Florida(60)

Yes, she says. People eat them with garlic and butter.

Oh, the little boy says, then, Why?

I think it’s because they’re delicious, she says.

Snails? he says, making a face. She watches him think. He is thinking, she can see, of the snail who would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The snail who refused to be thrown into the sea. It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.

Later, at the restaurant with the excellent lunchtime prix fixe, the older boy is made jealous by the little one’s adroit handling of his mussels, plucking out one fat bite after the other, and he leans forward and says, Those were alive, too. But now they’re dead. You’re eating dead things. Dead little mussels sitting in your belly.

The little one puts down the shell he was using as picker and says, No!

Yup, the older boy says, eating calmly. Pleasure flicks over his face as he watches the little one crumble, then he laughs when the mother shoots him a furious look. He is not a sociopath, she hopes. Just an older brother. She has an older brother who has turned into a fine person, a kind doctor who takes care of veterans and has become a feminist with the arrival of daughters, but who was endlessly cruel to her as a child. Her older son is only rarely cruel.

The little boy climbs into the mother’s lap and cries into her chest.

Oh, Little Bear, it’s okay, she says, stroking his head. The older boy eats his little brother’s french fries, another thing they never get at home.

It’s not okay, the little one says. It’s really not okay to eat alive things.

You don’t have to if you don’t want to, she says.

After some time, he calms. She carries him back home for naptime, and when she puts him into his sleeping bag, he pushes her face to one side and whispers hot and sticky in her ear, What if someone wants to eat me? And she can’t tell him nobody would want to eat him, because it’s not the truth; sometimes she herself wants to eat him, bite into his perfect soft sweetness as if he were a brioche.

Guy had three children with a woman named Joséphine Litzelmann, none of whom he recognized, all of whom died bastards without his name. How sad for those little children to be unclaimed by their father. How terribly sad for Guy, to not know how to love, not even his children. She smooths her son’s hair until he naps.



* * *



—

She is asleep. The moon is out, the room pale. She was too tired to close the windows; she wanted the cold air. Something falls into her dream, into the middle of the floor.

It is enormous. It is the biggest seagull. He is looking at her.

She makes her body heavy and still. She barely breathes.

The bird doesn’t move, just stands in the silvery light.

She wonders if it is about to speak, because that’s what birds do in stories, and the language she is most fluent in is story. It would have a deep male voice. Even now, even after all she knows and has read, the default voice of stories is male. But the bird just stands there, mute.

Eventually, her eyes grow heavy and she drifts out again.

In the morning the boys creep in, their limbs cold. They stay quiet. The little boy sucks his thumb, sighing contentedly. She unpeels her eyelids with tremendous effort.

I had a dream last night, she says. An enormous bird came into the room through the skylight and stood in the middle of the floor just staring at me.

Your breath stinks, the older boy says. It’s like something died in your mouth.

Can we watch Tintin? the little one says.

She pulls her feet under the duvet and warms them on her children’s legs, and they shriek at the ice in her bones. Why the hell not, she says.

When she can gather her body enough to move, she stands. She narrowly misses stepping in a huge jellied bird poop in the middle of the floor, shining and bloodshot like an eye.



* * *



—

The waitress said to the mother’s question that it was true, Fécamp was heavily bombed during the war.

She sounded cheerful, but must have been offended because she never came back after she delivered their food. All the mother asked was why there were almost no old buildings by the harbor; though, it’s true, it may have been evident in her voice that she’d never seen such an ugly city as this one.

The day is tannic in color. The beach’s curve between the cliffs is much larger here, dwarfing the cliffs themselves so they seem an afterthought. On one end of the boardwalk, they had seen a carnival covered in tarps. The carnies smoked cigarettes moodily in their plastic chairs.

The boys begged to see the rides, but the carnival didn’t open until afternoon, and the mother thought she’d probably die of sadness if she were to stay in this town for that long. She dragged her boys into a restaurant that looked less bad than the others.

The boys are sick of galettes, sick of pommes frites, but everything else on the menu was once alive, and she capitulates; she has no more strength, she lets them eat pistachio ice cream for lunch. Each bowl comes with tiny lit sparklers, and her sons’ faces open, momentarily happy. She drinks a pitcher of cider and picks at her scorched omelet.

On the long boardwalk, the same flags that exist everywhere up and down the coast whip and snap in the wild wind, in the dirty sky.