June 24
Dear Winny Girl,
How
is your summer vacation going so far? I hope I am not disrupting your fun with
this unsolicited letter.
First, forgive
me for the shakiness of my writing. We are currently on the road, headed
hell-bent for nowhere, and the family car is obviously in bad need of new
struts. As I write this, I am hunkered down in the corner of the backseat,
trying to get as far away from Mike as possible without having to open my door
and hang out over the road. I can never tell which of his bodily odors is
worse, but all of them combine to create an aroma that at once waters the eyes,
congests the nose, and makes me crave badly fried fish. The wonder of it all is
that, through his own reek, he can still sit there, head tossed back and
snoring like a tornado ripping through an apple orchard.
My parents, on
the other hand, sit quietly-- too quietly, if you ask me-- in the front seat. I
honest to God have no idea where we are headed. These family summer outings are
so spontaneous and so cloaked in secrecy you’d swear that they were military
operations. All I know so far is that we stopped once, somewhere in Indiana, to
gaze briefly at an enormous quarry. It is just like my father to think this a
fun sort of thing to do-- drive out of the way to stop and look at a big hole
in the ground. I don’t know, maybe he thinks it’s the same as stopping to look
down into the Grand Canyon, only better because it was all man-made. Really,
it’s impossible to know what he thinks, because he says so little. And my
mother never does anything to straighten him out; she just sits up there, in
the passenger seat, with her crossword book, trying to do puzzles she never,
but never, finishes. If my father does say something, all she does is look up
briefly, lets out a bored hmmmm, and goes right back to the book. It’s all so
bizarre, really, as if I’ve been abducted by a bunch of weird kidnappers who can’t
quite make up their mind where they want to take me.
I really don’t
think I could feel any more lonely than I do now--not even if I woke one
morning to find that everyone in the world was gone, and I was the last living
human on the planet.
Maybe it all
wouldn’t be so horrible if Mr. Stinky-Snorey would stay awake to share this
nightmare with me. But, then again, he might just make it worse. He has
developed a gift for doing that; he seems to suck the very life force of those
around him. Maybe that’s why my parents are the way they are. Frankly I still
cannot understand whatever attracted you to him last year. Was it just a phase
you were going through, or some kind of temporary insanity? The guy never takes
a shower, and since he has started growing whiskers, he chooses not to shave.
My God, he doesn’t change his sweat socks until they are good and stiff. And--
when he’s awake-- he constantly complains how he’s so tired, even though he
never really does anything. I really can’t see the attraction. You’ll have to
tell me sometime. I really need to know, because
Ohmigod, now
what?
Okay, we had a technical problem there, which is a gross
understatement, because what apparently happened was that our transmission
dropped out of the car. There was this huge bang, and then dad lost control of
the car, which ended up in a ditch. Everyone’s all right, though; my mom,
riding in the death seat, still seems pretty bored, Mike finally woke up, and
my dad is all pissed off, but at least there was no blood or gore or broken
bones.
About four
hours has passed since I broke off this letter, and now I am stretched out on a
bed in a hotel room that I am sharing with Mike, who is already fast asleep. We
are in some tiny town. I think it’s called John Junction. Somebody should have
named it Generic, because of all that businesses that line the town’s main
street-- which, by the way, is named Main Street-- the hotel is named The
Hotel, the café is named The Café, the barbershop is named The Barber Shop….
Really imaginative thinking, right?
Anyway, dad
talked to the guy at The Auto Repair Shop, and it seems it will take six days
to get the parts needed to fix the car, and then another two days to actually
fix the car. So I’m pretty much stuck here, in this hotel, whose rooms haven’t
been redone since the 1960s. I can imagine the place filled with hippies
crashing all over the places, jammed into the beds, sprawled out on the floor,
sleeping in the bathtub whose faucet will not stop drip-drip-dripping. The
place does have cable, remarkably, but only eight channels, the channels you
usually flip past while looking for something interesting, like the Sci-fi
channel or HBO. Well, at least, if I’m at all interested, I can always turn on
the television to see what the weather is like in Los Angeles or Guam or
wherever.
I am going to
sign off for now. I am feeling pretty tired, since we had to walk about six
miles to get to this godforsaken place. Tomorrow morning I will walk over to
The Bank, and drop this letter in The Mail Box.
Hoping you’re
having more fun than me, and not seeing how you couldn’t be.
Darlene.
June
26
Winny girl,
Well, I’ve had
a couple days to check out this town. Actually it took only an hour or so; the
rest of the time I spent shaking my head in wonder. It seems that the town is
literally neither here nor there. Half the town, it turns out, is in Illinois
and other half is in Iowa. I’m not sure how that came about, but I fail to see
the difference anyway. The town is completely surrounded by cornfields, which
spread out in all directions so that it appears they never end. I took a long walk out of town yesterday. The
sun set before I returned, and for a while I had to walk in the pitch dark, in
which all you could hear were crickets and the warm breeze whispering through
the young corn stalks. All I had to tell me I was heading in the right
direction were the distant dim lights that ran along Main St. It was really
quite creepy, and I promised myself I wouldn’t do it again.
I discovered
that the only true action that occurs in the town is when the truckers come
into The Truck Stop each evening. They come in one by one, like people coming
into a church Sunday morning. They pull their semis in to fill them with
diesel, and afterward they park them in an uneven line in the open field out
back. Then the drivers stroll over to The Tavern, and don’t return to sleep in
the backs of their cabs until they are rip-roaring drunk and can just barely
walk down the street without falling on their faces.
During the day,
my parents never leave their room. All they have been doing is fighting. Of
course, whenever I see them, they pretend that they haven’t been fighting; they
carry on in their usual way, with him silent and distant and her always
detracted by small, irrelevant, things, like the stack of business cards on the
front desk of the motel or whether or not it looks as though it will rain. But
I know the truth; I can hear them through the wall, which is none too thick.
They are actually fighting, and though I cannot quite make out the words, it is
almost certainly about money. It will always fall back on the old argument,
with my father insisting that he can’t afford to send me to private school, not
without falling short on cash for other things, like keeping the car properly
maintained, and with my mother saying she would be damned if I was going to go
to public school-- it might be good enough for Mike, but not for me. So,
naturally, when anything comes up, like our car breaking down in the middle of
nowhere on one of our stupid family outings, it is entirely my fault. My father
will always give me these icy looks, as though he wants to kill me, and
sometimes I think he really does. Even those times when I try to talk to him
about where I’d like to go to college, all he’ll do is grunt and mutter
“Whatever,” and make an excuse to leave the room. Most of the time, he treats
me as though I had the plague, probably always suspecting I am going to bring
something up that will somehow cost him money. On the other hand, he can be
quite warm and pleasant to Mike. Sure, why not? Mike is destined to forego
college for a career stacking shelves at Walmart or slinging hash at some
greasy-spoon diner. Wherever Mike ends up, my father can rest assured it won’t
cost him a dime. Sometimes it’s impossible for me to believe that my father is
a high-school guidance counselor. Really, I wonder how many young minds he
messes up each year, or does he save that treatment only for his own daughter?
The day is
growing old now. Through the window I can see that it is dark. The dim
streetlights have flickered on, and I can hear the loud grinding gears of the
first semi pulling into The Truck Stop for the night. I think I’ll turn in
early. Maybe Mike has the right idea; maybe sleeping all the time helps you to
forget that you have a truly lousy life.
XOXOXO
Darlene.
June
27
Winny girl,
Miracles of
miracles, the parts for our car came in early. I have been told we might be
able to flee this town the day after tomorrow.
In celebration,
dad took us to The Café for dinner. Although the food didn’t turn out as bad as
I’d imagined, the company was most definitely lacking. Sitting next to me, Mike
shoveled his food in his mouth. He makes slurpy sounds even when he isn’t
eating anything wet. He doesn’t even hold his fork like somebody civilized, but
grabs it with his fist, the way you’d imagine an ape or an orangutan would if
it sat down at a table to eat.
It didn’t take
long for my parents to start arguing. They pretended it wasn’t really arguing,
but instead a playful exchange, which didn’t sound the least bit playful to me.
“Well,” dad
said, and you could hear his exasperation, “you could at least consider going
back to work.”
“You know I
have to take care of the children,” she said.
“The children!
They’re sixteen and seventeen-- what’s to take care of anymore?”
Then they went
back and forth, with Mike and I the topic of conversation, even though they
both spoke as though we weren’t sitting at the same table as them.
Finally the
discussion played itself out, and they fell into a deep silence. Now and then,
I caught my father looking at me coldly, as if he were about to blurt out, “And
she does not need to go to private school.”
I made the
mistake, then, of muttering, “I never said I wanted to go to private school. I
could care less either way.”
Dad looked at
me, all surprised and innocent.
“I didn’t say a
word.”
“You didn’t
have to,” I said.
“Oh, stop
picking on the girl,” mom waded in.
“I’m not
picking on her,” he said, and then looked at me. “Am I picking on you?” he
asked, and before I could say anything, he turned back to mom, and said, “See?”
“Oh, really,”
mom snorted.
We finished
eating. As the busboy cleared the table, he cast sly, knowing looks at us, as
though he understand that we were the most dysfunctional family on the planet.
After dad paid
the bill at the front counter, we herded through the door. As soon as the warm
dusty air struck me, I strayed away from my family, who made a beeline toward
The Hotel. Not surprisingly, none of them noticed that I had chosen a different
direction, heading toward the edge of town. The Truck Stop looked sickly
somehow, in the waning light of day, with the distant skies purple-pink over
the endless cornfields. The building was shabby and the pumps were dusty and
rust-stained at their bases and the lumpy blacktop was strewn with candy
wrappers and flattened aluminum beers and soda cans and other debris that was
unrecognizable. Next to the building, there was a Coke machine, and I bought a
can and sipped it as I gazed across the cornfields, thinking I could probably
walk and walk and walk and never really get anywhere. There would always be
more stretches of road, and on either side, more fields of knee-high stalks.
Even if you could walk forever, there was no escape….
The Truck Stop
door opened with a loud squeak and tiny tingles of a bell. An old man wandered
outside as though he’d been entombed in the building for a thousand years. His
jeans and boots were dusty, and his checkered shirt looked about three sizes
too big. He might have been Asian, or part Asian, with a sparse beard that was
growing gray, and slicked back black hair.
“You new to
town?” he called over to me.
I told him
yeah.
“You stay
awhile, maybe?” he asked.
Not any longer
than I had to, I said.
“The truckers
come through pretty soon.” If he said it to make small talk, it didn’t sound
that way. “They make good money, those truckers, you know?”
I didn’t say
anything to that.
“Maybe you make
money, too, huh?” he asked.
I didn’t know
what he was driving at. “Make money?”
“Yeah, we split
fifty-fifty.”
“Make money
doing what?”
“You know,” he
said, and made a gesture like somebody brushing his teeth.
It took me a
moment to get it, and when I did, I felt my dinner churning around in my
stomach. I started walking away, and the guy called after me, “Hey where you
go? You stay. We make money.” But I never looked back, just headed toward the
hotel, wondering if I’d finally been missed.
The car is
fixed, and we are again flying down the road. Two days have passed since I
wrote the first part of this letter, and I have had a lot of time to think. I
still don’t know exactly where we are going, but then maybe that isn’t so bad
after all. I think I’m finally getting the hang of how to survive these
outings. I just fly down the Okie-Dokie highway-- that is what I have come to
call this road, or any road for that matter. We stop to see a big hole in the
earth, and I think, “okie-dokie, then,” and we pile back into the car until the
next stop, where we will see who knows what? But no matter what it is-- a
formidable reservoir, a vast junk yard, a dry riverbed, or whatever-- after
seeing it, it’s “okie-dokie, then,” and onward, until one day you run across
something that makes sense to you, maybe even something that you can attach
yourself to and call your own. Am I making any sense? I think I am, but I’m not
quite sure. You’ll have to tell me what you think in the fall, when I see you
at school, assuming I ever make it back.
For
now
XOXOXO
Darlene
