Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

She went down and told one of the women that one of her kids had broken the towel rack.

“How’d he do it?” the woman said. A different woman — with feathered earrings — was pulling something from the oven.

“It was my daughter,” Josie said, and now Josie knew she wouldn’t have to pay for the damage. Her leverage was invisible but real.

“Just leave it up there,” the woman said. “We’ll get it.”

Josie ordered a glass of chardonnay and two milks.

Upstairs, it was two p.m. but felt like sunrise. The light on the water was tap-dancing wildly, trying too hard, really, and there was some boat out there they were watching — some great yacht with a thousand white sails. Josie finished her chardonnay and when one of the political pizza women, a third, with a sheep’s black curls all over her big head, brought the food up, a lumpy pizza served on what appeared to be a piece of bark, Josie ordered another glass.

This was why people linger. Sometimes a place asks you to stay, to not rush anywhere, that it’s warm, and there’s the tap-dancing water, and the powder-blue sky, and they had the second floor to themselves. Josie felt that if anyone else came up there she would drive them away, she would throw a knife. This was now their home.

Soon Ana was standing on the floor, using her chair as her table, eating her slice with her elbows on the seat. She was a disgusting shark-child but Josie loved her monumentally at that moment. Her never-questioning confidence in herself, in how her limbs should work, made clear she would always do things her way and never wonder if it was the right way — this meant she could be president and certainly would always be happy. She wiped her mouth on her arm like a feasting barbarian, and Josie smiled at her and winked. The sun swished around in the gold in her glass and it sang a song of tomorrow. Josie drank it down.

The kids ate two slices each and Josie had two, and then wanted more wine. She asked the kids if they wanted anything. They didn’t, but she convinced them they wanted some of the cookies she saw in a jar on the counter downstairs. Then she convinced Paul it would be great fun if they wrote an order down on paper, and if he brought it down to the political pizza women. Josie didn’t want to see their eyes or puckered mouths when they heard her order a third chardonnay at three p.m. on a Monday. And besides, Paul was at a stage where he liked to be entrusted with making a phone call, with punching in ATM codes, with running into the 7-Eleven himself. He knew it would be a decade before Ana would be allowed to do this kind of thing. He knew he was responsible and he liked proving it.

She wrote out the order: 1 milk, 2 cookies, 1 chardonnay, and the check, and Paul took it downstairs. He returned a few minutes later with another bark plate, all the items balanced on top. He was struggling a bit, and Josie thought, for a fleeting second, that she could get up and help him, but would he really want that? She stayed put.

He made it to the table, and looked at her with a terror that seemed to question whether or not his parent really knew what she was doing. To put him at ease Josie smiled benevolently, like a grandma-saint. She wanted to toast him, and briefly raised her glass, but thought the better of it. “Look at the new ship,” she said, before turning toward the bay and realizing it was the same one she’d seen before.

The chardonnay ennobled her, made her stupid. Her tongue grew and could no longer form words. She didn’t want her children hearing her slur in the afternoon so she said she was resting her eyes, to soak in the warmth of the sun, and she raised her face to the streaked glass ceiling. Josie saw Jeremy’s face, then her father’s, and heard her father, in his white nurse’s uniform, joking about sticking his head in the oven. Josie opened her eyes and saw Paul and Ana standing, his face near the back window, watching a pair of dogs humping in the dunes.

After Carl she’d alternated between complete indifference to any carnal pursuits — she had no urges, no drive, made no plans, could muster nothing approaching an effort — and then, once every six weeks, there would be a calling within her, something like possession, and she would be in heat. She occasionally slept with Tyler, a high-school boyfriend. No, not a boyfriend. Someone she’d known glancingly in high school and with whom, through the miracle of internet nostalgia-sex, she had reunited. He’d written to her one day, attached a photo of her in her Halloween costume — she’d gone as Sally Bowles from Cabaret after her unsuccessful audition (I defy thy verdict, Ms. Finesta!). She recalled the feel of the tight satin on her legs in the cool night, the silver wig, and remembered her many admirers that evening and in the days after. A pair of satin tights, a black vest and the imaginations of hundreds of boys were alive for decades. So Tyler re-found some picture, called, said he was in town — passing through. Okay, fine. They ate pasta, drank numbing red wine and later, in his hotel, he did a fine job with his small cock until he became determined to stick his finger in her ass. He tried it once and Josie moved herself in a discouraging way. Five minutes later he tried again, and this time she gently pushed his hand away, assuming the matter settled. He tried once more, though, five minutes later, and this time she tried to make it funny, laughing a bit as she said, “Why are you so hellbent on sticking your finger in my ass?”—but despite her caution and obvious decorum he pulled away, pulled himself out of her, no great loss, and then — this part was delightful — he smelled his finger. Very slowly, very discreetly, as if he was just scratching his nose. He even looked away when he did it! Out the window! As if hoping he’d gotten at least a little bit of her feces on his forefinger before she’d thwarted him. That was why he’d been sticking his finger in there. To smell the finger afterward. He was memorable. And there was the other man, the one who died. The last man she’d slept with had died a few weeks later. How did she feel about this?

Vincent. He had been a kind man. A kind man who had said he would never leave her. For the children, he’d said, and she had appreciated this, his grave seriousness about not damaging her children in any way by entering and exiting their lives, for he knew about their father, Carl’s powers of invisibility. I won’t leave you , he said. I won’t do that to your kids , he said. Never mind that he barely knew them and they couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. It was too soon. She understood he meant well, but after two months of seeing each other, he had said that if they were ever to break up it would have to be her doing it. He could not abandon her. He would be in it for the long haul. She was flattered, maybe even impressed, but it was a bit constraining, no? She asked her friends: This was constraining, yes? To be told that this man would be attached to you, for the sake of the children he does not really know, for eternity.

He had a habit of watching her as she watched movies. He caught her tearing up during an Iraq War soldier-widow movie and after that, every time there was an emotional scene of any kind on the screen before them, he turned to her. She could always sense in the dark his face angling toward her, to see if she was crying, or about to cry, or welling up. To what end? What internal score sheet was he keeping? He didn’t carry a handkerchief and never offered her a tissue. But he’d been indoctrinated. Stay with woman for sake of children. Watch woman and her displays of emotion.

“Come to Normandy with me,” he said once. “The kids, too. I want you all to see something.” He wouldn’t tell her why he wanted to go to Normandy. He thought it would be some wonderful surprise. She explained the difficulty in leaving her practice, and trapping her small children for fourteen hours on two planes — all without knowing why they’d be going to that French beach. Finally he told her: He’d been learning more about an uncle — no, a great-uncle; he corrected himself the next day, apparently after some phone calls to his Salt Lake genealogists — who had fought and died on D-Day. He wanted to go, pay his respects, and apparently because he’d decided whatever was his was hers, he wanted to share it all, the field of graves, with Josie.