Heroes of the Frontier Page 5

  When Josie walked back to the Chateau, she found an irate man.

  “This is not your spot!” he roared. Idling behind the Chateau was another RV, this one new and far bigger and with a Norwegian flag flying from its antenna. The Norwegian’s face was red, his hands held behind his back as if to restrain them from doing some Norway-specific harm to Josie. He had been rehearsing this, it was clear. He’d been building a good head of steam for the fifteen minutes she’d been gone. Now, she was sure, he would mention her children.

  “And you leave your children driving!”

  She looked up to find that Paul was in the Chateau’s driver’s seat, and Ana was on his lap. All four of their hands were on the wheel.

  Josie had some thoughts. She thought how much she loved her children, how they looked like little delinquents, even though Paul was angelic and Ana had never hurt anyone but herself. She wondered why this Norwegian would come four thousand miles to look at Alaskan fjords. It was perverse. Norway was better, cleaner. And didn’t they give you things for free in Norway? Health care and the like? Go home.

  Without a word, she got into the Chateau, shooed her children into the back, and ceded the spot to the angry Norwegian. All the spots on the shore were taken, though, so they drove around the park until they found a berth in the woods. It was fine, still less than a few hundred feet from the water, but where the shore was bright and facing the illuminated mountains, the woods were dark, dank, hinting at Tolkien and trolls.

  Josie had spent a week there, in Norway, with Paul when he was two. It was a conference on teeth whitening. How strange the Norwegians were with Paul! (Carl stayed home, thought he might be getting sick, didn’t want to risk it. A paragon of a man.) So in Oslo, and especially on that ferry trip through some pristine fjord, the Norwegians acted like she’d brought a wolverine on board. Paul had been a well-behaved toddler, a little citizen, almost effete, almost too mature, but on that ship he’d been a pariah. He opened his mouth and it was as if he’d ruined the journey, the very sound of his voice some kind of American dirty bomb.

  Josie had heard every musical and thought an addition to the canon should be called Norway! It would feature a chorus of women in the same all-white outfits—everyone she’d met in Norway wore all white, and they all had the same suspiciously tanned skin, the same narrow black glasses—all these Norwegians pretended to be happy people, civilized people, singing benign songs about fjords and state-sponsored culture funded by oil, but meanwhile they were trying to eliminate all children so they wouldn’t have to share their limited amounts of white cloth. As she performed teeth whitenings, Josie often mused about the musical, picturing the finale, all the white-clad Norwegians singing some song with electronic accompaniment. Why did she do this? She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy—our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns.

  The teeth-whitening conference had otherwise been a boon—the treatments were like printing money. A patient was in the office for about an hour, ten minutes of which involved Josie—the hygienists could handle most of it—but she billed seven hundred dollars and everyone was happy to pay it. Thank you, Norway!

  They got out, and Josie removed the electrical hookup from the side compartment—basically a thick extension cord hidden in a rickety particleboard door near the rear wheel. She plugged the vehicle into the outdoor outlet and, not bad, they had electricity. She led Paul and Ana to the shore, avoiding the Norwegians, who were now taking pains to be friendly, standing over their weak grey fire, waving.

  The bay was full of otters. Ana and Paul had already spotted them, fifty yards from shore. What child doesn’t love otters? Josie sat on one of the ancient white tree stumps and let the kids go out on the waterline to get a closer look. The otters were maniacal they were so cute, swimming on their backs, holding actual rocks on their stomachs, using them to break open actual clams. Such an animal could not be conceived by any self-respecting creator. Only a God made in our image could go for that level of animal kitsch.

  Now Ana was on the ground. Now Paul was examining her hand. This was Josie’s preferred method of parenting: go someplace like this, with grand scale and much to be discovered, and watch your children wander and injure themselves but not significantly. Sit and do nothing. When they come back to show you something, some rock or mop of seaweed, inspect it and ask questions about it. Socrates invented the ideal method for the parent who likes to sit and do very little. Through judicious questioning, her children could learn to read and write right here, on this beach in Seward. Of course they could. Read the name of that ship. Quick, read that warning on the side of the water taxi. Read the notes about voltage on that outdoor plug-in.

  The air was clear. They were by the water, and the fire danger here was low, or at least lower, and somehow the winds that carried the burnt air were heading in some other direction. Josie breathed deeply and raised her closed eyes to the sun. She heard the complaints of some shorebird. The movement of gravel somewhere in the parking lot. The long shush of a breeze moving through the forest behind her. The crisp entry of a paddle into the bay. Now the squeal of a child. She opened her eyes, assuming it was Ana, hurt again, this time more seriously. But Ana and Paul were still where she last saw them, and now were stacking stones. She turned to the other side of the beach and saw another family, two parents, two children, all dressed in bright lycra and waterproof windbreakers. The children, about the same size as Josie’s, were upset about a trio of dogs, strays, circling the family like some kind of 1950s greaser gang. The family had no idea what to do.

  The adults of the group looked to Josie, outraged and imploring, assuming the dogs were hers. That these uncollared feral dogs were somehow hers. Because she looked feral? Because her children looked dirty, mangy, wild—the kind of people who would bring dogs to the beach to harass beautiful people in matching lycra. These were the people Josie had come to Alaska to escape.

  These were the breed of people who had overtaken Josie’s town, had overtaken the kids’ school. No one seemed to work; everyone had matching lycra and found time to be at every one of the three or four hundred yearly events at school. How could someone like Josie have a job, and be a mother, and yet not be a failure, a pariah, at this average school in this average town? She had been led to believe that having a job in the U.S.A. meant working forty hours a week. Debate it if you will—we should work less, we don’t work enough, so much time at work wasted with online pornography and break-room grinding—but still, forty hours a week is the expectation, the norm, the key to the national prosperity. But the schools, and these children, and their activities, and the parent-organizers of these schools and activities, and most crucially their judging eyes, were preventing the working of forty-hour weeks, and were thwarting this prosperity, and the answer to the question of decline in the U.S. might very well be these parents, their judging eyes, these schools, these activities. Was it not a generation ago when there were four one-hour school activities a year that a parent was expected to attend? There was the parent-teacher conference in the fall, its twin in the spring, there was the fall—no, autumn—music production, the spring music production. That was all. Maybe a winter program, but never two in one semester. Maybe a school play. Maybe a recital. But in any case there were four events considered mandatory, and most were at night, after work. Otherwise the family’s breadwinners or breadwinner was at work forty hours a week, was a hero to make it to any of the four events, was a champion if she or he managed to attend the games on the weekend, was a verifiable saint to coach a team, but in any case the parent could be considered a paragon for attending just three of the four mandatories, period, full stop.

  But now there is something else. Now there are, creeping like a well-intentioned but ultimately suffocating and murderous weed, these new and vague half responsibilities, which are choking the
life from all growth in this garden, which could also be considered human productivity and the national GDP. These optional things, these middling things, they sneak and kill like rust on flora. Like communism. No, not like communism. The communists knew balance, and worked hard. Did they work hard? No one is sure. But these other parents and their judging eyes: When do they work? Their jobs are attending these events. That is their work, they imply, and they also imply that you, and your actual work, are fine but also neglectful and sad. They don’t say that, though. They say, Don’t worry if you can’t be there, at the mid-fall solstice sing-along, the late-winter sledding-song craft fair and potluck. Not a big deal with the mid-spring parent-student doubles badminton under-the-lights evening funmaker. No problem with the mother-daughter pajama party on every third Wednesday movie day Sound of Music bring your own guitar or lyre. No need to bring treats on your child’s birthday. No need to come in for career day. No need to swing by the opening of the new art studio which features real clay-throwing technology. Don’t care about art? Not an issue. No need, no need, no need, it’s fine, no problem, though you really are selfish and your children doomed. When they are first to try crack—they will try it and love it and sell it to our culture-loving children—we will know why.

  And so Josie calculated, for her own amusement and for some likely future deposition, the hours it would take to actually attend all of these middle-mandatory events in a given November, and she arrived at just over thirty-two hours. That would sum up the time in the school, on campus, watching and cavorting, thanking and congratulating. But wait. Consider the time to get from and back to work, through traffic, against traffic, everything, all the tragedy of driving at all, it added up to forty-six hours. Forty-six hours in one month to attend the daytime and nighttime events, all of them optional, for which you are not expected, no problem, no worries, everything is optional, your children are doing so wonderfully, don’t worry, we know you need to work, Josie.

  Josie did have to work, because there were the kids, and Carl did not know how to generate income, personally contributed no funds whatsoever—his mother Luisa supported him, though she was anguished about it, and she paid for Ana and Paul’s things occasionally, too. It did not help that Josie had not taken on another dentist into her own operation, she was a fool not to, and it did not help that she offered her services on a sliding scale. None of it helped. All of it was ill-advised, and proved she should not have started a business, should not be living with her children in that town, with those gleaming people who balanced joy and obligation effortlessly. Every time she would attend some event, some cupcake soiree, some ceremony of the cupcakes of the oral presentation of the choral club, she saw them. All of them. The dads were there, the moms were there. They were all there, and when she saw them, inevitably and firstly, they would want to talk about the last event, the one the week before or the day before. The event she did not attend. Oh, it was great, they would say. The class killed it. They killed it! The parents would say this with wonder, with wonder at it all, the things these kids do, that these young children are capable of, and while saying this, they may or may not be aware of the shiv they were sliding between Josie’s ribs. They may or may not have any idea. But then they would turn the knife: And your son, they would say, wow, he was the star. Another twist: I think I have him on film, at least for a second. I’ll send you a link. Was this an Ohio thing? Was it happening everywhere? Was it helpful that Paul sang both “The Long and Winding Road” and “In My Life” in some daytime talent show that Josie hadn’t gotten proper notice of? It was not helpful. One parent said, afterward, Better you weren’t there. It was too sad seeing Paul sing those words. She really said this. Meaning this eight-year-old understood the words, connected them somehow to Josie’s split with Carl. This happened.

  The wonderful apex of it all was the email from a woman, another mother, a week later. “Dear Josie, As a service from the school community to our working parents, we’ve started an innovative program we call All in This Together, whereby each student whose parents can’t be at schoolday events is “adopted” by a parent who can be. This parent will take extra time with your child, will take pictures at events and post them, and in general give the child the support enjoyed by the students who…” The email went on for another page. Josie scanned to the bottom to see who had been assigned to her children, and found it to be this woman, Bridget, who she remembered being precisely the kind of mother she’d never leave her children with—loony-eyed and fond of scarves.

  Josie had chosen this kind of environment. She had left her former tribe, the searching ranks of Peace Corps alums, to go to dental school, to move to Ohio, to come to live in this suburb, among stable people—so stable they were willing to “adopt” her children during the school day—but she remembered her other people, other friends from the other life, those still roaming the planet like the undead. None of the Peace Corps friends had had kids. One had spent a year in bed, her healthy limbs unable to take commands (she’d since recovered). One had moved back to Panama, another learned Arabic and found some mysterious consulting job in Abbottabad and claimed to have watched the bin Laden raid from his rooftop. One was dead of an apparent suicide. A now-married couple ran a llama farm in Idaho, and had asked Josie to come, to move in, to be part of their commune (It’s not a commune! they insisted), and Josie had almost done it, or had almost thought about considering it, but yes, the rest of the ragged race of Peace Corps people were still wandering, unwilling to stop, unwilling to live in any traditional or linear way.

  Only Deena, a mother of a boy in Paul’s class and manager of a pet food store, understood, seemed to have any past at all. Josie had mentioned her emancipation to another couple and they had not been able to hide their horror. They’d never heard of such a thing.

  “I didn’t know that was possible,” the man said.

  “I ran away once,” the woman said. She was wearing capris. “I slept at a girlfriend’s house and came back in the morning.”

  Another time, at Moms’ Night Out—no three words more tragic—Josie had mentioned the Peace Corps and Panama, how she’d known someone, Rory, who had managed to become a heroin addict there. Josie thought she told the story in a funny way, an American smuggling drugs into Central America, but again there was the chasmic silence that implied Josie was bringing some hint of apocalypse to their fine town.

  But Deena understood. She was a single mother, too, though her husband was not a deserter, but dead. He’d been a contractor in the Nigerian delta, was kidnapped, ransomed, freed, and, upon returning to the U.S., died two months later of an aneurysm. Deena’s other child, also named Ana but spelled Anna, was adopted, and between that and the dead father, Deena, too, had been threatened with Anna being adopted by the scarf woman from All in This Together.

  Josie and Deena talked about being the only people in the school that anything had ever happened to. Josie felt right telling Deena anything, but she hadn’t gone far into her own childhood, her parents’ broken world. Those were untouchable years. It was one step too strange, so with Deena they left it at the particular absurdities of being a single parent—the making of money to pay children to watch their children so they could make money to pay these people to watch their children. The confiding in their children, complaining to them, lying too long with them at bedtime, telling them too much.

  “We should move to Alaska,” Deena said one night. They were at Chuy’s, a burrito place where the kids could run around and scavenge and Josie and Deena were free to have their mojitos and take off their shoes. Deena was watching her daughter spill a basket of chips on the floor, pick them up and eat them. She didn’t move a muscle to help, she didn’t utter a word in admonition.

  “Why would Alaska be any better?” Josie asked, but the idea stuck in her mind, in part because Sam lived there.

  —

  On the beach, the family in colorful new windbreakers disappeared behind a boulder down the shore, and Josie’s
relief was great.

  Ana approached carrying something carefully with two hands. Paul was right behind her, then by her side, his hands hovering around hers, ensuring that whatever it was they’d found would not fall. Josie stood, hoping to discourage them from dropping it in her lap. “Look,” Ana said with the utmost solemnity.

  “It’s a head,” Paul said.

  And now the stray dogs were among them, sniffing the head. Josie’s kids barely took notice of the dogs, and the dogs seemed to have no interest in eating or harming the skull.

  “One of dem otters,” Ana said, and waved toward the bay. She had a skull in her little pink hands, and Josie noticed with horror that it had not been picked clean. There was still cartilage on it, and whiskers, and fur, something viscous, too. Josie conjured Socrates and thought of a question. “Why in hell did you pick this up?” In solidarity, the dogs lifted their heads to Ana and Paul, then ran off.

  —

  At night they went to a real restaurant in town. Josie retrieved the velvet bag from under the sink, retrieved six twenties, feeling it illogical but inevitable that she would spend most of them that night.

  When they hit the main strip, they saw that a cruise ship had docked and Seward was full of identical couples in their seventies, all wearing slight variations on the same windbreaker and white sneakers. The town had been breached, the restaurants had surrendered, and Ana was running through the streets again. Josie and Paul caught her and Josie tried to appease her with a piggyback. No. Her little body, all muscle, moved like a barracuda: bending, twisting, anything to be free, so she let Ana run on the sidewalk. No negatives motivated her. Josie threatened to take away her Batman sticker book. No effect at all; she knew there were others. Josie told her she’d never watch another DVD; she had no sense of the future so she didn’t care. But if Josie said she’d get something, some dessert, some object, she would toe the line. She was the purest sort of materialist: she wanted things, but didn’t care about things.