Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Paul and Ana got changed and went upstairs, following the twins, and the twins said they would put them to bed. Ana was thrilled, Paul cautiously ecstatic. Josie had planned to tell Paul about Sam being his actual godmother, or announce this to Sam, but now she wasn’t sure. She hoped Paul had forgotten.

“I have a surprise,” Sam said.

She’d been making her own whiskey and wanted Josie to try it. Josie had never developed an appreciation for brown liquor, and was fairly sure Sam’s would not be good.

Sam brought out a medieval bottle and poured anyway, and poured too much, and worse, she poured it into a coffee cup. Josie smelled it, and the stench was stronger than regular whiskey — it was wicked and fathomless, a predatory smell. Josie feigned sipping it, pretended to grimace, pretended to swallow and enjoy it in the brave rugged way Sam expected.

“Damn,” Josie said.

Sam was pleased. The purpose of the whiskey maker, it seemed, was to make the drinker gag.

“So good,” Josie said. She hadn’t tasted it yet.

They took their cups out to the back deck. Sam grabbed a heavy blanket and turned on a propane heater and brought it close. The night was cooling and the sky was grey with low cloud cover. They sat with their feet touching, their bodies making a V facing the dark trees.

Josie assumed deep talking was about to happen, and so took a long pull on the whiskey, wanting its effects without experiencing its taste. But the taste was inescapable and wretched. It burned. She thought of tennis shoes on fire. “This is awful,” she said.

Sam smiled and refilled her cup.

“So what the fuck are you doing up here?” Sam asked.

Josie laughed. Sam laughed. They laughed loudly, so loudly that an upstairs window opened and one of the twins, Josie couldn’t tell which, leaned down and her dark face said, “Quiet out there, missies. It’s bedtime for the little ones.”

The window closed and Sam turned to Josie.

“So Carl didn’t want to come?” She was kidding. “Seriously. Are you in touch with him? He in the picture?”

Josie gave Sam an accounting of his participation in his children’s lives, which took eight or nine seconds.

“Too bad,” Sam said. “Remember when he nicknamed Ana Oh No and then My Bad ? He was funny. Actually pretty good with kids.” Both of these things had been true to some people at some point, but somehow his disappearance made him seem, to Josie at least, both less funny and less child-friendly. Whenever she heard Carl praised, she conjured his comical crimes. He had, more than once, asked Josie to fake an orgasm. She was ready to present this to Sam but Sam was moving on.

“And did I hear right, that you sold your practice? You’re not a dentist anymore? And wasn’t your face numb for a year or something? You’re not planning on driving that RV off a cliff, are you? Stop me if I’m prying.”

“No,” Josie said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She thought, You, who fled to Alaska and is somehow married but not married — you’re judging me? But chose not to. There was no point. Josie took another long sip of the sickening whiskey and felt she could just let the night pass over her, an hour until she could claim exhaustion and go to sleep. The night air was warm, and the crickets or frogs were making their noise, and there was a breeze and far off, some road hummed a forgettable tune.

Sam topped off Josie’s cup. “So you quit? You sold the practice? What did Sunny say about that?” Sam asked, and Josie was glad that Sam had stopped calling Sunny Mom . The last time she’d seen Sam, she was using that word, Mom. Neither she nor Sam had called Sunny by that name when they lived with her, and hearing her use it, twenty years later or whenever it was, was jarring — as if Sam had assessed what Sunny had been to her and had given it a name. Hadn’t she once called her Sunsy? She had! Sam liked names, nicknames. These names did what — they helped Sam define, or redefine, what she and Sunny were to each other. They gave her some control, as if to call her Sunsy put her in her place, as a small and aging woman, whereas Mom had been a holy honorific. But now she was Sunny again. Sunny was just her name. The name as they’d known her. Let’s settle on something and leave it alone, Josie wanted to say.

She sipped her whiskey, looked into the obsidian sky. This could be the cause of all modern neurosis, she thought, the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. The world is running out of water. No, actually, there is enough water underground to cover the surface of the earth six hundred feet deep. So there’s no water problem? Well, only six percent of that underground water is drinkable. So we’re doomed? Well…The hedging and backtracking never ended. The scientists, the astronomers being the worst offenders. We are matter. No, we are surrounded by matter. There are nine planets. No, eight. We are exceptional, our planet singular in its ability to sustain life. No, there are billions of Earth-like planets, most of them bigger than ours, most of them likely to be far better developed. Sunny. Sunsy. Mom.

Sam was saying something. Josie focused on the words. “She must have been devastated. De vastated.”

Oh this. Josie had expected this. When she’d taken up dentistry in college, Sam was cruel. “You don’t have to suck up like that, Joze.” That Josie had gone through with it, and had opened her own practice. Sam had been livid. Paralyzed. Then she’d moved up to Anchorage, then Homer, and there was an unspoken theory among Sunny, Josie, and Helen, that Sam had chosen Alaska as her way of ceding victory and territory to Josie. Josie had won, she’d secured Sunny’s greater love, and thus could have her and have the Lower 48.

There was a thumping of Sam’s unlaced boots. She put her feet, huge in their heavy wool socks, on the grey picnic table.

“Sorry, shit,” Sam said, and suddenly her face was directly in front of Josie’s. Their noses touched. “I’m not mad at you. Or jealous,” she said. “I’m nothing. Nothing like that. But I know you’ve always thought I was bitter.” Josie remembered, suddenly, a time when Sam had accused her of positioning herself to inherit Sunny’s practice. She’d been so nasty, so often, again using her excuse that it was all fucked up, so what. “I love you. We’re sisters,” Sam said, and now Josie’s eyes were welling and Sam was crying. “I want to hear about what happened. It helps to talk.”

Josie felt this a dubious claim. Usually it did not help to talk. It hurt like hell to talk. It was like saying Standing still helps to a person sinking in quicksand. In this case, Josie was sure the pain would be searing, that she would think about it more vividly that night, later, lying on Sam’s basement pullout. She knew, in fact, that she would lie down there, cold and with a head full of bad whiskey, and run all this through her mind again, while also thinking of her children sleeping two floors above, who very well might wake up in the middle of the night and would not know where their mother was — they wouldn’t guess the basement, and would find that terrifying, their mother asleep in a basement. Josie was sure talking about all this was a terrible idea — talking about horrors had not been helpful to her, she was better off forgetting, structuring her life around forgetting, but Sam wanted to know, and in a moment of whiskey-driven weakness Josie thought it a wonderful idea to open this wound.

—

She had such a gentle face. Her hair was white, her cheeks pink, anyone who met her would have thought of Mrs. Claus. How could a woman like that, a woman named Evelyn — Evelyn Sandalwood! A name to soothe the tired and weary! — how could this widow with five grandchildren become such a demon? Josie thought of the strange monuments in the desert, the hunched and hollowed shapes that wind and rivers had made of respectable mountains.