It’s not that I didn’t think of our races when we first got together. Or haven’t thought of our races since. Of course I did and have. At first they were ghostly thoughts. Really, he wants me? How could this be? Why not her or her or her? Or is it because I’m—so ghostly was that thought it could not be completed. Those weren’t our problems. He wasn’t like that. We fell in love like young people do for the first time—fast, reckless, absolutely, and hard. But unlike most, we remained in love. In college, I made a list of all the couples we knew who believed they would stay together. I crossed each one off after they broke up. We are the last ones left.
When we talked about race, we did so mostly from a distance or as a joke, like something that could not touch the depths of this combined entity that was “us.” But I know we do not and cannot exist outside of it. I know I am guilty of avoiding, or not completing, the conversations. That might still be our problem.
From an OkCupid FAQ:
Q: Are you saying that because I prefer to date [whatever race], I’m a racist?
On an individual level, a person can’t really control who turns them on—and almost everyone has a “type,” one way or another. But I do think the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—says something about race’s role in our society. . . .
. . . you can actually look at people who’ve combined “white” with another racial description. Adding “whiteness” always helps your rating!
My sister once dated a ginger. A real serious ginger, bright orange hair and skin a landscape of freckles. J’s mom saw her and her boyfriend walking downtown together in our hometown when they’d come back for a winter break. After spotting them, she called J and said, “Those girls love gingers!” When he told me this, I responded, “You’re not a ginger, are you? You’re just very pale.”
There is a long line of cars attempting to enter Yellowstone. We sit in ours from way behind, confused, craning our necks to see what’s taking so long, until finally, we spot them: the bison. Giant creatures walk along and across the road, at least seven of them, slow and plodding. Wild and closer than the ones we’d seen tucked away in Golden Gate Park. We approach with caution. One gets so close on J’s side, he could open the window, stretch himself out to touch the beast.
“They’re huge,” he says. “Huge and scary and gross and magical.”
“Don’t touch. Keep the window closed,” I say.
Their fur is matted and dreadlocked, falling off in patches. They are unkempt and free.
We are in front of bubbling yellow ponds. It smells of sulfur all around us.
“We’re in the land before time,” he says. “Let me get a photo of you. Pretend like you’re falling in.” I do and he laughs.
“You know that’s the title of those cartoon dinosaur movies.”
“Then we’re in a cartoon dinosaur movie. Look at how cute you are in this picture. I think it’s my favorite picture of you ever.”
“No! I look gross. I haven’t showered in four days!”
“Even better,” he says. He leans in and takes a huge, disturbing sniff of my dirty hair. “I love the way you smell.”
Yes, waiting can be rewarding, sometimes. I forget. Old Faithful is one example, even with the huge crowds encircling the geyser’s hole and the sun bearing down on us. (J burns immediately.)
“Any minute now,” says a father to his daughter.
“But you’ve been saying that forever!” she cries.
She’s not wrong. Compared to a grown man who has spent many more minutes alive, ten minutes would feel like much longer—possibly even like forever—to a small child.
Wow, wow, wow, everyone says together when the geyser blows and a thousand photos are taken.
Wall Drug, we see the signs for miles. As the billboards increase in number, and the distance in miles on them drops, our excitement grows.
REFRESHING! FREE ICE WATER and HAVE YOU DUG WALL DRUG and THE EXPERIENCE . . . PRICELESS, they announce.
“We have to go,” I say, and J agrees.
We are suckers for the ads, our anticipation built up so high that when we park alongside the long, low building with its awning of brown shingles and bright yellow wind flaps, it looks like a castle of mystery and intrigue. I hate ice water. And yet I want ice water.
The place is packed with Western kitsch and tourists speaking different languages—Japanese, German, Mandarin, French are the ones I recognize. The halls are lined with photos of Wall Drug devotees and their signs, staked across the globe, painted with the number of miles from wherever they stand to this destination.
J orders a vanilla soft serve and it melts down his hand. He licks at the escaping droplets. He puts a cowboy hat on my head. “Perfect,” he says. He tries one on himself, but it doesn’t fit. Almost no hats fit him, his skull too long from frontal bone to back, so they look like they float slightly above him. He tries on more hats. His freaky skull provides ample entertainment. In the backyard we climb a gigantic dinosaur play structure and take a photo with a plastic Mount Rushmore replica. It looks so real that we do not regret having skipped the faces carved into the Black Hills. How could it be more fun than what we just had?
Nothing but fields for miles. Over the car speaker someone says Because Americans worship technology. It’s an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist. I take twenty photos of him looking out at the middle of the country. Then close-ups of his face, of the hair growing down his neck, of his thick forearms, of his hands on the wheel, of his skinny calves leading to feet against the gas pedal.
“Why?” he asks. “Is it for that thing you’re making?”
“Yes,” I say, even though at first it was not.
Bugs smash into the window and grill and the RocketBox on the roof—the whole face of the car is deeply freckled in yellows, blacks, greens, and grays. At a gas station I try to squeegee the splattered bug bodies away, but many won’t budge, glued on by the sun’s heat.
“Looks like you’ve been traveling a long way, little lady,” says a deep voice.
I see the man at the pump next to me. He is thick and tall and ruddy.
“Yeah, ha ha ha ha.”
“Looks like you need a hand with that.” He takes a step toward me.
“Ha ha, no, I’m okay! Ha ha.” I grip the squeegee handle. Would this work as a weapon?
“Little lady, I—”
J walks up with two Snickers bars and a gigantic bottle of water.
“What’re you laughing about?”
The man retreats and waves at J. “Nice car you’ve got!”
“Okay,” says J. I get into the car. J stands outside watching the man pull out of the gas station, then he gets back inside.
“That guy was weird. What’d he say that was so funny?” J asks.
“Nothing was funny.”
Why do I laugh, then? Out of discomfort. Better yet, defense. I add it to my short list of survival skills. If you make people believe you’re strong and comfortable enough to laugh in the face of danger, maybe then they won’t eat you alive.
Here we are on a tiny dirt road that Google Maps insists leads to a campground. There is nothing in sight and it is growing dark.
“Might as well see where this takes us,” J says. “An adventure!”
We make more turns down little roads. No cars pass. We see no sign of human life. Along the edges of the pastures are wooden fences, primitive and spare. Any animal could squeeze through, though there is, also, no evidence of animal life.
I start to sweat and my stomach grumbles. I worry something will jump into the path and we’ll hit it, or the path will end in a ditch, or we’ll get lost and not find our way back out. I feel like I’m in a horror movie. I don’t want to get stuck out here.
J says not to worry. He is not worried. Right then the Google Maps app dings and tells us we have reached our destination.
“Where? There? That?”
Beyond is a metal gat
e blocking off more pasture, which rises up into a hill. At the bottom of the hill are two pickup trucks, one tent, and a gray porta-potty. It is not a campground, as far as I understand campgrounds. It is nothing recognizable.
“I guess we could pitch a tent here?”
“There?”
“Okay, I’ll check it out first.”
J puts the car in park and gets out. I lock the doors and watch him walk the hundred or so feet to the gate, behind which the trucks are parked. I look at my phone. No signal. How will I reach anyone if something happens to him or to me? Strangers. The wild. The type of strangers in the wild. I look in the glove box for something blunt. A metal flashlight. Knocking on the window. A jolt. J’s face. I unlock the doors, then relock them once he’s inside.
“You’re so paranoid,” he says, back in the driver’s seat. “It’s fine, but definitely a hunting site. It could be fun?”
“Nope, not going to work,” I say.
He turns the car around, not without disappointment, and we go to the unadventurous, cookie-cutter KOA we’d previously passed, where there are lots of other people and other cars, and where I relieve myself into a toilet inside a solid concrete structure.
I wake up from a nightmare in some tiny town, South Dakota. I want to call my mother. But it is too late, or too early. So early it is dark, and she is this wide country away from me. This is the most humid night in memory. Mine, at least. Mosquitoes hit their bodies against the tent’s mesh window, waiting for breakfast to venture outside. I think about the trip my mom and I took to Yosemite two years ago, just the two of us, a mother-daughter trip. But why did we go to Yosemite? We wanted the natural elements, but we were so out of our own. The whiteness around us put me on edge, as it does now.
I shake J awake.
“It’s so hot,” I complain.
“Maybe don’t use that below-freezing sleeping bag, then.”
He doesn’t understand that I need the weight of the sleeping bag to protect me from overexposure in these unfamiliar places. Like a dog that needs her tight anxiety jacket when she’s around perceived danger.
Some people have hardly suffered in life. Like him, who sleeps so soundly. He’s experienced so little external pain. That should be a good thing for a loved one. But then why am I lying here in the dark resenting him for it? Stop with these bad thoughts, I tell myself. Or think of nothing. Or just don’t think.
Everybody drives slower in Minnesota. Windmills sprout from all the land. Do the two have anything to do with each other? Anything is possible, but not all is probable, a fortune cookie once told me.
I fall asleep again. This time, when I wake up, the car is pulled over and I can see the red-and-blue whirl of lights in the rearview mirror.
“What—” I begin.
“I was speeding.”
The officer comes up to the driver’s side window. I gape at him, then wipe the sleep spit from the corner of my mouth. J says, yes, around eighty, we are on a road trip, moving across the country, New York, California, yes.
“Thanks, motherfucker,” says J as he rolls the window back up.
“Don’t! He might hear you and get mad.”
“Whatever. I don’t care.”
The ticket is for thirty-five dollars—and no points on J’s license. Mail in a check by this date. The cop says to have a nice day and drive safe.
“Very sorry, sir!” I say. We watch him drive off ahead of us.
“I fucking hate cops,” says J.
“I mean, fine. But you were speeding. And you were being very antagonistic for no reason. And look at how lucky you are.”
“Well, if you were awake maybe I wouldn’t have sped. Don’t fall asleep anymore when I’m driving. It defeats the whole purpose of this trip.”
“Well, I’m wide awake now with both eyes on the speedometer.”
J glowers at me, then starts driving. The adrenaline from the encounter wears off. I pinch my forearm to keep my eyes open. Still, all I see outside are bland fields.
“I don’t care if the dead find me,” he says without feeling.
“When we listen to music instead of this book, I stay awake better.”
“No. It’s almost done anyway.”
In Madison we eat fried cheese curds for the first time. Squeak, squeak they go against our teeth.
A white busker on the street yells to J: “Mister, you’ve got a beautiful wife!”
J replies, “Thank you!” and squeezes me close.
“Do you want dessert? Let’s go all out,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
“The pot de crème,” I tell the waitress.
“What?”
“The pot de crème,” I repeat.
“Oh, you mean, the pot de crème,” she says, and walks away.
“Wow,” I say. “Cool, cool, cool.”
“She definitely understood you the first time. What a snob.”
When she returns, J says, “Thank you for the pot de crème,” in an even worse accent than mine. She smirks. We stifle our laughter.
Day seven and we are making very good time. I’ve gotten to know this car like I would a person. All its strengths, flaws, and quirks. Some people might not understand its appeal, given its size and shape (big, boxy) but it is, in fact, incredibly practical. It is sturdy, reliable, strong, and it takes us from place to place. The car, I have decided, is very much like J. Minus the big and boxy frame; he is more lithe and triangular.
I get an email from Tim.
Subject line: Shit’s hitting the fan here.
Body text: Corey got fired.
I send Corey a text: Are you okay? I just heard.
He doesn’t respond.
There are cows and clouds outside, looks like blue skies for days.
J is afraid about one thing during the trip: that his bikes will be stolen. It’s not totally unfounded. He’s had several of his bikes stolen, because they are worth a lot, worth stealing. Each time we go for a ride in a new place, there is a long process of unlocking and relocking the bikes to and from the car rack. It is a mysterious, intricate process, with many locks, like taking apart and putting together a brainteaser puzzle. I am not to help, because I would not be a help, so instead, I busy my hands with my phone.
Jasmine now:
“So guess the fuck what. There’s this new unofficial minority group at work. They get drinks and commiserate about how hard it is to not be a white guy in the office. And they don’t even ask me to go with them and I’m, like, one of two women of color left here. And get this. Steve is in the group. There’s a fucking white guy in the fucking minority group.”
I am in Illinois. I don’t want to care. I am far away from the office, and yet, as Jasmine speaks, I can see it. I can see these people huddling together, whispering, socializing. Leaving Jasmine out, because she’s too much for them.
“Why Steve?”
“Didn’t you see he came out as bi on Facebook recently?”
“No. So you’re not still seeing him?”
“Fuck dating white guys.”
“You’ve said that before,” I say.
“This time I mean it. I seriously fucking mean it.”
And this time, for the first time, I look over at J and wonder.
After I hang up, he asks, “So, how’s Jasmine?”
“Good, good.”
“No work drama?” He raises his eyebrows and looks over at me.
“Eyes on the road, buddy,” I say. “And, sure, there’s always work drama. You really want to hear it?”
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t.”
“Okay, then don’t ask.”
“Somebody is being moody.”
“Yes. That somebody is me.”
Why is it bothering you now? One, you have the time. Two, traveling into unknown parts of the country is giving you raw skin and fresh eyes. Like a newborn with sensory overload, but what you’re overloading on is this sense of race, the colors that stand out against an increa
singly white background. And all you can feel and see is this difference, wary and on edge of what could happen wherever you go. And here beside you is somebody who does not understand.
In kindergarten. The boy who sits across from you, in a fury over your taking a crayon he wanted from the shared crayon bin, says, Your nose is flat and ugly. You’re stunned into silence. How have you never noticed this about your nose? It is the first time you see yourself in the eyes of this person, and from then on you are constantly aware of how you might appear in those eyes. Your mom advised: You tell him his nose is big and pointy and ugly.
But you didn’t. His nose was not, and you were too scared and wounded to retaliate.
Seventh grade history class. Mr. Hannah is teaching Chinese culture from a textbook. He looks only in your direction. You try to look away, but have a habit of holding eye contact with people who look at you. He has a reputation among the students for being creepy, though students say this of many male teachers. Which does not make it any less true, only less of a distinguishing quality.
He decides, midlesson, to improvise. “Tell us about the language,” he says to you.
What about the language? You’ve forgotten so much in the year back.
Him: “How about the words that mean different things but all sound the same?”
You think for a while. “Like, māo and máo? One means ‘cat’ and the other means ‘hair’?”
He goes: “Ha ha ha ha ha! I can’t tell the difference. They both sound the same.”
The class responds: “Ha ha ha ha ha!”
He says: “You know, Chinese people name their children by throwing pots and pans down the stairs. Ching bong bing chong ding dong.”
He goes: “Ha ha ha ha ha!”
The class goes: “Ha ha ha ha ha!”
You go red.
Him: “Isn’t that true? What’s your Chinese name?”
You say you don’t have one.
Him: “Wow, that’s too bad. It’s sad when we lose touch with our heritage.”
Days of Distraction Page 11