As the 'Me generation' eighties ground through and turned into the 'X generation' nineties, the world rolled with the punches absorbing an accelerated rate of change never before seen. Typewriters hit trash heaps and antique shops while personal computers invaded homes and the World Wide Web placed facts, philosophies, chats with total strangers and erotica at the public's fingertips. Publishing houses quaked at the ramifications while a new cause of accidents cropped up on the highways as people tried to juggle phone calls with driving. The world powerhouse of the USSR marched through Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Afghanistan, finally crumbling and dissolving all together, changing its name to the Commonwealth of Independent States. Americans made jokes about birds in the hand versus birds in the Bush as Dan Quayle entertained the press with his spelling. Nuclear winter hovered over the Ukraine as Chernobyl melted down in a classic sci fi scenario, obliterating 35 small towns in its vicinity, while Hurricane Hugo demolished the old South. World wide the family suffered meltdown too as double income families clawed and scratched to keep up with the rising winds of rampant inflation and latchkey children came home to empty rooms.
Helga sat quietly in her home, listening to the sheep munch and the crickets chirp, watching Curley, Fluff's successor wander around the flock, keeping lambs in line, unconcerned about the sweeping world changes blowing around her as leaves do in the fall, reading Anne Tyler, "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," finding comfort in the story of a broken family that finally comes to terms. She was worried about the future, having put all of her savings into the farm over the years to try to compete with the larger, mechanized concerns. She came to the heart-breaking conclusion she had to sell her land or find herself suffering in old age unable to work it, unable to keep her house if the farm didn't bring in income. Helga stiffly rose and called a Realtor, and four months later became the first of her family ever to live on no more land than a city lot, having kept the yards around her home and selling off the rest of the acreage and sheep. She felt as if her soul had been ripped out of her chest.
Dinah was also growing tired of supporting her husband, Fred having lost his job simply due to being unable any longer to do anything but roll to a sitting position in bed and wolf down food. His weight had swelled to 525 pounds, and Peter helped Dinah put concrete blocks under the bed since the metal legs had started to bend under the stress. He would sit in his bed and stare out the window all day, watching the trees bending in the spring winds, unconsciously disturbed to see the branches sweep low, pointing in the direction of the grave sites by the old town church. When he needed things, he yelled, and Dinah obediently came to him and catered to his every wish around slipping out in the mornings to work a few hours in the local department store to keep a roof over their heads. They no longer slept together, there being no room for Dinah in the bed and her not wanting to be there anyway, fearing she would be smothered in her sleep if he ever rolled over on her. She pleaded with Fred to seek medical help, to no avail. He adamantly refused help and fought off paramedics she called in one day with a strength and vengeance unsuspected from his bloated frame. They left him to his own devices, telling Dinah they couldn't take an unwilling patient unless he were declared mentally incompetent. Dinah looked into that and had a psychiatrist come out to the house to evaluate him, which Fred endured to humor her. The doctor came out and announced that other than an eating disorder, Fred was oriented and aware and he could not be committed because he had no acute disorder due to his weight, so it was not considered life-threatening. That if he chose to eat himself to death it wasn't considered sufficient of an illness to be declared incompetent.
The time came around for the kids to begin college, and with Peter off studying divinity, and Tammi entrenched in figuring out how to teach children, Dinah found herself without the strong right arm and gentle domestic aide who had helped her so much in dealing with her recalcitrant whale of a husband. On a steaming Georgia autumn night with the six air conditioners in the house working sweaty overtime, frustrated and lacking any other solutions, she decided, if he wants to eat himself to death, so be it. She knew he wolfed his food without bothering to chew, so began to prepare a meal especially for him. She cut raw carrots into inch-long cylinders, mixed them with whole radishes, cherry tomatoes, olives, Vienna sausages and Spanish peanuts and fluffed them into an exotic salad with a vinegary dressing, serving it with very well toasted dry rusks. For the main course, stroganoff, with large chunks of tasty, tough stew meat and whole small mushroom caps, accompanied by tiny new potatoes and whole baby fried okra. Dessert topped the meal with raw cherries swimming in whipped cream and short bread decorated with a sprinkling of jelly beans, sugar mamas and juju bees. She kind of forgot to bring his drink, delivered the meal with a sweet smile, and sat to watch him enjoy it.
He crunched his way through the salad well enough, mangling each bite with one chaw then swallowing hard. Slurping loudly, sauce slapping him in the face when the noodles flipped as he slithered them into his mouth, he worked his way through the stroganoff, muttering garbled comments of how well it was made while he ate, nonstop, downing each wad of meat with a loud gulp. Dinah began to wonder if there was anything that could stop this man, and began to chat with him, telling every rude joke she could think of, knowing these always sent him in to gales of laughter. He dove into his dessert, not even wondering why his demure wife was suddenly telling limericks and dirty tales, laughing loudly at her quips, splattering saliva and whipped cream all over his shirt as he guffawed, still shoveling in the dessert, which he got through without mishap.
She resigned and helped him on his bedside toilet, her arms shaking from the strain of helping him move around, settled him back in bed and flipped on the TV. Later in the evening, watching reruns of "I Love Lucy," his favorite show, he asked for his customary popcorn and pretzels, which she trudged to the kitchen to get, throwing it in the microwave, grumbling under her breath. She brought the snacks back with his customary 12 pack of beer, wondering if he'd eat whole boiled eggs in the morning.
Laughing at one of Lucy's disasters, shoveling in popcorn, he started to cough; then sputter, his face turning bright red. He gagged, unable to speak, with his eyes growing larger. Dinah tried to get him to lean forward and pound on his back, but his body instinct was to arch his back and she did not have the strength to push him forward. She hopped off the bed and walked sedately to the phone, picked it up and informed the 911 operator she thought he was choking, her heart pounding loudly in her chest. The operator explained the Heimlich maneuver, which she replied with the fact he was too large for her to embrace, could they please send an ambulance. She then retired to the parlor, unable to continue watching him gasp, and turned up the TV in that room to try to drown out the bed groaning as he thrashed around and the wet sounds of his gurgling wheezing that slithered around the edges of the closed bedroom door.
Thirty minutes later the paramedic truck arrived, and after removing the door frames and using piano dollies for support, the medics took away a very dead, reeking Fred who had peed and shat all over himself.
Dinah duly informed the children, who each found an excuse in tests or vital classes not to come home, although Peter did ponder for a few days as to why he didn't want to go, dismissing the twinges of guilt with the knowledge that Fred had been no father to him, replacing guilt with an empty space in his memory where a father should have been. Tammi, half drunk when her mother called, recalled Fred making advances at her when she came of age and kissed him off, glad to never see his pasty face again. Dinah called her mother, who simply stated, "good riddance." She had him buried quietly without any services, having to relinquish her plot beside him in the process since they needed that to accommodate his oversize casket. She didn't mind that at all, the prospect of being beside him for all eternity causing her to shudder, and walked away into the russet Fall, a widow, happy, and free, knowing now beyond a doubt that God does answer prayers.
Dinah went home and had a bonfire, burning the mattress, box springs, the wooden part of the bed frame, his portable potty, his clothes, his pictures, his videos of Lucy, and of Lucy, his toupees, his cheap cologne, and every last other vestige of him she could find in her home. The neighbors chalked it up to grief and never saw the bottle of champagne discreetly chilling beside her lawn chair in the fire bucket. The flames licked high into the night, sparks rising like fireflies to disappear among the stars, and Dinah raised her glass to Fred and drank to her own good health.
Over the course of the years, his son Peter joined the ROTC classes in school and graduated, going into the army as a chaplain, trading his flowing black robes for fatigues, never dreaming he'd be sent to war, but a storm blew up in the desert and he flew to Iraq on its winds. His hitch near Kamisiyah was short, for the war was short, and soon he had finally washed the last grit from the folds in his body and was sitting behind a desk at Fort Stewart, counseling young soldiers again, trying to ignore a nagging cough that seemed to have returned with him from the dunes. When his hair started falling out and the diarrhea he attributed to having drunk bad water over there failed to cease, he began to worry, but figured his extreme fatigue was due to the stomach problem. Rashes, sudden joint pain, blurry vision and dizziness soon followed, and when he began having chest pain that made him concerned he was having a heart attack, Peter sought help.
The VA hospital ran him through a variety of tests, concluding there was nothing wrong with him that they could find. Peter knew his body was going haywire, and began to seek private medical care for an answer, peeling his way through his service pay savings one appointment at a time, getting nowhere. Dinah's first move was to encourage Peter to get a medical discharge so he could come home and she could care for him properly, concerned that the military accommodations were making his illness worse. Peter agreed, and within four weeks, his discharge was granted, and he returned home to the ministrations of his mother.
Sunny also was having medical problems, but of a happier kind. She and Todd had carefully calculated when she could conceive, and in a comedy of errors managed to create their only child, Marcus Grant Black. The pregnancy was difficult, and Sunny greeted the mornings vomiting and dizzy, collapsing in the evenings with hands and feet swollen to the size of the softballs she so easily pitched. Her diabetic genes rebelled and the term turned toxemic, and the hugely expectant, nauseated mother-to-be danced heavily through a very carefully controlled diet at the agile hands of her husband and chef. Ten months later, the egg not having hatched, the doctors felt it best to remove the baby, who they estimated had exceeded eleven pounds. Half anesthetized and pleasantly groggy, Sunny watched her body cut open from hip to hip and the sideways breech baby lifted out at eleven and a half pounds and raised to the sky, bringing shades of the series "Roots" to her mind, Todd having fainted at the sight of the surgery, recovering in a nearby room.
As she slept off the anesthesia and surgical fatigue, Sunny had a dream of a doorway before her eyes, white light streaking between the door and the frame, a single brass knob the only adornment. A voice, familiar, came into her mind, "behold I stand at the door and knock," and the door began to swing open, the light flooding in. Sunny was hit with a rush of panic and she slammed it shut in her dream, not thinking.
Outside of her, the postop nurses were calling a code, for her heart had stopped from a morphine overdose. Once more dead, once more revived, Sunny woke up the next morning oblivious to what had happened other than a vague memory of the dream, attributing the bruising on her chest to the delivery itself and asked, in the way all new mothers do, to hold her baby and gaze into his dark eyes that were already beginning to show a glint of green.
Two weeks later, Sunny and Grant came home during a blustery summer monsoon, escorted by a very happy Todd. Sitting on the porch to greet them, soaking wet, shivering and mewing with his ears still flat and his eyes barely opened was a tiny Maine coon kitten. Sunny carefully walked into the house, her staples still not removed, set down the sleeping Grant in his new crib, stroked his cheek for a moment, and hobbled back to the porch, painfully bent down and just as gently as she'd carried her son, picked up the tiny kitten and wrapped him in a dishtowel to dry him off, sitting gingerly on the couch, looking up at Todd.
"Ohhh no. We can't have a cat! We have a baby!" Todd protested, Mouse having died the year before of kidney failure.
"I'll be feeding Grant anyway, as long as I'm up, I can feed the kitten too."
"Oh come on! No." The kitten struggled out of Sunny's hands and wobbled over to Todd, licking his hand. "Oh geeeze." He picked it up and the tiny thing immediately began to purr, nuzzling into his palm. "I give. Baby and kitten. We'll keep both."
Sunny immediately got on the phone to learn what to feed it, happy to find out that her baby's formula would suit for the kitten too, and retrieved the preemie bottles they'd been given as a baby shower gift, since they'd never use the tiny nipples and two ounce bottles on their bouncing boy. The days and nights fell into feedings around the clock, formula and cereal for the boy, half diluted formula and tuna fish water for the kitten. Some nights Sunny suspected she had gotten the bottles mixed up in her extreme fatigue, but since both were thriving and growing by the hour, she shrugged it off and didn't worry about it.
Fatkitty, as he was named, grew into an essential part of Sunny's family, her constant companion and Grant's favorite toy. Fatkitty had a mind of his own and a wisdom in his expression that at times startled Sunny into wondering if the cat somehow captured her father's soul when he was born. A huge cat when he reached his prime, outsizing Grant within six months, who then surpassed the cat two months later, he amused the family with rapid-fire fun fits and comforted them with soft affection and gentle paw touches to their face when he greeted them.
Grant grew too, soon wobbling around the house and happily disassembling anything he could manipulate mechanically, keeping Sunny running after him to put her house back together while Todd fussed in the kitchen to cook a healthy balanced diet for the growing baby, fretting over little fingerprints all over his polished tables. Todd and Sunny and Grant settled into domestic bliss, with Todd watching Grant on the evenings when Sunny continued to pursue her search for romantic love, enjoying the strength of the family love she now blossomed within.