Then I started thinking about what else Martin might have done with his life if he hadn’t been a salesman. And I think that once in a very great while he thinks about that too, sits outside at night, alone, wondering, and I know the notion pokes at a soft place in him. He is very successful, but he is embarrassed by what he does, he has told me. He wanted to study astrophysics, but when he was ready to apply to graduate school, he saw that there were so many people around him who knew more than he. Not to be racist, he said, but Jesus, those Chinese guys. Who could compete? On Saturdays, Martin would be on the campus smoking a little dope and playing a lot of Frisbee—mostly with dogs who wore kerchiefs around their necks—and he would see the Chinese guys in his classes coming from the library when it closed and think, No, I don’t think it runs so deep in me. He went into business. Put his telescope in the basement next to the TV trays we got for a wedding gift and never use but can’t throw out. And then I thought of how his bald spot is growing larger and how he was impotent for the first time in his life not long ago and it made me feel so tender toward him I almost called him. But he would not be at the kitchen table thinking about such things. The conversation would not have worked. When are you coming home? he would have said.
After lunch (a perfect cheeseburger at a dime store in the middle of a real Main Street), I passed by a house that stood all by itself, just at the edge of town. It was a chartreuse color, awful really, but at least different. I saw a woman sitting on the porch, watching her children play in the yard, and I remembered my desire to talk to other women. It occurred to me that I could really do it. Well, I could try. I pulled into the driveway, and the woman shaded her eyes against the sun, looking to see who I was.
“I’m not anyone,” I said, getting out of the car. And then, “You don’t know me.” She didn’t say anything. I said I was not a salesperson or a Jehovah’s Witness and then she smiled, relaxed. She asked if I were lost. I said sort of. She was awfully young, a pretty woman, her short, dark hairdo and large round eyes reminding me of a chickadee. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans and lovely pearl studs in her ears—dressing up a bit of herself so she wouldn’t forget how, no doubt. You will see this in mothers of small children: they dress up from the neck up. Everything else is in danger of peanut butter.
I sat down with her—although a step below her out of some sense of propriety—and one of her children, a boy who looked to be around four or so, came running up at full speed, then stopped dead in his tracks before me. I said hello and he said nothing, just looked at his mother. “She’s lost,” the mother said. “She just needs directions.” “Oh,” he said, in that kind of adenoidal voice kids often have. Then he ran off to join his slightly younger sister, who was adjusting her doll in the buggy with straight-mouthed determination. The boy faced away from her, made a gun out of a stick, fired into the woods at the enemy. The ancient roles.
I used to play with my cousins in the basement of our grandparents’ house. They were the warriors; we girls were the nurses, left to talk quietly to each other and make a hospital from towels we found in the laundry and lawn furniture stored in the cobwebby furnace room. One by one, the boys showed up with whatever wounds they described to us: “My guts are hanging out, right here, see? Pretend it’s just all gloppy intestines, real slimy.” Or “My bone is sticking out of my arm plus my ear got shot off.” Or “I’m dead. You have to wrap me up like a mummy and call my parents.” We cared for them, smiling with a kind of bruised superiority, silent.
The young woman asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. I said I would love one. She said she’d be right back and then when she stood up, there was just the tiniest hint of fear in her, a hesitancy—as though she were thinking, Wait, should I leave this stranger out here with my children, should I be getting coffee for someone who might be a bad headline tomorrow? But I looked at her and smiled my intentions and this worked; people still often communicate best without words. The woman came out with a yellow mug with blackberries painted on it and we drank our coffee and I told her about what I was doing. Said I’d decided I needed a trip away, just by myself, that my husband was back home, we were fine, I just … And she sighed and said yeah, she loved her husband but that she ran away from him with some frequency. I said, really? She said, yes, most of the time he knew nothing about it. But once he did. They’d had a bad fight late at night and she took off in the car, meaning never to come back, meaning to drive to Alaska and begin again. But she was barefoot and this seemed to prevent her from doing anything. She said she drove to the grocery store and slept in the parking lot until three-thirty, then snuck back into the house. “But I didn’t go to bed. I slept on the couch,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know I was home.” “Right,” I said, and I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with “Mommy” embroidered over the left breast, over the heart. I too sat on porches, on park benches, half watching Ruthie and half dreaming—trying, I think, to recall my former self. If a stranger had come up to me and said, “Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen,” I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it. It wasn’t that I was really unhappy. It was the constancy of my load and the awesome importance of it; and it was my isolation. I made no friends out of the few people I saw in the park—frazzled mothers too busy for a real conversation; discontented nannies staring blankly ahead. And oftentimes the park was empty. The swings clanked so loudly against the pole. I could hear Ruthie’s little voice carried on the wind toward me, always toward me. Watching her small back bent over her bucket in the sandbox, I ached with love for her and fingered the pages of the novel I couldn’t really read. I watched the time, because I had to have dinner ready when Martin came home. It was a rule neither of us ever thought to question or unmake. We flowered in the sixties, but the spirit of the fifties was deep in us. We saw what our parents did, and, blinking blandly like the baby chimps in the jungle, followed suit—at first in ways that felt clumsy, then in ways we called natural, though in me, I see now, there were internal earthquakes wanting to happen all the time.
I asked the woman how she was doing, how did she really think she was doing. “Oh,” she said. “Fine. Although … well, I know this is just temporary. But yesterday I shook the orange juice and the top was loose and a little bit spilled on the floor which I’d already wiped up about three hundred times that day and I just started crying. I went to sit in the bathroom, but of course I had to leave the door cracked open. I’ll bet I cried for twenty minutes. In the middle of it, I got my daughter a graham cracker. She didn’t notice a thing.” I said, but you believe you’re all right, that you’re doing fine? Well, yes, she said. Sure.
I drove the rest of the day feeling that my mind was wrapped in a blanket, insulated. I noted what I passed as though it were in someone else’s dream. I came back into myself after dinner, which was in a truck stop. There was a special area for “professional drivers” to eat where the service was extra fast. The room was filled with smoke, a blue haze. I saw one woman there—the rest were men. The menu posted over the counter was full of things that the American Heart Association would have had a collective heart attack about, and everybody there was eating them with gusto. I myself had chicken-fried steak, in the other room, the one for civilians. We didn’t get phones at our booths. We didn’t get shower services—I kept hearing over the intercom, “Roadway, your shower is ready. Carolina, your shower is ready.” I asked for a little extra gravy and the waitress brought it to me in a soup bowl. There are places time doesn’t touch, I guess.
There was a store there, too, a kind of 7-Eleven for 18-wheelers, attached right to the restaurant. They had an amazing variety of junk food, including the biggest bag of
the biggest pieces of beef jerky I ever saw; strange pieces of black or silver metal equipment that I couldn’t begin to identify; sheepskin seat covers; shellacked wooden plaques with “Prayer for a Trucker” written on them and featuring an illustration of an angel hovering over a truck as it made its way down a mountain road in a blizzard (if I’d known Lawrence’s address, I’d have sent him one). There was a whole rack full of black leather jackets, and, for the ladies, lace-trimmed, sleeveless T-shirts with a picture of a motorcycle done in pink and blue pastels. I bought one, couldn’t stop myself from smiling when I walked out with it. Do you want this? life seems to be saying. Is this what you want? Well, take it, then. What do you think it’s here for?
It feels like this is my time for coming into my own. Extraordinary to suddenly think of this as a time for gain. Martin used to say, imitating his funny old grandmother, “Oy, I can’t vait to get home and take my goidle off.” Well, my girdle’s off. Flung into the wind. What luxury, the feel of one’s true flesh beneath one’s own hand.
Dear Martin,
I am at a booth in a diner, and I just ordered your favorite breakfast: two over easy, sausage, home fries, wheat toast. As you know, I don’t like sausage as much as bacon, but I am doing this in honor of you. Well, not in honor of you. In remembrance of you. Because I kind of miss you.
I didn’t sleep much last night, and so I have that fragile kind of feeling. You know how I get when I’m tired, when any negative thing can seem to poke a hole right through me—a newspaper headline, running out of Kleenex, the messiness of a little girl’s braids. You know how I get. I think it’s something you were always very patient about, really, and I don’t think I ever thanked you for it.
Well, the waitress just brought the coffee and I must say it is the best I’ve ever had—caramel-colored from the real cream, a slight taste of pecan that makes you almost want to chew. This diner is called the Metro. Not many people are here right now, and you can hear bits of conversation. Two old guys in the corner, their pants hiked up to their armpits, are talking about their blood pressure medication—“Doc told me I could expect that, but hell, who needs it?” one of them is saying, with the tremulous kind of outrage that is soft at the center, that breaks your heart. Even as I approach old age, I can’t stop looking at older people and assuming they were never young. Whereas they can’t believe they are now old. One of my grandmothers used to say, “I wake up every morning and look in the mirror to see if I’ve started to go backward yet. I never have.” And then she said to me, quite seriously, “Darling. Don’t get old.”
In a booth at the other end of the room are two young mothers, their babies in strollers beside them. I’ll bet they’re talking about their husbands. Do men ever do that, Martin? Talk about their wives at some length? Try to figure them out?
Before my eggs arrive I want to tell you what I did last night. I spent the whole day doing not much more than driving. I passed so many lovely things—a wide brook that followed alongside the road and made a wonderful sound—I turned off the radio to hear it. There was a long patch of woods with DO NOT ENTER signs all over the place, and I confess it made me want to ENTER. I miss being young and rebellious. I wish I’d gone to more protest rallies. Remember when everyone was going to Washington that time? It was before I was with you. My current flame, a wild-eyed artist named Chico, came to get me to go, but I said no, I was too tired. I said I was too tired! I thought my whole life would be one opportunity after the other to make important statements.
Chico painted on huge canvases, often with his feet. He swam naked in a pond that was behind his crooked house, and it always pissed him off that I wore a bathing suit when I went in. He had a rowboat, and once when we were out in it he dove in the water and took the boat’s rope in his teeth and swam me back to shore. I suppose I was meant to be impressed or something but I was just annoyed. He gave me crabs, Chico. I was so embarrassed to have them. I remember when I told you, years later, that I’d had them—I thought you should know—and you said, so what? Everybody had them. I said did you? and you said sure, that you and your roommates used to have races with them across the lid of the toilet seat.
Not that you really need to know this, but my eggs are here. More later.
Well, I’m through with a delicious breakfast where the home fries were not made from canned potatoes, and the waitress has just said, Sit here as long as you want, honey, take your time, tell me when you don’t want any more coffee. So I will finish this letter to you. Someone has put Hank Williams Junior on the jukebox, and I am feeling quite content. The coffee has given me enough of a charge that I want all my i’s to be dotted, this paper to be folded exactly into thirds before it gets put in the envelope.
So. As I was saying, I saw lots of wonderful things—fields plowed in ways that were so neat and orderly, and farmhouses set back from the road, the kind that always make me think the occupants eat at tables with blue-and-white dishes, embroidered tablecloths, jelly glasses that are sparkling clean. Cows stood in pastures like chess pieces, rarely moving, seeming to contemplate some un-hysterical thing. I passed several houses in one town with quilts over the railings, out for an airing—quilting must be big, there. I was not thinking about much of anything, just driving and looking, driving and looking. When I ate dinner, there was a man sitting across from me reading a paperback that had a cover of a night sky. And it made me think about how I’ve always been so afraid of the dark, how I get a kind of claustrophobia when I am alone in the dark. I feel something surrounding me, kind of squeezing, and I wait for something awful to happen. It’s like hearing an evil mind thinking, and then the thoughts gain form and reach out toward you. And you are immobilized by your own too-strong desire to get away. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats so hard. I hate this about myself. I’m fifty years old and I still leave the hall light on when you’re out of town—as well as a light in every room downstairs. Looking at that book cover, I thought, Well, this is my time of discovery, this trip. This is my time to let new things happen, and to enter into fears in order to come out the other side. And so I bought a sleeping bag—not the kind you would have bought, I know; you would have researched sleeping bags and bought the most sensible one, and after you bought it you would have researched still, making sure you got the best price—whereas I simply went into a store and bought the one I thought was prettiest. And least complicated—my God, Martin, some of them seem like they ought to enter themselves in a talent contest. I drove until I came to a heavily wooded area, and then I pulled over to the side of the road and walked in a ways. The sun was setting—it was so quiet, no birds, no squirrels, nothing but the sound of my steps breaking twigs. It felt like On the Beach, like the world had died and I was the sole witness. I laid the sleeping bag out and got into it, and when the dark came, I was just petrified. I thought, this is how it happens. People go too far, they get foolish, and they get killed.
Still, it seemed very, very important that I do this, that I confront this fear of the dark, access my woman warrior—don’t smile, Martin, it is in us all, we are just well-behaved, and for all of humankind men have reaped the benefits of the first woman who said for the very first time, “That’s all right. You can go first.” Anyway, I thought, if I can just stay alone one night, I won’t be afraid anymore.
I stayed the whole night. And I must say it was the longest night of my life. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but there was no way I was going to have the kind of trust that would let me stop jumping at every breeze, every buzz of every mosquito (and there were many). When the sun came up, I burst into tears. Then I walked back to the car and got in and locked the doors and I drove to a gas station and washed up and put on deodorant and perfume and lipstick and a gold bracelet that was at the bottom of my purse. I guess it wasn’t exactly a vision quest. I guess it was just a woman trying not to be afraid of the dark, who still is.
One thing I want to tell you about all this is that the fear I felt lying alone in the dark was close t
o the anxiety I feel when I wake up at home. That sense of something out there that has no respect for my life. With the exception of my night in the woods, since I’ve been on the road, those middle-of-the-night panics have not been happening. I wake up and think about where I am, I lie awake for a while, but I am not afraid. I am just—Well, I don’t know how to say this to you. I am just realizing. I guess that’s what I’d say.
Watch out when you pay the milkman. The last three times he charged for cottage cheese which I never ordered.
Love,
Nan
I spent the night in the woods last night. I wanted to end up feeling calm and safe and a part of the orbiting earth. This was a romantic and completely unrealistic notion. I ended up feeling like a tidbit being dangled over the jaws of a wolf. I was so afraid the whole night, stiff with fear, literally afraid to move. Now it is five o’clock in the evening and I am in a filthy motel, but I don’t care. I only need sleep, and this will do for that. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to bed so early in my life. It feels very odd, yet very comforting, too, turning to pajamas in my time of need.