How Far Down

I went to Disneyworld and read The Assommoir

I recently visited Disneyworld with my boyfriend, our four-year-old daughter, his parents, his sister, her husband, and their children. The last time we did this trip, I read Therese Raquin by Émile Zola, which made me feel bruised and disgusting, as central Florida can make me feel with its humidity, broken infrastructure, and exposed toes. Confining bad sensations, negative thoughts, allows me to be a better mother, planning and packing, smiling and soothing, remembering to remove the rotting fruit from the backpack after bedtime.

I brought The Assommoir this time. In the foreword, Zola reprimands the scandalized bourgeoisie. It merely describes the society and squalor you have wrought! Don’t guillotine the messenger! It is difficult to not feel like I am in trouble while reading Zola.

The novel’s heroine, Gervaise Coupeau, suffers mightily for her dreams of owning and operating her own laundry business for Paris’s lower class. Earthly comforts, a deadbeat husband and a snake of an ex, keeping up with the Boches, bad luck and medical debt, and an ambitious passivity central to her character slowly erode the working class respectability Gervaise builds in the novel’s first half, until her death goes unnoticed for days and she is dropped in a pauper’s grave. Gervaise often repeats the sentiment, “I don’t want anythin’ special, you know, I don’t ask for much…” With each refrain, the narrator begs the question, Really, Gervaise? Sweet little Gervaise, smiling and planning and packing and soothing, did you not commit sins for your aspiration? Are you so blameless for the fall?

Our Florida vacation rental was in a community of many vacation homes, off the main drag where the movie The Florida Project was filmed. There waves the oversized stucco mermaid, a cross-eyed slattern, hanging from the side of a bootleg merch store, while you wait for a stoplight, controlled by someone who must be drunk or colorblind, to finally, mercifully turn green.

My daughter loved the pool most of all, climbing out, jumping in, climbing out, jumping in, over and over, out and in, up and down. There was a large screen enclosure around the pool to keep out gators. One morning, a red-shouldered hawk perched itself on the fence just beyond our screen to hunt the swamp on the other side.

Besides the alligators, the area reminds me of growing up in Southern California. Orlando is also in an Orange County; there are three approved tract models in the rental home community, which are somehow both enormous and cramped; there are billboards constantly reminding you that a conniving mouse is near; the traffic feels personal and vindictive; the bus stop is a lone bent pole sticking out of a patchy ditch by the box store parking lot; everyone has a pool that they take out a second mortgage to maintain.

I am not nostalgic. My older sister is, in some ways that have become stereotypical of a certain type of millennial. I don’t despise this about her, but I wonder. She reflects wistfully on our childhood, the television shows, the swim meets, the birthday dinners, her probably perfect attendance record in the tenth grade. I ditched, lied, and put myself in morally and physically compromising situations. She trusted our parents implicitly. I loved them.

The strongest memories I have are of family roadtrips, lying in the third row of the van with a damp cloth over my forehead, concentrating on a small, still point, and breathing slowly through my mouth so as not to vomit, while my dad puffed on a big fat cigar, the smoke from which the open car windows would suck out and blow back in my face.

Toward the end of a day at one of the Disney parks, I was feeling good. My daughter was happy and not sunburnt. I had packed the backpack impeccably: just enough toys and provisions to keep her amused in lines and at the table after eating her requisite four bites of lunch, a full change of clothes that we did not use but whose presence cosmically assured we would not need it, battery packs, sunscreen, hand sanitizer, rain ponchos, fruit. In my good mood, I suggested buying a round of beers. The Blue Moon on tap was dyed green for mysterious reasons having to do with James Cameron’s Avatar movie.

Our family set off in a stroller caravan toward the front of the park to find a nice place for a group photo. My boyfriend pushed our stroller. I sipped my green beer and smiled. For all the stink and crowds, it had been a pleasant day. I had not eaten dinner yet and the green Blue Moon was relaxing me. I raised my drink to an extended family of Castilians taking a picture in front of the fake banyan tree that serves as a centerpiece for the park. I felt my phone buzzing in my fanny pack and answered it. “Where did you go?” my boyfriend asked. I looked around and realized I had been walking alone for an unknown amount of time.

Gervaise Coupeau’s domestic stability begins its decline when her roofer husband slips one day and damages his body severely enough to decimate their savings and turn him off the manual labor he once relied on, but not severely enough to die. My grandfather was a roofer and his roofing career also ended due to a bad fall that mangled his back.

I asked my mother about it the day after we returned from Florida. Did it ruin the family? Did he become addicted to absinthe and rotgut liquors? No, he secured a desk job with the Knights of Columbus. They weren’t very well off before or after the fall. Her father was a steady man, so it didn’t make much difference, and their children went on to enjoy varying degrees of upward mobility. Later, in the same conversation, my mother told me she had been approved for her first credit card in nearly 20 years since filing for divorce and bankruptcy. I told her that was great and I was happy for her. She made a flitting motion with her hand.

On another vacation day, we went to the outdoor mall, also owned and operated by Disney. At checkout, the shopkeepers ask if you hold special Disney privileges. My boyfriend and I told our daughter she could select one toy from the sprawling Disney store. Almost immediately, my daughter selected a doll modeled after Elsa, a cold lipstick lesbian with whom most four year old girls understandably identify.

We explained to our daughter that she already owns several Elsa dolls at home, and it would be wasteful to select another as her special vacation present. She was unmoved, but spotted another toy from the same movie franchise and insisted she needed both. She looked imploringly at her grandmother, who looked imploringly at me. I said, Patty, no, we told her just one. I became hot and self-conscious. Why was I lecturing this woman who found a steady job with a pension, worked diligently all her life in service of others, and lived well below her means, all so that her children could enter adulthood without debt and give her grandchildren to spoil with family vacations and dolls. My boyfriend could see my resolve slipping and took over.

While they litigated toys, I moved like a wraith down aisles of bedazzled mouse ears and t-shirts featuring anthropomorphized animals with resplendent asses. Several families with smudged foreheads passed me; I remembered it was Ash Wednesday. There is an astounding amount of money being spent at any given moment in and around Disneyworld, but no one seems rich. What a thing to think, how suburban, how American.

We left the store with just the Elsa doll, but with the secondary toy in Patty’s bag to be given to my daughter at a later date, which she let my daughter peek at, kicking back up the lamentations. We moved on and found a fast casual Japanese stall for dinner. I plied my daughter with salmon, rice, and a large frozen lemonade, imagining this would improve all our moods.

On the drive back, we were stuck in traffic, again, of course. I sat in the van’s third row since Patty is arthritic and she and my daughter love to sit next to each other. Van design has not improved much since my childhood, and even at five foot five, my knees were bent at a 45-degree angle due to the limited distance between the height of the third row seat and the floor.

The stop and go, forward and stall, up and down motion of the car started to make me sick. I put in my earbuds and played an Aimee Mann song because I am an adult woman. I stared at a small, still point in the distance. After a few minutes, I noticed there was some commotion coming from the car’s front rows. On removing an earbud, I heard my boyfriend shouting, “[AM], what are you doing? You need to do something!” I unbuckled and stood to look over the back of the seats in front of me. Rivers of bilious frozen lemonade poured forth from my daughter’s open mouth. I stroked the top of her head and waited until she finished.

Back in The Assommoir, I became the most defensive during passages concerning Gervaise’s morally lax and manipulative daughter, Nana, who goes on to be the protagonist of her own eponymous novel, a more raucous and scathing book in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. Nana’s curiosity is a perversion; her upbringing, downbringing, does not corrupt her so much as it amplifies her nature. Still, there’s sympathy. Before leaving her jaundiced parents to be a sugar baby to a button manufacturer, Zola writes, “So it was that, tramping through the mud, spattered by passing carriages, dazzled by the splendid window displays, she’d feel cravings that tortured her like hunger pangs, she’d long to be smartly dressed, to eat in restaurants, to go to shows, to have a room of her own with nice furniture.” My daughter has all these things, to an extent, some secondhand, for now. What will she want? What will her nature incline? What can I provide?

At the end of our vacation, I was confronted by a Pig Lady at the Orlando airport. We were waiting in the families-with-strollers line to get through security, already defeated by the interminable process of checking baggage in that forsaken place. There was an A line and a B line zippering to a single agent checking IDs. The agent signaled A, B, A, B, A, B without variation or interruption. We stood in the B line. When we were up next, the agent held up his hand to indicate it would be a moment. A new agent came over to relieve the first from his shift.

I looked over at the family in the A line and locked eyes with the Pig Lady. Her nose was short and upturned and her skin was pale and so pink, like a ballet slipper. Her head was covered in thousands of frizzy strawberry coils. In the seconds that we held eye contact, I knew what she was doing. She had already assessed the new agent’s affable and laid back demeanor, not a man riding high on a badge, and she would use his ambiguous “next” gesture to break the pattern and cut the line. She only looked at me for that brief moment to calculate my disposition, which was that of a woman who depended on queue etiquette to navigate the world, but whose appreciation for the polite structures of society also meant I would not make a spectacle over what many would consider a minor transgression. She knew the play. I felt helpless, though I was not.

It went just like that. When we approached the gate agent, he had also determined by the ingratiating behavior of the Pig Lady toward him and the hatred on my face toward her that she had taken advantage of his line negligence. “I’m sorry,” he said, showing genuine feeling for my frustration. “Some people are not honest.” When we collected our belongings and exited security, I turned back to see the Pig Lady and her family still stuck behind the security detectors, having been herded into a slower line than ours by chance. I pushed the tip of my nose up with my index finger and snorted.

But before takeoff, the fear of flight now in me, I repented. Oh, what terrible things I thought about that Pig Lady, the name alone. Mary, full of grace, please have mercy on me, a sinner, a mope, and a loser who goes around wringing my hands in ineffectual judgment of those more inclined to act. Oh Orlando, oh Pig Lady, you are blameless! Stupid and beady eyed, yes terminally so, evil, without a doubt, but you are blameless in this! It is not you I hate; it is myself! I cannot shake the damn thing! I only pray when I need something!

There are certain images and characters that haunt Gervaise as her circumstances alter and the aperture of her worldview dilates or constricts. One of these is Pére Bazouge, the alcoholic undertaker’s assistant. On her way down in life, Pére Bazouge arrives at Gervaise’s doorstep and is confused to see her alive, thinking he had been called to the home to box her up, not her mother in law, dead in the next room. He sidesteps his gaffe with his usual round of innuendo, slurring about how the ladies beg him to take them into his arms in the end. Gervaise’s brother in law shoos him off and tells him he has no respect for principles. The undertaker’s assistant says, “Principles? What sort of principles? There’s no such thing as principles. There’s only respectability.”

My daughter rode her first real rollercoaster on this trip, the Slinky Dog Dash. She met the height requirements and, from the ground, the coaster appeared tame and not too high. In line, however, I began to doubt. Out of my daughter’s earshot, I told my boyfriend I would rather he ride with her, in case the lap bar malfunctioned or she slipped below it, as he was stronger and had a better grip, and would be able to successfully hold on to her for the duration of the ride, thus saving her life. He rubbed my shoulder and said please stop. My daughter asked to ride with me.

The ride begins by climbing to its highest peak, and I knew immediately that I had made a terrible mistake. This was not a ride for a small child. We floated for a moment before that first drop and time expanded as it does when manipulated by physics. I thought an incredible number of things. Oh Christ, this is high, I’m scared, if I’m scared then she must be terrified, why did I allow this, what was I thinking, how many times did I check the lap bar, hold onto both her arms, pin her down, he should have sat next to her, I am not equipped for this, why does anyone think I’m equipped for this, God damn you, Slinky Dog, God damn you to hell, she looks so scared, what have I done.

Then, a sick tug at the middle, ecstasy — the fall!

My daughter and me on the Slinky Dog Dash. The man behind us is not my boyfriend.