only what about YOU? she asks out of the blue. You're on holiday, nicht? How long are you here for? What are you planning to see? You hear yourself beginning to make your life into a story. You feel yourself both revealing and hiding, hiding by revealing. You don't know why you're doing it, exactly, but it seems easy enough, and you warm to the exercise quickly. You hear yourself telling Nayomi about how you live in a small town in northern New Jersey called River Edge. How the river there is brown and sluggish. How no houses line its edge. Yet how the place is called River Edge nonetheless, perhaps for the same reason that Greenland is called Greenland. When you were in high school, you went down to the river with some friends, through the dense woods and undergrowth, across the railroad tracks, with a mind to skinny dip. Only then you saw the water rats gliding along the muddy banks and that was that. Still, the place isn't as ugly as all that might make it sound. River Edge is one of those quaint little suburbs filled with shady avenues and sweet little gingerbread houses in whose yards people rake leaves, shovel snow, trim hedges, wave at neighbors, take note of their environment, keep to themselves. Yours is near a park named Van Saun. Van Saun has a small zoo, a large pond, a miniature train for the kids, pony rides and, on summer weekends, a craft market. On Saturdays you and Robert set up a grill near the playground and cook out among the hoards of New Yorkers who come across the George Washington Bridge weekly to enjoy the illusion of countryside. The children love feeding and chasing the ducks. Your parents live four blocks east. Your sister lives twenty minutes away in a seedy town called Hackensack. You see them all every Sunday for dinner. Each morning Robert rises at six, showers, dresses, and commutes to Manhattan by car. He works in the financial district. You're a realtor. Well, not really a realtor. A realtor in your spare time, is more like it. A realtor in waiting. In between raising the kids and taking care of the yard and shopping and cooking and just, well, just keeping up with life. In college, you were a double major, psych and English, which gets you exactly nothing upon graduation. You almost flunked your statistics course. You had no idea you needed to know math to study psychology. You have a lot of fun with realty, though right now you consider it more a hobby than an authentic job. You hope things will adjust someday. Then you could afford to take trips like this with Robert and the kids more often. Next spring, during the off-season, you plan to visit Portugal. Not because of anything specific. Just because the name sounds so romantic. Portugal. You can hear the ceramics in it, the mosaic pavements and picturesque cafés in Lisbon. Someday you want to visit Scandinavia. You don't know why, but you have always dreamed of sitting in a dogsled rushing across a frozen lake in Lapland at dusk. Sweden, maybe. Maybe Finland. Finland sounds as if it must exist at the ends of the earth. The kids would have a great time. It would be what a real education should feel like. They'll be teenagers before you know it, and you want to make sure to enjoy them, give them something to enjoy, an imagination full of important family memories, before they're all grown up and gone, because you want them to be happy, but you also want them to remember you and Robert fondly, want them to return often. Celan becomes aware he is being talked about and tunes into your conversation. From nowhere, he blurts that you saw the place in London where they chop off people's heads with axes. Robert half turns in his seat to explain, again, that it's called The Tower and they don't do that sort of thing over there any more. Nadi adds they forgot to cook her hamburger in Paris. Remember, honey? you say over your shoulder. We call that tartare. Steak tartare. We call that gross, Celan says. Nadi and her brother break into laughter. Nayomi joins in. The French, she says, the French. You take pleasure in listening to more of your vacation sifted through your kids' heads, how they erase and rewrite, edit and augment. After a while, they get bored, distracted, produce a deck of cards from the treasure-trove suitcase unzipped in the cargo space behind the backseat. Nayomi initiates a game of Go Fish. She continues talking as she plays. You're glad she's along. Robert floats in and out of conversation with her. He asks if anyone is interested in checking out a little road-trip music on the radio. Nayomi claps her hands and says yes. You think of the Saturday afternoons following college when you two had nothing to do except lie around in bed reading The New York Times and listening to records. Jazz, mostly. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Robert finished grad school, landed his job in lower Manhattan. You became pregnant with Celan and everything modified, attained layers, complex tonalities. You love it all and you feel disconcerted by it all, like the camera filming your life one day slipped on its tripod, like the frame skewed but the camera kept on rolling. Robert locates a station out of Florence. Procol Harum is singing about a whiter shade of pale. Behind the wheel, you coast gradually into the glassy blankness that always settles over you after you've driven for more than an hour. Everything grays into the automatic. It feels good, like staring at a television screen after all the shows have gone off the air. You are there and you are not there. You are thinking and you are not thinking. In the distance, the low blue mountains seem as though they've been water-colored across the horizon, they are so lacking in depth. Every so often you become aware of the manic eruption of the Italian announcer's voice between songs. He is speaking so rapidly it unnerves you. Every so often you become aware of a phrase passing between Robert and Nayomi. Celan and Nadi open their snacks. For him, a very large bar of milk chocolate. Before you went into the restroom, Nadi insisted on a kind she had seen in the little market next to your hotel this morning, something with marshmallow, toffee, and mysterious green bits mixed in it. She takes a bite and hates it immediately. It tastes like poop, she says, her eyes filling with tears of disappointment. Nayomi leans over and gives Celan a big hug, stage-whispers how special he'd be if he would agree to share his bar with his little sister. He tries to act aloof, proud of his newfound power, but crumples into giggles as soon as Nayomi starts making fart noises with her mouth against his neck. He gives up on the spot. Nayomi splits the chocolate bar in half, divides it between the kids, and eats the one with the mysterious green bits in it herself. You find yourself liking her more and more. After the card game, which doesn't conclude so much as trail off into late-morning, sugar-crash, perpetual-motion sleepiness, Celan and Nadi curl up on either side of Nayomi for a nap. Nadi lays her head down in her lap. Celan leans against her shoulder, knees to his chest, mouth soon parted slightly as if he just had an idea. Robert passes a bottle of water back to Nayomi, untwists the cap on a second, passes it to you. Nayomi continues talking, but you are no longer listening to what she's saying. You've lost interest. You would like to take a nap yourself. You enjoy hearing Donovan singing about the hurdy-gurdy man. The Rolling Stones about how she's a rainbow. The feel of one palm on the wheel, one gripping the cool water bottle. The exhilaration that you are somewhere special, somewhere very far away from those gingerbread houses and cookouts in River Edge. It comes to you that you have used up so much of your life in one place when there are so many other places to experience. It's so easy to let one day resemble another. You spend your time thinking about this until your stomach begins to remember lunch, then you check the clock on the dashboard. It is already 12:45. You ask Robert to consult the map, find a nice village for a nice meal. The kids can stretch their legs, burn off some energy. Once there, you'll pull your husband aside and suggest you treat Nayomi to lunch. She looks like she could use some kindness. It takes Robert a minute to pinpoint your current location, another to discover a good destination.