Lorna Moor.
My mother’s name filled my insides with an ache like freezing, but all around that aching was a peculiar sort of heat. Emma was related to me. Emma was my aunt. By blood. I was her niece by blood. I had a connection to her. She had a connection to my father. That’s why she didn’t leave, and in Glen Burnie, Maryland, with the planes sounding like they were landing on the roof of our house, that knowledge made me feel better.
Still, my first day of travel had turned out to have in it nothing I wanted, or had prepared for, or planned. I took out my spiral notebook from my duffel and looked over my schedule. We weren’t in Ohio. We weren’t west. We hadn’t gone 500 miles. On the plus side, the lodging was free. Recalling Gina’s little trivia diversions made me smile a bit, but otherwise, I couldn’t relax, or even look forward to tomorrow. But I knew what would make me relax: checking off the items on the agenda for today. Didn’t forget anything. Left on time. Headed in the right direction. Did not get lost. Oh well . . .
I made a list for tomorrow. That did make me feel better. Number one: Leave no later than nine. I couldn’t make any more plans as I’d left my maps and atlas in the car, and also because I had fallen asleep.
2
The Vedantists
Number one in my plan was out the window at nine-thirty because no one had woken up, not Gina, not Molly, and almost not me.
“How long are we planning to stay?” I asked Gina, when she finally tumbled out of her room around eleven.
“At least a week,” said Aunt Flo, who overheard. “Haven’t seen my darlings in years.”
“Yes, yes, of course. And I hope we have a nice visit.” A week! “It’s just that . . .” I became tongue-tied. What was there to do in Baltimore for a week? And I had a mission! I had to get to Mendocino. I’d rather spend a week looking for my mother than be here in Glen Burnie. Not wanting to be impolite, I stared at Gina until she said something, about ten minutes later.
“Shelby has to get to California, Aunt Flo. Mom told you. We’ll leave Molly here, but Shel can’t stay that long. She has to be back to get ready for college. And me too.”
“Yes, so true!” I piped up. “I told Emma I’d be getting back in a few weeks. Plus Gina has to get to—”
“Shh!” Gina interrupted, glaring.
“What’s the hurry?” said Aunt Flo. “It’s supposed to be a fun trip. An adventure. Stay a few days, relax. Then you can drive your sister back, so she doesn’t have to take a bus home.”
“Aunt Flo!” That was Gina. “We’re not driving Molly back. Mom and I agreed. We’re going cross country. We’re not commuting back and forth along the Eastern seaboard.” Way to go, Gina. But to me she said, “She’s right. What’s the rush?”
No, no rush. In one day I was going to chew off my own skin, piece by piece, beginning with my hands.
“You’re right to go,” Marc had said. “This is the only time in your life to take a trip like this, Shelby. Once you start college, you’ll have to work during the summer. You’ll be an intern. And then you’ll have a job in the city. When you have a real job, you’ll have an apartment, bills, a dog. And then even you might find a husband—and then forget everything. Once the kids come, you’ll never willingly get in the car again.” Marc talked of these things as if he knew. “I do know,” he said indignantly. “My older sister has four kids. You should see her. You won’t believe she’s a member of our species.” He drew her bent over the corn bread; the corn bread a happy yellow, and she all in gray. Later, when he showed me the picture, I said, don’t show it to your sister, but he told me she had had it enlarged and framed.
Gina and I went downtown to Harborplace Mall, looked around, flirted with some boys, bought nothing. The following day we went to the town pools. That was okay, even though we took Molly with us. We also took Molly to Burger King and to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. That night I lay fretting, and when I woke up, it was another day. In Glen Burnie. Close to the factories and the Camden Yards and the airport; just another drab neighborhood, familiar enough and bland, but how was staying in a small house with a large yard helping me get to California on my road to self-discovery? I took my Folgers instant coffee outside.
The backyard was home to dozens of Flo’s dogs, small and smaller, running around, yapping. It was the yapping that got to me. I wasn’t used to the cacophony. My inner life was quiet, so too my life with Emma. Sometimes my friends were loud, but they were loud temporarily, and then I went home, retreating into quiet again. I liked to listen to music, but quietly, even rock. When Emma and I cleaned or cooked, the house was quiet. Sometimes Emma would put something classical on. I enjoyed that; but this? A constant high-pitched, grating yelping? My point isn’t that it was unpleasant. Undeniably it was. My point is this: someone had chosen this voluntarily; a green backyard with trees and ungroomed flowers, filled with a running mass of barking fecal matter. I then realized. Flo couldn’t hear them. After an hour outside, I couldn’t hear them either. The house was under the path of planes landing at BWI airport four blocks away. Every five to seven minutes a deafening roar in the clouds muted any dog mewling which seemed like Bach’s cello concertos by comparison.
“Girls, why don’t you do something? Why are you sitting around? It’s a beautiful day. Drive down to Annapolis, see the harbor. There’s so much to do around here.”
“We were thinking of leaving to do something,” I said.
Gina kicked me under the table. Aunt Flo said, “Yes, yes, good. There’s an afternoon game today, why don’t you go? The Orioles are playing the Yankees.”
My interest in baseball was only slightly below that of cleaning a yard full of dog poop. And that, at least, would take less time. Besides, we didn’t budget for ball-game tickets. But Gina wanted to go, though she also had no interest in baseball. “Come on, we’ll get some bleacher tickets, they’re cheap.”
Aunt Flo picked up the shovel scooper. “I have to keep at it, otherwise they overrun me.”
“Really?” I said, neutrally.
“Oh, yes, yes. I have to clean the yard four to six times a day. Well, just imagine—twenty-four dogs, pooping at least three times each. Some as many as six.”
“I can’t imagine.”
Gina kicked me again.
“Twenty-four dogs, really? That’s a lot.” Nodding, muttering, I turned my head away so I wouldn’t have to watch a heavy-set, middle-aged woman spending her brilliant summer morning cleaning dog poo. If man is the dog’s master, then why was she picking up their poo and not the other way around? I got up to say we really had to be going. But how do you say this to someone who is fecally engaged? I waited. She was at it a long time. I went into the house, got my things together, my toothbrush, my shoes.
“Come on, let’s go,” Gina said, coming into my bedroom. “She’ll give us money for the ball game.”
“Why do you want to go to a stupid ball game?”
“You don’t understand anything. Bleachers are full of single guys. Jocks. Sports lovers.” She grinned. “Nothing they like better than two goils interested in baseball.” She threw back her hair.
“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all.”
“But we’re not interested in baseball!”
“And they’ll know this how?”
“Gina! Don’t you have to be in Bakersfield?”
“Shh!” There were just us two in the room.
“Why do you keep telling me to shh,” I exclaimed, “every time I say the word Bakersfield?”
“Because no one knows I’m going there. I told them I was just going with you for the ride. That you wanted some company. This is what friends do. That’s why they think there’s no hurry.”
What could I do but shake my incredulous head? “I thought you wanted to get to”—I waved my hand around—“as soon as possible? To get to him?”
“Why do you keep referring to Eddie as him?” she asked, her blue eyes narrowing.
“As opposed to what?”
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“As opposed to Eddie.”
“He’s not here,” I said, taking out my spiral notebook and my Bic pen. “I can refer to someone in the pronoun form when he’s not here. It’s not rude.”
“It’s weird is what it is.”
Oh, that’s not the weird thing, I thought, writing down: Number 1: Must leave, must go, must get going! “Besides,” I said, “why do you say, keep referring to him, as if we talk about him non-stop?”
“Yes, okay, you’re right, you win, you can have the last word.”
“Fine, you can have the last word. So when we go out cruising for boy toys, is your twelve-year-old sister coming with us?”
“She can if she wants,” said Gina. But even Molly refused. We went by ourselves. Gina turned up the radio real loud, and the only discussion we had was about whether or not the Nazis in Raiders had been destroyed when they opened the Ark of the Covenant because the Ark was not to be a tool in human hands. Gina maintained it could have been opened and looked at by the good guys.
“Gina, you think if Indy opened that Ark, he wouldn’t have gone up in flames?”
“No, I don’t think he would’ve.”
“He most certainly would. Why did he tell Marion to close her eyes, to not look? They only made it because they didn’t look!”
“You’re wrong. He told her just in case, not because they couldn’t look.”
“You’re so wrong.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
I think the Yankees lost. They could’ve won. It was hard to tell sitting a mile away in the bleachers. Men hit a small ball with a stick, ran about, then the game was over. Everyone around us had too much beer and was therefore unappetizing to Gina.
As we were returning to Aunt Flo’s house, I told Gina we had to leave tomorrow.
“Okay,” she said.
It took us another two days to get out.
Aunt Flo, to help us, I hope, told Gina and me that Aunt Betty, whom Gina hadn’t seen in years and who loved Gina and liked me too, lived near Toledo which was on the way. “Why don’t you stay with her, save yourselves some money? I’ll call her while you’re getting ready.”
I didn’t want to say that I’d been ready for days. “On the way to where?” I cut in.
“To California.”
“Toledo is on the way to California?” Once more I wished I had a clearer idea of what the U.S. looked like. An adult woman was saying to me Toledo was on the way; what was I going to do? Say excuse me while I skeptically check the map, because I don’t believe you; check the map in front of you, just to prove you wrong? So I said nothing, thereby, with my ignorant silence, tacitly agreeing that Aunt Betty was “near” Toledo.
“Shelby, why do you always look like you know best?” Aunt Flo threw open the map. “Look. Toledo is right off Interstate 80, and you have to take I-80 to California, don’t you?”
Well, now I definitely couldn’t even glance at the map in front of her. “Of course, you’re right,” I agreed. “I got confused in my head.”
“Oh, we’d love to, Aunt Flo,” said Gina. “What a great idea. Aunt Betty’s wonderful. Molly, you want to come with us?”
I widened my eyes. Gina did not (would not?) return my gaze. Wow. Gina really didn’t want to be alone in the car with me. By some miracle, Molly declined. She said she didn’t like Aunt Betty’s companion, Uncle Ned. “He makes me feel weird,” she said. “He is weird. A starer.” She made a yuck sound.
Visibly disappointed, Gina tried to convince her. “He’s not so bad. He’s quiet.”
“Yes,” said Molly. “A quiet starer. Nothing worse. So good luck with that.”
Finally around noon of the nth day, sunny, possibly a Wednesday, though it could’ve been Friday, I screeched out of the driveway, going from zero to 136.7 in three seconds.
“How can your aunt live in that house with so many yapping animals?” I finally asked, after the radio was the only sound in our car for twenty minutes.
“You know what I think?” Gina said casually, tossing her hair about. “I think you’re not a dog person. You don’t like dogs.”
What was she talking about? I loved dogs. I just didn’t love them in my brand new beautiful yellow car on my all-vinyl black seat, barking for 200 miles, needing to go “potty.” I liked my dogs bigger. And farther away. I liked dogs the way dog people like children.
“You have to give them a chance,” Gina continued, putting on peach lipgloss. She was wearing a white tube top and jean shorts today. “Dogs are wonderful. And therapeutic. Did you know they bring terriers to terminally ill patients in hospitals to comfort them?”
“What? And who’s they?”
“Like my mother said, you should keep an open mind, Sloane. You’re narrow-minded. You’re not open to other ideas.”
“Open to ideas about dogs?”
“No. Dogs as an idea. An ideal of affection and comfort.” What was she talking about? Why did she sound annoyed? I had driven her mother’s dogs, hadn’t I? It wasn’t enough for me to drive them, I was supposed to love them, too?
She put on the radio to drown out the barking silence.
David Soul beseeched me not to give up on us but then Mac Davis begged me not to get hooked on him and Toni Tennille wished things to be done to her one more time. Woof, woof.
Finally I had to know. “So what’s with the dogs? That’s new. Your mom, Aunt Flo. I don’t remember them being like that.”
“Aunt Betty, too,” said Gina. “All the sisters got into dogs. They breed them, sell them.”
“Really?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, nothing at all.” I coughed. “It takes time, though. And what about hatha yoga? Your mom was obsessed with that. She was so into . . .” I tried to remember the name. “. . . Swami Maharishi?”
“You mean Baba Muktananda?”
“That’s it.”
“My mother’s moved on from Baba,” said Gina. “She and all my aunts.”
“From Baba to dogs?”
“She keeps busy, makes a little money.” Gina turned her face away from me to the passenger window. “Dogs are kind and loving, gentle creatures.” When Mrs. Reed had discovered Eastern spiritualism, she spent four Christmases in a row trying to convert me. Get in touch with your inner Chakra, Shelby. You are one with everything, and everything is one with you. I kept telling her I could not be converted because that would imply a verting. I’m just trying to open your eyes, Shelby, open your eyes to the truth that’s out there. I listened politely, ate turkey at her house, and opened my Christmas presents.
We were going rather slow on Liberty Street, with strip malls all around, stopping at every light. I didn’t care, I was so happy to be on the road again. Number 1: Leave Glen Burnie at 9 A.M. Number 2: Gas up, buy Cokes, potato chips. Number 3: Keep conversation with Gina light. Number 4: Drive 500 miles to Toledo, OH. According to the map, in one and a half inches we would be near the Appalachian Trail and then the Pennsylvania Turnpike would take us north to I-80. Mrs. Reed and her three sisters had been into the reality of yoga and the oneness of the swami so seriously, they even persuaded their brother, a classics professor at University of Connecticut, to come with them to the Ashram, their upstate monistic Upanishad retreat. How many miles had we gone on Liberty Street, ten? It was one in the afternoon. Gina had taken off her sandals and put her bare feet up on the windshield.
“What happened with the yoga?”
Gina sounded reluctant. “Nothing. The dogs have replaced Baba.”
“Why?”
Looking away into the passenger window, Gina said, “Aunt Ethel killed herself.”
“She did?” I tried to keep the wheel straight. It wasn’t easy.
Gina shrugged. She still wasn’t looking at me. “It was called a car accident. But we knew. A clear blue day, no drugs, no alcohol, no heart attack, and she’d been depressed for years. Really depressed. The Ashram didn’t help one bit.”
“No
, of course not,” I muttered, clutching the wheel. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know? Agnes told everybody.”
“I make it a point,” I said, “to immediately stop listening to anything that begins with the word Agnes.”
As we drove past the bars and the tattoo parlors, I thought about Aunt Ethel. She was beautiful, soft-spoken and loving. “Her poor kids.”
“They’re okay. Daughter is grown. The son has a year left of high school.”
“What about the husband?”
“My mother thinks he’s the reason my aunt killed herself.”
I clutched the wheel tighter. I remembered him, with his overgrown beard and intense eyes. He never quite fit in the family celebrations. “What’s he doing now?” I asked carefully.
“I don’t know. We don’t see him anymore. He never liked our family.”
That was true. He always seemed like an outsider. I had thought Aunt Ethel was the only one he actually liked. He looked at her fondly when he said her name. “Ethel.” Yet I also remember feeling there was something slightly creepy about him, the way he stared at me longer than appropriate, the way he tried to engage me in conversation, and how, once, after Ethel and Mrs. Reed were done regaling me with the consciousness of the yogic vision and the attainment of the Moksha, he recited Donne’s poetry to me. I will not look upon the quickening sun / but straight her beauty to my sense shall run / the air shall note her soft, the fire, most pure / waters suggest her clear, and the earth sure.
I had been hoping he was talking about Ethel, beautiful for an aunt, and said nothing, embarrassed under his gaze. I was relieved when I didn’t see him at Easter.
How gravely Gina and I had grown apart, that not a rumor, a rustle had blown my way, not even from scandalous Agnes. “When did your aunt die?” We used to talk about everything. Every day. Not a day would go by without Gina knowing every minute of my life and me knowing every minute of hers.
“A year this November.”
This made me sad, made me think about things I didn’t want to think about—reminders of the past I wanted put away. Here I was, leaving home for parts unknown and still couldn’t leave them behind. Gina and I used to babysit for Jules and Jim, Aunt Ethel’s kids. Ethel would feed us dinner, and then she and her husband would go out to the movies. They had a beautiful house on the water in Rye. They had a boat, their own slip, eighty feet of private beach, a membership to the yacht club, and both the elementary school and Rye Playland were within walking distance. To Gina and me they had seemed to live an enchanted life, but I guess it was more like enchanter’s nightshade. Beautiful on the outside, poison underneath.