Elizabeth pulled her hand free. “So I should give up a sure thing for a complete unknown quantity.”
“I want you to have the sure thing, honey, but first I want you to find yourself. A girl needs to find herself. Then even if things end up in divorce she still has that.”
“Mother, I have found myself!” Elizabeth cries.
Her eyes fly open, to take in the broad slope of the International’s fat hood and the crumbling shoulders and rusting guardrails of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Had she actually cried out loud? Had Dennis heard? She feigns sleep, slumping against the door so as to crack one eye at Dennis. His eyes are steady on the road. Elizabeth opens her eyes slowly, yawning and stretching. “Did you hear anything?”
“Um, no, not especially.”
“Well, I mean, did I say anything? I mean, in my sleep.”
“Were you asleep?”
Elizabeth huffs in irritation and flops over to face her window.
“If the guy’s playing around, you’ve got every right to leave him.”
Elizabeth bolts upright. “You were listening!”
Dennis shrugs. “I got ears.”
“Andrew loves me too much to play around.”
“Then how come you’re not married?”
His right arm is still draped across the seat back. He massages her neck with his hand. She leans back, into the pillow of his hand . . . she sits upright, shrugging her neck free of his fingers.
Dennis grips the wheel with both hands, fixing his eyes on the road. “I’ll bet he introduces you as his wife. I’ll bet that whenever there’s somebody he wants to impress—”
“Dennis. He’s asked me to marry him. I said no.” She pulls the tissues from between her toes, wadding them into a ball in her purse, as the International climbs west, rising into the Pennsylvania mountains.
They stop for lunch at a Howard Johnson’s. Engulfed in pink and turquoise leatherette, they look out over the parked International and its heavenward-pointing monument. Shaped like the Matterhorn, wrapped in Hefty bags, the tombstone defines the space around it—in this case, the HoJo parking lot. Its black plastic sheath is beginning to shred from the battering of the wind, revealing a nubbled tit of flesh-colored stone.
The waitress leans against their table in a tired slouch, resting her pad on one hip. “Order?”
“Double cheeseburger, fries. A Coke. No, make that a vanilla shake.”
“Dinner salad. Thousand Island, low-calorie.”
The waitress brings their food. Dennis starts into his salad. “You were a distraction. Standing on the sidelines, in those cute skirts . . .”
“That was the first year the nuns let the cheerleaders wear pleats. Sister Angelina made us kneel before every game to make sure our hems were long enough to touch the ground. As soon as she turned around we rolled the tops of our skirts up over our belts.”
“You had them hiked up far enough at the district championship.”
“Dennis of the perfect memory.”
“I wouldn’t forget a second. It was a great game.”
“We lost. Danny Burnham missed that crazy jump shot from the corner baseline that he should never have taken and we lost.”
“I don’t care. It was still a great game. And you came up to me at the end and put your arm around me and told me it didn’t matter, that I was a star.”
“You were a star. You should have tried out for pro. Really! At those regional tryouts the pro teams give. You averaged eighteen points.”
“Nineteen-point-six.”
State flowers decorate the sugar packets. Dennis dumps them out on the table, then picks each up by a single corner and flicks it, with a snap of his forefinger, at the empty sugar bowl. “Bette C. I couldn’t have made pro.”
“You could have tried. You never know.”
Dennis stacks and replaces the packets.
“I’m sure you’re a great father,” Elizabeth says. “I’m sure you’re a great husband.”
“Even if I’ve run out on Crystal.”
“Wait a second. I thought Crystal gave you the OK to come on this trip.”
He flips the last sugar packet at the bowl and misses. “You played what . . . Barbara Allen, in Dark of the Moon. You were great. Every time you came out it was like the whole cast got serious. Same for the audience.”
“Dennis. What about Crystal?”
Dennis picks up the packet and begins fluting its edges between his thumb and forefinger. “You called and I wanted to come, I was obsessed, I couldn’t sleep, I thought about it that much, and I couldn’t ask Crystal—I mean, what if she said no? Which she’d have every right to say and surely would have said. And I would have gone ahead and done what I wanted to do and so what the hell, why not blow the top off of all this and just up and leave.”
“Dennis. You’re babbling.”
“She’s sweet and she’s still pretty and I could say or do anything, the worst thing I could think of, and she would never, not ever leave me. So yesterday came and I picked up and left.” The packet breaks, spilling sugar over Dennis’s salad.
“She has no idea where you are at all?”
He spreads his square hands flat against the table top, fingers splayed. “I was nuts about you that last year.”
Once fine as a piano player’s, his hands are swollen and lined now, and not just at the knuckles. His skin has coarsened, veins branch across the bones. She lays her hand next to his—finer-boned, smoother-fleshed, better cared for but still unmistakably the hand of a woman who has seen something of the world.
“So how are things with Andrew?” he asks.
“I took off and left Andrew.”
“I figured as much.”
“We’d been fighting a month, and all the time this damned tombstone was sitting in Philadelphia piling up storage fees. So a week goes by and we’ve hardly talked, I mean, you know what I mean? And then over the breakfast table he asks me to marry him. Not for the first time, either, but the other time I was kind of expecting it, you know, it was up at Big Bear or some romantic place. But this time it was like totally whammo, out of the blue he asked and I said no, again, and then I had to get out. I can’t do this to him, you know? I can’t even let him do it to himself.”
“So you called me up.”
“And you, thank God, said yes. My brothers and sisters don’t even know I’m showing up with this—rock. I mean, they’re expecting it to arrive on the back of a freight truck or something, with Andrew, if anybody, in tow.”
“So are you going back to him?”
She takes up her fork to toy with her fries.
He reaches across the table then, to take the fork from her hand and take her fingers in his own. “We’d been married about two years when I started thinking about leaving Crystal and following you to California. I even thought about it the day I got married, except I was a twenty-year-old hound in heat and there were all these presents and all these people and so what do you do? You get married. And then just about the time I got really antsy the kids came along, they’re great, and I settled into it, I made a deal with myself: You just make yourself be satisfied, you just count your blessings. Everybody wants to be a star when they’re a kid, that’s what I told myself, and then you get older and you aim a little lower, when those feelings come along you just put them aside, until finally you figure out that you’re being a star just by managing to get through the world in one piece and that’s all anybody has any right to ask for and so you shut up and don’t ask for anything else. But Jean Marie—she’s the youngest—she’s almost in high school, she’s all the way to seventh grade, they’re growing up, almost grown up, and all that wanting, it’s all come back, you know? You know?”
“It’s OK, Dennis. Really, you’re lucky. You’ve got your kids. You’ve got health insurance. You’ve got a retirement plan.”
“You’ve really put yourself out there. Hell, you were right to say no to Andrew. You were right to say no to me. You’re really
out there, in Hollywood. Making it happen.”
She squeezes his hand. “Dennis. I quit acting a couple of years back.”
Dennis leans back. “You quit acting?”
“I’m handling real estate. It’s what you do in L.A.” She avoids his eyes. “My God, Dennis, it was the eighties, you could make a bundle on nothing but fluff and turn. A little paint, a few potted plants, and bingo—twenty, thirty thousand profit in six months. I’d have been a fool to pass that by. My mistake was in not doing it sooner.”
The waitress, who has been hovering at some distance, closes in. “Eat up, folks, if you don’t mind, it’s getting on time to change shifts, and if I could, if you could . . .”
“Sure, ma’am, no problem,” Dennis says. He drops Elizabeth’s hand to pick up his fork.
Dennis walks to a nearby Drug Town to buy some gum. Sitting in the truck’s cab, Elizabeth studies her toes. Ten little piglets daubed with maroon, they look fiercely tacky, spread against the floorboard, wedged among the farm junk that litters the truck—jumper cables, a tobacco knife, hog rings.
She takes the tobacco knife and climbs out of the truck and onto the flatbed. She feels the stone through its layers of black plastic, searching for the plaque, whose design she has never seen. “A surprise,” Andrew said, when she asked to see his sketches. “A melding of elements from old and new concepts of death, designed for a family on the cusp between the two.”
She locates the plaque under the plastic cover and uses the tobacco knife to hack a hole in its protective covering. She bends to peer inside.
All those weeks of The Judds and Windham Hill on Andrew’s CD player—really, she ought to have suspected.
The plaque is mounted in one side of the rough-hewn stone. Elizabeth’s mother and father lead off its list of names, followed by the names of their seven children, their spouses, and their grandchildren:
HARDIN
ROSE ELLA PERLITE 1920–1989
m.
THOMAS HARDIN 1912–1990
Joseph Raymond 1945–
m. Catherine Ellison 1945–
Michael Leslie 1970–
Sean Thomas 1974–
Thomas Hardin, Jr. 1982–
Barbara Marie 1947–
m. Brady Wexelford 1941–
Mary Michael 1983–
Christopher Samuel 1985–
Matthew Curtis 1987–
Leslie William 1948–
m. Helen Jackson 1950–
Theresa Jane 1981–
Paul Benjamin 1982–
Helena Marie 1984–
Robert Crosby 1949–
m. Louise Gray 1948–
Sarah Marie 1977–
Margaret Erhart 1979–
Clark Andrew 1950–1970
Elizabeth Christine 1951–
m.
Raphael Cary 1953–1990
Around the plaque’s edges are engravings: a rosary, a leaping fish, crossed shotguns, a pair of books (one open, one closed), deer antlers, the Great Seal of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, ranged in a semicircle below an ancient Egyptian ankh—symbol (she has learned this from Andrew) of eternal life.
“Can I look?”
Elizabeth jumps, startled. Without waiting for her answer Dennis climbs to the flatbed. He holds back the plastic between pinched fingers and peers over her shoulder at the plaque. “These are supposed to be like—symbols? Of your parents?”
“It’s lovely,” she says.
Dennis drops the plastic veil. “So why are you defending the jerk, if you left him in L.A.?”
“So why aren’t you with your wife?”
Dennis jumps from the flatbed and climbs into the truck.
Elizabeth crouches to Andrew’s plaque. She lifts the plastic, her fingers read the raised bronze letters: her parents, then one by one her six brothers and sisters and their spouses, she among them: once the penultimate child, now youngest, now that Raphael is dead. The daughter whose name is followed by “m.” (she’ll wring Andrew’s neck for that), and following that “m.” nothing, nada, the void, the long, unnerving blank—spinsterhood’s hieroglyph, graphic proof for generations to follow that she has never found herself, or anyone else.
She climbs from the truck and walks to a nearby liquor outlet, where she buys a couple of tallboys, then crosses to a drugstore, where she searches for condoms. She yearns for this to happen, for those few seconds when desire triumphs over time and she lies unthinking, unaware of all she once wanted, where she is now, where she is going . . . She buys condoms.
Back in the International she takes the wheel, to drive deep into the Pennsylvania mountains.
Now that her mother is dead, Elizabeth understands why Rose Ella so much wanted her last daughter to leave Kentucky, to move to California, to try her hand at acting. And Elizabeth went, to learn in California what Rose Ella could not have known. By leaving home and family, Elizabeth now knows what she has lost: a landscape more familiar to her even now than any part of Los Angeles; an understanding of blood history and her place in it; the unquestioning womb of family, in whose comfort and security she might have enfolded herself after her mistakes and tragedies; an openness to the world, which in Los Angeles was no more than an invitation to be exploited. These things and more she has given up, in exchange for—herself. Her self.
Would she have been wiser to have stayed in Kentucky? In the end she suspected it all came out to the same. The first, or second, or third law of thermodynamics—she remembers this from a college physics professor on whom she had a crush. Conservation of energy. If anything was to be gained, something must be given up. If she was to find herself, she had to leave her family, her home.
“Life is the little that is left over from dying,” she mutters to herself, something she’d learned from some English teacher somewhere long ago. When both her parents died, she understood a little better what her teacher had been getting at. Then Raphael died—little brother, fellow Californian, closest of her siblings, fellow seeker of emotional asylum; and his death enforced understanding.
And now not much more than a few months later she is somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike traveling with the dead, carting across America the only certain, indisputable facts of life, cast in bronze (“lasts way longer than any granite,” Andrew is speaking at her ear), and at her side is her traveling companion Dennis. She is struck by how alone she feels with him here—more alone than if she were alone. He cannot know or share her grief, she thinks, and she knows no words that might do it justice. The only thing she knows, that she can put a finger to, is desire—for Dennis, who so clearly wants her in return. What can this mean, love and lust in the face of all that death? Surely two people who so nearly want the same thing may find their ways to it, she thinks, if only for the space of a single hour on a single afternoon.
She leans over and plants a kiss on Dennis’s stubbled cheek.
She exits onto a dead-end country road, the most deserted she can spot. She hands Dennis a beer, leaving the condoms in the bag. As she drives he drinks wordlessly, first his beer, then hers.
She turns into a lane, two ruts leading through a broken-down gate and dead-ending in a waist-high field of wheat. The culvert is decrepit, she narrowly misses lurching into the ditch. The truck bounces. The tires scrape the wheel wells. With a tug of the emergency brake she stops.
Dennis clears his throat.
In her vision they would not need words. Dennis must know what she is up to and would lean across the crinkly plastic bag and kiss her and save her the embarrassment of telling him what the bag contains.
The silence lengthens. The sun sinks. Dennis sits staring out at the gently waving wheat, his hands long against his lap.
She lifts the beer from Dennis’s hand, opens the plastic bag, lays a condom in his still-opened palm.
The sun is low in the sky, the light flat and clear and sharp as memory. Behind the seat there is a blanket, a little greasy, flecked with hay and horsehair, bu
t they spread it on the ground next to the wheels. Elizabeth lies back. As Dennis brushes his lips against hers she looks up, watching as the line of the truck’s shadow creeps up the tombstone until the sun strikes only the tip of the rock, pointing to the sky, an admonishing, rose-tipped finger.
Years of monogamy and she has forgotten how laborious sex can be. Dennis is gentle and this is not what she wants, at the end of this dirt lane where she has brought them. She who has never married wants adultery, desire without conditions, hot and steamy, all-consuming and above all fast; and here is Dennis, twenty-one years a husband, a father three times over, brutally tender, wanting love. The weight of his loneliness crushes her more thoroughly than Dennis himself, who has filled out considerably since his basketball days.
He is making clumsy love, and she is somewhere else, and finally he turns away. “I can’t do this.”
Elizabeth pulls his head to her breast. “The ground is too cold.” She stares up, past his thinning brown hair with the gold highlights—how she remembers that gold, at the end of a summer of outdoor practice his hair was almost blond . . . She stares up, trying to forget, to abandon her dreams to the dreamless blue bowl of the sky, while Dennis clambers to his feet and buttons his shirt and mumbles an apology, and all the while a corner of her mind that will not shut up rehearses lies for those survivors who are waiting for the tombstone, back home in Kentucky.
Discreetly diplomatic, she hands the keys to Dennis. She walks behind the truck, guiding him with hand signals onto the narrow culvert, but the right rear wheel slips into the ditch. With a delicate crunch the muffler snaps, while the rock tilts, slips, catches, holds; barely.
Dennis leaps from the truck. “This is your fault! Every bit of it! You told me to go to the right. Look at that ditch! Any bozo can see you’re supposed to cut to the left.”
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