother, Todd Slade, is a psychiatrist and married to a Connecticut native named
Heather, who is the first chair violinist in the symphony where they live in Durham, North
Carolina. Todd and Heather’s two girls and one boy—all bubbly, bright, and blond—are
math and music whizzes and, Dee is convinced, will one day pilot the first kiddie space
shuttle. Reneé’s second oldest brother, Marc, is married with two children, drives a Lexus,
and owns his own shipping company in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Reneé’s older sister, Sadie,
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has three children and is married to a maxillofacial surgeon in Ithaca, where they own two
homes, one a three-story “cabin” on Seneca Lake. Soon after he married Reneé, Dee felt his
grip on the bottom rung begin to slip. He’d married the Slade family baby and failed to
measure up to her family’s mile-high expectations. So one day he came home, jerked off his
tie, plodded to the computer, and started making phone calls and firing emails around the
country for a teaching job that related to his master’s degree.
No place had seemed too remote. New Mexico, Ireland, Johannesburg.
The moon.
He’d snapped and snapped hard.
Next morning, with Colette and Rae propped in front of a Sesame Street Sing-Along
video, Reneé called her mother and reported how Dee was “acting all weird.” By noon the
next day, Dee began receiving a torrent of faxes and emails at his office about job openings
for teachers, all in the state of New York, all within driving distance of the Slade family
home, all from Jillian: Here’s one just in case. Just something I found. This looks good.
Which had pushed Dee to choose Idaho.
During his frantic search for teaching jobs, he’d found an opening at a place called
Eastern Idaho Technical College in Idaho Falls. He chuckled as he pawed through the
application materials, thrilled with the thought of chucking their junk in a Ryder truck and
putting two thousand miles of sun-blasted American prairie between his family and the
snobbish suburban lifestyle of Jillian and Harv Slade. Won’t find us in Idaho, he laughed, firing
off the application like a sweepstakes entry. As he watched his plan unfold, he felt like a
mad scientist juggling Erlenmeyer flasks of fizzing, incandescent biohazards. No place more
podunk than Idaho, he thought, twiddling his fingers. That’s the other side of the freakin’ Rockies,
man.
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To those around Dee, especially Reneé and her family, he had yielded to the howling
dogma of some inner succubus. To his workmates, though, his actions proved completely
rational when within the space of two months, he secured an interview and a beginning
instructor’s position teaching communication and business writing at EITC in Idaho Falls,
Idaho. The envelope-opening ceremony drew icy tears from Reneé as she kneeled on the
carpet and changed Rae’s diaper. She eyed her husband while using a candy-red Elmo’s
World whiffle bat to fend off Colette’s T-Rex assault.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s great.”
“Isn’t it?” he said, holding the envelope aloft like an Oscar.
“So you’ll do what?” she said, blocking a home-run swing from Colette. She pinned
Rae’s karate-kicking legs to the carpet and secured her diaper.
“I’ll teach,” he said, envelope sinking.
At that moment, Rae broke free, and Colette chased her into a corner where they
pummeled each other like cavemen. A trace of bleach-blond hair slipped over Reneé’s
forehead, obscuring her eyes. Agitated, she swiped it aside and looked up at him. He saw
how beautiful and angry she was, the hole in the hole in his heart.
“Teach what?” she said.
“Teach.”
“Teach what?”
Now as August spins and fades like a war plane in flames over the city of Idaho Falls,
Dee McBride sits in the car with his daughters and wife and wonders what the hell it was he
missed. Reluctant to speak, he glances at Reneé. The sun slashes fingers of desire through
her hair. His stomach turns wispy at the sight of her total eclipse eyes, flawless cheeks, fierce
chin and jaw. She reminds him of a beautiful box of jigsaw pieces, all from different puzzles.
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With every atom in his blood, he wants to torch the madness and the loneliness. He wants
to lay a finger on the puzzle piece that will snap love into her padlocked heart.
To escape, he fantasizes. His daydreams churn out cartoon movies in which Reneé’s
ceaseless car trips and silent treatments morph into village strolls through Geneva. He
pictures Reneé running with him through sun-swarmed herds of wildebeest. Some dreams
are silly, others surreal. All revolve on themes of transformation and escape: Dee launches
Reneé from a circus springboard, and she lands as a kitten in velvet slippers; they eat sack
lunches on park benches and are carried aloft by massive green parakeets; Dee drives a
potato truck to Liberty Island to undress Reneé’s statuesque body in front of millions.
Reneé slaps his face, and he envisions her streaking with him out of Eden, their nude bodies
plastered with haphazard fig leaves. She throws a coffee mug at his head, and they duck into
a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast, where on the stormy Maine coast honeymooners search for
shells and black Labradors scamper after seagulls. She shrieks threats of divorce, and they
retire to an English farmhouse surrounded by a Roman wall, its stones and crevasses
kaleidoscopic with dusk and yellow songbirds and lacy thousand-year old lichen.
As they wait for the traffic light to change, Dee feels himself slipping into the safety-net
of fantasy. Reneé’s features make him hungry for distant escarpments where continents melt
into the sea, of beaches scored with patchwork seaweed and the nimble pizzicato feet of
blue crabs. Shrouded in the death of a red Idaho sun, she looks like a teenager. Two kids—
and she could be a high school cheerleader. Every time he looks at her he’s reminded that
her grandmother, Marjorie, was a Rockette. He catches her profile against the light, and he
hears Lloyd Cole and the Commotions singing “Perfect Skin.” Her malevolent, slit-yourjugular perfection astonishes him. She is a perfect-looking woman who bore him two
perfect-looking daughters. And they’re life is a million miles from perfect.
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“What are we going to do when we get home?” he says, hypnotized by the line of cars
ahead.
“What’s there to do?”
No torture more exquisite, Dee thinks, than being married to a sexy-looking woman who
is not sexy. He’s never shared his dilemma with anyone. He can imagine the result. In the
eyes of others, complaining your gorgeous wife doesn’t love you is like whining that your
Lamborghini doesn’t have the right upholstery. He knows the response: You have her, so
shut up! But here are different kinds of having, Dee knows. There’s having people to
possess them, to make them your emotional slaves. Then there’s the having that lets others
know you love them because you show it in tangible ways. He glimpses his daughters’
slumbering faces in the rearview mirror and wonders if he ever knew the difference.
“We could go out,” he says.
“How?”
At these moments of emotional shipwreck, Dee’s daughters’ beauty staggers him. Some
days, he feels he’s never breached the maternity ward window. Clearly, his girls have
emerged from Reneé’s gene pool. He knows, however, that stunning gene pools have
claimed many drowning victims. He knows that beauty is power and that he possesses none
of it, that he can’t tap its power source but can only howl like John Merrick from his
sideshow cage. Beautiful people, he knows, become actors and pop singers. They run for
office in corrupt political systems. They change sexual partners as often as they change
underwear. They court the tabloid press and crave bouts of plastic surgery to the point of
disfigurement. They consume monstrous amounts of cocaine and gin, pack the criminal
courts of the country, and learn to fire a gun, slash with a razor, or tie a dandy hangman’s
noose by the time they’re eighteen. He wants none of this for his daughters, of course, but
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he’s worried the Pissed-off Piper of Reneé will lead them away into this mountain of vanities
when she’s grown tired of his presence.
For some reason, Dee grew up with the notion that all children are loud, nasty, and
should be poisoned like garage rats. So he wasn’t prepared when Reneé bore two shining
stars. And they aren’t just cute. They’re rub-your-eyes-and-look-again cute. Wingedcherubs-in-the-Bible-cute. Two-hundred-thou-a-year-with-snooty-Giorgio-wearing-folksand-a-photo-exposé-in-Parents-magazine cute. Occasionally, though, he finds he can look
past the physical and view Colette and Rae as the key to the mystery. When he’s alone with
them, he picks them up and makes moo-cow noises and goofy monkey faces as if to prove
that Reneé does somehow love him. We have them, he thinks. So there must be something. To
tussle with his daughters on the floor is to know he and Reneé have kissed and lovelocked
under the covers under many a harvest moon. This isn’t the reality, he rationalizes under
smoldering heaps of emotional shrapnel. These cuties are the evidence. The reality, he tells
himself, is the way he and Reneé started, which is where they’ll end—eventually.
Then there are times he doesn’t sleep for days.
Trouble is, Dee’s thirty-five but looks forty-seven. Reneé’s thirty-three and looks
seventeen. Dee’s the oldest kid from a Haight-Ashbury family. Reneé’s the silver-spoon
baby from a New York suburb. He’s balding, prone to periphrasis. She’s a stunning bleach
blond, a conversation stopper. In the passenger’s seat, he slouches in a tan fly fisherman’s
cap, green T-shirt untucked, no belt, jeans and Asics cross-trainers. From the captain’s
position in the driver’s seat, her spine is a steel pole. She sports a black polyester jacket and
flared pants, platform heels, a gold necklace. The billowy satin collar of her turquoise blouse
flares like a tropical moth between her breasts.
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There’s this, too: Dee had no sexual partners in high school. A few close scrapes, but no
partners. Reneé can’t say the same. During her senior year in high school, on the run from
her parents’ lockstep conservatism, she couldn’t get enough. She had two partners she’s
mentioned to Dee: Luke Fein, her brother’s college swim teammate; and the captain of the
Penhurst High lacrosse team, Clint Fabbri. Dee suspects another one: Chris Benati, Reneé’s
senior prom date. Before leaving New York, despite Dee’s objections, he and Reneé
attended her ten-year high school reunion, at which Chris Benati—single, schnockered, and
now an architect—buzzed around one suddenly flirtatious Reneé McBride. Benati called her
“Slade,” brandished snapshots of Reneé’s drunken somersaults in her prom dress on his
front lawn, and demanded that she dance “The Electric Slide” with him for “old time’s
sake.” All the while, Dee felt like stalking over and socking Benati in the mouth for
changing his wife back into a Budweiser-swigging, twitter-pated teenybopper. As he
watched Reneé gambol like a groupie around the swarthy architect, Dee surrendered to
feelings of amazement and helplessness. He felt as if someone had plugged his wife into a
wall socket and changed her into a talking toy lamp that no longer recognized him. A
decade of marriage evaporated. To pass the time, Dee devoured fistfuls of pastel mints and
salted almonds and took notes on emotions connected to invisibility.
On one of their many trips to MegaMart, Dee, without thinking, shared with Reneé his
philosophy about sex. That it’s a baby’s bottle of milk: you get a full one at puberty, and you
either save some or guzzle it when you’re young and cry for more.
“Some people have milk in their reserves,” he said. “Others who gave themselves away
are sucking on a dry bottle.”
“Say that again,” she said, steamy eyes locked on Highway 20, “and I’ll drive us and the
kids into the river.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 20
After Rae was born, sex for the McBrides became a mere polishing of shoes, a quotidian
filing of recipe cards. Dee’s noted the changes childbirth has wrought on his wife’s body.
Veins decorate her calves like brush strokes in a Japanese watercolor. Her hips are like
bookends. Her breasts, once cocksure and firm, sink from her breastbone like water
balloons. Still, strangely, wonderfully, his desire for her has surged while hers has scuttled
into a stalactite-barbed cave. After Rae’s birth, Reneé started demanding they leave the
lights off. She would only let the games begin after he’d given her a prolonged massage. His
passion thermometer would trigger her snores. To his knowledge, she’s never come on to
him, but merely allowed him to stroke the magic carpet and hope for a ride.
One thing connects them: they were sexually abused as children. Dee by a business
associate of his father’s named Toff Kramer, who traveled with a steamer trunk of Hustler
issues, and Reneé by her Uncle Larry, who limped and chain-smoked and whose driveway
sealing business brought him into the city. This is the only item of tragic personal history
Reneé has discussed with Dee at length. But when the conversation drifts close to the
subject, she shatters Dee’s hope for an emotional breakthrough with protracted stares out
the window and the suggestion that they get something to eat. In Dee’s mind, Marvin
Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” is what they need. He believes he and Reneé could heal past scars
with a robust and adventurous sexual partnership, but he fears the fallout.
Reneé, instead of turning to her husband for fulfillment, has spun outward on a slashand-burn hunt for local volunteer work. Daily she scours the civic outback of local miseries
for charitable deeds she might perform to salvage a shred of redemption for herself. While
she neglects her daughters and Dee, with the regularity of a Münich glockenspiel she delivers
meals and laundry service to Evie Crouch, a frosty-headed, Alzheimer’s-touched woman
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 21
who lives next door in Thornton. Once, Reneé called Dee at his office to ask him if he
could drive home and watch Colette and Rae while she walked next door to give Evie lunch.
“Kinda busy,” he said. “Working.”
“Looks like you’ll never change!” she wailed into the phone. “Me, me, me, me!”
Before he could ask her why she was training to sing opera, she slammed the phone
down. Their most recent blow-up occurred when Reneé called him at his office to tell him
that Cherelyn, her brother Marc’s wife—to whom she hadn’t spoken in five years—had been
diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the esophagus.
“I’d like to help her in her time of need,” she said.
“Honey,” he said. “With the girls so young, and classes starting, I don’t know if that’s
feasible.”
She refused to speak to him for three days.
In the interim, he conscripted Colette and Rae into delivering “make-up” love notes to
her—crayon sketches scribbled on pages torn from Barbie and My Little Pony coloring
books. Reneé merely glared.
Now, Reneé’s pilgrimages toward community redemption breed domestic chaos. Dee
notices how she changes Rae’s diapers but doesn’t throw them away—just leaves them like
toxic stork bundles on the kitchen counter. He’s returned home to find the living room
carpet littered with soggy diaper landmines.
“Burn the extra calories,” he says, reaping hard looks. “Make it to the garbage can.”
She leaves tangled stockings on the kitchen table between the butter and the marmalade.
She can never find her keys, blames Dee for making her so scatterbrained she can’t
concentrate. Once, Dee became so desperate he called Jillian and Harv to ask if Reneé had
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 22
considered taking counseling. To the sound of Jillian’s indignant gasps in the background,
Harv munched on an English muffin.
“She has,” he said with a deadpan flourish. “Since she married a damn fool teacher who
gave up a good job to rope cows in a damn hayfield somewhere.”
2.
At home, three phone messages blink on the McBride answering machine. One is from
Jillian, concerning Cherelyn’s throat cancer; the second, from Evie; and the third,
astoundingly, is from Chris Benati in New York. Reneé listens to the messages. She plays
Chris Benati’s message four times, a girlish glow on her face.
“Sweetie,” Benati says, garbled with static. “It was so—great—to see you. We oughta
hook up, even over the phone. Rehash the times. Cute kids by the way. Angels. Hey, and
don’t let me step on Dave’s toes—Is it Dave? Don?—your, your guy?—I’d just hate to lose
everything . . .
A long bleep obliterates Benati’s voice.
Dee stands in the doorway, a groggy daughter in each arm, MegaMart bags slung from his
elbows.
Without speaking to him, Reneé heats a plate of chicken, beans, and au gratin potatoes
for Evie. She covers it with tinfoil and conveys it next door. When she returns, Dee is
asleep. The girls snore in bed, and it’s an hour before Reneé finishes talking to her mother
on the phone about Cherelyn’s medical procedures.
The next day, after Dee leaves for work, Reneé calls Chris Benati at his architectural
firm’s office in New York and chirps a cheerful reply into his answering service.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 23
3.
Tuesday. Reneé drives Colette and Rae to MegaMart. Four pairs of pastel polar bear
Sleep-Tite pajamas that were too small ride in the passenger’s seat. Having spoken with her
on the phone, Dee drives home for lunch while she’s away.
As he pilots his orange VW bug north on Highway 20, his surroundings strike him as
grotesque and beautiful. The northwestern landscape differs drastically from the scenery in
New York. A boundless space touches everything: white-faced cows, barbed wire fences,
roofless lava-rock storage sheds, tree stumps gutted by lightning strikes. Roads run forever
in one direction. The unchanging sky and horizon meet where oblivion curves toward space
and time. A wild ruggedness infuses every railroad crossing, creek bed, granary, and
lumberyard. The homes and trailer houses are what Reneé refers to as country kitsch.
Secretly, Dee is thrilled to think what Jillian and Harv Slade would do if they saw their
daughter and granddaughters wading hip-deep through so much redneck junk culture. To
them, it’s kitsch. To him, it’s a yummy hunk of Americana he’s been missing. The raw and
uncultured limitlessness of the scene snaps perfectly into his agenda of claiming a new
direction for himself and his family.
At the Jefferson County line, the sun-shocked fields and rickety fences give way to
battlements of poplars and willows on both sides of the highway. A railroad bridge parallels
him on the right. As he sails over the Snake River, the surface of the water flashes like liquid
steel. The reflected light dances away in rippling arcs through scrub oak, rocks, and
shattered cottonwoods. Below, to his left, a fisherman in waders steps from a boat ramp
into the shallows. Dee blinks back the glare. He grinds the heel of his hand in his right eye.
Beyond the railroad bridge, he speeds past a roadside store built in log cabin fashion:
“Country Collectibles.” On a chunky knoll in front of the store, someone has tipped over
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 24
five radial tires and filled them with dirt. Out of the earth-plugged tires, asters and petunias
sprout in slim explosions of canary, fuchsia, and crimson.
At the sight of the tire flowerbeds, Dee cackles.
He lets fly with a buckaroo yawp and yeehaw.
The sagebrush and billboards wink past, and he notes the shantytown names that could
double as vaudeville performers: LaBelle, Menan, Lorenzo, Archer, Thornton. Before the
Thornton Texaco turnoff, he passes a sign for the Blue Heron Bed & Breakfast and notes
with concern that Jillian and Harv could deem its lodgings suitable for a visit. Past the old
Thornton Merc & Café, instead of turning left, he succumbs to an impulse and wheels right.
Like one of the Beverly Hillbillies, he bumps down the gravel road to “Country
Collectibles.”
As he drives, he chews an invisible hay stalk, envisions himself in baggy Tom Sawyer
overalls, catfish rod bouncing over his shoulder.
He laughs, yuk-yuk.
He belts out off-key, unconnected snatches of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country
Roads.”
At home, he strings white twelve-inch wire fencing around the driveway. He steps back,
hands on hips, inspects his work. The cheap fencing looks like mangled croquet wickets, a
twisted chorus line of anorexic paper dolls. Next, to spite the Slade family and all they stand
for, he assembles three pink flamingos, two evil grinning lawn gnomes, and a “Well Wisher’s
Well” in attack formation on the grass.
On returning from MegaMart, Reneé stands in the driveway—as Colette and Rae do a
rabid Maypole dance around her knees, wearing gloves of melted ice cream—and stares at
the wooden monarch butterfly that hangs like an orange tumor above the garage door.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 25
4.
On the last day of MegaMart’s grand opening, a vicious summer downdraft propels the
store’s multicolored “Crazy Days” blimp into a nosedive through traffic on Hitt Road. The
blimp collides, Hindenberg-fashion, with a school bus of mentally-challenged fifth graders
on their way to see the snow leopards and albino tigers at Tautphas Park Zoo. While no one
is injured, the bus careens over the curb and causes two car crashes and the total destruction
of the Mr. Icy’s Sno Kone bicycle cart and Doogins the Clown’s cotton candy mill. On the
EITC campus, the incident sparks a mini-dialogue about Nazi dirigibles, Led Zeppelin, and
the Montgolfier brothers in Dee’s class—actually, more of a scattered monologue from Dee,
as his students stare at him open-mouthed with the glazed eyes of hooked trout while he
distributes a passel of pink photocopied sheets and proceeds to shake their foundations with
a pop quiz on Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics,” H. P. Grice’s
“communicative presumption,” and floating signifiers.
After one o’ clock, Reneé calls Dee at his office.
“Hi,” she says.
“What’s going on?” he answers. “How’re the girls?”
“Fine—hey, I was thinking—”
“That’s a good sign.”
“Stop. I was wondering if you’d go with me to MegaMart this afternoon—”
“Reneé,” Dee groans. “How many times are we gonna do this?”
“You don’t have class now.”
“I’m busy,” he says, looking around.
“With what?”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 26
“Things. I don’t just stand in class and talk. There’s a lot behind the scenes. I’m up to
my armpits—”
In the background, Colette and Rae battling over a toy dinosaur.
Reneé’s voice wavers into a puddle. She sounds like someone on a suicide hotline. Dee’s
spine withers. Black spittle collects in his gut.
“That’s fine,” Reneé weeps. “You need to work. But they are driving me up a wall!”
“I’ll be in the faculty parking lot,” Dee says.
At MegaMart, an early autumn breeze rattles strings of helium balloons and rainbow
pennants. When the McBrides pull up, they notice a disturbance in the loading zone. An
ambulance and two cop cars linger outside. It looks like a tank has plowed through and
smashed the game stands and food carts. Despite the accident, a gaggle of adults and
children litter the sidewalk. They slurp drinks, chomp corn dogs, and wrangle a gawky
zodiac of neon ostrich marionettes. Droves of consumers, oblivious to the suffering of the
accident victims, stream in and out of MegaMart’s commodious entryway. To Dee, they
resemble pilgrims ransacking a holy tabernacle. Hot ticket items flank the entrance: gaspowered trimmers, pallets of generic water-softening salt, steel wicker patio furniture.
Rectangular sale tags flicker like flags of revolution. To the right of the storefront, near the
bike racks and American Fare soft drink vending machines, kids gather around Doogins the
Clown, who twists and distributes balloon animals so quickly he seems to be pulling them
ready-made from his floppy sleeves.
“Don’t any of these people have jobs?” Dee says, entering the store with Reneé. He
wrestles a cart from the holding pen.
“Fifteen minutes,” Reneé says, shuttling the girls off in another cart.
“Why am I here?” Dee demands.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 27
“Just in case,” she calls, gliding across the waxed floor through cosmetics.
Dee’s cart wobbles on one bad wheel. Aimlessly, he wanders through the glittering maze
of snack chips, cut-priced lawnmowers, and Rubbermaid pyramids. The climate-controlled
environment stifles him. Everywhere he turns, the lipstick-scented, hypodermic-spired
Pandemonium of MegaMart rises in toxic pastels. He plods through aisle after aisle, short of
breath, crowded by spastic children and knobby grandmothers. Televisions and radios play
twelve different programs. Pink hatchet “Sale” banners and orange switchblade arrows prick
his sleeves. Everywhere he turns, he gags at the scent of lilac perfume, the salty reek of
cholesterol-caked corn dogs and pretzels. From every whitewashed steel beam in the ceiling
hangs a cherry or ultramarine poster on which back-to-school children of all ethnicities and
their sexy, slim parents proclaim the revitalizing powers of plum passion body spray,
Hawaiian shirts, or three fabulous notebooks for $1.99. Everything has a ninety-nine after it.
This alone irks him.
Dee speeds past the checkout lines, his cart extended like a dragster. He thrusts his head
down and avoids the prostitute grins of the red-vested MegaMart “Help Crew.” Moments
later, he finds himself fuming in the home and garden section, thinking of the unfinished
work on his desk. Exasperated, he snatches a help phone from a nearby service kiosk.
The phone is red. A curly cord attaches it to the kiosk. A sign on the kiosk blares in
white block letters: Help Phone Thirteen. As Dee waits for someone from the “Help Crew” to
answer his call, he envisions himself as a rat trapped in an exitless corridor. He sniffs for a
hidden door along the moldy alleyways and shiny shelves of non-stick frying pans and DVD
players. He sees himself, like Robison Crusoe, telling other shoppers in a raspy seafarer’s
voice how he came to be marooned in MegaMart, his beard ten feet long, his look a
bloodshot maniac’s stare, his home a pup tent in the outdoors section, complete with cooler,
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 28
fold-out lounge chair and beef jerky and Shasta Red Cream Soda and Pop Tarts warmed
over a Coleman propane stove.
A female voice interrupts his reverie. The young woman’s greeting crackles like an old
Edison recording.
“Can I help you?”
“Doubt it,” Dee says. “I’m looking for the office products section, and I’ve only got
about five minutes—”
“Really?” the voice says.
Dee pauses.
“Really,” he says. “I need office products, and I’ve got to—”
“That really what you need?” the girl’s voice persists, rippling through a glacial creek.
Dee holds the phone from his head. He examines it for defects. He shakes it. He
glances around at other shoppers who pay no attention to him. Some teenager, he thinks. He
returns the phone to his ear.
“Hello?” he says. “Is this customer service?”
“Depends,” the spearmint voice purrs. “What do you need?”
“I don’t have time for games,” Dee says. “I’m in a hurry, and I need—”
“You don’t have a clue what you need,” the girl insists. Her voice jangles through Celtic
ballads, a waterfall in the background.
“What’s your name?” Dee demands. “Who’s your supervisor?”
“I’m Help Phone Thirteen,” she pipes.
“Never mind,” Dee says.
He slams the phone down and scoots past kitty litter and toasters and cuts a beeline
toward the customer service area: an oblong red counter near the checkout stalls. As he
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 29
passes the front entryway, he catches a glimpse of Doogins the Clown. Doogins wrenches a
balloon into a brontosaurus for a kid in hooded green sweatshirt and baggy gangbanger
jeans. The kid hops like an electrocuted frog.
At customer service, Dee waits in line then asks to see the supervisor. A droopy sloth of
a man wearing a pinstripe shirt under a red MegaMart vest shuffles through a swinging door.
The man spies Dee, smiles, and smoothes his mustache with a forefinger.
“Help you?” he says. The man’s badge shows blocky white lettering similar to the kind
on the help phone placard: MegaMart Help Crew. I’m Karl.
“Karl,” Dee says, reading the badge. “Hate to inform you of this, but there’s somebody
screwing around on your phones.”
“Phones?” Karl asks, arching bushy eyebrows.
“Customer service?” Dee says. His finger circles an impatient lasso toward the store’s
yammering wasteland.
“Help phones,” Karl smiles. “Bingo.”
“Thirteen,” Dee says. “A girl was giving me a lotta lip. I said I wanted office products.
She said I didn’t know what I wanted and started goin’ off—”
“Girl?” Karl asks. He scrutinizes Dee.
“Right,” Dee says, explaining the situation to an invisible box in his hands. “She had this
voice like—” Karl puckers his lips.
“You get her name?”
“She said she was on thirteen—”
“They’re numbered on the floor,” Karl says. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the
door behind him. “Two people in here do the answering, but—”
“Who’s the girl on thirteen?”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 30
Karl searches Dee’s eyes as if looking for a fizzing circuit. Dee looks away.
“We’ve got two male employees back there now,” Karl says.
“Sorry?” Dee spits, narrowing his eyes.
“Two,” Karl says. “Male. So I don’t see—”
“Really?”
“Really. They’ve been—”
“This was a girl. A woman—female.”
“Far as I know, this is the only—”
“How long they been there?” Dee asks, backpedaling.
“Two hours,” Karl says. He crinkles the corners of his eyes. “Maybe three. I was here
seven sharp. When did you say this happened?”
“Just now,” Dee exhales, backing away. “Thanks.”
“If you’d like,” Karl says, “you could fill out a complaint card, and—”
“No, no,” Dee says, waving him off. “Thanks, Karl. That’ll be fine. That’ll be—fine.”
Woozy, Dee wanders through the automatic front doors. He dodges a mob of
scampering children and two senior citizens in big turquoise shorts. Outside, he stands on
the sidewalk, afraid he might topple off his disjointed legs. He squints, surveying the glare
on the sea of cars and vans. From all directions, people flood in and out of MegaMart’s
massive ark. A breeze shocks life into his lungs.
“What just happened?” he asks the world.
He reaches out for handrails of air. He admits to himself that he still feels lost in his new
place of residence. This incident, a quirk of the imagination, must have sprung from stress, a
sense of social and geographical alienation. He wonders what’s taking Reneé so long. He
feels anxious for her return. For the first time in a long time, he wishes she would hurry up,
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 31
say hello to him, take his hand, kiss him, and let him cling to her body, to the one sure fact
of her physical presence. He feels desperate to kiss Colette and Rae, to loop his arm around
his wife and feel her permanence rolling through his veins.
“What am I doing here?”
He paces. Shoppers swirl around the roaming island of his body. At the end of the
sidewalk, he bounces like a prizefighter shaking knots from his muscles, bobbing his head
from side to side. Nothing chases the fear from his bowels: that everything around him is a
hologram. He wants to rake his fingers through the tapestry of the air and reveal the
smoking craters of a destroyed civilization. He sees himself as the well-dressed protagonist
in a black-and-white B movie running amok in the MegaMart parking lot, tearing away the
pink rubber faces—his wife’s and daughters’ included—from a population of bleeping
androids. He tries to raise a logical explanation for the whole thing. Several scenarios
assemble: a prank; somebody with a cell phone and a camera behind one-way glass; a crossed
connection; somebody thinking she was talking to a fellow worker and not a customer.
Could be any of those, he thinks, reassuring himself. He blows out a sigh.
“Hey,” the clown says.
Dee whirls and stares. Doogins the Clown stares back, waving tentatively. Doogins
wears classic white face paint, traditional red foam-rubber nose, orange wig, and a rainbow
Rastafarian cap. His roomy royal blue parachute shirt puffs with good will. Floppy ric-rac
adorns his collar and cuffs. White pom-pom buttons bumble down the front. From the
waist up, he’s all clown. From the waist down, he’s a regular guy, jeans and Adidas hightops. A yellow bag slung over his shoulder swarms with a centipede frenzy of multicolored
toy balloons. Doogins plunges his hand in the bag and produces an orange balloon.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 32
Whistling a Dixieland ditty, he stretches and snaps it back, applies it to his mouth. In two
seconds a baby pterodactyl perches in his palm.
“Here,” he says, handing it to Dee. “For the kiddies.”
“How do you know I have kids?” Dee jumps.
“Just a hunch,” Doogins says. His clown grin melts like cake icing. “Take it easy, man.”
“Sorry, I—make it two.”
“Two?”
“Balloons,” Dee says, jabbing a peace sign at the bag. “The same. So they won’t fight.”
“Ah,” Doogins says. He cracks his knuckles. He claps twice, step-ball-changes, and
twists a second orange pterodactyl out of the air. “Okey dokey, artichoky. There ya be.”
“Thanks,” Dee says, taking the balloon without looking. He scans the parking lot, as if
trying to detect the approach of a disguised assassin.
“Everything cool?” Doogins asks. “No offense, man, but you look kinda—”
“Sorry,” Dee says, blinking. “I’m just—thanks for the balloons—I—do you work here?”
“I’m independently contracted.”
“Independently contracted?” Dee chuckles. “Really?”
“Whoa, what’s with the—”
“Sorry,” Dee apologizes. “Never thought of clowns as ‘independently contracted.’
Sounds a tad bourgeois.”
“‘Clown’ is all relative, man,” Doogins says. He fans both hands out. “What we do? It’s
a social institution.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Dee says, looking around.
“Like that Stephen Sondheim song, you know?” Doogins says. He raises his arms to the
arena of the planet. “Everybody needs us, but they wait till there’s a crisis. And then—”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 33
“You know anything about the phones here?” Dee interrupts.
“Phones?”
“Help phones,” Dee says, pointing through the entrance.
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” Dee says, eyebrows pinched. “I asked for help on one—thirteen—and
this girl comes on—”
“There’s no girls working the phones now—”
“Yeah, I asked Karl—”
“Karl’s the man,” Doogins says. He bobs his head. “Karl’ll set you up. So what’s the
problem with the phone?”
“Nothing,” Dee says. He waves his hand. “I asked for office supplies, and this girl’s on
there mouthing off, telling me I don’t know what I want and all kindsa crap.”
“Mm,” Doogins says, examining Dee. Dee’s jaw trembles.
“Her voice—it was like—not human—”
“Like a recording?” Doogins asks, folding his arms.
“Not a recording. More like the wind or—”
“Wind?” Doogins laughs.
“No, awright, that’s stupid. But it was—like the wind. And—other stuff.”
“Probably not my place,” Doogins says, assuming a confidential tone. “Sounds like
you’re stressed out. Problems at work or home.” Dee turns stern.
“So,” he says. “Balloon dinosaurs and therapy on the side, huh? That your thing?”
“Easy.” Doogins steps back. “Just telling you what we do. If we can help, give us a
call.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 34
With a magician’s flourish, Doogins produces a psychedelic business card that bears his
Idaho Falls address and phone number.
“We’ll let you know,” Dee smirks, pocketing the card.
“Don’t underestimate it, man,” Doogins says, with a Cheech-and-Chong lilt. “Lotta
people do.”
“So, what do you guys do?” Dee says. “Come in, jump out of a cake, and start shuffling
inkblots? Party hats and Oedipal complexes all around?”
“Funny,” Doogins says. “You—”
“What, pin the tail on the co-dependent donkey?”
“Man, you got a pistol wit,” Doogins says, deflecting the sarcasm. “You’d be good with
us if you could tame it.”
“With you?” Dee laughs. “What’s the clown gig pay these days?”
“It’s quality of life with us,” Doogins says. He waves and wags his tongue at a passing
mother and baby. The baby spits up. “Oop, sorry!” he says to the mom, then to Dee,
“What do you do?”
“Teach,” Dee says. He jerks his head toward the EITC campus.
“Like I said,” Doogins says. “‘Clown’ is all relative.”
“Oo,” Dee says, stepping back. “That repartee go over big at little Johnny’s party?”
“Sorry,” Doogins corrects himself. He jabs a good-natured punch at Dee’s left shoulder.
“That was wrong. I apologize.”
“Accepted,” Dee says. “Besides, I got a wife and kids. We’re barely making it now, and
my wife thinks what I do is basically clowning around—”
“I got kids,” Doogins says.
“Really?”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 35
“Yes, really,” Doogins replies, masking his exasperation. “No offense, but I hate it when
people say that, like I’m lying or—”
“Know what you mean,” Dee says. “Continue.”
“Daughter’s a freshman at Idaho State,” Doogins says, “majoring in information systems.
Son’s a sophomore at Skyline. Sixteen. His curve ball breaks a foot and a half.”
“Guess I learned something,” Dee says.
“Most people don’t know. We’re organized. About thirty of us serve Eastern Idaho and
the greater Snake River plain. Our local chapter belongs to a regional association covering
the Rocky Mountains and continental northwest. Seriously, profit sharing, investment
options, benefits. Annual conventions in Maui and Paris. Textbook and canned goods
drives for Nigeria and Haiti. There’s a company car in it, too, depending on—”
“This part of the act?” Dee says, spotting Reneé as she emerges from MegaMart. Colette
and Rae toddle behind, each carrying a balloon and a cinnamon Churro.
“If you ever hit the wall with teaching,” Doogins finishes, “check us out.”
“I will,” Dee says, turning away. “Hi, dear.”
“Hi,” Reneé says, visibly refreshed. “Who’s this?”
“Daddy!” Colette shouts, hopping on one foot, strawberry curls ringing with sun. “A
clown!”
“Clown!” Rae echoes. She juts out two chipmunk incisors and peeps at Doogins through
blond bangs.
“He made you balloons,” Dee says. “But you already have some.”
“Sorry,” Reneé says. “Keep the troops happy.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 36
“Can never have too many balloons,” Doogins says, waggling his head at the girls. He
dashes a clumsy grapevine combo left and right and finishes with a Fred Astaire flourish.
The girls squeal.
“Gotta go,” Dee says, scooping up his girls.
“Daddy!” Colette protests. She sags her body to the pavement. “I want the clown to
come!”
“He’s coming,” Dee says. He drags Colette’s rag doll body by her arm. Rae wraps a
bearhug around Dee’s knee. Burdened by girls, he shuffles to the car through switchback
traffic like a hunchback besieged by alien sucker-parasites.
With the girls strapped in their seats, Dee speaks first. “I’m happy to see you,” he says,
snapping on his seatbelt.
“Really?” Reneé says. “What’s the change—”
“I’m glad you finally came out,” he says. “I was getting—”
“Oh,” she says, turning the ignition.
“I got on one of those help phones, and this girl answered. She started talking back to
me, insulting me, saying I didn’t know what I wanted—”
“Somebody messing around,” Reneé says, pulling into traffic.
“Somebody,” Dee echoes. He turns to look at the girls. “You guys have fun?”
“Yeah!”
“Good,” Dee says. He swivels back to face the front. “Because I’ve got a ton to do.
Could you drop me off at the faculty turnout on your way—”
“I guess,” Reneé sighs, rolling her eyes. “Why can’t you just come home? You’re done
teaching. What do you do in your office all day?”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 37
“Research,” he says. “Grading, preparation. I’ll be home later now because this trip has
set me back—” Reneé adjusts her sunglasses.
“I’m so sorry your wife and kids are such a hassle.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“Listen to yourself. We are. Admit it.”
“It’s just hard to juggle what I’m doing with the kids—”
“Tell me about it.”
“Drop me off here,” Dee says, exhausted. “I’ll be home later.”
“Bye, Daddy,” Colette sings.
“Bye-bye,” Rae says, waving her arms in aerobic exercise circles.
In his office, Dee rushes through his grading and preparation for the next day. Before
heading home to Thornton, he drives back to MegaMart and parks outside as the shifts are
changing. With the engine idling, sunglasses on, he observes the red-vested employees as
they file in and out. He searches among the ranks for the girl whose voice was like the wind.
At home, he stalks through the front door to find seated around the kitchen table—like
poker buddies—three people who are scrutinizing a booklet of Sherwin-Williams paint
samples. They are also discussing the recent esophagogastrectomy undergone by Reneé’s
sister-in-law, Cherelyn. The people are Reneé; Evie in a filmy maroon nightgown and poofy
jack rabbit slippers; and Chris Benati, who’s flown in unannounced from New York.
5.
“He’s sleeping in our house,” Dee says, staring at the spider web cracks in the ceiling.
“Go to sleep,” Reneé yawns. “He’ll hear you.”
“Creepy.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 38
“What is?”
“Your stubby Italian prom date flies from New York to Idaho, and he’s—sleeping—in the
same house as our girls—and us.”
“So?”
“Creepy.”
“Stop saying that. He’s going back tomorrow. I think it’s sweet.”
“Sweet? You’re killin’ me, Reneé.”
“Stop being dramatic.”
“You want dramatic?” Dee’s arms shoot toward the ceiling. “Okay, who is this guy in
bed next to you? Who is he?”
“I don’t have to listen to—”
“Have ten years gone by? Are those love bundles downstairs sharing our
chromosomes?”
“He’s leaving in the morning. Will you please shut up?”
“This is insane! We’re married! I can’t believe you don’t see how this hurts me.” He sits
up and speaks to her in the dark. “Okay, here—what if I brought an old flame home?
Invited her to stay the night?”
“First of all,” Reneé says, flat on her back in a coffin of stillness. “He invited himself.
Second, that would never happen because there aren’t any old flames in your life.”
Dee chokes on the silence.
“Huh,” he utters thickly. “I guess—that’s—‘cause I was saving myself for you.”
“I married you, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t marry me,” Dee says. “You married marriage.”
“He says we should paint the girls’ rooms Wild Pomegranate or Ragtime,” Reneé says.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 39
“Architects don’t know paint,” Dee says.
6.
Dee McBride’s teaching and scholarship derive from his master’s thesis. At Columbia,
while holding down a middle management position at a copy center, he wrote a crosscultural Hegelian study and application: “Achieving Synthesis: Universality in
Communication Modes and Modules.” In it, he posits that all communication snags—
political, social, professional, domestic, electronic, and/or interpersonal—can be described
and resolved by what he outlines as a “TASC Module.” The acronym stands for Thesis,
Antithesis, Synthesis, Communication. “In all modes of communication, especially
conflicting ones,” he writes in his preface, “there is a first position (thesis), a second position
(antithesis), and the potential resolution stemming from the two opposing positions
(synthesis). This module applies universally to all communication scenarios and can be
implemented in theoria or in praxis in order to bring about harmony from discord, clear
communication from chaos.”
The third week of class, Dee assigns his students to use his TASC modules to explore the
“social” branch of communication outlined in his thesis. The modules are printed
goldenrod email attachments that show a large capital “T” in the center of the page, the left
side labeled “Thesis,” the right “Antithesis,” and the bottom of the “T” reading “Synthesis.”
“This week,” Dee tells his students. “Your TASC task (waits for deflated chuckles) is to
document all the communication hang-ups you experience in social situations.”
“Document?” a student says.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 40
“This week, write each claim, or thesis, you encounter in social settings on one side of the
paper,” Dee says, holding a TASC module aloft. “Put its opposite, or antithesis, on the
other side. Leave the synthesis space blank for class.”
Dee teaches Communications 100 in the octagonal rotunda of the Alexander D. Creek
Building. The washed-out, dust-blue carpet and cinderblock walls lacquered in bananacream paint convey the cheery lockdown atmosphere of an asylum. The door to his room,
number 519, is a wooden slab with stainless steel lever instead of a doorknob. A narrow
window of wired glass is recessed into the door, which allows outsiders to peep at the action
inside Dee’s cell of learning. In an effort to bolster a non-existent alma mater spirit, the
department secretary has taped a photocopy of the school’s “Mission” and “Vision”
statements next to Dee’s classroom. Dee hasn’t taken the slightest interest in his school’s
mission or vision. If he possesses no visionary mission himself, why should he give two
hoots about his school’s?
Inside Room 519, five carpeted tiers ascend toward the back wall. In every aspect, the
room projects an atmosphere of Greek theater, apart from the glaring fact that Oedipus is
interesting and Dee’s classes aren’t. The desks are made of shiny tubular steel bolted to
kidney-shaped desktops: pylon orange, putty beige, and birthday-cake blue. Most days,
Dee’s students gaze down like sleep-deprived medical trainees in a nineteenth-century
observatory. An overhead projector on a rolling stand waits in one corner next to a fake
philodendron in a wicker basket. Moon-colored dust sheathes the plant’s fronds. Dee’s
desk, a monstrous office model—much too big for his needs—occupies the focal point of
the classroom. Dee lectures from a wooden podium. With choreographed gravitas, he
props his body in striking poses on the podium and, for dramatic effect, plucks it from the
desk and bangs it down when students on the upper level begin to snore.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 41
The desk drawers contain these items: three paper clips, an empty stapler, and a business
card bearing the name and address of the previous teacher’s therapist in bold cranberry
letters on a mint background: Teton View Mental Health, Dr. Wendee Sonderegger. On the wall
behind Dee, two narrow windows provide slim glimpses of the outside world. Through
these windows, Dee’s students watch Daryl Gray, the head groundskeeper, putt back and
forth on his John Deere mower in frayed overalls and crumpled Cray’s Feed ‘n’ Seed cap.
To Dee, the windows are castle loopholes through which his students launch looks of such
earnest longing that most days, often in mid-lecture, he expects them to rush the podium
and dump buckets of molten lead on his head. In these medieval visions of professional
despair, he ascends a ladder every morning, hoping his one-man assault might land him in
the topmost turret where he can teach a young princess in pink pantaloons how to spin lead
into gold with the cabalistic formulas of good communication.
“As you come in,” Dee announces to the shuffling herd on Monday morning, “do two
things for me. One, try to forget it’s eight o’ clock. Two, turn in your completed social
TASC modules.”
As Dee stands at the door and collects homework in an Easter basket bearing a neonyellow card that reads “A Tiskit a TASC It,” he’s dimly aware that the strenuous events of
past weeks are replaying in his head to a circus calliope: cancer, architect, clown, help phone
thirteen, neighbor, wife, girls. He’s already exhausted. He can’t shake the hornet’s nest from
his head. Clean-cut in shirt and tie, he stumbles in a wilderness, wondering if all teachers
maintain a burnished exterior while, inwardly, their lives are a shambles.
“Thank you,” he says, trying not to fall over. “Thank you.”
As he forces a smile and gathers assignments, he notices two students are seated in
adjacent desks and making out in the back of the hall. Previous to this morning, he’s noticed
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 42
their love games, but he’s tried to ignore it in the hope that they might get tired, get bored,
or get a hotel. The male student, a fluffy-headed kid in denim jacket and jeans, looks no
older than seventeen. His eyebrows and eyelashes are bleached an unearthly blond. A wispy
gauze of beard clings to his pimply chin. The girl, also in denim jacket, wears blue eye
shadow and a kinked ponytail that spouts like a burst fire hydrant from her head. Her
ponytail is wrapped in a pink bandana. It’s too early in the year to have their names
memorized, so Dee coughs. He clears his throat. Oblivious, the couple continues to grope
and work their jaws, arms serpentined in a grappling match of lust.
“Excuse me?” Dee calls. “Could we try not to become impregnated until the end of the
term, please?”
The couple, crimson-faced, stops and stares at Dee. For a moment, the stream of
students entering the classroom freezes, then continues to flow.
“Thank you,” Dee says, prying apart the air with his hands. “It’s just—”
“Screw you, dude,” the guy says, jerking his head upward.
His girlfriend giggles.
“Impregnation is what I wanted to avoid in class,” Dee fires back. “And—never mind—
names?”
“Fender,” the young man says. “Dallas.”
“Fender?” Dee chortles.
“I’m Ali,” the girl says, flapping her eyelashes.
“Alley?” Dee says. “Like where you get picked up?”
Her expression sours.
“Back off, dude,” Dallas challenges.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 43
“I’m the teacher,” Dee says, head inclined forward, eyes widening. “I don’t back off.
Especially not from a guy whose name is a stupid TV drama and a dented car part.”
“What’s yours?” Dallas ripostes. “A letter in the alphabet—and a burger for married
women?”
Ali snorts, and the rest of the class roars.
“All right,” Dee covers, coloring. “Cool it. Let’s get to work.”
Later that day, Dee gets a call from Roger Ferguson, Dean of Business and
Communications. A little after two, the division secretary ushers Dee into the dean’s office
where he finds his boss seated on a tomato-colored leather chair in front of a computer.
The dean’s office rings with Spartan order. The walls are lined with a militaristic rainbow of
reference books and periodicals. An aquarium of angelfish bubbles on a gray file cabinet.
From a portable stereo, Rachmaninoff thrums quietly. On the dean’s desk a white ceramic
bust of Pascal gazes like a beheaded saint out the window, seeking the solution to the wind.
Dean Ferguson, a silver-haired, sober man of fifty-four rocks back in his chair and rises to
greet Dee with a nutcracker handshake.
“Have a seat,” he says.
Dee sits. The dean wears a buff-colored sport coat, plaid tie. His solid belly surges over
a rodeo belt buckle, straining to burst his pinstripe shirt. Outside the dean’s window, a
quaking aspen shakes its leaves.
“Dee, we had some problems in your class today,” Dean Ferguson. “I just want to get
your side.”
“Problems?” Dee swallows.
“Take it easy,” the Dean says, waving a hand. “I know students. There’s been a report.
I need to follow up.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 44
“Okay,” Dee says.
“Did you have words with some kids today?”
“Two students weren’t showing proper respect, and I—”
“What were they doing?”
“Kissing,” Dee says, sitting back. He folds his arms. Practically undressing in the class—”
“Couple of love birds, huh?” the Dean chuckles. His chair creaks under his weight.
“You could say that.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I asked them to stop, and they—the male student, Fender—Dallas Fender—
mouthed off, and I came back at him, and then it was over. Nothing big. But we did have a
bit of a spat.” The Dean probes his tongue against his cheek. He searches the upper spaces
in the room, blinking.
“How are you adjusting?” he says, bringing his fingertips together. Dee strokes his thighs
with his palms.
“Adjusting?”
“To us. We aren’t New Yorkers. Do things at a slower pace. How are you fitting in?
Wife and kids happy?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dee says, eyes to the floor, face clouded.
“Little slice of culture shock, coming out here, I bet,” the Dean says, examining Dee’s
reaction. “Can be tough, can’t it?”
“To be honest, Dean Ferguson,” Dee says. “We’re going through some things right now.
Finishing our home—”
“Sure.”
“—adjusting to the area, the kids and Reneé—”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 45
“Uh huh.”
“—she’s been depressed since I’ve known her, and last week, I thought I was losing my
mind—”
“That’s not good for teachers,” the Dean says, straight-faced.
“I know. It’s just, last week, everything happened at once and—”
“Dee,” the Dean says, cupping an elbow in his palm. “You want to know something up
front? We haven’t seen scholarship and presentation as creative as yours since I’ve been
here. We love your stuff, and we’d like to keep you. Hear me?”
“Yes,” Dee responds, looking up.
“But—base level—we can’t have teachers running down their students. Can we leave it
there?”
“I understand,” Dee says, standing. “I’ll watch it.”
“Good,” the Dean says. He strains into a bowlegged stance, waddles to the door and
opens it. “Take those kids and that wife out. Stress can blindside you if you don’t keep an
eye on it.”
“I will,” Dee says. “Thank you, Dean Ferguson.”
“You bet, Dee. Give me a holler.”
After work, before going home, Dee drives to the Ammon MegaMart. On the way, he
watches the lavender light slant across the field stubble, haggard cattle, and 1-800-Collect
billboards. It’s dreamy, beautiful. But his sick heart swings in the hollow of his chest like a
clapperless bell. In his mind, his girls appear like angel carvings on the balustrades of a
cathedral. Classic, severe, celestial. Reneé, Rae, Colette. He wants so desperately to love
them—to be maddeningly, achingly, overwhelmingly in love with them. And to know they
love him. But they are little more than strangers to him, a family posing for a magazine ad.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 46
As he enters MegaMart, he passes Doogins the Clown. Doogins has retained his red
nose, orange wig, white face, and blue eye paint. But he’s traded the Rastafarian cap and
floppy shirt for a fringed The Mamas and The Papas vest and giant pink foam-rubber
cowboy hat. He leans against the bike rack, smoking. As Dee passes, they make fleeting eye
contact.
Inside, Dee fights off the temptation to fly straight to help phone thirteen. Instead he
breezes to the entertainment quadrant, passing kiosks of sunglasses, bastions of Wild Cherry
Pepsi 12-packs, and headless orange mannequins in skimpy red Day-Glo bikinis. Once in
the music section, Dee finds himself imprisoned in terraces of glitzy, cellophane-swathed
CD’s. An anorexic-looking MegaMart employee, in scarlet “Help Crew” vest, stands in the
aisle. She gawks stupidly at the mirrored racks of music. She wears stovepipe denim Capri
pants and chunky vanilla platform sneakers. Two crimped ponytails, bound by plum-colored
bands, sprout like fuzzy antennae from her head.
“Excuse me,” Dee says, approaching the girl. “Could you help me?”
The girl steps back. She puckers her eyebrows and spools a slinky strand of bubble gum
around her index finger. Her makeup—pouty purple lips, base, rouge—sparkles with teeny
stars of silver glitter.
“Yeah?” she says.
“I need a CD,” Dee says. “Sondheim something or other. About clowns? Do you have
it?”
“I don’t know,” she responds.
“You don’t know?” Dee asks.
“The guy at the photo desk,” she says. “This is his area.”
“Where is he?” Dee says, rotating his head like prairie dog. “Can he help me?”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 47
“Probably on break,” she says then pops her gum in her mouth and wanders away.
“Thanks for your help!” Dee calls.
With both hands, he rifles through the CD’s. The plinking xylophone and diluted
saxophone from the intercom muzak—“Islands in the Stream”—grates against his
eardrums. After some aimless fumbling through the Broadway/Musicals section, he finds
what he wants—a “Best of” Stephen Sondheim collection including a song about clowns—
pays for it, and exits the store. On the way out, he shoots the customer service counter a
surreptitious glance. He avoids the eyes of Doogins the Clown.
At the Jefferson County line, approaching Thornton, Dee steers his VW bug toward the
Snake River parallel to the railroad bridge. In the red light, black willows and maples waver
along the riverbanks like living lace. The strangeness of the past few weeks and the residual
stress of the move to Idaho have left him adrift. He feeds on hollowness flavored with
hollowness. The road slips beneath his car like a honky-tonk treadmill, complete with
ragtime score and Wild West sagebrush. From a forgotten emotional drawer, he detects the
sadness about to seize him.
“Beautiful wife,” he says.
The new CD plays on the stereo. As he rattles across the river, Barbra Streisand launches
into the sad parabolic strains of “Send in the Clowns.” Dee looks across the riverbends and
rocky shoals to catch the sun shooting shafts of fire through poplar and white pine, barbed
wire and crooked telephone poles, each leaf and ripple dashed in liquid gold.
“Beautiful kids.”
The sadness clamps chains on his shoulders. It sinks talons in the turkey flesh of his
chest. In vain, he gulps back the sobs in his lungs. It’s a real cry. A pulsing, halted howl.
From another dimension, his hands seize the steering wheel and guide his car to the
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 48
shoulder. Out of traffic, he trembles in his seat, cries for twenty minutes like a lost girl.
With each throb, the oil slick of a foul spirit washes from his organs. Eventually, the cry
exhausts itself, rolls a pleasant coda through his chest cavity, rivers and lakes of clean misery.
Hunched over the wheel, he glances around, ashamed, as if one of his old schoolteachers
might see him. He inhales and exhales spasms until his last cry dissipates with the cosmic
stream of cowboy brake lights traveling forever north down Highway 20.
“A good job.”
He sighs. He sniffs and wipes his nose on his sleeve. He stares at the other side of the
river where in dusk-charred fields helpless teachers, next-door neighbors, cancer-ridden
sisters-in-law, handsome bulldoggish architects, sexy heartless wives, and Jillian and Harv
Slade—all attired in full clown regalia—gambol and frolic in a renaissance of the moment,
spinning out of their awkward choreography a burlesque circus of regrets, singing a
thousand songs of sorrow for no one.
7.
Two weeks after Labor Day, Reneé grunts and dumps a heap of groceries on the kitchen
table. Colette and Rae tear through the door into the living room. Like two slashing kittens,
they scream and scrap over which miniature Happy Meal Barbie doll is the best. Colette,
face puce with anger, holds the Working Mom Barbie—the one they both want—above her
head like a torch, out of Rae’s reach. Rae howls. She hops up and down like a dwarf unable
to reach a peach. She clenches her fists and tramps her pink “Go-Girl” sneakers on the
hardwood floor as if stamping on cockroaches. With a shriek, she launches the Vegas
Superstar Barbie across the room, where it strikes a potted Wandering Jew. Then, like Tom
and Jerry, the sisters chase each other around the table. Their screams shred the air.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 49
Fingertips to temples, Reneé sags into a chair. The Sherwin-Williams paint sample
booklet flops open on the table. She has earmarked her top three choices: Clamshell, Sulfur
Springs, and Patagonia Peaks. She tries to concentrate, but the ruckus in the next room
pumps a flicker of yellow acid through her jaw. She shoots to her feet and knocks the
groceries to the floor.
“Shut up! Now!”
Colette halts, looks at her mother. Rae’s face shrivels into a tortured, tearful mask. She
bawls.
Grinding her teeth, Reneé marches over and snatches the Working Mom Barbie from
Colette’s hand. The girls yelp as Reneé stalks to the sink, grabs a butcher knife, and axes
Working Mom Barbie into ham chunks on a cutting board.
“Mom! That’s mine!” Colette protests. She drops to the floor and writhes.
“Miiiiine!” Rae wails.
“Both of you—shut up! Shut up!”
Hands quaking, Reneé grabs the paint booklet and flees the room. Both daughters,
crying hysterically, pursue her upstairs where she slams the door and locks herself in with all
the catalog colors of fantasy and escape.
8.
For two nights, Dee, ignorant of his wife’s most recent breakdown, squirms in bed. A
flinty viper of suspicion coils around his body, feeding on his bankrupt brain. For days, he’s
battled the notion that he must know something—however ridiculous—for certain.
Eventually, the unknown becomes unbearable. He calls Reneé from work.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 50
“Where?” she asks.
In the background, Colette and Rae screech and batter each other with flexible TootieToot Train Tracks.
“MegaMart,” he says. “I need a break.”
“You want to go to MegaMart?”
“I always go,” he says, cradling a casual tone in his chest. “You have anything to return?”
“Two outfits I bought for the girls, but—”
“Pick me up after lunch,” he says. “Bye.”
They park near the front entrance and usher the girls inside. The sun warms the
pavement, but the air carries a chill. The sky shuttles a broken host of top-heavy clouds over
the hills to the east, toward Palisades Reservoir and Grays Lake. Outside MegaMart’s doors,
Doogins the Clown sports a yellow chicken suit. He juggles big pink and blue eggs. Inside,
Reneé snags a cart and propels the girls through archways of Fuji film and KarmelKorn.
Like a speedwalker, Dee dispy-doodles straight for the home and garden section and help
phone thirteen.
At the kiosk, he glances around at the plodding troops of shoppers, the funhouse funnel
of consumerism. His breath fires shallow bursts from his throat. He feels giddy and frantic
among the kaleidoscopic racks of bagged fertilizer, Ditch Witches, garden hose, and
sprinkler heads on sale. Sure that no one suspects him of mischief, he picks up the phone.
His head throbs. His voice cracks.
“I’d like some help in home and garden, please,” he says. As he speaks, he scans the
aisles, the rafters, one-way mirrors and service doorways.
“You’re back,” the voice hums like a cello string.
“I want to know what’s going on,” Dee says. “Now.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 51
“First,” the girl’s voice announces through a muted prelude of Icelandic waves. “Let’s
get this straight. I ask questions. You provide answers. Capiche?”
“What?” Dee snaps. He scours the store for a glimpse of his tormentor. “You on some
exchange program between Idaho and Venice?”
“Why the sarcasm?” the voice asks.
“Call it wit,” Dee says. “When I find out who you are, your ass is grass.”
“Threats,” the voice says as if taking notes. “I’ll remember that.”
“Let’s start with last time,” Dee says.
“Shoot.”
“You said I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“You don’t.”
“Where the hell do you get off—”
“Profanes,” the voice says, releasing an explosion of larks. “Goes with threats. And you
don’t, by the way—know what you want. Evidence, I think, in your recent slip into the
gutters of unprofessionalism in class, that little meeting with Dean Ferguson—”
Dees mind spins like a lottery wheel. He grapples for an answer—even a remote one—as
to who this person could be. His eyes dart left and right, loose in their sockets. All around,
mothers and children putter like drones. Instantly, the answer snaps into place. Voila! He
breathes easier, relaxes, no longer ready to pounce.
“—and you looked pretty stupid in front of Karl, the customer service manager, too.
That wasn’t good. College instructors have a certain level of respectability to maintain—”
“Zip it,” Dee says, resolute.
“—a certain level of decorum—”
“We’ll see,” he says.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 52
“Call again,” the girl’s voice chimes, church organs and mice in the background.
“Why? You’re no help,” Dee quips and slams the phone on the hook.
On Friday, the deadline for Dee’s student’s political TASC modules, he asks Dallas
Fender and Ali to stay after class. Like Jack and Diane, they slouch in their desks—legs
spread salaciously, emanating teen sex and idle time, perfumed with the scent of motor oil
and their parents’ bank accounts. After the last student exits, Dee slams the door and pivots
to face them. He jams his finger at them, his purple political TASC modules cocked on his
hip like a peacock’s tail. Flushed but communicative, he unleashes a monster truck of
Armageddon.
“Where do you and your little—floozie—get off trying to embarrass me in a public place!”
he fumes. “How dare you make a fool of me! Especially with everything that’s been going
on with my family. New job, new place.”
His throat grows parched and gravelly. Dallas and Ali’s expressions waver behind foggy
glass then crystallize into focus.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he spits, ripping a check mark through the air with his index
finger, “this is stalking and harassment, and I haven’t ruled out legal action. I trust your
behavior will cease immediately. End of discussion!”
Rabid and winded, he stands back like a swordsman after a fencing match. A rustling of
TASC modules mars the silence.
Dallas slouches in his chair, arms folded. He rolls a Denny’s toothpick in his lips. Ali sits
forward, lips trembling. Tears leak from her eyes, not from guilt, but from the Calvinistic
force of Dee’s rhetorical slamdunk. She releases a whimper and stares at her teacher like a
Pomeranian that’s peed on a rug. With the decorum of a Gestapo officer, Dee excuses them
from class, his mission complete.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 53
In thirty minutes, he’s in Dean Ferguson’s office and put on probation.
He decides to tell Reneé nothing about it.
In the parking lot, he stands and watches a white Buick Skylark with baby blue rims drive
by and honk. It’s Dallas and Ali. They wave.
In a blind rage, Dee drives to MegaMart. He crashes through a barricade of carts and
skids to a stop. On the way in, he passes Doogins the Clown. Doogins has changed into a
ringmaster’s tie and tails and holds a Chihuahua that wears a Francis Bacon ruff collar.
Doogins waves weakly. The dog yaps and bears its teeth. Half-stumbling, half-running, Dee
reaches the home and garden section. He picks up help phone thirteen.
“Who are you?” he hisses, cross-eyed with bloodlust.
“Slick,” the voice says. “Probation. Some of your students aren’t even on that.”
“I swear, if you don’t tell me—”
“You didn’t even call first to see if they work here—”
“—I’ll find out, and even if I don’t—”
“—or if any of your other students work here, or someone they know—”
Mad as a pit bull, Dee feels his voice rise to volcano force.
“Who—are—”
“Remember, think before—”
He bellows and seizes the phone cord. Like an Olympic hammer thrower, he heaves his
body into a hard arc and swings the phone over his head. On the back swing, he nearly
removes the head of a brunette girl with braids who’s flying a Super Barbie Jumbo Jet
behind him. The girl’s mother, a frazzled woman in bleached overalls, shrieks and shields
her daughter with her body. With a roar, Dee shatters the phone against the kiosk. A
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 54
nearby croquet display topples. The balls spin like a wrecked solar system down the waxed
aisles. He races to the front of the store.
At the customer service counter, he barges to the head of the line and finds Karl standing
like an orangutan waiting to be fed. With each word, Dee strikes the counter with his fist.
“Tell—me—what’s—going—on!”
“Get security,” Karl calls to the back room as people scatter.
Before Karl can call the cops, Dee storms out into the blinding sunlight, shirt collar
flapping, arms battering Satanic swarms of invisible bats.
“Hey!” Doogins calls, restraining his growling Chihuahua.
Back on campus, Dee locks himself in his office. He whips through a teetering pile of
correcting and scoring. He slops together Monday’s presentation on electronic TASC
modules. Halfway through, he stops and rakes aside the mountain of papers and weeps into
unsteady hands.
“Insane,” he babbles to his brain. “I’m going insane.”
Somehow, this acknowledgement is sweet. He feels pleasantly pure, having drunk the
syrupy orange elixir of this admission. He has seen the end, and it bears his clown face.
There is a peace, he understands, that comes with dropping the burden of sanity. With this
thought, his fractured psyche snaps together. Exhausted but newly calm, he sits up, fixes his
tie, runs a hand over his head. Whistling “Send in the Clowns,” he rummages through his
desk for his cell phone.
“Honey?” he says. “Late again, yep. Grading, committee work, exams. I’ll be home as
soon as I can.” With his thumb, he ends the call. “None of which is true, by the way.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 55
Then he drives around Idaho Falls and Ammon until ten minutes to closing at MegaMart.
He parks in front and from the back seat of his VW produces a fishing cap, sunglasses, and
navy blue windbreaker. He puts them on. With an air of caution, he re-enters the store.
Inside, MegaMart is shutting down. Between the Cheetos and Hallmark cards, red-vested
“Help Crew” members zigzag across the polished aisles like something from Aldous
Huxley’s dreams. The muzak—“Up Where We Belong”—floats in the rafters among
suspended kid’s bikes and inflatable play forts. Destroyed, drained, shaking, he picks up
help phone thirteen.
“Hello?” he wheezes.
“Hi,” the voice says. A Siamese gong sounds.
“I know you’re almost closed,” Dee breathes.
“I never close.”
“Who are you?”
“Help Phone Thirteen.”
“Then why won’t you help me?” he pleads, simple as a three-year old.
“You never asked.”
“Help me,” Dee heaves.
“With what?”
“Everything.”
“No good,” the voice says, tongue clucking. “I need specifics. Ain’t no genie here
waitin’ to be rubbed.”
Then, the loosening. Glaciers shiver and crack, releasing Arctic torrents. A chilled flood
nudges a beaver dam aside, and the ice-laden moonlit waters surge into the creeks and
eddies. Dee holds nothing back. He rambles more than speaks. He blubbers about the
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 56
charred ash-heap of his soul, and the voice answers—a girl’s voice, then a man’s—
mimicking the sound of traffic on Broadway, the Lunar Lander’s afterburners, Mets game
cheers, the night wind under an owl’s wings, its talons outstretched, the panicked dormouse
scuttling under a heap of rotten maple leaves.
“My wife,” Dee breathes. “Reneé—”
“Beautiful,” the voice interjects. “What about her?”
“She’s interested in everything but me. Why isn’t she interested in me? We’ve been
married ten years. The girls—”
“Try asking her that.”
“She sees talking as an invasion,” Dee says, hand to his forehead.
“Yeah,” the voice says as if admitting something. “I’ll have to get her in here—”
“She’s, she’s—”
“What?”
“Preoccupied.”
“Correct me. You’re preoccupied with her preoccupations.”
“I love her so much,” Dee surrenders. “I want to grab her and squeeze the love out of her
sometimes, but she doesn’t send anything back. It’s like hugging a cactus.”
“She’s been hurt,” the voice intones from within a church.
“So have I,” Dee says. A fit of weeping throttles him. He sniffs, wipes his nose with a
windbreaker sleeve.
“That’s why I’m here,” the voice urges.
“What do I do?” Dee probes. “We’re the parents, and we’re not fit to wipe our own
butts.”
“I’m Help Phone Thirteen. I don’t give help I’m not asked for.”
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“I want help,” Dee says, speaking with a jawful of ice cubes. “Help me with Reneé.
Please.”
“Tell her she’s beautiful,” the voice says, launching a flock of flamingoes into azure sky.
“She knows she’s beautiful!” Dee says, rigid. “She’s gorgeous!”
“Ever tell her that?”
“She knows it.” A door slams. A breaker box clanks. Dee looks around and presses his
body against the kiosk, arms around the cool metal.
“How do you know?” the voice says, tuning a tuba.
“I don’t.”
“So what’s holding you back?”
“Nothing,” Dee says, shivering. “Just don’t like stating the obvious, I guess.”
“So you got it?”
“Beautiful,” Dee repeats. “Tell her.”
“What else? I gotta run.”
“Thought you never closed,” Dee says.
“Don’t,” the voice answers. “I just gotta go.”
“There’s, well,” Dee says, letting the words flow like hasty translations. “She’s got this
sister-in-law. Cherelyn, her brother Marc’s wife? Who’s got throat cancer? They don’t
know if—”
“Right, right.”
“It’s just—never going away. Those things drag on for a lifetime, even if there’s a full
remission. I know it’s sad, and I feel bad and everything. But it’s—possessing us—”
“Cancer’s a biggie,” the voice rattles, rapping at a manual typewriter. A cash register
drawer chimes, a loading dock buzzer.
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“I don’t want our lives to be robbed because hers was.”
“Kinda self-centered, don’t you think?”
“It’s all Reneé thinks about. She’s on the phone for hours with her mother, and
meanwhile, the kids need bathing and feeding. Our relationship takes a hit—”
“Sounding a teensy bit chauvinistic here,” the voice says, kicking away bagpipes. “Like the
world centers on you.”
“There’s another sticking point for us.”
“For you.”
“Me.”
“So would you like help?”
“Yes,” Dee says. He glances around the store’s million-dollar mausoleum. Lights flicker
off. “I need help.”
“Pick up your phone then.”
Automatically, Dee answers his cell phone, which is attached to his belt and chirping a
Mozart concerto. Jillian Slade, Reneé’s mother, sings on the other end. She’s calling from
New York. Static warps her voice, but he recognizes it.
“Dee!” she says. “Is that you? I was just saying—Cherelyn’s cancer is gone. The doctors
are dumbfounded. They can’t find a trace. It’s a miracle.”
“That’s wonderful, Jillian,” Dee says, the two phones like mouse ears to his head.
“The treatments must have taken,” Jillian bubbles.
“Amazing,” Dee says, dry at the lips.
“It is,” Jillian says. “I’ve got to go. Just wanted to spread the good news. I called Reneé.
She’s waiting for you at home. We’ll talk to you kids soon, okay? Bye-bye, now.”
“Bye,” Dee says. He punches the “end call” button with his thumb.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 59
He floats.
Reels.
Goes numb.
“Who are you?” he rasps into the phone. “How can you do this?”
“Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” the voice says. “I’m Help Phone Thirteen. Bye, now.”
With that, the jaunty voice slithers into sand and sugar. A dial tone buzzes in Dee’s ear
then fades into an orchestra mingled with toucans and howler monkeys. Using his cell
phone, he calls Reneé, who, through tears of joy, tells him of her sister-in-law’s miraculous
recovery. Dee listens to the news and tells her he’s coming home because he has something
to tell her, which dampens her mood somewhat.
At home, the girls are asleep. Dee finds Reneé seated at the kitchen table in a sleek black
turtleneck and jeans. She’s floofed her hair like a magazine model. Shimmering triple-loop
earrings swing from he ears. Under the kitchen light, she droops her head in her hands and
stares at the paint booklet on the table. As he enters, she turns to greet him, the joy of her
sister-in-law’s healing lingering in her face like fresh rain.
“Cherelyn’s better,” she says. “Marc called.”
“I talked to your mom. That’s wonderful news.”
“You don’t look happy, though.”
“I have something to tell you,” he says.
“What?” she says, rising.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, weightless as a paratrooper.
“I’m—what?” she says. “What’s that have to do—”
“I think you’re beautiful,” he repeats.
“Dee,” she says, drifting closer.
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Then, with the rest of the world, his body drops into her arms.
“And I’m—not!” he wails, his voice sweeping down a tunnel of years. “I’m not!”
9.
October smokes silence into the valley. Frost scorches smashed gourds, sifts carbon
from wet leaves. Flickers flit in and out of gutted cottonwoods. Late in the day, the
overturned soil releases spirals of bright vapor. A chill clings to tree branches black with
rain. Aluminum sheds and mountainsides glitter. In the fields flanking Highway 20,
Holsteins expel plumes of silver steam, noses gleaming with dew. Evenings, jagged stars
break the sky apart, scattering seeds of light above Dee’s heavenward gaze. Reneé stares
too—then at him. After work and dinner, Dee slips his hands in his pockets and, without
speaking, steps out on the back porch and gapes upward. The girls toddle out, tugging
Reneé by the pant legs.
“Hello,” Rae squeaks.
“What are you looking at?” Colette says, cupping binocular hands around her eyes.
“Nothing,” Dee says.
“Everything,” Reneé says.
Early in the month, two cheerleaders from Mud Lake High School die in a drunk driving
accident. Local EITC and high school students erect corn mazes and spook alleys in the
nearby fields to raise money for a memorial fund. In Thornton, the Ririe High School Pep
Club commandeers a vacant four-story grain elevator and with a bed sheet and scarlet paint
dubs it “The Tower of Terror.” They charge five dollars for admission.
On Halloween, Dee and Reneé don costumes and drive to MegaMart’s “Trunk or Treat.”
Dee dresses as a W. C. Fields-ish honeybee in black tights and Chuck Taylor high-tops.
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Reneé wears a green turtleneck and skirt, with a purple and yellow bamboo sunhat to make
her the flower. Colette and Rae, in white sheets and black ping-pong ball glasses, are the
larvae.
MegaMart stays open late. The parking spaces swarm with parents in station wagons,
teens in SUV’s, and local merchants. A Q102 van blasts Roger Miller and Johnny Cash.
There are tailgate displays for bowling alleys, recycling, adopting animals, taxidermy,
chemical dependency, and Meals on Wheels. A Toyota Supra drapes from its open
hatchback a curtain of Hefty sacks decorated with construction-paper pumpkins. Across the
raised hatch, a banner drips with vampire-blood lettering: Domestic Violence Outreach. All over
the lot, hundreds of bumpers balance buckets of candy corn, Dubble Bubble, and Idaho
Spud bars. The fatty aroma of burgers and bratwurst wafts from barbecue units, and the
glowing orange squares of portable heaters turn the asphalt rows into small runways.
In mittens and ear muffs, the McBrides lounge in folding chairs behind their Stratus,
down comforters and blankets sheathing their knees. As each pint-sized Captain Bly or
Nefertiti hovers by, lamé capes and bloomers rustling, Dee and Reneé invite them to dip
into a tinfoil cornucopia of caramel, cherry chocolate, and nougat. Dee and Reneé take
turns leading Colette and Rae to the other cars—Dee humming to his wife and girls not to
get stung, and Reneé answering, with a smirk, that her “honey” shouldn’t worry. After three
candy rounds, Dee shifts in his chair, thinking.
“Restroom,” he tells Reneé. “I’ll ‘bee’ two seconds.”
“Buzz back,” she says.
At MegaMart’s entrance, hay-bale igloos house gremlins dispensing brochures. Doogins
the Clown flaunts polychromatic tights and a crushed ten-gallon hat. He wears a fiberglass
jack o’ lantern sandwich sign on rainbow suspenders. A squawking emerald parrot hops
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from his head to his shoulders: the stem. A witch’s cauldron of dry ice root beer percolates
at his side. As Dee enters the store, he glances at Doogins, who makes brief eye contact
with him, then offers caramel apples to two pogo-sticking Jawas.
“Closing in five,” Karl calls from the customer service counter.
“I’ll be three,” Dee says, hustling past bathtubs of Atomic Fireballs and Brach’s circus
peanuts.
In the home and garden section, leaf blowers are on special.
Dee picks up help phone thirteen.
“Hello?” he says.
“Hi,” the voice says, tortured ghouls and creaking coffin lids in the background.
“What’s with the scary soundtrack?” Dee says.
“Sorry,” the voice says. “Spirit of the season.” The Halloween sounds fizzle out. “So
how are things going?”
“Better,” Dee says.
“Told ya.”
“You did. But, Reneé, she’s—I don’t know—not happy. She moved out here with me
and—”
“The big move,” the voice commiserates.
“Right.”
“So whatcha gonna do?”
“Don’t know,” Dee ventures. “I thought I could—ask you. For help.”
“So—let me get this straight. You’re asking for help?”
“Yes,” Dee says. “I’d like some help with my marriage.”
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“Awright,” the voice says, flushed with mandolins and circular saws. “In two weeks—
got it?—two weeks, leave work after lunch, drive over here, and at precisely 1:13 p.m.—not
a second sooner or later—I want you to enter the Hawaiian Vacation Getaway Sweepstakes
at the customer service counter. Everything else will take care of itself.”
“Everything?” Dee asks.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just—everything’s a lot.”
“Everything’s what I do. I’m Help Phone Thirteen.”
The store lights waver to black. Dee hovers in a pod of darkness. A service light on the
kiosk shrouds him in a trim cone of green incandescence.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Better go,” the voice says. “You may never get this chance again.”
10.
November. Sleet. Bonfires stuttering in rutted fields. The world a brittle stalk. A
charcoal mist lingers over the state for days. On the banks of The Snake River, cattails
freeze in an elaborate scrim of ice that spreads to the middle of the current, narrowing the
river to a twisted black ribbon. On Highway 20, diesel rigs bellow a chorus of discontent.
At the Thornton Texaco, truck drivers stamp their feet, steam ballooning from their beards.
Reneé lies on her bed.
It’s noon.
As if gripping a stiletto, she holds a single Sherwin-Williams paint card in her hand:
Roatan Bay.
She’s called Chris Benati three times.
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Downstairs, Colette and Rae, kneeling in pajamas, stare at the television like dazed lab
rats. They are entering their third hour of Nickelodeon cartoons. In the kitchen sink, the
dishes from last night’s spaghetti dinner are heaped and crusty. The dining table overflows
with orange rinds, bowls of Cheerios, splattered milk, crayons, and coloring books.
Reneé stares at the ceiling like a saint in a coffin. The bat swarms of depression have
come swiftly this morning, as final and unrelenting as a cold front. Desperately, she claws
for a taste of what’s been happening over the past weeks—the good things, Dee’s change,
the way they talk to each other. But these thoughts mix with more savage birds. She sees
the jeering faces of her high school boyfriends, Captain Hook hooks corkscrewed into the
bloody nubs of their wrists. She feels the lumpy talons of a family friend with a ratty
mustache who reeked of tobacco. She recalls the way his palms leaked poison into her
young skin, his fingers frying pitchfork tattoos into her arms and legs, typing the trashy
manuscript of an endless horror novel down her spine.
She shivers. Her body shrinks into a fetal curl. She fights for air beneath a ceiling of
black ice chandeliers—that explode. Daylight floods her corneas, washing away the muddy
muck until she’s standing on a sandy beach. She doesn’t recognize the village, but she sees a
clump of grass huts, carefree tourists, plump dark-skinned natives selling fruit-colored Tshirts from banana-leaf baskets on their hips. Reggae music ripples through the limeflavored breeze. She rents snorkel equipment, learns to sailboard, canoes the fragrant sea.
All day, she’s borne on balmy wind, the intoxicating odor of spindrift and coconut oil.
In a peach kayak, she paddles to the breakers and plunges into the sea in her snorkel gear.
At first, she’s frightened. But she finds her swimming strokes surprisingly powerful as she
knifes like a mermaid through the surf. She throws her arms and head back, turns hundredfoot loops through shape-shifting screens of snapper and silvertail. Soon, she sheds the
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 65
hindrance of snorkel gear and flippers. Craving more freedom, she peels off her sherbet
bikini. In the mirror eye of a passing gray whale, she sees the sea has bequeathed her the
physique she had in high school. Sans stretch marks, cellulite, and deflated bust line. She’s
sixteen, and her skin snaps back. For a moment, she lingers, admiring her reflection. She
spins, primps, turns. She props a sprig of flowery seaweed behind her ear. A convoy of
loggerhead sea turtles swoops down like a deployment of submarines. She snags a flipper
and, on the back of the lead male, shrinks in size, clinging to its shell to avoid being thrown
to the sea floor. She is a small girl again, untouched. Her parents’ reprimands and platitudes
are garbled in the waves. Lost: her teachers, spankings, pets, first kiss. Found: everything.
The turtles deposit her in a bed of rosy coral. Fascinated, she retrieves a jagged piece and
runs the beautiful rough shard over her fingers. She dandles it across her wrist, where it
feels like the blade of a large kitchen knife. She wonders if she should leave her beautiful
new world. She casts one last look at her new friends, the sea lions and groupers. She
pauses. A pang of cavernous longing surges through her bowels. She listens to the
mournful music of the undersea landscape. Her resolve hardens to a razor edge. She toys
with it, weighs the outcomes. Waits. Wonders. Presses it against the membrane of skin
covering her wrist. So much beauty surrounds her. Purple sponges. Shimmering arcs of
gold light. Glimmering schools of jellyfish like unwashed kitchen windows, anemones of
dirty laundry. Buried treasure, buried life. No end to life. No tomorrow. Whale songs and
stupid cartoons in the living room. Deep inside, she yearns to break the surface, to barrelroll
through sky like a killer whale. She aches to heave sunshine into her lungs. Still, she thinks,
dabbling the coral-knife across her wrist, I’m so safe here. I want to stay here, where everyone loves
me, she sings. She rocks and weeps Pacific tears. I don’t want to go back up there. A little squid
curls a tentacle around her ankle. She presses the coral to her wrist, ready to draw it across
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 66
her flesh. But she is crying, crying. She can’t understand. The sea and her tears flow from
the same salt. Why? she pleads through the tempest. Why am I so sad to leave everything I love?
Then Dee stands in the doorway to the bedroom. He brandishes a red MegaMart
sweepstakes entry over his head.
“Like doing the hula?” he thunders like a game show host. He strides to her side and
rests a hand on Rae, who is tugging at Reneé’s leg. “Oo, better put that away,” he says,
lifting the knife from the nightstand.
“What?” she sniffs.
“Crying? No wife of mine cries! What’s going on around here?”
“I was, I thought—”
“You okay?” he asks. His arm loops her shoulders and raises her to a sitting position.
“Reneé?”
“Fine,” she says, head down. She scoops a wad of tears from her eyes. She forces a
smile through the jet of the sea. “Why are you home?”
“We,” Dee says, “are going to Hawaii. I won a contest.”
“When?”
“I entered something at the MegaMart—”
“No,” she says, slumping cross-legged in the pinpoint of light at the end of a dark tunnel.
“When are we going to Hawaii?”
“Tomorrow,” he says. He cups her cheeks in his hands.
“Now,” she says.
“What?”
“Let’s go now.”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 67
11.
Over Christmas, the McBrides send the girls a postcard from the Maui Hilton. Back
home, Evie babysits and collects the mail. For two weeks, the McBrides eat, swim, and surf.
They play shuffleboard, go spelunking, and tour live volcanoes. They fish for marlin and
sleep late. They doze in hammocks, read airport novels, and drink piña coladas served in
coconut half-shells garnished with chartreuse tissue-paper parasols.
As he strolls with her on the beach and traces the acrobatics of seagulls, Dee sees the
sunrise creep into Reneé’s eyes. Her laughter rings like bamboo wind chimes. She takes his
hand of her own volition, asks him to share his thoughts. She flirts in the way she walks, the
way she lets him approach her. At first, they resolve not to call the girls—for it to be just
them. But by the second night, Reneé breaks down, and they call Evie. They blubber like
children at the end of the conversation with Colette and Rae, who hoot and giggle longdistance at their funny mommy and daddy.
On their last night, they sit on the veranda and talk—sunup to sundown. Breakfast,
lunch, and dinner arrive on the balcony. Reneé talks about her parents, their obsessivecompulsive behavior. She even ventures into the territory of her high school and college
relationships, which leaves Dee aghast—not because it’s painful for him, but simply because
he witnesses his wife surrendering—outright offering—hurtful but helpful information.
Paradoxically, he feels not crushed but loved more than ever. For once, Dee listens instead
of talking. To hear Reneé speak to him about her life and feelings is more soothing than the
breath of the Pacific. Eventually, the conversation ebbs to a whisper, and they find
themselves sitting opposite each other, a flaming saber of sunlight dividing a stack of hotel
dishes on the table. Reneé smiles, looks away. Dee feels brave, says what he’s thinking.
“What came between us?” he asks.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 68
“When?” she says.
“After Rae was born. We don’t seem to—chase each other like we used to. I miss it.”
“Memories,” Reneé says, eyes foggy. “Sometimes I can’t get them out of my head.”
“I know,” Dee says, moving to her.
“It hurts to remember,” she says, wiping an eye. “I guess—my way of dealing with—my
past—is to turn away. I’ve learned to hate feelings.”
“What about new feelings to cancel the old?”
“I agree,” she says, accepting his hand. “But how long does that take?”
“Let’s find out,” he says, helping her up.
On the brick-tiled pool deck below, somebody plays an old Don Ho number on a
ukulele. Dee and Reneé limp through a foxtrot. He dips her. She laughs.
“Let me ask you,” he says, now that the wall between them has crumbled. “Why do you
go to MegaMart so much? Is it a girl thing? I can’t stand it. Help me. I’m a guy.”
“Because,” she says, stopping the dance. She looks at him like a child about to get
whipped. “It gives me something to do.”
“Reneé,” he says.
“No, no,” she says. “I need to say this. For me. This is how messed up I am.”
“You’re not messed up—”
“You know what else?” she says, stiffening. Tears pool in her eyes. “Sometimes? I
even—I get so cooped up with the girls—I buy the wrong clothes?—on purpose?—I buy the
wrong ones on purpose—”
“Why—”
“—just so I can get out of the house and go back the next day.”
“Reneé—”
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 69
“So I can go back, I buy the wrong ones on purpose—”
On the balcony, husband and wife fold together. Their last words rise in a full-bodied
wail of laughter. The crash of waves hushes the chatter of guests from Houston and Tokyo.
12.
At home, they paint the girls’ rooms Tropical Cove. They listen to Conway Twitty and
Merle Haggard from the MegaMart bargain bins. They crank call Chris Benati’s architectural
firm office in New York eight times.
13.
From January to April, Dee takes Reneé and the girls to MegaMart once a week.
Doogins the Clown dresses as an Eskimo, Cupid, a leprechaun, and an Italian mafia tulip.
Reneé shops for clothes. Dee splurges on sno cones and corn dogs for the girls. At the
suggestion of Help Phone Thirteen, Dee enrolls Colette in a preschooler gymnastics
program. A competent, affordable pediatrician is found for Rae. When the McBrides’
Dodge Stratus breaks down, the voice on the phone tells Dee where a used Dodge Caravan
can be found at a steal of a price—two weeks before it’s officially on the lot at Bonneville
Auto. They trade in the Stratus and buy the Caravan, and Reneé congratulates Dee on his
initiative and financial savvy. Once, while hunting for sales, Reneé strays through the purses
and makeup, leaving Dee with the girls. Convinced she won’t see them, he takes his
daughters’ hands and leads them to kiosk thirteen.
“Hi,” Colette says into the receiver.
“Well, hello there, little missy,” the voice crackles through popcorn and candy wrappers.
“And this is Rae,” Dee says, hoisting Rae up to the phone.
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“Hi,” Rae barks into the mouthpiece. “I’m fine. Good. Bye.”
“Cute,” the voice says to Dee. “Have a good trip?”
“Yeah, when’s the next one? We were thinking St. Kitts.”
“Whoa, cowpoke,” the voice says. “One per customer. Got a long list of people to
serve.”
“Really?” Dee says.
“I won’t tell you how I hate it when people say that.”
“Don’t have to,” Dee says.
“Anything else coming up?” the voice says, sawing wood. “Anniversary? Birthday?”
“I’ll let you know,” Dee says before hanging up. “Thanks again.”
Then one night in early June, in the same way that Yeats rises to go to Innisfree, Dee
McBride rises from his bed with a scribbled note to himself in his hand and a shishkabob of
suspicion in his heart. Something tells him he’s been duped, that it’s all too good to be true.
Without waking Reneé or the girls, he steals downstairs and dons a denim jacket and black
stocking hat. With a black water-based magic marker from his daughters’ coloring boxes, he
darkens his face. Before leaving, he tapes a note on the door: “Don’t worry. Went to
MegaMart. Be back for breakfast.”
In the post-midnight darkness, he rambles south on Highway 20. His senses trip on
electric energy, as if he could never sleep again. Before reaching Idaho Falls, he takes the
Hitt Road exit and drives past EITC, heading toward the 17th Street stoplight. The campus
hunkers like a bomb shelter in the night. A spotlight illuminates the U.S., state, and EITC
flags. As if for the first time, he notices the EITC sign, a granite sculpture of a gold sun
impaled like a huge cheese on stiletto mountains. At the light, he turns west.
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Using a map torn from the phone book, Dee sniffs out a side street called Shelby Drive.
On Shelby, he parks and cancels his headlights. Before getting out, he shines a pocket
flashlight on a piece of paper in his hand. He unfolds the paper—a green Xeroxed flyer
from a place called “Clown World.” The writing on the paper is his. The paper reads:
“2401 Shelby Drive, Doogins’ home address.”
He slips like a cat burglar down the street, sidling through cars and shadows. His liquid
breath grows shallow in his lungs. In a way, he doesn’t want to spoil the mystery, to know.
But something hot in his veins propels him forward. He’s come this far, he figures, so he
might as well finish it. For ten minutes, he circles the house at 2401 Shelby Drive, trying to
get a glimpse through a window. But the shades are drawn, and so he retreats to his car.
He sleeps until dawn. For two hours, he stakes out Doogins the Clown’s home
residence. Around eight, on the verge of Dee’s surrender, a man exits number 2401, gets in
a battered yellow Toyota truck, and drives away. Dee tails him. On 17th Street, the morning
traffic thickens, and Dee loses the little truck near Kentucky Fried Chicken and Harvest
Bread Company. Using an alternate route, Dee speeds toward MegaMart. He wipes his face
with Super Kleen Kiddie Wipes from the back seat. At the entrance, he finds MegaMart
open for business, but Doogins hasn’t arrived.
He hustles inside. Drowsy customers pluck diapers and granola from the shelves. The
intercom plays “Somebody’s Baby.” Near the back of the store, he peeks through the
swinging “Employees Only” doors and saunters into the cavernous loading dock. He scans
the stadium-sized inventory then lifts a MegaMart “Help Crew” vest from a nail. He slips
the vest on and checks all the service entries and loading docks. The storage bays are filled
to capacity with pallets of shrink-wrapped merchandise. The huge packages rise to the
ceiling like cargo from a science fiction film, cells of giant hornets or alien embryos. Faceless
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 72
“Help Crew” men and women nod and smile as they pass. The push pallet jacks, loading
dollies, and shopping carts toward their attack posts. Unable to spot anyone who looks like
Doogins without makeup, Dee gives up, returns his vest to the nail, and walks to the home
and garden section.
Sprinkler heads and gardening trowels have been dumped in shopping carts and tagged
with red “Sale” stickers.
Looking around, he picks up help phone thirteen. And hears a funeral organ.
“It’s not Doogins,” the voice says, disappointed.
“I didn’t think—”
“Exactly,” the voice says.
“Wait,” Dee says. “I was only—”
“Trust,” the voice says. “Is the central pillar in any relationship. Next to faith. But you
had to meddle.”
“No, I—”
“You had to pry.”
“Please—”
“So it’s gonna cost you.”
“What do you mean?” Dee pleads, panicked.
“I’m Help Phone Thirteen,” the voice says, a cathedral bell tolling doom in the
background over Civil War cannonades. “Hear me roar.”
The phone goes dead.
Stunned, Dee holds the phone to his ear. He scans his surroundings like Matt Dillon in
Tex after he gets shot. He shakes the phone once, expecting a gnome to drop out.
Thunderstruck, he returns home.
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Over steel cut oats and English muffins, he asks Reneé if she and the girls will
accompany him to MegaMart.
“You were just there,” she says.
“Got the wrong stuff,” he says. “Accidentally.”
“Well, in that case,” she laughs.
Holding hands, they enter MegaMart and pass Doogins the Clown, who sports a violet
tutu and scuba gear. Inside, MegaMart is a glittering Oz that buzzes with sleep-deprived
ranks of muffin-stuffing, coffee-quaffing customers. Reneé takes Colette and Rae to look at
swimsuits. Dee, whipped and apologetic, heads to home and garden.
To find help phone thirteen gone.
No kiosk.
No phone.
No help.
Someone armed with a jackhammer has gouged a two-foot crater through the tile and
concrete of the floor—and his heart. He races to customer service. He spies Karl.
“Where’s help phone thirteen?” he demands.
“I’ll help you,” Karl replies, smiling through his mustache.
“Where’s the phone?” Dee begs. “It was here this morning.”
“Remodeling,” Karl says, puzzled. “There are other—”
“I need thirteen,” Dee says.
“Why thirteen?” Karl asks, brows bunched, beginning to recognize Dee.
“I just do!” Dee cries. He staggers through the exit like a mugged tourist into oncoming
crowds. Noting his distracted demeanor, Doogins the Clown approaches.
“Find what you needed?” Doogins asks, blowing soap bubbles from his snorkel.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 74
“For a while,” Dee says, searching the parking lot for a savior.
“Huh?”
Then, the payphone mounted on the wall by the vending machine rings.
“Better get it,” Doogins says.
By force of habit, Dee walks to the phone and answers.
“Hi,” the voice says.
“It’s you!” Dee exults. “Where did—what do I do?”
“Excuse me?” the voice says.
“What do I do?” Dee repeats. “I mean, they tore the phone down. I thought I lost you.”
The phone simmers in static. After a tense pause, the voice speaks again.
“Um, I’d like help in electronics?” it ventures.
“Really?” Dee says.
“No, I’m lying,” the voices spits back, edged with sarcasm. “You know, I hate it when
people say that.”
“Yeah,” Dee laughs, recovering. “You’d like help. That’d be a switch, huh? You really
had me going there—”
“Look,” the voice says. “I need some help in electronics, and if—”
Dee swoons. He holds the phone from his ear, stares at it, looks around at the new
world that has become his home. As if they carry the weight of answers in their bags, he
examines the advancing army of shoppers, his brothers and sisters. For a moment, he
wonders what he should say. Action gives way to reaction, and he goes with it, like a leaf
borne on an alpine creek. Instead of clinging to his axis of fearful reason, he summons the
sweeping calm. The pulse of the implausible fills his blood, and he replies.
“You don’t know what you need,” he says to the voice on the other end.
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“What? Who is this?”
“I’m Help Phone Thirteen,” Dee says, tumid with authority.
“Thirteen? This says twelve.”
“Twelve,” Dee says. “Whatever.”
“What do you mean I don’t know what I need?” the voice demands.
“You don’t,” Dee says, sticking firm.
“Naw,” the voice withers. “You’re right. I don’t know what the hell to do with my life.
Everything’s just so, so—”
“See?” Dee says, gaining confidence.
“No, I’m messed up,” the voice says. “But who cares, right? You’re a phone.”
Near the end of the conversation, Reneé and the girls are crowding around him, poking
his ribs, and hugging his legs. Dee finishes the exchange, then hangs up.
“Who you talking to?” Reneé asks, opening a MegaMart shopping bag. Colette and Rae,
like cheerful droids, caper around her legs. They toast each other with drink cartons and
Sugar Shack donut samples.
“Communication department,” Dee shrugs. “Business.”
“Why not use the cell phone?” Reneé says, rummaging in the bag. “Drive to campus?”
“Next time,” Dee says, waving it off.
“Like it?” she asks. She drapes a mint-green dress shirt over his chest. “Your size. On
sale.”
“Thanks,” he says. He kisses her. “I love it.”
“You can return it if you don’t like it.”
“Let’s return it today.”
“Stop.”
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“Three times—”
“Daddy!” Colette calls. She yanks his pant leg and sloshes chocolate-peanut butter Moo
Juice on his shoe. “Where’d the clown go?”
“Clown go!” Rae mimics, bunny-hopping in a circle.
“Gone,” Dee says. He scans the MegaMart entrance, parking lot, the horizon. “Maybe
for good.”
“Race you to the car!” Reneé cries, off with a head start.
“Hey!”
*.
It begins with sarcasm.
But it doesn’t last.
“Bet you’re breaking the bank here in cow country, Dee,” Harv Slade says. Harv picks at
his MegaMart nachos with all the verve of a tourist prodding an octopus with a wedge of
driftwood.
“Dad,” Reneé says. “We have everything we need.”
The McBrides and the Slades sit at two tables in the MegaMart food court. The Slades
have flown out to see the town and their daughter’s refurbished house. Basically, they’ve
come to snoop. Harv sits opposite Reneé. He wears a pressed navy-blue Polo shirt, tan
slacks, and brown leather belt from the St. Andrew’s pro shop. His silver hair and mustache
are trimmed, and his Rolex glitters like gladiator armor. His stomach churns, and he still
isn’t convinced his daughter hasn’t been brainwashed. Idaho, he mutters. Sounds like some
damn disease you get from a tick. He examines his daughter’s eyes for any glint of derangement
and scours a canine tooth with his tongue.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 77
“Everything,” Reneé says. “Really.”
Jillian has paid eighty-five dollars for a shampoo and set. In flamingo pantsuit and gold
Nigerian jewelry, she sits opposite Dee. She tries desperately to preserve her twelve-inch
monolith of gray cotton candy hair from the buzzsaw maneuvers of her two whirligig
granddaughters, who wriggle like trout on her lap. She laughs and dodges a kiddie haymaker.
Like a punch-drunk prizefighter, she swivels her face away and fights back with soft, openhanded jabs. Dee smiles.
Outside, August spins and fades over the Ammon City Centre shopping district. The
light drapes buildings and cars and people in red-gold fire. Jillian sees the sinking western
glare, as Reneé and Harv chat about house paint colors, and she is struck by its simple
beauty. She watches the light blossom in sidewalk cracks, penetrate dirty shirt creases, chase
specks of dust and darkness. Then, she’s blindsided by a Colette McBride uppercut and a
Rae McBride Sunday punch. Cornered, she expels an exhausted laugh and sends an S. O. S.
to all sectors of the food court. As a last resort, she pulls clown faces, wheezes “Old Mother
Hubbard,” and launches a patty-cake defense that her granddaughters parry easily and reduce
to feeble hand-jiving.
For its “Crazy Days” one-year celebration, MegaMart stages a fireworks show. Dusk
descends, and the sky ignites. The pyrotechnic rain blazes on windshields and upturned
faces and green plastic yard rakes on special for 50% off. In the shoulder-to-shoulder
crowd, the Slades and McBrides gawk at the small-town sky. With each blast of chameleon
flame, Dee covers his eyes. For the time being, he hopes to elude discovery. He looks up,
and counts the porcupine balls of red-gold and green-silver that take on exotic names in his
mind: March Meadow, Moon Fossil, Tumbleweed, Coyote.
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 78
Right now, he tells himself, isn’t a good time to let Reneé and his in-laws see him cry.
They’ll only condescend, ask questions, draw faulty conclusions. Later, when he and Reneé
are alone, they’ll lie in bed and stare at the ceiling they’ve painted. Then he’ll tell her how he
cried when no one saw him. He’ll tell her how the look on her face this night was the face
of pure joy. How her declaration of happiness to her father was the greatest speech he’s
ever heard. Using simple language, he’ll say that when he looked at the sky, he saw fireworks
of imperial red and violet and golden ash, but he also saw the sparks stream to heaven like
body and soul, like sperm and egg bursting into a cosmos of children. He’ll tell her how, as
he watched the colorful bombs pinwheel and spray the sky with light, he saw the
innumerable lightning strikes of their generations, their children and children’s children,
streaking to earth like little meteors, burning with a brightness more glorious with every
second of their descent.
#.
Merle Fawcett made a fortune in electronics as CEO of his Los Angeles firm, Global
Tech, Inc. Then he retired early and moved to a small town. As his children have grown,
he’s found himself hungry for something bigger than success, which he’s already achieved.
So when the long evening reaches through the grasshopper haze on Shelby Drive, he finds
himself scratching the itch of an inner restlessness. This urge to challenge himself in new
and meaningful ways is only intensified by the sounds of suburban solace: children laughing,
Big Wheels and bikes, the clink of lawn sprinklers, the airy wings of gossip, church bulletins,
and weather. His wife, DuPree, has no idea how much he’s really worth because he’s never
told her—not out of selfishness, but reluctance. He simply doesn’t want to know how much
anymore. The reservoir of guilt he carries compels him toward and away from full-scale
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responsibility. In some ways, and on his worst days, he sees this debt to humanity as a sum
he can never finance.
When he first mentioned his intentions to move to Idaho, his family stood, slackjawed,
around the kitchen table. One by one, they strode over and gawked out the window at the
L. A. skyline as if aliens had bombed the city. They still think he’s crazy. Now, he craves
only to be left alone, in the company of his wife and children. He wishes to be lost forever
in Podunkville, for endless communion with Elsewhere, a regular corner table at the only bar
in Nowheresburg. Friends from the old corporate machine—the one he started—still call
his house and try to coax him back into the gasoline-powered coliseum of concrete and steel.
But he won’t budge.
He’s changed his phone number.
He’s moved twice.
Mornings, his schedule is simple. Around eight, he tells DuPree he’s going to his office
in the Teton Mall plaza. Halfway down 17th Street, he turns his Toyota truck into Tautphas
Park and strides with a duffle bag across the wet grass. He dodges the water sprinklers and
enters the cinderblock men’s room. Inside: a poofy blue shirt, orange wig, white makeup,
and—depending on the theme for the day—other sundry props, gimmicks, and novelties
he’s scrounged up from the Salvation Army across from Scotty’s Hamburgers on Northgate
Mile. In the damaged metal mirror over the sink, he checks his reflection. He adjusts his
costume and swipes away a stray smudge of red makeup with his thumb. He reads the
graffiti on the walls and laughs. Sometimes, he reads a message scrawled on the wall and
stands mute, shoulders sagging, thinking about the desperate soul who wrote it.
At the MegaMart in Ammon, he uses a complimentary key to enter the store. At the
customer service counter, he waves to Karl, who grins through his walrus mustache.
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In the maze of the store, he selects one of the many help phones. Avoiding scrutiny, he
unscrews the receiver and inserts a tiny two-way radio speaker the size of a dime. Then he
replaces the mouthpiece. Outside, as sunrise swells the parking lot, he repeats the procedure
with the payphone receiver. After prepping the phones inside and out, he stands for a
moment like a man whistling and waiting for a cab. Idly, he flips a third shiny radio disc
from his thumb into the air and catches it. He practices a casual sleight-of-hand sidearm
motion with the teeny radio in his hand, as if patting someone on the shoulder in order to
attach it to that person’s clothing. He rehearses the fluid flip-catch-and-attach routine until
he channels its invisible rhythm in his arm and shoulder. For a moment, he stands and
stares at the parking lot. Then, without looking, without moving anything except his arm, he
whips a cell phone from his pocket. He cups it like a magician palming a trick egg, flips it
open, punches a few keys, listens, snaps it shut, twirls it, plunges it in his pocket, and stands
as motionless as a Buffalo Bill gunslinger.
He thinks of the others. Many of them he’s never met. The majority he will never meet.
He imagines: A gossamer-haired former insurance CEO drives from his Florida bungalow,
emerges from a Chinese restaurant restroom in red nose and ruffled jumpsuit, and two-steps
like a snake-oil salesman in front of Bargain World. In Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a former
UN ambassador paints a blue tear beneath his right eye in the mirror of the Valu City
employee restroom. Two retired rock music executives, in the purple cowl and streaked
tights of medieval mountebank and merry andrew, stand in an April hailstorm in front of
Fuccillo Automall in Watertown, New York, and, when they take customers’ hands and lead
them under umbrellas around fake vomit on the sidewalk, goose them with joy buzzers. A
British hippie marquis dons Groucho Marx glasses and polka-dot tunic at the Bayswater stop
on the London Underground, bangs his tambourine and cackles knock-knock jokes. A
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forty-two year old Sacramento Internet tycoon in false skinhead and giant sunglasses
produces a banana cream pie and rubber chicken from the folds of his mango robe and
spooks snake charmers with ah-oo-gah blasts from his car horn on the streets of New Delhi.
They smile and cut capers and mix with the locals. They strike up conversations. They wait
in sun and shadow as the dusty earth rolls through a galaxy of receipts and pink slips and the
chatter of time clocks toward its next fantastic drudgery. Then they take what they’ve
recorded and make notes, tap it into databases, make calls, send emails. They laugh and cry.
They wish things were different and hope things never change.
After rehearsing his warm-up ritual, Merle pops his knuckles, jogs in place, cracks his
neck. He assumes the goofiest stance he can envision. Sometimes he uses a rented cotton
candy stand, sometimes jokes or games or toy balloons. Under his wig, he’s rigged up a
headset, which is hardwired to a computer chip he developed for the FBI. The chip, when
spoken through, garbles the speaker’s voice and makes a man sound like a woman and vice
versa. In addition to altering the speaker’s voice, the chip laces in a digitally-enhanced
lexicon of sound effects recorded from the wild, the media, the world of commerce, and
mundane town life. The entire program, which he wrote, is triggered at his command via a
palm-sized computer Velcroed to his wrist.
As he watches the waves of shoppers enter the store each day, he feels both despair and
hope. And shame—because in a way, he’s created them and their insatiable desire to own
horrendously overpriced high-tech doohickeys and gadgets. He and others like his former
self created the gizmos that beep and whir and store thousands of computer files in a space
the size of the human thumbnail, those that save recipes, save the world from aliens, and tell
people when their favorite television shows are being recorded. So shame, because it’s partly
his fault. And hope, because he knows it’s not completely futile. They’ve lost their souls, he
Babcock / Help Phone Thirteen / 82
knows. But only for a season. They’ve given their lives away. Offered their hearts as
sacrifices to the metallic god of consumerism. Become zombies of the Yankee dollar. But
only temporarily. They’ve learned, because he has taught them, to look past the ones they
should love. For now. But they won’t always be people sucked dry by a chrome-plated
technological vampire. What he’s done, he knows he can undo one soul at a time.
There’s really one thing, he tells himself, that keeps him going. In a word: wonder. In all
the sun-drenched hours he’s logged in front of so many stores and malls and marts, he’s
seen some amazing things, strange occurrences, many of them things even he can’t explain.
But as his experiences have taught him gradually to release his existentialist grip on the
plausible, he’s found himself turning instead to mystery, to surrender, to the ring of chatting
faces at the corner table of belief. So each morning he sets up.
Then he waits.
And as the crowds arrive, as regularly as waves of dawn troopers, their arms burdened
with bags and cranky children and the crushing weight of ordinariness and mediocrity, he
receives them.
As any true master would.
He sings.
Loudly at first. Then, as they march closer, a little more softly until his song is a rolling
but barely audible whisper.
“Where are the clowns?” he sings to them, to himself, as they stream into the store.
“Send in the clowns!”