Book Read Free

Interstate

Page 24

by Stephen Dixon


  They pass a sign saying there’s a rest area in three miles and Margo says “Can we stop at the next rest place coming up? I have to go,” and he says “But you went at home,” and she says “No I didn’t,” and he says “But I told you both to go just before we left. I said ‘Julie, Margo, everybody, including Daddy, go to the bathroom before we set out. Mommy, you don’t have to be cause you’re staying here,’” and she says “Maybe I did go then but I have to again,” and he says “How can you go so soon after you just went?” and she says “I didn’t just went; you kept us waiting in the lobby for a half hour when you said you’d be right down,” and he says “It wasn’t half an hour; it was ten minutes at the most,” and she says “Longer. Grandpa said so when he looked at his watch. He said ‘Where’s your father? He’s been kibbutzing’”—“Kibitzing”—“‘kibitzing upstairs for more than a half hour,’” and he says “Grandpa likes to exaggerate, not so much to make me look bad but to make himself—anyway, when he came up he said it was only quarter of an hour. ‘Nathan,’ he said, ‘it’s been quarter of an hour we’ve been waiting’—and it wasn’t even that, I don’t think,” and she says “Grandpa doesn’t exaggerate or tell lies,” and he says “Wait, can you hold it a second? The music’s about to end and they’ll give the title and composer of the piece—it sounds like Vivaldi but there’s something that tells me it’s Marcello. No, it’s all right, that was a false end,” sitting back again after leaning forward to the radio. “Look, maybe Grandpa’s watch runs a little fast and he got the time wrong,” and she says “His watch is very expensive and has a battery worth ten dollars in it and he says he checks his watch with the radio every morning so it’ll always have the right time. And he said we’ve been waiting a half hour downstairs, so even if his watch was five minutes fast or ten it’d still be a half hour we were down there. And when we went upstairs to get you it’d be more than a half hour because of the time it took in the elevator and upstairs, so that makes more than an hour altogether since I went to pee,” and he says “Wait, you lost me, and you’re also cheating yourself with the total time. My point is only that you still shouldn’t have to yet—go to the bathroom. We’ve been on the road”—he presses a radio button and the station numbers turn into the time—“almost an hour, which means it’s been at the most an hour and a half since you went. Can’t you keep it in another half an hour? That way we’ll have gone about seventy miles, if the traffic continues to move the way it is, which will be more than a third of the trip, even if that’s fewer miles than when I like to first stop, which is ideally about a hundred—halfway,” and she says “I think I can hold it in another ten minutes. But the sign we’re passing says the rest area is in a mile and the next one is twenty-six miles and I know I can’t hold it in for twenty-seven miles,” and he says “All right, and I’m losing the signal to this New York station fast, so I’m sure I’ll never find out who wrote the piece—it’s beautiful though, isn’t it?” moving into the slow lane, “—that oboe and with the harpsichord going in back,” and she doesn’t say anything and he says “I’m not trying to take your mind off your bladder, Margo, but you don’t like this music? It’s so soothing, even with the losing-the-station noises,” and she says “It’s okay,” and Julie says “I have to go also, Daddy,” and he says “You’re just saying that to help your sister, but you needn’t, we’re here,” pulling into the exit road. “You know,” he says, walking to the building from the parking lot, “even if you’re not hungry, get something to eat, for I don’t know if I’ll make another stop till we’re home,” and Margo says “Even if we have to pee bad?” and he says “Then I’ll stop, of course; I wouldn’t want to damage your insides. But I’m going to ask you both to go twice, once when we come in and then when we leave,” and Julie says “We won’t have anything to pee,” and he says “You can always pee something, always; you’ll just sit on the potty till you do,” and she says “It’s not a potty. These places don’t have them and I’m too old for one,” and he says “Sorry; but do you want something to eat? Margo?” They’re inside now and Margo sees a place that sells tacos and says “Tacos, yes, I want two—can I, and something to drink?” and Julie says “I don’t want them but I’ll find something,” and he says “First you both pee. I’ll do it twice too, now and later. Meet you both outside here, and don’t go wandering if by chance you’re out first,” and goes into the men’s room.

  Passes several urinals till he sees one that’s clean. One had a cigarette butt in it and three in a row needed to be flushed. What are the pissers afraid of, germs from putting their fingers on the flush lever? Then use a paper towel to flush it, if they have them here and not just hand dryers, or toilet paper, but that’d be thinking too far ahead, and if you only think it while standing at the urinal, then too much work to get it. And who throws a butt into a urinal? They don’t know someone has to take it out? Not with the hand but just any way you take it out, even with pincers or a nail at the end of a pick, is disgusting. Just the idea that someone has to take it out. Has to if it’s part of his job and he doesn’t want to be fired or quit. In that way the people who clean the ladies’ room have it better. But they’re probably the same cleaning men; they just block off the ladies’ room when they clean it, for he’s never seen a cleaning woman in one of these places, not to say because he hasn’t seen one they haven’t been there. At least there aren’t cuspidors anymore. Now those things had to be the worst to clean. When he worked in Washington they were all over the Capitol and Senate and House office buildings, even the public hallways. Worse cleaning them than preparing bodies for funerals, he’d think, or as bad. But they’re professionals, embalmers, and probably go to school for it or through some long apprenticeship before they start doing it on their own and they’re no doubt a lot better paid than cleaning men. They wore white jackets and black slacks, or is he mixing them up with the waiters in the Senate and House dining rooms? But he seems to remember seeing them, in some congressman’s office or Senate committee room, in that starched white jacket buttoned all the way up, emptying…not humidors. What are they called again besides spittoons? How can he have the word one second and not the next? “Spittoons” will do, but cuspidors, like on a cusp, which is maybe where the word came from—the shape of the thing, the lip—if he knows what cusp is, or exactly, but he bets it’s from the Latin somewhere for that’s how far back cuspidors probably go. They did it with a big can on wheels, about the size of a water bucket but the top covered except for a wide slit to pour the spit and chewing tobacco crud in. They probably emptied the bucket into a toilet someplace—where else?—and then cleaned and maybe even had to polish the cuspidors and probably cleaned those buckets as well and the toilets and slop sinks they poured it all in and maybe the area on the floor around the cuspidors where the spit missed. They also took care of the offices and committee rooms, vacuumed carpets, rugs, dusted, work like that, emptied trash baskets, made everything shine, while embalmers only work on bodies, he thinks, and have nothing to do with things like selling caskets and seating the funeral guests. So one job’s as bad as the other. Or the embalmer’s job is worse, especially since there aren’t cuspidors around for cleaning men to empty anymore. Though cleaning a bunch of those still couldn’t be equal to embalming or just preparing for burial a decomposed or particularly ravaged or mutilated body, and even worse, the body of a child no matter what condition it comes to him in, but he supposes they get used to that too after a few years. He’s heard of embalmers, once from a woman he was seeing who answered phones for a funeral home, who used the navels of corpses they were working on as ashtrays, though maybe those were just stories or the very odd case. If a senator still has a cuspidor in his private office, do the cleaning people there have to empty and polish it? He just doesn’t see anyone doing that chore anymore, maybe not even for the president, but then who would do it, for you can’t let the thing run over? A devoted follower perhaps or a janitor from the old days who sort of got used to putting up with it
or some young flunky who wants to become assistant to one of the administrative assistants and for that future job might even do something worse. When he was in the office of a senator or congressman he was waiting to interview—a different era, almost, but that has nothing to do with what he was saying, which was, well…he’d be looking around, in a way wasting time till he was called into the senator’s or representative’s private office, and suddenly find himself staring into a cuspidor on the floor. Didn’t do it out of any curiosity or because he was somehow drawn to it, that’s for sure, or maybe that was it; more like an accident of the eyes, he’d call it, that happened a number of times. But how’d he get into this and here while holding his dick? Something to do instead of just looking at the urinal while he tried to piss. He finally does—had to go when he walked in here so doesn’t know why it didn’t just come—flushes and goes to the washstand to clean his glasses and wash his hands and throw water on his face to help make him more alert for the rest of the trip, dries his hands—no paper towels, just the dryers, and for his face and glasses, his handkerchief—and leaves, kids aren’t there, looks around and doesn’t see them, goes to the gift shop and the wall by the exit where there are some video games, two places they’d wander off to without money, starts to get worried, thinks “Wait, who’s going to take both of them?” for both would have left the ladies’ room at the same time. Maybe they’re still in it, and at the door there cups his hands round his mouth and says “Margo, Julie, are you still in there?” and from what sounds like way inside it Margo says “We’re coming out,” and they come out, he says “What the heck were you doing? Don’t you know we’re in a hurry to get home?” and Julie says “Why do we have to? We want to see some things here; it’s a good place,” and he says “There’s nothing to see; let’s just eat,” and she says “There’s video games, a good gift shop; we’ve been to this stop before,” and he says “They’re all alike, up and down America; they all have everything you want to take all your dough. Come on, a snack—I’ll give you plenty of time to eat, and then I want to get home in time to prepare you a proper dinner and give you a couple of hours between dinner and bed to do what you want—read or ride your bikes or just relax,” and Margo says “It wasn’t our fault we took so long. All the toilets were filled. Ladies don’t have those stand-up things to pee in and they take longer than men,” and he says “Oh yes, boy oh boy, are you the observant one,” and takes Julie’s hand and they get on line at the Roy Rogers while Margo goes to a different fast-food place for tacos.

  They’re off the turnpike, across the big bridge and past the first rest stop on the left and about an hour and a half from home if they don’t run into any heavy traffic or tie-ups, or even closer, hour and a quarter, hour and ten, but around that time in the trip when he usually starts thinking of what he has to do when he gets home and in what order and how much time it’ll all take before he can sit down with the newspaper for fifteen minutes and have a drink, like unpacking the car—they didn’t bring much stuff and this time his in-laws didn’t load him down with presents for the kids and a couple of bags of deli and food his mother-in-law made, maybe for some reason because his wife didn’t return with them—get the various things in their various places and the emptied valises back to the basement, but what else? Raise the thermostat from the 58 he put it at when they left. Open the curtains and shades, take the automatic light timer out of the socket and reconnect the lamp plug into the wall and replace the bulb in it with the hundred-watt rather than the twenty-five he put in for these few days. Turn the oven on even if he doesn’t know what he’s going to cook them. Maybe there’ll be something in the refrigerator to reheat that hasn’t started to spoil, or from the freezer but which can be thawed while baking—he, he’ll just have wine and some mustard and cheese on the good bread he brought from New York and part of the salad plate or tossed salad he makes for them, but his own vinaigrette dressing, not their bottled creamy Italian kind they like, when a car in the fast lane a few feet ahead of him starts moving into his lane without signaling and he honks and it keeps coming and he slows down and starts moving into the slow lane and is halfway over the dividing line when he looks at the right side mirror and sees a van coming on fast. The van honks and he cuts back into the middle lane and waves without looking at the van and says “I know, I’m sorry, it’s that stupid car,” and honks at it, though probably the van will think the honk’s for it. The car moves slowly back into the fast lane and honks twice and he says, as the van passes him, “Oh Jesus, honk honk, bunch of geese we all are, heading south for the summer, though, and with no camaraderie or cooperation or concordance or just plain plan or whatever you want to call it—fool, fool,” in the car’s direction and Margo says “What, Daddy?” and he says “Nothing, I should’ve expected it or at least expected anything and then corrected it better—it’s essentially and evidentially partially my fault,” and she says “What is, correct what?” and he says “Oh, again, nothing, just talking faultily to my littlest self with my biggest words,” and she says “Huh?” and to Julie “Do you get it?” and he says “You know, you both do, the brain, for that’s about how it feels right now, pea-sized, miniaturized, but without the intricate technics—forget it, my honeys, Daddy’s just a-kiddin’ again and wouldn’t want to give you the impression he has a bad image of himself or any command of the language when he this minute does not—just a-kiddin’ again, oh, can I never ever stop?—boing boing,” rapping his temple, “sorry, getting myself even deeper into what I won’t be able to get out of unless I switch subjects or shut up.” Car to the left stays beside his and he wants to see who’s driving, what kind of person, really, could be such a lousy driver, though he can try and guess if maybe only to see, even when he’s thinking seriously, how far off the mark he can be: unaccompanied man, not a woman, alone because the passenger, if it were an adult, and this one wouldn’t have a kid, would have tipped him off that he was driving recklessly and he would have corrected it sooner, and a woman wouldn’t stay alongside the car she cut off and risk being needled if not taunted and propositioned and cursed, around forty and with a hat on, hunter’s or trucker’s cap or one they used to call and maybe still do a pork-pie, fatty face and about a hundred pounds overweight, torpid from his bloat and also the huge snack with a couple of tall sodas or shakes he had at the last rest stop, so another reason he was so slow to react, package of opened, no, open package of small powdered doughnuts or bonbons on the passenger seat, beanbag ashtray half-filled with butts on top of the dashboard, messy car, lots of dumb bumper stickers and window decals, dirty T-shirt, that should be it and he actually doesn’t recall any stickers or decals but he wasn’t looking for them then, looks and there are two men, young, passenger must have been bent over when he honked at them or could he have seen him from behind and completely forgot? look like brothers though driver’s clean-faced and other’s got a shaggy mustache, lean if not weightliffer-mus-cular, thick necks, beefy shoulders, work clothes or just not dress clothes—fancy catalog-type casual clothes, both staring stolidly at him, driver not glancing front once, as if saying “What’s with you, dummy, got a problem?” and he nods and faces forward and thinks maybe he should move to the slow lane—checks the right wing mirror, that’s what it is, wing mirror, no car there—nah, that’ll just…that’ll just what?—suggest to them he’s intimidated or scared and thinking him weak that could start who knows what with them, where they stay alongside trying to rile him even more: gibes, glares, threats, fingers, fists, as if he almost got them killed in an accident, dumb idiot, but they stay even with him anyway and he’d like to know why, hasn’t looked to the side at them since that one time and he didn’t do anything then but nod and maybe flash a nothing smile, doesn’t try going faster for he’s already doing seventy and that’s about as fast as he wants to get when the speed limit’s fifty-five and if they stick with him at that clip it could make driving even more dangerous than it now is and they also might take his going faster as some kind
of whatever they take it as, a contest they’re going to win no matter what, and he’s seen lots of cars stopped by cops on this road in the past and he doesn’t want to get tagged when he’s sort of anxious to get home, and really, he might be exaggerating the menacing from them and also with the ticket he doesn’t want to pay through the nose, for he thinks the fine’s up to around a hundred fifty now. Fact is he’s never been ticketed, all his years driving. Been stopped a few times, maybe twice, and once, second the cop reached his window, he said “I’m sorry, I must’ve been doing ten over the limit,” and the cop said “Twelve, but at least you’re honest about it; most drivers, you wouldn’t believe the excuses. I’ll let you off but don’t let me catch you going even five over on this street or I’ll ticket you for both at the same time,” and another time, twenty years ago, made a U on some boulevard and two cops stopped him in their car. Early morning, five-thirty, six and he was driving home from a woman’s house because she wanted him out before her kids awoke, didn’t want them seeing him in bed with her, just seeing him in the kitchen, even, and they could tell their father and it could hurt her chances in the divorce, and the cops warned him about making a U. “It’s not heavy traffic, so no big danger now, but in an hour you could get killed doing it, so don’t, as a standard rule, make a U.” “What’s the law on it, just out of curiosity?” and they said they didn’t know. Those, far as he remembers, were the only two. Looks over, casually, blank expression, as if something caught his attention on that side and he’s going to have a peek and then look back to the road, hoping those guys aren’t looking at him anymore and he can take his mind off them. Passenger’s staring at him with a tough look, driver’s just driving, pinky reaming his nose. Should he face front quick? but nods, passenger nods and then a little smile and then a broad one, throwing up his shoulders and raising his hands as if “What can I tell you? We made a mistake and we’re sorry,” and then points to the backseat, still smiling, as if “Hope we didn’t scare your girls none,” and then salutes him and waves to the girls with wiggling fingers and the car shoots ahead and soon they got to be doing eighty, eighty-five, maybe even ninety or more and he watches them awhile speeding out of sight and then turns on the radio and moves the dial around. Maybe now would be a good time to go seventy-five or so, he thinks, for if anyone’s going to get caught by radar somewhere or just a police car on the road, it’s them, but no, sixty-five’s fine. They could be slowing down, now that he can’t see them—all that shooting out and speed for his benefit, for whatever reason—and he could end up being the sole speeder on the road.

 

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