Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie found a bench, set the bags of horrible souvenirs down, and watched Ana tear through the play structure. Next to her, Paul was standing still, hands at his sides, carefully examining the playground, seeing its many features, judiciously deciding which would be best to experience first. Josie opened the free newspaper she’d been handed outside one of the stores, while keeping an eye on Ana, who she knew at some point would throw herself from the slide or find some new way to land on her head. Soon Ana stopped, had spotted a small skate park nearby, and was mesmerized by the teenagers in their gear. For no reason Josie remembered something Carl had written in a folded note, slipped under the pillow: I will never tire of your sweet ass . Was that sexy? His handwriting was a murderer’s scrawl. Otherwise Carl didn’t take sex seriously. He liked to make jokes during and after. “Well done,” he’d say afterward, immediately afterward, obliterating any mood, extinguishing any afterglow. When Josie told him she’d rather do without the jokes, he was so sad. He loved his jokes. After that, whenever he’d finish, she could see him staring up at the ceiling, wanting to say “Good work,” or “I think that worked out pretty well” but unable to. She’d squashed this crucial avenue of self-expression.

“Okay, locals against tourists,” a kid yelled. He was in the playground, standing in an area between Ana and Paul, and seemed to be about twelve, black-haired and handsome, and was organizing all the kids on the playground. He was a leader — if there were ever a true thing it was that some people, some children, some infants, were leaders and some were not — and in seconds he had divided eighteen children into teams and Paul grabbed Ana and all the smaller children were dutifully listening to the boy’s instructions. “This is how it works,” the boy-leader announced, shaking his long raven-black hair out of his eyes. “It’s like tag, but instead of being tagged it’s like you’re a zombie and you die if your neck’s broken, like this.” Then, as Josie watched, horrified and helpless, he took Paul, put his hands on either side of Paul’s head, and twisted, quickly, mimicking the breaking of someone’s neck as done in action films. “Now fall,” the boy said, and Paul dutifully crumpled. “That’s how it works. You’re dead until the game ends then we start over. Everyone got it?”

Ana’s eyes were huge, from fear or fascination Josie didn’t know. But she did know she was leaving and her kids were leaving. Seeing a twelve-year-old pretend to break her son’s neck had left her cold. She waved Paul over, as if she had some casual unrelated news or instruction, then grabbed his arm and didn’t let go. “Ana!” she yelled, and they walked off. Ana soon followed.

Seward had been nice but it was time to go. They still had a day to kill before Homer so they packed up the Chateau, Josie filled the tank—$212, an abomination — bought a map and left town.

“Where we going, Mom?” Paul asked.

“Put a seatbelt on,” Josie said.

THIS WAS A DIFFERENT WAY OF MAKING PLANS. Sam had said that she would meet Josie at five p.m. on Monday, and because Josie had no phone and Sam never picked up hers, that plan would have to suffice and be honored. By Josie’s calculations, if they drove straight from Seward to Homer they’d make it by noon, five hours early. There was supposed to be a barbecue on the beach to welcome them, Josie and her kids.

She caught Paul looking at her in the rearview mirror. He was assessing, gauging whether or not his mother knew what she was doing. She looked back at him, projecting competence. Her hands were on the wheel, she had her sunglasses on, she had a map on the passenger seat, and directions to Homer.

I’m dubious , his eyes said.

Screw off, her eyes responded.

Josie turned the radio knob left and right, occasionally securing a signal in the middle, and when it was clear, it seemed to be broadcasting a Broadway marathon. Gwen Verdon in Redhead. These were obscure songs, songs known only to someone whose formative years were engulfed by the maniacal sounds of musicals known and obscure, failed and world-dominating — most of them sounding tinny now and desperate to please. Her relationship to the music was complicated at best, tied up as it was with her parents’ work and devolution.

The musicals had happened when she was nine. She hadn’t known her parents to be interested in any music at all. The family owned no stereo. There was a radio in the kitchen, but when it was on, rarely, it was tuned to the news. There were no records, no tapes, no CDs, but then one day there were boxes of records, vinyl black holes spread all over the floor. Her parents were nurses in the psych ward, though they brought little of the work home. As a child Josie heard them mention restraints and Thorazine burps, heard them discuss the man who thought he was a lizard, the man who made imaginary phone calls all day, using a spoon. But now there was homework. They’d been put in charge of bringing music to the ward. Their supervisor had encouraged them to keep the music upbeat and clean and distracting. Everyone had settled on Broadway musicals as the least likely to provoke murder and suicide.

With a borrowed record player and fifty LPs bought at an estate sale — a music teacher in the next town had died — their home was filled, for the next few years, with Jesus Christ Superstar (deemed too thought-provoking) and Anne of Green Gables (wonderful, foreign, unrelatable) and On the Town (perfect, as it described a healthier approach to the home life of enlisted men). They would listen to a new one every night, were required to examine every song, every word, for its appropriateness, its ability to cut through misery and uplift. Patterns emerged: Irving Berlin was fine, Stephen Sondheim too complex, morally problematic. West Side Story, including as it did gangs and knives, was out. My Fair Lady, being about nothing the veterans recognized as their lives, was in. Older musicals about presumably simpler times prevailed. Oklahoma! and Carousel and The King and I quickly made their way into rotation, while South Pacific was shelved; they wanted nothing about soldiers still fighting any foreign war. So many well-known shows were tabled in favor of less troubling but forgotten shows that now only Josie could recall. Jackie Gleason in Take Me Along —a vehicle for Gleason to be Gleason. Richard Derr and Shirl (Shirl!) Conway in Plain and Fancy, about New Yorkers in Amish country. Pippin was out, the words circled by her father, then crossed out: “And then the men go marching out into the fray/Conquering the enemy and carrying the day/Hark! The blood is pounding in our ears/Jubilations! We can hear a grateful nation’s cheers!” That wouldn’t work.

The first musical Josie remembered well was Redhead, a show built around Gwen Verdon. The first seconds of the record were a revelation: everything was manic. The wall of delirious optimism appealed to her as a child, though her parents studied the words for controversy. They consulted her sometimes, danced with her occasionally — there was a time when their home had something in common with the bizarre happiness of dozens of people singing from a stage to darkened strangers who’d paid for joy and release. She remembered her mother, on her back with her legs in the air, doing some kind of yoga stretch, her father trying to put Josie on his shoulders to dance, finding the ceiling too low, her hitting her head, the two of them laughing, her mother admonishing, and the musical went on. Josie, in those years, pictured her parents’ lives at work as a similar sort of nonstop party, the soldiers dancing, too, with their simple and solvable problems — broken arms and legs, a few days in and then out again, her parents serving them jello and fluffing their pillows.