“Would you like a cookie?” she asks the children. “I have Thin Mints and Samoas. My daughter is a Girl Scout — I buy fifty boxes a year.” The kids each take a cookie. “It’s important to have something you can offer your guests, considering I get the lost kids as well — and whether it’s a skinned knee or separated from the pack, you need a little something to perk ’em up, josh them out of their pain. …”
Just the smell of the Thin Mints and the sound of the kids crunching away makes me sick — I run for the bathroom.
“Ice,” she says, “I can give you ice. I see a lot of heat-and food-related illness, also inner-ear issues — people who literally feel topsy-turvy.”
With me in the bathroom, she directs her attention to the children, who are working their way through boxes of cookies. “Don’t worry, this happens to lots of older folks who aren’t used to having to keep up with the kids full-time, so I am well prepared.”
I come out of the bathroom as she’s showing them her “crash cart,” a giant yellow plastic toolbox, like what you’d find at Home Depot, filled with supplies.
Ashley gives me a piece of gum. “Your breath,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“So what’ll it be?” the nurse asks.
“Have you got some Tums?” I ask.
“Used the last one this morning for myself,” she says. “It’s on the list.” She taps a long, narrow shopping list on her desk. “What about a couple of boxes of cookies to go?”
“Sure,” I say. I pull out twenty bucks, and the kids pick out cookies from her enormous supply cabinet. The nurse hands me a mini-can of ginger ale and a straw and tells me to take it with me and drink slowly.
“We’re here all day and half the night, same as park hours,” she says. “So if you need us just call, or ask someone else to call — they know where to find me.”
I reach out to shake her hand, but she demurs. “Can’t,” she says, pumping herself a giant handful of Purell and urging the rest of us to as well. We wash our hands, take our cookies, and bid the nurse adieu. At a roadside gas station I buy a large, out-of-date, overpriced bottle of Tums and pop them frequently. “Like Gummi Bears,” Ashley says.
“Chalky bears,” I say.
In the middle of the night, Nate wakes up with a stomachache and asks me to come into the bathroom with him, as he’s stinking up the place with explosive diarrhea.
“Flush,” I say after he fires off a round, and he does. I am looking for matches to light, but apparently there are no more ashtrays or matchbooks in hotel rooms anymore.
“There are some in my bag,” he says, “in the outside pocket.” I don’t even ask why; I light the whole pack up. A few minutes later, the phone rings. Nate picks up the receiver by the toilet and hands it to me.
“Can I help you?”
“We have a smoke alert coming from your bathroom,” someone from the front desk says.
“We’re not smoking, we’re pooping,” I say, wondering if we’ve been poisoned, felled by colonial-era cuisine?
“Apologies for the intrusion,” the front desk says.
“You think you have a normal family,” Nate says, as he’s straining on the toilet. I am breathing through my mouth and trying to listen attentively. “And then something like this happens, that’s not so normal.” An enormous explosion escapes him. “I don’t mean this,” he says tapping the bowl, “I mean Mom and Dad. … In just a phone call, your life changes. …” An enormous bellowing belch from his behind fills the air with fumes. “Sorry,” he says. “You don’t have to stay in here with me.” I shrug. And then, as he’s sitting there, he suddenly says, “I’m gonna barf.” I pass him the trash can, which luckily has a plastic bag in it. And he barfs and expels at the same time, and I feel bad for the kid. “Do you think we need a doctor?” He shakes his head. “No, this has happened before, I’ll be okay,” and he throws up again.
“I think we’ve been had,” I say, trying to make light of the situation.
“In what sense?” Nate asks.
“First me, then you; let’s hope Ash and the boy don’t get it.”
“Fuckin’ Thin Mints,” Nate says, spitting into the trash can.
“What do you think of the kid?” Nate asks.
I say nothing.
“I think he’s very funny,” Nate says. “He reminds me of Charlie Chaplin.”
“How so?”
“The way he walks, like he’s waddling, and his facial expressions are very rubbery.”
“Do you think he’s smart?” I ask.
“Why is that the criteria?” Nate defensively replies.
“Good question.”
We go back to bed. I dream that I am going to South Africa. At the airport I’m told the only way to get there is as luggage dropped out of a plane, wearing a parachute. The airline informs me that my mother has sent my old trunk from sleepaway camp and it’s already on the plane. I consent, and when the plane is at fifteen thousand feet I crawl into my old camp trunk. Once in the trunk, I am pushed into the rear bathroom and told that on signal someone will push the flush button and there will be a large whooshing sound and I will be vacuum-ejected.
When I try to ask questions, they shrug and say, “That’s just how it’s done.”
It’s a cross between something Curious George would dream up and some kind of terrorist situation. Clearly I must have known this was going to happen, because I’m wearing a giant parachute, which I notice only as I’m falling. Just before I wake up, I pull the rip cord and float, catching an invisible breeze high above the plains as a herd of giraffe runs below. I wake up at 3 a.m. with my arms above my head, as if still clutching the parachute, and find Nate sitting up, knitting.
“What?” he says, defensively.
“Nothing,” I say.
“I do it when I can’t sleep,” he says. “It’s very relaxing.”
I’m still half in the world of the dream, half watching Nate as he’s turning out a long striped scarf. “Don’t,” he says.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t ask if I’m gay. …”
“Okay,” I say. “How’s your stomach?”
“Noisy, but otherwise stable,” Nate says. And I go back to sleep.
In the car on the way home, everyone crumbles; there’s some kind of tension about returning to our “normal” lives. I wonder if we’ve spent too much time together — or maybe it wasn’t enough?
The kids ply Ricardo with treats, like life is all about getting a giant booty bag from a birthday party. “It’s not about stuff,” I keep saying. They know I’m right but don’t stop. Nate asks the kid if he has an e-mail account — he doesn’t. At a rest stop, Nate takes me aside and asks if we can buy Ricardo’s family a computer so they can Skype.
“No,” I say, perhaps too firmly.
“Transitions are difficult for everybody,” the woman working the register in the gift shop says. “I used to be a teacher, and it broke my heart to watch what the children went through. One boy ripped his mom’s skirt off, crying, ‘Don’t leave me here.’ We turned it into a teaching moment and duct-taped the mom’s skirt back together.”