I unfolded from my jack-knife bend. My voice deepened and my testicles lowered. I spoke with the voice of a Roman senator: “I am average,” I said, “because the cry of individuality flows through my blood as quietly as an old river… like the still power of an apple pie sitting in an open window to cool.” I folded my papers and sat down. There was a nice wave of applause that was hard to gauge, as I’d never received applause ever in my life. Gunther Frisk clapped with speedy little pops and leaned into the mike, “Let’s hope he means a Tepperton’s Apple Pie!” The applause continued over his interjection and I had to stand again. He waved me over and made a big show of giving me the check, then waved over all the other contestants and gave them the smaller checks. The auditorium lights came up and a few people approached the stage to ask for autographs, which bewildered me. After about four seconds my time as a rock star was over, and I was calmly ushered outside to a golf cart that had been secured by Brian and driven back to his car.
On the way home, Brian gave me several compliments that I discounted and denied. This tricked him into reiterating the compliments, and once he was enthusiastic enough, I accepted them. Then he segued into sports talk, mentioning Lakers and Pacers and Angels, teams I was so unfamiliar with that I couldn’t connect the team name with the game. But Brian had been so wholeheartedly on my side that I felt obliged to respond with ardent head nods and “yeahs,” though I might have misplaced a few, judging by Brian’s occasional puzzled looks.
Brian took me to my bank and we barely made it before closing time. I deposited the five-thousand-dollar check, keeping forty dollars in cash, offering Brian five for gas. Not having driven a car in ten years, I didn’t know how stratospherically the price of gas had risen. Now I know the amount was way low for what he must have spent, and I would like to make it up to him one day.
I heard about Granny’s suicide before it actually happened. She must have had second thoughts or been unable to pull together the paraphernalia, as her death date fell several hours past the day and minute of my reading of her note. This one lay for just a few hours on my kitchen table before I pulled myself up to it with a jam sandwich and cranberry juice. “Sweetest Daniel,” it began, and I suspected nothing. Her handwriting was always large and gay, filled with oversized loops and exuberant serifs. Only in the last few years had I noticed a shakiness starting to creep in. “I won’t trouble you with the state of my health, except to say I’m in a race to the finish. I can’t let my body drag me down like this without fighting back in some way. My heart is sad not to see you again, but on this page, in this ink, is all my love, held in the touch of the pen to the paper…” Then, in the next paragraph, “I can’t breathe, Daniel, I’m gasping for air. My lungs are filling up and I’m drowning.” She said, in the next few lines, that it was time to free herself, as well as the ones who care for her, of their burden.
Granny had two Mexican senoras who attended to her, and one of them, Estrella, loved her so much she called her “Mother.” One last line: “Finally, we do become wise, but then it’s too late.” Granny, dead at eighty-eight of self-inflicted vodka, pills, and one transparent plastic bag.
The news of her death left me disturbingly unaffected. At least for a while. I wondered if I were truly crazy not to feel engulfed by the loss and unable to function. But the sorrow was simply delayed and intermittent. It did not come when it should have but appeared in discrete packets over a series of discontinuous days, stretching into months. Once, while tossing Teddy into the air, a packet appeared in the space between us, and vanished once he was back in my grip. Once, I positioned my palm between my eyes and the sun, and I felt this had something to do with Granny, for it was she who stood between me and what would scorch me. It was not that I missed her; she was so far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare. She lived in me dead or alive. Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them, for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.
The day after the letter was Easter Sunday. It reminded me that as an adolescent I was primped and combed and then incarcerated in a wool suit that had the texture of burrs. I was then dragged to church, where I had to sit for several hours on a cushionless maple pew in the suffocating Texas heat. These experiences drained me of the concept of Jesus as benevolent. I did, however, proudly wear an enamel pin that signified I had memorized the books of the Bible.
That Granny’s death fell so close to this nostalgic day was just bad luck, and that Easter I lay in bed gripped in a vice of reflection. It was after ten, and although my thoughts of the past were viscous and unbudging, the darkness in the room intensified my hearing, allowing me to keep at least one of my senses in the present. Amid a deep concentration on a potato salad of thirty years ago, I heard a car door slam, followed by hurried steps, followed by a quiet but persistent knock on my front door. I threw on pants and a T-shirt and opened the door without asking who it was.
Clarissa stood before me in a shambles, with Teddy clinging to her like a koala bear. I had not seen either of them at all during Easter week.
“Are you up?” she asked.
“I’m up,” I said, and Teddy, holding out his arms, climbed over onto me. Clarissa came in, glancing toward the street. “He’s back?” I said.
“He was here all week and things were tolerable at least. But today he started getting agitated. It’s like he’s on a timer. He began phoning every five minutes, which got me upset, then he suddenly stopped calling and I knew what was next. I heard a car screech outside my apartment and I knew it was him, so I got Teddy and bumped his head hurrying him into the car seat.” By now her voice was breaking and she soothed Teddy’s head with her palm. “Can I just sit here or stay here for a minute or maybe the night till I figure out what to do?” But she knew she didn’t have to ask, just stay. Teddy gripped my two forefingers with his fists and I moved them side to side. “Do you have anything?” she asked. “Any baby wipes or diapers or anything?” I had it all.
We followed our previous routine. Clarissa and Teddy slept in my room, and I slept on the sofa under lights so bright I tanned. Around 3 A.M. there was baby noise and I heard Clarissa’s hushed footsteps as she lightly bounced Teddy around the bedroom. Her door was cracked open and I said, “Everything okay?”
She slid a bladed palm in the doorway, opening it by a few more inches. “You awake?” she asked. “C’mon in, let’s talk,” she said. We passed Teddy off between us several times as we entered the bedroom. I knew what the invitation was about, camping buddies. But she seemed to have something on her mind of a verbal nature. Clarissa accommodated my lighting requirements by closing the door just enough to create a soft half-light in the bedroom. After a while we put Teddy in the centre of the bed, and though he still was wide awake, he calmed and made dove sounds. We were lying on either side of him and I put my hand on his grapefruit stomach, rolled him onto his back, and rocked him back and forth.
“What’s going on with you these days?” asked Clarissa.
And I told her of Granny’s suicide. “The funeral is the day after tomorrow,” I said. “But I can’t be there.”
“Do you want to be there?” she asked.
“What could I do there? What good would I be?” I answered.
“I think I should leave for a while,” said Clarissa. “Would you like me to go somewhere with you? We could drive to Texas, you, me, and Teddy.”
“Too late for the funeral,” I said.
“Yes, but you would be there; you would have shown up for her.”
Upon hearing Clarissa’s suggestion, my mind did a heroic calculation resulting in an unbalanced equation. On one side of the equals sign were the innumerable obstacles I would face on such a trip. I could list a thousand impossibilities: I cannot get in an elevator. I cannot stay on a hotel floor higher than three. I cannot use a public toilet. What if there were no Rite Aids? What if
we passed a roadside mall where one store was open and the others were closed? What if I saw the words “apple orchard”? What if the trip took us in proximity to the terrifyingly inviting maw of the Grand Canyon? What if we were on a mountain pass with hairpin turns, or if, during the entire trip, I could not find a billboard bearing a palindromic word? What if our suitcases were of unequal sizes? How would I breathe at the higher elevations? Would the thin air kill me dead? How would we locate the exact state lines? And what if, at a gas station in Phoenix, the attendant wore a blue hat?
On the other side of the equation was Teddy. I could imagine Teddy cooing in the back while pounding arrhythmically on his kiddy seat, and I could imagine ideas for his next amusement streaming through my head from Needles to El Paso and displacing every neurotic thought. I could imagine trying to distil his chaos into order and taking on the responsibility of his protection. And there was Clarissa, who would be seated next to me; who, now that I was no longer a patient, could be asked direct questions instead of being the subject of my oblique method of deduction. I still knew very little about her, only that I was in love with her. These two factors pulled down the scale toward the positive. But I settled the matter with a brilliant dose of self-delusion. I manipulated my own stringent mind with a new thought: What if I could convert one present fear into a different and more distant fear? What if I could translate my fear of the Grand Canyon into a fear of Mount Rushmore? What if I could transform my desire to touch the four corners of every copier at Kinko’s into an obsession with Big Ben? But my final proposal to myself was this: What if during the entire trip I would not allow myself to speak any word that contained the letter e? This is the kind of enormous duty that could supersede and dominate my other self-imposed tasks. I quickly scanned my vocabulary for useful words—a, an, am, was, is, for, against, through—and found enough there to make myself understood. Thus “let’s eat” would become, “I’m hungry, baby! Chow down!” I couldn’t say, “I love you,” but I could say, “I’m crazy about you,” which was probably a better choice anyway. I could call Clarissa by name, Teddy would simply become something affectionate like big man, bubby boy, or junior. One minor drawback, I couldn’t say my own name.
This idea of condensing my habits into one preoccupying restriction seemed so clever that it filled me up with ethyl and I said to Clarissa, “Okay, I’ll go.” Even though I had not officially started my challenge, my response was my first stab at an e-less sentence.
It was decided we would leave in the morning. Clarissa was afraid to return home to pack; her bright pink car didn’t have the stealth we needed for even a night run. She would have to buy clothes on the road. She had a credit card that she said was at its bursting point, with a few hundred dollars left on its limit. She had her cell phone but no charger, so we would have to be conservative in its use. We waited until 10 A.M. when I could withdraw my remaining thirty-eight hundred dollars for the trip.
I got in the car and said, “It’s a long trip for us. I want our roads to know not much traffic.”
“Huh?” she said.
“In honour of our trip down south, I’m trying to talk Navajo,” I said. Clarissa laughed, thank God, and pulled away from the curb.
We knew we would never get to Texas in time for Granny’s funeral, but the journey had another grail: I would be able to see Granny’s farm one last time before it was sold due to the lack of an interested relative to run it.
April in California is like June anywhere else. It was seventy by 10 A.M., heading up to eighty. Even though our reason for fleeing L.A. was sombre, the spontaneity of our trip inspired a certain giddiness in us, and Clarissa laughed as we pulled up to the Gap and she ran in for T-shirts and underwear and socks. Teddy looked at me from his car seat and burbled while manipulating a spoon.
I, the passenger/co-pilot/lookout/scout who was incapable of taking the wheel, wondered what I would do if asked to move the car. Grin, I suppose. After the Gap I hit the Rite Aid, and my knowledge of its layout sped me through dental hygiene, hairbrushes, everything feminine that Clarissa might need on the trip.
“I got you razors and things,” I said. This was going to be easy; I had yet to miss the letter e.
I got back in the car and checked the glove compartment for maps. There were a few irrelevant ones, but the California map would at least get us to Arizona. Pinpointing my current parking spot on a map of the entire state of California was impossible, so I hoped that Clarissa knew how to get us out of town. She turned over her shoulder and fiddled with Teddy. Then, she didn’t even ask where to go, just started driving south.
The traffic stopped and started along Santa Monica Boulevard, but soon we drove up a centrifugal cloverleaf onto the freeway where Clarissa stepped on it and accelerated to blissful speeds. It was as if the car had grown wings, letting us soar over the red lights and curbs and crosswalks. I wondered if the reason I was crazy, the reason that I had no job, that I had no friends, was so that at this particular moment in my life I could leave town on a whim with a woman and her baby, saying good-bye to no one, speeding along with no attachments to earth or heaven. The moment had come and I was ready for it. We rolled down the windows and the air whipped around us; Teddy chortled from behind. In honour of Philipa’s dog, Tiger, I stuck my head out the window and let my tongue flap in the breeze while Clarissa changed the lyrics and sang “California, Here I Went,” and kept time by thumping her palm on the steering wheel.
There were unpredictable and unaccountable slowdowns until we passed some shopping outlets in Palm Springs, where suddenly the road widened and flattened as though it had been put through a wringer. We pulled in for fast food at lunchtime, barely stopping the car. After four hours of driving we had not lost our zing but had quieted into comfortable smiles and inner glows. Clarissa checked her messages once. She listened, disappointment slithered across her face, and she turned off the Nokia. I took the phone and stowed it in the car door, which had a convenient space for miscellaneous storage.
We continued heading south with the sun still high. I stole the occasional glance and could see Clarissa in relief. Each eyelash was clearly defined against the crisp background of desert and sky. She was an array of pastels, her skin with its pink underglow set against white sand and the turquoise blue of her blouse. I assembled from the sight of her, from memories of her, a clear picture of Clarissa’s most touching quality: her denial of sadness. Only the most tragic circumstances could take the smile from her face and the bounce from her walk. Even now, as she fled from terror, she looked forward with innocence toward a happiness that waited, perhaps, a few miles ahead.
Contained in the hard shell case of Clarissa’s Dodge, I was remarkably and mysteriously free from the stringency of the laws and rules that governed my Santa Monica life. So I decided to engage Clarissa in conversation. Clarissa must have decided the same thing, because before I could speak, she launched into a soliloquy that barely required from me an uh-huh.
“I think Chris saw me as his dolly,” she said. I knew from her icy inflection on the word Chris that she meant her inseminator. “But there was no way I could see it until we were married,” she went on. “He’s borderline; that’s what I figured. A belligerent narcissist. He needs help, but of course why would someone seek help if one of their symptoms is thinking everyone else is wrong? I think I’m a narcissist, too. I’ve got a lot of symptoms. Four out of six in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. It seemed to me that “Chris” was simply a violent son of a bitch. But I didn’t have to live with him. If I had to justify someone to myself, I, too, would throw a lot of words at him. The more words I could ascribe, the more avenues of understanding I would have. Soon, every intolerable behaviour would have a syntactical route to my forgiveness:
“Oh, he’s just exhibiting abstract Neo-juncture synapses,” I would say, and then try to find treatments for abstract Neo-juncture synapses.
The differe
nce now between me and Clarissa was that she was yakking and I was thinking. I felt I was in conversation with her; but my end of the dialogue never got spoken. So my brilliant comments, retorts, and summaries stayed put in my cortex, where only I would appreciate their clever spins and innuendos.
The route from California to New Mexico essentially comprises one left turn. The monotony of the road was a welcome comedown from the emotional razzmatazz of our tiny lives in Santa Monica. We had practically crossed Arizona by day’s end, and just shy of the border, we checked into the Wampum Motel, a joint with tepee-shaped rooms and the musty scent of sixty years of transients. It fit our budget perfectly because nobody wanted to stay there except the most down and out, or college students looking for a campy thrill. The antique sign bearing the caricature of an Indian was enough to cause an uprising.
I’m not sure why Clarissa put us all in one room. Since I was paying, maybe she was honouring the budget, or perhaps she saw us as the Three Musketeers who must never be torn asunder. She got a room with twin beds and one bathroom. The lights were so dim in the room that I had no wattage problem. All I had to do was leave the bathroom light on, open the door one inch, and the room would be perfect for sleeping.
This arrangement also provided me with one of my life’s four or five indelible images: After an excursion to the Wampum diner, we retired early to get a jump on the next day’s drive. While Clarissa showered, Teddy slept securely in one of the twins, buffered on two sides by a pillow and a seat cushion. I had gotten in the other bed and turned out the light. I huddled up, trying to warm myself under the diaphanous wisps that the Wampum Motel called sheets. The room was lit only by moonlight, which seeped around every window blind and curtain. I heard the shower shut off. Moments later Clarissa came quietly into the room, leaving the bathroom light on per my request but closing the door behind her. To her, the room was pitch black, but to me, having adjusted to the darkness, the room was a patchwork of shadow and light. Clarissa, naked underneath, had wrapped herself in a towel and was feeling her way across the room. I was officially asleep but my eyes were unable to move from her. Standing in profile against the linen curtain and silhouetted by the seeping moonlight, she dropped the towel, raised a T-shirt over her head, and slipped it on. Her body was outlined by the silvery light that edged around her and she was more voluptuous than I had imagined. She then crouched down and fumbled through a plastic bag, stood, and pulled on some underwear. I wondered if what I had done was a sin, not against God, but against her. I forgave myself by remembering that I was a man and she was a woman and it was in my nature to watch her, even though her ease with taking off her clothes in front of me could have been founded on the thought that she did not see me as a sexual creature.