Текст книги "The Vacationers"

Автор книги: Emma Straub

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Bobby nodded. The purple in his cheeks had shifted into a slightly greenish tint.

“Hmm,” Jim said. “We’ll talk about this later, son, okay? I’m sure it’ll all be fine.” He spoke with his most solid voice, then Franny withdrew her hands, and stood up, searching for a tissue. Sylvia laughed—she’d never heard so large a number said out loud so casually. Her bank account had approximately three hundred dollars in it. She used her parents’ credit card whenever she needed to, which wasn’t often. Charles and Lawrence held hands under the table. Charles wanted to remember to tell Lawrence that this was one of the possible perils of having children—having to bail them out. The chicken smelled heavenly, like butter and garlic and some tiny green things that Franny had snipped out of the planters by the pool, and he was starving.

“Well,” Charles said. “Would someone pass the wine?” Bobby lunged for the bottle on the table, delighted to have something else to do. “Lawrence, how are your werewolves coming along?”

Lawrence began to talk at length about the reshoots in Canada, about the waylaid bags of fur, and though everyone peeked at Bobby in their own time, even Franny made a show of listening to Lawrence talk about the movie, listening as if their lives depended on that rickety sleigh.

Franny and Jim lay next to each other, side by side on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Even before Jim had left Gallant, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars would have been a large sum, but now that there was only Franny’s inconsistent income and even more inconsistent royalties coming in, it was enormous.

“We could cash out some stocks,” Franny said.

“We could.”

“But is it our responsibility?” Franny flipped onto her side, making the bed buck like a small ship on a choppy sea. She rested her face on her hands, and looked as young as she ever had, despite the worried lines between her eyebrows.

“No, it’s not,” Jim said, and rolled over to face her. “Not directly. Not legally. He’s almost thirty. Most young people have debt. Anyone who goes to law school has three times as much debt as that.”

“But they’re lawyers! And can make it back! I just don’t know if this is one of those times when we’re supposed to let him figure it out for himself. Clearly he meant to—he didn’t bring it up, she did. God, that woman. And to think, all night, I was really starting to like her. But she did that to him on purpose!” Franny was getting agitated. “I know, I know,” she said, lowering her voice. “They’re right next door.”

Seeing his wife in such a state should not have thrilled Jim, but it did. It was rarer and rarer for Fran to get so riled up about something that she could discuss only with him—now that the children were so old, they no longer needed to have the endless conversations of their late youth and early middle age, wherein they would talk about their offspring’s friends and teachers and punishments and all the ensuing guilt and pride for days on end.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said, and reached out to stroke her face, but she was already rolling back toward the windows, settling in for sleep, and so he reached only her back, but when she didn’t shrug him off, it felt like a small gain.

All the lights were out—even Bobby and Carmen’s, Sylvia could tell from the dark crack of air underneath the door. Something was off, in addition to Bobby’s bank statements. She didn’t know what it really meant to be in debt, but Sylvia imagined men with fedoras and briefcases knocking on the door and threatening to cut off meaningful body parts.

At home, she knew all the noisy stairs, which wooden planks creaked and which ones didn’t. Here, she had to guess and so just stayed close to the banister, placing each foot carefully and slowly before moving down to the next step. She wanted to check the living room sofa. There was no evidence that her father hadn’t been sleeping in bed with her mother, but their room had just felt strange, that’s how Sylvia would have described it, had anyone asked, which they wouldn’t. It felt strange in the same way some places felt haunted, when she just knew that there were ghosts present who were friendly or not but definitely dead.

The downstairs was all dark, too, except for a single light in the dining room that someone had left on by mistake. The house was cool, and Sylvia shivered. She nudged her way over to the wall between the foyer and the living room and squinted into the darkness. She could make out the couch, but not well enough to see if there was anyone sleeping on it. She took a step closer but felt like she’d stepped into the middle of an ocean, completely unmoored and lost, and so she retreated to the wall, touching it with both her hands. “Dad?” she said, quietly. There was no response. Even if he’d been asleep, her father would have answered her. Sylvia waited for what felt like forever and then repeated herself.

Of course he wasn’t there. Everything was fine, except the things that weren’t. Her parents were screwed up, but maybe not as screwed up as she thought. Sylvia was relieved, and embarrassed that she’d even wanted to check. When she was a little girl, and had a nightmare, her father had always been the first one on the scene, opening closet doors and poking his head under the bed. That’s all she was doing—making sure that the monsters were pretend. Sylvia felt immediately tired, though she’d been wide awake until just that moment. She could hardly make it back up the stairs and into her own bed before falling asleep, so secure was she in her fact-finding mission.

Day Ten

FRANNY BUSIED HERSELF IN THE KITCHEN, MAKING Tupperware containers of snacks that wouldn’t melt in the sun. Gemma had the glass ones, of course, nothing plastic. Franny would have to be careful loading up the beach bags. No one wanted shards of broken glass with their grapes. The plan—her plan, which she hadn’t yet shared with anyone but Jim—was to take a field trip en masse, the whole group. They would drive to the nearest beach, which wouldn’t be so crowded on a Monday morning. They’d sit and bake there all day, splashing around and eating jamón and queso sandwiches from the local vendors. Gemma had two large beach umbrellas, and mesh folding chairs with low seats built for sunbathing. Franny would wear her large straw hat, and Bobby would be as happy as he’d ever been. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.

One by one, her guests trickled out of their bedrooms. Charles and Lawrence liked the beach and were easy to convince. Sylvia was nervous about seeing Joan and was more than happy to put him off for the day. Bobby said yes, and Carmen said yes, though they appeared in the kitchen separately and seemed not to be speaking to each other. It wasn’t even nine o’clock before Franny had the two cars packed up for the day, and they were off.

Gemma recommended three beaches: Cala Deià, opposite the Robert Graves House, which was remote and rocky and “rather magic” (no bathrooms, no snack shops); Badia del Esperanza, a wide “golden sandy paradise” (high possibility of children/tourists); and Cala Miramar, “a functional beach within a half-hour’s drive. Lots of Spanish families. Less-than– glorious bathrooms on-site.” (No more exciting than a trip to Brighton Beach.) How could they argue with paradise? Surely children wouldn’t be at the beach at this hour, when they should be napping or parked in front of cartoons. Franny plotted out directions to the Badia del Esperanza, and gave a copy to Charles, who was driving the other rental. Sylvia sat in the backseat of her parents’ car. At the last minute, Bobby had joined her, as if choosing to do so at the last moment would mean that no one would notice. Sylvia raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, and neither did Bobby, who immediately wedged a towel behind his head and fell asleep, or at least pretended. Jim and Charles drove in tandem, going slow around the hairpin turns, willing the tiny cars to climb and descend the winding hills with ease.

The beach was a twenty-five-minute drive over the mountains—up, up, up, then down, down, down. Jim drove under Franny’s close supervision—Watch out, watch out, watch out or Oooh, look, guys, sheep! depending on how harrowing the roads were. Sylvia read her book until she felt like she was about to barf, and by then (she had a strong stomach when she wasn’t hungover, and she’d slept as well as she ever had the night before) they were nearly there.

“Hey,” Sylvia said to her brother, and jostled his leg.

“What?” Bobby said, and looked at her warily.

“What did you say to Carmen? Clearly you told her about the girl. Otherwise, why would she have done that to you, right?” Sylvia was genuinely curious—she tried to imagine Gabe Thrush coming to her and telling her about his stupid indiscretion, instead of just showing up at school holding hands with Katie Saperstein. She might even have forgiven him.

“I didn’t.” Bobby raised a finger to his mouth and shushed her. Then he pointed to their parents.

“Oh.” Sylvia scrunched up her face. “So why was she so mad?”

“Shit, Syl, I don’t know, because I went out without her, and got drunk, and came home and puked. Do we really need to talk about this right now?”

“We’re not listening,” Franny said from the front seat.

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Great.”

They were close—the air was saltier. Sylvia decided to let it drop. It was strange to see Bobby this much—when he came back to New York, he never stayed more than a few days at a time, and even then he was always running around with his friends from high school. They never saw each other for more than a meal. She wondered if he’d always been this surly and defensive, or whether something had changed—those looming dollar signs—more recently. There was no way to know. She’d always thought that siblings were pretty much the same people in differently shaped bodies, just shaken up slightly, so that the molecules rearranged themselves, but now she wasn’t sure. She would have told Carmen the truth. As it was, Sylvia felt the information starting to rot inside her, like a dead rat on the subway tracks.

Jim parked in a slanted spot on the side of the road, and Charles pulled in two spaces behind them. They all loaded up their arms with Franny’s supplies and humped the lot of it down a steep set of stairs to the sand, walking past a barrier of narrow pine trees.

Gemma was right—the beach was glorious. Once they were through the trees, the beach opened up like an unfolded map, with more and more clean, bright sand in both directions. There were several clusters of people—umbrellaed colonies here and there—but on the whole the beach was quiet, and the water was nearly empty. The water! Franny wanted to run toward it with her hands clasping open and closed like a lobster’s claws, to hold on to it, a shimmery dream. The Mediterranean was richly blue, with tiny waves lapping in and out. One woman stood some ten feet out, her legs submerged up to her knees and her hands on her hips, elbows winging out to the sides. There was no music playing, no beach volleyball. These were serious sunbathers, the early risers, and dedicated swimmers. Franny led the troops halfway down to the water, and carefully set down her bounty. She flapped out her towel and unfolded an umbrella. She lathered herself with a low-SPF sunscreen—what was the point of coming to a beach and not leaving with a bit of a tan, after all?—and looked around, satisfied. There was sweat on her upper lip, and she wiped it away with a finger.

“I’m going in!” she announced, and peeled off her gauzy cover-up. She dropped it onto her towel and turned away, hoping no one was looking at her thighs. There was a pitter-patter of running feet behind her, and before Franny knew it, Carmen was in the water, sloshing through with high knees until it was deep enough for her to dive, and then she was gone.

Sylvia curled up like a sleeping dog in the narrow and shifting shade offered by the umbrella.

“You know that the sun will not actually set you on fire, right?” Bobby said. He was lying on his back, with his T-shirt thrown over his face.

“I’m a delicate flower,” Sylvia said. She stuck out her tongue for emphasis, but Bobby was no longer looking. On her other side, Charles and Lawrence had set up shop on an impressive scale—magazines, chairs, their shoulder bags weighing down the corners of the beach towels. They were both reading novels, and Charles had his camera in his lap, in case he saw anyone he’d like to paint. Lawrence had also brought his laptop on the off chance that the beach had Wi-Fi, which it didn’t. There was a large hotel just up the road, and he planned to duck away at some point to send some e-mails, or really just to hit the refresh button in hopes that the agency had written again with some news, asking them to call. The beach was too lovely to ignore, though, and Lawrence was more than happy to loll around for a few hours. The water was warm enough to swim in but brisk enough to be refreshing, and so they took turns splashing around and then baking on the sand.

Franny stood in the water and tried to look as European as possible. She wasn’t going to take her top off, but she could do the rest—sunglasses, a simple suit, an air of nonchalance. Carmen was swimming laps again, the current bringing her farther from the shore, but she seemed determined, and Franny doubted that she would need to be rescued. She had a good, strong stroke, dragging the water underneath her with every motion.

“Maybe she’ll drown,” Jim said, appearing next to Franny. “Would that make things better or worse?” He was wearing a thin cotton polo, which the wind pushed against his lanky torso. Jim’s resolute refusal to gain weight like a normal middle-aged person was always high on the list of things that drove her crazy. Bobby and Sylvia both seemed to have been born with this gene, which made Franny wish that it were possible to give such things in reverse, though she’d long held on to the idea that being chubby gave one character. Being thin led to nothing but cockiness. Maybe that’s why Bobby was in this pickle. If he’d been an overweight child, perhaps it could have been avoided.

“Oh, stop,” Franny said. She crossed her arms over her soft middle, pushing together her breasts. It felt absurd to still be conscious of her body in front of her husband, but after that girl, that girl, Franny had reverted to the behavior of a bulimic teenager, minus the purging—eating a second helping of dinner after Jim had gone upstairs for the evening, or when he wasn’t looking. Sneaking in an ice cream cone when she ran errands. Putting on her Spanx in the bathroom, with the door closed.

“So it sounds like Bobby did more than get too drunk the other night,” Jim said.

Franny quickly looked over her shoulder at her kids, some twenty feet away. Bobby was sitting up and staring at the water, his elbows resting on his knees. “I couldn’t tell what happened, could you?”

“Didn’t sound good.”

Bobby stood up, dusted off his bottom, and walked slowly into the sand. He nodded at his parents when he passed them, but kept going. Franny and Jim watched him wade slowly into the sea before he inelegantly dropped to his knees. He flipped onto his back and began to float, his body just a few inches above the sand and bits of seashells. Franny watched her son bob for a few minutes before his whole body began to thrash around as if he were being attacked by an invisible shark.

“Fuck!” Bobby said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He struggled to stand up, and began to hobble back to his towel. The other beach patrons turned to look. “I think something bit me.” He was clutching his calf, just above his right ankle. Carmen had heard the commotion and swum closer, her head and shoulders above the surface.

Jim hustled to his son’s side. “Here?” he asked, pointing to where Bobby was clutching his leg. The skin was raised and turning red, in a lacy pattern. Bobby lost about twenty-five years immediately, his face as open and expressionless as a baby’s right after its very first shot—that wide surprise. Growing up in the city meant little exposure to stings and bites of the natural variety, unless they were ornery pit bulls walking down Broadway. Franny pushed Jim out of the way, and knelt in the sand next to Bobby.

“Sweetie, are you okay?” She reached out for his leg but then withdrew her hand. “Can I touch it?”

Sylvia had rolled onto her side and was watching with some amusement. “Did karma bite you, Bobby?”

“Sylvia!” Franny shouted. They never yelled at the children—it just wasn’t in their nature. They cajoled, they teased, they wheedled, but they never yelled. Sylvia recoiled as if she were the one who’d been stung, and hid underneath her umbrella.

Jim weighed his options. He’d seen it done before, and it would make the burning sensation stop, but being peed on by your father would sting, too. He led Bobby, limping, off to one side of the beach.

“Just do it,” Bobby said. He turned his head, defeated. “Like this could get any worse.”

“Let’s go in the water,” Jim said, “out of the way. Just watch where you step.”

They walked on the dark, damp part of the sand until the very end of the beach, where they stood against the rocks. Bobby closed his eyes and winced in anticipation. Jim pulled down the waistband of his bathing suit and slid his penis out, aiming for Bobby’s leg. He had seen it done before, but never like this. He wanted to explain to Bobby that he was still his child, that even though Bobby had made mistakes, and he had made mistakes, there were years and years of love built up between them, that they could go without speaking for decades and Jim would still love him. Jim wanted to tell Bobby about how much shit he had cleaned off his bottom when he was a baby, about all the times that Bobby had shot golden arcs of urine directly into his face. This was purposeful, this was nothing! But it didn’t feel like nothing. Jim sighed, and a warm stream was released.

The piss worked like a charm. Bobby’s leg was still patterned with raised skin, but it didn’t actually feel like it was on fire anymore. He and his father rinsed the small puddle off the beach as well as they could, and then headed up the sand toward the bathrooms and the snack shop to clean up.

The bathrooms put New York City to shame—a slightly sandy floor, but otherwise sanitary and orderly, with extra rolls of toilet paper and paper towels on view, the kind of things that would have been bolted down if they were in Manhattan. Bobby soaked a few paper towels with soap and water and cleaned himself off. Jim stood back and watched after washing his own hands.

“What’s going on, Bobby?” Jim made eye contact with his son in the mirror, which Bobby quickly broke, angling his face back down toward his wounded calf.

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “I mean, you guys heard all of it. I wasn’t making enough money, so I got another job. It’s not that much debt. I’ll be fine. I was going to ask you guys to help me, but it’s fine, I can do it myself.”

“I meant with Carmen. What was Sylvia talking about in the car?”

Bobby let out an exasperated moan. He turned around and leaned against the lip of the sink. “God! It was nothing. Some girl at the club. It was nothing. I know that you and Mom have been together since you were younger than me, and you guys have a great marriage and all, but things are different now. I don’t know. Carmen is fine, she’s good, you know? She and I get along really well. But I don’t know, forever? Probably not. So why pretend? It’s not like she’s gonna know.”

Jim and Franny had agreed not to tell the children about Madison, about Madison’s upturned nose and her blond hair and the way she had wrecked Jim’s life. The way he had let her ruin his life. No, that still wasn’t it. Jim had been the agent of his own destruction. It was the way he had wrecked his life by choosing to have an affair with a woman so young. By choosing to have an affair at all. Affairs seemed so old-fashioned, like something his own father would have done, and no doubt did do, over and over again. They didn’t threaten the marriage, because the marriage was a scrim, a false curtain pulled tight over the turbulent inner lives of his parents. Jim had never wanted a marriage like that, and he didn’t have one. He and Franny had struggled and fought throughout, especially when Bobby was young. It was never a foregone conclusion that they would stay together—that was something from the stone ages, not the seventies. They’d seen free love (at least on television) and still chosen to get married. Their eyes were open. It was impossible to keep the information (the basics, only the basics) from Sylvia, because they were all under the same roof, but it had been easy to keep the truth from Bobby. It made it nicer to talk to him on the phone, now that Jim and Fran, separately or together, could pick up the telephone and travel back through time to a better marriage.

“Bobby, I cheated on your mother. It was a horrible thing to do, and I don’t want to sound cavalier about it. The only aspect of the entire situation that I know I did right, however, was to tell her the truth.” Parenting was a terrible curse—it was about subjugating your mistakes so well that your children didn’t know they existed, and therefore repeated them ad nauseam. Was it better to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn’t sure. Either way, he wished that Franny was standing next to him, in this beachside Mallorcan men’s room. She’d be furious at him all over again, but she would know what to say to their son.

“This is a joke, right?” Bobby looked confused, like he was vacillating between pride and disappointment. His face eventually settled into a half-smile, the look that Jim had most hoped he’d avoid.

“It’s nothing to be happy about, Bobby.” Jim flattened his own mouth into a thin, tight purse. He motioned toward the door.

“No, come on,” Bobby said. He slapped the remaining water off his leg and shook it out. “It’s just that I didn’t know that. About you. It’s kind of funny. I mean, you’re my dad.”

Jim looked at him quizzically. A Spaniard in a very small bathing suit walked into the bathroom and headed for the urinal in the corner.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” Bobby said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Jim.

Franny ducked under Sylvia’s umbrella to apologize.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. Sylvia looked at her warily. Franny wasn’t much for apologies, and her daughter clearly suspected there was more coming. Franny shrugged her shoulders and relented. “What’s going on with your brother? Can you tell me?” Franny looked back at the water. Despite the presence of electric fish, Carmen was still swimming. She was going to go back to America weighing three pounds, all the exercise she was doing to avoid spending time with the family, and for the moment, Sylvia didn’t blame her.

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Of course I do,” Franny said, but she wasn’t sure. The debt was enough, and the job at the gym. She didn’t want to feel like a snob; she was the daughter of a truck driver and a housewife—how could she be a snob? And yet she wanted more for him. She wanted him to want more for himself. She and Jim had had so many whispered conversations over Bobby’s crib when he was a baby, even before that, over her stretching belly when she was massively pregnant. They had planned his future—as a politician, a writer, a philosopher. A personal trainer with a sideline of whey had not been on the list.

“He cheated on Carmen. The other night. I saw him. It was gross.”

“What do you mean? Dancing with girls, like?”

“Mom.” Sylvia sat up, her spine uncurling. Slumped over, her baggy T-shirt hung to her knees, her bathing-suited body hidden well beneath it. “Please. I saw a lot more than that. Like, tongues. Eww, can we not talk about this? It was gross enough to watch it happen once. I’m not dying to relive the moment.” She squinted toward the sun. “I can feel the skin cancer beginning to form.”

“You actually saw him with another girl?” Franny’s breath shortened. There was that sickening satisfaction at hearing gossip for the first time, swiftly followed by the realization that she’d done everything wrong, everything important. She leaned to the left so that she was able to see where Jim and Bobby had gone. They weren’t at the far end of the beach anymore, and she couldn’t see them elsewhere on the sand. Maybe they’d heard Sylvia open her mouth and had run, knowing what was to follow.

Jim didn’t know it was possible to see actual wavy lines of anger around someone’s head, like a cartoon come to life, but when he saw his wife pacing back and forth on the sand, there they were, clear as day. Charles and Lawrence were standing on her left, and Sylvia was still tucked under her umbrella on the right. Carmen had made her way out of the water, and stood awkwardly in the background, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders like a cape. When Franny saw Jim approaching, she huffed her way up the beach to meet him. She made it just past the edge of Sylvia’s towel, kicking a little sand onto her daughter by mistake.

“Do you know what your son did?” Franny was hysterical, her eyes wild and searching.

“I do now.” Jim was in no mood for this. What Bobby had done wasn’t his fault—it had nothing to do with Jim or his own poor choices.

“He had sex with another girl, practically in front of his sister. In a public place! Should I be happy that you at least had a hotel room?”

Sylvia peered out from under the umbrella, her pale eyes tracking her mother’s movements.

“Fran, let’s talk about this at home,” Jim said. He stretched out a hand toward her, but she slapped it away.

“At home? In New York? When the kids are gone and you are, too, and so who cares anyway, you mean? I think they all deserve to know. It was crazy to think that we could keep a secret like this.” She pretended to look worried. “Oh, no, are there reporters here? Is anyone here from The New York Times?” The other patrons of the beach were staring, and Franny waved. “I think that woman’s from the Post.”

“Mom, we don’t have to do this here, okay?” Sylvia’s voice was quiet. She rolled onto her hands and knees and then pushed herself up to stand. She looked so thin to Jim, so delicate, just the way she had as a baby. He hated what she would hear next, and the way she would turn toward him, wanting it so badly not to be true.

“Your father slept with an intern. Your brother slept with a stranger.” Franny stopped, calculating how cruel she should be. “I don’t know how this happened.”

“People sleep with interns all the time,” Bobby said. “And strangers! Especially strangers! What’s the big deal?”

“She was not an intern, she was an editorial assistant,” Jim said. Franny looked at him and bared her teeth.

“The big deal is that she’s barely older than Sylvia, which makes me ill. The big deal is that your father and I are married to each other. The big deal, my love, is that you don’t seem to understand why this is a big deal. That is the biggest deal of all. Because my husband may have disappointed me, but if I haven’t even taught you that much, then I have disappointed myself.” Franny spun around and began to cry at a very high pitch, the sound of an insistent smoke alarm. Charles hurried over and tucked her into his arms. Lawrence shook his head in sympathy.

“I think it’s time to head back to the house,” Lawrence said, quickly gathering as many things as he could carry. “You get the rest,” he said to Jim.

“Franny, come on,” Jim said. “You’re acting like a crazy person right now. Just relax.”

Charles spun Franny out of his arms like a dancer sending his partner twirling across a ballroom floor. He marched up to Jim, stopping when he was two feet away. Charles gritted his teeth.

“Don’t you tell her she needs to relax, after what you did,” Charles said.

“I think we all need to relax,” Jim said, softening the air with his hands. He looked around at his children, seeking their support. “Am I right?”

“You have always been such a motherfucker,” Charles said. He pulled back his right arm, strong from decades of hoisting canvases and gallons of paint, and let it fly, directly into Jim’s right eye socket. Jim stumbled backward, surprised, and clutched his face.

“Let’s go, Fran,” Charles said.

Franny was shaking as if she were the one who’d been hit. She gave Jim a pleading look and then let herself be scooped back under Charles’s arm. They started to walk to the car.

“Wait!” Sylvia said. “Don’t leave me here with them.” She wanted to say more to her father but couldn’t. There was no air inside her lungs. Sylvia pictured the couch in the dark—maybe he had been there after all, not last night, but the night before, and for who knows how long before that. Everything was worse than she thought. She tried to remember New York, and all the nights since her father had stopped working, all her mother’s dates with her awful book club. There were too many things to think about all at once, and Sylvia felt like she might throw up. She dug her feet into her shoes, which were half filled with sand, and clomped after Charles and her mother.

Lawrence drove, and Sylvia sat in the front seat, giving Charles and Franny the entire backseat in which to cuddle and moan. Sylvia had never heard her mother wail like this—Franny sounded like a circus animal being trained to jump through a fiery hoop. Sylvia tried to face forward and ignore whatever was happening behind her. Out the window, palm trees waved hello, gigantic pineapples wearing grass skirts. The morning was bright, and Sylvia cupped her hands around her eyes like a horse wearing blinders. Lawrence turned on the radio, and Elton John’s voice once again filled the car.

After a minute, Franny’s sniveling tapered off. “I love this song,” she said, and started to sing along. Lawrence and Charles joined in—“Bennie and the Jets” in a fractured, off-key three-part harmony. Franny tried to sing the highest but couldn’t, and so Lawrence launched into an impressive falsetto. Charles sang bass and played along on an invisible guitar. The song went on interminably, their voices getting louder and louder, until they were all screaming. After Elton, the DJ said something in German and then played some Led Zeppelin. Lawrence turned down the volume.