Here She Lies

unabashed shopaholic — prime feed for marketers like my twin, advertisers, telephone solicitors, the whole bunch of them — and in light of our conversation on the way into town I began to feel supremely stupid sitting in my sister’s leather passenger seat. Her keen awareness of the workings of the world, her mastery of it, afforded her leather, while our car back in Lexington was upholstered in stained cloth. I wondered if it was possible that everything I did, half of what I thought, was influenced by someone else and I didn’t even know it. After all, in recent years the marketing of stuff had grown more ubiquitous and even sexier than the stuff itself. Were we offered what we wanted before we knew we wanted it? Were our own lurking desires being used to formulate and transform our wants into needs? I considered this as we drove ten more minutes along Route 7, the lush, hilly road that led into Stockbridge.
    Stockbridge was another jewel of a New England town in a prosperous area. It had its own Main Street, similar to Great Barrington’s, but it felt different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Then, when we passed a sign pointing in the direction of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I knew what it was. I remembered Rockwell’s classic midcentury painting of this very street: a lineup of brick and whitewashed storefronts on a cold winter night at Christmastime, a serene and pastoral small-town moment that anyone could recognize in his or her own way. His painting had become anAmerican icon, reminding us of the simplicity and peacefulness of our national soul back when existence was organic — not just the food but people’s daily lives.
    But the town I saw didn’t look or feel like the painting. Around the linchpin of a huge Victorian hotel were all the signs of a tourist trap gone to seed: a candle shoppe, a candy shoppe, a store featuring sweatshirts advertising the names of local towns and attractions, a crowded eatery. It looked to me like the painting’s fame had driven the town around the bend, devouring the innocence that had brought it acclaim in the first place.
    Was this — this sweet but faded town — what marketing left you with after the sale? A vague memory that you had once valued something but you could no longer recall precisely what it was because you had, almost inadvertently, replaced it with something else? It was cynical — I knew that — but there was something about this place, these scenic, almost staged towns and roads and flower beds and skies, that made me want to scratch their pretty surfaces to see what really was beneath. I liked it here, but none of it felt precisely real.
    I sighed, lay my head back against the headrest and pressed my fingertips into my temples. What I needed was to stop thinking. It had been an awful twenty-four hours.
    “What’s wrong?” Julie asked. We had reached the playground and she pulled up to the curb alongside it.
    “A little headache coming on,” I said.
    “It’s been that kind of day.” She smiled, trying to cheer me, and popped the locks automatically from her side. “Come on. Let’s show our baby a good time.”
    Julie carried Lexy, while I pushed open the playground gate with my foot; there was a fuzzy brown caterpillar inching along the top of the gate and I hated worms of any kind. It was a large and generous playground and we had it all to ourselves — swings, monkey bars, a sprawling modern jungle gym linked by gliders, tunnels, bridges, slides and ladders. Julie went straight to the baby swings, put Lexy into one and pushed. I had never put her in a swing before and was thrilled to see how much she loved it. I imagined how happily she would be to play here when she was older, on visits from the city to Aunt Julie: exploring the tunnels, scaling the ladders, rocketing down the slides. I stood in front of the swing, cooing and opening my arms each time Lexy swayed toward me. She would give me one of her big toothless smiles before swinging backward for another gentle push from Julie.
    Another caterpillar crawled onto the toe of my boot and I kicked it off into the grass. And then I saw more. There were so many of them. They were dark brown with tiny yellow balls — eggs? — dotting their backs. I looked around and realized they were everywhere: crawling along the picnic table, climbing up a leg of the swing set, inching along the jungle gym, swarming through the grass, hanging from the canopy of