Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

was certifiable, or at the very least blind drunk.
    Leaving, she pretends not to see Vinnie; if she smiled, it would come out one of those rictus screamer grins. Engrossed in her Afternoon Serial magazine, Hazel ignores Vera, who’s wondering why a woman who works all week bothers to read summaries of the soap-opera plots. Perhaps all her friends watch, and poor Hazel has to keep up. Vera’s heart warms to Hazel, then cools again when the elevator stops with her floor at knee level.
    When Vera walks in, Carmen holds up a tear sheet still smelling of printer’s ink: REMARKABLE RADISH DIET FIGHTS FAT. DES MOINES DOC PROMISES RADISHING NEW FIGURE IN 30 DAYS.
    “What do you think?” says Carmen.
    “Thirty days of radishes? Carmen, please.” Among Vera’s reasons for distrusting the Lizard is that he’s always telling Carmen how much he likes skinny girls. Consequently, Carmen has been on every fad diet known to man and permitted by the Seventh-Day Adventists. She loves talking about her diets, conversations that are theoretically about willpower and actually about food: I was doing fine till Cousin Lupe brought over her three-layer devil’s-food cake. Nothing but grapefruit for two weeks till Uncle Manuel had his barbeque—chicken, ribs, rice with squid, buttered pigeon peas, coco flan.
    Now she says, “No, I mean this .” She points to two postage-stamp-sized pictures at the top of the story. Like all before-and-afters, they look like no one you’d ever run across in real life. But these are both Carmen: Carmen bulging prettily out of a modest one-piece bathing suit beside Carmen with so much weight airbrushed off she looks positively anorexic.
    “Did Solomon take these?” Vera asks.
    “I volunteered,” says Carmen, saluting. “Now listen, here’s my diet. I send the ‘after’ shot to Frankie in Fort Benning. I say, ‘Look how skinny I’ve got!’ Then I’ll have to lose it before he comes home Thanksgiving.”
    “Don’t do it,” says Vera.
    “Relax,” says Carmen. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll just tell him I gained it back again.”
    “Forget it,” Vera says. “Just forget it. Are Shaefer and Esposito back yet?”
    “Jury’s still out,” Carmen says. “Go to your office, put your feet up, take it easy. I’ll buzz you when they come in.”
    Obediently, Vera trots off and actually puts her feet on her desk. She thinks of one of Solomon’s pre- This Week photos—the furrowed soles of an old Mexican who’d just completed a barefoot fifty-mile walk to some shrine. Leaning back, she studies her bookcase, filled mostly with books she’d gotten in the office mail and hadn’t thought worth taking home, including—she sees now—a load of material from Ray Bramlett and the cryptobiologists. She picks out Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy? and, opening at random, reads:
It is nearly impossible for most city dwellers to imagine a terrain wild and vast enough for a creature of Bigfoot’s size to live there undetected. In many ways, Bigfoot is a creature of the last frontier.
    When she catches herself reaching for Lowell’s letter again, she decides that working will make the time pass faster.
    Another game she plays, a little like Where-Did-This-Story-Come-From? only more productive, is to shut her eyes and put her finger on the nearest printed matter and make a story out of whatever word she’s touched. In this case it’s the salutation on Lowell’s letter: Howdy! She switches on the typewriter and without thinking slugs in the head: HOWDY DOODY VICTIM OF BIZARRE KIDDIE CULT. SHOCKED MOM SUES.
When six-year-old Teddy Fedders’s friends asked him to bring his Howdy Doody doll out to play, little did the Michigan tot suspect that his beloved puppet would become the latest victim in a wave of violence aimed against America’s best-loved dummy.
    In a schoolyard not far from his posh Bloomfield Hills home, little Teddy watched in anguish as the marionette—a legacy from his Dad, killed in a car crash