We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I’m not, for crying out loud. Don’t be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life. You have to admire how these people shamelessly try to get your attention as you drive by, whether they’re trying to feed you a hamburger or a savior.

We merge onto I-270, so to bypass St. Louis. We cross the Mississippi on a long, pocked suspension bridge that’s older than either of us. The dirty water roils beneath, licks up at us like liquid earth. I’m relieved when I see the sign:

WELCOME TO MISSOURI

Old as I am, I still get a thrill from that. Yet after this brief pleasure, some schnook in a big blue SUV, the kind everyone drives nowadays, cuts us off.

“John! Watch out!” I cry, sure that we’re going to smash into his rear end. I crush my foot to the floorboard, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for the impact.

John slams on the brakes and veers right. I jerk forward; my seat belt locks tight against my chest. Sunglasses and guidebooks fly from the seats. I hear a cupboard snap open in the back and canned goods hammer the floor. I open my eyes to find John staring absently at the taillights of the oblivious driver ahead. “We’re all right,” he mutters.

I told you, John is an excellent driver.

A few miles later, we come up behind the big blue truck again when it has to slow for traffic. When he hits the brakes, I see that someone has written something in the dust on his back window, directly on the third taillight they put on the new cars. When he hits the brakes again, the words flash at us:

DRIVEN BY DICKHEAD

After we finish laughing, we make it back onto 66.

 

Every once in a while, I see something that looks like it’s from the old days of the highway—a sun-scorched streamline filling station or chalky ramshackle motor court with a half-lit VACANCY sign. More often than not, though, there are only ruins, or simply a faded and rusted sign off the road in front of an empty field. They conjure up strange, random memories for me—the few dusty, deafening, rattletrap journeys I took with my parents ages ago to leaden towns like Lansing, Michigan, or Cambridge, Ohio. (There were no vacations back then, only purposeful visits to sullen relatives, always for deaths or the unhappy work that followed them.)

The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads.

Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever. I remember so much about our trips together: the tap of moths around a Coleman lantern as we played cards at a picnic table; constructing olive loaf sandwiches on the top of a cooler while John drove us through a Colorado spring snowstorm; reading the Arizona newspapers by brilliant moonlight on the shores of Lake Powell; stashing comic books in the trunk of our old Pontiac for Kevin, doling them out one at a time to keep down the whining and boredom; the cool gray formations of the South Dakota Badlands, rising from the earth like stone mammoths; eating chuck wagon barbecue in a giant teepee in Jenny Lake, Wyoming; the chugging penny slots at the old Vegas Stardust; and so many more I can’t even describe. As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that’s another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades.

 

At Stanton, I direct John into the parking lot of Meramec Caverns. Ever since we started this trip, we’ve been seeing signs for the place everywhere—billboards, roofs, bumper stickers, on the sides of barns.

“Come on, John, you want to go see the caverns?”

“What for?” he says, in a tone that I don’t care for.

I forget that I can’t really ask his opinion anymore because if he’s in one of his contrary moods, he will argue with me about whether water is wet. I have to remember what the doctors have told me, to not ask him, but to tell him.

“Here we are,” I say, as we park near a statue of Frank and Jesse James. Apparently, those James boys hid out here for a while. As a fellow fugitive, I feel right at home. I grab my trusty cane and we head on in.

Yet as soon as we try to purchase our tickets, we have problems. The young man behind the ticket desk gives me the once-over. He’s a red-faced little turd with a fake ranger uniform that’s two sizes too big for him.

“Ma’am, the tour is kinda long. I think you’re gonna need, like, a wheelchair,” he says.

“I most certainly do not,” I say.

He makes a face like he just tasted something bad. “The tour’s like about a mile and a half. Some of it’s uphill, and the walkways are wet a lot. We’ve had people, like, fall. It’s really, really hard to get a stretcher in there.”

I look over at John. He shrugs, no help at all.

“Fine,” I snap back, knowing that the little shit is probably right. A cavern is not the place for an old woman to keel over. (Or maybe it’s just the right place.) So, I climb into the wheelchair, which is so narrow that I can barely wedge my fat rump into it.

“I’ve got you, mumma,” says John as he latches on to the handle grips.

“Thank you, John,” I say, reaching back to touch his hand. Oh well, since he doesn’t mind, I might as well just enjoy the ride.

Before we head into the caverns, we visit the restrooms, and then stop at the snack bar where John hastily devours what I believe to be his first-ever subterranean hot dog. (See? Travel does expand your horizons!) A few minutes later, it is announced that the tour group is heading out.

As we enter, I realize that this will be nothing like my other cave experience. John and I and the kids once visited Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, where we waited hours for sunset at the mouth of the cave, when the bats would come out to gorge themselves on insects. (Only when you stop thinking about sunset, stop remembering to look, does it occur.) When the bats finally emerged, there were thousands and thousands of them, darkening, devouring the puce-purple sky. It was a terrifying and beautiful sight. Kevin kept his head beneath a beach towel the entire time.

As I said, nothing like that’s going to happen here. What gives it away is the first cave, where the floor is actually covered with linoleum, like someone’s rumpus room. There are tables and chairs and a sparkly disco ball hanging from the ceiling. I cackle as John pushes me along.

“Some cave,” I say, loud enough for the other six or seven people on the tour to hear. They all look over at us. Yes, I’m being a pill, but I don’t care.

Our guide, a chubby young woman with stringy beige hair, deep circles under her eyes, and a bad cold, ignores me and begins her spiel in a nasal, singsongy voice. “In this cave here, which we call ‘the ballroom,’ we used to have dances back in the 1940s and ’50s. Can you imagine young men and women jitterbugging in a cave? Today, it is still available for rental.”

Wonderful. A commercial.

As we move deeper into the caverns, the linoleum eventually gives way to a lightly cobbled path that makes my wheelchair vibrate. There are long periods where our guide doesn’t say a word, she just croups in a loud, honking way that echoes around us. The caves get darker, and she casually flips light switches as she walks. We roll past long rooms of quivering underground pools, giant oozing stone formations, murky deep grottoes, all with lurid colors projected upon them—infectious reds, virulent ambers, bilious greens. These nasty shades disturb me, especially projected on the stalactites, suspended like daggers from the cavern ceilings, bleeding limestone. I close my eyes, but it only makes me imagine my insides, as they are now, ugly and encrusted with matter. When I open them moments later, I immediately see an enormous shadow of two figures up on the wall of a cave. At first I think we’re the shadow, but then I see illuminated statues of Frank and Jesse James in their secret hideout below.

“Be careful, John,” I say, pointing out some wet patches on the path.

He says nothing, just pushes me along, nice as you please. Our guide leads us to a medium-sized cave with a lit stone bed. The sign on it says:

TV’S “PEOPLE ARE FUNNY” HONEYMOON ROOM

Our guide croups and gives us a big fake smile. “Art Linkletter, funnyman that he was, once made a newlywed couple sleep in this cave for nine nights so they could win a vacation in the Bahamas on his television show.”

“Are you kidding?” I say out loud. The people around me nod.

“No, it’s true. They stayed nine whole nights so they could win a beautiful honeymoon vacation.”

“That would be horrible,” says a tiny woman in her sixties, to my left.

“That’s not funny, that’s just plain old mean,” I say.

Everyone in the group murmurs in agreement. The crowd is on my side now. I hear someone say, “That son of a bitch.” The guide flashes an even broader fake smile and leads us away, before an anti–Art Linkletter revolt breaks out. As we roll forward, she keeps talking. Now we can’t shut her up.

“Lester Dill, the man who promoted the caverns for many years, was actually very kind to young couples. In fact, in 1961, he once offered a free wedding to any couples that would agree to get married in the caves. It was a huge success. Thirty-two couples signed up.”

She looks over at me, expecting me to spout off, but I’m bored with rabble-rousing and I just smile at her. Why anyone would want to get married in a cave is beyond me. When John and I got hitched, we just did it like everybody did back then. A simple ceremony at the church in my neighborhood, a little party at my aunt Carrie’s house, our parents, our friends, a cake my mother made, some sandwiches and coffee. Just a small celebration, not the kind of show-offy affairs they make of weddings these days with cathedrals and halls and limousines. Cindy’s wedding almost sent us to the poorhouse, and it didn’t even take. What’s the point of all that madness, I ask you? All the fancy weddings in the world don’t prepare you for where you end up—getting rolled around in a wheelchair through a garish tourist cave by the man who is the father of your children. But before you know it, there you are.

 

Surprise! There’s another depressing little hellhole on Route 66—Cuba, Missouri. In my guidebooks, I read about the past glories of these sad hamlets. In Cuba, there was a place called “The Midway,” a giant complex with a hotel, a car dealership, and a twenty-four-hour restaurant that fed up to six hundred people a day. Now, there’s a one-person fruit stand. Go figure.

“John, stop at this stand. I want to buy some grapes.”

John pulls the van up to a small clapboard stand where they are selling fresh grapes and grape juice. Apparently, this is wine country and we are here during the harvest.

“Why don’t you just stay in the car, John?”

“All right, Ella. Is there anything to drink there?”

“I’ll get us some grape juice, okay?”

John nods at me. “Sounds good.”

“Don’t take off without me,” I say as a little joke, but I kind of really mean it. Either way, John is mostly resistant to humor now. He can still make me laugh, whether he knows it or not, but my jokes, such as they are, miss him completely.

I pick out a small bag of grapes and a quart of grape juice, dark as blood. The woman at the stand puts them both in a paper bag for me. “Here you go, darlin’,” she says, with the kind of sugar smile that I’m sure is only reserved for adorable old women like myself, eccentrics who wear baseball caps as they waddle charmingly over with their canes from their heavily decaled recreational vehicles. (John always had a weakness for those stickers with the state name in bold letters and “Land of Wonder” or some such motto beneath it. The rear end of the Leisure Seeker is barnacled with them.)

Not that I doubt her sincerity. I don’t. I’m always pleased to see a kind face these days, and especially attached to someone bearing food.

“Thank you, miss,” I say, as I hand over the dollar bills, unable to conjure up the same regional graciousness.

“You have a good day, ma’am.”

There is a burr in her voice, a midwestern flatness that I did not expect here in the middle of the Ozarks, but find quite comforting. We midwesterners, I think, sometimes notice other folks’ accents more readily, because ours is, in many ways, so nondescript. But when I hear the variants of our hard r’s and nasally twang, it makes me appreciate our native tongue, the planklike dialect that matches our terrain.

We sit for a while in the van and sip juice, eat grapes, along with some Chicken in a Biskit crackers. It’s an odd combination, one that I’m not sure I approve of, but I didn’t feel like rooting around in the back for anything more substantial. Anyway, I’m just happy to have an appetite. The grapes are luscious, dark and juicy, so I tuck a napkin under my collar as I eat. Neither of us says anything. John occasionally makes a small approving grunt, but that’s it. It’s good this way, good that we’re not speaking. Speaking would only ruin it. For a moment, I am so happy I could cry. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.

 

We drive an old, old stretch of 66—curbed, pinkish, and veined with tar—until it turns into Teardrop Road, which takes us to the Devil’s Elbow, a twisty route over a rusted iron suspension bridge across the Big Piney River. Names like “Big Piney River” make me smile, remind me that I am nowhere near my birthplace, where the rivers have names like Rouge and St. Clair. (It occurs to me how French and fancy these names sound. Let me assure you that Detroit is neither. Even in the ’50s, when it was booming, it was a tough industrial town, fat with swagger and edged with grime. Yet I can’t imagine my life occurring anywhere else but where it did.)

After a bathroom and gas stop in Arlington, Route 66 disappears and we are forced back on I-44. Though the books tell us how to get back onto the old road after a short distance, we cheat a little and stay on the interstate. At yet another Springfield, I direct us back onto the old road.

“How are you feeling, John? You doing all right?”

John nods, runs a hand over his head, then wipes his hand on his sleeve. “I’m all right.”

“You tired? Want to find a place to stop for the night?” I’m asking him, but I suspect it’s me that really wants to call it a day. I feel sore and shaky. I am experiencing discomfort.

“Yeah, okay.”

Of course, once we decide to stop, we can’t find a place to stay to save our lives. We meander through a braid of towns with curious names: Plew, Rescue, and Albatross; old places of log and stone. In a town called Carthage, we find a campground that will do. We pay our money and set up shop for the night.

 

The late afternoon sun is too intense, so we sit at our table inside the Leisure Seeker. I turn on a little fan, take my afternoon meds, and settle in to read an old Detroit Free Press. After a while, John goes to the back of the van to lie down. The van shifts slightly with his movement. Something creaks in the undercarriage.

“Ella, where are the kids?”

“They’re at home.”

John sits up in bed, stares wide-eyed at the seam where the paneling meets the ceiling. “We left them there?”

“Uh-huh.” I know what’s coming.

He twists his head now, searching for me, eyes frantic with fear. “For Christ’s sake, we left the kids alone?”

I slap down the paper, in no mood for this. “John, the kids are adults. They’ve got families of their own now. They have their own houses. They’re fine.”

“They are?” he says, not quite believing.

“Yes. Don’t you remember? Kevin and Cindy both got married. Kevin and Arlene have got two boys, Peter and Steven. And Cindy has a boy and a girl.”

“They do?”

“Yes, John. Don’t you remember? Their names are Lydia and Joey.”

“Oh yeah. They’re little kids.”

“Joey’s eighteen. Lydia’s in college. Remember going to her high school graduation?”

Sometimes it feels like all I ever say is “Don’t you remember?” to John. I know that somewhere inside of his head, floating around, are all these memories of our life together. I refuse to believe that they are gone. They just need to be coaxed out. And if they need to be nagged out, then so be it.

“Lydia gave a little speech at graduation, about knowing where you’re heading, finding your own way into the future? Everyone applauded? Joey played in the band at the ceremony?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, good. You should remember. Keep remembering it because I’m goddamn sick and tired of remembering everything for you.”

“I’m sorry, Ella,” he says, shamed.

Sometimes I just want to smack myself. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, too, honey. I didn’t mean to get mad.”

“It’s this memory of mine.”

“I know, dear.”

I turn the page and decide to tackle the Jumble. I look around for a pencil.

“Ella, where are the kids?”

Deep breath. “They’re fine, John. Why don’t you take a nap?”

So, I tell him to take a nap and what happens? I fall asleep at the table. Involuntary catnaps: it’s another reason why getting old is for the birds. You don’t mean to fall asleep, but then suddenly you wake up and hours have passed. It’s an entirely different time of day. There’s a gap, an in-between period you just can’t account for.

It’s pitch-black in the van now and it scares me. John and I have not let it get completely dark in our house for years. These days, it disorients him and it just plain spooks me. When we go to bed, we always leave lights on all over the house. We sleep in half-dark rooms, doze in shadows. We live there, in the half night, especially John.

“John!” I yell, trying not to panic. He’s snoring to beat the band. Finally, I remember that there’s a lamp right over the table. Jesus. I reach up and fumble around till I find the switch. The light makes me safe again.

“John, get up.” I look at my watch.

“What is it?” he says, voice sticky with sleep.

“We’ve been snoozing for almost three hours. It’s dark outside.” I try to get up, but my legs are asleep. I wiggle my feet to get the circulation started. “Could you help me?”

“Just a second,” he says. In a moment, he’s at the table, his hands outstretched to pull me.

“Ow, ow, ow.” The edge of the table scrapes my belly. “Old Two-Ton Tessie here.” Then I’m back on my feet, knees discomforting like crazy.

“Hush,” John says, smoothing back my hair. His hands smell vinegary, but I welcome his touch.

“I’m okay. You hungry?”

John brightens at the mention of food. He’s in good post-nap spirits. Sometimes he wakes up mean as the devil. It can go either way.

“Why don’t I make us some eggs and bacon?” I say.

“Good deal.”

I shuffle to the kitchenette, all of three steps. (This is why RVs are the cat’s ass. When you get old, everything gets farther away. But here in the Leisure Seeker, everything’s right there where you need it.)

I fire up the electric frying pan, pull bacon and eggs out of the icebox, and lay six strips in the pan. After I hound him into washing his hands, John is on toast detail. He stands at the counter, a stack of Wonder bread in front of him.

“Don’t put it in the toaster yet,” I say.

I watch as he closes up the bag with a twist tie and starts rummaging in our junk drawer till he finds the scissors. He then snips the excess plastic bag just above the twist tie. John has done this for the last couple years. It’s the sickness. At home, he was always stacking, straightening, fiddling with something. He’d trim the bag, leave the room, then come back in and do it again. Sometimes before we even use any of the bread, the bag is trimmed down to a nub. Despite this, he’s more lucid than usual and all this feels pretty normal.

“Hey, how about a cocktail?” I say.

“Sounds good.”

I know you’re probably thinking, she’s grateful for a precious few moments of clearheadedness with her husband and what does she do? Make him dull with booze. You would have a point, but I really don’t care. I reach up into a cupboard and pull out bottles of Canadian Club and sweet vermouth.

“We haven’t had a cocktail hour in a long time,” I say as I turn the bacon on low. “Get some ice out of the cooler.”

John surprises me by turning on the tape player to some music. The van is suddenly filled with the sounds of lush strings and a mellow baritone sax. Years ago, he taped a lot of our favorite albums for us to listen to on vacations. All kinds of good stuff—Arthur Lyman, Tony Mottola, Herb Alpert, Jackie Gleason.

“Is that ‘Midnight Sun’?” I ask.

“I guess,” he says, coming back with a tray of ice cubes.

“I think it is.” I mix us manhattans, extra sweet. After the kids left home, John and I started having a little drink before dinner. We would sit downstairs at our rumpus room bar where we used to entertain, light a candle, put on some music, and just chat. John was just finishing up as an engineer at GM then and he would tell me about what was going on over at the Tech Center, who was stabbing who in the back, who was getting laid off, and so on. He didn’t care anymore since he was retiring. (Thank God for “Thirty and Out.” It was the mid-’80s, just as the Detroit auto industry was going to hell in a handbasket.) I would tell him who I had talked to that day, what was going on in the kids’ lives, sales at the grocery store—nothing earthshaking. But we got things out there, shared information.

Now we sit around our table staring at our drinks without a word. I’m thankful for Andy Williams singing “Moon River.” At least someone’s saying something. I give my drink a swirl, watch the cherry drop to the bottom. I lift my glass. “Well, here’s mud in your eye.”

John raises his glass and smiles, like he always has. Is there such a thing as cocktail muscle memory? I take a sip. It’s cold, sweet, and strong, and I remember that there is nothing like that first sip of a cocktail. Ah! The pleasure of forgetting, then finding again. This gives me renewed hope for the idea of this trip. John sips his drink and squeezes his eyes shut. I worry for a moment, then he sighs contentedly. “God damn, that’s good.”

“We’re making progress, don’t you think?”

John nods. “Sure are.”

“I think we did maybe about three hundred miles today.”

John takes a second sip and frowns. “Doesn’t seem like very much.”

“We’re doing fine. It’s just slower taking the old road. Don’t you worry.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he says.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I repeat, raising my glass. And never have two words seemed so true.

 

After our dinner, I decide that we need something else to do. I give John a Pepsi and make myself another drink. “Time for the evening’s entertainment.”

“It is?” says John, rolling a toothpick in his mouth.

John didn’t know that I packed the projector and a big box of slides. At home, in our basement, there’s a cabinet stacked with trays of slides—vacations, family reunions, weekend outings, birthday parties, weddings, new babies, everything that’s ever happened to us. At one time, John was quite the shutterbug. He was our official family photographer.

It’s a balmy night, and I like the idea of watching slides outdoors like at a drive-in. A floodlight has just ticked on nearby, so it’s not so dangerously dark. I leave the lights on in the van, which spreads a warm glow over our campsite yet is still dim enough to use the projector that I have John lug to the picnic table.

“How you doing out there, John?” I yell out to him.

“Where’s the screen?”

“Uh-oh. I forgot to bring one. I’ll get a sheet.”

I rummage around in our little cardboard storage chest and find a bunch of them, orphans left over from sets that wore out long ago. I’m not prepared for how they make me feel. Seeing these old sheets right now, rubbed so smooth, washed hundreds of times over the years, I can’t help but think of my life, or at least my married life, in terms of linens: the spotted stiff white wedding gift linens of our first hungry years together; those same sheets yellow with urine from Cindy climbing into bed with us; the pastel sheets I picked out after eighteen or nineteen years of marriage (that time where early components of a union need replacing—mattresses, radios, towels, all falling apart at the same time—reminding you of just how long it’s been); those same replacement sheets following us into middle age; then newer striped cotton-blend linens from the outlet malls we would encounter on the road (the luxury of three or four sets to choose from), taking us into deep middle age, then agedness, these last linens now softened to silk by constant scrubbing, lately soiled by John’s gradual lack of hygiene, the smell of an unwashed body preparing itself for a long slumber.

I think of my closet full of linens at home being sold at an estate sale. When I used to go to the sales, I never even considered buying anyone’s linens. Old sheets are just too personal, too full of dreams.

I pull out an old white sheet, almost worn through, that will suit our purposes nicely. I step outside to find John at the picnic table, quietly weeping.

“John, what’s wrong?”

He looks up at me, eyes red and wet, brimming with frustration. “Ella, Goddamn it. I can’t get this thing started.”

It disturbs me to see him cry. “Sweetie, it’s all right. Let me see.” I look around and find that he has plugged the extension cord to the outside outlet, but has not connected the projector cord to the extension cord. “It’s okay. You just forgot to plug this in.”

John lifts his glasses, uses the heels of his hands to wipe his eyes, pressing hard into the sockets. “Goddamn this memory of mine.”

I kiss my husband’s cheek and hand him a Kleenex from my sleeve. “Come on. Let’s watch some slides.”

 

It’s a long sunset over Lake St. Clair. Our daughter, Cindy, is lounging on a dock in her middle teens. We can see only her silhouette, her then-new young woman’s body set against the sky, which is fiery orange and gold with streaks of periwinkle. The colors seem artificial now, sharpened red with time, hyper-real like the colors of my dreams, on those occasions when they are in color. (As old as I feel, I’m sometimes surprised that my dreams are talkies.) It was a cottage where we spent many summer weekends, one that we shared with my brother and sisters and their families.

“Who’s that, John?” I ask, testing him. “Do you know who that is?”

“Of course I do. It’s Cynthia.”

“That’s right.” I’m holding the remote button. I click to the next slide. There is a shot of the four of us all together, a lovely one that John must have taken with the self-timer on the camera. We are all gathered in our shorts and bright-colored shirts and blouses after a long day outdoors. We look sunburned and happy, except for Cindy, who is sulking, most likely over some boy.

“That’s a nice shot, John.”

“Yeah.”

A few slides later, we are in the kitchen of the old cottage. My baby brother Ted and his wife, Stella, are there with their three kids, Terry, Ted Jr., and Tina. (Some parents are determined to alphabetize their offspring and there is no way to talk them out of it. I always felt bad for Stella, being one letter off from the pack.) My older sister Lena is there as well with her brood. Al, her soak of a husband, was probably off getting sloshed in the garage. He spent most of his time there, near the beer fridge. (Cirrhosis, when it happened, was no surprise to any of us.)

“Looks like a party,” John says.

“Just dinnertime.”

In the slide, people are standing around a table, helping themselves. The table is covered with lunch meats and potato chips and macaroni salads, Jell-O salads, bowls of dips and crackers, bottles of pop (red, orange, green) with names that I barely recognize: Uptown and Wink and Towne Club. I think about dozens of other photos like this one over the years, huge spreads of food, tables covered with it. I think about the people in the slides, most of them gone now, heart attacks and cancers, betrayed by the foods we ate, by our La-Z-Boys, by our postwar contentment, everyone getting larger and larger in every year’s photographs, our prosperity gone wide.

Tonight, though, what makes this particular photo interesting to me is me. (Why are we always attracted to the image of ourselves in a photograph? This doesn’t change, even at my age.) I’m in the background of the photo, standing in a corner, staring off to the side, not talking to anyone.

“You were sad that night,” says John, out of nowhere.

I’m surprised that he would say this. But looking at the slide again, I realize that I do look sad. “I was? What was I sad about?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly, I want to know the cause of my sadness. It becomes very important to me to know, but I can’t remember.

Behind us, on the road, a young family stops and waves. The husband, a dark-haired athletic fellow in his thirties, smiles robustly like he knows us.

“How you doing there?” he says, tugging his reluctant little towhead boy our way. His wife, a pert blonde in a pink sundress, follows behind, indulging her chatty husband in a way that looks mighty familiar to me.

The wife kneels down to the boy, points up at the screen. “See, honey, that’s what things looked like in the olden days.”

The boy, who looks about seven, is wearing a T-shirt that says: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT THE T-SHIRT.

I recognize the look on his face. He wants to escape, probably to go play with his Game Boy, if he’s anything like my grandkids.

“Nice setup you’ve got here,” says the husband.

“We like it,” I say. Somehow, I can’t bring myself to say much more. I’m hoping John will say something, but he’s concentrating on the screen. A few years back, you wouldn’t have been able to shut him up. John used to love to gab with strangers. He and this fellow would have gotten on famously, chewing the fat about the weather or camping or our respective destinations. But now, John sits in silence. The family stays for a few slides, then says good-bye. I’m glad when they leave, slightly annoyed with the blonde’s comment about “the olden days,” but mostly just ashamed of myself for my envy of their youth, of their lives so full and unfolding before them, of their complete unawareness of their great good fortune.

Some other folks walk by, and I have to say they get bored pretty quickly with our lives projected up there. Then a man and a woman in their late sixties come by. They stand and watch for quite some time. I can tell it’s not just a quaint amusement to them. This is probably what their life looks like, too.

When our kids were growing up, their idea of hell was to watch slides. When Cindy was a teenager, she couldn’t run from the living room fast enough when we’d drag out the projector. Kevin wasn’t much better. I’d make them watch for ten or fifteen minutes, then they’d get so fidgety that I’d let them go off so John and I could watch in peace. But in the past few years, both kids have come around. They like watching slides now and so do their children. I think they’ve realized that this is their history. It’s the history of all of us.

Up on the screen it is a different day on that same summer weekend, a barbecue with everyone outside playing catch, children doing somersaults for the camera, everyone loading up on hot dogs, hamburgers, mustard potato salad, three-bean salad, and ambrosia salad. The other cottages behind the people in the slides look bland and generic, like theatrical backdrops meant only to fill the eye. During a horseshoe match, I am far in the background again, looking no cheerier than before, yet John kept including me in his shots. I don’t know why. Then I remember something. I remember John waving at me from behind the camera that day, trying to cheer me up. It was shortly after my third miscarriage, the baby I had carried for so long, then so suddenly lost. Crushed, I had given up on having a second child at that point. A weekend party was the last place I wanted to be, but John and my sister Lena thought it would be good for me.

Even though I know the ending to this story and it’s a happy one—I changed doctors, and a year and a half later I gave birth to Kevin—it still wounds me to see that pained young woman up there trapped in her horrible present. I stop clicking forward and continue to stare at my blurry, background self. I am barely recognizable as I start to dissolve. I don’t proceed to the next slide. The oldsters wave good-bye to us and head back down the road, probably thinking that I’m nuts. They may be right. We’ve barely watched a tray and a half of slides, but I think we’re done for the night.