“That’s Latin,” Marcus said, and because he knew he had just said too much and he could not find a way to stop talking and to get the taste of his pipe-dream diatribe out of his mouth, he translated the phrase for Maria, who said, “Right.”
“Sorry, I guess you knew that.”
“Not that hard to figure out. Anyway, back to your sister.”
“Yeah. Annie. So all the overdue notices and the warnings and the foreclosure letter came to Route One, Box Nine-A, Silt, North Carolina, and from there the lot of it went into a Dumpster in an alley behind a place called Love Wigs in what passes for downtown Silt.”
“Okay,” she said again, and her saying it was starting to irritate Marcus, as there was nothing okay about it, any of it, and yet he did not mind being irritated at Maria, for it took the heat off him, if briefly. “Wasn’t she in on the flytrap thing?”
“The flytrap thing,” Marcus repeated, and not in a nice way.
“She must have known what you were doing with the land, right? It must have taken years for you to start your flytrap farm and this museum?”
“She knew I was raising flytraps. I did not tell her about the educational center. I meant to, but we don’t really talk that much. And you don’t need to keep saying ‘okay,’ okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “None of my business, and you don’t have to answer, but just so I understand, um, the gravity here, was the land worth a lot of money?”
“The initial loan was for nine hundred thousand. Since the bank had no problem lending me that amount against the value of the land, I’d say it’s worth a good deal more. Some of it is swamp, but there’s so much cypress back in there that the logging rights alone could have paid for the center had I been inclined to cut down a single tree. And there’s a good deal of river footage. Even though the river is nothing like the one we floated down, they’re starting to develop down there now.”
“Would you sell to developers?”
“Not if I had made a go of it selling traps and running the center. But I certainly thought about it. And I probably ought to have. As banal as it sounds, sometimes you have to do things you swore you’d never do.”
“Like thank the town fathers of Fort Stockton for that hideous display?” she said, pointing to a roadrunner constructed of painted rocks on the bank of the overpass, signal for their exit onto back roads.
“Sort of like that, but way worse. Anyway, stop at a gas station. I want some beef jerky and also I want to drive.”
When he got back into the car he offered her a stick of jerky, and for once she did not deride his awful diet and catalog, as she had several times before, all the awful things lurking in a solitary serving of beef jerky. “I’m not hungry, thanks,” she said from far away, against the passenger-side door. Her demeanor, suddenly, was the same as when she’d stopped Her Lowness in the middle of Pecos Street and waited for him to drive them out of town.
He did not say, Did something happen while I was gone? even though he thought it. Whatever had put her where she was had nothing to do with his presence or absence. He figured that whatever had made her want to leave town in the first place had settled in again upon their return. As if they had not left? This made Marcus feel worse than he’d felt when confessing that he had squandered his sister’s inheritance and hadn’t gotten around to notifying her. He remembered wondering, afloat on the river, suddenly blissful, whether Maria was another Monte Gale, the beginning of some impending unrest. For the first time since they’d left town, Marcus fought off the fast black tide.
After five silent minutes she began to talk. She started with the day she’d first spoken to Randy in the cafeteria her junior year and ended with the note her mother had left two days earlier on the place mat. Her story covered the distance from the interstate back to town. Marcus did not so much as nod. She would not have noticed if he had. She spoke not to him nor to the highway shimmering ahead but to the desolate miles outside. Her story took place along these roads and it was as barren a story as he’d heard in his life, but the words out of her mouth made this place she’d returned to make even more sense. It explained a lot, her faraway and unfading loss, her years of displacement, but one thing it did not explain—at least not in a way that was instantaneous and total, like that thing he’d heard described as an epiphany—was why Maria had chosen him to share the Buick. There seemed to Marcus, after listening to her tale, as many reasons why she wouldn’t do it as would. The obvious reasons—taking a risk, trusting a man back in this place she’d had to flee because she’d insisted on both motion and volition—seemed far too obvious. He wasn’t about to ask her, What does all this have to do with me? He wasn’t about to ask her anything. The questions she had posed about his story trafficked in facts: Did the bank notify your sister? How much was the land worth? But her story did not seem made of fact. It wasn’t so much what had happened as how she had let it linger.
Marcus would stop short of a reaction. He had no idea what it would be like to be a young, smart girl and return home with your mother from the clinic to find your boyfriend dead behind a camper. He would not offer any platitudes. You do what makes sense, and if it does not make sense, you make it make sense. This seemed the only advice (and reassurance) he could dispense. What did he know? He was wrong about so many things. The Alamo was no different from the Flytrap Educational Center. Science was as easily skewed as history. It was not the product he was selling, the so-called narrative he had to offer; he had spent too much money. The note came due. He was no businessman. If he had any business sense he would not have gone in on a used Buick with a woman who stopped said Buick in the middle of the street, oblivious to traffic backing up behind her. The plant was not animal. Rebecca did not leave him. Marcus was not going to disappear into Mexico. There was life and there was the “visualized narrative” of his life.
All he said to Maria was, “I am so sorry.” But he knew it was inadequate and what he was apologizing for was how he had started out sympathizing with her tragic past and ended up obsessing over his own.
Maria was silent all the way back to town and through it, until he pulled into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen.
“Why are you stopping here?” she said.
“I can walk back to the hotel from here.”
“But it’s your day,” she said.
Marcus counted back to prove it wasn’t.
“We can’t use one of your days on my trip,” she said.
“But I was on the trip, too, remember? You were showing me Texas.”
“I should be apologizing to you for even suggesting I was some kind of tour guide. You know why I wanted to go to San Antonio. Take the car. It’s your day. In fact, I owe you a few days. I owe you a week. Take it for as long as you need it.”
Marcus thought about what he should say. What he wanted to say was, I can’t believe we’re back here arguing about who should take the car. Why even leave if we’re going to act the same way the moment we roll back into town? But he did not say that, because he could not say it. After what she had told him about the boy she loved and the baby they made and the boy dying and her leaving, he could not assume, ever again, that the way she acted had anything to do with him. And it wasn’t as if nothing had changed. He wondered whether he would ever have gotten to hear her story had he not written that note on the dirty bag, and if his note had not followed so closely her mother’s. His own response, after not one but two rejections, would have been to blow everyone off and head to Mexico. He did what made sense to him, but if it did not make sense he did not try too hard to make it make sense.
“Okay, I’ll take the car today. But I’m going to drive you home.”
“Fine,” she said. Before she would have said no. But now she did not seem to care if he saw where she lived. He did not let himself wonder whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, because it was just a thing and water rose from the gutters and she was giving him directions now to her house, where she lived with her mo
ther. The storm drains were clogged was the problem. The town was not used to rain and the black water had nowhere to run off.
“Right on Pecos to San Jacinto, left on Nueces, right on One Eighteen,” she said. “It’s a couple of miles out.”
As he pulled into Maria’s drive, Marcus tried not to stare at the Airstream. He would have thought they’d have gotten rid of it years ago, but there it was, alongside the drive. He tried to look away but the sun hit the edge of it and turned it into a mirror flashing a semaphore indecipherable but impossible to ignore. When he realized he was trying to decipher it, he turned quickly and in shame to Maria, but she was looking where he’d looked.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s your day.”
Four
Pinto Canyon, Texas, 2004
The way Marcus apologized for looking at the Airstream—as if her story, the details of what happened behind it, had turned it into something he ought not even glance at—was what led Maria, her bag still in the drive, Marcus and Her Lowness just out of sight, to climb the steps and open the door and peer in.
Trapped air, and everywhere dust so thick the wood paneling—once cleaned weekly by her father and reeking of Murphy oil soap, an odor that ever after put Maria in this camper—was the wan gray of lint.
Only twice did she remember the Airstream leaving the yard: Once, the family went to Balmorhea, where she and Manny splashed around in the roped-off shallow end under their father’s care while their mother did God knows what a quarter mile away in the RV park. Another time her father took them down to Big Bend. Her mother stayed home. Manny had been allowed to bring a friend, which meant Maria slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, the two older boys whispering and giggling into the night on the foldout sofa above her, her father snoring, then not snoring, then snoring so wildly she feared he was dying, in the double bed at the other end of the camper.
Not until she left home did Maria understand the camper as an emblem of her parents’ stalled marriage. Her father had bought the camper from a coworker before Manny was born. They were going to hitch it to his truck and take off every summer for two or three weeks. Her father thumbtacked a map of the country on the wall above the double bed, and Maria knew that if she made it farther than the threshold, she would find the map there still, yellowed, its edges curled, looking like a relic, a newspaper from another era. Careful circles faint but still visible around the places her father had planned on taking them: Yosemite, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains. The usual destinations for middle-class families for whom hotels or even motor courts were held in suspicion because they belonged to another rung. The leisure class. Leisure, to her father, turned out to be sitting under the carport grilling chilies, or burning trash with a six-pack and a buddy who saw the smoke and stopped by to bum a beer, or leaning against a souped-up Nova talking cars with his daughter’s boyfriend. I like to sleep in my own bed, she imagined her father saying to her mother in defense of his purchase, for surely her mother had put up a fight, as she was finally the reason the Airstream came to rest in the yard. But her father had also bought it for her mother, for she certainly wasn’t going to stay in any motel. “Why would I want to spend one minute on vacation in a damn motel when all I do every day is cater to people who expect, because they’ve rented a room, for everything to be like it is back at home, except better?” her mother would say. “Because in a motel they don’t have to pick up after themselves or straighten up at all, and my land, the way people will mess up a motel room, it’s nasty. No, thank you, I know way too much about what goes on in those rooms to ever sleep in one.” And so her father, in an attempt to satisfy his curiosity about somewhere other than West Texas (or maybe it had nothing to do with actual places, for Maria doubted that had they ever actually made it to the Great Smokies, they would have done much but set up in some campsite and eat what they would have eaten at home, and their father would have burned trash in the campfire and her mother would have scrubbed the tiny shower, which was actually the entire bathroom, or cleaned the tiny oven or gotten down on her knees and scrubbed the linoleum floor while Maria and Manny played the same games they might have played at home), knowing that his wife would not stay in a motel, saved his money and bought the Airstream and brought it home one day and announced his plans to do something different from the day-to-day that had overtaken each of them, singly, as well as their marriage, that abstract union they had celebrated in a simple ceremony in a small Methodist church in Valentine, and—Maria was just now realizing this, as seeing the inside of this camper after all these years, breathing its stale air, opened up to her the secret, shadowy spaces of her parents’ early marriage, the things they wanted for their union and they things they wanted for themselves—the camper was maybe his most ambitious and perhaps final shot at fulfilling his fantasy of a future with this ranch hand’s daughter, this white girl he met at a dance and courted for six months and married and loved even when he knew he ought to have found someone else to love.
The camper, like her father, ended up hanging around the house long after it should have, long after it ought to have belonged to someone who would have taken it somewhere, slept in it, cooked on its tiny two-burner stove.
Maria had been the last to set foot in it. She did not know this until she opened the door and stood so tentatively a few steps inside.
But before she let herself think of that, of Randy, of the last time she’d inhabited this space, of ham thick and gelatinous and equally thick cheese, tasteless but chewy, of mayonnaise and spongy white bread, of what had happened behind the camper, she thought of campers in backyards all across West Texas, of how she’d seen them all her life and never seen them for what they were, mobile living spaces marooned permanently in backyards. Maybe it wasn’t just here but in certain neighborhoods and small towns all across the country. Bought to pull behind pickups, to go (places different from home, beautiful places, mountains, beaches, lakes, parks) and to stay (sleep in my own bed, cook my own food), symbol of the hopes of newlyweds, the wishes of young married couples, of people who fall in love and think love is always going to feel the way it did, first flush, can’t sleep or eat for want of you, more of you, I don’t even feel like I am in my own skin when I am with you, it’s like we’re sharing the same space and every night is so new and different and so like a motel room in another city, the air-conditioning cranked up without a thought of how we’re going to pay the bill, and all those channels on the television, and here is a hair dryer, let’s take a bath and point this gun of hot air at each other’s skin and then let’s jump still wet in the bed and let’s take all the shampoo and lotion and let’s wear shower caps and nothing else. And so the trucks were trailer-hitched and the campers were outfitted and their tiny cabinets were filled with extra blankets, board games, bug spray, sparklers, and let’s just take off and go, it’s us—me, you, the children we made together who are each of us and us together, our future, the gift we give to the world—against the rest of them. Driving along the interstate at dusk, they watched the sun set behind the mountains of America, and the sky striped with yellows and pinks causes the father to say to his wife and children, My God, will you look at that! and life intersects with the dream you had about what life would be like for you and the one you chose to spend your life with. But after a time, maybe two or three years, five at the most, of occasional trips, you outgrow the camper, it feels cramped, the kids get older, there’s no privacy, you can hear everything, and who wants to lie awake at night, ten feet away from their mother and father sharing a bed, and listen in the dark to their parents breathing and shifting in sleep, and what parents want to sleep in pajamas and nightgowns after so many years of slipping naked under the sheets? The kids get older, they want to stay home with their friends, they want to hang out at the pool, they can’t miss this game or that dance, they have lessons, or practice, and who wants to have to deal with kids so sullen and brooding in such tight qua
rters when it is supposed to be, after all, a vacation, which is supposed to be fun and filled with discoveries? Weeds reach the bottom of the camper; the tires go flat. Maybe an errant teenager or an ailing grandparent moves into the camper. Mostly their surfaces gather dust and the carcasses of expired insects.
Maria stepped farther inside the camper. For years she did not cry. She never asked people for anything. Everything she had, she earned. Kids get older, she said to Randy, starting to sob. They change, and when they do, everything changes. Or everything has already changed and the way the kids change makes it all the more obvious how we might have changed. Randy loved this camper. “I want to go to the Grand Canyon,” he said. “After I build our house, we can get a camper like this one and park it wherever we want.” He might have tried to buy this very camper. And Randy would have been the only person her father would have considered selling it to. In the afternoons when her parents were at work they would come here after school and eat sandwiches and drink Pepsi. She pushed farther into the camper and there was the bed still made with the awful orange-and-green polyester comforter. She walked to it and sat down on it. In the afternoons when her parents were at work she and Randy would lie in this bed and practice being grown up. I want this part of life to be over, they said to each other with their young bodies. It will always be like this, Randy said to her with his hips as he moved inside her, and she said, Like this, as she wrestled him over on his back and made him sit up with his head against the map of the United States of America and sat in his lap and lifted herself up and down and grabbed his head and brought his lips to her breasts, and there were so many ways to say to each other, I want this part to be over, I want to move on to the next part, and she said it back to him every time, she never said no with her body, she only said it afterward in the car high up in the mountains overlooking the twinkling valley.
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