Road to Paradise (9 page)

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’s 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.

“My mom couldn’t forgive the Vedantists for not bringing my aunt any peace or comfort,” said Gina, “when she needed peace and comfort most. See what I mean about religion?”

I didn’t see what she meant, but I did finally begin to notice that nearly every road we crossed was named Divine Way, Mary’s Way, Cross Way, Holy Road, Holy Family Road, Trinity Drive, Spirit Way. And on every corner rose a church, sandwiched between tattoo parlors and a Jack in the Box. Or were the tattoo parlors sandwiched between the churches? The only thing I noticed about the one church remotely near us in Larchmont was that on Monday each week, the bulletin board in the front would change its inspirational message. “J
ESUS IS THE
A
NSWER
.” “J
ESUS IS THE
A
NSWER TO EVERY QUESTION
.”

“Gina, look at all the churches. I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”

“Well, there aren’t any churches on the Jersey Turnpike. So no. But I wouldn’t have noticed even these had you not mentioned them. I don’t notice things like that.”

“Hmm. Hard to miss.”

Gina must have been thinking troubling things, difficult things—her eyes were unseeing. “What a weird life it must be around here,” she finally said, coming out of her reverie. “What do you think these people do all the time?”

“Well, judging from the road, get tattoos and go to church.”

She laughed. “I’d die if I lived here. Absolutely die.”

I stopped at a light. The road was called St. John’s Path. A white church on one corner, a white church on the other. We waited. There were no more strip malls or Burger Kings. Now, beyond the white spires were rolling fields of green, shivering trees, and sunshine.

“Did you know,” Gina said, “that 57 percent of all people who get tattoos regret them later in life? And that number goes up to 71 percent for women. More men get them, but more women regret them. And tattoos for females are on the rise. Like smoking. Apparently it’s the next trend. Women getting tattooed. Interesting, eh?”

“Yeah, very.” I was only half-listening, trying to figure out a mathematical riddle on the white board.

1 Cross

+ 3 Nails

= 4 Given

I was stuck on the numbers. One plus three did equal four, but what did it have to do with
Given
? I couldn’t decipher the meaning. Gina glanced at it and instantly said, oh how stupid. It took me another shameful mile to figure it out. Then
I
felt stupid. And resented her, like it was her fault. But numbers sometimes confuse me. I can’t see past them.
RUL8?
Master’s Ministry proclaimed I was, but they were praying I wasn’t 2L8.

“I’m a good person, I have nothing to be forgiven for,” Gina said. “I’m so beyond that.”

Didn’t Emma once tell me, when I was preening, that just as you’re about to put yourself on a pedestal for being good, the devil knocks you down with pride right back where you belong. I kept quiet.

Chapel View, Chapel Lane, Chapel Hill. Freedom.

The road wound through the fields. We rolled down the windows, turned up the music, the wind blowing through our hair. The Climax Blues Band yelled that we couldn’t get it right, and Kiki Dee croaked that she had the music in her. It was on Liberty Road, past Freedom, when the Blockheads were hitting us with their rhythm stick and I was flying, showing off my Shelby GT 350 to the blue skies, that I suddenly had to slam on the brakes for a black truck ahead of us.

“God, it’s crawling,” I said. In reality, though, it was probably doing forty. Gina groaned, I groaned. We continued singing, but it was one thing to sing and speed but another to sing at the top of your lungs, slam on your brakes, then dawdle along almost at walking pace.

The medium-sized, four-wheel utility truck in front of us was from the coal mines. Not painted black, but dirty black, covered with tar-like nicotine, its
two
smokestacks emitting black plumes. What was happening inside that it needed two smokestacks? Not only was it dilly-dallying as if on the way to execution, but it couldn’t stay in its lane. It kept rolling out to oncoming traffic. There was no traffic, but that was beside the point. It was a menace. We stopped singing.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s drunk.”

“It’s Wednesday morning.”

“What, people can’t get drunk on a Wednesday? And it’s not Wednesday morning. It’s Tuesday afternoon.”

We passed a billboard, huge black letters on white board. “W
ILL
THE
R
OAD
Y
OU’RE ON
L
EAD YOU TO
M
E
?”

“Did you know that reading billboards is responsible for eleven percent of all vehicular accidents?” stated Gina.

“Is that so?” But I wasn’t paying much attention to her or the billboards. I was entirely focused on the increasingly erratic truck. The driver could’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. I gave him plenty of room. No reason to tailgate; a good safe distance is what he obviously needed. We were two car lengths behind.

He had a bumper sticker on the back tail—everyone was so clever in this neck of the woods with their little aphorisms—I speeded up so I could read it: “I
DO ME
… Y
OU DO YOU
.”

“Oh, ain’t he the comedian.” Gina laughed. “It’s supposed to be
I do you, you do me
.”

“He frightens me.”

“Ha,” she said. “I like him better already. He says leave me the hell alone and let me tend to my business. That’s priceless.”

“Yes, but what business could he possibly have that he’s weaving all over the road like that?”

“So slow down. Give him some room.”

“Any more room, and I’ll be in another state.”

“Maybe he’ll turn soon.”

“Turn where?” The empty country road stretched between fields and forests.

“Wait, what’s he doing?” Gina said.

At first it looked like he was turning, but he wasn’t. He was stopping. Suddenly and without preamble, his coal-tar vehicle zigzagged to a halt in the middle of the road right in front of us. We had no choice but to stop, too. Like for a school bus. Maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t know, didn’t want to know and didn’t want to be any part of his trouble. I didn’t want to help him. What if
he had run out of gas? What if his door opened and he asked us for a ride to the nearest gas station? My insides filled with liquid nitrogen. No way! No rides to weaving strangers driving black trucks.

The passenger door flung open. There was shouting, and suddenly a girl was propelled from the truck onto the grassy edge. She didn’t hop out, she fell yelling, “You bastard! Hey, give me my stuff!” A hobo bag flew through the air, landing heavily on the grass. A man’s hand reached for the door, pulled it violently shut and the truck peeled away, leaving smoking tire tracks on the pavement, black fumes piping furiously out of the stacks. He drove fast now, and straight.

“Asshole!” the girl yelled after him, getting up, dusting herself off. She didn’t seem to be hurt, though I was trying not to look too closely. I put the ’Stang in gear and accelerated, not like the truck—in anger—but in fear. The girl stood, picked up her bag, turned to us, smiled, and stuck out her hitching thumb. She waved with the other hand. She was young, heavily made up, wearing not summer-in-the city shorts, but a white mini-skirt, a small electric-blue halter and lots of flashy costume jewelry. We passed her slowly, pretending like we didn’t even notice her, la-dee-dah. I whispered, “Gina, roll up your window.”

“Why are you whispering?” But before she could turn the crank, the girl called out. “Hey, come on, be Good Samaritans, help a sister in need, will ya? Give me a ride.”

Gina shook her head, I stared straight ahead without acknowledging her, and as we passed, the girl’s hitching thumb morphed into the middle finger to our departing yellow Mustang. “Thank you!” she yelled. I stepped on it, catching her in the rearview mirror walking uphill in high-heeled wedge sandals and her spicy blue halter.

“Who wears sandals like that?” I asked.

“Who wears a skirt like that?”

We drove in silence.

“We couldn’t pick her up,” I said.

“Of course we couldn’t.” Gina glanced at me askance. “What are you even
talking
about? We made a deal.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Shelby, did you
want
to pick her up?”

“Slightly less than I want to be scalped,” I returned. The ridiculous part was I now had to stop and look at a map to see where we needed to turn to get on Penn Pike, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid the girl might pursue me and force me to explain how I promised I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, not even a girl my age shoved roughly out of a black truck by angry hands.

I was going eighty on a local road, through fields with mountains up ahead, past abandoned gas stations.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you driving like a maniac?”

Silence again.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” I asked.

“About what? Can you stop for a sec and check the map? I don’t see the turnpike signs anywhere.”

We did see another billboard, this one from the American Board of Proctology: G
IVING SOMEONE THE FINGER DOESN’T HAVE TO BE
A BAD THING
.

“I mean, that girl could’ve been trouble, right?” I said.

“Oh, her. Why are you still talking about her?”

We turned up the music. Diana Ross plaintively wanted to know if we knew where we were going to. Gina plaintively wanted to know when she was going to be fed. Having lost my sense of how far we’d come, whether we even were still in Maryland, I made a series of rights and lefts hoping the zigzag would eventually lead me to the toll road that transsected the entire state of Pennsylvania, as per Rand-McNally road atlas. Past a meandering town of antique stores and law firms we drove, past a deserted little town with not even a sandwich place for us to hang our hats, and, still hungry,
we left the churches and the placards behind, the girl, too, and drove through the Appalachian Trail, sunlit and hazy, covered with a silken green and gold canopy. I pointed out a street sign that said
Applachian Road
. “You’d think that since they live here, they’d know how to spell it.” We chuckled at that, and then again at a sign that stated without punctuation: S
HARP
C
URVES
P
EDESTRIANS
4 M
ILES
.

For four miles we looked for these pedestrians with sharp curves. Liberty Street had long since become Appalachian Trail with the tall filtering trees looking almost yellow with their light green sparklings. After the trail was Hagerstown. The shops along the way seemed too dinky for us. Finally, our long-awaited toll road! With a shopping center and a Subway sandwich place.

At the table I stared blankly at the open map. Gina wanted to know if Toledo was in Pennsylvania. I glared at her over my tuna sandwich. “Toledo is not in Pennsylvania. It’s in Ohio. Everybody knows that. God, Gina.” Why was I so suddenly annoyed?

She shrugged, unperturbed, fixing her hair and applying lipgloss
before
eating.

“Did you say you were going to school to become a teacher?” I asked disapprovingly. “How are you going to teach little kids if you don’t know something like that?”

“The reason I don’t know it,” Gina said patiently, eating her Cheddar and Swiss on rye, “is because we weren’t taught it. And the reason my kids won’t know it, is because I won’t teach it.”

“But isn’t this something we need to know? Where things are?” I pointed to the state of Pennsylvania. “Look. I want to show you.” For some reason Gina had unreasonably irritated me with her torpid unhelpfulness. I flipped open my spiral, started to write down how far we’d come. I estimated it to be barely sixty miles. And it was nearing three in the afternoon. How in the world was I going to drive another 420 miles to Toledo? When I said this to Gina, I could tell by her glazed-over eyes she thought it was a rhetorical question she had no intention of answering. Her attitude seemed to be: I sit in the passenger seat, you drive, you get
me to Eddie. For my part, I sing, pretend to stare at a map, look out the window and give you a little bit of money.

“Gina, you have to help me. I can’t do this on my own. I’m going to get lost.”

“Why would you get lost?” She sounded frankly puzzled. “You just looked at the map.”

“Yes, but so did you!”

“Yes, but I’m not driving.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Look, I’m hopeless at maps. It’s just how it is.”

“I’m not very good either,” I retorted, “but I still have to look, still have to figure things out.”

“So figure it out.”

I crumpled up the map like a soiled tissue. I didn’t finish my sandwich. “Ready?” I jumped up and left the table without even glancing back to see if she was coming.

Was it ridiculous for me to be this ticked off? We were not yet in Pennsylvania, the state
next
to New York! My original plan had been to cross the George Washington Bridge at ten a. m., drive on I-80 for two hours and be in Pennsylvania for lunch by noon. So how was it more than a week later and we still weren’t there?

I had lots of reasons to be simmering. It wasn’t the geographical ignorance that was irking me; after all, I was no Henry Stanley myself. What was getting to me was the supreme geographical
indifference
. Not just, I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t care.

In the parking lot, the sunshine beating down, stomach half-full, the Interstate up ahead, things bubbled up and spilled over. Molly, Aunt Flo, too long in Glen Burnie, the prickly sadness about lost closeness.

“Look,” I said, whirling to Gina on the sidewalk. “This was a really bad idea. You clearly don’t want to be here, don’t want to do this. I don’t blame you. Why don’t I drop you off at the nearest Greyhound station and you can take the bus back home. You’ll
be there by tonight. Or go to Bakersfield. Do whatever you want. Just …”

“
What
?”

“You heard me.”

“Sloane, come on …”

“Gina, I am
not
your chauffeur, while you sit in my car with your eyes closed and act like Molly.”

“I’m not that bad, am I?”

“Almost! You see me struggling and yet you refuse to help me out by looking at the map.”

“You wouldn’t stop the car! How is that fair?”

“You’ve got absolutely no shame for deceiving me. We’re going to see
your
stupid aunt in Toledo and you won’t even help me figure out where we’re going!”

“We’re going to see my stupid aunt, as you put it, because we stay with her for free. Your little spiral notebook likes that, don’t it?”

“I’m not your hired driver, Gina. You want to get to Eddie? Take a bus. Or fly. Call him from Bakersfield airport, ask him to come pick you up. But I can’t do this anymore.”

“Shelby, we’ve been on the road five minutes …”

“Yes, and doesn’t it feel like five centuries?”

“I’m sorry, okay?” She waved her hand dismissively, not remotely sorry. “I’ll look at the map, if you want. Jeez, I didn’t realize it meant that much to you.”

“You know what means that much to me? You pulling your weight. You helping me out. You sharing in this. I’m not your mother.”

“Okay,” she said, quietly now. “I thought you had things under control, you and your written-down plans.”

“Leave my plans out of it,” I snapped, looking around for a phone booth. “Yellow Pages will tell us where a bus station is.”

“Sloane, come on. I said I’d try to do better.”

“What is this try? Yeah, and I’ll
try
to put the gas into the tank, and I’ll try to put the car into first, and I’ll try not to turn the
map upside down when I look for your aunt’s house. What’s with the try?”

We went on like this for a few more minutes. But the bubble had burst; deflated I knew I could not take her to the bus. I also knew three other things.

One, I did not have enough money to get to California without her.