the place. Toilets emptying into the sea. But thank God there’s no government regulation, though, right, Michael? They might not have sanitation, but at least they have their liberty.
(She says this like a dirty word.)
Oh, I say. I didn’t realize class had started. Is this Moral Superiority 101?
Very funny, she says.
I pick up Doodle and set him on the other side of a puddle.
I thought we were guests here, Juliet, I say. I didn’t realize these people are just our teaching tools. And the poor primitives don’t even know it.
A stray volleyball rolls toward my feet. I go over to the game, where a bunch of teens watch me smiling. I lob it back over the net.
Provisions are limited. We round up a bunch of lemons, bananas, & root vegetables, which is a depressing haul. We grab a couple boxes of cornflakes, shelf-stable milk. I buy the kids some shiny Mylar bags of this bright green cotton candy & Juliet gives me the stink eye. We’re all pretty bedraggled & the adrenaline is leaving us. Also maybe we miss Naguargandup. Maybe we’re starting to wonder if that wasn’t just a fantasy. Being there and feeling the way we did. Giving up time.
We find a place that serves Guna bread so we order like 50. Miraculously they also serve chicken tenders. Sybil starts to levitate w/ happiness. Juliet sits there nursing her beer and I think, OK we’re good.
But Juliet can’t let it go.
She snorts and says, I thought you loved the sea.
What do you mean? I say. I do.
So how do you justify your hands-off approach to taking care of it? Deregulation and all that?
I sigh. Well let’s look at your own example, I say. You’re upset that their toilets empty into the sea. You want these people to get flush toilets? Flush toilets are huge water-wasters. What they’re doing here is “greener” for the planet, you just don’t like the looks of it. It makes you feel bad.
It’s called empathy, she says. It’s called concern. Since when is feeling concern for others a bad thing?
Since politicians prey on it in order to justify taking your liberties—
Liberty, liberty! she says. I have plenty of liberty.
For now you do, I say.
And she just kind of groans.
Mommy and Daddy, Sybil says sternly. Eat your food.
Juliet signals for another beer.
You only talk about liberty, she mutters. You mean your own.
* * *
—
It simply took a long time for our differences of opinion to matter. We were both aspirational white people from frigid, working-class, landlocked towns. Our families were both middle-middle class, on a good day. We both went to Kenyon, for Christ’s sake. Our college friends went on to be journalists, lawyers, or well-read businesspeople. There was no reason to assume we didn’t vote the same way. But Michael had this way of hiding in plain sight. He didn’t like confrontation. So I was totally shocked when he told me who he voted for in ’16. His conversion had been so quiet.
You didn’t even warn me, I told him.
You wouldn’t have left me alone until I changed my mind, he said.
I couldn’t forgive him. I really couldn’t understand it.
He was such a softie. As a daddy, he was a pushover. Lenient. His children were his little angels. People liked him. Dogs liked him. But as he got older, sometimes I sensed, in the way he spoke, glinting from between his words, a mercilessness. There was an inner chamber inside Michael, where in the inevitable crises of man or nature, he planned to go without us. He loved us, but in “the arc of history,” we didn’t matter. Not specifically. He believed in self-reliance above all. But how does such a man accept his place in a family—a loud, disorderly, many-fated whirligig, a force by which each member is alternately nurtured and