Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

And Josie was free.

—

“That’s why your face was numb?” Sam slurred. They’d refilled their cups twice during the tale.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “Sure.”

Josie looked into the black night.

“Is this the way you’re supposed to live?” Josie asked.

“What does that mean?” Sam asked, and stood, and looked into the night, trying to see what Josie was seeing.

“Do you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing? That you’re using your time here properly?”

Josie laughed, to undercut what she’d just said, but she knew, even in her stupor, that this was the central thought that had occupied her mind for the better part of twenty years. Wherever she was, she could be content, and could do her work, or feed her children, or temporarily love a man like Carl, and live in the town she lived in, in the country she’d been born in, but a thousand other lives presented themselves to her daily and seemed equally or more worthwhile.

Sam didn’t answer. Then Josie realized she hadn’t said the words out loud. Josie had wanted to say them, but now the moment had passed and she couldn’t.

Instead she said, “It’s okay,” and by that she meant that they, Josie and Sam, should be better to each other. We all should be better to each other, she meant to say. Evelyn shouldn’t have gotten cancer, and shouldn’t have taken Josie’s livelihood in recompense, and why was it again that she hadn’t heard from her father in eleven years and that Jeremy was dead? How was that acceptable?

“What were you looking at?” Sam asked.

“It’s okay,” Josie said again, and then said, “I think it’s time to sleep.”

—

But she didn’t sleep. She went down to the basement and lay on the foldout couch there. Her business was gone, and there were no plaques, no thanks. Her employees blamed her, not Evelyn Sandalwood, not the cannibalistic legal climate, not the abyss that was moral order, but Josie, for the demise of the practice and the loss of their jobs. Tania had scolded her for not having the proper insurance. Tania! Who she’d insured! All these young women — they came to Josie looking for work, yes, but more important, they wanted insurance. A dentist’s office surely had the best coverage. They had unknown lists of pre-existing conditions and they could not help themselves — they asked about insurance in the first ten minutes of any interview. Josie took care of Tania and Wilhelmina and Christy, took care of all these people and none of them lost money. All the money to be lost was hers, and they took their pay and considered themselves cheated. There was no reason to run a small business and employ people. These people had been brought up to feel aggrieved at any employer, to feel cheated by every paycheck. Josie had repeatedly brought up the idea of a co-op, a system whereby everyone at the practice shared the profits and shared the risks. No one wanted any part of that. They preferred to be aggrieved.

She closed her eyes.

And was met by the face of that certain zealous woman at the school, the one with the scarf, always some scarf, who thought Josie was some kind of shirker. “How can we get you more involved around here?” she’d asked, her crazed beady eyes and wild black hair like a broom of brambles. No, no. New thought. Jeremy. Not Jeremy. Someone else. Not Carl. I read a book about html! Carl once roared, the only time Josie had ever heard him yell. I read it cover to cover! This, for him, was a kind of work. This justified his sloth. This might have been the greatest thing he’d ever done outside the bathroom. Remember the time he bought two twelve-packs of toilet paper? He had to; he went through a roll a day. No. No more Carl. Josie swept him away. Patti? Whatever happened to Patti, that friend of hers from nursery school? Patti was good. Patti was funny, ribald, knew the bullshit when it was bullshit. With a shock of recognition, Josie realized it was her fault — Patti had reached out repeatedly last spring and Josie had what? Forgotten to write back? To call. No, Patti had moved. Divorced and moved. Why couldn’t she remember these things? Running a business murders your ability to be the kind of friend people expect or deserve. Days and weeks go by and there can be no keeping up. Her best friends were her oldest friends, who did not expect constant contact. Everyone else was disappointed.

That was the primary response she provoked in others: disappointment. Her employees were disappointed in their hours and pay, her patients were disappointed in their care, in their cavities, in the fact of their dirty mouths, their soft teeth, in their slippery insurance plans. The suggestion box, the staff’s idea, had been a disaster. Kinda disappointed. Very disappointed. Super disappointed . She put away the box, had a few happy years, then the customer-review websites appeared, jesus, so many aggrieved, all these anonymous patients avenging her every slip, every imperfect moment. Disappointed in her bedside manner. Disappointed in the diagnosis. Disappointed in the magazines in the waiting room. Every disappointment a crime.

We live in a vengeful time. You didn’t get the orange chicken you ordered or the sticky rice? And now you’re already home? Meaning you’d have to drive all the way back to get the orange chicken and sticky rice you ordered? Injustice! And thus avenge. Avenge the proprietor’s crimes! This was our contemporary version of balance, of speaking truth to power. Avenge the proprietor on thy customer-review site! Right the imbalance! Josie had done it herself. Three times she’d done it, and each time it felt so good for two or three minutes, and then felt base and wasted. It meant nothing to the world. Forget it. How had she stayed in business that long? I’m disappointed, too, she wanted to say. Disappointed in your halitosis, by your hard-on when Tania leans over you, pressing her breasts into your pubescent shoulder. Disappointed in the way you hold the armrests as if I’m hurting you, fuck you, I’m barely touching you. You crybabies. You big babies. Bramble-haired mom was disappointed. Evelyn most disappointed of all. Oh shit: It was a show: Disappointed: The Musical .

Think of it: the audience leaves Disappointed . What’d you see? How’d you like it? Disappointed . That would be the ad! After This Show, You’ll Leave Disappointed . It couldn’t lose. Lying in the basement, apart from her sleeping and drooling children, her eyes now open, Josie thought about getting a notepad. No, she’d remember. It was better than Norway! Every song in Disappointed: The Musical a litany of complaint set to a jaunty score. The set a kaleidoscopic orgy of colors and products, the unimaginable array of things and conveniences available to us, all somehow falling short, all letting us down. Products to be disappointed in. Our friends: disappointing. Our parents: disappointments. Airlines: disappointing. Our nations and leaders, all disappointments. The show would make the disappointment four-dimensional. The actors would sing and dance in phenomenal outfits that would somehow fall short. The seats in the theater would be comfortable, sure, but could be better. At intermission there would be refreshments, but they would be not up to par, and the time before Act II not quite long enough to enjoy these beverages. Ticket prices: not quite outrageous, but definitely a disappointment. Availability, also disappointing. The show would be too long.

But Evelyn would be the star. Whoever played her would be in her seventies, but her opening number would be about all that she had to live for, the thousand possibilities ahead of her. We’d see an aging woman, and a woman who was not quite able to bound around the stage — and she’d be smoking, too, and possibly not even moving so much at all, perhaps just sitting on a stool — and she would sing a song as if a vivacious new arrival to the big city: all the things she wanted to do. But then. But then, she sees the dentist, who is somehow oblivious, somehow causes her cancer — that would be the end of Act I — this dentist causes cancer by not catching it. Her second solo number would be a tragic song about lost horizons, about finite time, about disappointment. The show-stopper would be that song “Every Disappointment Is a Crime,” and for it Evelyn would be joined by her children and grandchildren, all lamenting her fate, but expecting some measure of satisfaction when justice is served, when the negligent dentist is punished and cast away — perhaps some trapdoor in the stage? The show would end that way, with the dentist descending at the same moment Evelyn ascended — she would rise to heaven, amid a sweep of cornets and French horns, and then of course she would be disappointed there, too.