Florida(62)
Are you mad at Daddy? the little boy says.
Oh my God, no, she says. Then she remembers that she is supposed to only tell the truth and says, I mean, no more than usual.
Then why are we here, the older boy says.
She counts on her fingers: One, to help you learn French. Two, to do research on Guy, whom we all hate. Three, to get away from Florida in the summer because the heat makes me want to die.
She doesn’t say, Four, because there has been something heavy on her heart that she was hoping to remove by running away to France.
Well, the cold makes me want to die, says the older boy. I hate France.
She sighs.
I want Daddy, the little one says. I want my friends and my grandma and my daddy and my summer camp. It’s pirate week! he says. I think.
The older boy puts an arm around his brother. It’s always pirate week at summer camp, he says sadly.
* * *
—
They have tickets for the carousel, but the boys are too glum to ride.
They will only sit in plastic chairs, watching other children spin over and over. They have rimmed their mouths in green pistachio ice cream.
Well, at least the mother had an entire carafe of rosé at dinner and the pounding music is drowning out the seabirds. The sky is already red: sunset will take hours tonight. She feels untethered. She sits beside her sons watching a little band of six or so dirty blond children who are playing on the seawall. Every one of their heads is buzzed, and half have a slick of snot from nose to chin. A few, she thinks, are girls. There are placeholder nubs for boobs.
An infinite weariness comes over the mother as she watches these children’s bodies leap off the seawall. They glow palely, like angels, she thinks. Maybe it’s just malnutrition.
She can’t stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.
Refusing the pleasure of a dusk like tonight’s with its cool wind, its sunset, its ocean, its carousel, its ice cream, strikes her as profoundly immoral.
Now a hunger that cannot quite be located in the body comes over her, a sense of yearning, for what? Maybe for kindness, for a moral sense that is clear and loud and greater than she is, something that can blanket her, no, no, something in which she can hide for a minute and be safe.
So she stands tipsily and walks to the clump of children on the seawall and gives a nub-chested one the laminated tickets for the carousel. The child looks at the mother briefly, shoots her a gappy grin, jumps down off the seawall. The rest of the urchins follow.
And then the mother watches the little cluster run to the woman who takes the tickets, and this blonde, big-busted woman frowns at them and snatches the tickets from their hands, muttering something, then the girl says something, and the other woman looks up at the mother across the spinning carousel, and her face is folded in contempt. The buzz-cut children don’t get on the carousel. They run off.
The mother understands then that she is a fool. Those are the carousel lady’s own children. The mother watches as the other woman turns away, knowing before she even looks that her own smaller son will have begun to cry because she has given away their tickets, and the older one’s face will be aghast, another failure of hers that sinks to the bottom of him and that he will never forget.
* * *
—
They’ve been in Yport for ten days when, at last, she notices that there is a placard announcing free wifi in the tiny square outside the church.
She makes the older boy read a book to the little one, and he murmurs away on the curb beside her because the only bench is already occupied by pigeons and a snoozing woman.
She has thousands of emails. She goes through quickly, gets rid of the spam, the people who want things from her, notices from the boys’ schools, notes from her benign stalkers. Business she puts in a folder for later, or maybe never.
There are ten messages from her husband with swiftly breeding exclamation points.
She tries Skype, muting it to keep from getting her sons’ hopes up, but her husband doesn’t answer, and in retaliation, she won’t answer his emails. Let him dangle.
And then there are five emails from different people, all of which have the same friend’s name in the subject line. This friend is the sweetest man alive. He is slender, humble, vegan, bearded; he has tattoos he drew himself in his punk-rock-commune youth; he is now a librarian, a cartoonist, a fellow writer. She always thought that he is maybe too kind to ever be a great writer, but perhaps that will change with age; she knows from personal experience that most people get meaner when they get older. Once, she was having a terrible day and he was riding his bicycle and stopped when he saw her and she confessed her sadness, her sense of futility and the doom lurking around the corner, and he hugged her, and that night he left an entire vegan chocolate cake on her front step. After her husband went to bed, she ate half of it, and although she immediately felt much worse, the friend’s kindness in the moment when she opened the shoe box and saw the beautiful shining vegan buttercream inside made her feel loved.
A year ago, she went to his wedding in South Florida, where he married his high school sweetheart, who was tattooed all over like him, a thin Bettie Page in red lipstick and a white halter dress. They moved away from Florida to Philadelphia. He had a new baby. They gave the baby the name of a character from the mother’s last book, in fact the strongest, toughest, best character in the book, the nexus of her community, though the naming might have been a coincidence.