Even now, Kevin tells me stories about the company where he works, a place that distributes replacement engine parts for one of the Big Three, how his coworkers take advantage of him, bully him. Some things never change.
“You gotta come home, Mom. Are you taking your medications?”
“Of course I am.” This is mostly the truth.
“Oh Mom.” Another sigh.
So now, I’ve had it. “Damn it, Kevin. Stop being such a sad sack. We’re not coming home. What do you want me to come home to? More doctor appointments? More treatments? More drugs? I take so many right now, they’re going to turn me into a dope addict. No. There will be no coming home. Do you understand?”
One final sigh. “Yes. I understand.”
“Good. Now, how’s Arlene and the boys?”
A pause. “They’re good. How’s Dad? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine, honey. He’s driving great and he’s doing really well. Don’t worry so much about us. We need to do this.”
“Okay. Just be careful.”
I see John futzing around with something in the van across the street and think I need to get over there pretty quick.
“Bye-bye. Give our love to everyone.”
“Mom—”
I hang up in time to watch John start to put the van in gear. For the love of Christ, I think he’s going to drive away without me. The Leisure Seeker lurches forward a few feet, and I scream John’s name as loudly as I can. People on the street stop and look at me. I want to run, but I can’t run. My knees won’t do it. I wave my cane at the van.
“Someone please stop that truck!” I screech.
A young man wearing mechanic’s overalls comes up to me. The patch over his right pocket reads MAL. His hands are filthy, but he’s got a kind smile and he speaks gently to me. “Do you need help, ma’am?”
“Yes. Could you run up to that van and tell the man to wait for me?”
Without even looking both ways, the young man runs off into the street toward the van, which is moving slowly down the street. But before he gets around to the driver’s side, the van stops. He disappears around the side, so I can’t see what’s going on, but I hightail it across the street, as much as I can hightail it.
Once I get to the passenger door, the young man is talking to John through the window. “It’s fine, ma’am,” he says. “He wasn’t going anywhere. May I give you a hand?” He opens the door for me.
“Thank you so much, Mal. You’re a doll.”
Mal smiles at me, offers me a filthy hand, and I gladly accept it. I notice the patch over his left pocket as he helps me up. It’s a Phillips 66 insignia. I guess The Road provides. I step up into the van, close the door, and wave. I wait until we’re a good ways down the street before I speak.
“What are you, nuts?” I scream at John. “You going to take off without me? Where are you going to go? What are you gonna do? You’d be lost without me, you goddamned idiot.” I feel my blood pressure rising. “Where were you going to go? Huh? Tell me. What? You stupid asshole.”
John looks at me, a mixture of anger and befuddlement. “I wasn’t going anywhere. I just thought I heard a noise, so I drove forward for a couple of feet. For Christ’s sake, I wouldn’t take off without you.”
“Well, you goddamn well better not. Crazy old man.”
“Up yours,” says John.
I grab a Kleenex from our dispenser and wipe my hand. “Up your own.”
No one says anything for the next dozen or so miles. After that, John turns to me and smiles. “Hi, honey,” he says, putting his hand on my knee.
This little greeting is something we’ve always done, shorthand for “I’m glad you’re here,” “You’re dear to me,” or something to that effect. Whatever it means, I am not in the mood for it right now. I move my knee out of reach.
“Go to hell.”
“Why?”
“I’m still mad at you.” I cross my arms. “You almost took off without me.”
“What?”
God, how I hate it when he does this. We get into an argument and start screaming at each other, then five minutes later, he’s forgotten all about it. He’s all lovey-dovey. What do you do when someone forgets to stay mad? How do you fight with that? You don’t. You just shut up because it’ll make you crazy.
“You were gonna take off without me, dumbass.” I guess knowing what you need to do is different from actually doing it.
“You’re crazy. Go screw yourself.”
That makes me feel better. We’re both angry now, the way it should be. There’s another silence for about a minute, then John turns to me.
“Hi, honey,” he says.
I sigh. “Hi, John.”
It was my granddaughter who first noticed the changes in John’s behavior. During a Christmas celebration at our house about four years back, she found John downstairs in our rumpus room, where we keep all the memorabilia of our vacations, including a mounted map of the United States where John has marked the routes in color-coded tape. According to Lydia, he was walking around, bewildered, looking at everything and muttering to himself, “It’s going to be hard leaving all this.”
Lydia walked up to him and said, “Grandpa, are you all right?” She said that he looked at her as if he wasn’t sure who exactly she was. When she repeated the question, he just nodded.
Then she asked him, “Where are you going, Grandpa? You said you have to leave all this.”
He just said, “Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere.”
By the time Lydia got him upstairs, he seemed all right, more like himself, but she took me aside and told me what happened.
When I asked John about it later, he denied it. He was sure that he hadn’t even been downstairs, but I had seen him come up myself. Nothing happened for a couple of months after that, so I managed to push it out of my mind.
Then we went to Florida. We were headed to Kissimmee to visit friends who had a condo down there. All along the way, John had indigestion and light-headedness and shortness of breath. He kept saying he was all right, but I didn’t believe him. Midway into our second day of driving (we were trying to make it there in two days, always the big rush), he pulled over to the side of the freeway, panting. Then he opened the door and threw up.
“John, what’s wrong?” I was really scared by this time.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” He was coughing and wheezing by then. “I can’t breathe, Ella!”
I thought he was having a heart attack, but he wasn’t holding his chest or his arm or anything like that.
John held his hands over his mouth, breath shallow, eyes welling, voice trembling. “I don’t know if I can drive, Ella. I feel so light-headed. I’m afraid.”
It was the only time I ever heard him say that to me.
Around then, another Leisure Seeker pulled up behind us. A man in his fifties came up to the window and asked if everything was okay. (Leisure Seeker owners stick together that way.)
“I think my husband’s having a heart attack,” was what I said.
The man looked at John and saw he was truly sick. “Can you drive your van?” he asked me.
“I haven’t driven a car in thirty years, much less this thing,” I said.
“Okay.” He ran to his RV, then ran back to ours. “I’ll drive you two to the next town, and my wife will follow us.”
We ended up in some podunk hospital in the Florida panhandle. (It’s worth saying here that if you can ever avoid being in a hospital in Florida, do so. Instead of “the Sunshine State,” the state motto should be “Land of Unnecessary Surgery.”) Some greasy quack admitted John, got him into a bed, examined him, and proclaimed him a candidate for open-heart surgery within ten minutes.
“Bullshit,” said John, who was feeling better by then. “No way.”
After that, they put the pressure on me. “It’s for his own good. He could go at any time.” They basically scared the bejesus out of me. I told them I had to call my children. Cindy sai
d the same thing as John. Kevin volunteered to come down the next day. I told the hospital that there wasn’t going to be any surgery, not for a while at least.
Kevin arrived the next day. By then, John felt fine. He was ready to resume our trip.
“I’m driving the van back to Detroit,” said Kevin, with as much conviction as I’d ever heard from him. “You two are flying home.”
We both pissed and moaned because neither of us liked flying, but eventually we relented. It was the first time that we felt a real shift in power, how our kids now felt like they were in charge of us instead of the other way around. It’s not a good feeling, let me tell you. Watching the Leisure Seeker pull up in our driveway three days later made me feel like a scolded child banished to home. Grounded.
Our doctor at home, after hearing what happened and a thorough examination, told us that John had what is commonly referred to as an anxiety attack. An anxiety attack. Can you imagine?
John laughed it off. I personally didn’t really think anyone of our generation could suffer from such a condition. Anxiety was for our children and their children, but not for people who had grown up during the Depression, who had fought in the war. Who has time for anxiety when you’re trying to fill your belly or keep your head on?
I see now that the doctor was right. I believe this was when John was starting to truly understand what was happening to him. We have always been worriers, both of us. I’m just more likely to worry out loud. John keeps it in, like a man tends to do. I imagine him realizing with a horrible finality that he was indeed going to end up like his mother. Who knows what triggered it? But I imagine him running it through his head over and over as we drove along. That was enough to leave him breathless and heaving by the side of the road. And that, as they say, was the beginning of the bad times.
We eat lunch at a little barbecue joint called “The Pits” in Claremore. Both John and I feel better now, but then barbecue pork sandwiches will do that. John is an unholy mess with orangey-red sauce and grease smeared on his face and fingers. I look much the same way, I imagine.
This is our trip to eat anything we want. You have to remember, after you achieve a certain age, there are always people telling you what to eat and what not to eat. We start off in this life on milk and pablum, and they’d like to finish us off that way as well. (But without the milk because, you know, the cholesterol.) I say all this now, but I know, even with the Pepcid we took in the car, there will be gastric hell to pay later for this barbecue sandwich.
“You two look like you’re enjoying yourselves,” drawls our waitress, a rangy middle-aged redhead with too short a skirt, who appears from nowhere.
I smile, wipe the sauce off John’s face, then my own.
“More tea, dear?” she says to me, her voice thick and low pitched, already refilling my glass.
I have never been deared and darlined so much in my whole life as on this trip. If you’ve experienced that first middle-aged shock when you become “ma’am” or “sir,” it’s nothing like when you become “dear.”
“No, thank you,” I say, smiling back. It doesn’t really matter because she has already filled the glass. “My back teeth are already floating.”
“Heh, heh.”
Normally I wouldn’t say anything like that, but I don’t seem to care lately.
When she leaves the check, I grab my purse from down between my feet (away from pickpockets and sneak thieves and such) to fetch my wallet. I give the money to John and let him go up to pay. Meanwhile, I hunt down the ladies’ room. As I sit there on the pot, I look up and see that someone has written something in a delicate script on the stall door.
Love Always, Charlie
Who the hell would write something like that in the ladies’ room toilet? The world just keeps getting stranger. As I wash my hands, I worry that John has taken off on me, but when I exit the restroom, he’s waiting for me, nice as you please, polishing off a Hershey bar and talking to Red like it’s old home week.
“We’re headed back home to Michigan,” John says to her.
“I’ve never been to Michigan. Is it nice?”
“It’s wonderful,” says John. “We’ll be back in a day or two.”
I don’t bother to correct him. As I approach, he holds out his arm for me to take. It makes me glad to be married.
We pass on the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore. I never much cared for the man. A big phony, I believe. Anyone who never met a man he didn’t like just isn’t trying hard enough. I roll down my window all the way and hang my arm out. The wind tries to push my hand back, but I flatten my palm and hold it strong against the flow for a moment, then dip my hand horizontally, then cup it as if I were swimming. I weave my hand up and down, a reverse sidestroke through the air. There is a strange freedom to this gesture, a childishness, I know, but it feels good to be silly. There is so little silliness at this period of one’s life, but it’s the time when you need it the most. I cup my flowing hand and keep swimming in the wind and to my surprise, water soon appears along the side of the road—a long swimming hole, with a fringe of bulrushes, and a giant blue whale smack in the middle. Bright as the sky, mouth open and smiling, squealing children diving off his concrete back into the water. I sweep my arm forward and am suddenly swimming with the whales.
Sometimes when you least expect it, your life becomes a National Geographic special.
Before Tulsa, I direct John onto the I-44 bypass. We pick 66 back up at Sapulpa. Suddenly, I’ve got some considerable discomfort. I want to take a little blue pill, but I don’t want to do it until we’re settled.
“John,” I say, trying not to sound too weary. “I’m tired. Maybe we should find somewhere to stay for the night.”
“What time is it?”
The clock in the van has been broken for years. My watch says it’s only 3:05, but I don’t want to get into it with John about not traveling long enough.
“It’s after five,” I say, lying to my husband. “Let’s keep our eyes peeled for a place.” I go into my purse for my little blue pills. I try to break one in half, but it won’t break. Against my better judgment, I take the whole thing and wash it down with a sip of Faygo Root Beer.
Within ten minutes or so, I feel a little better, but start getting drowsy. Up ahead, there’s a billboard for a gas station in a town called Chandler. I remember something from my guidebooks about a good place to stay there. No sooner do we enter town than I see the sign for the Lincoln Motel.
“John, turn in here. I’d like to sleep in a real bed tonight.”
John does what he is told, I’m happy to report. We turn in and park by the office. Even feeling as rotten as I do, I have to say that the place is just darling, an old-time motor hotel from the ’30s. Luckily, there’s a vacancy.
When we drive along the back to park near our cabin, I notice something. “John, look at all these old cars.”
“How about that,” he says, giving a little whistle.
I point to one bulbous, bullet-nosed, gray-green car in particular. “John, there’s a 1950 Studebaker. Remember? We had one like that a few years after we got married. You taught me how to drive in that car.”
“I’ll be damned,” he says. “That was a good car.”
“God, did you scream at me that day. I was so mad at you.”
John shakes his head. “You were an awful driver.”
I want to tell him to cram it, but the fact is, he’s right. I was an awful driver. I never really got the hang of it. I was always afraid of going too fast. I hated freeways and left turns and parallel parking. I was constantly getting yelled at, either by John or people in other cars. Still, it’s hard to live in Detroit if you don’t drive. Yet as soon as the kids were old enough, I let them drive me everywhere. I gave it up for good right after Kevin got his license.
“There’s an old Imperial. That’s a beauty,” says John, checking out a gaudy lavender boat with gargantuan fins and ringed taillights like gun sights.
Y
es, we are definitely from a car town. We park next to a shiny red Ford Pinto with a license plate that says:
IBLOWUP
Our cabin is small, but clean and comfortable and all I want to do is go to bed, but I have to make sure that John is settled in as well.
“Let’s take a little nap, John. Then we’ll bring in our things.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Well, I am.” I turn on the television to distract him. We start watching an old rerun of M*A*S*H and John is immediately absorbed. I swear, he’s seen every episode a hundred times, but he still loves to watch them. I think that’s why he can still enjoy them. They’re familiar, but new. I lock the door, then settle into the too-soft bed, deeply weary.
When I wake up, John is gone. It’s only 5:25 P.M., so I haven’t been sleeping long. I pray that he has not wandered off somewhere. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and raise myself, using both my cane and the night table. Standing somehow makes me feel better, as if I am fooling my body into vigor. I open the door of our cabin and am relieved to see John sitting on a lawn chair, just staring into space. On a little table next to him is our slide projector.
“John?”
“I set up the projector.”
“Good for you, but it’s too light to show slides.”
“I can see that, Ella.” He can still remember to be sarcastic when need be.
“Well, good. We’ll set up the sheet in a little while. Come on, let’s go rustle up some sandwiches. I’ve got ham and bologna. What sounds good?”
“Bologna.”
Why do I even ask? He had a bologna sandwich every day for thirty-five years when he was working. Bologna with one slice of American cheese and a smear of mustard, cut top to bottom, not diagonally. I could make them in my sleep.
We walk around back to the van. I hope the projector will be all right because I don’t feel like moving it. I make us sandwiches and potato chips and root beer. My discomfort has subsided and I decide to whip myself up an old-fashioned. I dig out the booze, find a couple of desiccated sugar cubes in the cupboard, and I’m in business. I top the whole kit and kaboodle with a skewered orange slice and a cherry. It’s not an old-fashioned without. John just gets another glass of pop. The sun’s going down and he’s a little less sharp now.
The Leisure Seeker Page 6