Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Her table shook. Someone had bumped it. An older man turned to apologize but his wife spoke first.

“Nimble as a cat,” the woman said, her voice a patrician purr. Josie looked up to her, laughed and took in the woman’s face: it was beautiful, with an upturned nose, a delicate chin. She had to be seventy.

Hearing Josie’s laugh, the woman turned again to her. “I’m sorry. He’s just lost a step lately. He was a very debonair man — even last month.” The woman smiled, turned away, evidently embarrassed. She’d said too much.

“Who are those people?” Ana asked.

Josie shrugged. Her daughter’s face was streaked with dirt and dried snot. Josie had seen a sign for showers available at the campground, somewhere in a vast log cabin in the woods, so after breakfast they put on flip-flops, bought the necessary tokens and brought their shampoo and soap and towels.

They undressed, leaving their clothes high in a cubby, and stepped across the plywood floor to the women’s shower area, where there were two young women, each of them facing out, unabashed and vigorously shampooing their hair. They were ravishing creatures, taut and tanned with tiny breasts alive and alert, and their teeth were white, their asses high and shiny and pubic hair artistically groomed. Josie stared at them as she would a pair of unicorns. What are you doing here? she wanted to ask, though she had no better idea of where they should be. Where does young beauty belong? Maybe stepping through fountains in Rome calling Marcello! Marcello! Or on a plane. Piloting a plane. Josie pictured the two of them flying a plane through pillowy clouds, each wearing white, their legs uncovered and so smooth.

One of the young women now was looking back at Josie, who in her reverie was caught staring, and now she was telling her friend they were being watched, and soon they were hustling out of the shower and into towels. Josie thought of her parents, both nurses at a veterans’ hospital, how they taught her how to dry herself after a shower. Her mother and father mimed the brushing of all excess water from their arms and legs, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, saving the towel for whatever was left. Josie thought of their demonstration — they’d done it in the living room when she was eight — every time she showered; many days it was the only time she thought of them. What did that say about her? About the limits of memory, the threshold for the tolerance of pain?

Seeing they had the showers to themselves, Ana ran naked into the mist. Would she break into song? Josie got up and Paul followed, they hung their cheap rough towels on rough hooks and the three of them formed a tight circle, facing one another, the warm water falling between them. Ana looked between Paul’s legs and said “Hello penis.” It was not the first time she’d greeted Paul’s machinery. He’d gotten used to it, and took some pride in being the only member of the household so equipped. Josie soaped their bodies and shampooed their hair, Ana making underwater sounds and stamping her feet. We gravitate toward comfort, Josie thought, but it must be rationed. Give us one-third comfort and two-thirds chaos — that is balance.

—

Their hair wet and bodies clean, they stepped out of the hygiene cabin and into the dappled sunlight and Josie felt they were in the right place. The last few days, their many trials, were only adjustments. Now she knew what she was doing. She had the hang of it and all was possible. They rested awhile in the Chateau, during which time Paul brought Josie a card, dictated by Ana and written by Paul, which said “I love you Mom. I am a robot.”

That settled, they walked back into town.

“Mom?” Paul said. “Was that show good?”

“The magic show? Yeah,” she said. “Did you think so?”

He nodded, utterly unsure.

Where the town met the onslaught of the rough black bay, there was a monument to Seward with a long accounting of why the town had been named after Lincoln’s trusted advisor. Josie tried to explain it all to her children but they needed context.

“Okay, who freed the slaves?” she finally asked. Paul knew the answer, so Josie raised her finger to allow a moment for Ana to try.

Ana thought about it for some time, and then a light entered her eyes. “Was it Dad?”

Josie laughed, snorting, and Paul rolled his eyes.

Ana knew she had said something funny, so continued saying it.

“Dad freed the slaves! Dad freed the slaves!”

Near the monument there was a rocky beach decorated with wild debris and driftwood. They walked amid great rough-hewn beams, big as truck axles and thrown ashore like pencils. Paul picked up a steering wheel and Ana found the remains of a buoy, smashed into the shape of a child’s torso. Josie sat on a round rock and felt the salt air rush at her. Happiness swelled inside her with equal force, and she wanted to stay there all day, all night, wanted to live in that moment for as long as was allowed. She was right when she thought, every hour, that children, or at least her children, needed to be outside, amid rough things, and all she needed, beyond feeding them, was to sit on rounded rocks watching them lift things and occasionally throw them back to the sea. The sand was damp, a deep brown dusted by lighter clouds of dry sand. Soon Paul and Ana sat on either side of her.

“What’s that smell?” Paul asked, though Josie smelled nothing.

“It’s really bad,” he said, and then Josie saw something. There was a large stone in front of them, the size of a shoe, and it looked like it had recently been dislodged and replaced. Josie lifted it and the smell flew upward and filled the air. She replaced the stone but had seen, in a glance, a terrible thing. It was feces, and there might have been some sort of diaper there, too. She thought about it, examining the memory of what she’d seen. No, that wasn’t it. The answer came to her: it was a maxi pad. It was a maxi pad covered in caramel-colored feces. “Let’s move,” she said, and hustled Paul and Ana up from the beach, past the monument to the great man, and through town.

There could be no doubt that humans were the planet’s most loathsome creatures. No other animal could have done something so wretched. Someone, an outdoors someone, came to this shore, knowing it was beautiful and rough. Then they had shat here, even though there was a bathroom two hundred yards away. They had shat in such a way that most of the feces was attached to the maxi pad — the physics of it Josie couldn’t conjure. And then, instead of bringing the shit-covered maxi pad to a garbage receptacle, one only fifty yards away, they had left it under a rock. Which showed some strange mixture of shame and aesthetics. They knew no one would want to see the shit-covered maxi pad, so they hid it, under a rock, where, they surely knew, it would never decompose.

So they walked into downtown Seward and Josie, feeling magnanimous to compensate for the depravity of the rest of humankind, allowed Ana and Paul to explore the souvenir shops, and bought them each horrifying talking-moose T-shirts and snow globes. They walked along the waterfront and after half a mile found a vast green park with an elaborate play structure full of blond and black-haired children.

“Can we go?” Paul asked, but Ana had already run ahead, crossing a parking lot where she narrowly missed being crushed by a truck backing out. For all her young life Josie had had to envision the tiny coffin, the words she would say, life without this girl. Ana was doing everything she could to bring herself to an early end and the force and focus she brought to the endeavor could not be overcome. Oblivious, she ran through the woodchips and would remain among the living for at least another hour.