Prairie grass was the only thing that would grow in the yellow rock flour that passed for soil at the Commerce Vista. But the vegetation was all gone and so now it was just a hardpan mixed with broken glass so that it sparkled when the sun hit it right. There were no particular roads or streets, only the tracks left by the last vehicle. The only thing that kept it all from blowing away was the tamping action of car and truck tires, and the little waist-high fences that partitioned the land into tiny lots and gave each trailer a yard to call its own.
On their first visit to the place, Eleanor had noticed that the neighbor's gate had a little decoration on it. One of Doreen's kids had put it up. It was a jack-o-lantern: a circle of orange construction paper with three black triangles in it, one for each eye and one at the bottom that was apparently supposed to be the mouth. It hadn't struck her as odd that they had Halloween decorations up in June. Not until they'd moved in did Doreen explain that the symbol was, in fact, a copy of the radiation symbols that their kids saw across the highway at the arsenal.
She remembered all of these things one night as she reclined in the front seat of her old Datsun, trying to get some sleep. Eleanor tried not to think of the old Datsun as a car. She tried to think of it as a highly compact mobile home. She called it the Annex.
She could still remember walking down the street in D.C. with her mother when she was a kid and encountering dirty men who slept in parked cars. She could remember how frightened she was of those men and of the way they lived. She didn't want to be like that.
It was not really such a big deal, when you thought about it logically. She was living in a mobile-home park, for god's sake. What was a mobile home but a big boxy car without an engine? Her old beat-up Datsun, parked on four flat tires in front of the mobile home, was like a little annex, a mother-in-law apartment.
The seats did not exactly recline all the way, but they reclined quite a bit. The only hard part was trying to find a comfortable place to lay her head, because it tended to roll back and forth on the hard surface of the headrest as she relaxed. After a couple of hard nights she finally worked out an arrangement of pillows that held her head in place comfortably. That and a sleeping bag and she was all set. She knew that she might be sleeping this way for a while, so she safety-pinned clean sheets into the inside of the sleeping bag and took them out every week and laundered them.
The car's battery was run down but it still had enough juice to run the radio, so it could be said that the Annex had a home entertainment system. Sometimes Eleanor would sit there and listen to a little music, or to news of the presidential candidates. Looking out the windshield, she could see into her neighbor Doreen's trailer and see the candidates running around on Doreen's TV set on top of the fridge. When she watched TV in this way, from a great distance, through layers of dirty glass, unable to hear the sound, it had a weird, pixilated look to it. There were so many politicians going so many places, doing so many cute things to get the attention of the cameras. It was like a nursery school, she thought, full of lonely kids who were always punching each other, running with sharp objects, and sticking pencils up their noses - anything to draw attention to themselves. The TV producers, like overburdened nursery-school teachers, cut frantically from one three-second shot to another, trying to keep track of them, and all their little activities. Each cut made the image on Doreen's TV set jump, startling Eleanor a bit and making her eyes jerk involuntarily toward the screen.
So that was why kids couldn't stop watching television.
The candidates did not seem to have much of an attention span. As the weeks went on, most of them ran into trouble of one kind or another - a poor showing in a state primary, a scandal, or money woes - and dropped out. It always seemed momentous at the time of the actual announcement, and when Eleanor saw a candidate standing somberly in front of some blue curtains, she would turn on the Annex's radio and listen for news of his withdrawal. But a few days later she would realize that she could hardly even remember the candidate's name or what he stood for. And it got to the point that whenever one of the candidates made his little withdrawal speech, she would say, "Good riddance," and snap off the radio.
Eleanor Richmond was sleeping in her car because there was no room left in the mobile home. It only had two bedrooms. Until recently, she and Harmon had slept in one and their children Clarice and Harmon Jr., had slept in the other.
Now everything was discombobulated. Harmon had killed himself. Harmon, Jr., had taken to staying out late. Clarice had remained stable and reliable, a good girl, for a few weeks following the suicide, and then one night she had not come home at all.
And then Eleanor's mother had moved back in with them. Eleanor spent about half of one night trying to sleep in the same bed with her mother before going out into the living room, where she found Harmon, Jr., sacked out on the couch. From there she had gone straight to the car.
Eleanor loved her mother, but her mother had died a long time ago. Only the body lived on. The Alzheimer's had started when she was in the first retirement community. The nice one. The expensive one. By the time they were forced to move her into the not-so-nice one, she had deteriorated to the point where she had no idea what was going on, which was a blessing for all concerned.
Now she was home with Eleanor. She was back in diapers. Mother didn't mind, but Eleanor certainly did - and the children couldn't handle it at all. Eleanor hadn't seen much of her children since Mother had moved in.
With other kids, that would have been worrisome. But Eleanor's kids weren't like that. She had raised them the way Mother had raised her. They had their heads on straight. Even when Clarice stayed out all night, Eleanor felt confident that she was using her head and not doing any of that stupid underclass behaviour.
Harmon Jr., was a case in point. He had been horrified that first morning when he found his mother sleeping in a car. He had tried to insist that he be the one to sleep outside. Eleanor had put her foot down. She was still a parent; Harmon, Jr., was still her child. It was the parent's duty to look out for her children. No son of hers was going to sleep outside, not while she could help it. Harmon, Jr., eventually backed down. But the next day he came home with some sheets of silvery plastic stuff that he had brought at an auto parts store. He went out to the Datsun and stuck this material up on the insides of all the windows, turning them into one-way mirrors. From inside the car, it just tinted the windows a little bit. But from, the outside, no one could see in.
Eleanor really liked it. She liked to come out here and snuggle into her sleeping bag, lock the doors, and He for a while, gazing out the windows. Usually when you went to bed, you were blind. If you heard a mysterious noise outside the window or in the house, you felt scared and helpless. You had to get out of bed and turn on all the lights to find out what was happening. Here in her silvered bubble she could see everything, but no one could see her. If she heard a noise, all she had to do was open her eyes, and she could see that it was a cat scratching in the dirt, or Doreen coming back from her evening shift at the 7-Eleven. And if it was anything more than that, she had Harmon's old officer's .45 sitting in the glove compartment right in front of her, practically in her lap. Eleanor had spent a few years in the Army herself and she knew how to use it. She knew exactly how to use it.
When money got short and times got hard, you stopped worrying about all the superficial nonsense of modern life and you got down to basics. The basic thing that a parent did was to protect her family. That is why Eleanor Richmond felt more comfortable, and slept much more soundly, in her silverized glass bubble with a loaded gun six inches away. Whatever else was going wrong, she knew that if anyone tried to get into her house and hurt her family, she would kill them. She had that one base covered. Everything else was details.