26
She loved the drive to Albuquerque, the texture of it. For the first few hours, it was the deep reds and blues and purples of desert buttes and mountains stretching across all horizons. Then, there were those miles when the whole world went flat before the desert finally fell away and the roll to the forest began.
Somewhere between that flat stretch and the pines, she gave up a deep sigh and sat back ready to enjoy the rhythm of the wheels and the forward movement. By Flagstaff, that place of green and white, she would be totally relaxed.
There would be snow by Flagstaff, on the ground, and the smell of it in the air. She always turned on the radio when she got close to the town and listened to the station where the drumbeat of Navajo was strangely punctuated with white man’s words. The suck-breath, push-breath Navajo would suddenly spit out “hamburger” or “Chevrolet.” Money words. Once out of town, she turned off the radio and let her mind stretch out as did the miles before her.
From Winslow to Holbrook she watched the horizon, imagining how it would feel when she first sighted a massive head and the following rise of the immense body and the city-block length of tail, one of Tommy Rodriguez’s dinosaurs.
“Every time I drive that stretch, I get the feeling that some sort of prehistoric animal is going to start coming at me from over the horizon,” he told her. “You know what I mean?”
Looking at the flat land all around her, she knew exactly what he meant.
After Holbrook and into Gallup were the advertising reminders that this was the Wild West. A few stores painted bright orange and yellow beckoned tourists to leave the freeway. One, cut into the side of a rusty butte, offered the passing cars a wooden fort and teepees.
Signs alongside the freeway promised cheap cigarettes and moccasins and the last and best of all sales from Real Indians. The signs were landmarks. Their sales had been the last and best for decades. Each one made her smile.
By Gallup, her back was stiff. She spent the ten miles before the town with her left leg pulled up on the seat. She had no need to move her feet on the pedals, only the gas. Truckers would pass and glance back to see if she was worth a few blinks of their taillights and a few static-cut CB words to fellow truckers.
Sometimes, when she would flick her highbeams to show them where she was as they moved in front of her, they would blink those taillights slowly, seductively, like the knowing wink of a big-hipped woman.
The Navajos would pass her in their white and dark blue pickups, the women tight to their men, the children at the side window and an old woman blanket-bundled in the open back.
The fast-food hamburger in Gallup was dry and tasteless, the bathroom clean. She was in and out of that straight-road town in twenty minutes. Now the anxiety began and the excitement, waiting for Grants, waiting for it and passing it.
Wasn’t it Grants where the train derailed and because of it she had to tell Ronnie McBain they couldn’t have their first dinner together?
Didn’t she do a story on some small college in Grants or was that further south? And, where was the turn-off for the mountain scratched with the graffiti of three hundred years of travelers? The conquistadors carved their words on it, followed by the settlers who added their names before heading on and, before any of them, the Indians made their drawings.
The mountain was there, somewhere between Grants and Albuquerque or perhaps it was before Grants. She could never remember.
The lava land, the choppy badlands, that was out there too. She remembered the freezing day when she and photographer Pete Romero spent twelve hours doing three stories somewhere between Grants and Albuquerque. Pete turned the film, all of it, purple when he ran the processor. Three stories, twelve hours of driving and marching over the shoe-slashing lava rocks and freezing, all purple.
“Geez, Ellen, I am so sorry. I don’t know how it happened.”
“That’s okay,” she told him. It was his film as well.
“All purple?” she had to ask.
“Well, I guess a foot or two is okay,” he said and started to laugh. She joined him, laughing together until they were almost hysterical.
Acoma was out there as well. Acoma, the sky city, the place of adobe brown walls high on the butte. She thought of it as a cold mud city offering little reason to drive up the narrow road. She found the village’s adobe church as bleak and cheerless as the handful of worshipers.
The first hill before Albuquerque always promised that the city came next. The second hill, the third, all stretched equally long and high but once atop, the lie was seen. The city was not there, only the hint of the Sandias, the watermelon mountains, before the car went down again.
The air was different now, the sky different as well. Puffs of white clouds punctuated the blue. She inhaled deeply.
Finally, at the top of that one last hill, the city appeared like a jewel framed by the mountains that had begun their late afternoon change to deep pink. At that moment, she turned on the radio, loud, and hit the city singing.
27
Kim Palmeri’s blond head poked around the partition of Ellen’s cubicle.
“I’ve got you on that new factory tomorrow, on the west side,” she told her.
Ellen looked up in frustration. Two hours until the six o’clock and she didn’t have her stories written.
“Fine.”
“You gotta be out of here by eight.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
Kim leaned close. “What’s going on with Debbie?”
Ellen looked over at Debbie who was flipping through her notebook.
“There is something wrong,” Kim decided. “I caught her crying in the ladies’ room.”
Ellen shrugged. She had been back a few days and hadn’t had a chance to talk with Debbie. She tried calling her but got no answer. And, Debbie hadn’t called her.
She watched as Kim stopped at Debbie’s cubicle, speaking softly to her. Debbie looked up with a smile. A few minutes later, Ellen watched as Harold Lewis stopped at the cubicle and gave Debbie a little pinch on her arm.
“Hey, hey, cutie,” he sang.
When he passed Ellen’s desk, he gave her a short nod.
She felt a strange twinge of anger and something else she couldn’t identify. She glanced over at Debbie who was putting paper in her typewriter.
Others in the newsroom made it a point to stop by Debbie’s cubicle or they watched her when they had the chance. Something had changed. The excitement and the joy that had been so much a part of her seemed to have disappeared overnight. They didn’t see any anger or frustration. That they could understand. They all had that. No, this was different, and they felt the danger of it.
They watched and waited. Eventually they would know what was going on. See someone else change like this and they would know why. Oh, yeah, everything was worth knowing.
Ellen saw them bending over Debbie, talking to her in the hall. She heard the concern in their voices, the joshing they did to make Debbie laugh. She found it increasingly annoying.
Both she and Debbie were in early the next morning.
“Did you have a good time in Albuquerque?” Debbie asked.
“Yeah, did. And your Christmas?”
“Oh, it was okay. I had to work,” Debbie said as she sat down at her desk. She pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“I tried calling you, Debbie,” Ellen told her.
“I’ve been going to bed early.”
And apparently, Ellen thought, annoyed again, that was all she was going to say.
“I’ve got the house guest from hell,” Sandi from Accounting interrupted her thoughts. “You wouldn’t believe this woman.”
“How so?”
“She came with my mother. They’re staying a week and she is crazy. She’s on this special diet, has to eat six times a day. Drives me nuts. There’s nothing wrong with her, not really,” she explained. “I just hate it, that’s all.”
Ellen looked over at Debbie. She was reading an a
ssignment sheet.
“She goes crazy if I even suggest a restaurant or going out for a drink. She does it in public too,” Sandi was saying. “It’s embarrassing. Everything has to stop for her.”
“Oh,” said Ellen as though she had just made a discovery. “It’s all about attention. She wants attention.” She looked over again. Debbie was still reading.
“Well, yes, I suppose so,” decided Sandi. “The worst thing is this panic she goes into for no reason. She screams, actually screams. I almost drove off the road.”
“I once gave a neighbor a ride to pick up her car,” Ellen told her. “One of her kids in the backseat starts screaming at the top of his lungs for no reason and she does nothing. I stopped the car and turned around and said, ‘Don’t you dare scream when I’m driving.’” She gave a loud imitation of the voice she used on the boy.
“Sure, with a child,” Sandi agreed.
“No, you can do it with adults too,” Ellen stated.
“Maybe you can. I feel terrible even talking about her. She isn’t so awful, not really.”
With a hooded glance at Debbie, Ellen got to her feet.
“Sometimes,” she said in a stage whisper, “Truth can be a great kindness.”
In the van, waiting for Steve, she put her head in her hands. Why had she done that? Why? What was she thinking? Debbie would know she was talking about her. Of course she would.
She hit at her chin with a closed fist. What possessed her? Debbie had only sat down, pushed that blond hair behind her ear. And this is how she reacts?
That vision of the blond hair and the creamy skin and the pretty profile was vividly clear. My God, was she jealous of her? Was that it? She had never been jealous of anyone in her life. She shook the thought off. No, it couldn’t be.
Besides—she took a deep breath—Debbie probably didn’t hear a thing and, if she did, she wouldn’t know she’d been talking about her looking for attention. No.
Still, she told herself, she had to fix this. She had to do something nice because what she had done in there made her feel lousy and stupid.
28
After a week, Ellen decided to break through Debbie’s silence, pounding on her door one night while holding a half-gallon jug of white wine and balancing a pizza. The decision to move into the situation made her remember one of the newsroom stories in Albuquerque.
Dale told her how one Christmas they heard about some poor artist starving up in the mountains, a guy who used to be famous. Now he was old, broke and forgotten. A few of the people in the newsroom chipped in for groceries and a Christmas tree and drove to his house, all ready to sing carols and tear up over the good feelings of the night.
The adobe hut in the mountains turned out to be an expensive ranch house. The housekeeper, surprised at their Christmas Eve visit, told them the artist was spending the holidays at his home in Aspen. They backed away, smiling and waving, and jumped into the cars, hoping they hadn’t been recognized. They deposited the bags and the tree in front of the first shabby house they saw. She wondered if her trip to Debbie’s would be equally misguided.
“It’s me. Let me in. I’m dying out here,” she shouted at Debbie’s door-filtered questions. “Hurry up, Debbie.”
“Thought you might want to get drunk and get fat,” she said once the door opened, and she pushed past Debbie. “I brought everything we’ll need.”
“Where are the plates?” she asked, heading for the kitchen, ignoring Debbie’s “But, I already ate.”
“So, your vacation was good?” Debbie asked after Ellen poured the wine and grabbed a slice of pizza.
“It was,” Ellen said between bites. “I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while. It snowed, a couple of parties. It was a good time. It usually is up there.”
She knew exactly how to do it. You keep the patter bright and happy, filling every second with talk, dumb, quick talk. You did it before a tough interview, one where you were going to have to hang the guy out to dry or when the man was angry or nervous or impatient. You smiled and laughed and chattered on and on, keeping his mind off the photographer setting up the camera and the lights, running the cords, pinning on the microphones.
“And how about you?” she asked. “Christmas can be a bitch. The whole holiday season, if you’re working. I know.”
Debbie didn’t respond.
“Still, the weather is fantastic, isn’t it? I mean, this is why we are all here, right?”
“I guess so.”
“The first year I was here we had three floods, January through March. What a way to start a job. You started in March, didn’t you? April? Almost a year. It went fast.” She paused for a sip of wine.
You keep it going, the idiot babble, fast, happy, and meaningless, until the photographer nodded and you started the interview.
“Debbie, what’s the matter? You seem so quiet.”
“I’m tired, that’s all.”
Okay, she would wait. You always waited that extra second, that uncomfortable second of silence that cried out to be filled with a sound, a word. Inevitably, the person being interviewed filled that silence, usually by saying something they shouldn’t.
“I mean, I don’t know. I feel bad,” Debbie ended the discomfort.
Ellen paused again, as though in thought.
“What’s bothering you?” she asked softly.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the weather.”
“The weather is perfect.”
“Yes,” Debbie agreed without meeting her eyes.
“Don’t worry. It will probably rain in February and we’ll be flooded out and we’ll be working twenty-four-hour shifts and Brown will have us all sleeping on cots in the newsroom. He thinks he’s in Viet Nam or something, not that he ever was, God knows. You won’t be hoping for rain after that. Can you imagine seeing Brown sleeping next to you on a cot?” She pushed for a smile, a relaxation of the tension.
The small smile came but ended when Debbie lifted her shoulders like a child who knew she was going to stay unhappy, no matter what treats and promises were offered.
Ellen went back to the banter.
“God, I thought the second flood had come. Brown kept staring out the windows, praying it would keep raining. I kept praying somebody would let me go home. Where’d you get that?” She nodded toward the enormous hutch filling one wall of the dining area.
“It was my great-grandmother’s,” Debbie said. “I couldn’t leave it.”
Ellen could imagine somebody hauling that damn thing across the plains and the Rockies in a covered wagon. She had seen the paintings of the household goods tossed along the wagon trails.
“Can you imagine bringing that thing across the country in a wagon?”
“I think it came by boat. I think that’s what Dad said, or train.”
Ellen nodded. They were talking now. One slight push, a nudge, and they would move wherever she wanted them to go.
“Where did they bring this thing from, originally?”
“I know what you were doing,” Debbie cut in angrily. “I know what you were doing.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“When you were talking to Sandi.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you were talking about me.” Debbie was looking at her now, her eyes wide and questioning.
“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ellen lied.
“Yes you do,” Debbie nodded. “You were talking about me, weren’t you? You were saying that I wanted attention. You really think that?”
“Debbie, we were talking about an obnoxious house guest,” Ellen tried half-heartedly. She knew she wasn’t going to win this one.
“You meant me,” Debbie insisted. “I’m not dumb, you know. You may think I am, but I’m not.”
“No, I don’t think you’re dumb,” Ellen protested.
“And you meant it. Didn’t you? About the attention?”
“Maybe for a minute, but I can b
e so wrong about things. It was a bitchy thing to say and I am sorry for it. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Okay,” Debbie nodded, the anger gone. “That’s okay.”
Good, thought Ellen, that was done.
“You were wrong about that other thing too,” Debbie said then.
“What other thing?”
“That truth can be a kindness. That’s not true,” Debbie said, pushing the slice of pizza around her plate with her finger.
Ellen shook her head. “You’re the one who feels so strongly about the truth,” she said, reminding her of that first-day remark, the one she found so naïve.
“Maybe not anymore.”
They both sat with the thought.
“Look,” Debbie finally said, “I need to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” Ellen assured her, willing to do anything to make up for the past few minutes.
“No,” Debbie said, leaned over and touched at Ellen’s hand. “This is important. You have to promise me you will never tell anyone else.”
“I won’t say anything, Debbie.” Ellen smiled reassuringly. How bad could this really be?
“Because I don’t want anyone to know ever,” Debbie said in a worried voice.
“And who would I tell?”
“No one!” Debbie shouted it out. “You can’t tell anyone!”
“Debbie, it’s okay. I won’t say anything to anyone.” She put both hands up. “You have my word.”
She waited.
“How do you feel about abortions?” Debbie asked, looking away.
“You know,” Ellen chose her words carefully, “like it is not my business to tell another woman what to do with her body.”
“I had one,” Debbie said. Her voice was so low Ellen had to lean toward her.
“What?”
“After Christmas. I had an abortion.”
Ellen shook her head slowly. Time, she needed time.
“It wasn’t bad,” Debbie continued. “I thought it might be bad, painful, but it wasn’t bad. It only took a few hours. I was only worried that somebody would find out. And poor Clifford.” Her face softened with the name. “He was scared to death. He was sure I was going to die.”
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