Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  The boy in the booth seemed to follow her eyes, through the windows and out to the parking lot. He asked which one was hers, nodding at the cars. It was a question asked in order to go on talking and she didn’t necessarily want to do that, but she answered him anyway.

  Tammy told him that she was driving that Jetta out there in the parking lot. The boy looked out at the car, now covered in a layer of sleet. She didn’t tell him she usually drove an old Jeep Cherokee, a car that April had called the White Trash Mobile when she was in high school, but she’d say it in a way that showed she liked the car. Recently though, whenever Tammy picked her up at the airport in the last few years April’d say that Tammy needed to get a new car. Tammy would ask if she didn’t like the White Trash Mobile anymore, and April’d shake her head – once their joke, now something she could tell April was ashamed of. Tammy had called April after she’d first married Nicholas and said, So what does the husband think of marrying into a white trash family? April had asked her not to say that, that that’s not what she was, not what their family was, and not what Nicholas thought. Tammy told April that she knew what April thought of her, she knew what April thought of where she came from. I know why he’s taking you to some isolated place in the mountains, away from our side of the family, Tammy had said. April’d say to Tammy that Tammy was one of the smartest people she knew, she just hadn’t refined that intelligence, and she should take some classes, and they’d argue and argue on the phone, and hang up angry and hating each other. Tammy thought that part of the problem between her and April was that both of them forgot the good times. There were years in the small apartment they first lived in, after leaving her parents’ house, that she often wanted to go back to. That small place, almost no decorations, a few pots and pans and plates and bowls in the cupboards. Dinner was chili mac or sloppy joes or just popcorn. They didn’t have much money, but they were together. Tammy was the mother and April was her daughter. And Tammy was finally on her own, away from her family. Her family was only twenty minutes away, but she was still gone from them. She had her own family. April and her were now a family, and she could make what she wanted of it. She could construct a new story. They could. They did. There was a kind of effortlessness to their days, an easy freedom. Tammy drove April to daycare. They sang songs on the way. She picked her up in the evening and they practiced rhymes. She made them dinner, and they played games – Memory and I Spy, and then when she was a little older, six, seven, eight, they sang Creedence Clearwater songs, Neil Young, Carole King, Stevie Wonder. Tammy was educating April, in her own way, her own unique way. Rhyming games turned into Tammy giving April a verse to remember every day at preschool or kindergarten. Then they’d practice the verse on the way home. When they got home, April put the record on in the family room and they sang together while Tammy made a taco kit dinner or warmed up half a rotisserie chicken and potatoes. They did math, flash cards, adding and subtraction. Tammy felt some desire to go back to school, to become a teacher. She felt she was doing well. She felt like a mother and a teacher. She checked her annoyance in those years with the control of a good Samaritan checking on the flaws of the citizenry, governing herself through herself. When April broke something or spilled something, and Tammy felt annoyance, she recalled her father, and in this way, she didn’t let him in their apartment. Her parents, her father in particular, they saw on holidays, and Tammy met her parents on the holidays with the same carefreeness she and April met the world with: they didn’t need anyone else, they didn’t need the world, it was just them, and this was a nice stop, thank you for the meal, but soon they’d be gone, gone, gone, and no rules about how to behave in the house, where to eat, when to turn on the TV, how loud, no shoes inside, the heater not above sixty-seven degrees, coats hung here, that was her father’s chair, that her mother’s, none of these little rules had anything to do with her and April. They observed them and then left them behind, free. Tammy felt that she conveyed to her father by her very actions and living: I am finally out, away from you, who for so long kept me from some happiness. April was hers. She was April’s. They were for each other, like the song. She tried to convey this to her father, indirectly, but it didn’t touch him. Or she couldn’t tell if it touched him. These holiday visits allowed her to keep her parents, and her father in particular, at a safe distance, and yet, eventually, as if sensing Tammy’s plan, her father began just dropping by to see April. And when her father was around April, he was this happy and kind man that Tammy didn’t recognize. Tammy couldn’t believe her father’s way around April. Holding her hand, taking her on walks, kicking the soccer ball with her. On her father’s visits to her apartment, he’d come into the place as though he owned it, as though there had never been any problems between him and Tammy, as though he didn’t know, didn’t realize, that Tammy was purposefully keeping herself and April away from him, and he’d say she needed pictures or paintings up or more lamps and that he could buy some of these things if she wanted, which she always declined. He’d also ask how Tammy was, how her job as a dental assistant was going, if she thought she’d go back to school, which he thought might be a good idea, which he thought might be good for April, for getting April a better life, and when Tammy told him it wasn’t on her mind at all, she didn’t want to be in school ever again, she liked the job, she made good money, she was even saving a little money, he told her he was glad she was doing well and knew she would be. But see, she just had to fuck up first. He had to make her see that she was fucking up, so that she could know how to avoid it. Still, she could always be doing better. Things could be better if she tried harder, but this was good for now, pretty good. In these moments, she would recall images of him shaking his head at her, yanking her dog out of the house once when the dog had peed on a rug, putting a stake in the yard, tying the dog to it, never letting him inside again, and telling a seven-year-old Tammy that she’d lost the privilege of a dog. Now he was giving her backhanded compliments about her work and her parenting. But compliments nonetheless. She was pulled toward and away from him, and this very pulling she felt encroach on her life, cause some hidden tension. She’d wanted to tell him that there was no need to come by, but she didn’t want to fight with him either, or she didn’t want April to see her fighting him, since April had completely endeared herself to him: she saw the good grandpa! The fun grandpa! The funny and loving grandpa! So Tammy had no choice, like she had no choice in so many things: she let him in, let him be this person she didn’t know. She sometimes imagined subtle ways of pulling out his anger, to show April, so that she’d also see the meanness, the calm and almost effortless cruelty, the distance, his man’s mind. But she didn’t let herself do that, she told the boy. That would’ve been unfair to April. If this was what he was now, then she’d accept it. April wouldn’t know, her father wouldn’t know, but Tammy knew: she accepted, forgave. In those moments, she’d look at April and know that April wouldn’t know the hardship that Tammy knew, wouldn’t know the cruelty, wouldn’t really know this man, and in her acceptance and forgiveness of her father, she was both happy for her daughter and envious. Jealous, really. Jealous again that she saw in her father now the father she’d never had. She’d hated the return of this feeling she thought she’d escaped. Her father conjured it in her so easily, and she worked hard to hide it from April, from her father, and from herself. From herself, too, she said. She didn’t want to look at it and she sometimes thought that in not looking, she made it worse. It was the one thorn in those good years with April, the one thing she wanted to wipe from her experience but couldn’t. She imagined that if she could let it – her father, her jealousy, her anger – sink from her mind, like a ship sinking on the horizon, she could feel that everything was right, that her life with April in the apartment was complete, but she felt it always there, like the annoying hangnail of her well-being.

  Tammy watched the boy finish his soda and seem to accept that she didn’t want to talk with him. In case he made another attempt, she picked up
her phone and turned it back on and saw several texts from Steve. Each text was a version of an apology, with one text asking her to call him back, and another saying that he’d wait up until she called him back and that she should call him back, or not, whenever she felt like it, if she felt like it at all, and he’d understand either way, and was sorry for not being more up front with her. When she looked up, the boy was standing over his booth, laying down money on top of the tab. He told her good luck and then said that he had a feeling that things would work out in the best way possible for her and her daughter and then he smiled at her and went out to the parking lot. Through the windows of the diner, she watched him get into a pickup truck, reverse the truck, and then drive out onto the road. She imagined it was Jack’s truck, that Jack had bought it cheap and basically broken down at a local used-car dealership, and then had fixed it up himself and got it running again, and that Tammy had taught him the lesson of working for the things you wanted and needed because no one else was going to help you out.

  After finishing her coffee and eating a few French fries, she paid her bill, left a large tip, and then went out to her car without knowing what to do. The sleet had turned back to rain and was lessening, and before she got in the rental, she surveyed the diner, the parking lot, the road leading to the highway, and in the distance, cutting between what Tammy now could see was a forest, the sweep of cars on the highway, taillights going one way, headlights moving another. Something about the stillness of the forest against the constant motion of the cars momentarily disoriented her. The forest seemed to emphasize the futility of the travelers in the cars, as though wherever any of them were going was not a final destination, but just another place that they wouldn’t find home. She got in the car and pulled out, got on the road that connected to the highway, and continued driving toward Jack. Her car, among other cars and trucks and SUVs and semis, was soon up on the mountain road, on a flat, elevated stretch of highway, which widened to three lanes. She felt that being in her car on this cold night was the proper expression of how things were. If she looked to her right or left, as she passed a car or as a car passed her, she might see the face of the driver, might see a young man, an old woman like her, or she might see a husband and wife, children in the back of an SUV watching some cartoon. She liked that, even in separate cars, when she looked, people could feel it, and they’d look, they’d see her in her car, alone, separate, being conveyed to wherever. All were going to different destinations, all alone, like the boy she’d met in the diner. That was why trains were a lie, why the car, that American invention, was the proper expression of how things really were: separate and alone, and cars drew the division. I see you, but I’m not with you. We’re, none of us, going to the same place – that was what the car represented. Isolation and separateness, in the same way the trees were separate from the grass, the highway was separate from the mountains, the mountains were separate from the sea, and human life, cities, separate from nature, and you had to either fight your way through all these things that had nothing to do with you or let people pass. A car merged into her lane like some kind of symbolic action she couldn’t quite decode, though she gestured at the car as evidence of what she was thinking. For a moment, the rain and sleet seemed to stop, then a gust of wind brought down more. She hadn’t noticed it until now, but there were pine trees now along the road, rather than the deciduous trees she’d been seeing. The icy rain gave the pines a white sheen. Her phone lit up, and she saw another call from Steve. She decided to answer and told him she was in mountains. She glanced to her left – toward where? the west? she didn’t know – and saw the drop-off of a cliff, the valley below populated with the tiny lights of so many separate lives, lives that would never really know one another, lives distant as galaxies, separated by light years. Steve asked how she was doing. In front of her car, in the right-hand lane, was a semi, and on the left another semi came up beside her and boxed her in. She told him that she was fine, though there was too much time to be thinking, and she’d just gotten boxed in by a couple of semis so she had that to deal with. He asked what she was thinking about and she said, What I’m thinking is what are you going to say now. What are you going to say to try to convince me to not get Jack. Are you going to say that now you’re on my side and you think that I should do this, and hope, somehow, by saying that, that I’ll become reasonable and think that he shouldn’t live with us? Steve said that he wasn’t going to say anything like that, and that yes, maybe he hadn’t been fully honest with her at first, though he’d been at least partially honest. He did think, for instance, that she needed to be dealing with her sadness about April, he thought that was important, but he was wrong in using that to keep her from the idea of wanting to get Jack. If she thought Jack should live with them, then he shouldn’t stop that, and not only that, he wanted to say that he didn’t think she was being selfish, that wasn’t fair of him, and he was sorry for saying that, but she did really need to think about how their life would change, and while he had planned to say certain things about how time would change for them and how their jobs would make raising Jack difficult and that their age would make it difficult, and while he was going to say these things to sway her, to try to make her see that maybe they weren’t the right guardians for Jack, now he didn’t want to sway her, but he did want her to think about these things because these things were worth thinking about, worth considering, he said. Tammy asked him if he thought that she’d not thought about these things. He was quiet, and she continued by saying that if he didn’t think she’d thought about these things, then he must also think she was stupid. Did he think she was stupid? He mumbled a quiet no and she said that was good because while they hadn’t been together very long, she was beginning to think, based on the last few days, that he thought she was stupid, and she’d have to kick his ass out if that was the case. She explained that she didn’t like treating him like a child right now, but she sort of figured that’s what he deserved because he’d thrown everything she was doing into doubt and he had, she realized now, from the beginning, for completely selfish reasons. It made her wonder if he was only with her because he could maintain the lifestyle he wanted, he could basically be single, he could go out to bars, he could go to his job, he could hang out with his friends, and he got to come home to a roommate, sometimes a date-mate, sometimes a sex mate, someone who occasionally made dinner and did his laundry, she was beginning to wonder if everything he did wasn’t for some selfish reason. Hold on, hold on, he said, that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to take this one example and to then turn it into something bigger. He knew he was selfish, he was well aware, and sometimes he was selfish and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it, and he was sorry for both things, for when he knew it and for when he didn’t, but he wanted her to know, right now, that he was done, he wanted her to do what she thought she should do concerning Jack, and if that meant the boy living with them, then that was okay with him, no, it was more than okay, he’d support her and he’d help raise the kid to the best of his abilities, though she knew he’d never had children and never really had any intention of having children, but still, he’d do the best he could.

  Behind her, another car’s headlights appeared, so that she was nearly completely boxed in. When the semi to her left didn’t change lanes for some time, she pushed the gas and tried to make the semi in front of her change lanes faster, but it stayed steady, in the same way the semi on her left held his speed. She felt a tightness in her chest, a clenching of her shoulders. The semi in the left-hand lane, which seemed to have been ready to pass the truck in front of her, now was riding right along next to her, and she looked in her rearview and saw headlights were still only in the distance, so she slowed, let the semi to her left pass by, and then got behind him, signaled into the far left lane, and went around both, feeling herself breathing again. She had a brief image of cutting back into the center lane, but not moving ahead of the semi far enough, changing lanes without looking in her rearview, and the bac
k of her car clipping the front of the semi, sending them both into a near-fatal slide toward the guardrail, where they would both crash, the semi flipping and crushing her car. While he was talking, Tammy thought of Steve at home, Steve on the road for days at a time for UPS, how she was often alone in their apartment, how when he was home they sat together and watched television, ate in front of the television. She tried to insert Jack into this picture, like a hologram of the boy superimposed over images of their life. Trying to think of Jack with them made her aware that her own life was barely even there. She was a ghost in the house, looking for something to eat, staring in the fridge, the cupboards, wanting to be somewhere else. When Steve fell asleep early, which he often did after a long couple days on the road, or if he was gone, she sometimes drove through the nice neighborhood nearby late at night, not able to sleep. So many nights she didn’t sleep, her mind going and going, though thinking about nothing in particular: work the next day, something April said on the phone, her father’s failing health. She’d get up on those nights and drive, and she wondered, Would she take Jack with her on one of these drives if the boy couldn’t sleep in the new house? She’d drive into the neighborhoods with two-story houses, three and four bedrooms. Garages. Lawns and trees. Pools in the backyards. The houses lit by landscape lights. A second-story window with a light on. She saw herself driving slowly so she could see the people inside, who were almost always white. She sometimes saw glimpses of bodies. A man, a woman, a child. She hated them a little. For getting what they wanted. For the world giving it to them. Maybe Jack would be in her passenger seat and when he was older, she’d tell him that these people didn’t have to work for what they had, and that it was better to have nothing than to have things you didn’t deserve and hadn’t earned. What had these people done, she sometimes wondered? What weird portal opened in their existence, like an alien door presented to them by some sorcerer, that led them to easeful lives? Of course, they were also the worst consumers and materialistic people in existence, but still, they had something she had lacked, and they’d found a way to it: ease and comfort.