“No refrigeration,” Allie said, answering for Bea, who was lost in thought.
“What do you eat?”
“Sometimes we eat out,” Allie said. “Sometimes we buy stuff at the supermarket that doesn’t need refrigeration.”
“Short trip?” the wife asked.
“Not very,” Allie said.
“We can throw some extra food on the barbecue,” the husband called back. “You’re more than welcome.”
Bea felt her eyes go wide. “That’s awfully generous.”
She could feel two different emotions, two urges warring inside her: the part of her that wanted to keep to herself and build an invisible wall between her van and its neighbors, and the part of her that wanted barbecued chicken and sausage.
“My grandmother might like that,” Allie said, moving a step closer. “I’m a vegan. I doubt there would be anything I could eat. But thanks.”
“We have corn on the cob and salad and garlic bread,” the wife said.
“We’ll be right over,” Allie replied.
“This is absolutely delicious,” Bea said. “And we really appreciate the generosity.”
“I’ll say,” Allie added, talking around a mouthful of roasted corn.
They sat at a picnic table with their hosts, watching the top of the sun touch the blue horizon and disappear. Turned out the bright orange of the sunset had only been warming up for its evening show.
The couple was tanned, Bea couldn’t help noticing. Almost ridiculously tanned, as though they had nothing better to do than bask in the sun all day long. As though there were no such thing as skin cancer.
Three kids rode their bikes through the campground, ringing the bells on their handlebars and shrieking with laughter. Bea tried not to find it irritating.
She remembered suddenly that she was supposed to be communicating with the people they met on their trip. Not that she had exactly agreed to that challenge. But these people were feeding them a hot dinner. It seemed only right.
“Where do you folks live?” she asked. Just to dip her toe in that figurative human water.
Both the husband and wife pointed in the same direction.
“South of here?” Bea asked, not sure she understood.
“No, right there,” the wife said. “Our rig.”
“Oh, you live in that motor home.”
It made Bea feel a little better. A little more kindly disposed toward them. They didn’t have everything in the world that Bea didn’t. They didn’t have that huge RV and a big, fancy house. They had only what Bea saw in front of her. They lived on the road. Bea could relate to that.
“If you don’t mind my asking . . . ,” Bea began. Then she stalled. Who was she to ask them personal questions?
“We probably don’t mind,” the husband said.
“Was that a choice? Or out of necessity?”
“I guess everything is a choice at one level or another,” the wife said. Then she looked up and around at the faces at the table. And seemed to note that more words would be needed to get her point across. “Andy’s mother was sick. She was in her nineties, and she had Alzheimer’s. We sold the house to live with her for her last few years. She didn’t own a house. She lived in an apartment in Seattle. We hung on to the money from our home, but it wasn’t enough to buy again. We’d had a mortgage to pay off. We didn’t have a ton of equity.”
“We could have bought another house,” Andy added. Bea couldn’t tell if he was every bit as anxious as his wife to share personal details, or if he was a little defensive regarding the picture she’d painted. “Potentially. But it would have put us in so much debt. This rig we could buy free and clear, and that way we could afford to retire. I get a little pension.”
Bea realized she had stopped chewing to listen to their story, which came as a surprise, because the food was too good to stop eating.
“Debt is the worst,” Bea said. “Debt is a terrible, terrible thing. Somehow they’ve got us all primed to accept it. They’ve taught us it’s part of the American dream or some such nonsense. But it keeps you in chains. The deeper in you get, the more money they make off your misfortune, and the deeper in you get. It’s a big, vicious cycle where you give some faceless bank too much power over your life. And they don’t care about you one bit. Don’t for a moment think they do, because they don’t. It was always so stressful for me. Like a sword hanging over my head. Like being chased by wolves all your life, and you can’t stop running. No matter how tired you get, you have to stay ahead of them at all costs.”
A long silence fell.
“So you’re out of debt now?” the wife asked.
“I am. Completely.” She could have added, “Because I lost my home and I live in my van now.” She could also have added that she literally walked out on her debts. Left them unpaid. She didn’t.
Change was one thing, but there was no point in letting it get out of hand.
“You did it!” Allie said after they had thanked their hosts profusely and let themselves back into the van in the dark.
The girl sounded inordinately excited, which seemed to argue painfully with Bea’s fullness and sleepiness.
“What did I do?”
“You told them something about yourself. Something real. And, like . . . personal.”
“How do you figure?”
Bea could remember only that she’d spied a perfect opportunity to admit her homelessness and firmly, consciously let it go by. Even though she was really no more homeless than they were. Just living on the road in considerably less luxury.
“You told them how awful it was for you to be in debt.”
“Oh. That. Yes, I guess I did, didn’t I?”
“I was so surprised! I thought you were going to sit back and watch me do it and see how it went for me.”
“Yes,” Bea said. “I guess I thought so, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
You’ll Be in Heaven, and There Will Be Jellyfish
Bea let a snort of air pass through her lips to vent her frustration.
They drove—if this inching along and stopping experience could be called driving in any proper sense of the word—through San Francisco, accidentally on the 101.
Allie had the map open in her lap. She’d said they’d have to go over the Golden Gate Bridge and several miles beyond before they’d get the chance to peel off onto Route 1 again and make their way west to the coast. She had promised Bea that after they did, their drive would turn remote again.
“This never ends,” Bea said.
“It ends,” Allie said, sounding more like the grown-up in the conversation.
“Well, it doesn’t feel like it does. As far as I can see, there’s nothing but these little short blocks. With a traffic light at every intersection. And the traffic keeps backing up and making us miss the lights. We haven’t hit one green light since we came into the city. It’s taken us longer to get this far down this route—except it’s actually more of a city street—than it did to get up here from Santa Cruz.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Bea. It ends. I’m looking at the map. I wish you were looking at it. After we get over the bridge and get back on Route 1, there’s nothing. For miles and miles the coast is national recreation areas and state parks and national seashores. There’s not much up there.”
“Damn!” Bea spat as she missed another stoplight. Then, turning her attention to Allie, “That sounds good. Let me see that, please. It’ll sustain me through this.”
Allie handed her the map, and Bea pulled her reading glasses out of her shirt pocket and put them on. At first she couldn’t even pin down where on the map she should be looking. Allie pointed, and Bea felt deeply soothed by the green shading of undeveloped coast just north of the city. Preserved land.
The feeling was forced out of her by a rudely honking horn. The light had changed.
Bea handed the map back and stomped on the gas pedal.
“I’ve begun to hate everything man-made,”
Bea said as she inched along.
“The van is man-made.”
“I mean placewise. I like places where you can’t even see that people have been there. I think that’s a new thing about me. I always lived where there were freeways and stoplights and buildings. But I don’t think I want to anymore.”
The girl didn’t answer.
“What about you?” Bea asked.
“I like going where there’s nothing but cliffs over the ocean. But I think maybe when we’re done seeing all that I could go back and live in a city again.”
“It might be an age thing. I think we get to a certain age where enough of people and their ugly trappings is enough.”
“What town is this?” Bea asked.
In the absence of knowing, Bea knew she liked it. Because it was small and quaint. Unobjectionable. And not a stoplight in the place.
“I don’t know,” Allie said. “I missed the sign.”
“But you’re the navigator. You have the map.”
“Oh. Right.”
The girl peered at the map for a moment or two.
“Might be Tomales.”
“Well, I like it. Wherever it is. And I’m going to pull over and stop. Because I’m tired.” Bea parked the van in one of the perpendicular spaces in front of a bakery café. “Think anyone will care if we’re here all night?”
“No idea.”
Bea turned off the engine. They sat listening to the metal tick as it cooled.
“Only trouble,” Allie said, “is that if we only drive four or five or six hours a day, then here we are parked in a place and it’s only afternoon. So what do we do?”
“I have no idea. I just know I’m not good for any more driving today. It’s such hard driving. It was so twisty, especially that section just above the city. It makes my back and neck and shoulders ache.”
“I wasn’t blaming you for stopping. I’m just not sure what to do.”
“That seems to be the worst part of this whole living-in-my-van experience. These long stretches of time to fill.” A long silence. Neither one made a move to take off their seat belts or move out of the cab of the van. “It was worse before you came along, though.”
Bea thought the girl might have a response to that, but apparently not.
“What I wonder now,” Bea said, “looking back, is what I did all day in the trailer. I didn’t have a job. Or much in the way of hobbies, come to think. I guess I read and watched TV. And the day went by. Probably if you’d asked me where it went I wouldn’t have known what to say. Now I look back and all I can wonder is . . .”
But then she wasn’t the least bit sure she wanted to finish the thought.
She looked over at Allie, who was clearly waiting.
“I guess I wonder why I didn’t try to do more,” Bea said, essentially the same way you pet a bat ray. “I had all these hours that added up to all these days, and I look back and it seems my goal was mostly to make them go away. But that’s not a proper life. That’s not really living. Why didn’t I take up oil painting, or learn to play the flute or something?”
Allie waited, as if to see if Bea wanted to say more.
When she didn’t, Allie said, “No idea. But we’re living now.”
“How very true,” Bea said.
“I’m bored,” Allie said, sitting up suddenly on her inflated bed. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“A walk?”
“Yeah. A walk. You know. It’s one of those things people do when they’re living.”
“I’m an older woman, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“So? Older people walk.”
“This older person doesn’t.”
“Fine. Sit here in your recliner and read. I’m going out into the air.”
The girl began to put her shoes back on. It made Bea feel restless. Truthfully, she wanted a change of scene, too. The inside of the van grew tiresome quickly these days.
Bea looked out the window for the fourth or fifth time at a restaurant and tavern on the next block. A thought broke through and became suddenly conscious.
“While you go for your walk I’m going to go to that tavern and have a drink.”
Allie stopped tying her shoes and stared up into Bea’s face. As if Bea had just said she was going to pick up men on a street corner. But the girl said nothing.
“What?” Bea asked, to challenge the look.
“I just didn’t have you pegged as a drinker.”
“I’m not. Hardly. I might have a beer maybe two or three times a year. I just decided this is one of those times.”
Bea settled her tired bones at the bar and ordered that nice imported beer that came in the green bottles. The kind she and Herbert used to drink on Super Bowl Sunday. Bea had always hated football, but she had enjoyed its related rituals of good beer and mountains of empty-calorie snacks. That kind of indulgence had made her feel briefly content.
There was a restaurant on one side of the room, but it was neither lunch- nor dinnertime, and no one was eating. There was only one other woman in the place, a young curly-haired woman probably in her thirties playing darts with two older men. Three more men sat at the other end of the bar. Fortyish, all bearded. They had friendly faces that made Bea wish she was sitting with them.
She stared a moment too long, and one of them raised his mug to her, as if in a toast. Bea’s face flushed, and her eyes darted back down to her beer bottle.
“Traveler?” he asked across the empty expanse of bar.
She nodded.
“Welcome to our little paradise,” one of the other men said. He was wearing a panama straw hat over a thick and bushy head of hair.
“It is nice here,” she said. “The only thing that would make it better is if you could see the ocean.”
“Less than five miles that way,” hat man said. “Well, you know which way. It would be west, wouldn’t it?” He smiled at his own foolishness, and it made his cheeks dimple. “That’s probably where you’re staying tonight. Am I right?”
Bea felt her face flush again. She didn’t want to tell them that she planned to park on the street to save the camping fee.
“How do you even know I’m stopping here? I could be driving on.”
“We hope you’re stopping,” the third man said. “The coast route being what it is. We always like it best when people do their drinking at the end of the drive. Not so much in the middle.”
“I won’t be driving on,” Bea said, taking the first long pull of beer.
She could feel it go down, quenching her thirst, loosening her muscles, and soothing the inside of her gut. That was probably more than a first swallow of beer can do in reality, but that was how it felt to Bea.
“Car or RV?” hat man asked.
“More like an RV. Little one.”
“Okay. Then you’re in luck. You go west at this corner,” he said, pointing. “Road goes four, five miles and then at the end of it is the water, and a really big RV park. You can’t miss it. Acres and acres. It’s on a point of land right at the end of Tomales Bay. So you have open ocean to your right and still-water bay to your left. You can camp on the flat grass with just a walk over the dunes to the ocean, or you can go down to the seawall, which is on the bay. I’d go to the sea wall. You can put the nose or the tail of your rig right up to the wall, and if the tide is high I guarantee it’ll be the closest you’ve ever camped to water. Some people think it’s a little funky, that place. But if you’re not a snob about such things, you’ll be in heaven.”
“I’m not a snob,” Bea said, and took another long drink. The taste of the beer made her remember Herbert, this time in a positive light. “But I won’t be camping there.”
No one said a word. The bartender was washing and drying glasses, and the occasional light clink provided the only sound. Bea stole a glance at the men, who did not look back. The disappointment in the room felt palpable.
It’s just human communication. Wasn’t that what the girl had said? And how can people
use it against you? They can’t. And I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of it.
Or, at least, irritatingly precocious words to that effect.
“It sounds wonderful,” Bea said. “But the truth is, I’m on a tight budget. I was just going to park here in town. You know. To save the camping fee.”
Bea was careful to stare down at her beer bottle as she spoke. When she was done the silence reigned again. Bea did not dare look up to see how her admission had been received. She saw one of the men get up from his barstool, but she didn’t look over. She could hear someone moving about the room, but did not turn her head to investigate.
For a moment Bea felt the urge to leave her half-drunk beer and run out the door. Her muscles disagreed, or never received the signal. Bea only sat.
A moment later hat man was standing at her left shoulder, but with his hat off. It was in his hand, upside down, extended in Bea’s direction. Bea looked at his head and saw that all that bushy hair grew on the sides of his head only. He was bald as a bowling ball on top.
She looked into the hat to see a collection of bills. Several fives and one ten.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“We took up a collection for you. We want you to stay in heaven tonight.”
“I can’t accept that.”
“Why can’t you? It’s from all of us. It’s a gift. We want you to go down to that point between the bay and the ocean. You’ll like it. Trust us.”
Bea stared at the money for a long beat or two, saying nothing. A moment later the bartender moved close and set another green bottle of imported beer in the hat.
“It’s a narrow road, and a bit twisty,” he said. “So go down there first and then pop that second one.”
It felt impossible for Bea to say no now. Not even because of her pride. More because she’d begun to anticipate the heaven of the described experience.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 21