The ranger put his hand on her shoulder. “Come along. I’ll take you to a place where you can spend the night.”
“May we say good-bye to the baby?” Suzy asked. She went up to the woman and put her finger gently against the baby’s cheek. Then she looked seriously at the woman. “Why did you pick us?”
The woman gave a shaky laugh. “You looked so kind. I saw you at lunch. You said grace, and I liked that, and then you were laughing so much. You looked like good people. Oh, I don’t know, hon. I didn’t hardly know what I was doing.” She turned back to Mother. “Anyhow, I’m sorry. And thanks for taking care of him.” She gave us all a sort of floppy wave and then ran, stumbling, to the ranger’s bus.
Thirteen
The next morning we were a little late getting off because Daddy and John had a terrible time getting the tent pegs out, and several of the pegs got quite bent from being whacked at with hammer, pliers, screw driver, hatchet, almost every tool we had with us. The pegs had been a little hard to pound in, but not unusually so, and we never did find out what there was about the canyon ground that made them so hard to get out.
So the sun was already high in the sky when we started on what turned out to be the hottest drive of the whole trip. Every time we stopped at a gas station we filled the desert bag and water jug, but even so we kept on being dry and parched. I felt like a left-over, wrung-out tea bag.
At Las Vegas we marketed, had trouble getting a traveler’s check cashed (what did they think Daddy was? A crook or something?), and drove up and down the Strip a couple of times. The Strip is the avenue in Las Vegas that has all the great gambling places on it, some as huge and elegant as palaces, some just like fancy motels. Then there were the wedding chapels, and I can’t think of anything more gruesome than getting married in one of them, but evidently thousands of people do. Thank heavens Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena got married properly on the Island with Grandfather. There was one chapel that was shaped like a wedding bell, and these phony chimes came pealing out over a loudspeaker. Another had a false front like a New England church and it looked about as out of place there as a roulette wheel would on the Thornhill green. Then, right between two wedding chapels, called SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE and FORGET-ME-NOT, WEDDINGS AND DIVORCES, was a funeral parlor called ROCK OF AGES. You pays your money and you takes your choice. We all howled with laughter, but at the same time it was all so phony it made me want to puke. I wondered what Zachary would have to say about it all.
We were just as glad to leave the Strip and go off to find the campgrounds at Lake Mead. Lake Mead’s a huge, man-made lake created when Hoover Dam was built.
If somebody was going to make a movie of hell, and if he could reproduce the heat as well as the scenery, what we saw of Nevada would be the perfect setting. Maybe this isn’t being fair to Nevada, because after all we didn’t see very much of it, but what we did see was perfect for hell: dry, burning ground with practically nothing growing on it. What little did grow was sort of scruffy-looking, not green, but browney-olive fungusy-looking stuff. The mountains were bare, crumbling stone, and the sky was searing. It was so hot the sky wasn’t even a proper blue. Even the Strip in Las Vegas seemed like something in the underworld, and I could imagine a hairy devil presiding at a big gambling table and swishing his tail with annoyance when somebody won.
We’d thought that when we got to Lake Mead for sure there’d be trees and green things growing around it, but instead there it was, a great dark body of water that engineers had just plunked down in the barren land. It looked like a gigantic do-it-yourself lake, not like something real at all. Then we thought that when we got to the campgrounds there’d surely be trees and shade and relief from the scorching sun. But the campgrounds were so bare that we went right on by and had to turn around and go back. Well, sure, there were a few trees, kind of twisted, skimpy ones. And the place was crowded, not with tents, but with picnickers come to get away from the heat of Las Vegas. We drove around and around and every spot was filled.
“I’m wet with sweatperation,” Rob said.
“What’re we going to do?” Suzy wailed. We knew there wasn’t another campground anywhere around, and our next stop was Laguna Beach, and that was too far off. Anyhow, to get there we had to cross the Mojave Desert, and Daddy said there wasn’t any question of doing that before the cool of the next morning. Friends had told us of having to dip towels in their water jug and hang them up in the car in order to survive the desert heat. It made me feel like Lawrence of Arabia, and I’d just as soon have gone on. Partly, I’ve got to admit, because I hoped maybe there’d be a message from Zachary. Now that I hadn’t seen him for some time I forgot how he sometimes scared and depressed me and I was dying to see him again. Whatever else he was, he was different, and he was exciting. He was, you might say, an education, and everybody keeps talking about how you ought to get all the education you can.
Suzy was half-crying, but that was partly because she was still upset over the baby.
“Let’s have a drink of water,” Daddy said, “and then we’ll have another look for a campsite.” While Mother was filling our cups from the desert bag a man came up to Daddy and told him that he and his family were there only for a picnic, and would be gone in an hour. Daddy asked if we could leave our gear there to reserve the spot, and then we’d go off to Hoover Dam and wouldn’t bother them till they were through.
Hoover Dam’s in all the encyclopaedias, and engineering doesn’t send me the way it does John. The enormous hunks of machinery were scary, but the main thing was that lots of the tour was underground and it was heavenly cool. We went down into the bowels of the earth, jammed with dozens of people into an elevator. We were jammed so tight you couldn’t move, and I didn’t care for it. Maybe it’s because there aren’t any elevators in Thornhill and I wasn’t very used to them.
When we got back to our campsite the picnickers were gone, so we set up camp, drinking quantities of water every few minutes. It gave me great admiration for camels, I mean being able to store up enough water in themselves to take them across the desert. Rob kept refilling the desert bag and water jug for us; we evidently couldn’t store for more than a few minutes in that climate.
“Mother, I’m so Thursday,” Rob said over and over again.
About the only time we weren’t thirsty was when we went swimming. It was a long hot walk from the campgrounds to the lake, and there were no trees, no shelter of any kind from the great, brazen sun. The lake itself was marvelously cold. I don’t mean cool, I mean cold. I don’t know how it stayed so cold, out there in the middle of the desert. John and I were having underwater races when we noticed a sort of commotion and came up. Mother and the little kids were all laughing at Daddy, and Daddy had a very funny look.
“’Smatter?” John asked.
“Split my trunks,” Daddy said. “And but split! I might as well not have anything on.”
We hadn’t bothered to bring towels down to the lake with us because it was so hot. John looked from the lake across the long bare stretch to the campgrounds. Then he looked at Daddy and they both raised their eyebrows.
Daddy said, “I’ll just stay submerged till we’re ready to go in. Then you will all surround me very closely.”
When Daddy called Time it became obvious that he hadn’t exaggerated the state of his trunks. We all huddled about him, making a fairly good screen. The trouble was that we were all laughing so hard we could barely move, and the more we laughed the more peculiar we must have looked. Daddy didn’t get back to the tent in one piece, but he got there, and we had something good to tease him about for the rest of the trip.
That night for dinner we used Uncle Douglas’s little stove instead of building a fire because it didn’t give out as much heat. During dinner we got to talking with the family picnicking at the next table, mother, father, and twelve year old daughter. Their name was Newton, and they told us that the temperature, around 104°, was perfectly normal, nothing unusual, and that they often came out to the lake f
or picnics. If it had been a week-end we wouldn’t have had a chance in the world of finding a campsite because of the picnickers.
Karen Newton had never been in a tent, so we took her into ours, and told ghost stories. It wasn’t just that she’d never been in a tent, but I don’t think she knew many kids, because she hadn’t heard any of our ghost stories, and she got so scared at one I was telling that she started to cry. So we switched to funny ones, and then got her talking about herself. Her father had a rug-cleaning business and the funny thing was that he had to keep it open twenty-four hours a day; nothing ever closes for the night, because there really isn’t any night or day there; everything is all topsy turvy. Her school hours were the only regular hours in her family’s life. It sounded very weird to us, but I guess our ordered life in Thornhill would have seemed as strange to her as living at the gates of hell seemed to us.
After the Newtons left, and they stayed quite late to catch every tiny breath of cool air from the lake, and the breaths of air were very tiny and few and far between, we all lay on our sleeping bags and panted. After a while Suzy and I pulled ours off the tail gate of the car and out of the tent, and even so it was too hot to sleep, and it seemed to me all I did was doze, the kind where you’re not really quite asleep and you’re not really quite awake and you’re not really dreaming, but your thoughts sort of drift around and you don’t really control them because they’re more dreaming than thinking. I was walking down the strip with Zachary, and he was deciding whether to take me into SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE or ROCK OF AGES for a Coke.
Daddy had set the alarm for five thirty so we could drive across the desert before the hottest part of the day. It seemed like the middle of the night when people interrupted my walk with Zachary by slamming car doors, packing up, and driving off with a lot of noise. I felt Mother’s hand on my shoulder and she said, “It’s only four thirty, but Daddy thinks we might as well get up and go, because it’s too hot to sleep. Try to be quiet and not wake anybody who’s sleeping.”
“Those other people weren’t quiet.” I sounded kind of cross.
“Do you want to be like them?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
We ate just cold cereal and some sweet buns for breakfast, and Mother and Daddy made coffee on Uncle Douglas’s stove. We left camp before six and suddenly it was really cool, and what do you know, the dreaded drive across the Mojave was a more nothing, not nearly so hot as the drive from Zion the day before.
Now for Laguna Beach:
I don’t really know where to start, because it was both wonderful and terrible as far as I was concerned. I guess everybody else had a ball, what with going to Disneyland and the zoo in San Diego and Knott’s Berry Farm and swimming every day. I did all those things, too. It wasn’t any of that. It was Zachary.
Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and Maggy have a scrumptious house, all redwood and windows, with a big terrace overlooking the Pacific. Suzy and I slept in with Maggy; John and Rob had foldaway beds in the dining room (we ate out on the terrace all the time, anyhow); and Mother and Daddy had the guest room.
We unpacked and got settled and I thought maybe Zachary would have left a note for me or something, but nobody said anything, and with the way everybody felt about Zachary I just kept my mouth shut and waited. Uncle Douglas asked me if I had something on my mind, and I don’t think I convinced him that I hadn’t; Uncle Douglas always knows when I’m bothered. But he let it drop when he saw that I didn’t feel like talking.
After lunch we all had a short snooze, though Maggy kept whispering to Suzy. She’d grown taller and seemed older than when we last saw her, but she talked as much as ever. When she saw that Suzy had turned her back on her and gone to sleep as usual, she tried to talk to me, but I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to Maggy; but we hadn’t had much sleep the night before and I was tired. And I was disappointed because there wasn’t any word from Zachary. Somehow I had more than expected it, I had counted on it.
In the late afternoon we went down to the beach for a swim. It’s about a ten minute walk straight downhill from the house, and the beach was wild and rocky and completely unlike the long, level sweep of Atlantic we knew from Grandfather’s. Another difference was that on Grandfather’s Island there aren’t many people; there are great gorgeous stretches of deserted beach where you can walk and walk and not see a house or another human being. California was crowded, with one town running right into another so that you couldn’t really tell where one ended and another began, and the beaches always had a lot of people on them. Swimming in the Pacific, at Laguna Beach at any rate, is completely different from swimming in the Atlantic, not because of the people, so much: it’s just that the Pacific is lots wilder. The land tumbles precipitously down to the sea, and the beach itself slopes rapidly into the ocean and is uneven and has rocks for you to stub your toes on if you don’t watch out. Mother is always saying, comparisons are odious (that’s a quote from John Donne, John Fortescue, and Christopher Marlowe), but I’m not making that kind of comparison, just explaining differences. For instance, on our swim that first afternoon it was a calm, sunny day, but the waves were much rougher than the slow, gentle swells of the Atlantic on a quiet day. The push of the waves and the pull of the tide were stronger than we were used to, too. John and I had fun going out and riding in on the breakers, but it was too rough for the little ones (how Suzy and Maggy hate being called the “little ones”!). They stayed close to shore, where they had plenty of rolling and tumbling by the waves. The water was warmer than at Lake Mead the day before, but the air was cool. I guess one thing you can’t beat about Laguna Beach is the climate.
That night after dinner Mother and Aunt Elena played two piano music. Rob, Suzy, and Maggy went to bed, but John and I sprawled on the couches in the living room and listened, half asleep ourselves. After a while Mother said, “Oh, Elena, I’m so rusty I can’t make my fingers do a thing. You play for us.”
Aunt Elena played and suddenly I realized that I’d missed this kind of music. At home I never think much about it. It’s always there in the background. Mother’d never get any housework done if she didn’t play records, LOUD, to drown it out. And if I did think about it at home, it was to feel that it was longhair stuff, dull, nothing I liked much. But listening to Aunt Elena playing, the music from her big grand piano filling the house, I began to feel happy all over without really knowing why. It was as though a hunger I didn’t even realize existed had been satisfied.
Three days at Laguna and never a word from Zachary. I kept thinking maybe he’d called while we were out, because we were off on trips or at the beach most of the day. But he could have called in the evening, couldn’t he? It wasn’t like Zach to give up on something like that. And what about a letter? There’s always mail. We had letters from some of the kids in Thornhill, and we wrote everybody postcards. But not a squawk from Zachary. I came to the sad conclusion that once he’d got back to Los Angeles and all the sophisticated, rich girls there, he didn’t care any more about a doctor’s kid from New England.
Then the fourth afternoon when we were walking up from the beach there was a red convertible parked by the house, and Zachary was sitting on the terrace steps, smoking a pipe. My hair was all wet and dripping, but I did have on a good-looking bathing suit, a hand-me-down from Aunt Elena, and Zachary himself had said my figure is okay. Uncle Douglas looked at Zachary and then he looked at me, and then his eyebrows went up in the same way that Daddy’s do.
Zachary got up from the steps and came down and introduced himself to Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and said hello to the rest of us. He couldn’t have been more polite or charming, but I thought there was a kind of glint behind it all, as though it didn’t come really from inside him, but was some kind of an act. It’s difficult to explain. It wasn’t that he was phony. Zachary is lots of things, but phony is one thing he is not. It was just that there was somehow more to it than met the eye.
He asked if he could take me out to dinner, but Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena invited him to dinner instead. Mother and Daddy didn’t say anything. They looked at each other. I didn’t like it.
After dinner Aunt Elena and Mother played two piano, and then Aunt Elena played, and it turned out that Zachary knew a lot about music, he really did, and you could see that Aunt Elena thought he was just wonderful. At least somebody besides me appreciated him.
After he’d left and I was ready for bed and went to say good night to Uncle Douglas, where he and Daddy were sitting out on the terrace, Uncle Douglas pulled me to him and said, “That’s quite a boy you picked up, Vicky.”
“I didn’t pick him up,” I said. “He picked me up.”
“You don’t think he’s too old for you?”
“He’s not that old. And I’m not that young any longer, Uncle Douglas.”
“He’s an appealing kid,” Uncle Douglas said. “I’d like to paint him. Those planes to his face are a painter’s joy. But do your old Uncle a favor and watch it, Vicky, will you?”
Zachary’d invited me to go to the theater with him the next night, where some group he knew was giving a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank. Aunt Elena invited him to come over in time for a swim and dinner. He looked very thin and white in his swimming trunks. Here he was living in California and he didn’t have any tan at all.
The waves were rougher than usual that day, and Daddy just looked at Zach and said, “No swimming for you, Zachary, please.” The please was just courtesy.
Zachary scowled as though he were about to argue, but then he said, “I’m just going to sit on a rock for ten minutes and dangle my feet. I don’t want to get brown. Come sit with me, Vicky. Don’t be a muffin with a sun fetish like everybody else.”
You get a better sun tan if you’re wet; also I didn’t want to seem in too much of a hurry to do exactly what he wanted me to do, so I gave myself a good dunking, rode in once on the breakers, got tumbled around and a mouth full of pebbles for my hurry, and went to sit on the rock with Zachary.
The Moon by Night Page 13
