Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“There’s a swimming hole around the bend of the river,” he said, pointing downstream, where the river made a hard right into the woods. “Just an eddy about three feet deep, but it’s got a rope swing. You like to swim?”

“Are you like one of those chefs who won’t leave the customers alone?” she asked, meaning it lightly, but her voice sounded barbed.

“Guess I am,” he said, and stood. “See you around campus.”

As he walked away, the bottle broke against Josie’s face, but it was not a big deal. It was just a bottle across the face.

—

All day Josie allowed her children to wander near the wedding party, eating outside within sight of the preparations, and then playing in the river with the other kids, all of them with one eye on the men and women in black and white rushing back and forth between trucks and vans and the building.

“Go see what state they’re from,” Josie said to Paul.

Paul smiled and ran. “Alaska,” he said when he returned. “Are they really getting married today?” he asked, and when Josie said it seemed so, he asked where the groom and bride were, and Josie was not quite sure. All the men were dressed the same, but there was one young man who seemed slightly less joyful than the rest, moving slower, weighted with the trouble of his responsibilities, and she assumed this was the groom.

“Let’s take a bet who the groom is,” she said to Paul, and he asked if he could get a piece of paper to catalog the possibilities. He flew up to the Chateau and returned with the Yahtzee pad, which he turned over and began writing down differentiating details for each of the men. Tall skinny red hair, he wrote. Shorter brown hair beard, he wrote. Glasses and limping, he wrote.

At about two, a new car arrived and parked behind Jim’s office, close to the Chateau. The bride, Josie assumed. She watched as three women rushed from the car into the office, an older woman holding the white dress over her head. Soon a stream of new cars appeared in a cloud of dust. A bald and portly man emerged from one of them, wearing a tuxedo, the first man yet to seem comfortable in it.

“The father of the bride,” Josie said, and sent Paul to listen in on any conversations nearby, to confirm her suspicions.

He returned ten minutes later with no hard facts.

“Must be happening soon,” Josie noted aloud, thinking at least one of her children could hear her. But neither was within earshot.

Young people in sportcoats, and blue suits, and black suits, one white suit, all the women in very short dresses and very high heels, emerged from their vehicles and stepped through the gravel to the staging house. For an hour there was no movement, no sound. They were getting married, and Josie couldn’t hear a thing.

—

At dinnertime, she retrieved a few plates from the shower, and they ate inside the Chateau, a frozen pizza and greying vegetables, and as the sky bled orange the kids heard the laughter of other kids.

“Can we go see?” Ana asked.

Josie saw no reason why not, outside of her wanting them to stay with her, inside, watching a movie while their heads rested on her chest. She wanted them near her, and wanted to drink white wine while half-watching an animated movie. She was ready to let this day peacefully burn to embers, but they wanted to extend it.

“Sure,” she said. She could not keep her children from whatever happiness was outside.

Paul helped Ana get her shoes on, and while she watched Paul tie her laces, she looked back at Josie, and said, “I have diseases!” Paul finished one shoe and began the second. Ana was casual about it, as if getting her nails done, talking to a friend in the next chair. “Do you know how to spell diseases?” she asked, then answered her own question. “D-Z-Z-Z. Diseases.”

“I don’t think so,” Josie said.

Ana took Josie’s face in her hands and said, “Josie, I have diseases .”

Paul finished with her shoes, stood, and the two of them opened the door, Josie following them. Paul and Ana looked around, not immediately seeing the other children, but finally seeing the tribe not far off. The kids had made an impromptu seesaw using a wide plank sitting atop a balance beam. The alpha boy was standing in the center of it all, his arms crossed in triumph.

Josie sat in the doorway of the Chateau, watching as Paul walked toward the tribe, Ana following. Suddenly Ana turned back to Josie.

“You forget something?” Josie said.

“Yes,” Ana said, and took Josie’s face in her hands. Josie laughed, and kissed Ana on the nose.

“No,” Ana said, and repositioned her hands to get a better grip on Josie’s face. This time Ana came in for a more romantic kiss. It was all there: the closed eyes, the puckered lips, and Josie let her daughter go for it. She kept her eyes open, wanting to see what Ana would do, but after a moment of lips-to-lips, Ana seemed satisfied, and withdrew with great solemnity. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, said, “See ya.”

—

Night came on, and Paul and Ana returned, sweaty and complaining about falling off the teeter-totter. They were settling in for the night when a thumping reshaped the air. Josie assumed it was from a car passing over the road, but the pounding only grew louder.

“The wedding,” Paul said.

Josie went outside to see if this really could be music, and not some kind of military assault. She walked to the meeting house, where the lights were bright inside, and saw the silhouettes of a hundred people crammed tight and moving in sudden diagonals. Paul and Ana followed her, unbidden.

“The reception,” Josie said, and explained the idea to them, that the ceremony and dinner had happened quietly and now there was this, so loud, and it would go late. She thought about leaving the park. She thought about what she could stuff in her ears to muffle the sound. But there would be the thumping — in the ground, in the air. They would not sleep.

“We should stay here,” Paul said, and stood, squinting at the meeting house, as if they’d bought tickets to some outdoor concert and had found just the right spot. Josie sat down and brought Ana into her lap. From their vantage they could see the festivities through the large window, the guests passing across its bright picture-screen like actors in a party scene. The bride had bright blond hair and arms covered in tattoos. The groom was very tall and bearded, and seemed to be crying, laughing, lifting one guest after another off the ground and spinning them around. The music bled one song into the next, and the heads kept bobbing, and Josie pushed her chin into the furry mass of Ana’s hair as Ana drew ovals on Josie’s arm.

It was not novel for Josie to be apart and stare. As a teen, during the worst years of Candyland, she’d been through a very long few years of aloneness, a brutal and wonderful and terrible time of luxuriating in her tortured mind, her suddenly heavy thighs, her growing nose, the rumors about her parents, the word Rosemont on everyone’s tongues, always implicating her parents, her feeling of being horrified at being alone on weekend nights but not wanting to be among people, either. She railed against the injustice of her always being alone, but she loved being alone. As some sort of compromise, she’d taken to long walks at night, and that led her into the woods behind homes all over town, and when she walked behind these homes, keeping herself deep in the trees, often there were bright lights, and the people inside were illuminated as well as aquarium fish.

So on these long walks she would often sit and watch the families sit, or cook, or undress, and she found it reassuring and necessary. At a time when she doubted her place, doubted she was doing anything right, doubted her skin was really hers, doubted that she walked correctly or dressed correctly and at a time when she covered her mouth any time it was open, watching the quiet tedium of everyone else’s lives gave her renewed confidence. Her family was considered strange and unholy, a twisted family awash in VA drugs, but these other families were no better. All were deeply boring and sedentary. They barely moved. She would sit in the patchy woods, watching a house for an hour and scarcely see anyone move from room to room. She watched classmates and they were dull. She watched a classmate’s mother walk around in a bra, watched another classmate, a burly athlete, shockingly kind to all at school, come home and immediately get thrown across the room by his father. She saw certain things, scenes of violence loud and simmering. Being deep in the surrounding woods, she was never close enough to hear a word. And so in those dark woods, in the blue light of these sad homes, she realized she was no less normal than any of these sorry souls.