Family Night by Maria Flook

Author:Maria Flook [Flook, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780679416470
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 1992-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

II

They were riding up the Philadelphia Pike, a narrow antique four-lane that connected Wilmington with Chester, Pennsylvania.

“I used to come up here with Richard,” Margaret said. “He took me on sales trips, into Philadelphia, to U.S. Steel, to the refineries at Marcus Hook and to the Scott paper plant. I watched them cut giant tubes of toilet paper into four-inch rolls—”

“No kidding? Toilet tissue?” Tracy said. “Welcome to the world of Freud.”

“Why must you take my simple memories and dice them up into some kind of psycho salad. Will you let me alone!” Margaret said. She tried to remember the names of the drinking establishments as they passed the roadside bars, the familiar saloons displaying tipped neon cocktail glasses over their doors, one after the other. Coming home from the plants, her father had usually stopped for a drink somewhere. He might try to buy her a Shirley Temple, but the cherry repelled her.

At the White Horse Tavern, Richard argued with the bartender. Margaret loved the ornaments she saw, and Richard wanted to buy the heavy china horse heads, the handles on the taps. The bartender got the manager and the manager declined Richard’s offer. Nothing could go. Not even at that price. “The decorations are fixtures, as essential as the refrigeration,” the man said. Her father saw something else. He reached up to the well-stocked shelf and pulled a trinket from the neck of a brand of scotch; it was a small plastic horse on a loop of string. Richard handed this to Margaret. Margaret started to tell Cam about the souvenir, it might add a gram weight to the scales, on Richard’s behalf, but Tracy could twist the detail. Tracy might say it was another example of Margaret’s “equine obsession,” so she kept quiet.

Cam had to stop for some gasoline and he found a twenty-four-hour Texaco place where a girl sat in a Plexiglas booth. The girl was reading a book, underlining several sentences with a yellow outlining pen. She was going overboard with the marker, Margaret thought: what’s the point if you underline every word? The girl didn’t seem too interested in the Duster and Cam parked in front of the pumps. He told Tracy to go talk to the girl just in case.

Tracy was pleased by this idea, by his new partnership with Cam. He told Margaret to be cool, be like Bonnie to Cam’s Clyde. “You have the hair for it,” he said, “the blond hair. Just like Faye Dunaway.” Margaret watched Tracy go over to the girl and start a conversation. The girl was encased in Plexiglas and Margaret couldn’t hear what she answered, but Tracy was asking about White Tower hamburger stands. He was talking about the architecture of those restaurants compared to the golden-arches concept. Then the tank was filled and Cam paid the money. They drove away from the gas station and Cam pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. He went in back and unscrewed the tiny light bulb over the license plate.

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