by Deb Caletti
“I don’t believe you. I got you wrapped around my finger,” he laughed.
“I see you for what you are,” I said. I was still crying. I wish I hadn’t been, but I was.
“Right,” he said. He chuckled again.
“Travis? Fuck off.”
I slammed down the phone. I looked at it. I was surprised how beautiful it looked. Proud and strong and solid. This phone on a nightstand in a motel in Eureka, California. A fine, terrific, fantastic phone. A model among small appliances.
“I’ve never heard you say that,” my mother said coming out of the bathroom. Chip Jr. was still in there.
“I never have said that.” She put her arms around me. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand.
“Wow,” she said admiringly.
“Not bad, huh?” I said into her shoulder. I suddenly felt exhausted.
“Not that I want you to go around saying it all the time or anything.”
There was a knock at our door. My mother got up to answer it, opened it a crack, then wide. “Oh, my God!” she screamed. I walked over to look. Chip Jr. got up from the floor of the bathroom, where he had been sitting, trying to figure out how they replaced the Kleenex in those little built-in cabinets in the bathroom. The metal plate lay on the floor.
“Check out those snowflakes!” Chip Jr. said.
Peach had Harold by the elbow. Miz June rolled Lillian into our room in her wheelchair. She was already dressed for bed too, wearing a short flowered nightgown that showed her thin, veiny legs, pouchy flaps of elbow skin.
“I hardly see what the big deal is,” Harold said. But it was true: He looked hysterical. The pajamas were the kind you’d see on a stuffed bear, soft and flannel, and Harold’s round stomach stuck out round and hard. Chip Jr. patted it.
“Twins,” Peach said, and we all cracked up.
My mother gave Chip Jr. some quarters from her purse, and we went out to the soda machine and brought back a few cans of Mountain Dew. Everyone sat in our room and drank from plastic cups and played hearts with a pack of cards Chip Jr. had thought to bring along. I often remember that particular night, how strong we all were. How we were as vital and alive as a thunderstorm. Harold, with his tennis shoes worn without socks and his snowflake pajamas; my mother with the pencil behind her ear for keeping score on a piece of motel stationery. Lillian, with that bow at the neck of her nightgown, small, satiny, and girlish. That bow was as fragile as a whisper, as tender and vulnerable as a wave good-bye. And yet somehow, even in this, there was strength.
What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and down from the houses and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent—the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants of the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep.
“He’s going to need Jesus, he drives like such an idiot,” Miz June said about a truck that screamed past us with a huge wooden cross swaying from its rearview mirror. The driver flipped his middle finger up in that well-known gesture of religious tolerance and goodwill. I put my book down. Reading in the car made my head ache, anyway.
“That reminds me. I had this dream last night. We were all on a plane and it was being hijacked,” Chip Jr. said. “Robbed, anyway. Harold gave the guy his watch. Peach reached in her pockets and a frog jumped out.” Chip Jr. shivered. Obviously it was one of those dreams where you had to be there.
“It was from the train ride,” I said. “The fake bandits.”
“And the balloon,” Mom said. The frog had been shoved back in the trunk again, in creepy jack-in-the-box style. Cheer in unimaginable proportions becomes eerie somehow.
Lillian looked beautiful. Peach had overdone it a bit with the perfume, though, which was probably contributing to my headache. For this, her reunion day, Lillian wore a lavender sweater and lavender slacks, with a scarf of various pastels tied in a carefree way around her neck, and a serene smile. Her white, white hair was tucked behind her ears in a playful fashion.
“Lillian, you look great,” I said.
Peach gestured toward Lillian. “Woman, Starting a New Life,” she said.
“The day we’ve all been waiting for,” my mother said. I wasn’t sure if she meant Lillian’s new life, or her own.
We had veered through farmland, tall stalks of new green corn, and small round lumps of what must have been lettuce. Orchards, too, of nut trees and oranges, which made the air smell sweet and thirst-quenching. I started to have that feeling you get when you are heading toward the sea, that knowledge of its presence nearby, the sky that feels a little wider and that hollow in your stomach that senses it will soon be filled with something large. Every time we climbed a hill, I expected to see it, but not yet, not yet, until we finally rounded a bend and saw it there, a small peek of vibrant blue, fighting its way out of a cauldron of fog. It made me gasp. I think if the sea doesn’t make you gasp, I don’t know what will.
“There it is,” Miz June said. She must have been feeling the same. She was letting my Mom drive, thank God. The road was getting winding and narrow. She’d pulled over a few miles back and they’d swapped seats, after a hay truck passed her on the narrow road, zapping around a corner with the confidence of a loud radio, as the Lincoln shuddered.
Still, every time Mom picked up a little speed, the Queens would pipe up. You might want to ease up on this particular road, Ann. Miz June. Or, Slow the hell down! Are you trying to get us killed? Peach.
The ocean played hide-and-seek; gone for a moment, then back to shock us again with another glorious panoramic. We stopped at a scenic lookout point so that Chip Jr. could take pictures. It was deliciously cool on the bluff. A couple stood with their arms around each other, admiring the view. Their windbreakers flapped around, making the kid brother version of the sound the paragliders make when they ease into a landing at Moon Point. Looking at the ocean from up above gave me that same feeling as watching the paragliders, too—that slow fill of the heart to the point it felt like it had wings. I understood the logo of the paragliding school. Spirit liftoff.
Goose pimples sprang up on my arms. The coolness felt delicious. The air was a misty tonic of fog and salt and beach. I sniffed deeply. I felt so good, new. Waves rose and broke on kingly chunks of rock, rolled out, lifted again. Part of the water was sparkly and blue, the other part still sleeping in, reluctant and lazy with fog. Chip Jr. took too many pictures, none which would do the real scene justice. The sea and sky have a particular skill of eluding good photographs, like the tribesmen who believe their soul will be stolen if their picture is taken. Memory is the single way the experience can be captured and taken.
My mother had her arms wrapped around herself. “June is right,” she said as she looked out across the ocean. I got this sudden weird sense that I was seeing just her, the essential her, not the mother her. “We all have this longing for something bigger than life.” Miz June, for her part, had stayed in the car with the other ladies. Her face was stuck out the rolled-down window, eyes closed and chin tilted to best breathe the air.
“Men go to sea,” Harold said. His hands were shoved down into his pockets.
“Women fall in love.”
“And then they leave you because you drink out of the milk carton.”
“I guess that’s June’s point,” my mother said. “It’s too much to expect that someone else can satisfy that space.”
“Mary left me after I finally got out of the Navy and started working as a chef. She hated the Navy.”
Chip Jr. took Harold’s picture. I thought it was a pretty rude thing to do, right whe
n Harold was remembering hard things. Mom squeezed Harold’s arm. I’d never thought of Harold that way before—vulnerable, with the capacity to be hurt. He seemed too capable for hurt.
“Why didn’t you marry again? I’m sure you had plenty of chances.”
“Too goddamned ornery.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. In the excitement of leaving, he’d forgotten his razor at home. “Too scared, to tell the truth.”
We went back to the car. Lillian had fallen asleep. It sure seemed like she slept a lot. Like babies do. Sleep was another thing that came back to us in a circle.
Peach decided that she needed to use the bathroom after all, and we waited for her to appear again on the little winding trail that led to the creaky wood stalls. The windbreaker couple ambled back to their Honda. An RV was parked beside us, CAPTAIN ED written in script on the back, though Captain Ed was nowhere to be seen. HOME OF THE BIG REDWOODS, a faded bumper sticker said. It had been stuck on with an extra layer of packing tape.
“Look.” Harold snickered.
Peach appeared. She had a trail of toilet paper stuck to her shoe, and it was following out from behind her, toilet paper with big dreams, pretending to be a bridal train.
“Those places ought to be illegal,” she said, and gave a fake shiver.
The toilet paper had come loose. It looked abandoned and somehow sad lying there on the ground. “Ruby, pop out and pick that up,” my mother said. Chip Jr. poked my leg to point out that I had just won the crappy job lottery, as if I hadn’t noticed. I swatted him, made sure when I returned to throw the wadded-up ball into his lap. He batted it back at me. That toilet paper was having the time of its life. Sometimes it pays to make an escape attempt.
The road seemed to get narrower and curvier, as the scenery grew even more dramatic. The rocks became numerous and boastful, the crashing waves more forceful. The cypress trees that dotted the coastline were windblown into odd shapes, with branches thrust away from the sea as if they’d turned to run from the wind and gotten caught by a witch casting a frozen spell.
“We’re probably only an hour or so away. Is everyone okay?” my mother asked from the driver’s seat. Since the road had gone amusement park on us, everyone had gotten quiet.
“Puke fest,” Chip Jr. said. I felt around the crack of the seat, where the wad of T.P. had lain, forgotten for a moment, heading down into the Land of Disgusting Crud under the seat. Saved. I lobbed it, too hard, and it landed right back where it started at Peach’s foot.
“Crack the window if you feel queasy,” my mom said. “Do you need a Tic Tac?” She always offered us one if we were in the car with her and there was some kind of trouble. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Tic Tacs could cure boredom, sibling fighting, hunger and thirst, bodily needs, and being lost without a map.
“What’s that?” she said.
I looked out the window. But that wasn’t what she meant. I felt it a second later. A sputtering. Little jolts. It felt like the Lincoln was gasping for air.
“Oh, shit,” my mother said.
Lillian stirred, scooted up in her seat.
“What is it?” Miz June asked.
“Give it some gas,” Harold said.
“I am. That’s what I’m doing. Goddamn it.”
The car stopped sputtering. Suddenly there was only a gliding feeling, smooth and quiet. The engine seemed to have shut off.
“Shit, shit!” my mother said. She managed to pull to the shoulder, slammed on the brakes.
“Shit-shit,” Chip Jr. whispered. “Maracas played by some lady with fruit on her head.”
“Not now, you moron,” I said.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What are we, an hour away? And just look! Look around! Goddamn it to hell.”
She was right. In terms of being stranded, this wasn’t exactly the best place. Isolated curves behind us, a snake of road hugging the rugged coastline before us. The most beautiful view of the ocean you’d ever want to see, not that Mom could really notice that now.
“Oh, dear,” Miz June said. This was something a Tic Tac wouldn’t fix.
“And me, so high and mighty about not wanting a cell phone. Not wanting to be one of those people talking on them in the grocery store—‘fish sticks tonight, honey?’ And now is a time when you really need one. Great. Just great.” Mom put her head down on the steering wheel. It was not like Mom to get hysterical. This was bad.
“Do something, Harold,” Peach said.
He slid out of the front seat. We watched him through the window as he went to the front of the car and fumbled with the front latch. A moment later he disappeared behind the slope of the lifted hood.
Mom sighed and got out too. I wasn’t sure whether to follow or not. It was one of those times that either thing you do could be just as wrong. I opted to get out—I’d taken traffic safety the year before and learned how to change a tire. If one should happen to pop off while we were out there studying the engine, I’d know just what to do.
Harold was making noises as he looked at the engine, little hmms and ahs, as if he and the engine were having a little heart-to-heart talk. In my opinion, he should have been less sympathetic and more stern. We had somewhere we needed to be.
My leaving the car had apparently acted as a sign for everyone to abandon ship—Peach and Miz June and Chip Jr. all got out, leaving Lillian alone and looking as forlorn as a forgotten lunch box. Everyone made a half circle around the engine, waiting for it to do something miraculous, give birth maybe, or spout the secrets of the universe.
“Hmmm,” Harold said.
“You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?” Peach said.
“Not really,” Harold admitted. “Actually, no.”
Mom raked her fingers through her hair, trying to untangle the regrets that I’m sure were forming. “Okay!” she said decisively. Nothing more came, though. As a strategy, it needed some improvement.
“Excuse me,” Miz June said.
We looked at her. She spun the pearls of her necklace with one hand.
“I think I may know what the trouble is,” she said.
“Thank God,” my mother said.
“I neglected to mention something when you took over the wheel, Ann. We were a little low on gasoline.”
“We have half a tank,” Mom said.
“We always have half a tank, dear.” Miz June was retreating into old lady talk. She was probably afraid of being thumped by the whole gang of them. “What I mean to say is, the gauge is broken. It always stops at the halfway mark. Chester Delmore mentioned this when he gave me the car. Of course, he gave me his number to call him if I ever got stranded, which is probably why he didn’t fix it beforehand. I’ve been counting the mileage in my head, but it slipped my mind when you took over the wheel.”
“Well, Chester Delmore is a little far now for a rescue mission,” Peach said.
“I’m truly sorry,” Miz June said.
My mother sighed. “It was a mistake.”
The wind whipped around, flapping the old people’s pant legs. I knew what this meant from Cummings Road. “A truck is coming,” I said.
Actually, it was a Trailways bus. It lumbered around the corner, came toward us. It was filled with lots of fuzzy gray heads, too. It looked like a giant caterpillar in there. Harold waved one arm. They all turned to look our way. I could picture the tour guide inside on his microphone. And on your right, you’ll see a stranded automobile. Notice the bunch of idiots helplessly beside it. This area is particularly noted for its abundance of stranded idiots, dating back to the stranded idiot infestation of the early 1800s . . . He drove slowly past and disappeared out of sight.
“Thanks a lot, you old son of a gun,” Harold yelled to the back of the bus.
“Boy, that sure fixed him,” Peach said.
“Put a cork in it, heifer.”
“Back at you, stretcher case.”
“Corpse.”
“‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow,’”
Peach sang. She stuck out her stomach out. “Ho, ho, ho.”
“Ooh, that got me.”
“Okay, enough,” my mother said. She held up both hands as if she’d just been arrested. Rings of sweat were starting to form under her arms. We waited in tense silence. Moments passed. More moments.
“Car!” Miz June called.
A convertible, no less. Woman driving, the man next to her. Money. Cell phone jackpot. They probably had two.
We waved and called. Both waved back heartily and drove on.
“I can’t believe it,” my mother said.
“What did they think, we were the greeting committee?” Peach said.
Harold put on a blank expression. He imitated the moronic wave of the convertible drivers to imaginary passing cars.
“Oh, despair,” Miz June said.
We waited for a long time. Peach and Mom finally got Lillian out of the car. It seemed like forever, to the point where everything you can’t have—bathroom, food—suddenly begins to nag you with immediate need. I wished I’d gone back at the scenic lookout. The ocean roared in and out. The rocks sat patient, as they’d done forever. The road was still as a painting.
“If anyone tells Mrs. Wilson-now-Mrs. Thrumond this part, they’re dead,” Peach said.
“I’m thirsty,” Chip Jr. whispered to me.
“Drink your spit,” I said.
But I was thirsty too, and tired of looking at that dotted white line and imagining cars that weren’t there. Where had everyone gone, anyway? Where was the couple in the windbreakers? Captain Ed? The people in the cars parked at every rest stop? The trucks full of farm workers?
“This isn’t going to work,” my mother said. “We could be here forever. Maybe I should start walking.”
“I wish someone would call me a cab,” Peach said.
“You’re a cab,” Harold said. He chuckled. At least someone still had a sense of humor.
