Florida(59)

Not even cereal? the older boy says skeptically.

He’s probably skinny, she says. Wasted. A skeleton of his previous self.

No. I bet he eats burritos like three times a day, the older boy says, and he brightens. I bet he’s superfat. Like when we get home, we won’t even know who he is. He’s smooshing out of his clothes.

I bet he’s dead, the little boy says. He gives a little chuckle.

Hey! That’s not nice, she says.

I didn’t say I wanted, I said I bet, the little one says.

I bet he’s at Bill and Carol’s right now, the older boy says. I bet he has an omelet and a stack of pancakes and a biscuit with butter and honey and toast and coffee and orange juice and hash browns, and is just like shoving it all in like a steam shovel. It’s like falling all out of his mouth.

Yuck, the little boy says.

And a milkshake and a banana split and vegan chocolate cake and corn nuggets and a tempeh Reuben and french fries and hot sauce. And lobster soup and baked potatoes and broccoli and bean tacos.

When her bigger boy is like this, almost smiling, she wants to fold his triangular fawn’s face in her hand and keep it warm there forever.

The little boy throws up into his lap.



* * *



—

In the morning, the glass bottles are again on the steps, so many, ghosts of her nights. Someone is trying to tell her something. She heaps them inside, behind the front door. The pile makes her desperate.

There is too much noise and fog in her head to leave the house all morning, and she lets the boys stay in their pajamas after breakfast and they watch Tintin.

She feels obligated to attend to Guy. She can’t bear the biographies, the sour ugly man in them makes her feel sick, so she returns to the Guy she likes, the young man who wrote her favorite of his stories, “Histoire d’une Fille de Ferme.” The prose is beautiful, simple. It begins with a servant girl on a farm, on a torpid day, going out to a sweet-smelling little hollow full of violets to take a nap.

As the mother reads, she can almost see Guy’s square young face in the open window; it is 1881, étretat, a relatively warm day in early March. There are carriage and seabird sounds coming into the room. Papers breathe under the stone weight. Guy touches his moustache nervously with his tiny callused hand, dreaming a fiction into life, a farm girl lying back in her damp hollow, sex stirring in her body. Inside Guy, the imagined girl is being made real; in the mother’s imagining of him, Guy is also being made real.

Now the boys run over to her because Tintin has ended. The little boy farts, then raises a finger into the air like a gun and says, Un pistolet!

When they finally go down to the beach, they find the tide all the way withdrawn, a wasteland of black and green, and the older boy says, in Captain Haddock’s voice, Mille milliards de mille sabords.

They sit anyway, out of the wind at the pop-up free library. The teenager who watches them, day after day, lets them be. The mother finds Marguerite Duras and Michel Houellebecq and J. M. G. Le Clézio, and the boys flip through bandes dessinées, and she reads and ignores the shelf of Maupassant staring down at her.

She starts Moderato Cantabile, a book that has always struck her as contemptible, too cynical to be believed. There is no love in the book, not even in the mother character for her smart and naughty son.

From time to time, she looks up at the tiny figures picking at the edges of the receding tide, then back at her book to read.

The sun grows warmer. She takes off her jacket.

There is something beating louder in her, behind her thoughts and the book’s taut words, something terrible, but she can’t look at it, she needs to look away; if she looks at it, it will come even closer to her, rub up against her, and she can’t let it, all alone in this cold place with her two small boys to care for.

The big boy sits on her feet and leans his dark head against her knees. The wind plays with his hair, but he won’t let her touch him. After a while, she feels his body stiffen. The little boy says, It’s my friend!

She sees the galoshes in front of her, the jeans patched at the knees, the belly jutting over the belt. Jean-Paul. He is grinning and his teeth are thick at the gum with tartar. The little boy is waving Whoopie Pie at him.

Alors! Jean-Paul says. He thought it was them from way out, he came in to say hi, to see how the researches were going, how the boys liked this little town, if the house was treating them right, if all was well, if there was anything he could do to make her more comfortable.

She says it is all fine, fine, fine. She thinks of the broken wifi, but doesn’t want Jean-Paul in the house and stays silent about it.

He stares at her, or she thinks he does, his eyes so sunken. He shows the boys his bucket. There are shells moving slowly in it. He tells her they’re bulots.

At first, she translates this in her head as jobs, boulots, which makes no sense. Then she understands the creatures to be whelks. Sea snails. Escargot from the sea.

The little one dandles his hand in the bucket happily, but the older one makes a polite noise and leans harder into his mother’s legs.

There is not much left to say. Jean-Paul offers them some whelks, and she tells him no thanks! and then he makes jokes with the boys that they don’t understand, and when the silence goes on too long, he crunches away. They watch him pick over the black mottled rock.

Were those alive? the older boy says.