Outside a tourist center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a little boy was selling painted horseshoes from a large wooden wagon. He sat on a bench just beside the entrance to the shop, his wicker hat lay next to him, his small legs swung at the people walking by. Nanette circled the building twice before she stopped. The little voice behind her ear said it wasn’t appropriate to talk to him – hassle him with questions. Really she knew she wasn’t stopping because nobody else seemed to be stopping. That was the problem with other people; they were always around to remind her of how close she was to being exactly like them – scared, polite, infinitely similar. An awful beige monotony she had no desire in joining, which was why, as she came around the corner for the third time and saw he was still there; still largely ignored by the people walking directly past him into the tourist shop to buy plastic rulers and light-up keychains with their names on them; she stopped, as casually as she could.
“Did you make these yourself?” Up close, she was startled by how gray and big his eyes were, how thin and soft his hair looked.
“Painted em, yeah.” He swung his legs challengingly. His teeth were bucked like a twelve-year-old boy’s teeth usually are.
“Cool. How much?” She stood about four feet back with her arms folded, focused on the horseshoes as though she had never seen one before: she was shy around men when she wasn’t drunk.
He hopped up from his bench. “These big ones with the pictures in the middle are ten, these ones here are seven, the little ones are five each and the ones at the top here with the stars on are a little more expensive, those are twelve fifty. You can buy a little string like this” he pulled one from his pocket “to hang them with for fifty cents. If you buy two you get a discount.”
Nanette nodded, taking everything in.
“Okay. Give me the little black one and the little green one.”
“You want the strings too?”
“Sure.” He pulled another string from his pocket, began working it through the holes in the horseshoe in that self-consciously aggressive way that boy’s hands do men’s work. His hands were exactly like her brother’s hands.
“Seven dollars please.” He tugged on the strings to make sure they were secure, handed her the horseshoes. Nanette dug in her bag for her wallet, in her wallet for her money. The boy looked past her at the people walking by. She handed him three bills.
“Thanks.” She put the horseshoes directly in her handbag. “Do you mind if I sit here and smoke?”
“No, go ahead.” His small hand gestured hurriedly and ungracefully – a movement he would not fully gain control of until he was much older. She sat on a bench nearby, tried to think of something to say to him. Now that she was here, she could not think of a single question. They watched the sky turn from blue to slate.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“India,” she said, “but I live in California now.”
“Oh,” he nodded, his eyes rather big. She wondered if he knew where India was on a map. She wondered if he knew where California was.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“About a mile from here.”
“Did you walk here?”
“No, I can ride this thing,” he indicated the wagon.
“Oh wow. How do you do that?”
“I put one knee on it and use the other leg to push.”
“Oh, like a skateboard.”
“Uh huh.” Silence again. Nanette blew smoke at the sky.
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh…I dunno.” He shrugged and smiled.
“Do you listen to the radio?”
“No.”
“But you can, right?”
“Yeah, if I wanted to.”
“Do you know who the Beatles are?”
He shook his head. The air went heavy all of a sudden – rain about to fall. The grass looked darker than it was. Across the road, corn marched in the wind like neat rows of soldiers. Nanette pulled a bag of chocolate covered raisins out of her handbag and offered it to the boy. He came over to her and took just one, didn’t take another when she offered again. They watched the people go by. Nanette was surprised at how few seemed to notice that he was even there. Some did, but seemed too nervous to stop. It was a fragile situation, Nanette supposed, to feel curious but to feel like you had no right to be curious. I mean suppose, she thought, you had never met a gay person before?
“Do you get bugged when people ask you a lot of questions?”
“No, I don’t mind it,” he said. “People are curious.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gideon Jr.”
“Gideon? That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks.”
Nanette clawed through her mind for more questions. So much for being a reporter, she thought. Suddenly she had infinitely more respect for Joan Rivers.
“Still trying to sell them horseshoes, huh?” A man with a pot belly and a crew cut walked by. He was walking a tiny dog on a leash too big for it. His daughter and her mother followed, the girl looking unabashedly at Gideon through her hair.
“Was that one, Mommy?” she said as they went inside.
Nanette finished her cigarette, looked around for a trash can. There was one about ten feet away. She stood up and stretched, flicked the butt in the can. Normally, she would toss it on the ground and stub it out with her toe, but that felt rude in front of Gideon. She checked her watch – she was signed up for a tour that started in five minutes. Out on the road a buggy and horse went by, snorting and sweating proudly.
“Hey, excuse me?” It was Gideon behind her. “Would you mind watching my wagon for a minute? I have to use the bathroom.”
“Of course!” Nanette’s heart flapped a little. It was silly, she thought, such a small favor for him to ask, but she was flattered to have earned his trust. He ran inside and she sat behind the wagon, imagining what it would be like to sit behind it every day.
In the corner of her eye, a group of people was milling around the door where her tour would start. She sat up a little and waved, trying to catch someone’s attention, suddenly angry about trapping herself behind these horseshoes. The tour guide came out of the door and they began traipsing inside. She looked around for Gideon. He was nowhere. She thought about yelling out to the guide, but felt silly. It was only a fifteen dollar tour, and after all, she was already talking to the real deal! What tour could be better than that? She lowered her hand, didn’t attempt to catch the tour guide’s attention when he looked around for people he had missed.
The sky was still out there. Still as damp and as gray as it had been. It would probably rain later, she thought. Or perhaps that was just how the sky looked here. She had only been here for two days, what did she know about the weather in Pennsylvania? She wondered how many of the people walking by did know about the weather in Pennsylvania and how many were tourists like herself. She wondered how many were tourists in their own towns. Gideon came out of the shop.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem.” She stood and went back to her bench. “What’s the weather usually like here?”
“Usually pretty good around this time. It snows in the winter and we get good rain in the spring for the crops.” Gideon was no tourist.
“Alright man, how much for one of these things?” The pot-bellied man was back. His daughter was swinging from his arm like a little monkey, the dog trying to lick her face. Gideon hopped off the bench, gave him the spiel. “Alright, I’ll take one. Princess, what color do you want?” The little girl, suddenly shy, peeked at Gideon before pointing to a pink one.
“You want the string to hang it up for fifty cents?” The man nodded and pulled out his wallet. His wife came out of the store, carrying a menu.
“Honey, they say the wait in the café is about twenty minutes. Oh you got a horseshoe!” She had a vaguely Spanish accent. Nanette wondered if it was Mexican or Cuban. “What’s your name?” the woman said to Gideon.
“Gideon.”
“Oh that’s a nice name!” She tossed the menu at her husband and sat down on Gideon’s bench, blocked him from Nanette’s view. “Tell me, Gideon, do you celebrate Christmas?”
“Yes. We celebrate Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving and sometimes New Year.”
“That’s interesting.” The dog was trying to lick her face now. She pushed it away. “Could I take a picture with you?”
“Oh,” he looked embarrassed, “We don’t really do that.”
“Oh.” She looked around and spied Nanette. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me! Yes, you dear. Are you from New York?”
Nanette frowned in surprise. “No, I’m from California.”
“Oh. Why do you wear that hat?” Nanette touched the big crocheted beanie slouched on the back of her head.
“I have very short hair and my neck gets cold,” she offered.
“Oh,” the woman looked disappointed. “I thought you were Jewish.” She turned away from Nanette, back to Gideon. How dare that woman sit between us! Nanette was fuming. I missed my tour to watch his horseshoes! Jewish?
She couldn’t hear what the woman and Gideon were saying, so she watched the woman’s daughter. The little girl was spinning circles a few feet from the bench, long brown hair whipping innocently in front of her eyes. Nanette tried to look at Gideon to see if he was watching her – she was about his age and she was pretty cute – but she couldn’t see his face. The girl’s father was trying to control the dog and read the menu at the same time.
“Princess, do you want grilled cheese or chicken nuggets?” She wasn’t listening. “Princess!” On the bench, the woman seemed to be talking pretty nonstop to Gideon. Nanette wondered what she was saying. What she was asking him. She wished she had been able to think of so many questions. She felt bad about being bitter about the woman – after all, she was a better Joan Rivers than Nanette had been. She caught snatches of his answers; “I have seven brothers and two sisters,” “No, we don’t have TV,” “I play baseball and volleyball and help my parents.”
“No drugs huh?” the husband cut in suddenly. Nanette turned her head. He was peering at Gideon over the menu. Gideon shook his head.
“Uh uh.”
“Jesus, you see, smart people. Smart people.” The pot-bellied man tapped his head and walked away, stood near Nanette.
“That’s one thing I wish I never did,” he said. Nanette realized he was talking to her. He watched his daughter grab his wife’s hand and drag her inside, Nanette assumed to the bathroom. “I have friends, you know, not one of them is happy, you know, that they did it.” He quickly lit a cigarette. “Not one person I talk to doesn’t regret it. Smoking weed, whatever.” Nanette made a sympathetic face and nodded. She had spent the last year in LA getting high and had loved it. “It gets you.” He said. “It made me quit school. You know, I dropped out of school because I was smoking weed. I have friends who are lawyers and engineers now, you know, they’re successful.”
“Man, I have friends who are in college studying to be lawyers and engineers and they still smoke weed,” Nanette said. The man rubbed the top of his head.
“Yeah, yeah. I guess I had friends like that too. I guess they just didn’t smoke it as much or something, you know? I dunno.” He turned and looked out into the sky, seemed to be studying a grain silo on the horizon. His eyes told her he had just realized what she already knew: that it wasn’t the weed that made him quit school.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“New Jersey.” He filled the heavy air with smoke.
“Is it nice?”
“Nope.” His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, proud of its knowledge. “You know what rat race means?” Nanette nodded. Rat race, fat race, mouse and cat race: it was the same everywhere. The man was still studying the grain silo. “Not like here,” he said.
Nanette turned to Gideon.
“Do you like Shoo Fly Pie?” she asked.
“My mom makes it,” he grinned.
“How did it get its name?”
“I dunno. I guess one day they were making it and they had to shoo some flies away from it.”
Nanette imagined Gideon’s mother shooing flies away from her pie. She felt that the kitchen would be yellow and the table cloth would be checkered. There would be jars of jam on a shelf above the stove and a large dog asleep under a chair. Somehow it had everything to do with what the pot-bellied man was talking about.
“Honey!” His Mexican or Cuban wife stuck her head out the door. Nanette quickly looked to see if the man had put his cigarette out. He was holding it behind his back. He waved to his wife.
“Looks like my table’s ready. Nice talking to you.” He stubbed out his cigarette, put the half-smoked butt back in the pack for later, went inside like someone walking into Gettysburg, the dog tucked under his arm.
Nanette raised her eyebrows at Gideon, who swung his legs at her. In this way they filled the silence until Nanette’s phone rang. It was her mother.
“I’m in the parking lot. Are you ready to leave?”
“Sure. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Nanette closed her phone. “Well, I guess I’m on my way too,” she said to Gideon. “It was nice talking to you.”
“You too,” said Gideon. Nanette thought about writing him a letter when she got home, but she doubted that his trust in her extended as far as giving out his home address. She dallied for a couple of seconds, feeling like there should be more to this farewell. There wasn’t.
“Well, bye,” she said.
“Bye,” he nodded. She made an awkward shrugging gesture, as though he should care that she was leaving, and walked away. As she was about to round the corner into the parking lot, she thought of something.
“Hey,” she called back to him, “Don’t work too hard.”
On the way back to their hotel they stopped at Staples so her mother could buy a digital camera, and while Nanette’s mother berated the stringy haired, acne-d salesman; first for letting them stand around waiting to be helped for fifteen minutes, and then for not having the camera she wanted in stock; Nanette browsed the aisles. On aisle 7: New Technology, she found something called a Sony E-Book. Nanette had read about them but had never seen one up close. She touched the screen, followed a brief tutorial. For the very reasonable price of three hundred dollars (plus the cost of each book), the tutorial said, you could have access to a nearly unlimited supply of reading material.
“You know they have a printer now that prints in 3D?” her dad had told her a week before. “You feed it raw materials and it prints you a shoe, or a coffee mug, or whatever. Fascinating! It’s like living in Star Trek!”
Nanette shook her head at the E-Book and looked over her shoulder for Big Brother. She was always doing this. It was part of being in the race: you always had to be checking to make sure He wasn’t gaining on you too quickly. He wasn’t there: instead she saw her mother striding huffily up the aisle.
“They don’t have the camera I want. Honestly, how can it be so hard to spend two hundred and fifty dollars in this country?”
“Hey, what do you think of this?” Nanette picked up the E-Book.
“What? Oh. Well, I don’t know. I suppose anything that makes people read is good, but it would be hard to curl up with in bed.”
“E-Books don’t make people read,” Nanette said bitterly. “Harry Potter makes people read.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Her mother wasn’t really paying attention. “Shall we go?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
They walked to the door. Nanette was surprised to see an Amish woman at the check out. She was pleasantly round, with an unpretentious frizz of black hair and a unibrow. She could have been Gideon’s mother. Nanette had learned at the tourist center that they sometimes shopped in “our” stores for things they ran out of. She wondered what an Amish woman could possibly be buying at Staples. Were they secretly using electricity? Were they secretly reading E-Books? She imagined little farmhouses full of Amish families huddled over E-Books, eating microwaved Shoo Fly Pie, taking turns on the X-Box, their father watching through the curtains in case a tourist should come by. Gideon buying pre-painted horseshoes in bulk from a craft store and riding into town on his brother’s Vespa, parking it somewhere out of site, hiding his Blackberry in his shirt pocket and smoothing out his answers to banal questions. Had she been taken in by this little con artist? Somehow she doubted it. And even if she had, she thought, she would rather keep intact her vision of the yellow kitchen, the jam jars, the sleeping dog. If nothing else, she wanted to hold on to that image for the sake of pot-bellied college dropouts everywhere, who needed to believe there was something else out there beside the rat race.
“Did you make these yourself?” Up close, she was startled by how gray and big his eyes were, how thin and soft his hair looked.
“Painted em, yeah.” He swung his legs challengingly. His teeth were bucked like a twelve-year-old boy’s teeth usually are.
“Cool. How much?” She stood about four feet back with her arms folded, focused on the horseshoes as though she had never seen one before: she was shy around men when she wasn’t drunk.
He hopped up from his bench. “These big ones with the pictures in the middle are ten, these ones here are seven, the little ones are five each and the ones at the top here with the stars on are a little more expensive, those are twelve fifty. You can buy a little string like this” he pulled one from his pocket “to hang them with for fifty cents. If you buy two you get a discount.”
Nanette nodded, taking everything in.
“Okay. Give me the little black one and the little green one.”
“You want the strings too?”
“Sure.” He pulled another string from his pocket, began working it through the holes in the horseshoe in that self-consciously aggressive way that boy’s hands do men’s work. His hands were exactly like her brother’s hands.
“Seven dollars please.” He tugged on the strings to make sure they were secure, handed her the horseshoes. Nanette dug in her bag for her wallet, in her wallet for her money. The boy looked past her at the people walking by. She handed him three bills.
“Thanks.” She put the horseshoes directly in her handbag. “Do you mind if I sit here and smoke?”
“No, go ahead.” His small hand gestured hurriedly and ungracefully – a movement he would not fully gain control of until he was much older. She sat on a bench nearby, tried to think of something to say to him. Now that she was here, she could not think of a single question. They watched the sky turn from blue to slate.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“India,” she said, “but I live in California now.”
“Oh,” he nodded, his eyes rather big. She wondered if he knew where India was on a map. She wondered if he knew where California was.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“About a mile from here.”
“Did you walk here?”
“No, I can ride this thing,” he indicated the wagon.
“Oh wow. How do you do that?”
“I put one knee on it and use the other leg to push.”
“Oh, like a skateboard.”
“Uh huh.” Silence again. Nanette blew smoke at the sky.
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Oh…I dunno.” He shrugged and smiled.
“Do you listen to the radio?”
“No.”
“But you can, right?”
“Yeah, if I wanted to.”
“Do you know who the Beatles are?”
He shook his head. The air went heavy all of a sudden – rain about to fall. The grass looked darker than it was. Across the road, corn marched in the wind like neat rows of soldiers. Nanette pulled a bag of chocolate covered raisins out of her handbag and offered it to the boy. He came over to her and took just one, didn’t take another when she offered again. They watched the people go by. Nanette was surprised at how few seemed to notice that he was even there. Some did, but seemed too nervous to stop. It was a fragile situation, Nanette supposed, to feel curious but to feel like you had no right to be curious. I mean suppose, she thought, you had never met a gay person before?
“Do you get bugged when people ask you a lot of questions?”
“No, I don’t mind it,” he said. “People are curious.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gideon Jr.”
“Gideon? That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks.”
Nanette clawed through her mind for more questions. So much for being a reporter, she thought. Suddenly she had infinitely more respect for Joan Rivers.
“Still trying to sell them horseshoes, huh?” A man with a pot belly and a crew cut walked by. He was walking a tiny dog on a leash too big for it. His daughter and her mother followed, the girl looking unabashedly at Gideon through her hair.
“Was that one, Mommy?” she said as they went inside.
Nanette finished her cigarette, looked around for a trash can. There was one about ten feet away. She stood up and stretched, flicked the butt in the can. Normally, she would toss it on the ground and stub it out with her toe, but that felt rude in front of Gideon. She checked her watch – she was signed up for a tour that started in five minutes. Out on the road a buggy and horse went by, snorting and sweating proudly.
“Hey, excuse me?” It was Gideon behind her. “Would you mind watching my wagon for a minute? I have to use the bathroom.”
“Of course!” Nanette’s heart flapped a little. It was silly, she thought, such a small favor for him to ask, but she was flattered to have earned his trust. He ran inside and she sat behind the wagon, imagining what it would be like to sit behind it every day.
In the corner of her eye, a group of people was milling around the door where her tour would start. She sat up a little and waved, trying to catch someone’s attention, suddenly angry about trapping herself behind these horseshoes. The tour guide came out of the door and they began traipsing inside. She looked around for Gideon. He was nowhere. She thought about yelling out to the guide, but felt silly. It was only a fifteen dollar tour, and after all, she was already talking to the real deal! What tour could be better than that? She lowered her hand, didn’t attempt to catch the tour guide’s attention when he looked around for people he had missed.
The sky was still out there. Still as damp and as gray as it had been. It would probably rain later, she thought. Or perhaps that was just how the sky looked here. She had only been here for two days, what did she know about the weather in Pennsylvania? She wondered how many of the people walking by did know about the weather in Pennsylvania and how many were tourists like herself. She wondered how many were tourists in their own towns. Gideon came out of the shop.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem.” She stood and went back to her bench. “What’s the weather usually like here?”
“Usually pretty good around this time. It snows in the winter and we get good rain in the spring for the crops.” Gideon was no tourist.
“Alright man, how much for one of these things?” The pot-bellied man was back. His daughter was swinging from his arm like a little monkey, the dog trying to lick her face. Gideon hopped off the bench, gave him the spiel. “Alright, I’ll take one. Princess, what color do you want?” The little girl, suddenly shy, peeked at Gideon before pointing to a pink one.
“You want the string to hang it up for fifty cents?” The man nodded and pulled out his wallet. His wife came out of the store, carrying a menu.
“Honey, they say the wait in the café is about twenty minutes. Oh you got a horseshoe!” She had a vaguely Spanish accent. Nanette wondered if it was Mexican or Cuban. “What’s your name?” the woman said to Gideon.
“Gideon.”
“Oh that’s a nice name!” She tossed the menu at her husband and sat down on Gideon’s bench, blocked him from Nanette’s view. “Tell me, Gideon, do you celebrate Christmas?”
“Yes. We celebrate Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving and sometimes New Year.”
“That’s interesting.” The dog was trying to lick her face now. She pushed it away. “Could I take a picture with you?”
“Oh,” he looked embarrassed, “We don’t really do that.”
“Oh.” She looked around and spied Nanette. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me! Yes, you dear. Are you from New York?”
Nanette frowned in surprise. “No, I’m from California.”
“Oh. Why do you wear that hat?” Nanette touched the big crocheted beanie slouched on the back of her head.
“I have very short hair and my neck gets cold,” she offered.
“Oh,” the woman looked disappointed. “I thought you were Jewish.” She turned away from Nanette, back to Gideon. How dare that woman sit between us! Nanette was fuming. I missed my tour to watch his horseshoes! Jewish?
She couldn’t hear what the woman and Gideon were saying, so she watched the woman’s daughter. The little girl was spinning circles a few feet from the bench, long brown hair whipping innocently in front of her eyes. Nanette tried to look at Gideon to see if he was watching her – she was about his age and she was pretty cute – but she couldn’t see his face. The girl’s father was trying to control the dog and read the menu at the same time.
“Princess, do you want grilled cheese or chicken nuggets?” She wasn’t listening. “Princess!” On the bench, the woman seemed to be talking pretty nonstop to Gideon. Nanette wondered what she was saying. What she was asking him. She wished she had been able to think of so many questions. She felt bad about being bitter about the woman – after all, she was a better Joan Rivers than Nanette had been. She caught snatches of his answers; “I have seven brothers and two sisters,” “No, we don’t have TV,” “I play baseball and volleyball and help my parents.”
“No drugs huh?” the husband cut in suddenly. Nanette turned her head. He was peering at Gideon over the menu. Gideon shook his head.
“Uh uh.”
“Jesus, you see, smart people. Smart people.” The pot-bellied man tapped his head and walked away, stood near Nanette.
“That’s one thing I wish I never did,” he said. Nanette realized he was talking to her. He watched his daughter grab his wife’s hand and drag her inside, Nanette assumed to the bathroom. “I have friends, you know, not one of them is happy, you know, that they did it.” He quickly lit a cigarette. “Not one person I talk to doesn’t regret it. Smoking weed, whatever.” Nanette made a sympathetic face and nodded. She had spent the last year in LA getting high and had loved it. “It gets you.” He said. “It made me quit school. You know, I dropped out of school because I was smoking weed. I have friends who are lawyers and engineers now, you know, they’re successful.”
“Man, I have friends who are in college studying to be lawyers and engineers and they still smoke weed,” Nanette said. The man rubbed the top of his head.
“Yeah, yeah. I guess I had friends like that too. I guess they just didn’t smoke it as much or something, you know? I dunno.” He turned and looked out into the sky, seemed to be studying a grain silo on the horizon. His eyes told her he had just realized what she already knew: that it wasn’t the weed that made him quit school.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“New Jersey.” He filled the heavy air with smoke.
“Is it nice?”
“Nope.” His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, proud of its knowledge. “You know what rat race means?” Nanette nodded. Rat race, fat race, mouse and cat race: it was the same everywhere. The man was still studying the grain silo. “Not like here,” he said.
Nanette turned to Gideon.
“Do you like Shoo Fly Pie?” she asked.
“My mom makes it,” he grinned.
“How did it get its name?”
“I dunno. I guess one day they were making it and they had to shoo some flies away from it.”
Nanette imagined Gideon’s mother shooing flies away from her pie. She felt that the kitchen would be yellow and the table cloth would be checkered. There would be jars of jam on a shelf above the stove and a large dog asleep under a chair. Somehow it had everything to do with what the pot-bellied man was talking about.
“Honey!” His Mexican or Cuban wife stuck her head out the door. Nanette quickly looked to see if the man had put his cigarette out. He was holding it behind his back. He waved to his wife.
“Looks like my table’s ready. Nice talking to you.” He stubbed out his cigarette, put the half-smoked butt back in the pack for later, went inside like someone walking into Gettysburg, the dog tucked under his arm.
Nanette raised her eyebrows at Gideon, who swung his legs at her. In this way they filled the silence until Nanette’s phone rang. It was her mother.
“I’m in the parking lot. Are you ready to leave?”
“Sure. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too.” Nanette closed her phone. “Well, I guess I’m on my way too,” she said to Gideon. “It was nice talking to you.”
“You too,” said Gideon. Nanette thought about writing him a letter when she got home, but she doubted that his trust in her extended as far as giving out his home address. She dallied for a couple of seconds, feeling like there should be more to this farewell. There wasn’t.
“Well, bye,” she said.
“Bye,” he nodded. She made an awkward shrugging gesture, as though he should care that she was leaving, and walked away. As she was about to round the corner into the parking lot, she thought of something.
“Hey,” she called back to him, “Don’t work too hard.”
On the way back to their hotel they stopped at Staples so her mother could buy a digital camera, and while Nanette’s mother berated the stringy haired, acne-d salesman; first for letting them stand around waiting to be helped for fifteen minutes, and then for not having the camera she wanted in stock; Nanette browsed the aisles. On aisle 7: New Technology, she found something called a Sony E-Book. Nanette had read about them but had never seen one up close. She touched the screen, followed a brief tutorial. For the very reasonable price of three hundred dollars (plus the cost of each book), the tutorial said, you could have access to a nearly unlimited supply of reading material.
“You know they have a printer now that prints in 3D?” her dad had told her a week before. “You feed it raw materials and it prints you a shoe, or a coffee mug, or whatever. Fascinating! It’s like living in Star Trek!”
Nanette shook her head at the E-Book and looked over her shoulder for Big Brother. She was always doing this. It was part of being in the race: you always had to be checking to make sure He wasn’t gaining on you too quickly. He wasn’t there: instead she saw her mother striding huffily up the aisle.
“They don’t have the camera I want. Honestly, how can it be so hard to spend two hundred and fifty dollars in this country?”
“Hey, what do you think of this?” Nanette picked up the E-Book.
“What? Oh. Well, I don’t know. I suppose anything that makes people read is good, but it would be hard to curl up with in bed.”
“E-Books don’t make people read,” Nanette said bitterly. “Harry Potter makes people read.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Her mother wasn’t really paying attention. “Shall we go?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
They walked to the door. Nanette was surprised to see an Amish woman at the check out. She was pleasantly round, with an unpretentious frizz of black hair and a unibrow. She could have been Gideon’s mother. Nanette had learned at the tourist center that they sometimes shopped in “our” stores for things they ran out of. She wondered what an Amish woman could possibly be buying at Staples. Were they secretly using electricity? Were they secretly reading E-Books? She imagined little farmhouses full of Amish families huddled over E-Books, eating microwaved Shoo Fly Pie, taking turns on the X-Box, their father watching through the curtains in case a tourist should come by. Gideon buying pre-painted horseshoes in bulk from a craft store and riding into town on his brother’s Vespa, parking it somewhere out of site, hiding his Blackberry in his shirt pocket and smoothing out his answers to banal questions. Had she been taken in by this little con artist? Somehow she doubted it. And even if she had, she thought, she would rather keep intact her vision of the yellow kitchen, the jam jars, the sleeping dog. If nothing else, she wanted to hold on to that image for the sake of pot-bellied college dropouts everywhere, who needed to believe there was something else out there beside the rat race.
To see more pictures of my trip to Pennsylvania, click here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=39760&id=1168357147&saved
very beautiful. ain't the midwest something?
ReplyDeleteNanete's mum sounds like a bit of a waste of space. Great writing though!
ReplyDelete