But at this moment you are inexplicably here, in this windowless dungeon of decadence, where the obese demographic stands in line to suck soft-serve ice cream straight from the industrial teat. Your mother’s plate is heaped with deep-fried tidbits: fried clams, fried shrimp, fried lobster, fried crab, fried fish, fried chicken, fried steak, fried pork, fried potatoes, fried onions, fried batter.
“You need to eat some vegetables,” says your father, who has added a blue-cheese-smothered salad of pesticide-saturated genetically modified iceberg lettuce to his pile of garbage.
“That’s not good for you,” he says.
“It is good!” cries your mother, jerking her plate away as though your father wants to snatch her food.
“Good for you, Jenny, not good.”
“It is good,” says your mother.
Her pouched brown eyes quiver behind glasses.
Do you detect a glimmer of slyness? You wonder; for during your childhood your mother was in some ways the shadow-governor of your house, the manipulator, the ever-scheming dumb-playing domestic Machiavelli, and though her bubble of understanding may have shrunk, her control impulse is stronger than ever.
“Of course it’s good, Jenny. Fried meat is high in saturated fat and cholesterol. But it’s not good for you.”
“It is good!” screams your mother. “Look at the flowers.”
She points at a vase of plastic hibiscus that rests on a pearl-white baby grand that you suspect has never been played. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Tell her, Caroline. Tell her that what she’s eating isn’t good for her.”
You begin your diatribe with the salmon.
“Consider the salmon,” you actually say, though there are no hip, clever people around to get your allusion. “Farmraised, of course. If their feed were not laced with toxic dye, their meat would be the unappetizing color of a maggot.”
Your father, who is squeamish, retches into his napkin.
“Please,” he says.
But you have no mercy. Trotting out Deadly Harvest, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Fast Food Nation, you present the grim facts about the agri-industrial complex. You touch upon monocropping, genetic modification, the specious differences between artificial and so-called “natural” flavors, after which you provide a brief aside on the heated debate surrounding the controversial issue of saturated fats, which have, perhaps, been unfairly demonized. You bemoan the planet’s dying oceans. You describe the melancholy lowing of diseased cattle crammed cheek to jowl in a concrete feed lot. You depict corn syrup as though it is some kind of evil ectoplasm that possesses the food system, haunting cereal boxes and jars of juice. You pick flecks of flesh from your salmon and pop them into your mouth. You wince, for effect, each time you swallow. And when you are done covering every nook and cranny of the thoroughly corrupt contemporary food system, your cheeks are flushed with elation.
“Food is food,” your father says. “One of the few pleasures in life.”
“You are what you eat,” you say. “And you, dear Father, are not eating a duck but a brutal duck-raising technology.”
Your father rolls his eyes.
So you take it upon yourself to make him understand the true nature of the food system in which he is complicit. You discuss antibiotics, hormones, lice medicine. You evoke the pale winter light that once played upon the cold bars of this duck’s (you point for emphasis) cramped prison cell. You hypothesize about the nature of duck depression. You want your father to taste the despair of the cage. The sad duck restlessness. The bleak duck sighs. Bleeding cankers of the flipper, cloacal tumors, swollen feather follicles. You ask your father to imagine the vitamin-deficient creature’s cloudy eyes, its scaly beak, its tongue, dry as a biscuit, feebly protruding to taste an anemic crumb of genetically modified Roundup Ready corn.
You do not feel satisfied until your father puts down his fork.
“Nevertheless,” you say, “you might as well eat it. Not waste it, you know. After all it went through.”
“Caroline, why don’t you eat something?” says your mother. She’s standing up, half-empty plate in hand. “There are all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And it’s all natural, natural, natural.”
She skips off into the labyrinth of troughs, wedges herself between two wheelchair-bound senior citizens, heaps her plate with desserts, and returns to the table.
“Want some?” she asks.
You shake your head.
You imagine your husband weeding his vegetable garden. You left on a bad note two days ago, after a long and tedious fight that ended only when you walked out the door. In fact, the reason you decided, at the last minute, to join your parents for a cut-rate vacation in nightmarish Orlando was to get a break from what you call the husband situation. And while your angry side still wants to double-slap the self-righteous prick across his smug face, the loving and sensitive soul deep within you, gagged and strait-jacketed by bitterness, misses him.
“Whew,” says your mother, putting down a Pepto-Bismol-pink spoonful of M&M-studded pudding. “I ate too much” (she always says this). “I won’t have to eat a bite of supper” (she always does).
Though her smile is huge, she looks uncomfortable and hypertensive. In the spasmodic light of the fluorescent chandeliers, her face looks alarmingly flushed. And you think you see a hint of wildness in her eyes.
The condo balcony overlooks a parking lot. A dumpster swells like an island amid the glittering sea of SUVs.
“Great view,” you say, and your father sneers into his gin and tonic, wondering, you suspect, why he invited you along.
“It’s beautiful,” your mother says, her smile rapturous.
“What a sunset.” Your father takes your mother’s tiny restless hand, caging it in both palms as though he’s trapped a wily songbird.
But the sky is beautiful, you admit, scarlet with particulates and smeared with clumps of glowing smog. You mention the role of pollution in what you call the apocalyptic beauty of the postmodern sunset. And yes, you do feel pretentious for using the term postmodern, particularly in the presence of your quaint, modern parents with their atomic-age notions of human progress. You actually wince before turning back to the screenplay you’ve been working on for a year, a sci-fi satire that you secretly hope will release you from your peonage as an adjunct instructor of English composition with a course load of five/five. You are a debt prisoner struggling to pay off student loans, teaching future debt prisoners whose student loans are three times as usurious as yours. But you have promised yourself that you will not think about your students during spring break. You will focus on your neglected screenplay. And you actually feel inspired by the ridiculous sunset. Riding the crisp, optimistic wave of a chardonnay buzz, you tap laptop keys.
Dusk. The sky in pink turmoil, a froth of toxic clouds. Cars cruise the city grid. Behind an abandoned strip mall, on cracked blacktop, in the sultry haze of perpetual summer, two black sedans approach each other. Each vehicle emits a pink plume of exhaust. They drive in circles, assessing pheromones. The male organ emerges slowly, like an expanding telescope, to the pulsing throb of bleak techno music. And then the cars copulate, bumper to bumper, like cockroaches.