by Mary Morris
Melanie smiled an “I told you so” smile. They shopped for Hamburger Helper, bananas, Diet Cokes, and Oreos. An old woman in the corner was selling beads, and Melanie stopped to look. The old woman looked at Melanie for a long time. Then she tied a blue beaded bracelet around Melanie’s wrist. “Oh, no,” Melanie said, but the old woman motioned for her to keep it. When Melanie reached into her purse for money, the old woman pushed Melanie’s purse away. All the Indians at the trading post looked at Melanie intently when the old woman did this.
The road went from bad to worse. It narrowed abruptly and became a single lane. The potholes were enormous and they banged the bottom of the Winnebago. Huge dips were in the road. Hal kept cursing under his breath. Melanie looked outside and saw the landscape. It was mountainous and strange. The hills came in colors—red, green, brown—that made them look as if someone had painted them. Then they saw the last real sign they knew they’d see. “Dinosaur tracks. Straight ahead.” Melanie sighed with relief. “Well, I guess there’s no going back now.”
As they rounded the bend and came to a valley of huge pink and yellow craters that made them think they were on the moon, the Winnebago stalled. A gush of steam rose from the radiator. Hal jumped down, opened the hood, released the radiator valve. Then he leaped back as steam burst like Old Faithful. “Damn it,” he said. The RV had overheated from the heat and the strain.
“We could probably just walk down the road,” Melanie suggested. “I’m sure it’s not far now. Maybe someone there can help us.”
“I’m not leaving this van,” Hal said. “It’ll cool down, and we’ll go ahead.”
Unsure of what was best, Melanie put some Hamburger Helper in the skillet with some ground beef she had in the fridge. Hal popped a couple of beers that were left in the cooler. “I think it’s kind of romantic,” Melanie said, lighting a candle. “Just the two of us here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “No hookup, no electricity, no water.”
It was their first night not in an RV park, Melanie agreed, but it was a beautiful spot. She looked at the mountain straight ahead, behind which a fiery orange sun was setting. A cathedral-like silence fell across the valley. The head of a woman looked down on her, bemused, staring straight at them. “That’s it,” Melanie said. “That’s Head of Mother Earth Mountain.”
Hal looked up. “Where?”
“Right there,” Melanie said. “See?” With her finger, Melanie traced the outline of the woman’s face. “She’s looking down on us.”
“Well, I’m glad someone is,” Hal said as he tried to start the engine, “because we aren’t going anywhere tonight.”
After they ate the hamburger and drank some beers, thunder cracked. Rain pounded the top of the RV. Hal groaned as they sat in the candlelight. Melanie moved against his arm, curling close. She raised her mouth to his, but he pulled away. “Not here,” he said. “I’m too nervous. I want to listen, in case anything comes.”
“We’re locked inside the RV,” she said. “The only thing that could come is help.”
“Or some of those Indians from back there.”
Melanie put her hand on his. “Maybe you’re uncomfortable because we’re off the beaten track.”
“I’m uncomfortable because things can happen.”
“I don’t think anything bad will happen to us here.” She spoke with authority, as if she knew, but Hal would not be moved. She saw how frightened he was. He was able to do only what they’d planned for. He had never liked surprises, spontaneous events, sudden changes. He ate the same thing for breakfast each morning. He had played golf with the same foursome since he was a young man. He and Melanie had made love on Tuesday night and Sunday morning for years. On trips Hal always kept a map open at his side. He liked to know exactly where he was going and what he was getting.
Kelly used to tease her father about this. She’d say to him when they’d all get into the van and go on a car trip, “So what if we lose our way for a while? So what if we don’t have a place to stay for one night?” Or she’d say, “Come on, Dad, live dangerously. Eat in a restaurant you haven’t been to before.”
Kelly always liked doing things spur-of-the-moment. A friend would call and she’d be out the door. If a boy wanted to ask her out for the weekend, she’d tell him to call her on Saturday morning. “How do I know how I’ll feel when Saturday rolls around?” she’d say. She’d never study until the night before a test. In her room after school she’d put on loud music and dance until her father carried the stereo from the room.
At the dinner table he’d point a finger at her, lecturing while their two older, more manageable children stared into their plates. “You can’t just do things in this life when you want to.” Kelly would roll her eyes. For him, life was a long-range project. He devoted himself to securing the future. When each child was born, he put one thousand dollars into a college fund. Kelly would have been in her junior year by now.
At times—when she felt bitter—Melanie thought how Hal hadn’t minded Kelly’s going so much as he minded her not leaving an itinerary. She thought he’d driven her away. But in her heart she knew this was not true. She had to blame herself as well. After Kelly left, Melanie spent months wondering what she’d done wrong. She thought of all the times she’d told Kelly to stop moving, to sit still. Kelly was different from the other children. She was different from all of them. They should have loved her for her differences, not tried to make her one of them.
Hal fell asleep on top of the RV’s kitchen table, which converted into a double bed, but Melanie found it impossible to sleep. The rain had stopped, so she put a robe on and went outside. The air smelled fresh; now it was a clear starry night, and she stood at the side of the Winnebago at the edge of the road in her nightgown and robe, looking up at the stars. Then she sat down on a large rock, facing Head of Mother Earth Mountain, whose silhouette she could see in the moonlight. She had no idea how long she sat. She was aware only of changes in the configuration of the stars, the place of the moon overhead. She was aware of the rock beneath her, turning warm. It seemed as if she could feel something flow within the rock. She loved the feel of the warm breeze against her skin and through her gown. She loved the clear sky overhead.
Melanie didn’t notice the prowling of a coyote not that far away, or the flight overhead of an owl. She thought how beautiful it was there. What a beautiful country this was. They had gone out of their way and now they were lost. She thought of Kelly, spending night after night like this beneath the stars. She found herself suddenly as close to her daughter as she’d ever come. She felt as if she could sit there forever. As if she could just stay in that spot.
As the sun was starting to shine on the face of Head of Mother Earth Mountain, Hal opened the door and found her sitting on the rock. “What are you doing?” he shouted. Then he sat down beside her, putting his arm across her back. “Are you all right?”
She had no idea how long she had been there, but she was awakened as if from a dream. She felt refreshed, though she was not sure if she had slept. “I’m fine. I’m ready to go on.”
The Winnebago started up with no problem, and they hadn’t gone a thousand yards when they saw the single arrow, pointing straight ahead. And suddenly they arrived at a small stand with “Dinosaur tracks here” in the same scrawl they’d followed for so long painted in black letters on the side of the shack. An old woman sold beads. A man in a blue vest stood in the shade. His dark hair was greasy, parted to one side. His tired eyes widened as they approached. “I’ll be your guide,” the man said, “for five dollars.”
Hal gave the man the five dollars, and they parked the van. They got out and followed him. “Over here,” he said, “tracks of diplodocus and tyrannosaurus.” They followed the man across the muddy clay. The old woman removed the shawl from her head. She was bald. Melanie could not even begin to guess her age. They walked for about two hundred yards across the desert and then the man stopped. “There,” he said, pointing to the faint, wet imp
rints of a dinosaur’s foot.
Melanie and Hal looked down. At first they could not see them. The tracks looked like ripples in the rock. But then the man drew the outline with his finger. “There,” he said. At last they both recognized it. They stared into the wide, deep petrified dinosaur track. “Hey, Mel,” Hal said, “get closer.” He raised the videocam. Melanie thought how he looked like a lab technician, setting her up for an X-ray.
Melanie stepped to the right, then to the left. “Back a little,” Hal said. The Indian looked at them strangely. Finally Melanie took one more step back, letting her feet sink into the red-clay water that filled the tyrannosaurus tracks. Hal stared at Melanie, her feet having disappeared. He put the videocam down, letting it drop to his side. She looked like a clown with giant feet. The clay soaked into her shoes. She thought how good it felt to have her feet in these clay tracks. How good it was to stand in the tracks of this creature who was gone.
When Jessie told her mother she was getting married, Mara began to dream. For years Mara’s nights had been dark and uneventful, but now she dreamed the same dream that had come to her before Jessie was born. She dreamed that Jessie was a baby, a newborn. On the first day Mara cradled and nursed her. On the second day Jessie walked. On the third day she went to school. On the fourth day she went to high school, and on the fifth day Mara packed her off to college and she was gone. At the end of the dream Mara was always standing in the doorway of a house she’d never owned, handkerchief in hand, waving. Mara had thought before Jessie was born that the dream meant she didn’t want to have a child. That it was a mistake.
Now the dream came back to her. Everything was the same except that the house Mara waved from was the one they had bought upstate just before Burt died, the house that was to be their weekend retreat, that had become her home.
Jessie had phoned to say, “Mom, guess what, I’m marrying Zach.”
Mara had replied, only half-jokingly, “Who’s Zach?”
“Oh, Mother,” Jessie moaned, “you know.”
Actually, Mara barely knew. She had met him only once or twice and then not for very long. She couldn’t say if she disapproved of Jessie’s marriage to Zach, a nice enough man who was going to be an architect, but she didn’t exactly approve either. Certainly Zach wasn’t the kind of man Jessie used to date, the ones whose spiked hair made them look like stegosaurs and who asked impertinent questions about Mara’s accent and where she came from.
“Louisiana,” she liked to respond to their inquiries. “The Blue Bayou.” They’d look at her askance. In fact she’d come from Berlin via London and New York, but that was nobody’s business but her own.
Mara knew it was hardly her place to approve or disapprove of Jessie’s choices. Jessie had been making up her own mind since she was three years old, when she decided she wanted her hair cut short. Jessie’s hair had been like honey—thick, pale, and flowing; it had been Mara’s pride and joy. People stopped her in supermarkets, perfect strangers, and said, “Look at that child’s hair. Isn’t it wonderful?” Women gasped, saying, “Do you set those curls? Is that her natural color?” Once a man, an artist Mara assumed, lifted Jessie’s hair into his hands. “Titian red,” he had exclaimed.
Jessie had had the features to match. Eyes the color of green pools. Skin like pale fruit. An exquisite child who had been spared pain and grief. And then one day when she was just three, she said to her mother, “I want my hair short.” Mara ignored this. What can a three-year-old know about having her hair cut? But then Jessie said it again and again. “I want short hair. Like my friends.” So Mara had agreed. She’d taken Jessie to a Hispanic beauty shop in the Village, where the little girl sat on the phone books for Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens and told the lady to cut her hair short.
When the scissors were put to Jessie’s hair, it was Mara who burst out crying, as if something more than hair was gone. Tears had welled in the eyes of the Spanish beauticians; the clientele as well. Even now Mara recalled how she had crawled on the floor, scooping clumps of hair into a plastic bag that she kept to this day in the back of her lingerie drawer, hair that she sometimes would take out and comb.
A few weeks after Jessie had called to say she was getting married, she’d called again. “Mother …,” Jessie said, a sheepish tone to her voice.
She’s calling this off, Mara thought, relieved. Mara had been sitting up on those nights when her dream aroused her, thinking of how to make her daughter change her mind.
“Mother, Zach and I have been talking,” Jessie spoke sweetly, the way she did when she wanted something, “and we were thinking that we’d like to be married at your place, in the garden.”
“Here?” Mara said, trying to imagine her retreat in upstate New York deluged with design students from Cooper Union. “When?”
“In early June.”
Mara peered down at her crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips, all about to bloom. Ever since she and Burt had bought the place a decade ago, Mara had hoped Jessie would want to be married here. But not yet (she wasn’t even twenty-five) and probably not to Zach. “In early June?”
“Yes, perhaps the first weekend. Why? Does it matter?”
“It isn’t a good time.”
“A good time for you?”
“No,” Mara said, emphatically, as if this were absurd. “For the garden.”
“The garden?” Jessie said.
“It’ll be between blooms.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Mara thought of early June when the tops of the irises, tulips, and daffodils would be cut back, their leaves and stalks lying dormant as the bulbs absorbed the food they needed for the following year. The garden would be all brown, wilted, with no new blooms. “The spring flowers will have faded and the summer flowers won’t be up. It won’t have any color. Couldn’t the wedding wait until July? It would be better then.”
“Oh.” Jessie paused. “Can’t we just stick some annuals in? Petunias or something?”
“I suppose …” But Mara did not like this idea at all.
“We wanted to go away for the summer, Mom. We’re going to see all the villas in Italy.”
“Ah, Europe.” Mara sighed, her voice far away. “Well, I’ll have to think about it.”
“Oh, you don’t have to think about it,” Jessie said. “We’ll take care of everything.”
In early April Jessie and Zach drove up in Zach’s old van. Mara was stooped over, digging with her trowel in the cold, loamy soil. The ground was still hard. She had almost forgotten they were coming. When she saw them, for a moment she wondered who they were. Mara had met Zach only a couple of times and was never impressed, though she couldn’t say why. She had trouble remembering his name. He was a second-year architecture graduate student at Cooper Union, whose senior project was a postmodernist design for a low-income housing project along the East River. She had no reason to dislike him.
He was, Mara had to admit, attractive, responsible, a little moody. But that was Jessie’s problem, not hers. Still, she saw nothing special about him. Nothing that brought him clearly into focus in her mind.
“So here you are,” Mara said as they walked out back.
“We thought we’d just sit down and plan it all together, Mom.” Jessie looked tired, Mara thought, as she received her daughter’s hug. Mara struggled to keep her dirty hands from touching Jessie. She glanced at their jeans, their sweaters and down vests, which made the two look as if they were modeling for a catalog. She was sure they’d made these purchases for this visit.
“Hello, Mara,” Zach said, kissing her on the cheek. Had he ever called her Mara before?
Zach came from Tampa. He had grown up in the sun and had a weathered face, so different from Jessie’s pale, New York features. He just wasn’t what Mara had in mind.
First, he wasn’t Jewish, which had never really mattered much before, but suddenly it mattered enormously. Had she survived all that she had so that her only living flesh and blood
marry an Episcopalian graduate student? Shouldn’t they perhaps stick to their own kind—not that Mara had ever thought about what this meant before. She had never really liked the notion of having your own kind.
Now she gazed at Jessie, whose coloring was still that of honey and peaches, though her hair had remained short. She was clinging to the arm of this rugged-looking man whom Mara had hardly ever laid eyes on, whom as far as she was concerned her daughter scarcely knew.
“We know this is rather short notice,” Zach said.
“Yes, six weeks is rather short notice,” Mara mused. “These will be all gone.” She pointed to the tulips she had bought through a mail-order catalog from Holland, “and nothing will have replaced them.”
“Well, we just want to do it,” Jessie said, with the defiant pout Mara never liked, even when Jessie was very small and other people thought it was cute. “We don’t want a big deal and we don’t want to wait.”
“I’ll just finish up here,” Mara said. “Why don’t you go inside and rest from your drive.”
Now Jessie’s face relaxed and again she gave her mother a hug. “You shouldn’t work so hard.”
Mara watched them head back into the house. Then she turned back to her plants and to preparing the soil. Jessie, Mara thought, didn’t understand the essential things. An interior designer, she knew nothing about the outdoors. It had been a mistake, trying to raise a child in a small New York apartment. Jessie knew how to move a wall or put in a thousand shelves where none had been before, or make a room that faced an air shaft appear light, but she knew nothing of the earth, the weather patterns, the timing of blooms.
Early June was the worst time of year for the garden. The primroses would be going (she was lucky to have them at all in this climate). The roses wouldn’t have bloomed. The day lilies, which made a carpet of orange and yellow, would not be up yet. Mid May, of course, was the nicest time for spring flowers, as was late June for summer blossoms. But early June just wouldn’t do.
