The Leisure Seeker

by Michael Zadoorian

  When I grew up, we lived on Tillman Street in the city, in an area that was very poor. Black folks lived on our block with us and it didn’t matter then. We had everyone on our street—Bulgarians; Irish; Czech; lots of Poles; a Jew; some French (the Millers, who were all thieves); and a black man, Mr. Williams, who lived with his daughter, Zula Mae; even a mixed-race couple, a white woman and a black man. It didn’t matter because we were all poor. We all owned nothing and all lived peacefully.

  Everything just seemed to fall apart after the riots. Coleman Young was elected mayor and made it pretty clear that he didn’t like white people. He told us all to hit Eight Mile Road and keep going. Before long, everyone I knew, my sisters and brother, all our neighbors and friends, moved out of Detroit. Except us. Again, I lived down the street from black folks and I told myself that it wouldn’t matter, but it was different this time. We were made to feel that Detroit was their city now. I guess we weren’t so used to being the minority. I didn’t want to leave my home. I loved that house. But we left it.

  It still breaks my heart to see what happened. So many slums and abandoned buildings. Michigan Central Station, the National Theatre, J.L. Hudson’s, the Statler, the Michigan Theatre, all destroyed or left to rot. Now I hear white people are starting to move back into the city. Buildings are being renovated. There are new condos and developments and office complexes. Things are changing again. I don’t know what to think. What is white has become black, what is black becomes white. And these days, these lingering days, John and I live in between, in a grayworld where nothing seems really real, and the places that were once so important to us are forever gone.

  I have to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to get up yet. I just want to lie here for a few moments more. I wonder what happened to all of them at Winkleman’s. Most of them were older than me. They are dead now, I’m sure of that, just like almost all of our friends, the ones who moved with us from the city to the suburbs. The Jillettes, the Nears, the Meekers, the Turnblooms, almost all gone, except for a straggling widow here and there.

  You worry about parents, siblings, spouses dying, yet no one prepares you for your friends dying. Every time you flip through your address book, you are reminded of it—she’s gone, he’s gone, they’re both gone. Names and numbers and addresses scratched out. Page after page of gone, gone, gone. The sense of loss that you feel isn’t just for the person. It is the death of your youth, the death of fun, of warm conversations and too many drinks, of long weekends, of shared pains and victories and jealousies, of secrets that you couldn’t tell anyone else, of memories that only you two shared. It’s the death of your monthly pinochle game.

  Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now.

  At 4:23 A.M., I wake from my usual flimsy slumber to find John standing over me, lips knitted over teeth, forehead veined with rage. I think I’ve mentioned that sometimes he isn’t able to distinguish his dreams from reality. Sometimes he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is or who he is. And he’s mad as Hades about it.

  “John, what’s wrong?” I say, sitting up in bed.

  He glares at me, mouth open, his breath ragged and phlegmy.

  “John, what is wrong?” I say, noticing something glinting in his hand. I thought, this is it, he’s finally gone round the bend. “What do you have there? What are you thinking? You were just having a dream.”

  “No, I’m not,” he growls. “I’m awake. Where are we? This isn’t home. Where have you taken me?”

  “John. This is our camper. We’re on vacation, remember? I’m your wife. I’m Ella.”

  “You’re not Ella.” He barks it at me, between clenched teeth.

  “Of course I’m Ella. I know who I am. I’m your wife, I’m Ella.”

  His eyes soften a little as if what I’m saying is starting to make some sense to him. “What are you holding there, John?”

  He holds out his hand so I can see what he’s got. It’s a knife.

  A butter knife.

  “Give me that, you horse’s ass.” I’m ready to smack him one by now.

  When I call him that, it seems to prove to him that I am indeed Ella. He hands me the knife and I feel something on the blade, something sticky.

  “Were you making a sandwich, John?” I take a closer look at him.

  “No.”

  “Then how come there’s peanut butter on your face?” I take a tissue from my pocket, wet it at my mouth, and wipe his upper lip.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Good Christ. Come to bed, John.”

  It’s not the first time this has happened. The last time at home, he just shook me awake clutching the neckline of my nightgown. The time before that was the scary one. He was holding a claw hammer and he kept banging his nightstand, demanding to know where he was.

  Right after that, I started having a hard time sleeping. It’s not just from being afraid of my husband. It doesn’t upset me to think about dying. What upsets me is the idea of John being alone after his spell passes. The idea of one of us without the other.

  The morning sky is annoyingly blue. John wakes up quiet but chipper, whereas I am grouchy as hell. We have toast and tea and oatmeal, meds, then pack up and move out. Getting back on the road is a welcome relief. I decide to forget about yesterday and concentrate on what’s ahead. We have a long pass through the panhandle of Texas ahead of us, at least one hundred sixty miles.

  The landscape is flat and uncheering—scalded rock and cracked earth, scabbed with wiry bush. Just to be on the safe side, I make John stop to fill up the Leisure Seeker. After I put in our credit card and get John started, I visit the ladies’ room, then buy us snacks and two big bottles of water. (I hate spending money on water, but it makes me feel better to have them.)

  John is still filling up when I get back. I think he hasn’t been pressing the nozzle trigger beyond a trickle. He smiles at me as I walk toward the van. He’s wearing a big golf hat with the American flag on it that he must have found somewhere.

  “We all set, El?” he says through the open window after I climb in.

  “Set as we’re gonna be,” I say, surprised to hear that name again. It’s been years since John has called me “El.” These are the things the disease steals from you, one by one, the little familiars, the details that make that person feel like home. These are also the things that this trip is stirring back up to the surface again. I like that.

  The nozzle snaps itself off. John hooks it back on the pump, then opens the van door. Our credit receipt curls out from a slot on the pump, quivers in the wind, then flits away. We are not worrying about such things. John settles in his captain’s chair, beams at me, gives my knee a squeeze.

  “Hey lover,” he says, looking pleased, though most of what he’s feeling there is fat and titanium. I don’t mind telling you that just then, my heart soars.

  I smile back, in a better mood now, and glad to see my old man. “Someone’s full of piss and vinegar today,” I say.

  He pats my knee and starts the van. We need this after yesterday.

  We decide to forgo the “Devil’s Rope” Barbed Wire Museum in McLean because it sounds like it could be the silliest museum in the world. Not long after, we pass a little old-fashioned Phillips 66 gas station with orange pumps and a milk-bottle-shaped chimney. Like a lot of the things that people have restored on this road, it doesn’t actually work, but it looks good.

  The miles pass easily. It is hot and clear and arid, but not uncomfortable with the windows open. The advantage of traveling in fall. Route 66 is the frontage road alongside the freeway, uncrowded as we pass through towns with names like Lela and Alanreed. You could call these places sleepy, although comatose may be more like it. A sign off the freeway:

  RATTLESNAKES EXIT NOW

  Yet at the Reptile Ranch, there is nothing left but rubble. I almost want to have John pull over for a closer look, but i
nstead I direct us onto I-40 to avoid the dirt road section of 66 coming up, what’s left of the Jericho Gap. Anyway, it feels so good to be moving that I wouldn’t want to ruin our momentum by lollygagging. I also don’t want to do anything that will make John any different than he is right now. He is downright chatty.

  “Ella, remember when we went to Colorado that time? Where were we when we woke up and there were all those sheep all around us? God, that was something.”

  I turn to John, amazed. He hasn’t recalled anything like this for a long time, but I’m not complaining. “It was Vail,” I say. “When we went out west in ’69.”

  “That’s right!” he says, nodding with his whole body.

  “That was so strange,” I say. “We woke up early and I happened to look outside. The sun had just come up and all these sheep just appeared.”

  John pushes back his glasses with his index finger and nods again. “That man was herding them through the campground. We were right next to that hillside and they stopped and grazed all around us. I don’t know how he managed all of them.”

  “Did he have a dog?” I can’t believe that I’m asking John about something that happened decades ago.

  “I don’t think so.” As he speaks, John stares at the road before us as if he’s watching the scene unfold right there. “I remember how that felt. It was like time slowed down when those sheep surrounded us. Everything got so still while they grazed. They weren’t even that noisy. I remember feeling like we were trapped in the camper. But it was all right. We were just surrounded by sheep.”

  “That’s what I like about vacation,” I say, gazing out my window at the brownish puffs of undergrowth dotting the roadside.

  “Sheep?”

  “Everything slows down. You have all these experiences in a short period. You can’t remember what day it is. Time slows like a dream.”

  John looks stymied by what I just said. Or maybe he didn’t even hear me. Just as well, since I’ve probably just described his usual state of mind.

  “Remember how scared Kevin was?” he says. “Poor kid had never seen so many sheep. Not even at the State Fair. I had to tell him that everything was okay. That sheep are nice and you don’t have to be afraid of them.”

  “Good grief, John.” He’s giving me details that even I forgot and I’ve got a memory to match my girth. I put my hand on his forearm, run my nails through the snowy hair.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  There are no perfect moments. Not anymore. I realize this now because this day, this brief moment where I have my John back, is the same time that I suddenly feel pressure in my body, an intense, gut-crushing discomfort like no discomfort I’ve experienced so far. I remove my quivering hand from John’s arm, glad that I didn’t sink my nails into the flesh when the first wave hit. I fumble around in my purse for my little blue pills. I look and look, my purse is full of pill bottles, just not the right ones. I find tubes of lipstick, wads of Kleenex, half-sticks of Doublemint, and John’s gun (so very heavy, but I am scared to leave it anywhere else), but no little blue pills. Finally, I locate the vial. Hands shaking like a dope fiend, I wash two down with the emergency water. It’s going to be a while, I know, before I feel any relief. I need distraction.

  “Talk to me, John,” I say, wincing, but trying to keep my voice as normal as possible.

  “About what?”

  “Anything. I don’t care. Tell me what you remember.”

  “About what?”

  “About us. About our marriage. Tell me something.”

  John looks at me, confused at first, as if on the verge of forgetting the question. Then he blurts it out: “How you looked when we got married. I remember how red your cheeks were. You weren’t wearing any rouge, but your cheeks were so red. I kept thinking you were running a fever. I remember kissing you on the steps of St. Cecilia, touching your face and feeling how warm it was and thinking that I wanted to feel that warmth against my face.”

  I wince. “I remember you doing that. Your face was nice and cool. I was so keyed up that day. I just wanted us to be married.”

  John laughs and smiles at me. I hope my grimace passes for a smile.

  “Tell me something else you remember, John. Hurry.”

  “I remember after Kevin was born. I went home after you were all settled in for the night and the baby was okay. Cindy was staying with your sister and I was alone at home and I couldn’t stop crying.”

  “Why were you crying, John?”

  “I don’t remember. I think I was happy. I remember being ashamed for crying so much.”

  “There was nothing to be ashamed of, sweetie.”

  “I guess not.”

  I close my fingers around the armrests of my captain’s chair and ride it out. “You used to get so mad at Kevin for crying all the time.”

  “I didn’t want him to get picked on at school for being a crybaby.”

  “He still was anyway.” I can’t laugh or smile right now, but I want to.

  John doesn’t say anything. A car passes us on the left spewing exhaust fumes. The smell of the fumes makes me nauseous. I almost think I’m going to upchuck, but I roll down my window farther and it helps.

  “What do you remember about vacation, John?”

  He thinks for a moment. A ragged jolt of discomfort shoots through me. “John.”

  “Fire. The fires we would have. The campfire smell on my clothes the next morning when I would get up and put the same sweatshirt on. I liked that smell. By the end of the day driving, it would be gone and I wanted it back.”

  “Maybe we’ll have a fire tonight.”

  “All right.”

  We pass the town of Groom and I can see the “Leaning Tower of Texas,” as the guidebooks call it. It’s a water tower lurched way over to one side.

  “Are you all right?” John asks.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. Another car rockets past us.

  “What’s his hurry?” says John, irked. This has happened a lot this trip, people ticked off at the oldsters driving so slowly, but this is the first time John has noticed. I worry that we did the same thing when we were young, our impatient travels, going too fast to get somewhere, then hurrying back home. I think of the map in our basement with the tape lines webbed over the country, all those vacations, how fast this all went by. I think of the Joads trudging through the Jericho Gap, their truck being sucked into the earth. Then a quicksilver warmth starts spreading through my bones. My head loosens on my shoulders, and I can breathe again. Outside my window, I see a grain elevator in a field, its silos like fingers clutching at the sky.

  I have achieved comfort.

  “Howdy, partners!” says Jeanette, our pretty, perky waitress, all gussied up like a cowgirl, still young enough not to be completely beaten down by grueling waitress work. “Welcome to the Big Texan Steak Ranch!”

  “Howdy, little lady,” John says back, tipping his golf hat to her. He’s still doing well and it’s brought out the flirt in him.

  Jeanette laughs much too long and much too loudly at this. “Well, aren’t you two just the cutest thing?”

  I nod and smile. Jeanette has no idea that the cute little old lady she’s waiting on is high as a kite on the dope. Maybe I took a little too much. My head is humming. My body feels liquid and electric. The discomfort is gone, but so am I. I’m lucky I made it to the table.

  The Big Texan Steak Ranch is a gaudy place that looked like great fun from the outside—a giant cowboy and his giant cow, right next to a giant ranch house. John was so excited when he saw the place, I couldn’t disappoint him. (In case you haven’t noticed, I am a sucker for the jumbo tourist attractions. I still get a thrill passing the enormous Ferris wheel–sized Uniroyal tire on I-94 back in Detroit. And I used to love that colossal Paul Bunyan we had up north in Michigan. I have a photo somewhere of Cindy and myself when she was just five or six, standing next to Babe the Blue Ox. We are looking up and waving at John taking the pi
cture from high above us in Paul Bunyan’s head.) Anyway, now that we’re inside the Big Texan, it looks more like an Old West bordello than a ranch house. On top of that, a big hunk of meat doesn’t exactly sound appetizing to me right now.

  “All right, you cuties. What’ll y’all have?” squeaks Jeanette.

  “I want a hamburger,” says John. No newsflash there.

  “Is the eight-ounce chopped steak all right?”

  I nod at Jeanette. “That’s fine for him. Well done, please.”

  “You also get a salad and two sides, sir.”

  John looks a tad bewildered, so I perk up, though I’m loopy myself. “Uhhh, Thousand Island dressing?” I say, stalling, as I scan the giant, crazy, cartoon-filled menu. “Mac and cheese. Fried okra.”

  “Okay. And you, ma’am?” asks Jeanette, head cocked.

  “I’ll just have a glass of sweet tea, please.”

  Jeanette pouts theatrically at my answer. “You sure? Don’t forget we’ve got our special Big Texan seventy-two-ounce steak. Four and a half pounds! It’s free if you can eat it all in an hour!”

  I stare at her blankly. “Um. No, I don’t think I’ll be having that today, thanks.”

  “We’ve had a sixty-nine-year-old meemaw eat one,” Jeanette proclaims proudly.

  “Is that so?” I say. “Well, this meemaw just wants sweet tea.”

  “Okay! I’ll be right back with your bread and butter!” Jeanette leaves, and I am relieved. It’s a strain being around all that enthusiasm.

  John looks at me, concerned. “Are you all right, honey?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little queasy.”

  “Are you sick?”

  This might be an appropriate time to mention that John doesn’t really know that I’m ill. I mean, he knows that the kids take me to the doctor. (We tape notes all through the house—MOM AT DOCTOR. BACK IN TWO HOURS!—so he doesn’t panic when he realizes I’m not there.) But he doesn’t know why. He wouldn’t be able to retain the information, anyway. When Cindy told John about her divorce, he kept forgetting. Every time he saw her, he’d ask, “Where’s Hank?”