The Inelegant Universe
Chapter 11. Rest Area
She thought it was quite a wonderful spot, for a highway rest area. Fifty yards north of the road, which had crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada only a few miles to the east, was a small parking lot and a tidy cement-block restroom. They were shaded by a cluster of the enormous pines whose bark passed along a delicious rumor of pineapple when the sun warmed it. From the restroom she had threaded her way around and over the surrounding granite boulders for another 100 feet, and found herself on a promontory overlooking a deep gorge topped by tree-blanketed slopes and, higher, the stern, bare Sierra mountaintops. A dam plugged the canyon a mile or so to the west, where its sheer walls closely approached each other. Walking close enough to the cliff edge to make herself nervous she could see, far below, a blue reservoir curling away eastward behind the fragile, convex seashell of the dam.
It was an October morning, and chilly at this elevation, but the sun was strong. She found a spot where the huge coarse-grained boulders sheltered her from the breeze and sat nibbling the granola bar she'd bought at the camp store a little farther up the road. After a while she unbuttoned her sweater and took it off, to let the sun warm her pale, bruised arms.
She was a small woman, with a neat, graying bob and large, not very flattering bifocals, dressed this morning in a pair of bright blue slacks, a printed sleeveless blouse, and blue sneakers. The softening of late middle age was well advanced on her cheeks and her neck. This was her fourth day of driving west, with only the vague goal of California, spending the nights in the cheapest places she could find in her Triple-A guidebooks. The previous night she'd been in the town of Fivespot, in a little independent motel off the main drag. A gaunt and amiable old gent, who'd been rocking on a tiny porch when she drove up, had taken her money and then walked her to the room to light the gas heater for her. Although he'd been talkative and curious, she hadn't volunteered any information.
She'd been avoiding the freeways since she'd crossed the Rockies. In the desert, so strange and thrilling to her eastern eyes, the bare highway junctions had the feeling of accidental encounters. Whenever she reached one, she took the direction that looked the most promising, without really knowing what her criteria were. Her planlessness had led her through towns with names like Burnett and Fiddleneck, and finally to the California border the previous afternoon. But Fivespot hadn't really looked any different from western Nevada; and it was only this morning, having wound her way up the steep eastern slope of the Sierra and over the crest at Pincushion Pass, that she felt herself truly in California.
Now that she was here, seated on the knobbly old granite of the mountains and listening to the fluttering and tapping of the unknown western birds that were breakfasting in the pines around her, she felt no impetus to go farther. Her son lived with his wife in San Francisco, and she supposed that was why she'd headed in this general direction, but he had no idea his mother was now perched on a mountainside only a couple of hundred miles east of him. She wasn't sure how he'd have reacted if he had known. Now there seemed to be no reason to move on, or even to change position on her rock. The sun was warm, and the air had the clarity and freshness that she associated with the few perfect autumn days in the Midwest. If her spirits were not exactly lifted by the serenity of this scene, the stately current of the natural world, to which she was always attuned, was at least having its usual soothing effect.
The granola bar was half gone. She folded the end of the wrapper around the remainder and tucked it in the pocket of the blue slacks. She looked out over the canyon again, thinking I don't have to do anything. I can sit here as long as I want, all day if I want to, and just watch the sun cross to the west. I could go on to San Francisco later, or I could go back to that motel in Fivespot. I could even stay here and sleep in the car. She tried to focus on the novel sensation of being totally without obligations, but didn't quite succeed. For one thing, there was a faint but insistent pull from the east, the brick house in Indianapolis. She supposed Peter was at work, but found it hard to imagine what he was thinking. She'd left without any explanation, not that one was really needed, and hadn't even called since then. There was also a tingle of anxiety, resolutely suppressed so far, deriving from the dwindling supply of cash in her purse, along with the related question of what she was going to do when it was gone.
She heard the faint crunch of tires on loose pebbles as a car rolled slowly into the parking lot behind her and stopped. After a lengthy pause, she heard the car door slam. She hoped it was just someone who would use the restroom and then leave. In this solitude she felt no loneliness, only a magical and sufficient lethargy. She didn't want to have to move, to share the morning, to look at, talk to, or smile at anyone. She was weary of a lifetime of looking, talking, smiling.
A plump, bespectacled woman of about her own age appeared on the rocks to her left, walking slowly with a slight limp toward the spot from which Ruth had earlier gazed down at the reservoir. She was rosy-cheeked, with an ash-blond helmet of neatly combed hair, wearing white slacks and a loose-fitting pale pink pullover and somewhat outsized gold hoop earrings. A white plastic purse was slung over one shoulder. She walked nearly to the edge of the cliff and stood looking down.
Ruth stayed silent and motionless, hoping not to be noticed; but after a few seconds the intruder looked around casually and saw her. She made a little wave with one hand and said, "Isn't this a glorious morning?"
It was beyond Ruth's powers to act as standoffish as she felt. The uncontrollable smile was on her lips as soon as she knew she'd been spotted, and she answered in spite of herself. "Yes, it's a beautiful place. I've just been sitting here soaking it up." To her annoyance, the woman walked over and stood with her hands on her hips, gazing out at the panorama and smiling benevolently. "It's been so hot the last two weeks," she said, "but now it's finally cooled off. I guess fall is on the way."
"It feels like it. It's got that crispness. But it could just be the mountain air."
"Are you from around here?" The woman was examining her a little more closely. "Just passing through?"
"My son lives in Fivespot," Ruth lied, not knowing why. "I'm on my way to visit him. Sort of." She laughed uncomfortably, realizing how silly it must sound.
But the woman laughed, too. "Oh, I know, these kids!" she said. "You never know whether they really want you there or not, do you? But you have to try, I guess. If you don't visit them, then they start to wonder about that. I've got a daughter in Boca Raton and a son in Butte, Montana. You don't suppose they could find anywhere nearby to live, do you, so I could at least see my grandchildren occasionally. Or at least closer together, so I could visit them all at once." These thoughts brought a slight squint to her eyes. She turned and looked out again over the canyon and the mountains. She's nice enough, but I hope she stops talking now and just gets back in her car and drives away, Ruth thought. She wanted to be left alone again, to meditate on this mountaintop she now felt she'd been driving three days to reach.
"Is your son your only child?" the woman asked.
"No. I have two daughters, too," Ruth answered, more shortly than she'd intended to, and immediately felt guilty.
The woman nodded thoughtfully and resumed admiring the vista. There was a long pause. The habits of a lifetime prodded Ruth to break the silence, but she resisted stubbornly. I don't have to, she thought. Somebody else can do that work for a change.
"Well it surely is a beautiful morning," her unwelcome companion finally said. She looked down at Ruth and smiled her rosy-cheeked smile again. "I wonder if you'd mind watching this for me for a bit. I'd like to take a little walk in this nice sunshine. It kind of gets in the way when you're walking around these rocks." She unslung the white purse from her shoulder and let it dangle above Ruth.
"Oh sure." Ruth tried to soften her earlier unfriendliness by adding "That's very trusting of you."
"Well, we have to have a little faith in our fellow human beings, don't we?" the woman said. "Otherwise, wha
t's left?"
"True," Ruth agreed with a smile, arranging the purse on the sun-warmed rocks next to her. She watched the woman turn and limp slowly to the edge of the cliff, pause briefly, and then, with a slight hop, step over it and disappear. Ruth listened, but the only sounds were the breath of the wind in the pine needles and the busy tapping of the birds. She tried to remember what the cliff edge had looked like. Was there a ledge the woman could have stepped off onto? She couldn't remember any such thing.
After a minute or two she stood up, a little creakily from having sat still for so long, walked to the brink and carefully leaned over to look, hugging the white purse against her stomach. As she had remembered, it was a vertical drop. Below her, what seemed to be hundreds of feet down, she could see the green and tranquil crowns of trees. They were swaying lazily, but that could have been due to the breeze. There was no sign of the woman. Staring into the deep green of the treetops Ruth had the odd sensation that she was looking not down but up, toward a limitless and textured green sky, into which the woman had somehow flown. Oh Lord, she thought. Now what?
She stood at the edge of the cliff for a long while, occasionally peering over to see if anything was moving down there. Finally she returned to her protected corner and sat down. The sun felt very hot on her head. After a while she unzipped the white purse and rummaged slowly through its contents. There was a package of Trident sugarless gum and a set of keys on a keychain which had a small flashlight attached. There was also a clipped-out newspaper article, folded neatly, explaining how to rid one's house of two different species of ants. Otherwise there was only what seemed to Ruth an excessive number of used, crumpled tissues, some of which were still somewhat moist. There was no wallet, no money, no driver's license or credit cards, no photos of the two children the woman had mentioned or of any man who might have been involved in their creation. At the very bottom of the purse Betty could feel the fine, dried crumbs of what might have been a cookie.
She heard another car rolling into the parking lot behind her. The sound of opening doors was followed by the high-pitched yells of children, along with the officious tone of a woman attempting to assert authority. Two children appeared almost instantly, sprinting toward the edge of the cliff and then halting at the last instant. "Look OUT!" the woman's voice shrieked, but the children were already running away along the edge, laughing, and then disappearing over the piles of boulders. The woman, a somewhat puffy blond in an overstressed tanktop, arrived a few seconds later and stood briefly with her hands on her hips, staring out at the view. She shouldn't be wearing that, Ruth thought, automatically. The woman was soon joined by a glum male, with longish hair curling out from under a baseball cap and a T-shirt that didn't quite extend down to his belt over a massive belly. They glared briefly at the middle-aged lady seated among the rocks with her white purse, then moved away toward the restroom.
I should be doing something, Ruth thought. But her inertia had somehow been deepened by the turbulent, insular little family. She continued to sit quietly, gazing out at the opposite side of the gorge and waiting for them to leave. Eventually she heard the children again, converging on the hectoring adult voices, doors slamming, and the car rolling slowly out of the parking lot. She stood up and walked to the cliff edge again. There was still nothing human in sight below, and even the treetops down there had stopped moving. She turned and climbed back over the rocks to the parking lot, carrying the purse and her sweater. In the lot, a green foreign car with patches of rust underneath the doors was parked next to the tan Pontiac she'd driven from Indiana. With some difficulty she found her own keys in the pocket of her slacks, opened the Pontiac, and sat in the driver's seat with her feet outside on the pavement, holding the white purse on her lap.
The main question seemed to be which way to drive. The nearest telephone was at the camping store where she'd bought the granola bar, back toward the pass. On the other hand, she could keep driving west, down toward San Francisco and her son, and stop at the first telephone she encountered. She had no idea how far that would be. Then should she call 911 or some local sheriff's department, or maybe the state police? She'd always hated calling strangers on the telephone, and now she felt a faint anxiety at the idea of talking to any of those agencies and trying to explain what she'd seen. And of course it would mean the end of her own little odyssey, her interlude of solitude, her unauthorized holiday from the daily grind of dealing with Peter's despair and rage. She was balanced between the two not very attractive poles of San Francisco and Indianapolis, with no particular desire to tip in either direction. In her mind she watched the plump woman step over the edge of the cliff again, with that little hop. She wondered what it would feel like to just let the earth take over.
She removed the keys from the white purse, got out of the Pontiac and, after a bit of fumbling around, found the right key to open the trunk of the old green car, which she saw from the logo was a Datsun. The trunk was empty, and very clean. The interior of the car was in the same condition, as if the woman had spent some time tidying up, preparing for this moment, although she'd left a bit of a mess in her purse. But maybe she'd originally expected to take that with her, and had only at the last instant decided to leave it with Ruth, an enigmatic memento. Ruth was impressed by the care with which the woman had organized her project. I could never have done it so thoroughly, she thought. I would have forgotten something important, or gotten distracted by something in the mail and never done it at all. She tried to visualize the plump, good-natured face, the glasses and smooth hair. Had there been any hint in her expression? She remembered the slight squint when the woman had mentioned her children, but surely that wasn't enough. Arlene, she kept thinking. That was the name that seemed to fit. I'm just not ready to go back. She felt as though she hadn't quite managed to free herself, had barely found her solitary rock in this clean light, before Arlene had arrived with her own obviously very serious problems to drag her back down to the thick air of the human world. She'd climbed laboriously out of the sink her life had become and now, finally, found herself balanced on this high, uncluttered ridgeline. Here the earth stopped rising and began its descent back to civilization; but she felt that it would be good to leave the planet behind completely, to let her upward momentum carry her on into the pure sky of the mountains. How high did you have to go to escape the pull of gravity completely?
She went to the rear of the Pontiac and opened the trunk. There was her one black suitcase, with the green ribbon she'd tied to the handle to make it easier to recognize on baggage carousels, along with a 25-pound sack of dry dogfood that she'd forgotten to remove and a couple of brown bags full of newspapers for recycling. I should do that, she thought. Do they recycle in the West? She gazed into the trunk for a while, with one hand on the raised lid, then took the handle of her suitcase and lifted it out. She carried it over to the trunk of the Datsun and deposited it there, then went back to the Pontiac and leaned in to remove her maps and guidebooks, plus a couple of used Kleenexes. She examined the interior for any other artifacts; but the car was uncharacteristically clean, except for a lot of dog hair on the back seat. She made sure all the windows were rolled up. After a short pause to think, she dropped her own keys into the white purse, zipped it up, and left it lying on the driver's seat. She didn't bother to lock the car.
She had a little trouble with the alien controls of the Datsun, but finally got it started, backed slowly out of the parking spot, turned out onto the road a little jerkily due to the stick shift, and headed east. A few miles farther along she passed the camping store and its telephone, just before starting up the steep grade to the pass. She slowed a little bit, but something prevented her from turning in. She couldn't see herself on the phone to the state police. In her mind instead was the image of the funky little motel, the clean and unnecessarily wide streets of Fivespot, and the noisy crowds of blackbirds foraging in the meadows that edged the road into town, fluttering upward and then settling again like a flapped blank
et as cars rolled by.
An hour later she pulled back into the gravel driveway of the motel in Fivespot and parked under the neon sign that read "Oleander" and, in smaller letters, "MOTEL Vacancy." The nondescript quality of the place appealed to her, as it seemed to increase her chances of remaining temporarily anonymous. It was situated just south of the chipped concrete balustrade of the river bridge, within easy walking distance of the few stores, a rundown but homey little restaurant or two, and a couple of slightly more upscale inns. It was a single long, low, narrow, paint-peeling white wooden structure, set at an angle to the highway, a sort of extended shotgun flat partitioned into eight units, one of which functioned as the office. The proprietor, whose name was Merton Pearl, was made even more curious by her return in a different vehicle and her stated intention to stay a few days; but he respected her privacy in good innkeeper fashion and offered her the reduced weekly winter rate in exchange for paying in advance. He insisted that she call him Mert, rather than Mr. Pearl. "Since we're going to be friends," he told her as he carried her bag to the tiny room. "OK," she said, amused at his seriousness.
Despite the ugly exterior of the place, Ruth liked her little room. Mr. Pearl apparently had a taste for wood; or perhaps, not being able to afford new furnishings, he'd been forced to compile his a few at a time from local garage sales and flea markets. The bed had a wooden frame and a mattress that was rendered reasonably functional by Ruth's small stature: she could curl up comfortably in the hollow in its center. The only other pieces of furniture were a creaky old birchwood rocking chair and a small sideboard that held the TV, with its rabbit-ear antenna. The bathroom door barely cleared the edge of the toilet, and had to be completely closed to make the sink accessible. But there were pictures on the walls and the linens were clean. Mr. Pearl had already informed her that he did the laundry himself.
She left her suitcase on the bed and went out just long enough to walk the length of the main street, clutching her sweater around her in the wind. The double line of low structures seemed to hunker between mountains and plains, as though intimidated by the vast scenery. She bought some bread, peanut butter, honey, and a couple of apples to get her through the rest of the afternoon. She also stopped into a little book and card store and bought two postcards with anonymous mountain vistas, one for each of her children, along with two stamps and a used paperback entitled Far Tortuga. Then she hid in the motel room, reading and rocking and eating peanut butter and honey until it got dark, after which she ventured out for another short walk. At night the back streets of Fivespot might as well have been the desert suburbs of Indianapolis. Everyone else was inside, and the only sound was the dry clatter of leaves manhandled by the cold wind. The darkness was so thick she couldn't see her sneakers; it felt like a spacewalk. It was a comfort to be able to return to her small, warm enclosure at the Oleander. She carefully brushed her bridgework and got into the bed. The room was not well insulated or sealed, so she could get plenty of fresh air for sleeping without bothering to open the window. She felt quite cozy under two or three red Hudson's Bay blankets, with the gas heater glowing a faint, watchful blue in one corner, ready to spring into action if the temperature dropped too low.
She lay on her back for a while after getting under the covers, staring up into the dark and listening to the ticking of the heater. She thought a little about what must be going on at home – the phone calls to her children on their opposite coasts and maybe even to the police by this time, her morose husband and pets, the neighbors wondering why she wasn't around but afraid to ask Peter what was going on. She also got, against the darkness, sporadic glimpses of the sudden void of sky above the boulders the previous afternoon, when Arlene, as she continued to call her, had disappeared. These visions were more puzzling than sad. Arlene had been so matter of fact in her action, and before it so calm and even cheerful, that Ruth was inclined to accept it as entirely proper, although at the same time horrible in another way of looking at it. She wondered what had been the factors in Arlene's decision to hop over the cliff into that green sky of treetops; but she had been careful to leave no clues, at least for strangers, and Ruth was unable to invent a life for her. The matter-of-factness had made it seem an entirely personal and private act, and so not subject to the judgments of human society. That feeling allowed Ruth to store the idea of informing the authorities in a back closet of her mind. Finally she just drifted, enjoying the knowledge that tomorrow there wouldn't be anything she really had to do except get up and have breakfast.
But in the morning, sitting over the coffee, whole wheat toast, and small orange juice she'd ordered at the Deerslayer Cafe, whose walls were covered with plaques bearing the heads of noble dead animals, she had an attack of almost unbearable dread. Outside the window was the pristine white facade of the little County Building, surrounded by huge, comfortably spaced cottonwoods with yellowing leaves that flashed their undersides in the wind. Dense blue air clung to all the corners and edges of the buildings, and bolts of sunlight glanced off the row of pickup trucks parked at the curb outside the Deerslayer. In the backs of several of the trucks sat well-trained dogs, gazing solemnly into the windows of the cafe where their owners were having breakfast.
These were things that ordinarily would have provided Ruth a good deal of pleasure; but viewed in the stark morning light her situation suddenly appalled her. How could I have taken her car, she asked herself. And now that I have her car, how can I report her suicide to the police? And of course they will find out, and what are they going to think when they do? What can I possibly say to them? She could actually feel the sweat breaking out on her back and under her arms when she thought about these things.
She hurried out of the cafe without finishing her breakfast, got back in the green Datsun without even stopping at her room to brush her teeth, and drove all the way back over the pass to the rest area, thinking she would, if nothing else, claim her own car and leave Arlene's where she'd found it. That, she thought, would at least reestablish the status quo as of just before her loss of sanity. Then she could decide what was the best thing to do.
But there were no cars in the parking lot at the rest area, and there was no sign of activity – no police cars or yellow tape, no detectives in trench coats and slouch hats, no bloodhounds hullooing at the base of the cliff, nothing. Just the same sun and wind as yesterday, the same faint tapping of birds foraging in the big pine trees. She sat with her stomach grinding, staring out the window of the Datsun. In this wild zone, that was without other means of transport, it now felt shackled to her like a green, rusting corpse. After a half-hour of paralysis she drove slowly back over the pass and on down to the Oleander, parked the car, and shut herself into the little room, where she sat on the sagging bed, waiting for the resolve to begin untangling the mess she'd created for herself.
She was no longer able to reconstruct the reasoning, if there had been any, that had made her take Arlene's car and leave her own at the rest area. She supposed it had seemed like a way to gain a little extra time, a few more days of freedom for herself; but now the idea seemed merely insane. Why had she left the keys in her car? Why hadn't she at least locked it? And why hadn't she called the police about Arlene? What about the people who must be worried sick about her by now? How could she have convinced herself that they didn't need to know what had happened to their wife, mother, grandmother, friend? I must be going a little crazy, she thought. First leaving home without a word, and now all this. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, tears collecting in the corners of her eyes. You've got to do something, she told herself. But she couldn't make herself do anything, except lie back on the bed, with her knees up. Eventually she dozed.
She was awakened by a knock on the door. She sat up, disoriented by sleep, then got off the bed and stood next to the door, listening fearfully, wondering who it could be and hoping they'd go away. But after a few seconds there was another knock. It wasn't a very loud knock, she thought, not a police knock. Since t
here seemed to be nothing else to do, she opened the door. Standing outside was Arlene, as plump and rosy-cheeked as if she'd never stepped off a sheer cliff at all. Ruth stared at her. Parked behind her, next to the old green Datsun, was her own tan Pontiac. "May I come in?" Arlene asked. Ruth stood aside to let her in. She sat on the edge of the bed, while Arlene took the birchwood rocking chair and sat rocking peacefully for a minute or two.
"Well, we seemed to have exchanged cars," she said finally, with a little smile. "How did that happen?"
"I didn't think you were coming back," Ruth finally managed. "You just... disappeared."
"I said I was going for a walk." There was a slight edge to Arlene's voice.
"Well, you were gone a long time," Ruth said. "I looked for you. But I didn't see where you could have gone."
"What did you think – I just vanished into thin air?"
"Well, yes, actually. In a way." They looked at each other.
"Did you call the police?" Ruth admitted she hadn't.
"Well then, why did you take my car?" There was definitely an accusing tone in Arlene's voice now.
"I don't know why. I guess I didn't think you were going to need it any more." Ruth felt the beginnings of annoyance at this odd power struggle. Here she was being attacked by a woman who, if she'd done what she was supposed to do, wouldn't have had anything to say about her car or anything else. But it was apparently important to Arlene to establish that she'd been wronged.
"What's your name, anyway," her accuser asked rather rudely. Ruth told her, and added "I've been calling you Arlene. In my mind."
"While you were driving my car around."
"Well, I left you my car," Ruth reminded her. Which sounded stupid, she thought. It had been a little more than a simple car trade, at least in her mind.
"It's actually Margaret." Margaret, who still seemed to have the moral high ground, rocked thoughtfully, while Ruth waited. Finally she said "I haven't had anything to eat since yesterday. Maybe we should get something." Ruth didn't relish the idea of spending more time with her aggrieved new companion. On the other hand, she was finding the confrontation in her tiny motel room very claustrophobic. A change of venue might relieve some of the strain.
They sat under the glassy gaze of a dusty bobcat in the Deerslayer while Margaret wolfed down an enormous salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. Betty ordered a club sandwich, but could only eat about a quarter of it, plus a few french fries. Although Arlene/Margaret's reappearance had abruptly resolved her immediate worries, it was far from clear what the new situation was, and her stomach was still acting up. It was a pleasant enough restaurant, she thought, looking around curiously at this unfamiliar world. The waitresses were busy but calm, tending to happily gabbling families with small kids and small groups of men in baseball caps, hunters or maybe fishermen. A faint, pervasive odor of mold and dust underlay the food smells, as though the carpeting needed replacing. Outside the windows darkness was diffusing upward from the low eastern hills.
"Your son doesn't live here," Margaret announced, when she'd finished cleaning her platter.
"No. He's in San Francisco." Ruth paused, and then for some reason added "I'm actually a Hoosier... on the lam." She had to laugh a little at the term.
"From your son?"
"My husband."
"You drove all the way from Indiana? Does he know where you are?"
"Well, I sent postcards to the kids," Ruth told her, feeling the first real twinge of guilt that she hadn't at least called Peter.
"That was quite a fight! A 2000-mile fight." Margaret took one of Ruth's french fries, dipped the end in ketchup, and nibbled it down to her fingers.
"I guess it was," Ruth said. She was remembering the heel of Peter's hand, punching her again and again on the shoulders, his enraged, miserable face. But all she said was "Are you from around here?"
"Wishbone. Just down the road from where we met." There was a pause, while both of them, Ruth supposed, thought about what Margaret had been doing at that rest area, only a few miles from her home. Finally Ruth asked, timidly, "Are you having trouble with your husband?"
Margaret blew out a tiny amount of air. "I wish I was having trouble with him. I have nothing from him. That's the trouble. He talks to the dog more than he talks to me. He's got a thumb like a bear trap from operating the TV remote. The kids left home years ago and they both moved about as far away as they could get. They don't even write, basically. So it's just me and the dog and the satellite dish and silent Fred. The dog only puts up with me when Fred's not home."
"Well you must have some friends," Ruth suggested.
"A couple," Margaret admitted. "But try to picture Wishbone, California, in the winter. I don't think I can face another one of those. In the summer at least you can take a walk. In the winter there's nothing to do, unless you're an alcoholic. You need more than a couple of friends, believe me." It seemed to Ruth that her companion was enjoying complaining about her plight. She had the odd thought that she might have given Margaret something to live for, at least temporarily, by stealing her car. Still, the image of a tiny mountain town, more or less snowed in all winter, was kind of scary. Did they get skiers, maybe? Who else would come up here that time of year?
"What do you do all winter?" she asked. Margaret clasped both pudgy hands around her water glass and looked down at her plate. A large diamond glittered on one finger.
"Not much," she finally said. "Wait for my cancer to show up."
And what do I see when I look ahead, Ruth wondered. Her weird, mostly widowed friends, also aging rapidly. Weeding her garden and keeping the birdfeeder filled, packing groceries with the girls at the church. Occasional visits from the kids and the grandchildren. Mice and squirrels in the attic, leaves clogging the downspouts, tree branches lashing the roof in the winter storms, a failing septic system. Peter in his armchair every evening, yelling at the newscasters. The bruises on her arms still ached. I should never have quit the publishing company, she thought. What keeps me from walking off a cliff, other than the general shortage of cliffs in Indiana? My life, in fact, could use more cliffs.
Margaret didn't seem to have much else to say. She also didn't have any money, so Ruth paid. They hurried along the dark street toward the Oleander, battling a wind that poured down from the mountains as though a dam had burst. I'll have to buy a jacket if I'm going to stay here any longer, Ruth thought. Margaret was shivering in her thin pink pullover.
They stood next to their cars in the Oleander's parking lot and exchanged keys. "What are you going to do?" Ruth asked.
"I don't know," Margaret said. "I slept in your car last night. But I don't really want to go back to Wishbone tonight. It's a long way over the pass in the dark." And probably something of an anticlimax, too, Ruth thought. Could you yank your whole life up to a point, the way Margaret had, and then just let it subside?
"Well, you could at least spend the night here." She resigned herself to paying for Margaret's night in the Oleander, too. What was she going to do, just say good night and leave her new friend standing in the wind? "Let's see if we can find the owner."
The office was empty, suffused by a reddish light from the apparently permanent MOTEL Vacancy sign. Behind the white barracks of the motel they found Mr. Pearl's little house and peeped in his window. He was seated before the TV, motionless, in an armchair, the front side of his body bathed in phosphorescence like the moon in first quarter. "Look at him," Margaret whispered, with a little sneer in her voice. But Ruth was noticing his white hair and expressionless face and thinking he looked kind of lonely. She wondered how he spent the winters. Even now, all the other rooms were empty. What must it be like in February? Mr. Pearl was so still that he appeared to be asleep, or dead. His white hair was electrified by the TV glow.
They broke his enchantment by knocking on the door and getting him to check Margaret into the room next to Ruth's. He furrowed his brow when he noticed that there had been another automobile
switch, but they stonewalled, and eventually he went back to his TV, after lighting Margaret's heater for her. "It's a good night for sleeping," Ruth told her. "I bet you'll feel better in the morning."
Back in her own room, she listened for sounds of Margaret moving around, turning on the TV, getting into bed; but there was nothing. All she could hear was the wind and the heater's obsessive muttering. What was she doing over there? Was she thinking about Wishbone, California, or maybe planning a new life? Or about revisiting her cliff at the rest area? It was surprising how even the flimsy walls of the Oleander were enough to shut out another person's life so completely.
Margaret knocked on Ruth's door early in the morning, but she was already up. Together they pursued their long shadows back along the highway to the Deerslayer. Margaret was stowing away a three-egg cheese omelet with bacon and hash browns and Ruth was warming her hands around her cup of coffee when Mr. Pearl appeared next to their booth and asked if he could join them. He ordered coffee and a stack of blueberry pancakes, and then sat staring shyly at his cup.
Just to get the conversation started, Ruth told him how much she liked the little room at the Oleander. "How did you get into the motel business?" she asked him. He relaxed then, and while they finished their breakfasts he told them his life story, managing somehow to maintain his stream of talk even as he chainsawed his way through the stack of pancakes. He spent about six months a year in Fivespot, he told them, from May through October, running the Oleander and fishing in the afternoons when things were quiet at the motel. He was from Lake Havasu City, Arizona, which information he thought should be sufficient to explain why he was in Fivespot right now. "Been 120 degrees down there all summer," he said, shaking his head. Not too many folks stayed there in the summer; most of the population were what he called snowbirds, people who just pulled their vehicles into the RV park in November or December and stayed all winter. In the summer they all scattered to the mountains or the north. It was beautiful down there in the winter, though, and the population tripled or something like that in the winter months. Used to be a quiet place, when he moved there 25 years ago, but not any more. Traffic! You wouldn't believe it, out there in the middle of the desert. You'd have to wait 10 minutes at an intersection! But in the summer it was real quiet. His wife was one of the few who stayed. "Seems like she just prefers her own house and her own bed."
He didn't linger on the subject of his wife. "That town's all about the lake – didn't even exist until they got the lake. And then they got that London Bridge, you know. It's their claim to fame. You ever seen that? They bought the whole bridge and took it apart and moved it over to the desert, and set it up again. It's really something. Golf courses and palm trees, and then London Bridge." He smiled happily. "It's pretty historic."
"I can see why your wife wouldn't want to leave," said Margaret, "living right next to London Bridge like that. I bet she's got a British accent by now." Her tone made Mr. Pearl stop talking and apply himself to what remained of the blueberry pancakes.
"I've been to Florida in the winter," Ruth said, trying to soften the awkward silence, "but I've never seen the desert at that time of year. It must be wonderful in February." In Indiana in February the icy winds would be roaring and the squirrel nests of dead leaves high in the bare treetops would be swaying and swaying all night long.
Mr. Pearl eventually recovered his spirits, bolstered by a refill of his coffee cup. "I'll be heading back in a week or two," he told them. "You two ladies are liable to be my last guests this season. It slows down quite a bit up here once the weather gets cold, and then I start thinking about the sunshine and them palm trees." He laughed.
"And your wife," said Margaret. Ruth wished she'd let go of that. But Mr. Pearl only nodded, without losing his smile. He insisted on buying their breakfasts, over Ruth's weak protests, and then walked them back to the Oleander. "You drive carefully, wherever you're headed," he said to Margaret. He went off to do some chores, although Ruth couldn't imagine what chores there could be, she and Margaret being the only guests.
"One thing about not carrying any baggage is, it's real easy to check out of a motel," Margaret said.
"What are you going to do?" Ruth asked her. "Are you going to be all right?"
"Yeah, I'm all right. I gotta do something, though. Wishbone." She shook her head.
"Maybe you should just go somewhere else. What's the point of being there, if your husband doesn't talk to you? Move to a bigger town and get a job. Make some new friends."
"Yup. I guess I'll think of something. Money's one problem, though. I haven't had a job for 20 years. Did you leave some gas in my car, by the way?" Ruth gave her some more money, just to make sure. She thought she was probably still feeling guilty about having taken Margaret's car. They exchanged addresses. Shouldn't I have hugged her, she was wondering, as she watched Margaret pull out of the parking lot. But she hadn't really wanted to.
With all that had happened since the previous morning, Ruth hadn't really been thinking much about what she was going to do herself. With Margaret gone she was alone again; but this was no longer the enchanted bubble of solitude that had wafted her across the plains and all the way up to her warm rock on the mountaintop. Fivespot looked pretty bleak this morning, despite the sunshine, and her room in the Oleander looked less like a cozy haven and more like a lonely little motel room. She was no longer quite sure what she was doing there. Without thinking much about it she brushed her teeth and began packing up her suitcase.
Mr. Pearl was a little surprised that she wasn't going to stay out her time, but he kindly refunded the money for the unused nights. "You get that hankerin to be home, I guess," he said knowingly. In fact, she didn't really want to be home just yet. She reminded herself that she still had quite a bit of time. There were the rollercoaster ranges of Nevada, and then the Rockies, and finally the long coast back down the gentle slope that separated the Rockies from Indiana. There would be at least two more motel rooms all her own and thousands of miles alone in the Pontiac, as the mountains gradually dropped below the horizon behind her.
"You have a good trip back to Arizona," she told Mr. Pearl, "and enjoy that winter sunshine."
"I will," he said. It was nice to see his face brighten at the thought of London Bridge and the flocks of returning snowbirds settling in the trailer parks, and maybe of his wife.