Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie glanced back to the TV. Again the players seemed to be celebrating some minor achievement. It offended the eye at first, then Josie grew to understand it. That’s what’s missing in my life, she thought. The celebration of every single moment, like those fucking idiots on TV.

“Jager shots for the ladies,” Robert said to Tom. Tom’s wax face tightened, as if struggling with this, the fact that he had no choice but to serve. He had chosen a life where he had to serve any kind of human, had to hope for a good tip from a bad man.

Robert seemed surely a bad man. There was something about him, everything about him, that was disagreeable, untrustworthy, lecherous and leering. His shirt was open to the crease where his sunken chest met his sudden belly.

“To sisters,” he said, saying the word sisters in a strangely lewd way. Sam winked at Josie under his raised glass. She must have kept it plain with him, telling him they were simple sisters.

He ordered another round, but Josie hid her share of the second batch behind her elbow. He didn’t see or care.

“Josie’s up from Ohio,” Sam said.

“Oh yeah?” he said, now taking this geographic information as license to scan Josie, neck to knees. Arriving back at her eyes, he let loose what he would surely consider the night’s great bon mot. “I’d like to go down there sometime.”

Sam didn’t seem to catch his meaning.

“Okay,” Josie said, trying to yawn. “Think I’ll head home.”

“Don’t go,” Robert said, trying to touch Josie’s hand. Josie pulled it away so quickly she hit the man behind her.

“Sorry,” she said to him.

“Don’t be sorry,” Robert said. “Just stay.”

Sam wasn’t following any of this. She was two margaritas and two shots in, was now holding Robert’s hand, and seemed intent on making a night of this, of Alaskan Leonard Cohen. Tom was on the other side of the bar, looking up at the TV at what seemed an uncomfortable angle.

“C’mon,” Sam said, “there’s so many people here you could meet.” Robert wanted a threesome, and Sam wanted to be alone with him. She scanned the bar for people she could pass Josie on to, and came up empty.

“I’ll see you back at the house,” Josie said.

Josie turned, not expecting Sam to allow her to leave. When she made it to the door, she turned to catch Robert plunging his seventy-year-old tongue down Sam’s young throat.

—

In the sky there were low white clouds, and clouds of steamship grey, but there were visible stars, too, and a crisp white moon. Josie walked back up the hill, thinking of Sam’s face, Leonard Cohen’s face. She was sober, and she was furious, and she was thrilled to have escaped that bar, and so thankful to have been spared the sight of the inevitable dancing that Robert would want to do with Sam, the delicate swaying drunk old leches want to do in public, their gyrations, their gropings — they no longer cared about hiding any of it. Josie was intermittently confident she could get home without getting lost, and soon was reasonably sure she saw the church at the end of Sam’s street, but then looked at her watch and saw it was only ten thirty. The kids would still be awake, and would think their mother was unwilling to give them any space, time alone with the twins.

Josie stood on the side of the road and thought some thoughts, including the certainty that despite her tidiness and Popeye boat and beautiful children Sam was a monster, an immoral animal, and that she was finished with her. And she also thought: This is me living my life. And she thought: Was Sam a Leonard Cohen fan? Was that the attraction? Josie decided they shouldn’t have come to Homer.

Consistency. I need to be consistent, she thought. The sun was consistent, the moon. Life on Earth thrives because it can depend on the sun rising and setting, the tides coming in and out. Her kids needed only predictability. But so why had she brought them to Alaska, a new place every night? She must be consistent. Bedtimes must be the same. Her tone must be the same. Atticus! Atticus! She must be Atticus. It was simple to be the same. How simple! But what about not being simple? What about being interesting? Parents could not be interesting, could they? The best parents rise and fall like suns and moons. They circle with the predictability of planets. With great clarity Josie realized the undeniable truth: interesting people cannot bear children. The propagation of the species is up to the drones. Once you find you are different, that you have moods, that you have whims, that you get bored, that you want to see Antarctica, you should not have children. What happens to the children of interesting people? They are invariably bent. They are crushed. They have not had the predictable suns and so they are deprived, desperate and unsure — where will the sun be tomorrow? Fuck, she thought. Should I give these children away, to some dependable sun? They don’t need me. They need good meals, and someone to bathe them dutifully, and to clean the house not because they should but because they want to. Not someone to keep them in this particle-board RV, carrying their dishes in the shower, their feces in a tank.

But wait, Josie thought. Maybe they could could live here. Maybe there was destiny and symmetry in her coming here to live near Sam, her fellow feral. But who could live here? It’s beautiful now, yes, but the winters were surely a holy fucking horror. The clouds continued to move above her like troops in formation.

She would leave Homer tomorrow, she decided, but she didn’t know where to go. This town, because it had people like Robert in it, was an unlivable place, no better than the town she’d left, and that town had been overtaken. What had happened in her little town? “I really have to get out,” Deena said one day. “I can’t hack this place anymore.” She’d grown up there. Once it had been an actual place, a smallish town with an actual cobblestone square where children rode their scooters and were chased by tiny lamentable dogs, perversions of selective breeding, off leash and barking. Now the place was crowded, there was no parking, women in ponytails drove at dangerous speeds on their way to yoga and pilates, tailgating other drivers, honking, cheating at four-way stop signs. It had become an unhappy place.

The crime of the ponytail ladies was that they were always in a hurry, in a hurry to exercise, in a hurry to pick up their children from capoeira, in a hurry to examine the scores from the school’s Mandarin-immersion program, in a hurry to buy micro-greens at the new ivy-covered organic grocery, one of a newly dominant national chain begun by a libertarian megalomaniac, a store where the food had been curated, in which the women in their ponytails rushed quickly through, smiling viciously when their carts’ paths were momentarily waylaid. In its radical evolution toward better food and health and education, the town had become a miserable place, and the organic grocery was the unhappiest place in that miserable town. The checkout people were not happy being there, and the people bagging groceries were apoplectic. The butchers seemed content, the cheese people seemed content, but everyone else was murderous. The same terrible women (and men) who drove aggressively to yoga now drove aggressively to the organic grocery store and parked angrily — they stole the last parking spot from some elderly citizens hoping to use the nearby pharmacy, got out and rushed from their cars, half-livid, to buy havarti and prosecco and veggie burgers. These people were now all over Josie’s small town, endangering her children with their predatory driving and barely contained fury.

The town, green and hilly and with streams running through it, though not far from an abandoned steelmill, had been discovered by these hordes and their anger, and all their new money and new anger had culminated in the incident, the Bike Pump Maiming — only Josie called it this, but still — in the middle of town. The incident involved a man in a pickup truck and a man on a bicycle, and the result had been a fight that left one man half-dead. But it had not been the pickup man who had beaten the bicycle man, not at this moment, in this town — no, this was the contemporary inversion, the version where the bike-riding man, wearing spandex and riding a five-thousand-dollar machine, triumphs over the kindly lawn-cutter in his rusted truck. The bicycle man had apparently taken umbrage at the pickup driver, who scraped out a living trimming grass and doing one-man landscaping gigs, who apparently had not given the bicyclist wide enough berth while passing. They were both on the road, traveling along the tiny pond that an environmental group had preserved for migrating ducks and stationary herons. So at the stop sign, the bicyclist pulled up, yelled his choice words, at which point the pickup driver stepped out and was promptly struck in the head with a bicycle pump. The driver went down and was struck again and again until the bicyclist, in his spandex and tiny special shoes, had fractured the lawn-cutter’s skull and blood covered his face and spattered on the rhododendron that had recently been planted on the median by the Retired Gardeners’ Club (RGC), which had supplanted the Association of Green Retirees. It was inside out, utterly backwards but perfectly emblematic of these new angry people rushing to and fro, always rushing to angrily go jogging, to angrily explain, to angrily expound, to explode when interrupted or slowed down, ready to be disappointed. These were the people! Josie made a mental note. The bicycle man, the maimer, would be in her Disappointed musical. Could there be some nod to Mame ? Would that be too much?