Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

  The awful unease is gone from me by the evening. It’s gone before the handshakes and the laughing and the two-stepping has begun. I’m calmed during the song and the long walk down to where Son is waiting for me.

  The spell, or whatever you might say it was, has passed.

  Likely it was fear that started it. Or it might have been girlish habit or tendency. Or it could have been being mixed up or overwhelmed or even being just tired. Or maybe any number of things. Whatever the feeling was, it came over me like some great alter in the weather when I got into the backseat of the station wagon. My mother put her foot to the gas and we were off in a kickup of dust. She paid no heed to my abrupt quiet, as she must have been deep in some daydream of the notice that lay in store for her that day. She didn’t look back at me. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t say anything without something inside me breaking up and coming out in a kind of strange and embarrassing sound. We moved down the road inside a cloud of whirling earth, my stomach rocking in unsettling waves, and my mouth watering up with a worrisome taste. I took long deep breaths in to make the dizzy go away and the faint stop. I sat looking out at the world as it went wheeling by outside the window, feeling undone. I was overcome by a reckoning, is what I was, a kind of knowing, a kind of something that made me hesitate, made me want to say, Wait—say, Can’t I maybe stay a child for just a little time longer yet? Yet knowing too it was too late to back up and turn around now.

  I cleared my throat and hoped to stop shaking.

  We rode down Main Street. It seemed the longest ride I had ever taken, but we were already turning into the alameda before it seemed we should have been there. My mother parked the car in the shade of desert sycamore, and we got out and I gathered my train up and we walked out into the hot open sun of the plaza. A diamondback rattled out in front of us onto the footpath, and my mother and I cried out and shot back, watching the thing slither off into the nopal.

  You’d better decide to take it as a good-luck sign, she said.

  We hurried on into the courtyard and were soon inside the cool reprieve of the sanctuary. Chiseled figures hovered in the stillness above while on the ground busy women floated about with great concern for certainty, for detail and timing. I stood in the foyer, amid all this, trembling in vaulted shadow during the entire wait of the gathering, a heap of feelings welling up inside my chest and pushing my breath out in small and labored breaths. I stood alone in a thicket of confusion and the stirrings of goings-on, in the hard lope of my heart—a pounding so loud others surely could have heard it as well. Finally the building up of who knows what it was broke apart inside the hold of my throat. It spilled out when my mother—dressed for this occasion in a prom dress of mine, one that I would never wear now—came up to me and spoke a few sentimental and commonly said words right before the step and assemble of the ceremonial party started.

  I couldn’t keep it reined in anymore. The dark poured forth from my eyes and splotched up the bodice of the already stained dress. The mascara matted my lashes together and rolled down my cheeks, turning the world a bog and my face and dress a mess. Dark blotches would mark all the photographs of us that were made in testament to the day. I would later see me standing upright and smiling in the biddings to be fertile as the earth and happy until death.

  You are pale as a ghost, my mother said.

  There were all the people there. There were all the names that had been written in the book. There were the words we had been told to speak. There was the thin gold band ready to be fitted against the bright solitaire meant for it. There were all the wishes prepared for us, all the gifts set out on the table, a feast on display, a great fiesta awaiting. The band was ready to play.

  Son stood at the far other end from where I was, dressed up in a dark and stiff formal outfit not his, tugging at his shirtcuffs. But I cannot here recall having seen his face enough, as my mother was suddenly walking off ahead of me and blotting him out, coupled and arm in arm as she was with her young escort. There was a humming commotion among the guests, a resonance as of insects. A soprano’d voice cued me to move, and all the many heads turned back to watch as I walked toward them. I thought right then but too late that the song that had hooked me once was the wrong one to choose for today.

  I tried to let the melody calm me.

  The bridesmaids started out ahead, their gowns proudly homemade, their hair done up and laced with heliotrope and adam-and-eve. Then it was me. I walked alone. It was my way of doing things. I had said I wanted to walk it alone, as I had written but never heard back, though I held to the chance that my father might show at the last minute. Yet knowing I was born only a daughter and not a son—an old and piddling story, too many times told.

  So I walked alone now in the weight of that dress and in parched afternoon light, the dress so heavy and the air so dense it seemed I moved in slow motion, as though there were something from sleep I was harnessed to and trying to make my way forward in. I walked down that long aisleway, past all the town people who had come for the show and that I mostly didn’t know, their faces looking to me all one and a single blur of questioning. I walked on and on for what seemed a long time. I walked along to that wrong song. Pillars of dusty light filtered in through the tall windows and settled on the heads of the attending, bestowing them with a kind of otherworldliness. You should have seen everyone, the way they had come dressed up in their finery and niceties and frills. The women had come powdered and feathered and gloved, their hair twisted and braided and coiled, and there were pillboxes and bonnets and mantillas among them. The men wore their best-yoked jackets and leather vests, their silver bolo ties and turquoise studs, their tooled belts and rodeo buckles, their dress boots of lizard or snakeskin. They scratched at their starchy collets. They covered their crotches over with the flat of their felt hats.

  All were upstanding now.

  It was time to go on and do what we had decided.

  What I had decided.

  MY MOTHER CALLED the sheriff the first go-round. He showed up at the trailer and told me to get into his car, and I argued that I would not, and he said, You had better or else, and he said a few words more added to all this too. So I got in, mad as I was, and the sheriff delivered me back to her.

  This is some months before Son.

  Let me thank you personally, my mother said to the sheriff.

  Why tack a personally on for, I said, not asking a question.

  My mother’s way of keeping me with her was to say she was grounding me. She said I was to take the bus straight to campus, and after classes I was to go directly to the coffee shop for evening shift where she would come pick me up. It was home only after that, and that was it every night after work, no matter what. Her dictum lasted about a week before my anger at her began to stir about from where it was seated not so deeply. It spiraled up and out of me like a dustdevil. My mother was one great spouting horn of her own, coming at me with threats the way she did, with a potlid in her one hand and a spatula raised above her head with the other. I fired some words at her, hoping to knock her back, and this must have worked, as she was stopped in her fury and her face went suddenly deadpan. She wiped the froth off her chin with the back of a hand and she drove a cold hard look into my eyes that I won’t soon forget. She put the potlid and the spatula down and turned away.

  Just go, she said.

  The trailer I later found was on the far edge of town, parked on desert pavement out on a deserted lot. The earth was barren and hard, having been winnowed over the years by the sand and the wind. A gasoline station sat next to the lot, and with a telephone booth there if I would have needed it.

  I believed I wouldn’t need it.

  It was hot in the trailer on hot days out. It was hot in the trailer even on not hot days. I sat on the front stoop with a hand saluted to my forehead to keep the burn of the sun off my face. I listened to a fiery wind huffing through the bitterbrush and mesquite. The repeat of cicadas came from everywhere and who knows where, going on an
d on as they will in their constant song and trill of courtship and territory. I sat in thought of better days to come as hot gusts of wind scarved dust across the lot. I imagined lush woodlands and wild rivers and grassy fields. I thought of boys who played guitars and sang to me. I thought of all there was that had been left or lost or simply tossed away and forgotten.

  There was a dumpster that sat out across the lot. There would be picked-over bones and blackened peels and soiled diapers and such toppled out, no matter if the garbage had just been emptied from it or not. There was not much else around. Just a billboard at the side of the road with a cowboy pictured on it who held a coiled rope in his fist and a cigarette between his teeth. I thought about someday getting braces for my teeth, thinking how that might change everything for me in the right direction. I added money to come and counted up the weeks. I thought about the days and the places and the people gone and now far away.

  I picked a stick up. I tossed it to shoo a raggedy crowbird off the strewn garbage, and it kwok’d and lifted and paced. I swatted the flies away from my head. I looked for shade, a cool place. A truckload of fieldhands passed and there were those hisses and clucks you get, and I picked a rock up and pitched it at their wake of hopeless noise, choking on the choking cloud of dust they left behind.

  I was thirsty.

  I got up and wandered over to the gasoline station to buy a soft drink. There was an old card-table and some half-broken fold-down chairs under a single pecan tree there, and I sat and would drink my drink in the shade of it. I used the sweat of the cold bottle to wipe the dust off my face, and then I might rest my eyes on the empty phonebooth ahead of me, at the lovers’ names painted and scratched on the glass, at the book of pages yellowed and hanging abandoned inside on the chain, thinking how often I mistakenly heard the telephone in it ringing. Thinking how I would be sickened by someone feeling as sorry for herself as I was feeling sorry for me.

  WE MAKE THE first stop the trailer where the clothes I left are waiting arranged for me on the bed. It’s almost too small a space in this aluminum alleyway, not space enough for me and all this dress I’m fettered in. It takes a long time for Son to unbutton all the hundred tiny buttons down the back of it. Such frippery, he says. He’s drunk on wedding punch and he stumbles back and forth and the whole trailer rocks from side to side with us. His tongue is thick in his mouth and his fingers none too nimble and he mumbles and knits along the length of my spine, tail to nape, impatiently. He undoes the last button and holds up the heft of the dress, and I free myself from within and climb out and under from inside it. There is a whoosh of fabric to the floor, the tent of it collapsing in release, a great rush of breath as of a wind gust through desert brush.

  Son takes hold of me. He says, C’mon, Darlin’, we should let’s do it here, but I tell him I want to do it as these things are done on such a day as this. What we do will be held in memory, I say. For always, I say. So? he says. That’s good any way it goes, isn’t it? But he shrugs and lets me go and picks the borrowed suitcase of my things up and carries it out to the truck. I put my new travel dress on and follow after him, closing the door of the trailer the one last time.

  The night sky is filled brimful as a night sky can be, lit brightly as it is with clusters of planets and pulsating stars and marriages of galaxies, all of it within a wobble of dust and gas and debris unseen. There are the Dippers Little and Big tonight, a lovely Pleiades, and a throbbing red star out like a tiny heart. This is the stuff of which we are made, I say to Son, all that is of us is above us. We stand together looking upward, our mouths hung open as if to swallow what’s above down and into us. Looking out at the past in its far distance, where from there, here we are not.

  Let’s get a get-go, he says.

  He lets the truckbed down in a screech of metal and hinge. There’s a thump of a suitcase tossed in, a jingling ring of ringed keys, Son humming that wrong song the wrong way. He opens the door and acts to doff a hat, and I take the keys away, telling him he has too much punch in him to be driving out on the highway, and when the fun is just beginning for us. He says, Okeydokey, you are the wifey, Darlin’. We hop up and into the pickup and I pull us out of that empty lot, leaving the trailer behind, the dumpster, the billboard, the gas station, the card-table, and the fold-down chairs, leaving the lot of it behind.

  We drive out past the outskirts with the lights veiled upon the town and atwinkle in the distance. We take the highway west and come soon into a great arenal of sand, an arena of darkness, a kind of nothingness that goes on and on for miles and miles, making a person uncomfortable, distrustful. It is darker than dark in the night. Our headlights begin to flood saguaro and organ pipe and ocotillo. Bright coyote eyes wink like stars along the roadside, and startles of jackrabbits take cover in the brush. Desert rats dart to and fro in a rush to their middens—twig, bone, teeth, shell, toy and cob and fur, and whatever else they may be home to. Creeping things unnamed go every which way in a dash to sand hole or desert nest—timid creatures frightened by the rouse of our engine and the ricochet of our lights.

  Son jumps into a story about rabbit hunting with boyhood chums. He laughs about getting drunk and shooting twenty-twos from the windows of pickup trucks.

  My father always said to keep your eyes out the window on the broken line ahead if you’re feeling carsick and queasy, I say.

  Son slaps some kind of drum routine out on the dashboard.

  Why do guys always do that? I say.

  Do what? he says.

  He rolls his window down and lets the cool desert air in and we sit in silence for a while. In not too long a time we come into a sea of rippled dunes that crest and pyramid at our sides and attend us like guests for miles ahead. On the foreland in the distance lie the curved spines of the foothills, seeming to be beasts fallen to extinction at the earth line. We make bets on how far away we are in minutes from here to the pass, and our game carries us along for a good stretch of highway. After a time we go to naming the names of places to come that we have seen on the map, names such as Spring Valley and Torrey Pines, Oceanside and Riverside, Santa Clarita, Santa Rosa, Santa Jacinta, and Santa Whatnot, remembering Petaluma and Fortuna and Ventura, Red Bluff and Coos Bay, and not to forget Lincoln City or Fall City, Tumwater or Winslow, nor Astoria. We will move through names. We will move through valley and mesa, playa and canyon, grazing field and urban park, through shrubland and grassland and woodland, past chaparral and fumarole and peninsula, old-growth and clear-cut slopes, and we will move onward into so much of the world out in front of us we don’t know yet. Who might possibly be as happy as we are?

  A scratching of melody comes from the radio, chords rising open as the land that carries us, rhythm mimicking our passage down the road, harmony making this life seem it should be only that. We sing along to what songs have always been about—beginning, going on, breaking up, forgiving. We sing in missed words and broken phrases as glints of tiger moths fly at us like snow, streaking the windshield over.

  In time we begin to climb. We come to the top of the pass and into blue spruce, dwarf cedar, juniper. Just off the highway, lit up among a hush of trees, is the small lodge we have heard of and have chosen to stay at, for this our first night betrothed, a place that is just the beginning of all the places we have yet to get to. Yet believing there is no more joy in the getting there than there is in the going.

  Hold it while ye may.

  We get out of the pickup and breathe in the incense of pine air and woodsmoke. Our breath pales the dark and goes ghosting off between us. Above us is a canopy of trees, and through the tree holes there shines a luminous star. The stillness is certain here, compared to nights upon nights glutted with the high-pitched shrill of crickets—that hum in the ears that can buzz up the nerves. Except for the riffling of the creek alongside us now, the quiet is like something from out of a dream, making us want to whisper at one another in the dark to hold to the silence better, as if not to be waked from the time and the place we are i
n. A desire path cuts through the grass, and I point to it that we should take this shortcut way instead of the steps laid out ahead. There, the way through the trees, I say. Son takes off on the path into the dark ahead of me, and I turn to run and catch him when then comes a thwok, like the sound of a softball hit against a bat, and Son has run smack into the overhanging branch of a rambling tree. He’s laid out flat on the ground. Even sober he could not have seen it coming. I cover my mouth to mute my laughing and I wait for Son to get up. But he doesn’t. Don’t be kidding around, I say. Still he’s quiet. C’mon, I say, you have had your fun. But he’s quiet yet and now you see I’m not laughing anymore. I bend down and Son is cold silent. I touch his face, feeling the wet trickle of blood, and my heart tumbles inside my chest like a stack of children’s blocks toppled to the floor.

  Son, I say. I shake him.

  Another light inside the lodge goes on.

  He opens his eyes and smiles.

  WHAT ARE YOU doing just staring there, Girl? the old man says. He finds me standing in the afternoon ticking of the grandfather clock, in the cool dark parlor of the old adobe house, in front of a fireplace meant more for fancy than for function. I stand at the mantel, handling the knickknacks placed just so and studying the pictures there in front of me, and I tell you, I could stay standing here this way the entire rest of the day and on into the evening, throughout the night even. I could do it all over the very next day for the entire day again. That’s how much in awe I am of Son’s growing-up days I see before me in the pictures, how in awe of the ways of his family I am, so foreign as they are to me. I’m taken by the history of him. I’m taken by the flesh and the hair and the teeth of him, of all that I see.

  But I don’t tell the old man any of this.

  That boy sure knows how to set a horse, don’t he? he says.

  He picks one of the pictures up and puts his nose to it, with his eyes asquint as if he were seeing something in it for the very first time. Then he puts it back down.