I.

David was in Japan, so I took the boys to the Intrepid, hot and crowded on a summer weekend. I hadn’t, previously, focused on this, but one thing I enjoy is militaristic sight-seeing. I visit the places where people killed each other, and look at the instruments they used to do so. I take my children with me, so they can play with the guns that have been disarmed but left for us to handle. We imagine ourselves officers, pilots, bombers, grunts.

What should we do? Should we look away?

II.

Outside the library one afternoon this week, women sorted donated books that had been left out in the rain. They set them up along the wall, in the sun, to dry. Two older folks, a man and a woman, sat sleeping in their wheelchairs while their aides sat behind them on the bench, then walked over to look at the books. I imagined that David and I were there, asleep, in the wheelchairs. That we were out in the sun, in public, unaware of our surroundings, but watched after, cared for, together. This was almost unbearable. I went to my car and drove home. When I came back to the library, after lunch, the older couple was awake, and being helped into a car. The man waved at me, friendly and insistent, as I drove by, so I waved back.

A voyage is a grand thing: It begins with terror, but the terror is not bad, the terror is good, the terror allows you to see everything clearly, to understand that you are at risk, that life is unstable, that some of the yellow flowers growing by the side of the driveway are daisies but that one is not, it is different, it is more beautiful than the daisies, and you don’t know its name.

Then there’s a flight.

You stand on line for bottles of water and margherita pizzas at the food stand at Versailles. You are in the garden but you are hidden from the garden, on line at the food stand at Versailles. Later your husband will say to you, I measure my life in trips to Versailles. The line to buy food at Versailles is long, and slow-moving. You are behind a group of people who eventually notice a wild Polish woman trying to cut the whole line. You are united with them—Yes! Yes!—as they tell her in French—she doesn’t speak French—that she should go stand on the end of the line. She just wants water! She tries to explain. But that is what everyone wants on the line for food at Versailles. Everyone wants bottles of water, because it is hot and dusty at Versailles. She leaves for the back of the line, then comes back to plead her case again to the women in front of you. In the end, she is allowed, because she can’t be stopped, to cut in front of them and order her water. She seems entirely bewildered by the problem for which she just found an effective solution.

At the taxi stand outside the gates of Versailles there is another problem, which can also be solved: the taxis won’t take you the train station, because it is close. They won’t take you to Montrouge, where your friends live, because that’s not what they do. They won’t tell you what they do, even if you speak French and can be abusive in French. But if you ask them if they’ll take you to the Sixth Arrondissement they will take you there, and charge you what the meter reads, which is fifty euros.

That’s fine, that’s how things are. You can go to Versailles many times. Your husband has been many times, he measures his life in trips to Versailles. But no matter how many times you go to Versailles, you will never get further than a certain point. You will never see more than three fountains. You will never see the inside of the chateau. You will have to cut things short. Then, one day, either because you have grown old, and your children have left home, or because you are lucky, you will come to Versailles and find you have time enough for everything. You will also find that you have seen everything you wanted to see, and there is nothing left to do. You will be bored by Versailles.

You embark on a canoe trip down the Sorgue. Fat trout hide in the shadows of the Sorgue’s cold water. Fisherman stand in the flow. Your husband is given the back position, because he is stronger than you are. The children sit in the middle, and you sit in the front. When you go down a small rapid, your seat fills with water. You pull over to the side of the Sorgue to dump the water out of your seat. But when you get back in the boat, the current is strong, and you are pulled into the trees that hang over the water’s edge. You lay back to avoid a branch, you try to force it away, but it hits your son in the face. You blame your husband for steering badly. You are ashamed of yourself, then get over it. This will be your favorite part of the trip.

At night your husband drives home from dinner à deux. The road is a narrow twisting mountain road that takes you through the southern hills of the Luberon. The advantages to driving this road at night is that lights tells you other cars are approaching, and that, unable to see clearly what's coming, you never put on unmanageable bursts of speed. The disadvantages are that the other drivers are drunk, that it’s easy to make mistakes, and that you might die.

The flight home takes place entirely during the day time. It is always sunny out the windows, although the window shades are mostly pulled down. You must make eight-and-a-half hours disappear. Eight-and-a-half hours of sunlight, of the same sounds, of the same smells, of the same people, of the same ideas, of the same hunger. Eight-and-a-half hours of eternity. You do it, but you’re not sure how you did it, or whether you could do it again.

I bought myself a bike. It is blue, it is easy to lift, it has a straight handlebar, and a bell. I have a friend in town who bikes, and is nervous, as I am, about cars and even about biking, and she agreed to come by on Sunday morning to pick me up for a very short ride with no hills. Because I was so pleased with my bike, and with myself, for having a bike and riding it, I had David take a picture of me standing by my bike, wearing a helmet and the pants I bought last summer, when David, Henry, John and I were in Vancouver, and the boys had said, firmly, that they didn’t want to ride in Stanley Park, so I dressed for the day’s activities as if we were not bike riding in Stanley Park, but when we got, with some effort, to Stanley Park, everyone decided they did want to go bike riding in Stanley Park, and I had to buy a pair of pants in the running store next to the bike rental shop, so that we could go bike riding in Stanley Park.

Then, of course, I didn’t go riding in Stanley Park. Henry and I rented the bike, walked it through traffic, maneuvered it onto the very busy bike path, and biked almost to Stanley Park, when Henry said, Mom, I don’t want to ride this stupid bike. And because the last time Henry and I rode on a bike together he was hit by a car—he was basically all right, but all of us were shaken—and because I had recently sprained my ankle and was scared of bike riding, myself, we got off the bike and walked it back up the hill to the rental shop. Then, while John and David rode in Stanley Park, Henry and I moped around the entrance to Stanley Park, sitting on different benches and feeling frustrated about the fact that the world isn’t what other people make of it, and even though things seem like they will be nice things to do, and might be nice things to do, they are still things we’re not going to do.

It’s actually funny, really, that I like my new blue bike so much. I love it. I’ve gone to look at it in the garage a couple times, when I wasn’t even taking it out. I held this photo session with David. I'm afraid of certain physical activities, and I mistrust speed, so the only explanation I can offer is that while other people may enjoy biking for the freedom it promises, the speed, and the physical accomplishment, I love my new bike because I know that when things get hard, I'm going to walk it up the hill.

It’s very civilized here. The houses have small lawns, in the back, and the small lawns back onto each other. Sunday we walked down the street to our neighbor’s house for a block party, during which we sat in the back yard on chairs under the trees with a view of everyone else’s backyard stretching down into the distance. Music played, the host passed out glasses of iced coffee sweetened with sugar and milk, and the children shot each other with water guns. This was very civilized, as well. Civilizations make war, of course, but I meant more that water guns were a good way, on a warm spring morning, to cool each other off. And water guns distracted the children, so the adults could talk.

Talk turned to the fox. There was a fox among us, in our back yards, killing squirrels, and causing the dogs down our row of back yards to bark. Our hostess had been feeding her children breakfast one morning when the fox had appeared in her yard, stalked and killed a squirrel, and started to tear it apart. When she opened her back door and asked it to go it picked up the carcass and trotted off. What a nice fox, everyone said. Clean and polite. Not like the squirrels, which eat crocus bulbs by the hundred. Not like coyotes, which live farther north, and will eat decent-sized dogs.

That was Sunday, and on Monday the four of us got into the car to drop Henry at school, then David at the train, then Johnny at school. Henry’s school is close by, almost directly behind our house, and as soon as we dropped Henry off we heard crows yelling and saw the fox, our fox, brown and silver, being chased by three crows. We were running late, but we stopped to shoo the crows off, and to offer the fox a ride. The fox accepted, hopping into the back and riding along as far as the little woods that runs by the parkway, where he said goodbye. I do hope we see him again. The crows are a nuisance, and do terrible things to the tomatoes, but as far as I’m concerned, the fox is a friend.

The boys had haircuts on Saturday. Should I cut their hair myself? My mother used to shampoo us, pin a bath towel around our necks, lay newspaper on the floor and have us climb onto the kitchen stool in the center of the paper. Then she stood behind us, measuring, or, once, across the kitchen from us, taking a photograph. Somewhere there is a picture of my sister, eyes and hair dark, sitting on the stool, waiting for the scissors.

We had to sit still, and stare at the oven clock. Time moved slowly, but not, it turns out, as slowly as I thought it did. It is unlikely that I will start cutting my own sons’ hair. I’m not going to make their clothes, as my mother did for us, or even their Halloween costumes, or teach them to ski. I have to offer them something else: I will tell them true stories about the old times, long ago, when life was different, but not very different from how it is now. I was them and my mother was me.