White Noise - Don Delillo [17]
It was out in the parking lot that we heard the first of the rumors about a man dying during the inspection of the grade school, one of the masked and Mylex-suited men, heavy-booted and bulky. Collapsed and died, went the story that was going around, in a classroom on the second floor.
10
TUITION AT THE COLLEGE-ON-THE-HILL is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included. I sense there is a connection between this powerful number and the way the students arrange themselves physically in the reading areas of the library. They sit on broad cushioned seats in various kinds of ungainly posture, clearly calculated to be the identifying signs of some kinship group or secret organization. They are fetal, splayed, knock-kneed, arched, square-knotted, sometimes almost upside-down. The positions are so studied they amount to a classical mime. There is an element of over-refinement and inbreeding. Sometimes I feel I’ve wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. But it is only the language of economic class they are speaking, in one of its allowable outward forms, like the convocation of station wagons at the start of the year.
Denise watched her mother pull the little cellophane ribbon on a bonus pack of sixteen individually wrapped units of chewing gum. Her eyes narrowed as she turned back to the address books on the kitchen table before her. The eleven-year-old face was an expert mask of restrained exasperation.
She waited a long moment, then said evenly, “That stuff causes cancer in laboratory animals in case you didn’t know.”
“You wanted me to chew sugarless gum, Denise. It was your idea.”
“There was no warning on the pack then. They put a warning, which I would have a hard time believing you didn’t see.”
She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.
“I’m happy to do it either way,” Babette said. “It’s totally up to you. Either I chew gum with sugar and artificial coloring or I chew sugarless and colorless gum that’s harmful to rats.”
Steffie got off the phone. “Don’t chew at all,” she said. “Did you ever think of that?”
Babette was breaking eggs into a wooden salad bowl. She gave me a look that wondered how the girl could talk on the phone and listen to us at the same time. I wanted to say because she finds us interesting.
Babette said to the girls, “Look, either I chew gum or I smoke. If you want me to start smoking again, take away my chewing gum and my Mentho-Lyptus.”
“Why do you have to do one or the other?” Steffie said. “Why not do neither one?”
“Why not do both?” Denise said, the face carefully emptying itself of expression. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? We all get to do what we want, don’t we? Except if we want to go to school tomorrow we can’t because they’re fumigating the place or whatever.”
The phone rang; Steffie grabbed it.
“I’m not a criminal,” Babette said. “All I want to do is chew a pathetic little tasteless chunk of gum now and then.”
“Well it’s not that simple,” Denise said.
“It’s not a crime either. I chew about two of those little chunks a day.”
“Well you can’t anymore.”
“Well I can, Denise. I want to. Chewing happens to relax me. You’re making a fuss over nothing.”
Steffie managed to get our attention by the sheer pleading force of the look on her face. Her hand was over the mouthpiece