“But I’m French!”
“You’re English.”
“A hundred years ago! And only on my grandfather’s side of the family!”
“So you’re a mere product of your socialization in the city of romance.”
“Through and through! It’s like an illness!” A hand raked back his wild blond hair as he shook his head in shame. “Oh,” he moaned, “how I wish there were a cure!”
The crazy old coot with binoculars asked in English, “Are you two speaking Spanish?”
Pierre glowered and flicked a hand at him, and he scurried.
Natalie asked, “Are you intending to join me now?”
“I have a ticket.”
“We’ll share the bus. That is all.”
The hydraulic doors of the See America bus shushed open and people commenced pushing inside as if sale prices had been slashed. And for the first time Pierre observed the group he’d be joining on their tour, seeing a guy dribble the last of his Coca-Cola on the sidewalk and then smash the empty can against his forehead. Pierre turned to his fiancée and objected in French, “But they are peasants!”
With irritation she shoved ahead of him and got into a window seat near the front of the bus, shifting away from Pierre when he took the aisle seat next to her. Two high school boys in street clothes got on with scuba masks and fins in their hands and scuba tanks on their backs. An enormous man who’d joined the tour in Cleveland huffed after the boys, carrying a long something that was wetly dripping through its butcher paper wrapping. Clive averted his eyes as he sidled down the aisle. And then there was an old shawled woman towing along a son in his fifties whose name tag read “Seymour” and who was holding a plastic bag with a goldfish floating in it. They were followed by a hugely overweight woman in a raccoon coat with a cake box in her hands. She squinted at Pierre and his aisle seat and with annoyance said, “You. Skedaddle.”
Pierre glanced up, “Quoi, Madame?” (Pardon me?)
“Don’t start with me.”
Helplessly looking to Natalie, he asked, “Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?” (What’s she saying?)
The woman with the cake box informed him, “I am not the milk of human kindness!”
Natalie told Pierre in English, “She is not milk.” And then she looked out the window again.
Sheepishly getting up, Pierre headed down the aisle, and the woman haughtily sat, saying to Natalie as she opened the cake box, “And you can just keep your hands to yourself.” She then lifted out a three-layer coconut cake that she held up in front of her mouth like a sandwich. She took a bite and coconut flakes snowed down her front.
Scanning the seats behind her, Natalie found her fiancé huddled down in the rearmost booth seat and squeezed between the old shawled woman and the son with the goldfish. As the tour bus rolled forward, he looked plaintively at her as if he were a schoolchild being unjustly punished.
She smiled.
4
Much later on a gray two-lane highway that was branched with tar, she looked over her shoulder to find her dolorous fiancé cradling the plastic bag of goldfish in his lap as Seymour held out a Nebraska road map and prattled on about sites. Sympathetically, she wrestled past the fat woman and walked back to Pierre.
Seymour was saying, “Another roadside attraction you’ll want to show your girlfriend is Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village. About twenty miles southeast of Kearney. In Minden, Nebraska. Two of my favorite displays are the monkey wrench exhibit in the agricultural building and a living diorama of all seven native Nebraska g
rasses. Warp, as you may know, made his loot in Chicago, with plastics. Flex-O-Glass, Glass-O-Net, and Red-O-Tex. If you haven’t heard of any of them, then you’re obviously not a Midwestern chicken farmer.”
Pierre seemed sunken and yoked with a great weight as he eyed Natalie pensively and said, “On a besoin de parler.” (We need to talk.)
“We are in America,” she said. “We should speak English.”
He got a mimeographed sheet of paper from inside his suit coat and shook it. “It is that I have read at last now our itinerary. Look at how we shall be eatings. Look at where we sleeps. What is cooking in your head?” He rattled the sheet again and scanned it. “We are to introduce ourselves to ‘Little Miss Middle-of-Nowhere.’ And then corn detasseling, whatever is that. We go to Chester, the birthplace of six-man football. We dine at the Wednesday night meeting of the Nebraska Catfishing Club. Are you thinking this is amusing for I?”
She’d be the first to admit her voice was teeny as she answered, “It has its charms.”
“We could have gone to Avignon. But no. You do not want to go to Avignon. We could have gone to Aix. Again, you do not want to go to Aix. We are hearing good things from friends about Basel. Mais non, we could not go there. We had to go on . . . un pèlerinage!”
“A pilgrimage.”