Florida(56)

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At the end of the boardwalk in Yport, near the spooky cave in the cliff, there is a carousel of ersatz Disney characters with vehicles that jerk eight feet into the air when the boys push a button.

The woman who sold the mother twenty tickets is beautiful, a bleached blonde with huge tits. She lives in a trailer behind the carousel with a fleshy man who never wears a shirt. She never speaks. The mother thinks she is maybe Eastern European. The woman makes savage faces at the backs of the parents who buy tickets, and when she goes around to take the same tickets from the children before their rides, she rips them nastily out of their little hands.

The boys ride together in the Dumbo car. They flash by, flash by, flash by, first low then high in the air, shouting with joy over the Spice Girls.

At her first family, in a village outside Nantes, during her study-abroad year, her fourteen-year-old host sister would play the same song loudly and on repeat when her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, who was in the navy and wore a silly pom-pom on his beret, came over and they locked the door. She could hear their moaning even through the noise. I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want; the mother associates the song with statutory rape.

When her children descend from the air and the ride settles, the little one runs to her, banging his golden head into her lap, and only then does she understand that he is weeping; he hadn’t been laughing, he’d been screaming with terror the entire time. It hadn’t been the height, she understands, but the red button. His brother had told him that if the four-year-old touched it, the Dumbo would explode.

I promise you, Little Bear, she says. It won’t explode.

But what if there was a bomb? he sobs.

She has committed herself to truth; she has to find a way to tell it, so she says, Well, yes, if there was a bomb, it’d explode. But who would bomb a children’s carousel?

Nobody? he says.

You said it, she says.

It’s true that the world is overrun with terrorists. It’s true that the mother no longer goes to movies in theaters, and she scans for the exits in restaurants. Deeper, worse, the death everywhere, the surgical strikes, the eyes in the sky. Aleppo in the beautiful before, the ravaged after. She puts these thoughts away. If she could, she’d spend the entire day in bed.

Her little boy looks at her, wanting more.

I’d chase down the guy who tried to bomb you and punch him in the face, she says. Also, the penis.

You couldn’t, he says, but he is laughing; the word penis is inherently ridiculous, the concept of a penis is ludicrous, it always gets a laugh.

Who’s faster, Daddy or me? Who wins when we race at the park?

You, he says grudgingly.

There you go, she says. I’m the toughest mother in the world. I won’t let anybody hurt you, she says, and she is either lying or not, it is hard to tell, because this promise is so complicated, the future so dark.



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Sunset is still three hours away but the sky is pink, and the quickest way to happiness is sugar, so she buys them all ice creams. Chocolate for her, rum raisin for the boys. They sit in an upturned fishing boat to eat.

The boys vibrate until their engines shut off one after the other, and she carries one on her back, the other on her front, huffing all the way home.

She puts them to bed upstairs and doesn’t bother to turn on the lights in the house. She likes the gloomy dim through the curtains downstairs. She also wants to steer clear of the seagulls, the way they shouted down the sunset the day before.

She looks at her empty notebook until its emptiness is seared into her brain, and then she opens one bottle of burgundy and drinks it and then opens a second, because why not.

The neighbors are having dinner in their courtyard. She imagines it full of bougainvillea, bird feeders, a long antique table. Silverware that’s heirloom silver but mismatched. They are talking about the migrants from the war in Syria. She has to concentrate: their French is rapid-fire and muffled with food.

An infestation, someone says. Someone else chuckles. Disgusting, those Arabs, do you see the way they treat their women? someone says. Stone them to death if some uncle molests them. Sell them off to be fucked by old men when they’re eight years old. Barbaric.

She finishes the second bottle and tries the wifi again but there is none, and she can’t figure out the television and the books she brought are full of Guy and she is in no mood for his bullshit tonight, not after dealing with étretat.

She’ll go to bed, she decides. She stands. But her eye falls on the door, and she sees in the glass behind the curtain the silhouette of a man. His arm is moving.

Maybe she hasn’t locked the door, she thinks. She can’t remember. She is pretty sure she hasn’t.

She holds her breath, and her body goes into a crouch behind the sofa. There is a single soft knock on the door, and she listens to the silence afterward.

She stares at the knob, a curled lever, and keeps seeing it move, but the movement is in her eyes, not in the knob; the knob stays where it is.

After a while, the man moves away. There is an elaborate whistling, sharp footsteps. The neighbors’ voices have lowered, and she can no longer understand them. She no longer wants to listen.

She locks the door, then puts one of the kitchen chairs under the handle. She shuts all the windows. Her children’s faces in the darkness are featureless pale blots. She stands over them until one complains in his sleep about the hallway light, then she crawls up the spiral to her bedroom, where there is still sun in the skylight, which she blocks out by pulling her duvet over her head.