by Sue Miller
She pushes her bag into the middle of the passenger seat again, she adjusts the visor a little more. She reaches into the open pocket below the radio for her sunglasses. And then she realizes: she’s heading into the sun. She’s taken the wrong turn again; she’s going west.
CHAPTER XIV
We lie to ourselves about such things. We say they were meant to happen. We let them thrill us, shake us. Lottie does: I’m going to Jack, she thinks, and feels a light-headedness, an excitement, that makes her hands tremble on the wheel, that quickens her breath.
But of course Lottie has read Freud too. She knows very well that this kind of mistake is like a slip of the tongue, that it reveals intention more than destiny – that this is the more reasonable way to speak of it. So later what she will say is that she was so afloat in her confusion about what she had done that she missed the first two exits where she might have turned back. And that by the time she reached the third, she had consciously made a decision to drive on. She will speculate that if she hadn’t been someone who drove so much to make a living, it might not have happened. If the car itself, the breaking open into four lanes, the green and white signs, hadn’t somehow signaled beginning to her, maybe the reality of the distance to be covered would have been too daunting.
She will speak, too, of how pretty the Wilbur Cross is for that old stretch, pretty in a way that American highways used to be – winding, barely wide enough, with trees growing in the median strip and little hillocks rising on either side, giving way to sudden mild vistas. It could be said – she’ll say it herself – that this, too, might somehow have helped.
And she will feel, but not say so often, that maybe if she hadn’t hit Cam, to whom she would have to return; if he hadn’t been held by Richard Lester, whose sounds she would hear in the night; if the same sprung chairs hadn’t been waiting in the same vague, unwelcoming circle; if the angle up the street to Elizabeth’s house with its glimpse of the porte cochere hadn’t been there – if she hadn’t had the sense that she would be returning to the sordid scene of a crime, a terrible and ugly accident she had some responsibility for – maybe then she would have turned around at the first exit, or the second. She will always know that some part of it, too, was running away.
But she will also always believe that it was the thought of Jack that made her make the mistake in the first place, and she will privately take that as a sign of her destiny, her fate, adolescent at heart that she is. White trash she’ll call herself, when she thinks of it this way.
For whatever the reasons, then, Lottie drives on. The sun sets, gold and then pink in the clear western sky ahead of her. In the twilight it leaves behind, she can still see the muted shapes of everything, but other cars begin to turn their fierce silver lights on. Once or twice, unbidden tears begin to slip from Lottie’s eyes, though she could swear this is happiness she’s feeling. She winds into heavier traffic as she passes the last, expensive shore towns in Connecticut, as the houses thicken up in New York and become more suburban. Her heart is swishing steadily in her ears, and her tooth throbs to its rhythm.
Jack, she is thinking. Not that she’s trying to imagine him in terms of what his response will be to her, particularly – that seems dangerous. But his physical presence. A gesture: his clenched fist and grimace of pleasure when a musical passage he loves begins on the stereo. His slow, widening grin when she says something that surprises or amuses him. His distinctive smell, soapy and salty, and how she wears it after sex. The ease with which he carried her up the stairs one night when they were alone in the house. The way he walks in winter, his coat open, no scarf.
She remembers facts about him, parts of his story that she loves. That he grew up in a small town in western Ohio with four brothers. That his father was the high school principal. That every night there was a meal on the table. His father sat at one end, his mother at the other. There was attention, as evenly distributed as food, passed up and down.
That his mother was an island of calm, unflappable in spite of her sons’ wildness, their fights, their broken limbs, their pranks. Though once his father had criticized her for something – no one could ever remember what it was, it had seemed so harmless: maybe they could eat a little earlier, maybe the boys should take on some chore for her – and she had lunged forward suddenly and bit him. Her teeth had pushed through fabric and skin, and his father had cried out in shock and pain. Jack couldn’t remember whether he had been present or not; it was one of those memories that are retold so often, every detail made so familiar, that everyone feels he must have been there.
His father had driven himself to the emergency room and lied about the accident. He said he’d been wrestling with one of his almost grown sons and it had gotten out of hand. They cleaned him up, put a stitch or two in the deepest holes. It scarred him, though, Jack said, a curve of little white marks across the flesh of his shoulder. She didn’t like to see him without a shirt on after that, even at the beach. It must have been emblematic to her, Lottie thinks now, of a moment when all that love failed her. When she felt as trapped as an animal, suddenly, and fought for something vital in herself that she couldn’t have known until that moment she cared about.
She didn’t like them to joke about it, but they did, of course. Later in her life she would sometimes be able to laugh too, he said. The first time she did, they all applauded her, having understood without speaking of it that this meant that she’d finally forgiven herself.
Lottie has always envied everything about this story. The peace, the order. The encircling applause. The sense of violence as aberration. Now she thinks, too, of the powerful control his mother must have exerted on herself much of the time: the revelation that perhaps it took great effort to achieve the kind of family Jack had had. The extraordinary fact that to someone it was almost always worth that effort.
What else does she know about him? That he played in a band in high school – all of his brothers did when they came to be an age when their parents would let them, each a different instrument. They traveled in a radius of one hundred and fifty miles or so to high school proms, to roadhouses, to private parties. The permanent members of the band were older, men who taught school in town or worked in banks. They would drive around in a car belonging to one of these men, crammed in, five or six of them usually. Jack had his first drink on the road with them, his first cigarette, his first sexual experience – with an older woman who followed him outside during a break. ‘Older,’ he’d said. ‘It occurred to me much later that she was maybe twenty-five or so.’
Lottie has seen a studio photograph of him at that age, holding his clarinet. He’d paid for the picture himself; he had thought, then, that he might become a musician. In it he’s wearing a dark suit, his hair is pomaded wetly back. He is unbelievably long and skinny, but there’s a sense, too, of something knowing, something hungry about him that stirred Lottie when she held the photograph, even all those years afterward.
The excitement of those days had folded into Jack’s love of music, even into his love of dancing. Once when they were moving together to a swing-band tune at a hotel ballroom in Chicago, he’d bent over Lottie and whispered, ‘Care to dance?’ and when she’d said yes, they walked straight off the slick floor to the front desk and rented a room.
She’s in New Jersey now, on route 80, floating on the Percocet. She can still feel the pain, a light, steady throb from under the tooth, actually, but it seems almost to be happening to another Lottie, another Charlotte. Dusk has deepened into near-dark along the highway, but there’s still a light cast to the sky. The dark moving shapes of the trees are silhouetted against it. The needle teeters at around 72, 73. Lottie feels invincible. She has asked for directions when she crossed the George Washington Bridge, and she has made every connection, feeling a peace and accomplishment simply in driving: in making this curve, in signaling so politely to change lanes. Traffic was heavy around New York, but it has cleared out now, and she takes comfort in the distant taillights ahea
d of her, the headlights that move up from behind and then sweep past. Others on ordinary errands. Or, like her, hastening home, mending rifts.
Lottie turns the radio on. She thinks of the music she listened to on the way out east, when she thought she was leaving Jack. It seems another universe. But what has changed?
She thinks momentarily of his big house, the handsome rooms – too many, too much. Of Megan’s closed face across the dinner table.
But love is something you choose to do.
Cam said that.
Nonetheless.
I have changed, she thinks. I can do it. I can.
She finds another oldies station but tires of it quickly. They seem to specialize in white boys – Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon. She pushes the Seek button, settles on the first clear station, a call-in show. They’re discussing the effects of crack cocaine on kids in the ghettos. There’s an expert, of course, full of statistics. His voice is nasal, nerdy. Lottie would put money on it, he’s never done drugs. Crack is cheap, he says. It’s highly addictive, it’s the beginning of the end. She thinks of Ryan, of finding dope in his jeans pocket when he was fourteen or fifteen, of trying to decide whether to confront him. She’d talked to Jack about it.
He said she had to.
‘But I smoked dope, Jack. I don’t disapprove. In the abstract.’
‘He’s not abstract, Lottie. That’s the point.’ His concerned face, the lines deepening. His light eyes on her.
The calls start now on the radio. Gradually the tone of the show changes. Nobody is forcing these kids to use it. Nobody’s excluding them from the American dream if they just get off their asses and go to work. The talk show host is on the callers’ side. Maybe addicts deserve their fate.
Lottie changes the station. She finds some soft rock, then an Elvis retrospective: the Las Vegas years. She turns the radio off. The Percocet isn’t making her sleepy at all. Just somehow tranquil, in absolute control. Practicalities begin to occur: she’s left everything behind. She’ll have to go back for her computer, her books and papers. Her clothes. She moves through the house mentally. She packs everything up. Then she starts again, rearranging. Then: did she lock the door when she left? Should she call Richard? Might he be worried? Cam?
Cam. God. She doesn’t want to think about him. And suddenly she’s aware of the pain again, sharply this time. She fishes in her purse, swallows the rest of the pill.
Just over the line into Pennsylvania, she stops to use the toilet in a rest area. The foyer is half filled with milling weekend travelers heading home. Heavy people – why are people in rest areas so often heavy? she wonders. Several of them have bright, painful-looking sunburns. Still, there’s something pleasurable in the bustle, the sense of being in motion among them. We’re all going somewhere. But it’s more than that. Lottie wishes there were someone she could tell. I’m going back. She’d like to say it aloud. I’m going home.
In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face, wipes it with the rough, stale-smelling paper towels. When she comes out, she’s aware of the aroma of coffee and thinks for a moment of having a cup. But then, she tells herself, she’ll just need to stop again sooner.
She goes into the little front room off the lobby, full of vending machines, and sees that, as she’d hoped, one of the machines dispenses No Doz along with other over-the-counter drugs. There’s another woman in here, buying candy. After Lottie’s bought her No Doz, she watches this woman dropping quarter after quarter as though she were feeding a giant slot machine, pulling the handle, which releases, with a heavy thud each time, a huge Milky Way. She does this six or seven times.
After she leaves, Lottie buys a candy bar too. She may get hungry. At the last minute, she gets a can of Coke also. Handy to wash down whichever drug she needs to take. She drives to the pumps and has the tank filled. Might as well, even though it’s still got some gas left.
On the road again, it’s truly dark; the sense of sky is gone. Lottie’s been driving an hour or so when she realizes she’s hunched over the wheel, that tension is radiating from her jaw through her whole body. She makes herself sit back. Her leg aches. She adjusts the seat. She tries the radio again. There are several religious services in progress now, a lot of country music, a replay of a Democratic debate. She finally settles on some static through which she can faintly hear sweeping orchestral music. It may be Brahms; but then suddenly a bit of melody makes her think it’s the sound track to the movie Giant, something she wouldn’t have said she’d known.
The road lifts and drops. The terrain here would be different if she could see it. She remembers it from the trip east: hilly, and beginning to be farm country. The cars around her have thinned out, just an occasional light ahead or behind, and Lottie is aware of the glow from the dashboard. She thinks of Jack again, driving on the straight section roads of the Midwest in his adolescence, the way the lights would have reflected up on the tired faces of the older men in the band.
Where was she when he was that age? Eight, ten, running wild, a wiry small girl with scabs on her knees who still liked to boss the other kids around, who didn’t realize that her day as leader, as queen of the block, was almost over. In a few years, she would be wearing the wrong skirts, long and straight and too tight. She would have on too much makeup, she would sport a ponytail with spit curls, her nails would be a frosty pink. And five or six years after that, long after she thought she’d put both of those Charlottes behind her, Derek’s mother would look at the dress she was wearing as she came down the curving staircase in the White Plains house and say crisply, ‘I think something a little less revealing would work better at the club, Charlotte.’
Derek: he’d smiled openly up at Lottie from behind his mother. He’d liked the idea of her discomforting his parents, making his mother and her friends nervous as they tried to have bridal showers and ladies’ lunches for her. That was part of the point of Lottie – of Charlotte – for him. She thinks of him now, – tall, blond-going-to-gray, his face pulled tighter, more skeletal in age, instead of pouching into deep tired lines, as Jack’s does. His comment comes back: that he has the chance to do it right this time.
She smacks the steering wheel. Here’s what bothers her. Not just what that suggests he feels about Ryan, but the arrogance in assuming he has control. Sure, you might do it right, she should have said. Or you might make a whole new and incredibly inventive set of mistakes.
She should have said no such thing.
The music has changed by now on the radio. It is more sprightly but even less clear. Lottie turns it off.
She’s in trouble, she’s in trouble, with this tooth.
If she hates Derek so much, it must be that she hates herself as she was with him. And that is true. It makes her angry that she let herself be fooled so readily by his ease, his smoothness. His wardrobe. Al had tried to warn her. ‘Think of it, Lottie,’ he’d said. ‘What does it mean that he’s nominally the only humanist in the house, and he was the last one to realize you were human?’
She smiles at this until she remembers her tough answer, something like: ‘It doesn’t seem to me that fucking me is the same thing as recognizing my humanity.’ Al didn’t try again.
He’d come to their wedding, though. He’d gotten staggeringly drunk and fallen asleep in a kneeling position, with his head resting on the seat of a chair in the anteroom to the men’s and ladies’ johns. Lottie had passed him several times, and it pained her to see him there, his wide ass presented to all who passed this way. She had a sense, by this time, that marrying Derek was a mistake, but she seemed to be in the grip of a kind of inevitability constructed of invitations, and tickets for the honeymoon, and elaborately boxed silver-plated presents. A little drunk herself, she’d bent over Al once, asked him please to get up, please not to kneel here anymore. He moaned. She started to cry then, holding his head. Thinking of it as something precious, something dear, thinking drunkenly and sentimentally of Al as truer, sweeter than anyone she would ever know again.
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Lottie has started to hum, a little moaning hum that intensifies with each breath. She’s in real pain, she realizes. She finds another Percocet, bites part of it off, swallows it down with some tepid Coke.
Is she sleepy? She doesn’t know. The earlier Percocet has made her feel alert somehow; but also strangely peaceful. This is worrisome, this peace. This might be sleepiness in another guise. She opens the box of No Doz and takes one of those.
Pills, pills. The secretarial job she had in the hospital when they first moved to Chicago. The doctors dumped their sample meds into canvas carts that sat at the ends of the hallways, and Lottie, who was going to night school then too, had developed quite a little appetite for sample Dexedrine. She never even noticed the strength of the pills she took when she picked up the packets, when she swallowed them. All she knew was that it let her stay alert, it made her snappy and nervy. During this period she began to fight back when Derek was sarcastic to her, when he disapproved. And that changed her, permanently. Even after she quit the hospital job for a job at Roosevelt, where she could take courses for free, she remembered the way she could be when she was on Dexedrine and she made that part of herself – never to be passive again, never to let him get away with it.
His eager look, asking her if she and Jack didn’t think of having a child. She could have slapped him. ‘We have a child,’ she should have said. ‘We have several children.’ Really, though, wasn’t it that she found something unseemly about his wish to have everything that a young man, newly married, would want? He should understand he can’t have it all anymore. Isn’t there an age, after all, when you ought to settle for a little less?
