14,000 Reasons To Be Happy

Published in Emrys Journal, Volume 14, Spring 1997

            This time, I’m prepared.  Rather than being super-sensitive, I’ll be generous, yet firm in my resolve.  My skin’s tough because I’ve made it that way.  So we have our differences!–that doesn’t mean that anything has to go wrong.  But when I see my parents trundle off the plane in a bowlegged roll, my mother wearing wraparound sun glasses with yellow feathers on the edges, book in hand, and my father in pink floods (undoubtedly my mother’s doing), with both of them glowing that brutal Florida bronze, maybe, I think, only a little will go wrong.

            “Hello!  Hello!”  Arms outstretched, they come at Gail and Jean, besieging them with juicy kisses and hugs.  Gail, almost three, lunges behind me, digging her fingers into my leg.  John, the baby they have traveled 1,500 miles to see, cries.  Then a neon green plastic arm with a hand on the end reaches out from my father’s sleeve and scratches Jean’s back.  When the arm is tilted, it makes a noise that sounds like indigestion. 

            After putting the final touches on her groans of exaltation, her energy spinning off in all directions, my mother says: “I’m starved.  Let’s go out to lunch.”

            “We just had lunch,” my father says.  He straightens up, and gives the neon green arm to Jean.  Jean moves it up and down, trying to make it burp.

            “You call that lunch?”  With feathered sunglasses propped on her head and new black eyeliner, my mother looks like a traveler from a distant solar system.  I feel a white, fluidized, super-critical heat, a heat that surrounds and engulfs; a heat you never get away from—not even in Minnesota.  People look at us, and they look more intently when my mother bends down, grabs Gail’s hands, and gives her a cackling witch laugh.

            Gail pauses, then laughs.

            “Remember the last time,” my mother cries, as if this is a great pronouncement, “we went to Cafe Late!”  Rising, she looks at me.  “The Late Cafe?” 

            “Cafe Latte,” I say slowly, evenly, giving her a gentle nudge with my hip, and her ample hip bumps me back–a prelude to a dance–and she cackles again.

            “That place with the two-dollar coffee,” my father says, grumbling.  He adjusts his black-rimmed glasses.  The glasses are new.

            “Don’t be so negative, George.”  My mother, a wellspring of infinite optimism, holds up her book to me—14,000 Reasons to be Happy.  Eager to convert the unenlightened. 

            “Don’t you want to check in at the hotel?  Take a nap while the kids take theirs?”  I casually glance at my watch.  “See, the kids sleep until four.  At six we eat dinner.  At seven–“

            “The Late Cafe for a late dinner!” my mother cries, like someone shouting “Bingo!”  To five-year-old Jean, she says: “You like shrimp, don’t you?”

            “What’s shrimp, Mom?” 

            My parents are dutifully picking up the slack while Ray, erstwhile husband, father of three, and ambitious scientist putters away in a research lab in California: Bad timing, but it couldn’t be helped: The day the lab was ready, the baby was born.  Anyway, Ray doesn’t get along with my parents.  “They’re tasteless, ignorant and dangerous—TIDs,” he claims.  “TIDs!”  When he says that, his thin lips tighten, his dark eyes narrow working up into a full-face sneer.  The vein going up his forehead starts pulsing.  “Brainless TIDs: you look through one ear and see out the other.”

            After snatching up the airport’s free weeklies and posing (with devil horns and smirks) for photographs with the kids, I drive my parents to their hotel so they can nest.

            When I get home, I put everyone down for naps.  I run downstairs to my office, a mole’s hole: narrow, dirt-colored walls, one low-watt light bulb.  In my chair I lean back, stretching out my legs.  I close my eyes.  There’s not a sound in the house except for my computer’s efficient hum.  I count backward from ten, and feel my body turning into liquid.  Lulled by my computer’s hum (I call it my “Song of Myself”), I finally relax, every cell limp.

After thirty seconds of nirvana, I hook into the net and find an e-mail from Ray.  It says: “How’re the kids?  How’re the visitors from the distant solar system?  Has anyone blown up yet?”

“The hotel’s toilets flush and the TV has cable,” I e-mail back.  “They couldn’t be happier.  And Ray: intelligent adults do not ‘blow up.’”

            That night, to prove I am the dutiful, self-effacing daughter of their dreams (I am their daughter, but I am not them), I take my parents to an outdoor concert. 

            We sit on a terraced, velvet green hillside facing the outdoor theater and watch the Ding Dongers–a group of septuagenarians costumed in red and white.  Behind the theater, ducks waddle in a pond.  My parents are enthralled: Outdoor concerts are definitely their turf.  Geese fly overhead, some even honk, making them feel like they’re back in the country of upstate New York, cultivating the garden with their tractor, or shoveling six-foot snow drifts off the front porch. 

            The Ding Dongers serenade the polite crowd (mostly elderly women perched on lawn chairs) with “Let’s All Sing Like the Birdies Sing.”  My mother, sitting Buddha-style, sings and sways as if she’s in some religious trance.  Then the Ding Dongers put their hands to their mouths, where they’ve cleverly concealed whistles.  They warble together.  My father whistles with them.

            “How do they do that?” Jean asks. 

            “How do they do that?” Gail repeats, savoring each word.  Gail’s at that stage where she doesn’t know enough about words to use her own. 

            “I don’t know,” I tell them. 

            “What do you know, Mommy?” Jean says.

            Emerging from her trance, my mother says: “That’s one of the mysteries of growing old.” 

            “Like the mystery of the universe,” I say, without looking up.  I brought my work: a computer printout of the parts-per-billion of benzene in soil near a landfill.  “You know, Mom?  Gases accreting in the Big Bang?”   

            “What are you doing?” asks my mother.

            “Looking for glitches in patterns.”  Ruler and pencil in hand, I go down columns of data, then more columns of data. 

            “You’re missing everything,” she says.

            I look up.  On stage a Ding Donger steps out of her red skirt, revealing silk pantaloons edged with flowered lace.  She holds her arms out chest high, like she’s getting ready to hypnotize us, and starts tap dancing.  Another one languidly plucks at an electric keyboard.  One in a motor-powered wheelchair shakes a tambourine.

            “We did that tap dance in seventh grade,” my mother says.

            “You did?  You remember that?” I say, wondering if she’s going to demonstrate.  Already her arms are rising. 

            “Everybody took dance then.”  My mother’s still swaying.  Jean and Gail start swaying.  “It was in the curriculum.  We didn’t waste our time on sex education.  Sensitivity training.”  My mother snorts.  “That’s what choice should be about, not this other choice.  Life used to mean something.  No wonder your sister is home schooling.” 

            When my sister, mother of five, lectures to me about the school system dumbing down and the government making us into automatons, I nod, and make the perfunctory “hmms.”  If I didn’t know her, I’d think she were a fanatic, or had a persecution complex.  But obsession is a trademark of my family.

            “What’s that on your shirt, Mr. Gerk?” Gail asks, pointing to my father’s dark blue, short-sleeved shirt.  The shirt shows off his arms, which like his legs, are slim and tan.  They’ve nicknamed my parents The Gerks, a throwback from last year when Ray called them The Jerks.  When my mother asked how they chose The Gerks, I told her it’s after Gerkian motion: the motion of small particles in fluid, the impact of liquid striking the particles moves the particles.

            “That’s his moon shirt,” my mother says.  “It shows the moon.”

            “How come the moon isn’t round?” Jean says, frowning.  She touches a white sliver on his dark blue shirt.

            “The moon has phases,” my mother says.

            “Phases.  Right, Mom,” I say.  To Jean, I say: “The moon circles around the earth, and the earth circles around the sun.”

            “And the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone–“

            “Mo-om,” I say.  “The moon is always whole, Jean–always–but it gets its light from the sun.  Not the earth.  The earth can block off light, making the moon appear to be not whole.”    

            “That’s what I said,” my mother says.  “It’s a matter of phases.  Appearances.”

            Waving pastel hankies, and wiping sweat from their wrinkled foreheads, the Ding Dongers bid the crowd adieu.  My mother waves, too–big waves–and Gail and Jean do likewise.  The girls are watching my mother closely, wondering what she’s going to do next.

            Next up is Uncle Jim Slim and his three-piece band.  A kiddie band, so all children including Jean and Gail, swarm to the stage and help Uncle Jim sing the ABCs.  I’m left with the sleeping baby, and with my parents, one on each side, which could be good or bad.

            “How did you like those tomatoes we had for dinner?” I ask my father. 

            “OK,” he says, as if he’s doing me a big favor.  He starts whistling the ABCs.

            “There’s nothing like a tasty tomato,” my mother says.

            “They used to have good tomatoes,” my father says reflectively.  Growing up on a dairy and vegetable farm, he should know, but ever since the steel plant gave him the golden handshake, he’s had moments of melancholia. 

            “Remember the tomatoes we used to grow?” my mother asks.  “They were so good.”  A former self-reliant country type, she used to pick cucumbers and haul slate from the back woods to put around the house.  Now, down on her knees, she plants flowers.  She organizes the condo people to protest bulldozing the nearby jungle.

Not to let a good opportunity pass me by, I tell them: “I grew tomato plants recently.”

            My parents look up, impressed.  Maybe their daughter is not the vain, polo-shirted yuppie from the suburbs: gravel surrounding the shrubbery, the kitchen host to an army of dangerous-sounding vegetable machines.  

            “I bought biodegradable cups–made of peat moss.”  I nod, raising my eyebrows, and they raise theirs.  My parents are great fans of peat moss.  “I watered them.  I sunned them.  I babied them.  Then Jean pulled all the plants out.”  I nod again, waiting for them to raise their eyebrows.

            My parents look at me: So? 

            Then my mother starts laughing because Uncle Jim is doing an accelerated rock-and-roll version of Itsy Bitsy Spider: the rain coming down, the arm rolls, the sun coming up.  He’s losing half the kids, but he’s not losing my mother.  Jean and Gail are back up with us, watching my mother, their small hands moving in wobbly circles, trying to imitate her.  As she does Itsy Bitsy Spider, she tells my father: “You have to teach her, George.  You don’t have anything better to do.  Go buy some plants for Kate.”

            “Mom,” I say sharply, “I don’t have any place to plant them.”

            “We’ll find a place.”

            “What else do you need done?” my father asks.  Swallowing, he looks up to the sky as if he’s calculating the amount of radiation the grass is absorbing.  “I could paint the front door.  Or give your windows a grease job.”

            “You don’t have–“

            “It will give him something to do, Kate.” 

            When the concert is over, my mother says: “Come on over to our hotel room.” 

            “That’s OK, Mom,” I say gracefully, as if the visit is an invaluable privilege, which is exactly what the girls think.  They can’t get enough of The Gerks.  Their hotel room is like a giant hamster’s nest: several editions of USA Today (shredded and unshredded), candy wrappers, apple cores, half-filled cups of orange soda.  There, my parents prop themselves up on beds for the night and gradually become soporific, the TV blasting away, potato chips in one hand, Coke in the other.  It’s their at-rest mode, the essential complement to the going-out mode. 

            “Sure you don’t want to come?  I think Homeward Bound is on.  It’s so funny.”  My mother starts convulsing with laughter.  “They have this dog–”  Her eyes become tiny stars.  Spit flies in projectiles from her mouth.  “This dog who talks.”   

            “Gee, Mom,” I say, coolly, lowering my eyes, “I have to put this baby to bed.  See how cranky he’s getting?  He kept me up last night.”  I jiggle him, and he smiles at my mother.

During the next few days, we eat dinner out.  We eat lunch out and sometimes breakfast, as if being “in” manifests a failure of the spirit of adventure. 

            “Why work?” my mother asks.

            “Work?” I say.  It’s more work trying to keep the kids entertained at a restaurant than making dinner, but I take the invaluable opportunity to tell her: “Mom, you work to get ahead.”  I’ve already shown them my state-of-the-art computer station, and explained to my dad (he has an analytical mind, unlike my mother, whose mind is likely engaged in some out-of-body, extra-terrestrial traveling) how I can access thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of databases on just about any subject under the sun: knowledge at my fingertips.  

            “But we’re on vacation!” my mother says, punctuating this with her witch laugh.  “Who cares about databases?  We need to go to Cafe Late.  The Late Cafe!  Isn’t there a parade somewhere?”

She nudges my father and he says: “Yeah.”

            “The mall,” she says to me.  “The biggest mall in America.”

            “Yeah!” the girls scream and start dancing around.

            “Mom, the traffic will drive you crazy.  That mall is a black hole of traffic–the cars go in, but they never come out.”

            Most times, I weasel out of the parades and the two-for-one breakfasts, claiming that if the baby spends his life in a car seat, then he’ll grow up with a hunched back.  Or I tell my mother: “I have to make some phone calls.”

            “Relax, Kate, you just had a baby!  Take it easy!”

            “I have a job, Mom.”

            “The job can wait.”

            “What job?” my father says.  “I thought you stayed home with the kids.”

            “I work at home, Dad.”

            I don’t pretend to be the mother my mother is.  For the next four days, however, I will ease up on the job; I need my energy and intelligence to outsmart them.  But my parents are persistent. 

            “Chicken,” my mother says, when I decline still another dinner invitation–as if I am a defector.  As if I am abandoning the kids.  Or them? 

            They’ve gone back to the hotel, the kids are napping, and I’m in the basement, cushioned by darkness and silence, a hot cup of coffee beside me.  My computer screen glows blue.  I hunch my back, there’s a dial tone, the connect, and I see four new messages.  The moment is perfect.  The last message, from Ray, says: “Are the TIDs driving you nuts yet?”

“A lot you know about people!” I bang on the keyboard, and send it off.

            That night I find myself at Fun Time; it’s the least I can do after all my father’s painting and greasing.  No sooner do Fun Time’s glass doors swing open than cheerleader music blares out at us.  High-pitched sirens scream and lights of all colors flash at us, as if in warning: Enter at your own risk; leave your mind behind.

            “We never had things like this when you were a kid,” my mother says, unsure for once what to think.  The kids stare, goggle-eyed. 

            “These places are everywhere, Mom,” I tell her casually.  “I predict they will replace the swing set.” 

            “Remember the swing set we had for you kids?” my mother says, wistfully.  “Our swing set was the center of everything.”  She twists on her legs and I feel her absorbing the place’s karma.  She likes the place; in fact, there doesn’t seem to be any place she doesn’t like. 

            “I remember putting it up,” my father says, groaning.

            “The people that bought our house–he owned a bank in town–they took the swing set down,” my mother says. 

            My parents, pausing mid-thought, tilt their heads, together, like the cardinals in our backyard.  I get the feeling they’re intercepting a secret message.  Suddenly a giant polar bear with glowing pink paws grabs Jean’s hands and bobs his enlarged head.  Gail crouches behind me, and the baby howls.  If it were just me with the kids, I’d make some lame but logical excuse and escape; but it’s one thing fooling the kids, another fooling the parents.

            “They should put this in 14,000 Reasons to be Happy,” my mother says.  She gives the polar bear a cackle, and he cackles back. 

            “What?” I can barely hear her.

            She repeats it.

            “Yeah, yeah right, Mom.”  Every day after dinner, when the kids are screaming, or during dinner when they’re screaming (the screaming is a recent development), my mother opens 14,000 Reasons to be Happy.  She reads a passage then laughs uncontrollably.

            We’ve gradually moved ourselves away from the noise center, toward the restaurant section when my mother suddenly cries: “George!  Talk to your daughter.  You never see her.”

            “I have a routine in Florida,” my father says, his voice deadpan.  He’s watching Jean and Gail as he talks, maybe trying to find the resemblances between them and me.  Or maybe he just wants them to come over and pinch his nose, or pull his hair–something he actually encourages.  “I get up at five and bike to the bagel shop in Cocoa.  Then I play golf.  Then I swim.  Then I make lunch.  Then I eat lunch.  Then I take a nap.”

            “Huh,” I say, nodding, hopefully reflectively, not wanting to hurt his feelings.     

            “Then you eat dinner and go to sleep at five,” my mother says, putting her hands on her ample hips and jutting out her chest, as if after forty years, she’s ready to break in another husband.  

            “I don’t go to bed that early,” he says, slowly raising his gray eyebrows at my mother.  He looks sad.

            “You can get a jumbo pizza, a pitcher of pop and twenty tokens for $19.95,” my mother says, sticking out her stomach.  

            My father snorts.

            “We don’t need a jumbo,” my father says.  “Anyway, I thought you were on a diet.” 

            My mother gives him her evil look, which closes that matter.

            Behind the counter, the at-attention teenagers are sweating, watching my parents for signs of decisiveness.  A line has formed behind us, a line of busy, time-crunched people–like myself.

            “What are you doing?” my mother asks my father.

            “I’m reading the menu.”

            “He’s in one of his moods,” she says to me.  “A phase.”

            “What do you mean by that?” he says.

            “It means you can’t make up your mind.”  My mother jabs my father in the side.  “Get the goddamn pizza, George.  Just get the goddamn pizza,” she says louder, and the mothers in line behind us try to stare her down.

            “What kind of soda?” he asks.

            “No Coke,” I say.  “They’ve eaten so much sugar recently,” I pause slightly, “that it’s a wonder they still have teeth.  We never got Coke.  Remember, Mom?  You used to give us lectures about how the pop molecules got beneath the gums and rotted the teeth–in no time at all.” 

            “One night of Coke isn’t going to kill them,” she says.  She orders the food and my father pays the relieved teenagers.  Then I watch my parents and the girls play games.  Then I watch them play videos.  Then I watch them go on rides.  Luckily, I brought my briefcase.  Then as they eat greasy pizza, I think about Ray, who is undoubtedly, after a satisfying day of work, eating dinner (salad, chicken breast, new potatoes) alone, in a quiet restaurant. 

            “One-hundred and forty-thousand a year,” my mother says.  We’re sitting in my family room, looking out the bay window to the back yard.  The back yard is bordered by tall pines and lilac bushes. Earlier my mother remarked that pines reminded her of the old house, and I took this as a minor concession.  This is also their last night so I indulge in a beer, and we have our annual argument on abortion.  We know beforehand that neither of us will change our positions.

            “Nobody wants to get an abortion, Mom.”  

            “This one abortionist botched it, and the woman ended up with a baby without one arm.”

            “Totally unsubstantiated, Mom,” I say, my voice raised.

            “Is that the beer doing that?” my father says.  He laughs, and the baby starts crying.  

            “Here, Dad.”  I hold out something I found on a computer search, The Perfect Tomato.  Snatching the computer printout from my hands, he mutters, then goes outside to smoke a cigarette.  The back door slaps twice.  The girls hurriedly put on their sneakers, and the back door slaps twice more.  They get him to push them on the swing set.

            “He’s in his antagonistic mood,” my mother says, her voice now quiet.  She’s on my chair, rocking back and forth.  “He gets unhappy when he’s not working on something.”  I look at the clock, and at my gargantuan pile of untouched computer printouts on the dining room table.  “If I didn’t push him, he’d be like his Aunt Ruth who rocked and rocked and pulled out her hair, saying the communists were after her.” 

            Then together we look outside to where the children are swinging happily.  The sun has fallen, the stars are bright, and the full moon lights up the back yard and its perimeter of tall pines.  Startled, I look again, feeling myself on the swing, my hair flying, and my body escaping the pull of gravity. 

            My mother’s dogmatic tone of voice returns.  “It’s a business, Kate.  Abortion clinics don’t present all sides.”

            “They’re only trying to help people–to give choices, Mom.”

            “Choices!  I don’t like what’s happened to that word.”  She throws up her hands then rocks more vigorously.  “Choices, but no direction, and no thought of the final outcome.  What are choices without responsibility?”

            “That’s why the woman has an abortion.”

            Then we look outside.  My father stands beside the swing set, pushing one child, then the other, the moonlight glinting on his glasses.  Chains squeak and the girls cry, “Higher!  Higher, Mr. Gerk!”

            “Mom, listen to science, the voice of reason.  It’s a fetus.”  I watch her cringe.  “A few cells.  You lose cells every day.  It’s more cells vs. less cells.  A numbers issue.”

            “You know what they do in China with ultrasounds?” my mother says.  “They want boys.”  For the first time, her face sags.  “People think they’re taking the easy way.  In twenty years, when the experts look back on us, and see what was good and what was bad, will they say: It was a harsh time?  The experts have all these studies, so they know something, but soon they begin to think they know everything.  Who knows everything?”  My mother looks woefully around the room at the big-screen TV, the complicated telephone answering machine.  “I almost forgot.”  She reaches into her purse, and pulls out The Book, holding it out to me.  “I bought this for you.”

            “14,000.  Yeah.  Right.  I don’t need that.”  I try not to sneer.  She’s still holding out the book, so I take it and thwack it down beside my computer printouts.

            “I know you like to read,” she says, her eyes hopeful, latched onto the injured book. 

            “I don’t have time, Mom.  I work.  I’m a working woman!”

            The back door slaps, and everybody comes in.  Then backs bent, my parents gather the clothes they’ve shed.  They pick up their dripping, sticky bottles of suntan lotion, their crumpled tourist brochures they left in the bathroom.  Who knows what they’ll do with them!  Then with plastic bags hanging from their hands, they lower themselves into my car and race off–in low gear–to their hotel.  They ignore the car’s computer command to switch gears, so all the way to the next street over, I hear my poor car whine.  It’s like a baby: You have to listen to it, take care of it.  But tomorrow morning I’ll take them to the airport.  The Gerks will be gone!  They will be history until next year!

            After I get everyone to sleep–and it’s not easy with all the Coke they’ve been drinking–I run down to my office.  I slump in my chair and count backward from ten, then call Ray on the phone.

            “Ray?” I say.  “It’s me.”

            “Why are you using the phone?”

            “My mother was on the computer trying to draw a picture, and she wiped out the communication program’s exec file.”

            “Typical.”

            “How’s everything going?”

            “The data I’m getting are great.”

            “Ray, I know about the beauty of numbers.  Listen: I miss you.  I love you.  I know how important work is, but how much longer are you going to be away?  The baby smiled.  You should have seen him.”

            “They want me to set up some other labs around the country.”

            I don’t say anything.

            “Kate, it’s an invaluable opportunity.  And we can talk every day.”

            “Ray, the baby smiled.  Do you hear me, Ray?  He smiled at my crazy mother.”

            “The TIDs!” he laughs.  “The city will never be the same.” 

            “Ray, I don’t like you calling them that.”

            “Okay, I’m sorry.  Have them stay longer.  They’re there for you, Kate.  For you, alone.”  His voice is softer.  “They’re doing it all for you.”

            That night I have nightmares about limbless babies, babies with big heads or no heads, babies crying for their mothers.  And me: I’ve been vaporized.  I’m floating like stardust, and I’m trying to catch the pieces of myself, but I’m no bigger than a speck of dust.  In fact, I’m almost nothing!  I’m a speck that came from the speck before me, which came from the speck before it.  “Specks!” I scream, “We are all specks!  We were all born from the same speck, so we must all be each other!”  I’m screaming, trying to find my mother, trying to get her to understand, trying to gather my specks together, but I start sinking, falling faster, the pieces coalescing, then I hear terrible, insistent screaming, but I can’t open my eyes.  I wake up.  It’s the baby.  I nurse him, and no sooner do I fall asleep, than I’m vaporized again.  Gail’s screaming.  I get up and comfort her.  Just as I fall back asleep, my alarm goes off. 

            The next morning, I drive my parents to the airport in the rain, during rush hour.  My parents’ silences, so rare, say: “We’re sorry–we didn’t mean to be pests.”  They’re huddled together in the small back seat (a girl on each lap), which makes them seem even meeker, as if I am the parent.  Traffic slows, and Gail starts crying.  Then the baby starts crying.

            “Who has the baby’s pacifier?”  I look back at the girls, then wildly, at my parents.  Moving their squished shoulders, my parents make an attempt to feel around for the pacifier.  Then my mother starts doing Itsy Bitsy Spider.  My father warble-whistles along.  The crying stops instantly.  We creep forward, almost getting somewhere.

            “What did you think about that article, Dad?  The Perfect Tomato.  Isn’t that incredible what technology can do?” I smile into the rearview mirror. 

            “Incredible,” he says, deadpan. 

            “Dad, the genetic engineers can make any kind of tomato you want.  Juicy, not juicy.  Seeds, no seeds.  Green, pink or blue.”

            “But if it’s tasteless,” he says, “they said you might as well eat plastic.”

            “The engineers can do it.  They can even make it rigid, so it will have a longer shelf-life.”  I honk at the car in front of me that’s taking too much time.  “So it won’t give when you move it across the country.”  Gritting my teeth, I smile into the rearview mirror.  My parents look at me, as if I haven’t understood a thing.

            “The article also said they spliced a human gene into a pig,” my father says.  “A pig,” he says, like it’s a crime.  “It gave the pig wrinkles and arthritis.  Did you see that?”  

            “Poor pig,” my mother says.

            “I can’t read everything,” I tell him.  “You can’t know everything.” 

            “Oh the poor pig,” my mother laments.

            “Look, the airport,” I say casually, as the airport signs greet us, and I try hard not to show my profound relief.  My parents look bewildered.  They start crying, big tears that they don’t even bother to wipe away.

            “I’m sorry we never made it to Cafe Latte,” I tell my mother.  As we say good-bye, and I love you, I give them back to the land of sun.  When I look in the rearview mirror for one last time, they’re gone.  I almost can’t believe it.  There’s a profound silence.  There’s so much empty space in the car that I feel chilled.

            Getting back on the highway, I tell the girls: “If I speed, we can make it back in time for the sitter.”  Jean is in front beside me, and the other two are in back, strapped in like machine-packaged dolls.  They look stunned.

            “What are we going to do today, Mommy?” Jean says.

            “We’re going to do what we always do: Play, eat lunch at noon, take a nap at two, eat dinner at six–“

            “But what are we going to do?” she asks, insistent.  “It’s going to be boring without them.”

            “Boring, I’ll say.  Huh, what’s wrong with a little boredom?”  It starts to pour.  Suddenly the highway becomes lines of brake lights. 

            “What happened to The Gerks?” Gail says suddenly.  “The Gerks!  The Gerks!”  Jean repeats the chant, then starts heaving.  Her face contorts; the baby’s face contorts.  They start whimpering. 

            We’re at a standstill.  From the radio I hear there’s been a twenty-car accident a mile up–no injuries–but a semi spilled a load of soap.  I turn off the engine.  There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to read–except my mother’s book on the floor.  The kids are screaming, so I hold out The Book, fanning its rainbow-colored pages.  “Look, Mrs. Gerk forgot her bible.”

            “You didn’t read it,” Jean screams at me.  Arms folded across her chest, her eyes tighten into the accusatory stare.  “And she’s your mother.”

            I look at Jean, at the wailing baby, at Gail who’s chanting and rocking.  Cars are honking behind us, and cars are honking in front of us.  “Goddamn traffic,” I murmur.  A burly guy a few cars up gets out and screams.  Then he starts pounding on the hood of his BMW.  A woman in high heels and a black raincoat gets out and walks along the shoulder, head bent against the rain. 

            “Why are they doing that?” Gail says between whimpers.

            “That’s modern life.”  Then I look at Jean, who’s sneering at me.  So I find the book’s dedication page and read it aloud.  “‘To all Fools.  Be a Fool, don’t be uptight.  You could be dead tomorrow, or even today.  Yes?’  Pretty optimistic stuff, huh?  Do you think that was written for me?  Do you think The Book (I pause, emphasizing that term), has How to be happy in a traffic jam with three screaming kids?”

Eyes tear-filled and glazed, the girls rock, chanting softly: “We want The Gerks.  We want The Gerks.”  I skim the Table of Contents.  Then I stop. 

            “Look!”  I look again to make sure.  “There’s a page titled ‘Traffic jams on the thruway in the rain with screaming kids.’  Do you believe that?”  I hold up the book.  “I don’t believe it.”  I turn to the indicated page: “’We all know life is not a rose garden.  It’s more of a bug-infested vegetable garden.’  Ha! You can say that again.  ‘You can either give up and rot, or you can rise above it all.  To rise above it, start by doing Itsy Bitsy Spider.  Start slowly so you don’t screw up.  Ask the screaming kids to help.  Don’t forget to sing the words and move your eyes.’”

            “Don’t forget to sing!” I say sarcastically.  “This is ridiculous.”  More cars are honking.  More people are abandoning their cars.  It’s a hell of a jam, a jam to beat all jams.  Sirens are coming from several directions and the people from abandoned cars are walking to the next exit.  Some are climbing the chain-link fence that separates the highway from the neighborhoods.  Those in cars are screaming at those out of cars.  I look up the highway and behold a sea of approaching soap bubbles.  The bubbles keep coming.  The kids are chanting and crying, so I start singing, slowly, just like the book says: “‘Itsy Bitsy Spider went up the water spout.'”  I crack open my window, and the rain, beating all around us like millions of tiny drums, has a sudden, fresh timbre.  “Down came the rain and washed the spider out, out came the sun, and dried up all the rain–.  . . .”

            They’re not crying anymore, merely hoarsely chanting: “We want The Gerks.  We want The Gerks.”  They’re watching me, watching me closely with surprise, maybe alarm, and I start making faces.  I do Itsy Bitsy Spider with the hand movements, faster and faster, and I do it for them (they’ve stopped chanting, their hands are moving in circles, following mine), and I do it for the car next to us, and then I get out of the car, the soap bubbles surrounding me, and I start doing it in the rain and the bubbles because I feel that white heat, that uncontrollable energy that overwhelms me, and takes me by surprise.