THERE IS NO THERE, THERE It’s a day you feel like dying, and you stop at a McDonald’s on the long drive home for what could be your last meal. You sit sandwiched between two minivans full of sleeping children in the parking lot, carefully unpeeling a paper napkin on your lap and thinking of the trips your family used to take, how your parents let you and your sisters sleep in the car while they stopped to get food, warm bags of it that would wake you. And when you woke to the smell of fries and the crinkling of paper, everyone eating their selections in silence, it didn’t occur to you how fortunate you were to have parents like this, how that mournful munching could be missed. Suddenly the selfishness of children seems the greatest crime against humanity, and you want to call your parents to thank them but know you won’t, your internal irony already kicking in, mocking your situation, how obviously you’re feeling sorry for yourself, listening to this sad slate of love songs and tending quietly to the Quarter Pounder on your lap. Can one cry over a Quarter Pounder with no cheese? You straighten up and look indifferent as first one mom then the other comes back to her children bearing bulging white bags, passes out the fries and little cheeseburgers, then sits for a while watching them
in the rearview mirror, occasionally picking at a fry to let them know she’s eating, too. How miserable you were on those car rides. How inexplicable. What state must you be in now to equate that misery with comfort, to see gardens in those minivans already filling with grease, to feel home in the weight of this burger in your hand? It’s a trick of advertising, you know, and yet the care and continuity of corporations on this day seems curiously all you have, you who are so unreachable, who wants only for those minivans to leave you to the bottom of your bag strewn with fries, the crooked brown fence edging the parking lot, the sound of your chewing over these songs, these familiar repetitions.