Too Much Happiness

of bourgeois
gentilhomme,”
Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.
    “Don’t make fun of your father,” said Sally mechanically.
    “I’m not. It’s just that most geologists seem so grubby.”
    The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo article in
Zeitschrift für Geomorphology
. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been there.
    They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road-having turned off a decent unpaved country road-and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

    CAUTION. DEEP-HOLES.

    Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?
    The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect to find what had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.
    Deep chambers, really, some as big as a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them and ferns and mosses growing out of their sides. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble that seemed so far below. The path went meandering amongst them, over hard earth or shelves of not-quite-level rock.
    “Ooee,” came the call of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, running ahead.
    “No tearing around in here,” called Alex. “No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me.”
    They called okay, and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn’t slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.
    The outlook did not appear until they had gone along these dirt and rock paths for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and a halt of her husband ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops-above several levels of treetops, as it turned out-with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.
    As soon as she was put down on her blanket Savanna began to cry.
    “Hungry,” said Sally.
    Alex said, “I thought she got her lunch in the car.”
    “She did. But she’s hungry again.”
    She got Savanna latched onto one side and with her free hand unfastened the picnic basket. This was not of course how Alex had planned things. But he gave a good-humored sigh and retrieved the champagne glasses from their wrappings in his pockets, placing them on their sides on a patch of grass.
    “Glug-glug I’m thirsty too,” said Kent, and Peter immediately imitated him.
    “Glug-glug me too glug-glug.”
    “Shut up,” said Alex.
    Kent said, “Shut up, Peter.”
    Alex said to Sally, “What did you bring for them to drink?”
    “Kool-Aid in the blue jug. And the plastic glasses in a napkin underneath.”
    Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally’s breast. He thought it was high time Savanna was transferred to the bottle-she was nearly six months old. And he thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled. With Kent sneaking peeks and Peter referring to Mommy’s milk jugs. That came from Kent, Alex said. Kent was a sneak and a troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind.
    “Well, I have to keep doing those things,” said Sally.
    “Nursing’s not one of the things you have to do. You could have her on the bottle tomorrow.”
    “I will soon. Not quite tomorrow, but soon.”
    But here she is, still letting Savanna and the milk jugs dominate the