M Objects

The amusement park was hot and littered. Nothing twirled. I revolved ponderously in one of Santa's snowballs: cramped, sticky, gritted. The park was moribund, aimed at seven year olds. At ten I should have craved more speed, but did not. People got hurt when things moved fast.

Before we left, my parents danced on a raised platform, bordered by rope like a fight-ring. The dancing was dangerous. Mother had hissed enough times, "don't play with your father when he's been drinking." My face once had collided with the sharp edge of a wrought-iron stair-rail. The metal corner subsequently had acquired a stiff pad of green upholstery fabric, with the black stitching of a monster. My own stitches were clear.

If she was dancing with him, maybe there hadn't been too many beers. But I felt no surprise when he fell, almost gracefully, right into the five-piece band. Other dancers laughed. The collision wasn't all that loud. The tam-tams were down, but the drumskins unruptured. It still seemed that things might stay okay.

Once pressed into the enormous back-seat of the Buick LeSabre, I realized that we were in trouble. We were moving too fast. We stopped in jerks. Every move landed us on the same dusky, then dark road. My mother stared ahead, and chipped, "let me drive, Bill." No audible answer, of course, merely angry acceleration. It was just another night of Beethoven's Ninth. Ask him to turn it down, and ba ba ba BUM: the entire German chorus swelled.

We were two hours into the 30-minute trip. I sat at the left window, Mary at right, with Tommy in the middle. We were trying to get home, but we couldn't. Dad was driving and Dad was drunk, again.

We were turning too many corners. We were braking too late. Every muscle stood in relief, as I braced against the coming crash. I started at the back of my mother's head just as fixedly as she stared at the road. Why hadn't she checked to see if we were scared? Did she even understand that this was serious?

The distances inside the LeSabre were expanding. Our parents drifted, then became obscured. They were far away in a different misty claw of the Crab Nebula. The front and back seats were separately swirling, in different directions, drawn to opposing galaxies.

Tom at three was propped up, but asleep. I looked at my sister; we wordlessly joined hands to create his seatbelt.

Suddenly my father peeled into an empty lot. He pulled himself out, and leaned his bones (heavy for such a small man) against the car. "Goddamned North Star," he said, with a baleful glare at the florid night sky. And with that, I knew that we would stay lost forever.

My father lately had become interested in astronomy, one of his sequential nature enthusiasms. He owned no telescope, but many books. H.A. Rey's The Stars depicted the constellations as stick figures. I found the illustrations impenetrable and thus hateful.

As with all of his interests, I refused to participate: my guerilla action in parental war. I would not locate Sirius, the bright Dog Star. I would not imitate the distinctive cowbird. I would not, despite my father's increasing incredulity, ever correctly identify the Shagbark Hickory. "But," he would argue, "it's ... shaggy."

As he now muttered, my mother finally twisted her face to us. "Get out of the car," and she headed toward nearby lights. He growled -- something. "It's ten at night," she snapped, "and they are hungry." Who, I wondered, could she be talking about?

It was my first smorgasbord. After hours in the dark, the restaurant's glare -- multiplied by stainless steel pans -- was both clinical and alien: a UFO operating room. Whatever foods there were had been molded abstractly and arranged randomly. After yam-shaped meat came chop-shaped cake. Even the customers were arrayed at endlessly long tables without demarcation. You couldn't tell where anyone's family started, or stopped.

The mood changed there. The darkness continued to lift, even after we returned to the car. We traveled on highways, with more lights. We drove in smoother and gradually-broadening circles. My sister and I did not resume our arm-lock, but dreamed in window refractions. My mother relaxed her visual grip on the road. Her spirit seemed to float outside -- following but reluctant, tethered perhaps to the radio antenna.

There was less traffic. The night was quiet. We would not die. We even would see our house again. But first we had to orbit for a while.

"Time to take another peek at old Polaris." This time he managed a neat stop in the emergency lane. I craned my head outside, but saw only sodium vapor coronas. He squinted upward briefly, and then he drove us in a straight line back home.

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An old snippet of kids and back seat mysteries, posted in salute to the back seat at slow reads.