by Jodi Picoult
“Not here it isn’t,” he says, and he walks back to the MG. “This car here I’ll give you for one thousand.”
Rebecca turns to me with incredibly sad eyes, meant for Tall Neck to see. “It’s too much money, isn’t it, Mama?”
“It’s okay, honey. We can go somewhere else. There’s lots of places to stop on the way to Hollywood.”
“Five hundred,” Tall Neck says, “and that is my last offer.”
A woman drives into the station in a lemon-colored van and pulls in front of the gas pump. Tall Neck excuses himself to fill the tank. Rebecca beckons me closer to the car, and I climb over the door less agilely than she did, and sit in the driver’s seat. “Where did you learn to tap dance?” I asked.
“School. Gym class. I had a choice of tetherball or tap.” She leans against my shoulder. “So you think I’ll make it on Broadway?”
“I don’t know if you’d make it in Poplar, to tell you the truth. But you did a nice job of snowing this guy.” I begin to fiddle with the radio dial (broken) and the shift (sticks on reverse). Rebecca opens up the glove compartment, which is empty, and reaches under the seat to find a lever for moving it back. She pulls out a manila envelope, dusty, which has been wedged into the springs underneath.
“What’s this,” she says, opening the clasp. She pulls out bills—twenties, all of them, and as her eyes grow wide I grab the envelope from her.
I start to count quickly, before Tall Neck finishes his transaction. “There’s over six hundred here,” I tell Rebecca. “That’s what I call cash back financing.” Rebecca, who sees the van pull away, stuffs the envelope back into the springs below the seat. “Is this really the one you want?” I say loudly, as Tall Neck approaches. Rebecca nods. “Well, Happy Birthday then.”
“Oh Mama!” Rebecca squeals, and she throws her arms around me. She breaks away from my embrace to pump Tall Neck’s hand up and down. “Thank you, oh, thank you so much!”
“I’ll get the title,” Tall Neck says, and he limps towards the concrete block building that must serve as an office.
Rebecca smiles until he closes the door behind him and then she turns to me. “Let’s get out of this dump.” She leans her head back against the seat and holds her hand to her throat. “Does anybody tap dance anymore?”
Tall Neck reappears with a manila envelope that looks much like the treasure under the seat, which makes me wonder if this isn’t some stash of his he has forgotten about. I rifle through the cash. “You should really keep your money in a bank,” I tell him. “You never know if you’re going to get held up.”
He laughs, showing spaces where he has no teeth. “Not out here. Tourists don’t come to Poplar. And,” he points to a shotgun propped next to the gas pump, “robbers know better.”
I smile weakly. “Well,” I say, wondering if he’ll shoot at us as we leave, realizing he’s left money in our car, “thanks for your help.”
Rebecca has been moving all our possessions from the back of the station wagon. She takes the duffel bag out of the back seat and the maps from the glove compartment and tosses them in the tiny trunk of the new car. “Look for me in the movies!” Rebecca calls to the man. We pull alongside the station wagon, expecting to feel some sort of remorse, the way you feel like you are leaving a piece of yourself behind whenever you trade in an old car. But this one reminds me of Oliver, and of leaving, and I don’t think I will miss it much at all.
“Mom,” Rebecca urges, “we’re going to miss the audition.” She reaches her arms over her head as we plow back through the field, which is easier this time because we have cleared a path. The weeds climb right inside the car, since we have the top down, and Rebecca picks them as they whip her across the chest and the face, creating a bouquet in shades of purple. “This is some car,” she screams, her words lost in the rush of the wind.
It is a lot of fun. It’s less clunky than the station wagon, that’s for sure—I keep looking in the rearview mirror and expecting to see another half-length of car. There is just enough room for me and Rebecca. “So whose money do you think that is?”
“I think it’s ours now,” Rebecca says. “Some mother you are. Turning me into a liar and a thief.”
“You turned yourself into a liar; I didn’t command you to do a tap recital. And as for being a thief, well, technically we bought the car, including anything that happened to be inside it.” Rebecca looks at me and laughs. “Okay, so it’s a little dishonest.” A runaway reed scratches against my cheek, leaving a raised mark. “I think the money belonged to an heiress who had fallen in love with her groundskeeper.”
Rebecca laughs. “You must write plots for All My Children in your spare time.”
“So the groundskeeper sees the baron approaching with the body of the woman he loves and has to decide whether to take off with the car or to grieve over the woman. And of course he stays—”
“Of course.”
“—and is shot by the baron, who then drives the car to a deserted town in Montana where it is not likely to be found, and moves his estate to Estonia under an assumed identity.” I take a deep breath, proud of my story. “What do you think?”
“Number one, how did the money get into the car, then, if the woman never had a chance to get it before she was knocked off? Number two, no idiot in his right mind would take a bullet just because his girlfriend has been killed too. If he really loved her he’d go off and live the life they’d planned together.” Rebecca shifts in her seat and inadvertently knocks the rearview mirror. “You’re a hopeless romantic, Mom.”
“Well, whose money do you think it is?”
Rebecca starts to throw the flowers from the bouquet she’s collected in the air, one by one. They seem to fly away as if they have lives of their own. “I think that Indian guy put his savings account in the car a long time ago, so long that he’s completely forgotten. He’s probably after us in the blue Jeep right now.”
“That’s lousy,” I tell her. “That’s hardly a good story at all.”
“If you want to spice it up, then maybe he got the money from robbing a bank. Which would explain why he doesn’t keep his cash there in the first place.” Rebecca cocks her head to one side. “Now that we’re rich, what are we going to do to celebrate?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Take a shower. Get another pair of underwear. And other luxuries like that.”
“We should buy some clothes,” I agree. “Not that the selection around here is going to match our style.” Some style. I’ve been wearing the same dirty shirt of Oliver’s for four days, and Rebecca has been sleeping in the bathing suit she wears all day.
“So we’ll go shopping the next town we find.”
“The next town that looks like a town,” I clarify.
“The next town that has a store.” Rebecca pushes her hands against her stomach. “When did we have breakfast?”
“Two hours ago,” I say. “Why?”
Rebecca curls into a ball, her head on the armrest beside the stick shift. Here she doesn’t have the room for movement the station wagon allowed her. “My stomach hurts. Maybe I’m not hungry. Maybe I ate a bad egg or something.”
“Do you want to stop?” I turn to look at her; she’s a little green.
“No, just keep driving.” Rebecca closes her eyes. “It’s not so bad. It comes and goes.” She kneads her hands in a knot, and presses it against her stomach.
For about half an hour, Rebecca falls asleep, which makes me feel better because I know she is no longer in pain. This is the mark of a mother; I am able to feel what she feels, to hurt when she hurts. Sometimes I believe that in spite of the traditional birth, Rebecca and I were never disconnected.
She has not missed much, being asleep. We have passed the border into North Dakota, and we seem to be leaving the great purple swells of mountains behind us.
“Are we there yet?” Rebecca rolls into a sitting position, pushing her hair away from her face where it has unraveled into thin str
ings. She folds her legs into her habitual sitting position, and then she screams.
I swerve the car onto the shoulder of the road and brake violently. “What’s the matter?”
Rebecca reaches between her legs and lifts her hand and on it there is blood.
“Oh, Rebecca,” I say. “Relax. You just got your period.”
“That’s all?” she says, dazed. “Is that all?”
She starts to smile, and then she actually laughs a little. I help her stand up outside the car and we survey the damage: her bathing suit is covered with a spreading brown stain and there is some blood on the vinyl MG seat. I wipe this clean with a rag from the trunk, and then Rebecca and I take a walk further into the flatlands on the side of the road. There are no cacti or brush to hide behind here, but then again there aren’t many passing cars either. We take my pocketbook, which Rebecca, thank God, had remembered to grab in San Diego, and rummage through it for a tampon or a sanitary napkin. I am hoping for a napkin; I don’t want to have to explain the use of a tampon. When I find one I help Rebecca position it in the bottom of her bathing suit. “We’ll get you something else to wear at the next store.”
“This is disgusting,” Rebecca says. “This is like a diaper.”
“Welcome to womanhood.”
“Listen, Mom.” Rebecca looks at me sidelong. “Don’t give me any of those talks about how I’m growing up, all right? I mean, I’m fifteen and I must be the last girl in school to get my period, which is bad enough. I know all about sex, so I don’t want the responsibility lecture either, agreed?”
“No problem. But if you get cramps again, let me know. I’ll give you Midol.”
Rebecca smiled. “I’ve been wanting this to happen for so long, you know? So I could get boobs. I can’t believe this is what I’ve been waiting for.”
“Someone should tell you when you reach twelve that it’s no great shakes.”
“I feel like an idiot. I thought I was dying.”
“When it happened to me I said the same thing. I didn’t even tell my mother. I just went to lie down on my bed and folded my arms across my chest and expected that I would die before the day was out. Joley was the one who found me, and got your grandmother, and then she gave me all those lectures you don’t want me to give you.”
We reached the car and Rebecca hesitates before sitting down. “Do I have to sit there?” she says, although it is clean.
“You’re the one who wanted the sports car.” I watch her climb in and adjust herself in her seat several times, getting used to the sanitary napkin. “Okay?” I ask, and she nods without looking at me. “Let’s find a place to go shopping.”
Rebecca leans her head against her arm, propped on the open window. There is so much I wish I could warn her about; the chain reaction that is a consequence of this event. The acquisition of hips, for example, and the discovery of men, and falling in love, and falling out of it.
Rebecca, suddenly self-conscious, sifts through the glove compartment she has already inventoried. She is looking for something, or pretending to look for something, that isn’t there at all. She closes her eyes, letting the wind unleash her hair and blow the garbage twist-tie in the direction of Montana.
30 REBECCA
July 18, 1990
The people wearing white T-shirts marked CREW ask us to join the line of cars. It stretches like a snake along the dock in Port Jefferson. While we are waiting my mother makes up stories about the people she passes in surrounding cars. A woman with a baby beside her is going to visit her long-lost aunt in Old Lyme, the one for whom the baby is named. A businessman is really a government spy, checking on the U.S. Coast Guard. Sometimes I wonder about my mother.
“This way,” a man yells. My mother puts the car into gear. She rolls it up a side ramp and into the hinged mouth of the ferry. It is like we are driving right into the jaws of a great white whale.
We are beckoned by another crew member and told to park the car halfway up a steep ramp on the side. There are two symmetrical ramps, and cars are parked on them and beneath them. I had been wondering how they would fit us all in.
It is a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute ride. We spend it on the upper deck, lying on our backs on the compartment that holds life jackets. Between this and the convertible I am starting to get some color. Even my mother is looking tan.
“Well,” she announces, “we’ll be in Massachusetts first thing in the morning. We should get to Uncle Joley’s by noon.”
“It’s about time. It feels like we’ve been gone forever.”
“I wonder what it is he does on an apple orchard?” my mother says. “We didn’t even have a garden as kids. Well, we tried, but everything kept dying. We blamed it on the New England soil.”
“How did he get it?”
“Get what?”
“The job. How did he get a job, without any experience farming?”
My mother flips onto her back and shields her eyes against the sun. “He didn’t quite tell me. Something to do with a visit, I think, and this guy hired him. The guy who runs the place. Supposedly he’s younger than Joley, even. He took over from his father.” She sits up. “You know the types. The real ambitious ones, who’ve wanted to be farmers ever since they were knee-high to a beetle.”
“A grasshopper. Knee-high to a grasshopper.”
“Whatever,” my mother sighs.
“How can you pass judgment,” I say to her. “You don’t know the man, and you don’t know anything about growing apples.”
“Oh, Rebecca,” my mother laughs. “How hard could it be?”
The ferry is gushing a backwash and slowly turning 180 degrees. That way, when we dock, we can drive right off. From what I can see, Bridgeport does not look like someplace to write home about.
It seems as if every other line of cars gets to drive off before we do. Plus, since we are halfway up a ramp we cannot see if the line is moving. We cannot see anything but the Ford Taurus in front of us. It is very dusty and someone has etched “WASH ME” on the back window. Finally a man wearing a CREW shirt points to the car and motions that we can move ahead. But the Taurus in front of us, instead of pulling forward, has shifted into reverse. It slams us squarely on the front fender. I can hear the metal crunch.
“Jesus Christ,” my mother says. “It figures.”
“Well, aren’t you going to stop?” The man in the CREW shirt is yelling something I can’t hear. The overall gist of it is: Move, lady. My mother pulls off the boat with the fender hanging half on and half off. She drives to a spot out of the way, on the right, where the Taurus is waiting.
She gets out of the car and walks in front to see the damage. “We can drive. We just won’t look very pretty.” She tries to bend the fender back into place with her bare hands. “I suppose you can’t ask for much when you’ve paid five hundred dollars.”
The driver gets out of the Taurus, which hasn’t been damaged. “Oh, dear,” he says. “I’ll certainly pay for this. I can give you cash, right now, if you like. Or we can exchange licenses.” He wrings his hands in front of himself, so upset that it is almost funny.
“Well,” my mother says, “it would probably cost at least four hundred dollars to fix. Don’t you think so, honey?” she calls to me.
“At least. And the car being brand new, and all.”
“Brand new?” the man gasps. He doesn’t notice all the rust spots, apparently. “I am so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry. I didn’t mean to put it into reverse. Stupid, stupid me.” He bends down over our twisted fender and smooths his fingers over it. “I don’t have the money on me, but if you follow me I can get it. And I don’t mind giving the cash up front, not at all. Less points on the old insurance, after all.”
“We really don’t have a lot of time,” my mother says.
“Oh, it’s just up the road. I’m Ernest Elkezer, the curator for the Barnum Museum on Main Street here. It’s after hours, but I’ll let you look around while I open the safe. It’s the least I can do.�
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My mother gets into the driver’s seat and starts the ignition. “Can you believe this? The car was free, and now we’re getting a bonus four hundred dollars.” She turns her face towards the sun. “Rebecca, baby, the gods are smiling on us today!”
The P. T. Barnum Museum is next door to a modern city building. It is strange, walking up to this huge door which is locked and being let inside. I feel like I am doing something I shouldn’t. “You know Bridgeport was the birthplace of General Tom Thumb,” Mr. Elkezer says. “Full-grown he was only twenty-eight inches tall.”
He switches on the lights—one, two, three—and the dark hall comes to life. “Make yourselves at home. Plenty of interesting circus memorabilia here. You won’t want to miss the third floor.”
The third floor is almost entirely covered with a miniature display of a big top. Three red rings sit in the sawdust center. Suspended over one is a net for the trapeze artists. There are heavy drums tucked into the corners for the elephants to stand on. A thick, knotted tightrope is stretched overhead. “If it was a little bit larger, I’d try it out,” my mother says, one foot already in the display. When I close my eyes, I can see the audience. Red flashlights on lanyards, circling over the heads of kids.
I leave my mother and walk around the perimeter of the mock circus. There is a display about Jumbo the elephant, whose skeleton (it says) is on display in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Now that would be something interesting. I lean closer to see the photograph taken of the huge skeleton, which has a man standing beside it as a reference measure. The man is Ernest Elkezer himself. Just as I am reading the caption, Elkezer approaches with a wrinkled manila envelope.
“Jumbo was my favorite,” he says. “Came over a century ago, on a ship called the Assyrian Monarch. Barnum paraded him up and down Broadway, with a big brass band and all the fanfare you could imagine.”
My mother walks over, and Elkezer hands her the envelope absentmindedly. “Back then, most people had never seen an elephant. So it wasn’t really that he was so tremendous, but that he was here. And then three years later he was hit by a speeding freight train. Other elephants that were crossing the tracks got knocked out but survived. Jumbo, though, well, Jumbo didn’t make it.”
