The Leisure Seeker: A Novel by Michael Zadoorian Read Free Book Online Page B

one that John must have taken with the self-timer on the camera. We are all gathered in our shorts and bright-colored shirts and blouses after a long day outdoors. We look sunburned and happy, except for Cindy, who is sulking, most likely over some boy.
    “That’s a nice shot, John.”
    “Yeah.”
    A few slides later, we are in the kitchen of the old cottage. My baby brother Ted and his wife, Stella, are there with their three kids, Terry, Ted Jr., and Tina. (Some parents are determined to alphabetize their offspring and there is no way totalk them out of it. I always felt bad for Stella, being one letter off from the pack.) My older sister Lena is there as well with her brood. Al, her soak of a husband, was probably off getting sloshed in the garage. He spent most of his time there, near the beer fridge. (Cirrhosis, when it happened, was no surprise to any of us.)
    “Looks like a party,” John says.
    “Just dinnertime.”
    In the slide, people are standing around a table, helping themselves. The table is covered with lunch meats and potato chips and macaroni salads, Jell-O salads, bowls of dips and crackers, bottles of pop (red, orange, green) with names that I barely recognize: Uptown and Wink and Towne Club. I think about dozens of other photos like this one over the years, huge spreads of food, tables covered with it. I think about the people in the slides, most of them gone now, heart attacks and cancers, betrayed by the foods we ate, by our La-Z-Boys, by our postwar contentment, everyone getting larger and larger in every year’s photographs, our prosperity gone wide.
    Tonight, though, what makes this particular photo interesting to me is me . (Why are we always attracted to the image of ourselves in a photograph? This doesn’t change, even at my age.) I’m in the background of the photo, standing in a corner, staring off to the side, not talking to anyone.
    “You were sad that night,” says John, out of nowhere.
    I’m surprised that he would say this. But looking at the slide again, I realize that I do look sad. “I was? What was I sad about?”

    “I don’t know.”
    Suddenly, I want to know the cause of my sadness. It becomes very important to me to know, but I can’t remember.
    Behind us, on the road, a young family stops and waves. The husband, a dark-haired athletic fellow in his thirties, smiles robustly like he knows us.
    “How you doing there?” he says, tugging his reluctant little towhead boy our way. His wife, a pert blonde in a pink sundress, follows behind, indulging her chatty husband in a way that looks mighty familiar to me.
    The wife kneels down to the boy, points up at the screen. “See, honey, that’s what things looked like in the olden days.”
    The boy, who looks about seven, is wearing a T-shirt that says: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, BOUGHT THE T-SHIRT.
    I recognize the look on his face. He wants to escape, probably to go play with his Game Boy, if he’s anything like my grandkids.
    “Nice setup you’ve got here,” says the husband.
    “We like it,” I say. Somehow, I can’t bring myself to say much more. I’m hoping John will say something, but he’s concentrating on the screen. A few years back, you wouldn’t have been able to shut him up. John used to love to gab with strangers. He and this fellow would have gotten on famously, chewing the fat about the weather or camping or our respective destinations. But now, John sits in silence. The family stays for a few slides, then says good-bye. I’m glad when they leave, slightly annoyed with the blonde’s comment about “the olden days,” but mostly just ashamedof myself for my envy of their youth, of their lives so full and unfolding before them, of their complete unawareness of their great good fortune.
    Some other folks walk by, and I have to say they get bored pretty quickly with our lives projected up there. Then a man and a woman in their late sixties come by. They stand and watch for quite some time. I can tell