“Order the same thing for me,” Lise says, and heads off to the bathroom.
“Did she say to order the same thing for her?” Renie asks.
“Maybe she doesn’t know what you got,” I say. “She was in a big hurry to get to the bathroom.”
“I’ll bet she’s going to email him,” Renie says. Then, to me, she says, “While you were on the phone, she checked her email and there was one from him but she wouldn’t tell us what he said.”
The waitress, a tired-looking brunette with a thin ponytail and the smallest waist I’ve seen since Dolly Parton, takes our order and then we take turns guessing whether or not what he said was romantic, sexual, or funny.
“Funny is best,” Renie says, and Joni says, “Yeah, but she didn’t laugh. Or share it with us. So I think it was romantic. And you know what? I hope she lets whatever might happen, happen. I hope she won’t let Sandy dictate what she should do.”
“Sandy’s just scared of getting hurt again, don’t you think?” I say. “We were talking about it last night and Lise wondered if she and Steve had changed enough to give it another go, or if it might mess things up even more with Sandy. There’d be an awful lot of pressure on them to succeed.”
“Too bad you didn’t bring your box,” Joni says, and I look over at her, smiling.
“Really?” she says. “You brought it?”
“I brought my favorite deck of cards. Just in case.”
“Let’s do them tonight!” Joni says. “There’s something I want an opinion on.”
“Lise should have a secret relationship with Steve for a while,” Renie says. “Seems to me it’s started already.”
When Lise slides back into the booth, Joni says, “So?”
“What?” Lise’s eyes are big.
“Oh, come on, tell us.”
She smiles, then pulls out her phone, calls up the message, and reads it to us: “It seems to me that you still have that same way about you, a sweetness, a kindness, and a vulnerability, but also a chronic and tightfisted resistance to things that might in fact be very good for you. My goal, if I may have one as pertains to you, is to convince you that I still want all of you, and think maybe we can rebuild a life together. I know how important it is for us to regain trust. I suppose some may find it miraculous that my feelings for you remain, especially when you made it so painfully clear all those years ago that you were not in the least bit interested in staying married to me. I confess it surprised me, the force with which so many things came back as soon as I saw your face. But you and I both know there’s more to the human heart than anatomy and physiology taught us. Tell me honestly how you’re feeling today, after a night that went a lot better than I think either of us suspected it would. Know that whatever you tell me is safe with me. Know, too, that I have no intention of moving back to Minneapolis this afternoon. But a visit soon with a walk around the lake might be nice. We always did like that.”
“Wow,” Renie says. “What’d you say back?”
She shrugs. “I said, ‘Come.’ ”
The waitress bangs down our platters, and Lise looks at hers and says, “I ordered this?”
“You did,” Renie says, her mouth already full.
“The biscuits and gravy are actually really good,” Joni says.
Lise dives in. “I owe you,” she tells me.
“For eating this?”
“For thinking of this trip.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.”
“Don’t you guys ever tell him I read you his email,” Lise says.
Renie puts down her fork. “Damn it.”
“What?” Lise says.
“Is he going to move in?”
“No! We’re just … I don’t know, Renie, we’ll see. I’m a long way from living with him again.”
Renie looks over at me. “When he moves in, you and I find another place, right?”
“What about me?” Joni asks.
“Oh,” Renie says. “That’s right. Well, I think the easiest thing is that Lise will have to move out.” Satisfied, she resumes eating.
I dip my toast into the egg yolk, and think how odd it is, how odd and wonderful, that at any age, and all of a sudden, just the prospect of love can draw the curtains open to such a dazzling day.
Many years ago, I went to see a very famous novelist speak after her latest book had come out. It was in a huge auditorium that was packed with people. She was so eloquent, so clearly respected and admired, and beautiful to boot. She said many noteworthy things, thoughtful and really intelligent things. But you know what’s stayed with me all these years? She was asked a question just before she left the stage, and she answered by saying, “Oh, well, I’m like everybody else: when it comes to love, I’m just a fool.” And all of us sitting in the dark, thinking, Oh, good. Oh, phew.
After breakfast, I get into the driver’s seat, adjust the mirrors, turn the key, back out of the lot, and head for wherever the freeway is not.
I watch the miles go past, and I think about whether Dennis and I could still be right for each other. If we could be right for each other long-term.
At the first bathroom break, I let the others go in before me, telling them I need to make a phone call. But after they’ve disappeared, I get out the cards. How likely? I ask. How much of a chance do we have of ending up together, finally?
I draw Cradleboard, “Ability to respond.” I’m not supposed to sit and wait for someone else to do something. I’m supposed to use my creativity and speak my truth.
Well, that’s a stupid card. All it does is fill me with fear. How am I supposed to use my creativity? What am I supposed to respond to? Maybe I shouldn’t even be doing this. Maybe it’s just too late. Although why should I think it’s too late when my mother is currently starring in The Housewives of HavenCrest?
How can I calm down? I think, and draw another card. I get Whirling Rainbow, “Unity/Wholeness achieved.” I’m being asked to remove discord in my life in order to grow. To not feed negativity. To create new beauty and abundance in my life.
I close the book, put it and the cards back in my tote.
All right. All right. I go into the gas station, where Renie is standing in front of gigantic ropes of beef jerky. “Want some?” she asks.
That night, Joni and I share a motel room and she asks to borrow my cards. She lies on her bed, closes her eyes, and pulls a card from the deck, then reads from the book. “This is really interesting,” she says. “This is helping me make up my mind, all right.”
“What’s your question?”
“I can’t tell you yet. I’ll tell you at some point, but not yet. It’s too … I have to be sure before I tell you.”
“Well, what did you draw?”
“Whirling Rainbow,” she says.
WE’RE ON A STRETCH OF RELATIVELY UNINTERESTING ROAD in Indiana heading for Cleveland and Renie is working on her column. “Listen to this one,” she says. “A woman who works at an airline ticket counter is complaining that passengers come to her and ask questions without saying ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you?’ and she wants to know how to respond to such rude people.”
“And …?” I say.
“And here’s what I’ve got so far. ‘Thank you for asking this very important question. Here is what I’d suggest you say to the next beleaguered person who has waited in a slow-moving line of more than enough people to populate an incorporated town and dares to come up to you with a question pertaining to, oh, say, air travel rather than an inquiry as to how you are feeling at any particular time. I’d suggest you say, “Okay, where’s my gift? You show up here with no gift? Go and get a gift and then get back in line.” ’ ”
“Or,” Lise says, “you could tell her to say, ‘First, on behalf of my airline and myself, I’d like to apologize to you for whatever airline experience you just had or are about to have, because it isn’t going to be good. Now let me see if I can help you with your question. If I can’t, I’ll probably take it out on you.’ ”
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“I feel sorry for airline employees,” I say, and Joni says, “Me, too.”
“Look!” Renie says, pointing. “A Carnegie library! Let’s go in and all of us find a good quote. And then let’s eat.”
As we’re getting out of the car, Lise says, “I might start making art boxes,” apropos of nothing.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You know, sort of like Cornell boxes, only deeply personal. I might start making those.”
“When did you start thinking of doing that?” Joni asks.
“Last night, Steve reminded me that I used to talk about that before we were married. We had seen an exhibit where a woman used old purses to create dioramas, and I felt so drawn by the notion of doing that kind of thing. I wanted to try doing it, using common objects in a very different way. What if this trip changes my life and all I want to do is make art boxes? What if there’s a whole different me under the me I know?”
It seems possible. Already I’ve seen that when you’re pulled away from your normal routine, it’s as though air and sunlight come into your brain and do a little housecleaning. A lifting up of what’s been practically rusted into place to reveal something else, a thing that makes you understand the origin of the phrase new and exciting, a phrase usually offered with irony, in order to hide the longing.
We go into the library, that layman’s priory, that paper-scented oasis of quiet industry and calm. I wander around the place to admire the graceful architecture and to pull books off the shelf to read a little here, a little there. It’s going to be hard to find a good quote, because every book says the same thing: Dennis, Cleveland, tomorrow; Dennis, Cleveland, tomorrow.
WE ARE AT a roadside restaurant that I want to go to for dinner because of the name, Sunny’s No Foolin’ Home Cookin’ Cafe. It looks like a house that’s been converted into a restaurant, and when we walk in, we see that it hasn’t been converted so very much. We are seated in what was a bedroom, which accommodates four small tables. I tell the others to order the meat loaf platter for me, and make my way to the bathroom, which is a bathroom like in a house, complete with tub and a crocheted cover for the extra roll of toilet paper.
When I return to the table, Renie is saying, “Well, I’m going to ask her.”
“Ask what?” I say, sitting down.
“I’m going to ask the waitress if she thinks everyone is carrying a heavy burden.”
“That again?”
“It’s time to start my research. She’ll tell me what she really thinks; I can tell.”
When the waitress appears, I think Renie must be right. The woman is tall and muscular, blond going gray, with a direct gaze and a no-nonsense attitude. “You the meat loaf?” she asks, and I say yes, I am.
“Best thing on the menu,” she says.
“I thought you said the broasted chicken was the best thing,” Joni says.
“It is.” She puts a platter of catfish in front of Renie. “That’s the best thing, too.” When she puts down Lise’s chef salad, she says nothing.
“What, no good?” Lise says.
She shrugs. “It’s a salad.” She puts her hands on her hips. “All set, girls?”
“Before you go, let me ask you something,” Renie says. “There’s this saying, Be kind, for everyone is carrying a heavy burden. Do you think that’s true?”
“Hell, no!” she says, and Renie’s face says, See?
“I was. But I got rid of my burden, and I’m happy as I guess you get to be in this life. It took me thirty years, but I finally left a husband who it turns out couldn’t wait for me to go. I left the stuck-up suburb we lived in, moved here and took this job, which is mostly just fun, and bought myself a trailer, which is much nicer than you might think. The thing that’s most surprising is the closet in the bedroom; I’m going to tell you, this thing must have been designed by a woman. And I’ll bet she was thinking, What do you need with a bunch of crap in your bedroom? You need a bed and a dresser and a closet that earns its keep. And that’s what I got.
“My place is walking distance from here, over in Arrowhead Court, you can see my trailer if you want. I get off in twenty minutes.”
We look at each other, and she says, “Talk amongst yourselves and decide. Makes me no nevermind. I wouldn’t mind having a little company tonight. If it’s not you all, I’ll find me somebody else.”
She goes out of the room and Renie whispers, “Want to go?” and we all nod.
Forty minutes later, we’re in Wanda’s living room, three of us lined up on a gold sofa, Renie in one of the two swivel club chairs, also gold. We’ve been shown the closet, which is indeed impressive, and now Wanda takes a pack of cigarettes from a drawer in the table by her chair. “Cigarette?” she asks Renie, and Renie takes one. We all do. After a moment, Renie says, “This isn’t tobacco.”
Wanda looks over at her, a mirthful glance. “It isn’t?” She leans back in her chair, looks at Renie. “So let me ask you something. How come you asked me if I was carrying a heavy burden? Do I look like I am?”
“No, it’s just a goof,” Renie says.
“What do you mean?”
“A goof, you know, just a question I keep bringing up for the hell of it.”
Wanda nods, then says, “I’ll tell you, though. I do think all people carry one burden, and that’s fear. It’s a problem, what fear makes people do, and also what it keeps them from doing. I mean, it was fear kept me from doing with my life what I wanted to. And why? I didn’t have any responsibilities to anyone but myself; wasn’t going to hurt anybody by getting out of what I was in, and going in a new direction entirely. But fear, you know, the boogeyman under the bed, you’re just scared of making a change. And then one day you just go ahead and do it anyway and there you are: blue skies.”
She rises up out of her chair. “Anybody want some Cheez Doodles?”
She fills a bowl with them and sets it down where we can all reach it, then says, “Fear and lack of love, those are the A-number-one problems of human beings. Every time there’s another disaster, you know, somebody shooting up a place, you look. Fear. And a lack of love. Or, you know, something wrong with the hard wiring, and they just couldn’t take any love they were ever offered. Or ask for it.”
She eats another Cheez Doodle. “Well, now I’m thirsty. Ain’t that the way? You get one good thing, you just want more.” She goes over to her little fridge and leans in. “Who wants a Dr Pepper or … a Dr Pepper?”
A chorus of I dos, and she hands us each a can. “You all been friends for a long time, huh?”
I smile. “Not so long, really.”
“Huh. Well, there’s an ease to you. I can see you’re having fun.”
“That we are,” Lise says.
“Nothing like a pack of women, having fun,” she says. And then, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, “Anything can happen.”
“WOW,” JONI SAYS. “I never do stuff like this.”
It’s late, approaching midnight, and we’re ready to find a motel, but first we are lying out in a field looking up at a sky that should have put flyers all over town to announce the show it would be giving tonight.
“I do it all the time,” Renie says, and Joni says, “No you don’t.”
“Well, I want to do it all the time, and I used to.”
“Boy, that’s my theme song,” I say.
It’s very quiet, and then somebody snorts, laughing. And then I laugh. And then we all do, we lie in the dark under the stars laughing and laughing. For too long, really. And then Joni rolls up onto to her elbows and says, “I don’t know why I’m laughing so hard.”
“Because we can,” Lise says, and she’s right. It’s as though there’s a dome of power around us, four women lying on the night-cooled earth, looking up and giving props to the same sky Cro-Magnon saw. Though for him the constellations were even clearer, much clearer, I’m sure. But this is enough, this starscape and these women and this moment.
I think I know why Wanda
thought we’d been friends for a long time. Because of fate, because of timing, because of our own blend of chemistry, and because of this trip, we do share that kind of friendship. We’re ahead of where we should be. And I realize now that I’ve been gifted, if not by a replacement of Penny, then by some pretty fine compensation for her loss.
“Hey, Renie,” I say, thinking of the day I met her. “We’re lying outside and looking up at the stars and sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings.”
“Yeah. All we need is to hold hands,” she says, but there’s a softness in it. And when I pick up her hand and squeeze it, it takes her a minute to let go.
“ARE YOU NERVOUS?” JONI ASKS. I HAVE BEEN SITTING STIFF and silent as a mannequin for the last fifty miles. The day before we left, I’d sent Dennis a postcard telling him that I thought we’d arrive today, probably early evening. But because of our erratic route, we’re going to be late. Today we stopped at a ramshackle building missing half its corrugated metal roof called Atlas Garage: Home of the Mighty Fixers; Vi’s Pies, which were not as good as Brooks Daniels’s, but a close second; the Museum of the Stamp, with its earnest curator; and we stopped to take photos of a sign for a small town announcing its population as NOT MANY.
I’d given Dennis my cellphone number again on that postcard, and he’d finally sent me his, a single entry on one of his photo postcards. I hoped that this simply reflected his disinterest in talking on the phone. He’d never been one to engage in long conversations on the phone and in fact disliked doing anything on it but exchanging vital information. “If I’m going to talk to someone, I need to see their eyes,” he always said. But there is also the chance that he’s having second thoughts about seeing me at all. Well, I’ve come too far to hear that on the phone; if he’s changed his mind, let him tell me face-to-face.
All I say to the others, though, is “I’m wondering if we should wait until morning. We may get there too late. He might be asleep.”
“I think we’ll get to Cleveland in another couple of hours or so, maybe around nine,” Joni says. “And then we’ll have to find his house, but that shouldn’t be so hard. So we’d probably be there by around nine or ten at the latest. You really think he’ll be asleep then?”