Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Sam had said she’d be back by three, so at two, realizing they had done nothing but eat all day, Josie knew they’d have to go grocery shopping. She dressed the kids and they made their way down the road, enjoying the new experience of being able to walk to the store. Josie was sure she’d seen a food market down that way the day before, but the store they found was half hardware store, half discount grocery, and wasn’t the one Josie had in mind. The ceilings were high and the shelves piled precariously with wholesale goods, enormous bags of rice and flour, and a remarkable variety of food for dogs. All the brands were different from any Josie had seen before, none of them recognizable. The kids were confused. The cereal aisle was indistinguishable from the aisle, next door, that sold garden supplies.

They found what they could and paid some irrational sum for it all. Walking home, Josie carried four bags, and the kids each carried one, and in a steady drizzle they made their way up the hill. All was routine until Ana began splashing in the puddles, Josie unwisely allowing it. The water eventually weakened Ana’s paper bag and her groceries fell through and onto the street. The kids began retrieving them, but there were cars speeding by, and there was no sidewalk, so Josie positioned Paul and Ana on the narrow strip of grass between the road and the ditch, and arranged the stray groceries in their remaining bags, gave one soggy sack to Paul and carried the others herself, and they resumed their journey. Dignity was at an ebb.

With the house in view, three blocks up the hill, Paul turned to Josie. “Why are you sighing?”

“I was yawning.”

“No, you were sighing,” he said.

She told him she didn’t know what she’d done or why, and it was raining so they should hurry. When they turned the corner Josie saw Sam’s truck, and her heart split. She was home early, and Josie had the unmistakable feeling that she was about to be scolded.

“Boy, you sure did some house-exploring, ha ha,” Sam said after a moment, without anything like mirth. “And eating! You guys must have been hungry!” Josie tried to recall. Had they opened drawers, left them open? Closet doors? They must have.

“We bought food,” Josie said, holding the bags high in the air. She brought them to the kitchen, and as she began to unpack them, she realized they hadn’t done any kind of organized replenishing. She’d bought some basics, eggs and milk — regular milk; they hadn’t had the hemp variety Sam favored — some stuff she and her kids wanted, some stuff the kids put in the cart and then a fair number of items even Josie wasn’t sure they’d eat. She looked back upon herself from just an hour ago, at the store, and couldn’t fathom anything at all about that person who had done that.

“Looks like I’m going grocery shopping, ha ha,” Sam said.

“Just make a list,” Josie told her. “I’ll go out again.”

“It’s fine.”

“Let me go, Sam.”

“No, it’s okay. You’re the guest. You relax.”

To make her point as clear as possible, and to be the biggest ass she could be, Sam got her keys and went out then and there.

—

An hour later Sam returned, her hands full of newer, better groceries, and a wide smile on her face. It was as if, having proven her point — Josie could not be trusted with any task — a grand benevolence had overtaken her. She seemed under the impression that she and Josie were close again, that the dressing-down she’d given Josie an hour ago was right and just and had been dutifully absorbed. Grinning like they were in pajamas and still sharing a bedroom, Sam suggested a plan for that night whereby the twins would babysit Paul and Ana, and she and Josie would go out on the town. When the kids got wind of the possibility of staying alone with Zoe and Becca, ordering pizza and watching TV, it was over.

Soon Josie was in Sam’s truck, and they were driving to a bar Sam insisted was for locals only, as if what Josie wanted and needed more than anything in the world was to drink with locals — that drinking with or near tourists was not right.

“This is my place,” Sam said, and Josie nodded appreciatively. It looked like a VA bar. This was Sam’s place. Sam had a place. The walls were decorated with pictures of fish and battleships. It seemed a pivotal and regrettable moment, when you had a place at all, and it was a place like this. Sam ordered margaritas not from the bartender, but from Tom. He was a large man with a pink face that seemed to be prematurely falling, like a wax figure in the midst of melting.

“We hooked up once,” she said to Josie, loud enough to be heard by Tom and anyone else. He smiled to himself while turning a glass upside down and setting it in a mound of salt.

“Cheers,” she said, and clinked Josie’s glass. As a teenager, Sam didn’t drink. Not through college, either — she was a puritanical young woman fueled by her sense of control, her ability to avoid all substances and temptations. Sunny couldn’t get her to take aspirin. Now Sam was this. She’d downed half her margarita and had hooked up with the bartender. When?

Above the bar, a football game was in the middle of some celebratory moment. “Look at that,” Tom said.

It wasn’t a touchdown, though. The players now rejoiced after every play. Whether they were winning or losing, every time they did anything, they found something to celebrate.

“I have to pull my girls from school,” Sam said, her eyes on the TV, where an adult male in silver spandex was doing some dance involving a football and a towel. “You ever hear of girls giving boys a rainbow blowjob?”

Josie had not. Tom had stopped moving, was visibly listening, thinking so hard his forehead had sprouted twin diagonals from his temples to the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t wait to hear about the rainbow blowjobs.

“Apparently this is done,” Sam explained. “A girl puts on red lipstick, and gives a guy a red ring on his dick. Then her friend puts on orange, another ring. Then another girl with yellow, another with green, blue. Would it be blue next?”

Tom was nodding vigorously. Yes, blue.

“Now I have this to think about,” Sam said, finishing her first drink and ordering another. “Will one of my girls be doing this? I mean, there’s no right way. Either I let them do whatever they want and they go and give rainbow blowjobs, or I try to control them, and to spite me, they go give rainbow blowjobs.”

None of this seemed possible in Alaska, not with these girls. All the girls she’d seen, especially Sam’s twins, seemed of an entirely other world, another time, apart from any contemporary teenage nonsense, more likely to harness and ride a whale than want to be indoors with tiny boy-penises.

“They’re how old?” Josie asked.

“Thirteen. I have a friend, an older woman, who offered to take them to live with her, in the woods. Like Sunny did with us, in a way.”

Sam spotted someone across the bar and waved. “Old friend,” she said by way of explanation. Soon he was walking over, and he was as advertised: old. Sixty. As he got closer, he seemed to be getting older. Sixty-five, seventy.

“ Old friend,” Josie said, and Sam took a second, as if deciding whether to pretend the comment was funny or pretend it was offensive. She chose to blink a few times.

Then he was upon them, and looked seventy-five. He was a sort of Alaskan Leonard Cohen, tall and handsome but with no fedora.

“Robert,” he declared, and shook Josie’s hand. His touch was both wrinkled and oily, like some dying fish. He looked between Sam and Josie a few times, nodding. “This is my lucky night!” he said loudly, his voice high and limp. Tom heard but did not smile. Josie felt she was in the middle of a slanted love square — love parallelogram? — but Robert was either oblivious or didn’t consider Tom a worthy part of it.