America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw

have a warm and cozy little fishing cottage there, set on a point of land that extends into a protected bay. Going alone permits us to eat, talk and act in ways that would not be possible under the civilizing influence of femininity—in other words to be slobs.
    It was very cold, the longest cold spell of any recorded March. The hundred-mile highway from New York was high-walled on either side with snow tossed up by the plows, but snow doesn’t bother us much. My vintage station wagon wears snow tires from November until May. We were a traveling nightmare—the car radio yowled and the boys tapped their feet, patted rhythm with their hands, squirmed and occasionally threw a secret punch at each other. I’ll be glad when they are old enough to drive and I can sit back and criticize. “Watch out! You’re going too fast! For God’s sake don’t pass on the right!”—that kind of thing.
    At exactly halfway we stopped at a big silver diner. They loaded the jukebox and each boy had three hamburgers and a bottle of Coke. For dessert one had chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce, and the other vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. Their main problem seems to be getting from one meal to the next without starving to death. While I paid the bill, they bought candy bars to tide them over until dinnertime.
    Back in the car they were a little sluggish and conversational, too sluggish to squirm. In honor of the occasion we took new names. This does for us what a new hairdo or a flowered hat does for a woman. My oldest son became The Tingler, and the younger The Fly, a character from another horror picture. I kept my old calypso name, Insidestraight, which was awarded me in Trinidad.
    We passed a few guarded remarks—weather, how we felt, how good it was to be together—not really fighting, just feinting and getting the range but enough for me to relearn the always amazing fact that in the short time since I had seen them at Christmas they were changed, grown, enlarged.
    The Fly has become arrogant—an arbiter of manners, clothes and ideas, and his standard is strict. He described many persons, ideas and things as corny, square or sentimental.
    I threw a sneak punch. “The only people I know who are afraid of being corny or sentimental are adolescents and second-raters. Homer wasn’t afraid of it. Neither was Shakespeare. And can you think of a cornier character than Albert Einstein?” I don’t think I got over.
    â€œIt’s a sign of insecurity,” said The Tingler. And lest you think this profound, I must explain that just as The Fly uses “corny” and “square,” The Tingler substitutes “insecure” for the same qualities. The boys were a little edgy. They knew the infighting was to come.
    It was evening when we got to Discove Point and the sun was bleeding into the clouds over the hills to the south of Great Peconic Bay. The Point was deep-drifted. We had to shovel out a road to get the car in the garage. Our own bay was frozen over with only tide channels of open water. The huge oak trees on the Point were black against the whiteness of the snow and the steel blue of the ice. Our little shingled cottage with its good oil furnace was lovely and warm and immaculate. At least it was clean when we arrived. We lighted the water heater and loaded the refrigerator with the exotic and indigestible foods we had brought from town.
    Then it was night and the beauty thing was the full moon, white and serene and lonely. The ridged ice of the bay was piled in high wreckage along the shores where the tides had thrust it. The plumed stalks of the pampas grass whispered wonderfully in the night wind. On the frozen surface of the bay the seagulls in congress assembled stood like hunch-backed old men, beaks into the wind to keep their feathers down. In the open water of the tide race the wild ducks gabbled, shovelers in transit now, competing with the