“Would you like some of this ginger ale?”
“Thank you.”
“….”
“And so they get back to the cabin, and things are more or less as they were before, although the woman is eating and sleeping a lot and gaining weight fast, and the man is so angry at the exorbitant price of the anticrying medicine that he vows to make a special effort to control his temper and be extremely nice to both children so they’ll cry as little as possible. But of course meanwhile his old emotional temper problem is little by little getting worse and worse, and the strain of being artificially nice to the children is really telling on him, and at ever more frequent intervals he has to run deep into the woods to yell and punch trees with his fists, and he becomes involuntarily cruel to the sweet sad woman, and hisses at her about her steadily increasing weight late at night when the children are asleep at the other side of the tiny cabin, which hissing of course only makes the woman more melancholy and sleepy and hungry, and she quickly shoots up to her old pre-love weight, and then some. And this goes on for roughly a year, with some potentially really terrifying epileptic crying fits from the children, especially the older one, being averted only by administering the special medicine just in time.”
“I’m engrossed, I admit it.”
“Well, and now on the disastrous and climactic night of the story, symbolized by a really unbelievable rainstorm outside, with the wind screaming and big gelatinous globs of rain pelting the cabin, the four are sitting at dinner, and the woman’s plate is piled almost to the ceiling with Hostess Cupcakes, and she’s yawning, and the man, who is under enormous strain, is unbelievably pissed off, and struggling every moment to control his temper, and the older child, who’s now about seven, whines a little bit about not wanting to eat his peas, which the woman had been too sleepy and gorged even to bother to unfreeze and cook, and the whine on top of everything else so angers the man that he involuntarily fetches the child a tremendous slap, purely involuntarily, and the child flies out of his chair, and falls, and knocks over a little table, on which are kept, in a place of honor, on a purple felt pad, all the precious bottles of the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and all the bottles are broken, and all the medicine in an instant ruined, and of course the child naturally starts crying from the tremendous slap and goes right away into a severe epileptic fit, and the baby, at all the negative commotion, begins to cry, too, and goes into a little fit of its own, and so suddenly the man and the woman have both children having epileptic crying fits, and no medicine to keep the fits from grievously harming the childrens’ hearts and brains and maybe killing them. And they’re frantic, and the kids are flopping around, and the woman finally manages to get the baby semi-calmed down by holding it and bouncing it and crooning to it, but the older child is in a very bad way indeed.”
“Good God.”
“So both parents are completely frantic, and they decide all they can do is for the man to take the older child in the Jeep and try to get to the tiny far-off hospital just as quickly as possible, while the woman calls ahead and gets them to make up an emergency batch of anticrying medicine right away, and that thus the woman should stay and try to call and keep the baby, who is now more or less stable in the mother’s arms but who hates to ride in the Jeep and would certainly cry disastrously on the way to the tiny hospital, from crying and convulsing any more, until the father can get back with the medicine and the also hopefully saved older child. And so the man carries the flopping boy out to the Jeep in the gelatinously heavy rain and off they go, and the woman begins to try to call the tiny far-off hospital but can’t get through because, as the narrator tells us, the hospital’s lines have been hit by lightning, and so in desperation the woman finally calls their old psychologist in the city, because he’d told them when he’d sold them their cabin that if they ever needed anything not to hesitate to call, and she gets hold of him at his downtown penthouse and begs him to drive to the tiny far-off hospital and get some anticrying medicine for the baby and bring it down to the cabin right away. And the psychologist, after he’s reminded of who the woman is — he’d forgotten — reluctantly says OK, he’ll do it, even though it’s raining gelatinously, and says he’ll be right there, but as soon as he hangs up, who should stop by but a current patient, whom the psychologist had been trying to convince to buy a cabin and live out in seclusion, and so the psychologist delays for a bit while he stays and shows the patient brochures and tries to convince him to buy a cabin, and we’re again rather irritatingly reminded that there are tiny green dollar signs in the centers of the psychologist’s eyes.”
“Bastard, though.”
“No lie. And meanwhile the man is driving like mad in the Jeep toward the tiny far-off hospital, with the boy, who’s no longer convulsing but now is sort of autistic and slack-jawed and still obviously in a very bad way indeed, and the man’s driving like mad, but it’s very slow going, in the dark and the gelatinous rain and the mud of the deep-woods roads, and the man is so incredibly angry at the universe for putting his family in this position he feels as if he’s about to explode, but through enormous strength of will he keeps the lid on, and keeps driving, and eventually gets off the muddy deep-woods roads and onto the highway, where the going is at least a little faster. And the woman is meanwhile back at the cabin, waiting for the psychologist to arrive with the anticrying medicine, and she’s so full and so upset and depressed at everything, that’s happened that she’s yawning all the time, she’s unbelievably sleepy, and it gets still worse as the hours go by and it gets late and the gelatinous rain drums rhythmically on the cabin roof, but the baby is meanwhile having small but severe convulsive attacks whenever it cries, and the only way the woman finds she can keep it from crying is to hold it against her enormous Frito-crumbed breast; whenever she puts the baby down, it cries and begins to have an epileptic fit. So she’s staggering back and forth with the baby. And this goes on, some switching from scene to scene, the psychologist finally makes his sale and gets going, and he has an.incredibly fast and expensive car, paid for out of cabin profits, and he gets to the tiny backwoods hospital in no time flat, and he talks to the kindly old country doctor, and after a brief wait while the kindly old country doctor practically kills himself making the anticrying medicine in almost no time, the psychologist gets the medicine, and says the man will pay for it, and starts jetting down the highway toward the deep woods and the far-off cabin, at incredible speed, and in an ironic and ominous twist he goes right by the Jeep, for obvious reasons headed in the other direction, while the Jeep is pulled over in the dark with a flat, which the man is in a rage in the storm fixing, while the child slumps in the front seat in a bad way, and the psychologist’s incredibly fast car splashes a huge wave of rainwater on the man from clear across the highway and knocks the jack handle out, of the man’s hand, and the jack handle hits something small but vital on the axle of the Jeep, and partially breaks it, which the man doesn’t notice, because he’s so pissed off at the psychologist’s car for splashing water on him that he’s jumping up and down and screaming and giving the receding car the finger, and just temporarily out of control.”