After their McDonald’s supper, their unhappy meals, they had driven up a switchback in the mountains, near the national park, but not a part of it. Walter hadn’t wanted to pay to enter the park, much less interact with the ranger at the gate. It was dark, and they had to move slowly, the headlights catching deer, who looked malevolent to Eliza. Holly was weeping openly, constantly by then. Eliza yearned to comfort her but didn’t know how. She tried, at one point, to pat her shoulder, only to have Holly recoil as if Eliza intended harm.

Once he found a place to camp, Walter set up the tent he had bought at a Sunny’s Surplus and unzipped one of the sleeping bags, telling the two girls to lie on it. The night was chilly, but Eliza understood that Holly wanted no contact with her. “I’d give you both sleeping bags,” Walter said, “but I need something to pad the bed of the truck, if I’m going to sleep there and give you your privacy.” Eliza curled up into a ball, shocked by the cold, wondering how much longer they could sleep outside at this rate. The tent was another one of Walter’s big ideas. It had been expensive, but he had argued it would pay for itself quickly. Only, it hadn’t, not by a long shot. He hadn’t realized, when he bought the tent, that most camping sites, the ones with showers and restrooms, had charges, too. It had been days since he had landed any work. Holly’s money was the first real cash they had known in a while. She wondered how much there was, if they might check into a motor court the next night-

“Elizabeth?” Walter had entered the tent and was standing over them.

“Yes?”

“Go sit in the truck for a bit. I want to talk to our new friend here.”

She did. She always did whatever Walter told her to do. She went and sat in the truck. Not in the bed, as Walter had probably intended, but in the cab, in her usual seat, the windows tightly rolled up. Still, she couldn’t help hearing what happened next. Screams, sobs, a terrible bellow, like a lion’s roar, then a streak of white, which must have been Holly’s hair flying behind her as she ran, Walter not far behind her. She studied the keys in the ignition, which hung from a chunk of turquoise. Even if she could figure out the clutch, she could never drive back down that switchback. Still, she reached for it, flicked it, hoping to turn on the heater. No, you had to press the clutch in to turn the engine on, and Walter would be mad if she used just battery power. She slid behind the wheel, managed to turn it over after a few tries, then returned to her seat. Warm air filled the car, along with the sounds of a country song, “Have I Got a Deal for You.” She and Walter had worked out a compromise on the radio. He controlled it for forty-five minutes and then she got fifteen. He said that was fair because he was older and it was his truck. He said he really didn’t have to let her listen to those pop stations at all, that he was a good guy. He told her they were bad girls, Madonna and Whitney Houston and the Mary Jane Girls and Annie Lennox, and even Aimee Mann, although all she did was let the world know that her boyfriend was hitting her. He didn’t like any of the songs that Eliza liked except for one, “Every-y body Wants to Rule the World.” When that one came on, he would nod in agreement, say it was very true. He also liked-

“Why’d you turn the engine on?” Walter asked. His face was scratched, and he was breathing hard. “You know better than that. You’re wasting gas.”

“I was cold.”

“Then why are you still shivering?”

She hadn’t even noticed. But she was shivering, and her teeth were chattering so loudly it was amazing she could hear the music at all.

Part VII.EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD

Released 1985

Reached no. 11 on Billboard Hot lid on June 8,. 1985

Spent 24 weeks on Billboard Hot 100

41

“DO YOU WANT TO STOP?” Vonnie asked. “There are a bunch of places at the next exit, and we’re making good time.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“There’s a Dairy Queen.” She drew out the syllables, knowing what tempted Eliza. “And a Cracker Barrel.”

“That’s okay.”

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll find a Stuckey’s.”

Eliza began to laugh, almost in spite of herself. “The infamous peanut log, which you insisted on having-”

“We both wanted it.”

“And it was awful and Daddy copped one of those attitudes he had every now and then, said we had to eat it, because we had been adamant about wanting it, that it would be our treat every day of the vacation until it was gone-”

Vonnie put on their mother’s voice. “Oh, Manny, I’m sure the girls have learned their lesson.” She switched to a lower octave. “They must learn proportion in some things, to stop being so wasteful. Children are starving.”

“So, on the second night at the-what was it called?”

“The Martha Washington Inn. In Abingdon.” Vonnie’s memory always amazed Eliza, but maybe it was just another facet of Vonnie’s certainty about everything. She believed she was right, and no one called her on it. “They took us there because it had a good theater and they were going through one of those phases where they thought we were philistines.”

“Not you, never you.”

“Yes, me too. Daddy thought I had atrocious taste in my recreational reading, and you didn’t read at all when you were young. So they took us to Abingdon to see Of Mice and Men. Which was pretty good, but what we all remember is what happened when you and I tried to flush that Stuckey’s peanut log down the toilet in the Martha Washington Inn’s quaint antique bathroom. If only we had used the ceramic bedpan that was provided for purely decorative reasons!”

Of course. That was why Eliza had started reading Steinbeck a few years later. Because the play had moved her, all of eleven years old at the time. It was 1981, the first year of the Reagan administration, and their parents felt like exiles in their own country, out of step with the times and the mores. Their father was prone to moods like this, a situational depression generated by the culture around him. It was as if he saw his children being borne away on a stream of cheap toys and stupid sentiment. As a parent, Eliza understood better now. She often felt the same way about the things that Iso and Albie coveted, their susceptibility to trends and advertising. But she was less inclined to counter as aggressively as her father had, to insist on trips to Gettysburg and Antietam and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The trip to Monticello notwithstanding, as that had been more of a cover for the need to go to Charlottesville.

If Eliza and Peter had been inclined, they could have married this trip to a visit to Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. Instead, they had claimed that Peter and Eliza were going on a getaway to Richmond, which had been written up in the New York Times as an ideal weekend retreat. They assumed the children could stay with their grandparents, but it turned out that Manny and Inez had their own plans for the weekend, a trip to the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and Eliza could not bear to disturb their genuine getaway for her fake one. Instead, she called Vonnie, who declared she would be happy to stay with her niece and nephew. But Peter countered that it might be better for the two women to hit the road together. “No knock on your sister,” he said, “but I would be distracted beyond all reason, wondering if she would remember to pick Albie up at school on time. Besides, Iso’s still grounded, and she’ll find a way to get around Vonnie. Your sister may be able to go toe-to-toe with most secretaries of state and the chairman of the Fed, but she’d be outwitted by a thirteen-year-old intent on making contact with some pimply boy in North London.”