South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  My hands on the steering wheel hold me in place as my body goes through the raging. The holding is exhausting, an act of will, because mentally I want to give in, everything I feel about the world and myself in it is true and yet, and yet I know it’s not the only truth. I am not only my personality disorder and I break into a sweat with the effort of holding on to that thought. My hands hurt—fucking hands, fuck that!

  A police officer taps on the window. My startle reflex working overtime, I cry out and fumble to start the car, but it’s already on, isn’t it, and the air conditioning is blasting and the rap station is pounding and so is my head. I turn the radio off and slide both front windows down. “Oh, dear.” I dab at my eyes, then gesture toward the phone on the seat. “I’ve had some bad news.” I see myself in his Polaroid cop glasses—my hair’s a mess, I’ve scratched my face, my eyes look crazy. “But I’ll be fine.”

  He leans in the passenger side window, inhales, sniffing. They have their priorities, I think, and with this thought I begin to calm down, flutter my fingers to seem that I’m tidying my hair. The officer asks, “May I see your registration?” I open the glove compartment. He looks at the documents, nods, hands my papers back. “Nice time of year for you snowbirds.” I assure him, yes it is. He lifts his hands off the sill and, changing his mind, looks in again. “You have someone at home to check on you?” I reply that I do indeed. My son, a good boy. He lives here. “We all get bad news one time or another. You drive slow and take care now, ma’am.” And simple as that he turns and walks away. I watch the patrol car swing out onto the road and am so relieved that at last I feel the pounding of my heart. My God, what was I thinking, what was I doing?

  Walking across the parking lot, I pay attention to the physical sensations, to my breathing, to the right toe with the bunion that hurts, the warm tarmac on the soles of my shoes, the olive trees emitting pollen that make my eyes itch more, the screeching great-tailed grackles, black birds with long tails and yellow eyes. Entering Walmart, I ignore the carts and the Mac-sized people pushing them, and head straight to the back where there’s a washroom. In front of a mirror, I know the drill—comb my hair, pat down my face with a wet paper towel, apply allergy eye drops, blow my nose, smooth on a new coat of foundation to hide the scratch, paint my lips with lipstick, tap a finger to my lips, and add some colour to my cheeks. There.

  I walk back through the store, attentive to the children running, the stacks of DVDs on sale, the music in the background, the smell of hot dogs and popcorn, the piles of boxes filled with chemicals disguised as food.

  Outside, I make my way through the multicoloured array

  of cars, then drive to a nearby carwash and sit inside as machines shoot water and soap, and spinning rollers lather my vehicle. I have time to think. The moods are quick as a tornado no one has sighted. They come without a physical warning, unlike, so I understand, an epileptic seizure, where a person might have a subtle intimation. What caused this uproar? A border guard not noticing me? I must be crazy. Please, God, let me be ignored. And thank God for the police officer who walked away.

  The car jerks forward to the vacuum dry. The light is red. Agitation subsides, sinks back to wherever it lives. As hoses blast the car with air, I shudder. I think, Work with what you have.

  The light turns green.

  Managing to hum a little in the quiet after the storm, I park behind my building. A man about my age who rents an apartment near mine—I’ve seen him walking a border collie—stops to talk. “Listen, I gather you go to Tucson a lot.”

  My antennae go up. I cover with a lame rejoinder. “You’ve got a border collie. Does that you mean you work for the Border Patrol?” I can’t prevent this sort of comment, but he laughs.

  “We know everything about you, what can I say? I’ve signed the petitions against the damn thing, but I’m afraid it won’t go away.”

  “I signed ‘Citizens for Freedom’ with a fake name, and I’m not even a citizen.”

  “Noble of you,” he says, smiling. “The Kinsmen are having a shoe giveaway this weekend and we need people to pick up shoes—good ones, really expensive dressy ones—in Tucson. Would you be willing?”

  I cross my arms. “Dressy? I haven’t heard the word dressy in years.” Damn. Not nice. I uncross my arms. “Who are the shoes for, cocktail waitresses?”

  The border collie lunges at the leash. The man frowns and takes a step away.

  “Wait! Listen. Yes, I will. Pick up shoes. Any kind, I don’t care. I’m Paula.”

  “I know.” He pulls the dog up. “As I said, we know everything about you.” He raises an eyebrow, waits, and then, smiling, relents. “The gallery. I’ve seen you at the art gallery. I’m Robert, a volunteer there. You once said we had better stationery than the museum in Tucson.” The dog sits, eyes me as though I might need herding.

  I may, indeed, need herding.

  Robert explains that the shoe giveaway is for the working poor. Yard maintenance men, motel housekeepers, caregivers to the elderly, people earning minimum wage, people who live in sneakers from Walmart, where many of them work. “The surprising thing we do is turn the situation on its ear. We give away really expensive shoes, the leftovers from high-end stores. And our customers enjoy what we’re doing and so they’re very particular. We measure shoe size because people often don’t know what size they are. You should see the pleasure on a hospital cleaner’s face when she’s wearing a perfectly fitted, beautiful shoe.”

  I listen and like the idea that the recipients will be picky about styles and sizes. Certainly I like turning a situation on its ear. Robert suggests that I consider volunteering. “People will be lined up hours in advance, and it’s pandemonium once the door opens.”

  I nod. “I understand pandemonium.”

  “We’ve done the big-batch pickup but some better, smaller mall stores are coming in on it, so it’s a boon. Thanks.” He salutes and turns to walk away. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I blink. The light is so bright it buzzes. The buzzing becomes excitement, coursing through my body. I watch him and the dog until they round the corner.

  In the apartment, I head to the bathroom mirror and look at my watch. I will stand for five minutes until the excitement passes. He saw me; he talked to me. My fingers touch my face. Yes, this soft skin is mine, the wrinkle between the eyes mine. The dark eyebrows that arch a bit too much as though surprised, those are mine too. I reach in my makeup drawer and add eyeliner, then fill in the brows with eyebrow pencil and step back. There—almost—is a reasonably calm face. Don’t study the eyes, just glance. I check my watch. One minute to go.

  When time’s up, I fiddle tuning the radio, listen to the pops, snaps, and static, look longingly at the door and consider grabbing a sunhat and running after Robert. I’ll offer to make dinner, I’ll help him walk the dog, I’ll nestle right up to him, move in. I hear myself say, I just want to move in to the shrink. A lively Mexican pop song breaks through, a surprise. I look at the radio thoughtfully, glance again at the door. Tell myself no. I will collect footwear and then measure and fit tired feet. Just that. I kick my own shoes off, step to the kitchen sink, and turn the water on full blast. Drink one glass and then another for the sake of something to do, for the feeling of fullness.

  Desert Dreams

  Nina stops at a Walgreen’s on Speedway to buy a bottle of shiraz, and then stands outside in the sun to phone her mother. She can see a Taco Bell on the corner. “How about crispy tacos?” Miriam loves crispy tacos. It’s Thursday night, and on Thursdays Nina arranges dinner for the two of them in Miriam’s suite. Miriam says, “Just the ticket.” Her retirement complex doesn’t serve Mexican or Chinese food, Miriam’s favourites. Sometimes Nina cooks in the suite’s efficiency kitchen. Her pancakes and eggs-over-easy are a hit; Miriam loves real maple syrup and Trader Joe’s cage-free eggs and brags about them as though she’s been using them for the last fifty years so that the “chickens have a free life, like us.”

  When Miriam e
mploys irony with the captives in the wheelchair exercise class, sometimes Nina knows because someone on staff informs her. “Folks don’t like to be reminded of their situation, and your mother’s jokes . . .”

  “People don’t know how to laugh,” Miriam says, wiping her face with a dishtowel (crunchy taco bits are everywhere), when Nina broaches the topic. “What’s the matter with those dumb birds . . . can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  Nina interprets her mother’s occasionally slurred speech—a result of Parkinson’s—and her “forest for the trees” remark as meaning elderly people who are ill aren’t free and you might as well laugh about it. “Is that what you mean?”

  Miriam gives her a look with a shrewd blue eye. “Close,” she says. Nina nabs a shred of lettuce from Miriam’s cheek, taco pieces from her mother’s bib and the cushion, then drops to her knees to pick pieces from the rug and from around the carved lions’ feet of her mother’s chair.

  “Silvie is coming in the morning,” Miriam says, waving a hand, which means don’t bother. But Silvie hasn’t cleaned since the house in Portland. Miriam wrinkles her nose. “Do I smell gasoline?”

  “Yes.” Nina explains the fiasco she had earlier with a gas nozzle, how it got away.

  “First funny thing I’ve heard all day,” Miriam says, her consonants sounding clear, and then she laughs behind her hand to hide her mirth.

  Walking back from the RV park laundry room under the eerie sulphur-coloured streetlights obliterating the desert stars, Nina doesn’t follow the cement paths. Since Frank’s death she forces herself to act brave, and so she walks in sandals and defies a scorpion to sting her. Her little camper is parked ahead, its porch light on, steadfast as it waits for her in a row with others, bigger units, shinier rigs, owned by couples. When she explains her mother’s situation, they commiserate and pat her arm—all safe as houses in this gated, winter community. She misses Oregon, the green ruggedness of Oregon. She misses the mists and rain, the palette of cool, clean colours, the restless ocean. After Frank died, she drove to the coast, to practise towing the sixteen-foot travel trailer behind the blue Explorer he’d bought them, stayed overnight in motels or RV parks to keep herself out of the house, away from their bed, away from his “King of Hearts” coffee mug. She’d sketched breakers surging against offshore rocks, pounding on them, white foam spewing.

  Her plan is to take Miriam back home with her, but Miriam won’t go. Miriam hates the desert; she came for the winter sun and then, according to her, she met a bunch of idiots, and now is caught in the same net. Whatever that means.

  Nina finishes the wine. At 1:00 AM she lies awake, gazing at a slice of moon. A country singer warbles, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

  Miriam is rooting for her, hoping, Nina suspects, that on the road she will stumble onto the perfect companion, and that the new man will stop her from moping. “Mope, mope,” Miriam says. “Hanging out with old people, get out of that place,” she says about the compound where Nina’s staying. “I don’t need you,” Miriam insists. “Go get a life.”

  “Why aren’t you worried about me travelling alone?”

  “Why should I worry? You’re no spring chicken, doll face.” Then Miriam tells her to buy some decent clothes, hit Vegas. She uses the world flirt or maybe lurk. Lurking around Vegas, just the ticket.

  Here it is, the end of March and the end of spring in the scrap desert between the Mohave and the bright lights of Vegas, and Nina has driven and camped for two weeks, working in watercolour, painting flowers that survive despite the arid, often bleak and inhospitable landscape. The project has provided her with a purpose. The burden of being followed everywhere by her own home is an inescapable preoccupation too; for long moments she hurts less about Frank. Last night, camped at a truck stop in Blythe, she was making ordinary love to him with all the loving kisses she gave him when he was alive. The spirit of him was in her but no silky penis; she didn’t have an orgasm. Then in the dream she was washing towels, green and blue. There had been the dream, the hot wind, stars twinkling through the tiny window, her aching hip.

  She’s driven through Needles, a Route 66 town on the border between California and Arizona, and once again can’t find a campground. She’ll dry-camp again—no water hook-up, no electricity, but she has water aboard and propane for cooking and running the refrigerator—and turns in to park behind a gas station. But when she takes a quick look around, she spots a dark truck and the light of a cigarette in the cab. She turns the ignition over and moves on, cruising slowly along the highway, searching for a safer place—not too isolated, no garbage strewn about, no single wide trailer surrounded by wrecked cars and rusted appliances.

  In a pull-out on her right, a white Chevy Silverado towing a Prowler camper trailer is tucked near some eucalyptus trees. The Silverado, nosed toward the road, has left room for an escape. If you pin yourself in a tight spot with the bad guys coming, you’re open to ambush; Westerns taught her that. She circles back to the Silverado, slides by slowly to take another look at it and the Prowler. The vehicle is newish and in good condition. Michelin tires, good tread. Though the Prowler isn’t a new model, what counts are the blinds. Blinds that are dented or askew are a sure sign of a mean dog or a single man falling apart.

  The blinds of the Prowler are orderly.

  She lowers her windows so that anyone watching can see that she’s by herself. Her theory is that a man with a gun will holster it if he sees a woman of her age travelling alone, and if he’s a good man, he’ll feel protective. The best place to park, Frank had said, is slightly behind the other rig so you’re visible through the driver’s side rear-view but not situated so that someone sitting outside will feel spied on.

  She sits in the sweltering cab and waits for her intuition to catch up.

  Fine.

  She settles in.

  A man from the Prowler, wearing a straw hat, catches her dumping a pot of hot water used for cooking penne pasta into the ditch. He introduces himself as Louis Shaw and tips the hat. His hair is wavy, grey, a good cut. His plaid shirt is spotless, his nails clean. He’s Frank’s size, a size she likes, solid, not sinewy.

  She lets Louis Shaw see her looking at him.

  He says he’s travelling with his son, a young man recently divorced. They’re on a father–son bonding trip. She raises her hand to her eyes, looks toward the Prowler.

  “You won’t see him,” Louis Shaw says. “He’s depressed.” She’s glimpsed a figure, ducking in and out with something in his arms. “We have a cat,” the man says, following her eyes, a man who has an answer for everything. She wonders, nonchalantly, if they’re nuts—the skulking son, the blunt man, the cat. Probably feral, the three of them.

  A cactus wren, a confident bird with a distinctive eye stripe, stalks out from under the brush to check the tire treads for treats. It disappears under her Explorer. Louis Shaw says, “Arizona state bird.” He looks down at his feet. Nina watches him, curious. He murmurs, apologetically, “I want to make love to you.”

  At first she wonders if she’s heard right. She peers at him as he raises his head. His eyes are hazel. Dark freckles spread across his cheeks, the skin fine against the hard bone. The expression on his face is pleasant. She waits to see how she feels. Not panicky. Not anxious. Not afraid. She says, “You would, would you?”

  Her comment brings a shy nod, some twitching in the hands.

  “That’s lovely.” She touches her cheek, looks sideways at him. “I have a bottle of wine. Would you care to sit down? You’ll have to bring your own chair.” Inside the camper, she locks the door as a precaution, and slips the pasta out of the strainer into a bowl, tosses it with olive oil, puts a plate over it. The wine is already chilled; there is nothing as reliable as a Dometic-brand three-way fridge. She fluffs her short hair in the mirror over the sink.

  She climbs onto the bed, reaches into the elongated storage space above it for the wineglasses, and unwraps them from their prote
ctive towels.

  “It’s only a cheap shiraz,” she says, outside again. The camper shields them from the highway, but she’s heard a string of fast cars go by. Dust floats in the hot air and settles slowly. “Red,” she adds. Some people don’t know a white grape from a red one. He’s brought a typical aluminum folding chair. Green stripes.

  “Oh, I know.” He looks at the label. “The Australians are oaky. But the wines are predictable and generally inexpensive. A good bargain.”

  She smiles, offers him the expensive corkscrew.

  He places the bottle on her step. “I see. You’re a connoisseur.” The cork eases out with a subdued pop. “I shouldn’t drink.”

  So he’s an alcoholic. Perhaps there’s a weakness in him that his son has to look after.

  “It’s Lent. I was giving up wine for Lent.”

  “Oh.” That information makes her mind reel in another direction—religion, responsibilities, respectability. “You should have told me. I wouldn’t have served you wine.”

  “You don’t have to serve me anything. We don’t have that arrangement, do we?”

  “An arrangement.” She laughs. “Nicely put.”

  She sees a warm glow spread across his face. She likes a smart man.

  He pours her a glass, pours his.

  “But I thought . . .” she says.

  “This is an exception, an occasion, meeting such a fine lady in what would otherwise be desolation. Though, as I’m sure you know, Needles has its modest fame. John Steinbeck himself reported that the Joad family stopped here.”

  “Grapes of Wrath.”

  He corrects her. “The Grapes of Wrath.”

  Nina nods and, taking her glass, looks at him over the rim. “A song: ‘I headed for Las Vegas, only made it out to Needles.’”