FRIED green tomorrows

Or: another crowd. Memorial Day. This time we're fully an hour and a half from Reading, our odd little proxy hometown, in the proverbial sticks west of the Appalachian trail. We're at a friend's parents' house, a big, rude pre-fab affair on ten or more acres, nothing to look at but hills and mountains and circling hawks. It’s blindingly bright. It’s needlessly, stupidly hot. A quintessential American landscape. Again: Memorial Day. We’re sitting drinking expensive imported beers, sweating onto white plastic furniture, squinting at each other beside the flashing swimming pool. Our friend's brother, visiting from Sweden with his Swedish wife and kids, has procured, seemingly from thin air, a bottle of Absolut. This is trouble. Suddenly he and his wife, blonde and freakishly beautiful, are teaching us all a Swedish drinking song. The words and gestures become very intricate indeed. We fake them, singing nonsense syllables, throwing back our sweating shot glasses, grimacing and coughing extravagantly. Two chubby blonde children splash in the pool, screaming at each other other in Swedish. "Fleegplon, fleegplon!" the female child hollers, pointing at a vapor trail inching across the cloudless sky. "Look," says our friend Gary to my boyfriend Alex, pointing down a long grassy slope to the neighbors' emu ranch, five hundred yards away. "They're out!" Several of the big awkward birds are loping around, kicking up little dusty dirt clouds behind a tall wire fence. The cell phone by the Absolut bottle starts ringing. The children, stoned on chlorine, start singing. "They're basically like beef," Gary is saying.