That Fast Frog

 By: David Prosser

    Kate, Eric, and Bobby waited in the driveway, seated in the van. Kate was anxious to leave. The sooner they left, the sooner they could be on the road, the sooner they could be at Disney. In that moment, she was struck by the thought that no one said Disneyland anymore, herself included. It was just Disney now, almost as if the excitement of the place, of simply speaking its full name out loud, was too much, and so you had to resort to shorthand in order to not completely short-circuit your nervous system. The happiest place on Earth, Kate knew, could have that effect on you.

    She remembered what it was like when she was a child. Each time, she was so excited to make the seven-hour trek from Sacramento to Anaheim. Once, they had stayed with relatives she met for the first and last time on the trip, and they had taught her how to twirl spaghetti with a fork and spoon, acting as though this were a basic survival skill. Another time, both of her grandmothers had accompanied her family, then competed for her and her sister’s affections, one-upping each other with gift giving in the battle for greatest grandmother. Up through high school, she must have been there six times, and now it was her turn to make the rite of passage, to take her family to that most magical of places. Because there really is magic in the world, but it isn’t to be found in palm readers or ouija boards. It is at Disney.

    Marc loaded the last of the suitcases into the trunk and positioned himself behind the wheel. He adjusted the rearview and side mirrors and went down his mental checklist. Turned off the coffee pot? Put the lights on timers to fool thieves? Unplugged unnecessary items from outlets? He was a man who liked to be prepared for everything, and having gone down his list, he felt they were. “All set?” he asked.

    The chorus of yeses that emerged from the backseat, from Eric, eight, and Bobby, six, told him he could proceed. 

    “Then let’s goooo!” Marc said, reversing out of their driveway. 

    Kate felt it: the lighter than air magic entered their minivan. Maybe it was pixie dust and Marc wasn’t Marc, not really, not anymore. The magic that now coated them said he could be Peter, leading them off to Never-Never Land, to a place where imagination and miracles exist for the young and old alike. Kate was glad to see he’d gotten into the spirit. Marc had a vastly different upbringing from her own. He’d had to grow up young. Too young, she thought. Marc’s childhood could be described as Dickensian with a straight face. His father had cheated on and beat his mom until he left, perhaps needing to start the cycle anew, deserting his family, and then the poor woman had a nervous breakdown. She subsequently entered a psychiatric facility, causing the family to splinter, sending Marc’s brothers and sisters to foster homes, splitting them up. Marc was fifteen at the time. 

    Fifteen.

    Fifteen when he left high school and did what Kate thought was miraculous for someone so young: he took it upon himself to get the family back together. He rented a dirt-cheap room, technically a garage—after getting a judge’s approval to emancipate—saved as much as he could, and eventually was able to get his mother out of the psychiatric facility and to live with him. Then, together, they were able to get a small apartment and started the long process of getting Marc’s seven brothers and sisters back under the same roof.

    Kate, next to Marc, had a privileged upbringing. Her parents were still together, and she felt she would have died of shame if she’d never had the chance to finish high school like Marc, although he got his GED years later. She spent many childhood summers going to Disney or on road trips to national parks or flying to Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico. She tried to imagine having the weight of the world on her shoulders as a sophomore in high school and could not. Fifteen should be for beginning to feel a little independence, for worrying about acne, for starting to discover your identity apart from your parents as you rebelled against them. It was not the time for having the responsibility to save your family thrust upon you, or choosing, as Marc did, to take up that mantle on his own. It wasn’t fair, but she knew life was under no obligation to be that. It had been unfair to her, too, just in different, more minor ways.

    She pondered occasionally why Marc never told his story to their boys. Such as when he would get upset and tell them, “You two have it so easy,” he never backed it up with how he had not had it so easy. But Kate felt it wasn’t her place to elaborate because it wasn’t her story to tell. If Marc wanted to speak about it, he would. Maybe even all these years later, the weight of what he had had to do at that young age still weighed on him. But looking at him now, cruising down the highway on their way to secular mecca, she could see a glint in his eyes that was not there the day or week before, and perhaps had never been there because for it to be there, life would have had to start differently for him. She thought then, You couldn’t have it as a child, but you can have it now. You can experience what you missed through the eyes of our boys.

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    Kate offered to share driving duties, but Marc wouldn’t hear of it. Seven hours on the road was nothing, he said. Besides, he sometimes got carsick if he sat in the passenger seat. And if he sat in the backseat? Forget about it. So Kate let him drive, and after the boys’ sugar rush from the donuts they’d consumed from their breakfast pit stop caused them to crash out, Kate also felt like taking a good long nap. She asked Marc if it would be okay if she could rest her eyes for a little while, and Marc said she could sleep for as long as she liked. 

    “This,” he said, referring to driving, “is nothing,” and Kate thought, To you, yes.

    When she later woke up, she took a moment to admire their sons. They were both still sleeping, Eric with his mouth agape, a string of drool running from his lower lip to his seat belt, with Bobby beside him, his blonde head resting on his big brother’s shoulder. She wondered if maybe they should have come to Disney earlier. She guessed that her first time must have been when she was about five, but Marc, the love of her life, was reticent to take the plunge before now. Besides being a cautious individual, he was also an economical one—and Disney, families learn quickly, does not dole out its magic inexpensively.

    If Oliver Twist grew up to become Ebenezer Scrooge and was then transported to the modern world, made American, and given a subdued, even-keel personality from his over-the-top “Merry Christmas for all!” ending (while still retaining his cheapskate traits), Kate figured he might resemble Marc. They could both pinch pennies with the best of them. While Kate had grown up coveting name brands, Marc had grown up taking whatever he could get and being glad he could get it, and this behavior he had not outgrown. He could not, for instance, comprehend why others would pay more money for practically anything other than the minimum amount required. He believed the argument of quality over quantity was a false one. Which was why when he gave Kate a necklace for Christmas one year and she asked him, “Are these diamonds?” Marc responded, “No, that would be too extravagant.”

    And while his response had hurt in the moment, and for more than one moment, she later realized that he had not meant his insensitive comment as a slight. This was a man, after all, who insisted that money from a raise be immediately applied to their mortgage principal. A man who had never bought a new car. A man who would never think to buy coffee out when he could make it at home. A man who did not desire extravagant things, and so he struggled to imagine that others might, if only occasionally.

    Finally, she had gotten him to agree to Disney when she offered that they could cancel their live TV subscription and use the savings to go, and Marc agreed. It had taken her two years, but the money she set aside each month finally accumulated into enough for them to spend two whole days at Disney, provided they stayed at a motel not too close to the park and carried in their own food and beverages in a backpack.

    She hadn’t been to Disneyland since her sophomore year of college, fifteen years before, and didn’t remember much of it, having spent the trip largely drunk, cutting lines, and later vomiting an oversized turkey leg on Space Mountain. The memories that were part of her DNA were the ones when she was a little girl, with her parents and sister. Oh, how she could spend an hour in those daydreaming. The Swiss Family Robinson Tree House! Kate and Amy, her sister, had gone wild there once. They’d gone “off-course,” as her mother put it. But why, the sisters had argued, have such a tantalizing banyan tree if said tree of trees were not meant to explore? She remembered her parents in a panic grabbing them as she and Amy, like monkeys, attempted their escape, to climb ever-higher, leaving the safe confines of the roped-off sections for the possibilities and dangers that lay beyond.

    Or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride! That first time at Disney, Kate had been so terrified. She’d cried, and the next time they went to Disney, she’d lamented, “I don’t want to go on that fast frog!” She used the ears from her Goofy hat to wipe her tears—something her sister and parents still poked fun at her about to this day. Later, however, she’d learned to love it. Where else, after all, can one careen through jolly old England, enter Hell, and escape? She’d never read Dante, but she’d ridden that fast frog.

    There were so many memories like that, such as exploring Tom Sawyer’s Island, or riding the train that took you through a cavern to see dinosaurs, or America Sings, which was later discontinued—a big mistake, Kate thought, because what America needed to do to overcome its differences, she felt strongly, was to sing together. But even though Disney changed with the times, Kate admired how they respected their rich history. They could easily get rid of Mr. Toad or the Alice in Wonderland ride, which were both outdated, but they didn’t. They weren’t like Universal Studios, Kate thought, which had no sense of history. And they’d had such great things to preserve too, like the E.T. and Back to the Future rides, but out with the old and in with the new seemed to be their ethos.

    In any case, they weren’t going there. Marc was taking them to Disney, and the moment was perfect. But could he maybe step on the gas a little? Sheesh, had he really been travelling in the slow lane the whole time she’d been asleep? That was not how one made good time going to Disney. When she was young and went at eighteen with a twenty-four pack of Heineken in her trunk that a sketchy guy at her job had bought her and her two girlfriends without any questions, they had put pedal to metal. Okay, they had also driven the whole way in the slow lane because she had driven them in her hand-me-down 1984 Chevrolet Chevette, whose manufacture claimed its top speed was around eighty mph—even they weren’t sure—but in reality was more like seventy if the wind was at your back, you were going downhill, and you caught the Chevette on a good day—but still. She had done it. Did someone, maybe several people take her to the side before the trip and, leaving no room for ambiguity, warn her that her car might literally explode and leave her parents devastated if she bent the needle? Tipped it, pushed the Chevette to its limits, to the top of its speedometer’s measly gauge, redlining it the whole glorious way, fueled by bad ideas, junk food, and the promise of wonder? They had, but Disney magic had seen her through.

    “How long have you been behind that big rig?” she asked Marc. Unless he was interested in phoning the number listed on its rear, under the question “How’s my driving?” she saw no reason for Marc to be behind it.

    “Huh?” Marc said. 

    “I’d like to check in before nightfall is all.”

    “What are you talking about?” Marc said, his voice chipper. “We’re making great time. Right on schedule.”

    Oh God, the schedule. 

    Not the one that was on paper like an actual schedule that you could all look at, debate, and offer suggestions about. No, Kate knew he meant the mythical one that occupied his mind and his mind alone, the one that made perfect sense in Markland but little sense outside. They could be broken down on the side of the road, praying for help and for bandits to pass them over for name-brand families in a rut, surviving off the last vestiges of homemade trail mix and urine water, defecating behind desert grass for cover, and, to Marc, they might be just a little behind schedule. 

    She needed to take the wheel. She had the need for speed and a toothbrush. Glazed donuts followed by sleep made her mouth taste like something evil had spawned there. She exhaled into her hand, inhaled, and nearly succumbed. 

    “Why don’t you let me drive for a while?” she said pleasantly, as if she wanted so badly to do something nice for her husband of nine years, instead of putting pedal to metal and mainline Disney this instant rather than after her next birthday—which, at the pace they were going, might arrive sooner.

    “What?” Marc said, chuckling a little. “This? This is nothing.”

    Yes, to you, she thought, forcing herself to smile while her life drifted by as they made terrible time getting to a place she needed desperately to return to. She had been away too long, she told herself. The magic fades with time. If one does not renew at the source, the magic recedes. But pleasant Marc was good Marc. Because Marc could become incensed Marc if she really pushed, and she had not invited that Marc along to Disney. She told herself she had waited this long, scrimped and saved as the Beatles song stated—just as long as they made it before she actually turned sixty-four—and so a little longer would not kill her.

    Other things could kill her. Such as? No, she would not be playing that game, engaging with what-ifs now, not on a road trip where there was no escape, where she was trapped in a rectangle on wheels with a slow driver and had to moderate how much liquid she consumed, especially diuretics which could—she would count license plates. Yes, she would count license plates and not think about having to tinkle, from different states, pray the boys remained asleep and didn’t have to go numbers one or two, or that they remained calm and silent as monks if they woke. She would tell herself that each moment that passed was one moment closer to Disney, even if there would be way fewer moments that needed to pass if she were driving. Perhaps if she opened the door and ran a few links ahead, Marc would pick up the pace.

    “Are we there yet?” Eric asked.

    What, did he have a death wish? Did the boy dare risk awakening the beast that is incensed Marc?

    “Huh?” Marc said, oblivious, his mind elsewhere.

    Kate, shaking with fury or perhaps from the sudden appearance of an acute neurological condition, turned in her seat, craning her head, and reached for Eric. She pulled him close in a way that mothers have done since before recorded history, in a way that non-mothers sometimes mistake for abuse instead of an attempt to cling to respite from chaos, and whispered in his ear, “I will break you.” She released him, smiling, repeating her internal mantra, Almost to Disney. Almost to magic.

    “That’s the second one from Maine,” she reported, noting the Volkswagen’s license plate that moved from the slow lane to the middle one in order to pass them, easily leaving them in its dust.

    “We’re right on schedule,” Marc said and gave a reassuring nod to his wife. She wanted this trip so badly. To just rush there was to take half the fun out of it. No, better to savor. Besides, gas mileage efficiency went in the gutter the second you hot-rodded all over the place. And the good Lord knows that gas isn’t cheap. She might not thank him now, but she would thank him later.

    “I have to tinkle,” Bobby said, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

    “You don’t have a bladder,” Kate said, and waved her palm in front of Bobby’s face like it would make this so, hoping residual, waning magic would allow her to perform the Jedi mind trick.

    “What?” Marc said, the beast within stirring, opening an eye. “Since when? You told me an hour ago at the donut shop—”

    “It’s only been an hour?” Kate whispered, her soul momentarily leaving her body in search of Tinker Bell.

    “—that you didn’t have to go.”

    “I didn’t, then,” Bobby clarified.

    “Well, grab a bottle, buddy. Cause this train’s not slowing for anyone. We’re right on schedule.”

    “Almost to Disney,” Kate mumbled, not noticing she was speaking out loud, staring ahead through the windshield and seeing Main Street just out of focus, just beyond the borders of her perception. “Almost to magic.”

    “What if I have to poop?” Bobby asked, holding a mostly empty liter bottle of soda, angling it in his hands as he contemplated dubious logistics.

    “What do you mean, ‘what if?’” Eric said. “You either have to or you—”

    “Almost to Disney,” Kate continued murmuring just beneath the sound of the air conditioning and motor, letting the words wash over her, like a newborn in her mother’s arms, or one seeking reentrance into the womb for the comfort and safety that world held. “Almost to magic.”

    “I guess I can do both in the bottle,” Bobby said.

    “You two have it so easy,” Eric said.

    “Almost... ”

Bio:

David Prosser is a writer and teacher based in the Charleston area of South Carolina. His work explores the human condition and the strange, often humorous ways people think, behave, and contradict themselves.