by Cyndi Myers
When I was sure I was seconds away from either screaming or fainting, the first cop sauntered back to join us. “Everything looks okay.” He had me sign the speeding ticket, then handed me my copy. “The instructions for mailing in your fine are on the back,” he said. “You keep your speed down from now on.”
“Yes, sir,” I muttered, already headed for the truck.
Somehow I managed to fasten my seat belt, start the truck and merge onto the highway at a sedate speed. I took the first exit I saw and pulled into the driveway of a fast-food place and rested my forehead against the steering wheel.
“What is wrong with you?” Alice asked. “I never saw anyone get so worked up over a speeding ticket.”
“I don’t like cops,” I said. “They make me nervous.”
“They shouldn’t make you nervous if you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“It’s their attitude,” I said. “They automatically assume everyone’s a criminal. You heard him, asking all those questions about guns and drugs, searching the truck.”
“Only because you acted as if you were guilty of something,” she said. “Honestly, you broke out in a cold sweat the minute he walked up, and your hands were shaking so badly you could hardly open your wallet.”
“I just don’t like cops, okay? Everybody has phobias. The police are mine.”
“Well, it’s over with now. At least he didn’t find this.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out a short, fat cigarette.
I stared, my heart in my throat. “Is that what I think it is?”
She laughed. “It is if you think it’s a joint.”
“Alice! If he’d have found that we could have been arrested.”
“For one joint? Nah, it’s probably just a fine. And he didn’t find it, so it’s all good.” She put the joint back in her pocket.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked.
“What do you think? I’m going to smoke it later.”
“But why?”
“Why? Because it feels good.” She leaned toward me. “Don’t tell me you’ve never smoked pot.”
I shook my head. “Frannie would have killed me.”
“Who cares what Frannie thinks? You’re thirty-eight years old.”
I looked away from her, embarrassed, and at the same time angry with her for making me feel that way. “I never saw any reason to do drugs.”
“Go through chemo and you might think differently,” she said. “When I was puking up my guts around the clock, marijuana was the only thing that saved me.”
“Oh.” I looked at her, touched by the pain in her eyes. “I’d forgotten they use it for cancer patients.”
“Yeah, well, this cancer patient intends to keep using it. There’s too much misery in life. There’s times when it helps to soften the edges a little.”
I nodded, regretting that I’d judged her. “Yeah, well, if it helps you, why not?” I handed her the keys. “I think I’ll run in and get something to drink. You want anything?”
“I could go for a Coke and some fries.”
“Sure thing. Then you can drive for a while.”
“Think if I speed that cute cop will stop us again?” I must have looked as horrified as I felt, because she laughed and punched my shoulder. “Just kidding.”
I hoped this would be one of those things I could laugh about later. They say life’s a joke, but right now I felt like the butt of it.
The afternoon stretched out before us as empty and featureless as the fallow fields that rolled past the car windows like an endless loop of videotape. I let my eyes lose focus until the world around me was a blur of dusty green, gold and brown. It was a talent I’d perfected as a child on endless car trips to distant relatives. Hours would pass while my thoughts hummed like static above the soft pop music on the radio.
Embarrassment over my silly fear of the cop lingered like the ache in my legs after too much time on the treadmill. I was mortified that I was still such a martyr to my emotions. It was a simple speeding ticket, for God’s sake. And I’d nearly had a panic attack.
“I…I’m sorry about what happened back there, with the cop,” I said, after an hour or more had passed without either of us saying anything.
“Don’t worry about it,” Alice said. “People who’ve never been in trouble with the law often have an overdeveloped conscience. At least that’s my theory.”
“Alice!” I stared at her. “You’ve never been in trouble with the law, have you?”
She gave me a sly wink. “I’ve never been caught, if that’s what you mean.” She laughed at my incredulous expression. “Relax. I’m not wanted or anything. I dated a guy for a while who was into some shady dealings—a little drug running, some work for the mob. He taught me the cops aren’t nearly as smart as they’d like you to think.”
“Alice! Did you really? I mean…drugs? And the mob?” This new image of her as a Mafia princess was both fascinating and repellant.
“It wasn’t anything big-time or glamorous, believe me,” she said. “I mean, I’ll admit at the time I thought it was very exciting.” She glanced at me. “It wasn’t too long after I split with Travis. I went through a kind of self-destructive phase, I guess. After a few months with Stan—that was the crook’s name—I came to my senses.”
“Thank goodness for that,” I said. “You could have ended up in real trouble.”
“But I didn’t. Though I learned pretty quickly I wasn’t cut out for a life of crime.” She made a face. “I didn’t even do anything wrong and I felt guilty. Anyway, that was years ago, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’m a little jealous.”
She arched one eyebrow. “Jealous of my foolish relationship with a small-time hoodlum?”
“Not that,” I said. “But I envy how much you’ve done with your life. I haven’t done anything.” In so many ways, I felt as if I’d been standing still since I was sixteen. I’d moved to California with Frannie and had sat there ever since, letting things happen to me, but never taking an active role in my own life. Even the flower shop happened by accident. I’d taken a part-time job, discovered a love of flowers, met someone from the movies who knew a set designer who needed flowers, and the next thing I knew, I had my own business.
Losing weight had been the most proactive thing I’d done in years. And I guess shedding those pounds was really the trigger that got me moving again—away from California and Frannie, out here on the highway, trying to figure out where I really wanted to end up. I knew I didn’t want the same kind of life I’d had before, but I couldn’t yet picture my life in the future.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alice said. “You have your own business, you own a house. Everything I own is in this moving truck. And I never had a job in my life that paid more than twelve dollars an hour.”
“But you’ve done things,” I protested. “You’ve traveled and lived different places, had relationships with men.”
“What’s stopping you from doing any of those things?”
Her question caught me off guard. For years, I’d used my weight as an excuse not to move out of my comfortable routine of work, food and evenings in front of the television. “I’m thirty-eight,” I said weakly.
“As if that’s old! You have a lot of years ahead of you. Even if you don’t, all the more reason to get busy and live the life you want.”
The idea was as fascinating and frightening as an exotic serpent. “I guess I never thought about it that way before.”
“You’re off to a good start,” she said. “You lost all that weight. You came to the reunion, and now you’re making this trip. That doesn’t sound like a dangerously dull person to me.”
I laughed, the nervous, giddy giggling of a person who’s afraid of heights who finds herself standing too close to the edge. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“The next thing is to decide what to do next. Where do you want to travel? What kind of man do
you want to meet?”
“I don’t think I’m going to find a man just by deciding what kind I want,” I said.
“It’s the first step. Of course, all this is coming from a two-time divorcée whose longest relationship outside of marriage lasted eight months. So you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Alice arched her back, stretching, and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “Check the map and see how far it is to the next town big enough to have a decent motel,” she said. “I’ve about had enough of the highway for one day.”
Salina was less than an hour away. Once there, we found a so-called “budget” motel and gratefully claimed a room. It had all the requirements: two beds that didn’t sag in the middle and weren’t too hard, frigid air-conditioning, enough clean towels that we could have two each and an in-room coffeemaker so that we didn’t have to go out in public in the morning before we’d had a shot of caffeine.
Alice lay back on one bed, arms out at her sides. “God, it feels good to get out of that truck,” she said. “I don’t see how truckers do it.”
“Me, either.” I reclined on the other bed. “Who knew basically sitting all day could be so exhausting?”
“Thank God you agreed to come with me,” she said. “I don’t know if I’d have made it this far without you.”
I rolled over onto my side so I could look at her and cradled a pillow beneath my head. “I’m glad you invited me,” I said. “I really needed to get away from the shop and everything for a while. I don’t think I realized how much until you asked me to make the trip.”
“Glad I could help.” She propped herself up on her elbows. “What should we do now? I don’t think I could face going out again.”
“We could order pizza.”
“Sounds like a good deal. But it’s a little early yet.”
I checked the clock. It was only a little past five. “So what do you want to do?” I asked.
She rolled onto her side and dug in the pocket of her jeans. “I’ve still got this.” She pulled out the joint. “Why don’t we smoke it and get happy?”
8
“Alice!” I tried to sound horrified, but I wasn’t really. I’d been sort of expecting this ever since she’d showed me the joint in the first place. But I still didn’t quite know how to react.
She sat up. “Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to smoke a joint, either.”
For half a second I thought about lying, but what was the point? “I’ve thought about it, but never had the opportunity,” I said. “I tried cigarettes for a while because I heard they were a good appetite suppressant, but Frannie nagged at me so much about it I ended up quitting.”
“Well, Frannie isn’t here right now.” She scooted to the edge of the bed and swung her legs to the floor. “And I promise not to tell a soul.”
I glanced toward the door, as if I expected a cop to burst in at any moment. “Aren’t you worried it’s illegal?”
“Who’s going to know?” She shrugged. “And who cares? It’s just one joint. It’s not like I’m shooting heroine or anything.”
“I know.” And I believed her. My hesitation was like an itchy sweater—familiar but increasingly uncomfortable. I was probably an endangered species—the only child of the sixties who had never smoked dope.
“Is it a moral objection that’s holding you back, or are you just scared?” Alice asked.
“Why would I be scared?” I winced at the quaver in my voice.
“Lots of people are scared of new things.” She leaned forward and grabbed the pack of matches out of the ashtray on the dresser. “My theory is that the more new experiences you try, the less you have to fear.”
Everything she said made sense, yet a lifetime of avoiding any kind of change held me back. “All right,” I admitted. “I am afraid. I’m afraid I’ll make a fool of myself.”
“We’ve all been fools at one time or another, thank God.” She struck the match and held it to the end of the joint. The end glowed and a thin trickle of smoke curled up like a genie escaping from a magic lamp. “I’d hate to be the only person in the world who’d made mistakes.”
I came and sat on the end of the bed next to her. She handed me the joint. I stared at it as if it were a lit firecracker. “What do I do?”
“It would be better for your first time if we had a bong, but we don’t, so just inhale slowly and hold the smoke in as long as you can.”
Feeling very self-conscious, I stuck the joint between my lips and inhaled—and immediately exploded in a coughing fit. My lungs burned and my eyes watered.
Alice took the joint from me. “Go slower next time.” She demonstrated. “Like that,” she squeaked. She held the smoke in her lungs for a moment, then released it in a fragrant cloud.
I did better on my second try. I handed the joint back to Alice and waited. “So what’s supposed to happen?” I asked.
“Give it a minute. You’ll start to feel mellow.”
We smoked in silence for a while, passing the joint back and forth. At first I didn’t think this was anything special and was disappointed. Then I noticed my mouth was dry. That was it?
“Look at the bedspread,” Alice said. “Aren’t the colors pretty?”
When we’d first entered the room, I’d noted that it was done in what I’d come to think of as typical motel decor, complete with odd-colored chintz bedspreads and matching drapes.
Except this bedspread didn’t look odd-colored at all. The tones were deep, almost jewel-like. I ran my hand over the floral design. I could almost feel the flowers.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Alice lay back and took another deep drag on the joint, then handed it to me. “It is nice.” I smiled and admired the way the light glinted off the brass lamp base. “I feel…good.” Better than I’d felt in a long time.
“It’s good to let go of our inhibitions,” Alice observed.
“But I like my inhibitions,” I protested, then started giggling.
Alice giggled, too. “That’s like saying you like wearing a girdle.”
“I liked that wearing a girdle made me look better,” I said.
“You don’t need a girdle to look good now,” Alice replied. “So maybe you don’t need a lot of those inhibitions anymore.”
I stared at her. “For a woman smoking dope, you make a lot of sense.”
“That’s not much of a compliment, considering you’re high, too,” she said.
“I am not.” I discovered it’s hard to sound indignant when you keep falling over and giggling.
“You are, and it’s a good thing. I’d hate to be having this much fun all by myself.”
“Are we having fun?” I asked, giggling again.
“You sound the way we did when we were kids and would try to stay up all night,” she said. “We’d get the giggles and couldn’t stop.”
“Your mother would always come in and tell us to settle down and we’d laugh at her, too.” I smiled. “I always liked your mom. Better than my own.”
Alice patted my hand. “She liked you, too.”
“I wanted to be your sister,” I said. “And live at your house all the time.”
“You should have done it. I’d have let you move in.”
“I should have,” I agreed. I took another toke and thought again of those giggly slumber parties we’d had. “This does feel something like those nights we stayed up really late,” I said.
“One of the worst things about being an adult is we take ourselves too seriously,” Alice said.
“Being an adult is serious business.” I tried to frown and failed.
“Oh, yeah. It’s damn serious. Sometimes I want to chuck the whole thing and go join a commune. Sit and smoke dope and contemplate my navel all day.”
“That would get awfully boring,” I said.
“Yeah, and the hippie chicks I remember probably all look like hags now anyway. Twenty years of not wearing a bra o
r shaving your legs or cutting your hair are bound to haunt you by the time you’re forty.”
I doubled over laughing again. “Maybe the hippie dudes don’t care,” I choked out.
“That’s another thing.” She pinched the end of the joint between her fingers and waved it at me. “Have you seen an old hippie man? Bald on top with a little gray ponytail and beard and a pot belly.”
“Stop!” I screamed, holding my stomach. “I can’t stand it!”
“I can see it now,” Alice continued. “I’d show up at the commune with my high heels and makeup and offer free makeovers for everyone.”
“You could be queen of the commune,” I said.
“More likely they’d kick me out.” She sighed and fell back on the bed. “Guess I’d better stick to smoking the occasional joint and doing the grown-up thing the rest of the time.” She smiled again. “It isn’t so bad. Grown-ups get to have sex.”
“Some of you do, anyway.”
She turned her head to look at me. “Your turn will come, my dear. You just have to find the right man.”
“Mythical Mr. Right. If he exists.”
“What about that good-looking florist?” She grinned.
I nodded. “A possibility. Except he’s in Kansas.” And he hadn’t called. I don’t know what I was expecting. I’d been away from Sweetwater less than a day. Still, I couldn’t help hoping my phone would ring and I would hear his voice on the other end of the line.
Another ridiculous fantasy, I guessed. “Do you think there’s a Mr. Right in California?” I asked.
“Maybe a movie star,” Alice said. “Robert Pattinson?”
“Too young,” I said. “Johnny Depp?”
I made a face. “Too scruffy.”
“Brad Pitt?”
“Taken.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t want a movie star,” I said. “I just want an ordinary guy.”
“There’s plenty of them out there, but I think you deserve someone extraordinary.”
Unexpected tears pricked my eyes. “That’s such a sweet thing to say.”
She sat up again, her gaze still locked to mine. “You deserve the best. We all do.”
