DADS EYE VIEW A Hot Day in July in Washington, D.C.

BY RICK EPSTEIN

“I THOUGHT YOU SAID THERE were TWO Wright Brothers,” said my 6-year-old daughter Sally. We were in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

“There were,” I said. “Wilbur and Orville.”

“Then how come there’s only one man in that plane?” she asked, pointing to the contraption of cloth, wood, and wire that hung from the ceiling.

“The first plane was too weak to carry more than one person, so the brothers had to take turns,” I said. “I think the mannequin in the plane is supposed to be Orville, since he went up first.”

Sally’s dubious look told me that if the Epstein Sisters had been testing a flying machine at Kitty Hawk, it would’ve been a two-seater or nothing.

Her older sister, Marie, 9, was only slightly interested in the planes and rockets. She was waiting to get back outdoors to see if she could add to the list of out-of-state license plates she’d begun compiling that morning. A notebook and pencil were sticking out of her back pocket, and she took them out when we emerged from the museum into the hot humidity of a July afternoon.

“There’s a Michigan!” I said, pointing. “Have you got it on your list?”

“Nope,” she said happily and wrote it down.

“There’s my 19th Maryland,” Sally chirped. “There’s my 20th Maryland. There’s my 16th Virginia.”

Marie, who was only recording the first of each state’s license plate, rolled her eyes in a superior way as her sister scooped up the fool’s gold. We found our car and drove along Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting for the air-conditioning to kick in.

“There’s the White House!” I said. Marie looked.

“There’s a Maine!” my wife said, pointing down a shimmering side-street. Marie, distracted by the presidential mansion, missed the Maine plate. “Where is it?” she demanded desperately. But it was gone. I parked the car, and an anti-freeze yellow plate shot past too quickly to identify. “What kind is that?” Marie asked, nearly hysterical. No one knew, and her life was ruined. This street hadn’t known such distress since 1814 when the British torched the White House.

“There’s my 21st Maryland!” Sally said, sounding like the Hope Diamond had rolled out of the Smithsonian Institute and bounced into her pocket. “There’s my 17th Virginia!”

“Dad!” Marie demanded, “Make her be quiet.”

“I can’t,” I said. “She has a right to be silly.” That right was hinted at by the Founders on that other July day in1776, and the Constitution all but guarantees it. “My sister is the most annoying person in the world,” Marie snarled, not especially to me; she was speaking for her future biographers – putting something on the record that needed to be there if the full context of her life were ever to be understood. Then she went into a funk so deep that even a Montana plate on a parked car did not cause her to take out her notebook. At the Lincoln Memorial, Marie sat on the cool stone floor, looking weary and pained. In comparison, the sculpted Abraham Lincoln, seated massively nearby, looked like the life of the party. Marie wasn’t soaking up much of her national heritage, but we had provided her with a grand background for her pageant of self-pity.

Our next destination would be Ford’s Theater. “C’mon Marie, we’re going to the place where Lincoln was shot,” I said. Her look said: Lincoln had his problems; I’ve got mine. We began walking in that direction anyway.

After a full 90 minutes of pouting, Marie began once again to show an interest in her surroundings – not the heatbaked monuments and statues and the white marble tabernacles of government, but in what Sally and the rest of us were doing and saying as we walked along Constitution Avenue. “I think that squirrel is looking for Sally,” I said, uncorking a pleasant little Sally-as-nut joke. Marie managed a small smile.

And in front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she and Sally got into a butt-bumping contest that seemed to dispel Marie’s animosity and restore her to the family union. I wondered how the Wright Brothers managed to collaborate so effectively all those years. And what about when Wilbur’s little brother won the coin toss and got to take the first airplane ride in the history of the world? It’d take a heap of butt-bumping to take the sting out of that. ✦