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By Root 1268 0

a vague appreciation for government, because unlike most of the big, abstract forces in America that people talked about—religion, capitalism, mass culture—it didn’t seem like much of a threat. But then again, how would I know? It’s not like I had any personal experience dealing with the state, other than the six early years I spent in public school. Like most products of the Boston suburbs, I had managed to avoid incarceration in a U.S. prison, was not pressured by my parents’ social circle of 1960s-era college professors and hippie musicians to join the military, and had never been in a jobs center, a veterans’ hospital or a staterun foster home. The one continuous up-close contact I had with the government was garbagemen, who deliberately spilled trash all over our sidewalk every Tuesday morning. There were also occasional encounters with the toll collectors on the Mass Turnpike, whose dead-eyed expressions made me want to drive away from them as fast as I could. (And for only fifty cents, they let me.) Add it all up and you’ve got about eighteen seconds of face time with the government a week.

Of course, for a small business owner, it’s your duty to hate the government with an all-consuming passion, no matter how big a fan you are of, say, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You’re supposed to become a rabid, red-faced Contract with America–spewing zealot with a violent hatred of trial lawyers and, above all, tax collectors who think “government” is a synonym for a Mephistophelian leech sucking the hard-earned dollars out of America’s last honest citizens. New York doesn’t help matters by never apologizing for taking your money. It’s an adversarial city. “Everyone wants a piece of us,” says Gab. There’s no union or lobbyist to stick up for you. The city itself doesn’t care. And with all the adversaries besides the government lined up against you—competition, the economy as a whole, the weather and even something as random and frequent as street repairs—the last thing you have patience for is some multichinned bureaucrat waving a clipboard. And sometimes you just want to know, as Gab said to me recently, “Who’s watching them to make sure it’s fair?”

I DRIVE OUT to Queens to pick up Emo at the airport. She’s on the red-eye from LAX, sprinting across the country in response to Kay’s summons. After hardly talking for years, the two of them have been on the phone almost every day, and at last Kay had asked her to come out and help with the store. Within days Emo had quit her job, broken her lease and gotten rid of most of her possessions. It makes me wonder: What would someone in my family do if I asked them to drop everything, relocate and come work at a convenience store? Probably resort to the grand old Wasp tradition of installing “difficult” relatives in McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.

I look for Emo in the arrivals area. This will be the third or fourth time she and Kay have lived together. Their fighting is so constant and predictable and, above all, so petty (“You think you know about America? You know nothing! I’ll show you how to make s’mores”) that you would think they really dislike each other. Of course, the truth is, they can’t stand to be apart. For the last twenty-odd years, they’ve both led peripatetic lives, moving every other year, and eventually they’ve always ended up in the same place, if not the same house. The last time they were in the same city they even worked together at a lunch counter Emo owned in Manhattan—that is, until they got in an argument and Emo fired Kay (or Kay quit—depends on who you ask), which was awkward given that their bedrooms were across the hall.

“What were they arguing about?” I remember asking Gab.

“I don’t know—probably who had the ‘real’ recipe for turkey tetrazzini,” said Gab. After that, Emo sold her lunch counter and moved to L.A.

They don’t look like sisters. As I scan the passengers coming out of the terminal, I’m looking for a tall and slender-shouldered former high school beauty queen who jogs, counts calories and doesn’t drink