All of that was going to have to change now, at the very time I felt hormonally downgraded from brilliance, shoddily reliant on my husband for the management of practical matters, not a way he wanted to live, he began discreetly communicating his resistance, then not so discreetly, staying out late at the locals’ bar on the windswept red-dirt corner where our miles-long dirt road debouched onto the highway, a bar notorious for fights, whose sign flickered first through the word Saints and second through Sinners, a tilted white-neon halo over the S of Saints, a red pitchfork clasped by the S of Sinners, and when my loneliness bit worst I would drive our dirt road at midnight and park close enough to keep an eye on his pickup in the shard-glittering desolation that served as the bar’s parking lot, lowriders whose chrome glimmered with mobile radiance from headlights passing on the highway, each lowrider given a wide margin, set apart in an isolation the other vehicles honored, in collective homage to the glamour of the candy-colored paint jobs and because a single drunken scratch while backing out would mean hell to pay, apart from the spaciousness conceded to the lowriders the scene was more or less chaos, old trucks parked higgledy-piggledy, displaying every variation of disrepair, one night I parked next to an ancient Dodge whose windshield was missing, but the most I ever did in the parking lot was to cry for a while before backing up ultra-cautiously and driving home, and hungover or not he was sweet to me in the mornings. If confrontation could be avoided, I could hoard my psychic supplies. As I saw it I was now far more responsible than ever before, and I didn’t know what difference it was making, however effortful the generation of responsibility was, it left no vapor trail, it was just gone, the purity of its disappearance intimating the fluency and constancy of the tenderness I was going to have to manufacture in the near future and how tracelessly that tenderness would be absorbed. For ongoing grown-up obligations to be required of me when I was desperate to figure out how to do this was unjust and worse than unjust, alienating, but my husband wasn’t the only one who asked, my life as a writer came with commitments, some of them sprung as surprises, as honors, and not only was I bad at saying no in general, I feared there would be some cost in entirely breaking with that world, disappearing from it for the duration, so when appearances were asked for, I went, and was on the way to the Albuquerque airport for my flight to one such commitment just after dawn when I had to get off the bus, and because my bag was stored in the luggage compartment the driver, too, had to descend the stairs and come around the side of the bus to unlock the compartment packed with duffels and hard-shelled suitcases like my ridiculous orange one, and when I pointed he hoisted it out, and the embarrassment of imposing on him, of having stalled him and everyone on the bus in their transit to wherever they needed to get to was keen enough to obscure the dangerousness of the decision I was committing to, standing beside the idling, rumbling bus, whose windows overlooked us, and our consciousness of being observed allied us in five minutes’ stilted performance, the Greyhound bus driver and me, his performance of thwarted protectiveness, mine of—well, I wanted to look as if I knew what I was doing, consciously and I’m sure unconsciously I was radiating resistance to further questions precisely because I did not know what I was doing, of the two of us only he could grasp how vulnerable I was about to be and the somber obligingness of his body language in setting the blaze-orange suitcase down beside me would have been enough to enlighten another, more present person about the craziness of what she was doing, but not me, and however worried he was, he was efficient, when I said I wanted to get off he had said, startled, I can’t let you off, and when he saw he would have to he said We can wait, and I said Don’t wait, he must have felt he had carried intervention as far as he appropriately could, and in resisting his attempt to talk me out of doing the very thing I was doing I was a problem not easily dealt with, which he had no more time for and was going to have to drive away from, but the detachment required for the act of driving the bus away and leaving me there wasn’t coming easily, his brusqueness had an insulted quality—the insult being this: what was being asked of him diminished him. At the time I didn’t have the wherewithal to grasp any of this, though I was trying to keep my dissent from his advice courteous, out of fear, the fear I always felt of male retaliation for perceived slights, and this, too, the tincture of fear in my share of our minimal dealings, may have been visible to him, exasperating, since what he wanted was to rescue me. Bluish stoles of exhaust slung themselves around the rear of the bus as a cat’s tail wraps its haunches when it sits. It came crawling past our knees. I wondered what kept the smoke close to the ground—did the cold prevent its diffusing?—and how I could get away from the smell, in short how I could convince the driver to go, and just then he turned and mounted the steps and took over the bus again, and everyone at the back was watching as I lifted my suitcase and walked off to give a small wave to the driver, leaning forward over his wheel, not yet willing to relinquish eye contact in case the last-minuteness of this scenario should induce me to change my mind, and he was right, I could have, I almost did, and the kindness of his patiently wanting me to be all right, his gaze’s solicitation back to safety, his seeing what I could not and the one-to-one human valuing implicit in this remarkable, unremarkable departure from business-as-usual were lost on me, the need to vomit was mounting even as I returned his gaze, and when the doors accordioned shut and for better or worse my choice was made, I was glad and gladder still when a roar relaunched the Greyhound. At first it rolled slowly. For those observing from the rear window—people had been sympathetic; someone had called out Don’t get off, there’s nothing out there—I must have had the idiot staunchness of a scarecrow, my black coat flapping. For some reason it struck me as crucial to appear poised in the wake of my conceivably disastrous decision, maintaining an air of bright composure. But the work of maintaining it turned acridly lonely, all of a sudden. When finally the bus seemed far enough away I shuddered and hid my face inside the gloves whose costly new-leather smell had helped keep the nausea at bay while I was on the bus. I was very capable of imbuing objects with intense significance, I’d done so all my life, or—not done so willingly, but since childhood often had the experience of instantaneous conviction about an object, its valence, whether it was charged like a battery with potent grace or had the dead meaninglessness of manufacture, and out in that blazing-cold desert I felt justified in having invested the gloves at first sight with something like transitional-object magic because look what they’d done, they’d saved me, and it was as if the desire that hit when I noticed them on their shelf in the expensive store had been foreknowledge of their worth now that I was out in the middle of nowhere needing them against my face, needing this snug ostrich reprieve from whatever was going to happen next, and it wasn’t the first time I’d needed them, getting dressed in the dark that morning I had admired the gloves as if they belonged to some other, perfect woman, talismans of the sophistication I did not in the least possess, originality, too, signified by their being bright red, and I was like that, given one perfect thing to work outward from I could manage to assemble my persona for the trip and the reading scheduled for that night. And I worried about them, as I did about all perfect things, worried I would ruin them, these gloves whose new-leather scent I took steadying breaths of, trying to placate the nausea just then turning from a promise into actual movement, acidic upward gushes I swallowed down until I had to give in and vomit, hunkered over my knees with my hands flat on the ground, rocking forward when the next spasm rolled through, trying not to splatter on the flapped-forward tails of my coat or in my hair or on the gloves, ransacked till I was dry and bright-minded and relieved, able to stand up alone on a long-shadowed planet, chamois and rabbitbrush yanked at by wind, rolled over by cloud shadow. No help in sight, which for some reason amazed me. The cold felt sharp enough to put an edge on the visible world but the land resisted it with soft hues and folds, the ruched rims of old arroyos, distant mountains ranged in layered translucence. I spat repeatedly.
Wow, my high-heeled boots were stupid, worse even than my suitcase, which was going to be tough to lug across the six lanes between me and the small gas station over there, my only chance of a telephone. No neon showed in the station’s windows and its parking lot was empty and what made it appear even emptier was the skinny dog trotting across. If I hadn’t been on the other side of the highway from it I would have called to the dog because to be glanced at by the dog would have made me feel I had a little more hold on life which was threatening to get away from me. Clouds in the east looked as if they had been swept from the earth upward like reversed cascades of snow, sheer blue-tinted launches of snow whose radiant-dust edges were angled as if being towed along gently, and miles overhead these swathes culminated in prodigious glowing mother-of-pearl brains. Before long my plane would fly through them. I wouldn’t usually have taken a bus, but my husband had to go into the office that morning and I needed to get to the airport for my flight to Washington, DC, for that night’s reading at the Library of Congress, an event I was overjoyed to think might impress my parents, who were very pleased by the tickets I’d sent, their tickets to my perfect restoration of our relationship. In order to carry our reconciliation off, every detail of my clothing and appearance and manner needed to be just so. Washington was their hometown, and if I chose a story with no sex in it and no blame of any mother or father, then this, their first attendance at a reading of mine, might go okay, and afterward I was going to tell them I was going to have a baby. In these early weeks I was experiencing the most opulent sleep. The more I had of it, the more I wanted. I slept and slept; then the need to vomit woke me and I knelt before the toilet and bile thrashed upward. Some days, the vomiting tore through every couple of hours, and why I had thought I could get away with a bus ride followed by a cross-country flight and an intimidating public performance on whose success the future of my relationship with my parents rested was obscure, on that gusty road shoulder I had no idea what I had been thinking. Except of course I did: perfectionism was my reality-neutralizing opiate, promising my inadequate nausea-prone self could be easily discarded and replaced by a creature of red-gloved stylishness and health and readiness to take on the world. Perhaps it was only ever my mother and father, whose vanishing it had once failed to fend off, who mobilized perfectionism to its most violent incitements: it was thrilled at this chance at minor but, in my parents’ eyes (I imagined), redemptive fame. After that crazy U-turn away from graduate school, look how far I had gotten: books were out with my name on them, handsome volumes with borzois on their spines the same as John Updike’s had. The absence of traffic meant I was going to make it safely across the highway, and I did, hastening, strands of hair lashing, eyes tearing up from self-pity and the wind, and once across I could tell that the gas station was a ghost of itself with no sign of being about to open any time soon, but there at the edge of its parking lot loomed the most merciful phone booth in human history and its accordion-hinged door closed almost all the way, leaving the wind only two inches to whine in through, and the glass of the booth was hazed with etched, scratched inscriptions, initials and hearts and fucks and sucks and pendejos, and being shut up inside so much raunchy communicativeness induced the need to vomit again, the need that had made me pull the emergency-stop loop on the bus made it impossible to respond to the bus driver’s Not here, sweetheart, there’s nothing out there, except by saying Let me out, please, just let me out, other passengers murmuring their pity, the shame of being about to go down on my knees and make disgusting sounds in front of these kind others and the cloying vitriol smell bound to make them nauseous in turn and how embarrassed for me they would be but also resentful, wondering why they should be held up by such grossness when they had planes to catch, none of it was bearable, not to me then—unbearable to vomit into the red gloves that declared my desire to be a famous writer. That had been the absurd truth. I hadn’t yet tried the phone. I was afraid to find out it wouldn’t work—often this kind of Edward Hopper bleakness in a gas station meant the receiver would have been left dangling by its metal umbilicus—and worried about intruding on my husband’s morning. The meeting he had gone to was an important one; he had a reputation for bohemian unreliability as it was, without his bosses witnessing the dramatic interruption this call would be. My awareness of the jeopardy my call would put him in made me lonelier and my teeth were chattering from the cold. He was working as an insurance salesman. He was intensely affable without being in the least convincing. He had never said so, but I sometimes thought he had begun to believe I was getting to be ashamed of him, and when I imagined I saw in him various insecurities and a devious new tendency to undermine me, it was as if I no longer knew him; but I wasn’t sure whether these perceptions were true or some kind of hormonally induced paranoia; I could barely think, and when I found quarters and picked up the phone the dial tone lullabied and I was happy until the receptionist at the insurance office flat-out refused to interrupt the meeting. By the way she said Is it an emergency?, I understood I should be ashamed of needing my husband then, and as I was about to say Pretty much, a truck rolled past and pulled up in front of the gas station and sat there idling out plumes of exhaust whose taint the wind carried to the phone booth and I told the receiver I would call back later and hung up. The driver of the boxy white truck was looking my way, smoking in a manner suggesting, somehow, helpfulness. On the side of the truck was painted a brown loaf of bread with slices fanning from one end. After a minute or two I stepped shyly out of the phone booth. He waved. Listing to one side because of my suitcase, my hair whipping, I crouched-ran toward his truck and he leaned to lever the door open, and when I paused he said Come on in where it’s warm, and I climbed in, hoisting my suitcase after, and once I was in that truck and close enough to feel what he was like all stupid needfulness drained from me and left alertness in its wake because something, I didn’t know what, was wrong about him, it just was, it didn’t matter that he was nonthreatening in appearance, clean-shaven and wearing the company uniform, and he levered the doors closed, shutting us in with the bread, and I wondered if the doors locked or if I could get down the stairs and throw myself against them and break through, and he saw the thought and gave his head the slightest of shakes and as if accepting that the head shake needed accounting for, before worse meanings could coalesce, he said Hey, come on, just get warmed up, he was looking out for me, was all, and hadn’t I consented to being looked after by entering the truck, wasn’t he just a good guy answering the second-guessing remorse I was trying to keep hidden from him, advising me not to act crazy but to take advantage of the warmth I had believed I needed or I wouldn’t have come into the truck in the first place, couldn’t he reasonably have wondered what was wrong with me, How far off was my intuition? was a question asked only by the most superficial, most wistful-for-normal water-strider mote of consciousness riding the flood-skin of intuition, the steady pour of terror more urgent in its hiddenness, in the advantageous ruse, as I saw it, of keeping terror out of the social equation as long as possible, whatever impulses toward restraint (in hesitations, in dips of tone it existed: his restraint) or actual rather than manipulative courtesy he felt needed a social field to assert themselves in, if the social field was stripped away those impulses would be cast into outer irrelevance, the continuousness of his account of himself, to himself, as a good man would have been damaged, and by me, my perception of him as dangerous, should it show, a weapon immediately turned against me, my fault for bringing it into the open, dangerousness, when he’d been doing what he could, when he had no intention of, when he’d only meant to, but look what she thought of me, she went there first, it was possible he did not know what he was capable of, had not yet decided, and there seemed to me an advantage in no one’s having decided, in maintaining the plausibility of this encounter’s basic innocence, closely bound up as it was with my innocence, innocence of thought, of perception, innocence in my stance there in front of the closed doors, innocence of my shivering, inn
ocence in my gaze seemed like it might count on my side somehow, I had little idea how to carry the deception off, my face, small-boned and made for subtlety, probably wasn’t helping, I was told throughout childhood that whatever I felt could be read in my face, to me it seemed we were both engrossed in performance, in choosing what was to be signaled, divining the consequences that would spin out from there, him at the wheel of the idling truck, me five feet from him at its door, immobility seemed like the most innocent way to occupy space, the gestures I’d made toward getting warmer had been exaggerated, when he studied me clasping my gloved hands to my cheeks I felt weirdly ashamed, phoniness could offend people, men, in even ordinary situations, how much could you guess about what a person was likely to find offensive, was the spic-and-span interior of the truck company policy or his preference, though it wasn’t in terms of square footage very big the front of the truck felt like a boxy vacancy focused on the steering wheel where he sat in the vehicle’s only, and very simple, seat, apart from the tiers of bread the whole truck was unusually empty, the floor mats of trucks in New Mexico were never this clean, if he abandoned the truck there would be no sign of his ever having been there, his uniform similarly impersonal, if his name was embroidered over a pocket his jacket hid it, he was one of those men for whom the saying nothing, not a hair out of place was true but at some cost, though it wanted to curl forward his hair had been groomed back from his forehead with some sort of pomade (pomade?), because he was sitting I wasn’t sure of his height, only that he was taller than my husband, stockier and more inward, yet with an air of readiness, it strikes me only now that one of the things you know instantly about those you encounter, how good-looking you privately deem them to be, that quick, gratifying estimation was absent, I had no awareness of his looks as looks, only and intensely in relation to his essence did his appearance offer itself, he seemed confident, he had all the time in the world, I was wondering about the door, how hard it would be to get out, maybe his unfussy quietness was proof he had nothing in mind and while he went on studying me I kept still, immersed in desperate interpretation of subtext, intentions that slid across his mind slid across his eyes in the form of briefly intensified opacity, nictitating membranes of fantasy gone in a blink, and it was cold terror to be in the presence of such fantasizing, a gesture as inconsequential as his little finger’s lifting from the wheel to point at me to underscore the words just stay there lit my nerve endings, what did it mean to be pointed at, was it meaningless or a first, subtle violation of the aura around my person, the realm that, though it was only air, was necessary psychic clothing, and I believed it to be crucial, the zone of inviolability he and I were enormously aware of and pretending did not exist, and pointing is interesting because even if the gesture begins small-scale, done with a little finger whose nail is too long, the gesture’s energies extend outward from the point, that’s what pointing is, the gesture’s object is identified, singled out, possibly accused, the menace implicit in pointing was why the Dineh relied on juts of the chin to indicate what was being referred to, in the bread truck it came back to me how delightedly savvy I had felt at nineteen on the dig in Chaco Canyon, jutting my chin at the raven alighting on a fence post to await a feast of crumbs, how embarrassed when the Navajo boy sharing the table had laughed in a startled whoop before regaining composure, the boy I liked, and as so often my body was quicker than my mind was to get the hang of the situation, my laugh a sweet reflex, we were in it together, white girls should go ahead and point at ravens, Just stay here where it’s warm, the bread-truck guy had said a second time, why a second time, what was that about, my sense of him was that he was not impulsive and the steadiness of his studying me seemed to bear the conjecture out, a second time could seem like a warning, what would the warning be, not to misbehave, if that emerged, if a warning for me not to try to get away emerged and hung itself flagrant as a banner between us there would be no going back, and it was as if reality had all along been a substance, an encompassing transparent membrane visible now as it warped sideways, and I could see his thinking as he had seen mine, and I said with a sort of pure authority I didn’t know I had in me I’m pregnant, and his expression told me that meant nothing and I said I’m going to be sick, and in the boxed-in, purringly warm, spic-and-span interior that did mean something, vomit would be horrible for the bread, and I said I’m going to be sick and could feel it turn true, burning its way up my throat, and I said helplessly Right now! and he levered the doors open and I banged my orange suitcase down the steps, out into the buffeting wind, walking fast to the phone booth, feeling his gaze on my back, feeling him thinking She was lying, and only once I had the receiver in my hand did I look back at the truck. I held a long pretend conversation while that truck idled. He didn’t get out. He didn’t get out. He didn’t get out. But I was not far enough away to be sure it was over, every detail of what I did could be seen through the glass, and it dawned on me that in my performance I’d missed a step, I hadn’t rummaged in my bag for change, I could do that now, could feed coins to the machine till black vacancy yielded the aural drizzle of the dial tone, I felt I needed to keep an eye on him and needed not to let it show that I was keeping an eye, only that was the kind of thing I had just definitively proved I was bad at, in the bread truck, not letting things show, I’d known it before but had somehow nursed the daydream that if ever I ended up in real trouble, if my life depended on it I would effortlessly shed my usual inadequacies and a fine new elizabeth, courageous and quick-witted, would emerge to deal with threat. There wasn’t anybody in the truck stop to accept a delivery of bread. He didn’t like what I had done, getting out of the truck. The rudeness of it, the insolence of my being involved in a phone call clearly fake. Fakery was stupid, not as stupid as my having gotten into the truck in the first place, but still, stupid, if something happened to me wouldn’t that be one of the questions asked about my disappearance, passengers on the bus would remember where I’d been let off, the bus driver would say But she insisted, the person who’d said There’s nothing out there would say I told her, I said there’s nothing out there, and it was likely the driver would have a fairly accurate sense of where he’d stopped the bus and could describe how far it was from Santa Fe, thinking to add There is a truck stop, other side of the highway, too early for it to be open but she might have gone there, it wasn’t far-fetched for him to recollect the truck stop if he drove the Albuquerque to Santa Fe route as well as the southbound route from Santa Fe, the interior of the shop was well stocked, the placards in its window unfaded, its windswept lot empty of the old car tires that spelled abandonment in New Mexico, after all in real time the sun was just barely up. The bread-truck driver sat there, why. The one and only thing for him to look at: me in my glass box, performing calm connection. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I hung up from that pretend call, I rummaged, I found what was needed, noticing meanwhile I had lost the gloves though I had no remembrance of taking them off, When was the last time you saw them? was what people asked of the lost thing, Are they somewhere? is what I wonder now, and while the phone rang each ring was an increment of safety, the world’s proffer of concern, ringing with the protectiveness I deserved, only it was not true, when I turned and caught the eye of the man in the bread truck and felt again the profound slippage into some other, ongoing story of what I was good for, a story being written, if it was, in a mind whose acquaintance I had foolishly made, that I was precious to myself was in fact a matter of indifference to the arroyo, however distant, where I would have been found, the skull of the Pleistocene antelope had held as much aliveness as my head did now and I remembered what I could not afford to be conscious of in the truck, in the ultra-visibility of my freaked-out exposure I closed my eyes, time doling out its seconds slowly, fourth ring, infinity, fifth ring, infinity, sixth ring before the secretary could answer with the name of the company and How may I direct your call, a recitation that held me for some reason spellbound in its surreality until she said again How
may I direct—and I said my husband’s name, aware she was probably steeling herself for another refusal and preempting that refusal by saying This is an emergency, and when the silence suggested she didn’t believe me, You need to get my husband now, I’m stranded in the middle of nowhere and he has to come get me, just barely keeping myself from saying fucking, get him right fucking now, that grenade not nearly as common then, viewed then not as proof of scorched sincerity but craziness, and I could hardly risk that, and who knows why she got it, heard the ferocity of despairing need which I was both sorry to have had to show her, because it was fucking private, and proud to have been able to summon on my own behalf, except it wasn’t mine alone, and when she said she would go find him I said Listen please write down this number because I’m not sure when this call will run out or how many quarters I have left and he might need the number to call me back, I’m not at home, without this number he’ll never find me, proud, very proud to have foreseen that contingency, I had managed that at least, thought of that, it didn’t counterbalance the sickening mistake of having gotten into the bread truck, nothing could, ever, that was always going to have happened, I was always going to have shown such fantastic stupidity, to have risked not only my own life, but at least I struck myself as thinking clearly now, now that I had entered into a new relation with the world, beautiful, terrible, beautiful I had known, terrible confided to me in of all places a bread truck, I was in possession, happened to be in possession of so terribly much to lose, not very was the answer to how far along are you, the socket of my pelvic bone, if a finger had been run around the rim of its central oval in the far-distant, infinitely detached future, wouldn’t be sufficiently altered to confide the truth of what I was responsible for, more than responsible, already in love with, in love since the blue + floated into visibility, the universe plus one, as rushed and emphatic as tears, the float into visibility of the little sign made me wet, bodily receptivity as sparklingly instantaneous as tears arising from who knows where, they never feel like they come from right behind the eyes, more like from darkness, how glad I had been of my cunt’s yes, how even proud of my arousal because if it began with love how could it ever go wrong, surely after that yes responsibility would glide into place, in dreams begin, I had only to enlarge my soul, but wasn’t that a lot, an endeavor that reflected well on me not because I’d carried it off but simply because I’d thought of it, virtuousness laid the groundwork for the project of enlargement, of transcending an inheritance of damage, no one had done it for me, the unseeingness that had diminished them they’d passed on, when she left the phone to go find my husband I pitied myself because with no inheritance of caretaking I was going to have to invent its gestures and intonations from scratch—the whole mother-child cosmos, from scratch, invented by a woman who had willingly gotten into the white truck. And I could see how badly it was possible to fail and let harm in. Without meaning to. Without ever meaning to.
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