I REMEMBER the rest of the day as a cacophonous competition between Dexter and Grumpy Cluck, with the nod going to Dexter, who put in an hour’s overtime, to the surprise and annoyance of all the inmates, with the possible exception of Alice, who found this development “fascinating,” and recorded it on her chart. By dinnertime, the island was quiet again, except for the buzz of conversation, and we were all cheered by the thought that Dexter would not be back until Monday. In the evening, I read episode eighteen of Dead Air, “No Worries, No Kidding,” to a lively Friday audience.
MY MOTHER had begun having trouble sleeping as I approached thirteen. Anxiety hung in the air like a hovering spacecraft or an intercontinental ballistic missile at the crest of its evil arc, and I was no more immune to the ambient anxiety than my mother was. However, one night my mother had borrowed my flying-saucer detector, and, under the influence of its comforting quiescence, she had slept. From the silence of her sleep, I had gotten the idea that I could make big money selling saucer detectors, and that idea had kept me awake most of the night.
The next morning, when I came downstairs for breakfast, I could feel the difference in the mood of the house. Something had relaxed: the system of attractive and repulsive forces that bound the elements of my nuclear family but kept them sufficiently distant to avoid detonation. The forces were still in place, still at work, but they were easy on the job, humming, not whining.
Even my father was humming. He was sitting at the table drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading a newsmagazine. It had been his habit to drink Strong ’n’ Bitter brand coffee, smoke Rawhide cigarettes, and get his news from Snap, a weekly magazine that claimed to deliver “photographic proof,” but my mother, in one of the fits of improvement that came over her at the time of fall cleaning, had persuaded him to drink Olde Plantation House coffee, smoke Oriflamme cigarettes, and read Matters of Moment. He had been grumbling for a couple of weeks, but now he was humming the Oriflamme jingle.
“How did you sleep?” I asked him.
“Fine. Just fine.”
“And Mom? How did she sleep?”
“Fine. Just fine.”
“The detector didn’t go off, I take it.”
“No.”
Pause.
“So, she wasn’t tossing and turning?”
“What?”
“Mom. She wasn’t tossing and turning? She wasn’t vexed and tormented by fears of the imminent approach of flying saucers?”
“How would I know? Ask her yourself.”
In a moment, I did get to ask her. She came to the breakfast table humming, like my father, the Oriflamme jingle.
“I guess you slept well,” I said.
“Oh, I did,” she said.
“Would you say that you got a good night’s sleep because of the saucer detector?”
“Yes, I think I would.”
“Would you say that it was the first good night’s sleep you’ve had in weeks?”
“In I-don’t-know-how-long!”
“Would you say that you slept like a log?”
“Like a baby.”
“Would you say that you weren’t vexed and tormented by fears of the imminent approach of flying saucers?”
“I wasn’t even worried about the bomb!”
“No kidding?” I said. This was a surprise.
“No kidding,” she said. “No kidding, no worries. I mean, no worries, no kidding.”
“So,” I said, marshaling my thoughts, “would you say, ‘I used to be vexed and tormented by fears of the imminent approach of flying saucers, but thanks to the Magnetomic Flying-Saucer Detector I got the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks — in fact, I slept like a baby!’?”
“Say that again.”
“‘I used to be vexed and tormented by fears of the imminent approach of flying saucers — and the possibility that an intercontinental ballistic missile would deliver a nuclear warhead to my back yard — but thanks to the Magnetomic Flying-Saucer Detector I got the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks — in fact, I slept like a baby!’”
After a moment’s reflection, she said, “Yes, I’d say that.”
“Would you say it in writing?”
She would, as it turned out, provided that I wrote it out for her. I did, and with the aid of my Little Giant Printing Outfit I printed some flyers. I used what would today be called clip art, which is to say that I held each flyer up to a window in my room and traced the pictorial diagram of the saucer detector from Cellar Scientist magazine and the saucer photograph that had appeared in the Babbington Reporter. This was not an efficient way of producing flyers, but the results seemed, to me, at that time, well worth the effort. My mother had even given me a slogan: No worries, no kidding!
[to be continued]
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