The Cannibal Queen (12 page)

Everyone should come here at least once and find they spent twice as much money as they thought they would. Every good parent should give this experience to his or her children, who will grow up warped if they don’t see a million acres of grass without weeds and all the freaky educational stuff in the tunnels. That’s what’s wrong with me—I’m forty-four and this is my first visit, and probably my last unless there’s a procreative accident lurking in my future.

The first day of our Disney adventure we “did” EPCOT Center. I don’t know why they always capitalize all the letters in EPCOT, but I think it stands for something abstruse.

Our hotel was nifty in that the monorail ran right through the fourth-floor shop and restaurant area. From the outside it sort of looked like an ancient Mayan temple, and as I climbed the steps it occurred to me that I was making the pilgrimage with a lot of good sacrifice material—one first-born son and two virgins.

Anyway, we checked into our hotel, which the desk person said had 1,036 rooms, dumped our bags and drained off the slag, then boarded the monorail.

At EPCOT we charged through the surging crowd for the geodesic dome, where we boarded a little plastic car and were transported through the ubiquitous tunnel. I have already forgotten what we saw there. We immediately scurried to the next building and had a similar experience. The same in the third and fourth one. Nancy and the kids did the fifth one by themselves while I loafed outside.

They saw Michael Jackson do something that earned him outrageous bucks and came out groaning. “Now I remember why I detest Michael Jackson,” Rachael whispered to me. Lara and David just rolled their eyes. Nancy liked it though.

Hungry, jaded with the Disney experience, we found grub in a fast-food joint where everything costs twice as much as it does “outside.” We were smiled at yet again by the gracious employees.

We left our trash in a can like good citizens and joined the throng outside in the grotesque humidity. A short boat ride across the lake and we were in the midst of the international exhibits, the faintly interesting architecture of which I spoke, full of shops selling knickknacks like you buy a third cousin who is getting married and restaurants selling stuff that doesn’t look like anything your mother ever made.

We took in a well-done concert by a band called the College All-Stars. They played some Broadway show tunes and a group of dancers cavorted appropriately. Then we went down the walkway and Lara tried her hand at playing a dulcimer. She could learn it if she worked at it.

Now a sidewalk portrait artist caught Nancy’s eye. In a twinkling Nancy had contracted for three profile portraits, one of each of the kids, which turned out to be four because she was unhappy with the way Rachael’s first one turned out. It was 9
P.M.
by the time the pictures were all done.

We loafed for the next hour, strolling leisurely and sitting on a flower-bed retainer wall, while waiting for the 10
P.M.
light show to start. David tried to get us to scoot to the front of the mob and stand for a half hour so we would be sure and see everything, but Nancy and I scotched that. We waited patiently on our retainer wall and watched the human parade while David stewed.

The light show involved a lot of fireworks and laser lights and classical music. I was hoping they would close with Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the
USA
and use fireworks to emblazon the American flag in the sky, with lasers zigging around, but they didn’t. Maybe the Fourth of July.

Then we joined the mob trying to get to the parking lot and monorail. At 11 we got back to our hotel.

The next day David, Rachael and Nancy went to the Disney-MGM theme park while I wrote. Lara slept most of the day, not feeling too chipper. When the adventurers returned, I asked David how it had went. “Well, everybody said the Star Tour is the thing to do—‘Oh yeah, you’ll really like it.’ So we did that. But it’s all over in three minutes. It’s kinda stupid.”

The following day was Saturday and, by mutual consent, water sports day. We rented Water Sprites, little boats with 10-horsepower engines, at the marina in front of the hotel and putted around the lake for an hour. Nancy and I shared one, but each of the kids had one of their own. David’s went the fastest, a happy accident that tickled him no end. Lara’s went okay. Rachael traded hers in twice trying to get a faster boat and ended up with one that ran out of gas in the middle of the lake. The boat Nancy and I shared plowed the water at the speed of a garbage barge.

Then we packed the car and went looking for a place that rented jet skis or wind surfers or water skis. We found a jet-ski merchant on a little lake in Kissimmee.

This mogul also refused to let David pilot one. I thought the kid took it well. I would have spit on the man’s shoe.

Rachael drove one with David up behind and Lara drove the other with her mother as her passenger. Just when I think I know Nancy like a book I wrote myself, she does something to astound me. I should have known. The kids tell me she learned to wind surf in Hawaii last summer.

We signed up for 40 minutes of jet skiing, but after 15 the merchant waved them in. Storm coming. About the time everyone had concluded the warning was a false alarm, the storm hit, a torrential tropical downpour that reduced visibility to about a hundred yards. After it passed, Lara and Rachael and their passengers rode the jet skis around the little lake for their remaining 25 minutes.

That evening Nancy thought it would be a good idea to go to Pleasure Island for a sit-down dinner, so we rode the bus over. We selected an Italian joint, Portofino Yacht Club. David thought the sign looked like “Pot Belly Yacht Club.”

The waiter was a young man from Danville, Virginia, a first-class nice guy. As Lara pondered her dinner selection, he explained about one of the specials, a shrimp concoction. I told him to save his breath—the girl hadn’t let a shrimp touch her lips in 18 years and I doubted if she would tonight.

She glanced at me, asked about the other specials, then ordered the shrimp. After the Virginian disappeared with the orders, I asked her, “Did you order shrimp just to stick it to me?”

She ignored me. As I contemplated the magnitude of my faux pas the conversation swirled on, jokes and teasing and wry comments on the state of the universe and man’s precarious place in it. They are acute observers, looking for places for themselves. This fall will be Lara’s freshman year in college, Rachael’s sophomore year. These girls are becoming women before I am ready. They are children no longer, nor are they mature adults. They are somewhere in that gray twilight zone between.

Babies should gestate for 18 months, childhood should last 40 years, and parents should have time to learn how to be parents before the whole experience is over. If the creator of the universe ever asks my advice, I am going to suggest these changes.

Moments like this are what family vacations are really about. The essence of parenthood is to see the child mature, and where better than on an expedition to a tourist attraction? Here you see them night and day for a week or so. Here you learn what they really think, who they really are.

Sunday we went to the Magic Kingdom. It is a first cousin of California’s Disneyland and I understand was the first theme park in Disney World.

When we got to Tomorrowland all three kids saw the sign,
GRAND PRIX RACING
, and lined up. They came out shaking their heads. The cars are on rails and the only real control is a foot pedal to make it go, though it doesn’t go very fast. Rachael’s refused to go at all. This ride should be avoided by anyone over the age of eight.

Warning!

To enter this ride,

you must be in good health,

with no heart conditions,

motion sickness, weak back,

or other physical limitations.

That’s what the warning sign said at Space Mountain in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom park. But the sign is just inches from the place you board the indoor roller coaster for a fast ride through dark, twisty tunnels. It would have been nice if they had added “weak bladder” to their list of disqualifying infirmities and posted the list out front where a fellow could chicken out with a little dignity. Now as I stare at the sign I realize I am committed.

Rachael and Lara and Nancy are behind me staring at my broad, manly back. David is in front. He turns around with his grin and announces, “You’re going in the front seat.”

“Uh-uh. You are.”

“Not me.”

I try to get behind Rachael. “I’m not going in the front seat,” she tells me without a trace of shame.

Her sister, Lara, says the same thing. So does Nancy. Women! And they want equal rights!

I merely walk toward the back of the six-person car and stand there. We arrange ourselves so the front seat is empty. At last I come to my senses. I’ll never live this down. “I’ll ride in front,” I announce with simple dignity and move that way. I can just ride the whole trip with my eyes closed—there’s nothing to see in a dark tunnel anyway. The attendant waves me toward the rear, bless him. He says to leave the front seat empty.

We are quickly seated and pull our safety bars down. Then we are off. A grind up the long incline, then headfirst down the chute in the dark, right, left, up, down, the Gs tugging first one way, then another, David screaming in front of me at the top of his lungs. It’s over in about 90 seconds, about the same as every roller coaster.

I suspect roller coaster freaks will think Space Mountain pretty tame. Those wooden monsters around the country that have thrilled generations of youngsters—the Twister, the Rebel Yell, the Hurricane—will squeeze the juice out of a stone. Still, it’s the best ride at Disney World.

Last year my brother, John, got deathly ill on the Body Wars ride in EPCOT. He described the room where everyone sits as a cross between a cocktail shaker and a vibrator bed gone crazy. After almost losing his lunch in that contraption, he staggered out to sit for an hour and a half before regaining control of his stomach. So some of the Disney World rides might be profitably avoided by people sensitive to motion sickness.

The rides in Fantasyland are all equivalent to the carousel that sits in the middle of the area. Fantasyland is for kids still in diapers. A woman in the laundromat told me that the Thunder Mountain ride in Frontierland is pretty good, but my tribe never got that far. She said her family was from Chicago and this was their sixth Disney World vacation. “But the kids are getting too big,” she said with hope in her voice, “so next year I’m voting for Colorado.” I told her that made sense to me.

After the Magic Kingdom, we came back to the hotel for lunch, then got our swimming gear and drove to Typhoon Lagoon. I rented a locker and got on my swim suit, then we trooped through the wall-to-wall bodies to the beach. There is a real beach, with real sand, around a giant man-made pool with a surge device that produces one large wave every 90 seconds. I sat down behind a palm tree on the only empty pool chair we could find to guard our stuff while the kids and their mom sported in the water.

Modern swimwear hides nothing, and with a crowd of thousands to examine, I saw every imaginable body type and size known to medical science. Big guts, big butts, big thighs, little guts, little butts … I qualified there as an expert witness able to swear that people come in all shapes and sizes. Which I already knew. The only excitement I had was watching a tartlet in a teeny-weeny bikini that barely contained her truly mammoth assets light a cigarette and suck on it with puckered, painted, Lolita lips.

Did I make such a fool of myself when I attempted to claim an adult’s estate?

After a half hour sweating in the oppressive heat and humidity trying to remember, I was ready for the baby-urine and chlorine mixture they advertise as water in these parts. Just then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that a storm was coming—this is Florida, folks—and the pool was closed. Everybody out!

More time passed and so did the crowd. Just when I had decided my brood was missing in action, they arrived. After ten minutes in the water they had elected to make the pilgrimage to the top of the water slide. They trudged and trudged as the line slowly scaled the artificial mountain, and were only ten or so bodies away from the slide when the announcement came closing the pool. So they had to about-face and follow the crowd back down the steps.

We fought our way through the adults, teenagers and squalling kids all reeking of perspiration and chlorine, retrieved my pants from the locker and headed back to the hotel.

It never did rain.

Back at the hotel we gave the Water Sprites another try. This time Nancy got her own boat and it turned out to be the quickest. She refused to switch with David. As usual, I got a dud and brought it back to the dock after thirty minutes. Nancy and the kids stayed out going round and round the lake for the whole hour.

Today, Monday, our last full day in Orlando, Nancy and the kids went to Sea World to see Shamu the Killer Whale do whatever it is killer whales do. I elected to skip the expedition and write. They just returned at 5:30
P.M.
and said they had a great day. David is still looking at the shark picture in the brochure. “The best part of the whole trip,” they agreed. Yet I think they are ready for the plane ride home tomorrow morning. The neighbor keeping Lara’s dog told them on the phone that it hasn’t eaten since they left.

This family vacation was a good one. The memories I will carry with me are of Rachael, Lara and David eating dinner as their mother monitored their manners, their eyes flashing as they told jokes and enjoyed themselves hugely, and their explanations to their stuck-in-the-mud parents of how the world looks to them. I will remember the giggling as ice cream ran down their fingers, the gleeful shouts as they gunned Water Sprites and jet skis with hair flying in the wind, the shrieks and laughter as the roller coaster shot down into the darkness rolling, twisting and bucking on an unknown path through unknown perils toward an unknown destination.

They have courage. They are willing to try and brave enough to pick themselves up when they fall down. They want to see it all, try it all, live it all. Nancy and I have made our share of mistakes, but somehow the children acquired courage. Maybe they had it all along and our mistakes have not diminished or tarnished it. Whichever, all three of them have it, and for that I am truly thankful.