Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  The highway was becoming hillier, and the bunched trees, set back from the road, seemed like black malignant growths along what had once been a flat, clean skin of land. The rain was slowly thickening on the windshield, changing to sleet, and the cars around her, she noticed, had decreased speed. She was in the right-hand lane, but was passing all the other cars, and she touched the brake gently, slowing the Jetta from eighty, to seventy-five, to seventy. She was surprised at how easily the outside world could disappear. In talking to Steve, she’d barely even seen it, she’d barely even remembered she was driving. Now though, with the sleet, she felt a danger that made her pay attention. She saw a sign showing upcoming cities, Salt Lake City in forty miles, and she knew the mountains were coming, leaving Idaho and entering Utah and Wyoming before moving on to the flatter plains of Nebraska and Iowa. Billboards along the highway, lit up in the sleeting rain, advertised for McDonald’s, Shell, BBQ, Fireworks, Adult SuperStores, the Bible, the miscellaneous array of stupid American rural life that she knew she was a part of, that was her heritage.

  Steve said that he wanted to know what she was going through and to please talk to him, he was ready to listen. That was his problem, he knew, that he was always wanting to fix things, and he said he would try not to do that, a thing he knew he sometimes did, and would just listen, if that’s what she wanted. He said he knew that he could be a selfish asshole and he was sorry, but please explain to him so that he could understand why she wanted Jack to live with them. Not that she shouldn’t want that, or that she should have to have some explanation, but just so, so that, he said, hesitating, confused now, stammering. I get it, Tammy said. Just hold on a minute. After thinking for a moment, she told Steve she thought it started from the very beginning: when she had April at eighteen, her parents insisted they live with them. The arrangement had slipped Tammy out of needing to be a mother. She became a worker, not a mother. Her father demanded it. There had been, Tammy said now, a strange relief: she’d been frightened of being a mother, and while she felt a joy she had never experienced when April was delivered safely into the world, the fact that she wouldn’t be doing this alone and would, in fact, have to be a worker, could leave the house, would have help, even though it was her parents helping, was a sad relief. She felt guilty for feeling it, she said.

  In the car, the sleet-rain increased its ticking onto her windshield. She thought of when her father told her that what was going to happen here was he and her mother were going to take care of April until Tammy saved enough to get a place of her own. She was the one who’d fucked up. He wasn’t going to pay Tammy’s way, she wasn’t going to leech off him, but he’d help. Along with feeling secretly relieved, then ashamed at this relief, she’d also been surprised even at that offer of help. Her father wasn’t a man who did such things. Suddenly the trees dropped away on her right and there was open farmland, fields broken apart by barbed-wire fencing, and in the distance, set in rolling hills, farm houses, barns, with hazy lights seeming to struggle against the sleet and rain. She told Steve that when she had April, her father had changed. She remembered seeing him in the kitchen, she said – making bacon, flipping bacon, his beard greying and long, lumberjack-like she’d thought – and holding April at the same time he was making breakfast, singing to her, and she remembered clearly seeing that the baby had aged him, caused him to grow older, and also softer. This helpless thing, smiling and happy, had opened him up. She witnessed less drinking and smoking from her father. There was a new No Smoking rule in the house. He’d implemented it one night over dinner, maybe two weeks into April being there with them, sleeping, or often not sleeping, in her crib, and Tammy’s father, while passing a bowl of potatoes or something, said that there’d be no more smoking in the house, and that when it was cold, if you needed to smoke, then people could smoke in the garage, but no more in the house, and though Tammy’d wanted him to state the reason, wanted to ask him why he was saying this now, even though she basically knew the reason, she hadn’t had to ask because he then said, It’s not fair to the kid to smoke in here. She told Steve that she and her mother had sat quietly, a little stunned, and then finished their meals. She told Steve that maybe Jack could do something like that for them. She said that when she was with Jack, she also felt again the possibilities of what she herself could be. Like her father years ago, she wanted a change, was ready for a change, was tired of being in an ugly world that was only against her, that didn’t allow her to care for anything, and here was a chance to care again. Just like when she witnessed her father hold April, sing to April, make faces at April, give April a bottle and let her sleep on his chest, she wanted that again with Jack. She knew part of it was selfish. But part of it was for Jack. She knew the right way to take care of him because she’d done it the wrong way for so long. Just like her father seemed like another person with the new baby, like he’d been taken aboard an alien craft, her father’s self removed, and then the aliens had implanted some other being inside his skin, she wanted to feel new again, and she wanted the world to also feel new again.

  Steve told her that he understood that, understood wanting all that. He said that there was nothing wrong with wanting that, but the problem was, it seemed to Steve, that that was just Tammy wanting Jack so that, you know, her life would be better. I feel like that’s not taking into account certain practicalities, Steve said. Like clothing, shoes. Diarrhea. Sickness. Also, this isn’t a baby. This is a four-year-old kid. He’s not going to want to be sung to every night. Tammy said that she understood that, that she was just using an example – she didn’t think Jack was going to magically change everything. What she was trying to say was that maybe a change in her life would be a good thing. Maybe having to care for someone else would do her good, in the same way it did her father good. That was all she was saying.

  Driving in the sleeting rain and not actually seeing the rain, or hardly seeing it, only some mechanical part of her driving the car, she remembered how she drove to work, at nineteen, leaving April at home, and cried in the car, thinking of her father holding her baby. The image of her father holding her baby didn’t move her because of its beauty. She remembered crying because she was witnessing a kindness that was never afforded her. A kindness that she didn’t even know existed in him and was now easily available, as though he’d been saving it up for someone more worthy, and that more worthy person was her daughter, who Tammy had not even wanted. She spoke toward the phone in the stand near the digital display and told Steve that for the first two years of April’s life, she worked two jobs, two shifts – one at UPS, and another bagging groceries. She eventually became a clerk at the grocery, then assistant manager. She saved money. She found the apartment. She didn’t want to leave completely, but she didn’t want to be in the house with her parents anymore. She couldn’t deal with this new father anymore. A father who was finally a father, she told Steve. Something he had never really been to me. Her parents, her father, took care of April during the day, feeding her and clothing her and changing her diapers and wiping her spit up. Her mother knitted and read the Bible. Her father walked the baby through town in a stroller. When Tammy came home, exhausted in the evening, or in the morning, if she worked a nightshift at UPS, she’d hold April and the baby would cry and cry. She didn’t feel like a mother, or a caregiver. She had loved April, of course, but she didn’t feel the love was the right love. There was something in the way of it. She knew now it was her father, and she also knew, she explained, that the reason she was driving across the country was because if she didn’t do something, there would be something even bigger in the way of her and Jack, that there already was something in the way, and she had to do her best to knock it down.

  Steve said that he remembered some of this. Hadn’t she told him at some point that her parents would not help with April when Tammy was in the house? That’s right, Tammy said. Steve said that, see, he really did listen, and that she had told him some of these things. She rolled her eyes at the boy-like comment,
but was also pleased. She didn’t remember telling him and yet he was saying that he remembered her telling him that when she came home from a late shift, maybe it was one of the first times she’d come home late, after a shift at UPS, he thought, he wasn’t sure, and the baby crying, spit-up on the baby’s shirt, a wet or pooped diaper, and she tried to eat some dinner and hold the baby at the same time. Her mother had come up to her to take the child, possibly to change her, and soothe her while Tammy had a meal, and her father came into the room, standing in the kitchen. You told me, Steve said, that your father said something like, Not if she’s in the house. We don’t help if she’s in the house. This is her responsibility. Your mother tried to argue against your father but he took the baby and handed her to you. I mean, I remember you telling me that and thinking that that was just awful. Tammy said that wasn’t all. That there was more to it than that, that she had withheld this from Steve because she was afraid of what he’d think of her. Her father, while not helping when she was in the house, still corrected Tammy as he’d always done. No, he’d say about the way Tammy held April. Like this. Your forearm under her butt, that’s how she likes it. Stable base. And if you bounce her, well, don’t. Don’t bounce her. She doesn’t like being bounced. And he’d hold her and April would be soothed, contented, and this man, who had been no real father to her, was being, suddenly and unexpectedly, a good father. So many moments of turning away, gritting her teeth, wanting to scream, Tammy told Steve. She told him that she knew now, and probably knew years before, realized it years before, but felt it more now that April was gone, the shame of what she felt: that her father had made her envious of her daughter. Her father had made her resentful of her own baby because her baby got from her father the exact thing she knew she wanted. In this way, she told Steve, she’d come to understand that her father had made her fight herself, fight these feelings in herself, and she worked hard to keep herself aware that none of this was April’s fault, and she worked hard as a worker, to keep her mind on the goal of getting out, which had become at the time a bigger goal than Tammy had ever had, maybe, she told Steve now, the only goal she had ever had, really, and filled with a sort of cosmic significance: leaving home meant being a mother, and she felt that same significance now: getting Jack meant correcting the mistakes she’d made with April. She said into the phone held neatly in the little stand near the Jetta’s digital display screen, I want to be able to sit in the family room with Jack, to teach him things, now that I have time. We can do flashcards. We can learn to make models together. I know what Jack likes. I’ve been with him, taken him to movies, to playgrounds, on bike rides, I know how he likes to play during the afternoon and then sit and read in the evening. Nathaniel and Stefanie don’t know these things. And I know what I failed to do with April, and what I failed to feel. Or what I felt that was wrong. That won’t be there with Jack. I was hoping you’d want to do that, that you’d want to be a part of that for Jack. Steve said that that made sense, he didn’t realize any of that, and he wanted to answer her, but let him think for a moment because this was not something he’d considered, how could he have. As he was saying it, as her car was ascending, moving steadily upward toward the mountains, the call dropped.

  In the distance, through the rain, Tammy saw the lights of a police car and thought there’d been another accident, but as her car approached the flashing lights, she saw that it was the BMW that had passed her fifteen minutes ago, pulled over. Rain like a thin veil over the car and two men. The driver was being given a sobriety test, the cop shining a flashlight at the man. The beam of the flashlight made clear by the rain. The driver, in a long raincoat and dark clothes, had his hands extended, like a man walking a tightrope. The cop wore a bulky jacket over his uniform and a little plastic covering over his hat. All passed in a moment, gone, the blue lights behind her. Sleeting rain ticking on the car and windshield with more intensity that, along with the rushing sound of her car over the highway, created a white noise of weather and road. In the space of time in which she passed by the sobriety test Tammy unwillingly recalled the time her father forced her to drink a bottle of whisky. She’d come home late from a party when she was a sophomore, drunk, driving the car drunk, and when she arrived at her house, every light was on. She knew her father did it. So she’d know. So when she pulled the car into the driveway, she’d know. So she’d feel his anger before she even saw him. She turned off the car and got out and walked up the path to the front door and went in, quiet and head down, not wanting to meet his eyes. She didn’t have to look up to know he was there in his recliner, sitting up in it. He had a beer belly then (which he lost a good deal of after April arrived), and always smelled of cigarettes. He told her to sit. When she didn’t move, he’d said, Is there something about the word sit that you don’t understand? She’d moved then, into a chair he had out, right in front of the coffee table. The bottle of whisky was on the coffee table, and he told her to pick it up. She didn’t move. If you want to drink, he’d said. Pick it up and drink. She’d looked at the bottle and heard him say, Now. She picked it up and drank. Then put it down. He reached across the table, took a swig, and put the bottle back down. There were small beads of liquid in his beard, like there often were when he drank anything, something that bothered Tammy, like why couldn’t he drink in the way everyone drank and not get it on his face. Now you, he said. They finished the bottle like that and when she was vomiting in the backyard, on her hands and knees she was so drunk, the frozen ground and grass hard and cold beneath her knees and hands, she heard his calm lecture: If this is what you want, that’s fine with me. But I want you to know what this really is. This is what it is. You will turn into this person, on hands and knees. Or you’ll turn into what I am – I drank half that bottle and feel nothing. I don’t feel a thing. And that I don’t feel a thing is disgusting, but what you’re doing is even more disgusting, and you should feel disgusted by it. It was a discipline beyond discipline, conveying her toward her own eventual meanness, she thought. And yet, even at the time, very drunk and vomiting what she’d had for dinner that night, a cheesesteak and French fries – she could see undigested chunks of bread and fries, thinking she’d never eat a cheesesteak again – even at that moment, repulsed at her father and herself, she detected a message of love in what he was doing: he didn’t want her to be like him. It worked, she thought, driving through the sleeting rain. She never drank again. She could still very clearly remember the cold ground of the backyard, frozen and hurting her knees, and the smell of alcohol and vomit and also of cold, clean air. It was so strange, that deeply unpleasant, repulsive smell mixed with that crispness of cold pine and snow, as though even the gross things in life – one’s body and garbage and the smell of skunk or a dead dog on the road – had their own pristine quality, something beyond good and bad, all just what it was. She experienced that basic banality years later when April was in the world, pooping ridiculous green slime or runny peanut butter-looking liquid, and while unpleasant, Tammy didn’t care, wasn’t repulsed, could see such things only as another example of something she should be grateful for, which was weird. Of course then when she saw a disgusting or ugly person, she’d forget all this and feel repulsed, but she tried to remember April as a baby, pooping everywhere, out the top of diapers, onto shirts, onto Tammy, and when older, vomiting on Tammy when she ate too quickly, and when out in the world, feeling repulsed at some ugly person, she’d check herself momentarily, and try not to be like her father, try not to see things, supposedly ugly things, as ugly, to know that there was a person there. Uglier were the pretty ones, the Facebook perfect ones, the ones who didn’t acknowledge their animalness, Tammy thought now. The supposed disgusting things were not what was unpleasant, what was unpleasant was other people, their selves, what they thought, their self-righteousness and stupidity, not their bodies. Her father never saw that, but she did. She remembered feeling years later – when her parents were taking care of April while she worked, then not taking care of April whe
n she entered the house again – that April would never know these things about her father, never know his cruelties. Part of her was grateful for that. Part of her was grateful to her father, she thought driving now in the rain, but another part of her was envious and resentful and that part of herself she hated. She hated that she was resentful that her father hadn’t thought to treat her, his own daughter, any better, which in turn translated into Tammy being envious of April, her daughter, whose life, she had immediately seen at the time – like the world had stamped its approval on it and forlornly handed the certificate to Tammy for safekeeping – would be easier than her own. She wanted her own life to be easy, she remembered thinking, to be like this car through the rain, effortlessly passing through the unpleasantness of other people and the world, but it was not like that, so she worked hard those two years while living with her parents, not really being a mother to April, in order to get out and get to some easier place in her life. She might not get to be young again, but she could at least be a mother to April. She worked hard and was proud of that, she thought in the car without feeling as though she was in a car, or anywhere at all, and after two years, she’d made enough and left. She remembered thinking that she wouldn’t be indebted to them, to her father, and she most especially wouldn’t watch this man give to her daughter what he never gave to her.