7-Up

Good God, Megan was thirsty. The thirst came upon her while she ate a bag of chips and watched Dr. Zhivago. She needed vodka to go with the movie. There was nothing to drink in the house except a bottle of soda her son had left in the refrigerator. She poured half the bottle into a tall glass. For the first time in years she was drinking diet soda.

She switched the channel to Dick Clark at midnight. The ball dropped over Times Square. She shuddered. Who would want to be at Times Square on New Year's Eve? And poor Dick Clark. It was courageous of him to go on TV after his stroke, though she didn’t want to see him. Who did? But he apparently did not want to quit working. Probably he got a huge pot of money.

She became hooked on Diet 7-Up. It was so citric and fizzy that it tasted as though it had vitamins. She got up in the morning, ate cereal and drank Diet 7-Up, read the newspaper and watched CNN, then sat down at the dining room table and read.

She was reading 1960s science fiction. Vernor Vinge, Anna Kavan, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Many of the novels and stories questioned gender issues, environmental issues, and war. Some of the writing was surprisingly good, some bad. She outlined a chapter on ‘60s science fiction. She also skimmed some Tolkein--she couldn’t face reading the whole bloody Lord of the Rings again--and The Worms of Ourobouros, fantasy novels which had been widely read in the ‘60s. How she had loved Tolkein. She still had a button that said FRODO LIVES. She idly wondered if her son could sell it for a fortune on e-bay.

She called him at work.

No, he said.

You haven’t even checked.

I’m in the middle of something. I have to file this story by noon.

Will you look it up later?

You have a computer.

We’ve been over this. I don’t use the computer. You use the computer.

He really used the computer very heavily. He was now into You Tube. He had made her watch some You Tube videos. The ones he made were really very cute. He tried to persuade her to star in one so he could have Rose and the other relatives watch it but she said no.

Please no. The FBI would think it’s a militant activity.

You never leave the house. They can’t possibly think you’re a militant.

In the end she agreed to appear very briefly in his video. He pointed the camera at both of them and he said, This is my mom. She never goes online. I gave her a computer and she won’t use it. She’s a total washout.

Megan nodded and said, Yes, I am his mom, and no, I’m not online. So Happy New Year, especially to Rose, Ben, and Abby, who have been told to tune in.

Later he showed her the You Tube page. He looked very sweet, but she looked fat. Just as she suspected. That’s when she went on the Diet 7-Up diet. She wasn’t losing much weight, though. She needed to exercise. Hard to exercise when you didn’t leave the house.

She experimented with walking around the block. She could do it, though it was a little spooky. She carried her insulated coffee mug and sipped coffee or Diet 7-Up as she walked, looking at the houses and trees. People were at work when she took her walk, so the neighborhood was quiet. Philly was a beautiful city if she bothered to go out. The sky was still blue, but the light was different. Brighter? It was supposed to be less bright. She had read that somewhere. But it looked brighter to her. The street would be quiet and then a Hummer or some other huge vehicle would tear down the street. The cars were too big. The SUVs definitely scared her. She should be able to walk around the block without having a panic attack. Even people looked different to her. There was something too tucked-in about them. She couldn’t explain it.

You’re crazy. Take your pills, her son said.

She didn’t tell him she had left them at Rose’s.

When she stayed indoors she felt better. She loved her messy little world of CNN, newspapers, and writing. She was finished with the first half of her book. It was part memoir, part history. The memoir part made her chortle. She included excerpts from her FBI file. Under the Freedom of Information Act she had been able to request it, and she was astonished by how much they had gotten wrong. Yes, she had slept with several radicals, but why was that in her file? Did that make her dangerous? Could she help it if her boyfriends wore leather jackets and planned demonstrations? She was not talking about Vietnam or the Nixon White House while they were having sex, and that was the only time she saw them. It was a hoot. She had gotten Ben to do some legal thing to force them to remove several things from her file. As Ben put it, it was ridiculous to have a file on her. They had nothing on her. She had attended only one or two protests against the Vietnam War. She had worked as a secretary, then gone to nursing school and gotten married. The FBI made her sound like a radical. But here was nothing about her drug use, which proved that the FBI was either stupid or entirely corrupt, in bed with the Mafia.

One morning, while she was taking her walk, she mused about JFK and LBJ. Funny how Kennedy and Johnson were known by three initials, but no president afterwards was. Nobody called Nixon RML. Nobody called Gerald Ford anything. Jimmy Carter was Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan was not RR. Why not? .

She drank her 7-Up and wondered.