Animal Crackers

“Want an animal cracker?” Renee asked, as they pulled away from a Shell along route 80. While Jack had pumped gas and cleaned the windshield, she’d gone in to buy bottled waters. They’d just crossed the Platt River, and had another day’s drive before them.

“I didn’t know they still made these,” Renee said. “I used to love them with cocoa when I was a kid. I think there’s a song about that, but I don’t remember it. Have you ever had that eerie feeling when you’re not sure if you remember something or only imagined it? Here’s a sheep. Baaaaaa.”

“I don’t want a sheep.”

“Yesterday, when we saw herds of them, you said they were beautiful.”

“Know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”

“No, Jack, but I was just wondering.”

“Sheep can hear a zipper at a hundred yards.”

“All right, how’s about a monkey with a banana?”

“Very unappetizing,” Jack said as he opened his window to the smell of diesel fumes, fertilizer, and green corn—in that order.

“Say wha? Jack, I can’t hear when wind is roaring in.”

“Too bad, I just hummed the song you couldn’t remember,” Jack said. “It’s called ‘Animal Crackers and Cocoa to Drink.’ ”

“Cocoa what?” Renee clutched her head like The Thinker, holding her hair down as if it might blow off. Her hair, she’d complained, was at an in-between length. She was growing out the spiky boyish style she’d sported since her divorce. That cut was a feminist statement, she said, not to mention a conversation starter in bars. She’d dyed her hair a streaky sun-on-straw to match the moussed way it poked up. But now she felt beyond the age of someone with a cut like that. She was allowing her natural color back, too, a shade she called “almost blonde.” Before giving up her sun-streaked spiky look, she’d had a professional photographer take a set of photos. She’d worn an off-the-shoulder dress so that once the photos were cropped it appeared as if she’d posed nude. She’d given Jack a blow-up mounted in an art deco silver frame. When he opened the gift wrapping, he stared at the photo as if lost in thought, then looked at Renee and said, There never was a question for me, was there?

Does that mean you like it? she’d asked.

Jack raised his window and turned on the air. “I said eating a monkey sounds disgusting.” His voice sounded overly loud without the road racket to shout over.

“A simple ‘No thanks’ would have sufficed.”

“No simians, thank you,” Jack said.

“Are you still in a bad mood?”

“Still? I was never in a bad mood. Why would I be in a bad mood?”

“About the stories we, you know, exchanged. It’s not fair to ask and then sulk about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“It was your idea to break up the ride by telling secrets.”

“Like my sharing the deep, dark secret that when I was nine, me and my cross-eyed cousin Cindy would sneak into the garage and show each other our hairless privates?”

“I think it was more what I told you.”

“You mean, since I’d mentioned cousins, your story about a sailing lesson with a cousin you’d always had a crush on …”

“Uh-huh.”

“… At the family cottage in Wisconsin the summer you first streaked your hair blonde when you were—seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen, wearing a green bikini, and he says the color goes great with your hair, and then asks what color your pubic hair is, and if he’ll ever see it, and the two of you end up making the Sunfish rock out there in the middle of Moon Lake, and later he says, thank god neither of us gets sea sick. You think that’s bothering me?”

“You got quiet after that.”

“I’ve been driving all day, give me a break. That was cute about sea sick.”

“We weren’t having a competition,” Renee said.

“Good thing, too, since I don’t have anything to top incest.”

“For the record, you added that part about the green bikini. I never specified. Green is your favorite color.”

“Well, that changes it completely,” Jack said.

Sudden splats of mustard and yolk streaked across the windshield that Jack had industriously squeegeed clean at the Shell station. He gripped the wheel with both hands as if navigating through a blizzard that required total concentration.

“God! Can you see the road?” Renee asked. “Try the wipers.”

“You want to resist spraying with wiper fluid,” he said. “I made that mistake once.”