The Leisure Seeker

by Michael Zadoorian

  A semitruck roars past us. In a moment, it’s silent again, except for the wind. “I haven’t seen one of those places in years,” I say. “Do you remember Stuckey’s, John?”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, in a tone that almost makes me believe him.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go. We need gas anyway.”

  Nodding, John pulls up to the pumps. No sooner do I get out of the van than a man, neatly dressed in a beige sport shirt and copper-colored slacks, approaches us.

  “We don’t have gas anymore, but there’s a BP up the road,” he says, his voice raspy, but not unpleasant. He tips his puffy white cap back on his head with his thumb.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We really just wanted a pecan log.”

  He shakes his head. “We don’t have those anymore, either. We’re just gone out of business.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I say, clutching my armrest. “We used to like Stuckey’s. We came with our kids.”

  He shrugs forlornly. “Everyone did.”

  As he walks away, I wrestle myself back into the van. By the time I’m buckled up and ready to give John the go-ahead, the man is back at my door.

  “I found one,” he says, handing me a pecan log.

  He’s gone before I can even thank him.

  I find out now that Route 66 was already starting to fall apart the time we traveled on it in the ’60s. Much of the old road is closed now, buried or bulldozed, long ago replaced by Highways 55 and 44 and 40. In some places, the original pink Portland concrete is so decrepit you can’t even drive on it. Yet there are maps and books available now that show the old route, turn-by-turn directions, guides to the trailer parks. It’s true. I found it all on the World Wide Web in the library. Turns out people didn’t want to let go of the old road, that a lot of the kids who were born after the war, who traveled it with their parents, want to retrace their steps. Apparently, everything old is new again.

  Except us.

  “I’m hungry,” says John. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.”

  “You always want to go to McDonald’s,” I say, poking his arm with the pecan log. “Here. Eat this.”

  He looks at it with suspicion. “I want a hamburger.”

  I stash the pecan log in our snack bag. “We’ll find you a hamburger somewhere else for a change.”

  John loves McDonald’s. I’m not that crazy about it, but he could eat it every day. He did for quite some time. McDonald’s was his hangout for a number of years after he retired. Every day, Monday through Friday, right around midmorning. After a while, I started to wonder what the big attraction was, so I went with him. It was just a bunch of old farts sitting around, chewing the fat, drinking Senior Discount coffees, reading the paper and bitching about the state of the world. Then they’d get a free refill and start all over again when new old farts arrived. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I never went with him again, which I think was what he wanted. Frankly, I think John just needed somewhere to go to get away from me after he retired. Truth be told, I was happy to have him out of my hair, synthetic or otherwise.

  Yet once we both settled into the rhythm of retirement, we had a good time. We were both in pretty decent shape then, so we did a lot. After John would return from McDonald’s, we’d take care of things around the house, run errands, chase down the sales at the supermarkets or Big Lots, catch a matinee, have an early dinner. We’d gas up the Leisure Seeker and take off for weekends with friends or take the long trek to the outlet mall at Birch Run. It was a good period, one that didn’t last long enough. Soon, we started spending our days going from doctor’s office to doctor’s office, our weeks worrying about tests, our months recovering from procedures. After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation.

  We manage to avoid McDonald’s long enough to stop for lunch somewhere outside Normal, Illinois. I grab my four-pronged cane and lower myself from the van. John, still pretty spry, has already gotten out on his side to help me. “I got you,” he says.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  Between the two of us, we do all right.

  Inside, the diner is meant to look like the 1950s, but it doesn’t look anything like how I remember them. Somewhere along the line, people became convinced that that decade was all about sock hops, poodle skirts, rock and roll, shiny red T-birds, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. and Elvis. It’s funny how a whole decade gets reduced into a few seemingly random pictures. For me, that decade was about diapers and training wheels and miscarriages and trying to house and feed three people on $47 a week.

  After John and I sit down at a table, a girl dressed as a carhop walks up. (Why a carhop? We’re inside, for Christ’s sake.) She has long bottle-blond hair, bow lips, and eyes like a kewpie doll.

  “Welcome to the Route 66 Diner,” she says, in a whispery voice. “I’m Chantal. I’ll be your server.”

  I don’t know what to say to this, so I just say something. “Hello, Chantal. I’m Ella and this is my husband, John. I guess we’ll be your customers.”

  “I want a hamburger,” says John, abruptly. He’s lost a few of his social skills along with the memory.

  I try to laugh it off. “We’ll both have plain hamburgers and coffee,” I say.

  Chantal looks disappointed. Maybe she works on commission. “How about some Fabian Fries? A Pelvis Shake?”

  “What is that?”

  “A chocolate milk shake.” She gives me a little nod. “They’re good.”

  “All right. You don’t have to twist my arm.”

  “Pelvis Shake, coming right up,” she says, pleased to have made a sale.

  After our new friend Chantal leaves, I excuse myself to make a phone call.

  “Mom, where the fuck are you?” screams my daughter over the phone, right there in the lobby of the diner.

  I look around, almost embarrassed to be listening to her. I don’t know where she got this mouth, but it wasn’t from me, I assure you.

  “Cindy honey, don’t use that language. Your father and I are fine. We’re just taking a little trip.”

  “I can’t believe you went through with this. We all discussed this and decided that you and Dad taking any kind of a trip was out of the question.”

  I can hear the exasperation in her voice. I don’t like it when Cindy gets all worked up. She’s been having blood pressure problems lately, and getting all frantic certainly doesn’t help.

  “Cindy. Calm down. Your father and I didn’t decide anything. You and Kevin and the doctors decided for us. Then, Dad and I decided that we should go anyway.”

  “Mom. You’re sick.”

  “Sick is relative, dear. I’m way past sick.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” she says, indignantly. “You can’t just stop going to the doctor.”

  I look around the restaurant to make sure no one is listening. I lower my voice. “Cynthia, I am not going to let them do their treatments on me.”

  “They just want to try to make you better.”

  “How? By killing me? I’d rather go on vacation with your father.”

  “Damn it, Mom!”

  “I don’t like being yelled at, young lady.”

  There is a long pause while Cindy gives herself a time-out. She used to do this when she was frustrated with her kids, now she does it with John and I.

  “Mother,” she says, newly composed. “You know Dad shouldn’t even be driving in his condition.”

  “Your father still drives just fine. I wouldn’t go with him if I didn’t think that.”

  “What if you guys get in an accident because of him? What if he hurts someone?”

  I know she has a point, but I also know John. “He’s not going to hurt anyone. If they let sixteen-year-olds on the road to run wild, then your father, who has an excellent driving record, should be able to do the same.”

  “Oh God. Mother,” she says, her voice rising, signaling surrender, “where are you?”

  “It
doesn’t matter. We just stopped for lunch.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I don’t appreciate the “20 Questions” from my daughter. I’m not even sure I should tell her, but I do anyway. “We’re going to go to Disneyland.”

  “Disneyland? In California? You cannot be serious.” This is where I realize that my daughter still has the flair for the dramatic that she developed when she was a snotty teenager.

  “Oh, we’re serious.” I think I’m going to end this call soon. Who knows? They could be putting a tracer on the call, like on the television.

  “Oh God. I can’t believe this. Do you at least have the cell phone we bought you?”

  “I do, but I don’t like that thing, honey. But I’ve got it in case of an emergency.”

  “Would you please at least turn it on,” she says, pleading, “so I can keep in touch with you?”

  “I don’t think so. Don’t worry so much. Your father and I will be fine. It’s just a little vacation.”

  “Mom—”

  “Love you, honey.” It’s time to hang up, so I do. She’ll be fine, but she’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to turn on that cellular telephone. I’ve got more than enough cancer, thank you.

  Back at the table, John and I eat our Route 66 burgers. My chocolate Pelvis Shake is not half bad.

  Back on the road, the fatigue comes on hard and sudden. I want to tell John to call it a day, but we’ve only been driving for about four hours. I try to ignore it. After the phone call with Cindy, I want to put more distance between us and home. Yesterday I was afraid to leave home for all the obvious reasons, but now that we are gone, I want us to be really gone.

  John turns to me, looking concerned. “Are you all right, miss?”

  “Yes, I am, John.” He is having one of his moments where he knows I am someone dear to him, but he’s not entirely sure who I am.

  “John. Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then who am I?”

  “Oh, knock it off.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “John. Tell me who I am.”

  He stares at the road, looking annoyed, but worried. “You’re my wife.”

  “Good. What’s my name?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he says, but he’s thinking. “It’s Ella,” he says, after a moment.

  “That’s right.”

  He smiles at me. I put my hand on his knee, give it a squeeze. “Keep your eyes on the road,” I say.

  As far as what John does and does not remember, I cannot say. He does know who I am most of the time, but then we have been together so long that even if he is slowly working his way back in time, forgetting as he goes, I’m still there with him. I wonder: are the eyes deceived along with the mind? If it is, say, 1973 to him, do I look as I did back then? And if I don’t (which I most certainly don’t), how does he know it’s me? Does that make sense?

  Route 66 is the frontage road of I-55 for this stretch. To the left of us, telephone poles, blackened with age and exhaust and crowned with blue-green glass insulators (the kind you sometimes see in antique shops), run parallel to the highway. Some of the poles are broken and splintered, toppled or teetering over in some places, the lines long snapped and dangling; yet many still retain their wires, and they somehow connect us to the road like an old streetcar, as if we are tethered to the air.

  On the other side: the freeway and the railroad tracks that will follow the road pretty much all the way to California. Between our road and the freeway, I see barricaded patches of what must be a very old alignment of 66, a narrow pinkish path that barely looks wide enough for one car. Nature is slowly reclaiming it. Vegetation creeps in from the edges, narrowing it like an artery. Weeds grow in the crevices roughly every six feet or so, where the slabs were poured. In a few more years, you won’t even be able to see this old highway.

  When we’re not on the frontage road, we pass through tiny, desperate towns. Once everyone stopped taking Route 66, there was no reason for anyone to stop and spend money in these places, so they just languished. In one burg called Atlanta, we pass another fiberglass giant (as they refer to them in my guidebook). This one is Paul Bunyan holding a gigantic frankfurter.

  “Well, look at that,” says John. It’s the first one he’s shown any interest in.

  “They just moved it here from Chicago.”

  “What for?” he says.

  I look around this street, all boarded up and joyless. “That, my dear, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  We pull over, roll down our windows to look up at the giant’s bulging forearms. According to my guidebook, he was originally holding a muffler, so now the wiener sits on the top of a clawed left hand withered shut. It looks like Bob Dole holding a jumbo hot dog. It makes me sad to think of these people pinning all their hopes on this thing to bring their little ghost town back to life.

  Outside Springfield, we stop for the night. The park is not so much a campground, but a trailer village, with a few extra spaces that they rent out to folks with campers. Basically, it’s like camping in the middle of someone’s crummy neighborhood. But we were tired and it was available.

  We settle in, hook up our electricity, water, and septic lines. (Between what John remembers and what I remember him teaching me, we muddle through the various plugs and connections.) We have sandwiches and take our meds, then John lies down for a snooze. I let him sleep because it feels good to be by myself sitting at the picnic table.

  Next door, our neighbors arrive home for the night. First the man of the house arrives in a beat-up Olds, the hood and roof covered with a vast landscape of rust, a corroded map of the world. When I wave hello, he stares right through me and heads inside the trailer. Minutes later, the woman shows up on foot. Still in her Wal-Mart smock, she’s tanned and rail thin—that kind of beef jerky look that I associate with either two-pack-a-day smokers or those people who run long-distance races. When I wave to her, she marches right over.

  “Hey, neighbor!”

  I smile at her. “Just for the evening, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m Sandy,” she says, holding out her hand.

  “Ella,” I say, shaking it.

  She lights a butt, then launches right into it. “Lord, what a day I’ve had. My manager was on my ass from the moment I punched in till the moment I walked out of there. He searched me out while I was eating my lunch, I swear it! I was sitting there, nice as you please, eating my Salisbury steak when he comes up to me and starts giving me grief about the inventory we’ve got coming up. He’s screaming at me during lunch! Can you imagine? I just sat there and shoveled food into my mouth right in front of him. And I didn’t close it, either. I just left it wide open and chewed while he bitched away. I even let a little fall from my mouth onto my plate. He didn’t even notice. I figured, hell, I’m on my lunch hour and I’m gonna eat my lunch whether he likes it or not…”

  This goes on for quite some time. Smoking and talking. Talking and smoking. She just lights one off the other. I feel sorry for her at first, that she needs to do this with complete strangers, but after about twenty minutes, I was afraid that I was going to be out there all night. Poor thing, I know she just wanted to make a noise, have someone to pay attention to her, know she was there. She didn’t understand that it didn’t matter that I knew she was there. I would be gone tomorrow. You need to have it matter to people who count.

  “My first husband, he gave me gonorrhea for our fourth anniversary. He was a sonofabitch, that one. He about wore me out with his hijinks—”

  Right then, her husband comes out, and without a word, grabs her arm and starts pulling her back to their little place.

  “Ow! Donald! What are you doing?”

  He didn’t say a word, but she chattered and smoked all the way there. After the door shut, I could still hear her talking.

  Twilight slips in like a timid creature. Lights tick on around the trailer village. The air grows cooler. I grab one of John’
s old jackets and throw it over my shoulders. In a storage bin, I find an old gray wool winter cap to put on my head, which is freezing, unaccustomed to being without its hat of hair. The cold and the musky smell of John’s jacket make me think of a night after we were first married in the winter of 1950. We were living on Twelfth Street just off West Grand Boulevard. It had rained all night as the temperature plummeted. At about midnight, it stopped, and John and I, for some reason, decided to take a walk.

  It was frigid, but so beautiful. Everything was coated with a thick layer of brilliant clear ice, as if the world were preserved under glass. We had to take tiny hesitant steps, so as not to slip. Above us, power lines crackled and tore from their poles; a streetlight globe, laden with ice, dropped and shattered in the street with a muffled pop. We walked and walked under a brittle black sky, jagged with stars, moon shining hard and bright on the crystal buildings that lined the boulevard. The world looked fragile, but we were young and invulnerable. We kept walking, at least a mile, toward the golden tower of the Fisher Building, not knowing why, knowing only that we needed to get there. We returned to our flat that night excited, our hair glistening with shiny flecks of ice, full of a deep thirst for each other. That was the night that Cindy was conceived.

  Right now, I hear the loudening trill of crickets and the sizzle of gravel as cars slowly pass. I can smell microwave popcorn coming from somewhere. There is no reason to, but I feel safe with all these people around us. John is awake now and I can hear him talking under his breath. He is telling someone off. I hear him whispering obscenities, threats to enemies, accusations. All our lives together, John was a passive, quiet man. But now, since he started to lose his mind, he says the things that he always wanted to say to people. He is forever reading his personal riot act to someone. It often happens this time of the day. When the sun sets, the anger rises in him.