Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  She’d started working at the hospital full-time by then, covering other people’s vacations and enjoying the industrial air conditioning. “Why anyone would want to travel in this heat is beyond me,” she said. Meanwhile, she couldn’t sit still. She had struggled with her college classes but was restless without them. Restlessness coursed through my own teenaged limbs, but mothers were supposed to stay put, like furniture.

  Weekends, there was nothing to anchor her down. It was too hot to be outside or inside, too hot to stay awake, too hot to sleep. I moved as little as possible, fanning myself ferociously with magazines and trying not to think of the crisp, blue pool close enough to dive into. But Mom was always on the move. She’d go from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again, as if she’d lost something. At night, I heard her haunting the fridge, the liquor cabinet, a ghost with no social life. At least when she did laps in the pool she had somewhere to go—shallow end, deep end, shallow end, deep end. “Why don’t you come in?” she’d say. “I just washed my hair,” I’d lie. And Mom would shake her head, grinning, like it was some old joke she’d half forgotten. She used to wear a swimming cap. Now she let her hair get green and stiff with chlorine. Once in a while, she’d bend over the kitchen sink and let me rinse it with lemon juice and soak it with olive oil. Her salad days, she called them.

  One Saturday, while Mom wandered the house in her towel turban, I sat at the dining table, thumbing through one of the grade eleven textbooks Mr. Galpin had given me to take home for the break. I had managed to avoid summer school this time, but just barely. “Let’s see if we can’t keep that momentum going,” Mr. Galpin had said, like it was a group effort, like we were a team. “If we get a bit ahead of things, I don’t see why we can’t try for a few B’s next year.” I had thought of a few good reasons, all of which I kept to myself. Now here I was trying to care about the early American settlers, for Mr. Galpin’s sake, if not my own. An hour in and I hadn’t cracked the first chapter, while Mom had made excellent progress touching nearly every object in the house with the tips of her fingers, as if tallying our possessions. There were one or two clear ovals on every surface. It was the most dusting I’d seen her do in weeks. Eventually, she came to a stop beside me and bent down to see what I was reading—or not reading, such as it was.

  “What’s so fascinating?” she said.

  “Nothing, unfortunately.”

  She flipped slowly through the pages, pausing here and there to squint and frown at something. “What’s that they say—those who forget history are doomed to repeat it?”

  “So my history teacher keeps telling me.”

  “I was never very good at history. You probably get that from me. I wasn’t very good at any of it.” She squeezed my shoulder and wandered away again.

  An hour later, I found her outside, cigarette in hand, staring hard at the back of the yard. There was no mistaking what she was staring at. Then she turned suddenly, went back inside, and picked up the textbook I’d finally abandoned. She turned the page, then another. Finally, she sat down on the sofa with it. When I went to bed she was still there, feet tucked in the crack between the cushions against the evening chill.

  Sunday, she was there again, this time with a hefty hardcover novel she’d once said was the reason people invented movies. I thought she’d thrown all her college books away, but one by one they reappeared. She read every evening, long legs folded inside her caftan. She was all angles again, sharp corners and switchbacks, hollows where once hills might have been. My own body had become unwieldy. I had dreams where my legs grew so long they snapped at the knees when I tried to walk. I made do with cut-offs and bare feet. I could’ve walked around naked, for all Mom would’ve noticed. She could sit that way for hours, lingering over pages like they were fabric swatches and she just couldn’t decide. When the college books ran out, she went to the library downtown. The only thing piled higher than dirty dishes in our house were books. She was soaking it all up like a sponge, which was more than I could say for the actual sponge. Mom’s housekeeping had become increasingly sporadic since Dad left, but lately her neglect had vigour, a sense of purpose. “Appliances are the backbone of the domestic industrial complex,” she said when I lifted my eyebrows at the state of the kitchen, the island of dirty dishes, the fields of toast moulding on countertops. The mound of coffee filters in the garbage was a tiny Krakatoa waiting to happen.

  “Housewife,” she told me, “is just another word for indentured servant.”

  “What’s another word for dysentery?” I said.

  Our neighbours’ prim lawns, conspicuously clean cars, mailboxes decorated with painted wood flowers—Mom glowered at these things as if observing the rituals of some barbaric tribe. “Those garbage cans probably cost more than I make in a week,” she said. “They’re for holding garbage, for Christ’s sake.”

  Our house was next. Mom hated the wallpaper, the carpeting, the artwork, the tablecloths. Oh, the tablecloths! The abomination! Objectionable items were put out with the weekly trash. A small footstool, a box of fringed hand towels, the guest soaps we hadn’t been allowed to use, the iced-tea spoons. “What do we need with iced-tea spoons? Is the Queen going to drop by for Hamburger Helper?” The nautical watercolour that had hung in her bedroom for years, the hand-knotted rug we weren’t supposed to walk on, the sheers, the phone table. “A phone needs its own table? Well, la-de-da.”

  The kitchen was left alone only because she so rarely went in there anymore. Same for my room. The rest of the house Mom scrutinized with the diligence of a minesweeper. “Such clutter,” she said, admiring the growing pile at the curb. “Such waste.” She thought this was a great success, this stripping away of the things she once loved.

  It made her no happier. Every morning, she got into the Buick in her practical black slacks, hair pulled back in a tidy French twist, looking like someone on her way to a tax audit. There she goes, I’d think, turning the world on with her smile. I was glad for the reprieve, but not for long. Within minutes the relief would give way to disquiet. The house was too empty. There was too much space, shadowy indents where lamps and chairs used to be. She’d agonized for months over the fabric of those chairs.

  I would invent reasons to call her at the hospital. I couldn’t find the can opener. I’d lost my keys. “Now what?” she’d say instead of hello. Evenings were okay. I could watch her, camped out on the sofa, nose in some book. But at night it hovered over me in the dark, this sense that something was missing or misplaced. It sat on my chest and whispered in my ears. It wasn’t the house she was stripping away. Waking every few hours, I’d creep down the hall and press my ear to Mom’s door until I was sure she was still there on the other side.

  One night, ear pressed against pine, all I heard was the blood pumping through me. I opened the door one inch, then another, until I saw the empty bed. The rumpled sheets did not reassure me—she’d stopped making her bed long ago. I hurried through the house, throwing open doors and finding only more emptiness. In the living room, I saw the half-drunk bottle of red wine left just inside the open sliding door. I scanned the yard. It took a minute for my eyes to catch hold of her standing in the doorway of the pool house. Her caftan fluttered around her. An empty wine glass dangled from one slack hand, the swooping tip of her cigarette in the other, a lightning bug in the dark. The cigarette disappeared inside the pool house. Mom followed.

  I could hear her moving things around. I didn’t know what she was doing in there, but I knew it couldn’t end well. Did she notice what was gone, the many small flammable objects that could be easily ferried to vacant lots at dusk and not be missed?

  After a minute, Mom stepped back out onto the grass. Her placid face was lit up bright as the moon overhead.

  I couldn’t see what she’d lit, but I could see the flames lapping eagerly at the air. Whatever it was burned furiously. A few more hot seconds and there would be no stopping it. Everything in that pool house was as dry as moth wings. I su
ppose I should have warned her or called out in alarm, but I didn’t feel alarmed. Memories of the fire I’d set—when I let myself remember it—always brought with them the purest disbelief and wonder for simply, remarkably, being something that I had done. One moment I was a nice kid, a normal kid, someone you might like well enough but hardly think about, the next I was someone you would not say those things about at all. So I stood at the sliding door, watching quietly. If I felt anything it was curiosity. If I was a pyro freak, maybe it was in my genes.

  At last Mom reached into the pool house and pulled out a box. For a few seconds it blazed gloriously above her head like an Olympic torch. She stood tall, hoisted it a few inches higher, and pitched it into the deep end, where it bobbed a few times, sizzling loudly, before sinking, unceremoniously, to the bottom of the pool. Seconds later, one of Dad’s oxford shirts swelled to the surface like a giant jellyfish. Mom lit a fresh cigarette, reached for the pool skimmer, and wrestled the shirt back under water. I went back to bed and slept through the sunrise for the first time in days. What can I say except that it’s reassuring to realize you aren’t the only mental person in your family.

  The next morning, I found Mom standing at the sliding door, drinking coffee and staring at the pool. As I joined her, I saw the box still crouched at the bottom of the deep end. Dad’s shirt had gotten tangled in the gutter. It waved its arms in the water like a drowning man. She turned her back to it.

  “Let’s do something,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere. Wouldn’t that be fun?” She made herself smile.

  “Where do you want to go?” I said.

  “Anywhere but here.”

  Finally, something we could agree on.

  The Buick expelled suffocating gusts of volcanic air when we opened its doors. We rolled down all the windows, laid beach towels on the seats, and tried not to think about the heat. We drove to the new McDonald’s and ordered ice cream cones through the drive-thru window. That was as far as our planning went. After that, we let the green lights guide us, dripping chocolate everywhere, glad for simple things like napkins and a breeze. At first the radio did the talking for us. Soon we were singing along. We tipped our melting cones together like glasses of champagne, grinning our chocolate grins.

  These drives became our thing. When we’d had enough of summer’s heat, of the television’s war, we jumped in the Buick and drove. Mom would toss her pumps in the back seat and drive in bare feet. I’d stick mine out the window and let the wind tickle my toes. We cruised by the new golf course being built into the hills. We zipped past the old mall coming down, the new mall going up. We zigzagged, circled, doubled back. Hamburger wrappers rustled in the footwells. Wads of used napkins flowered from the door pockets. You’d think somebody lived in that car. Getting low on gas was a sign of accomplishment. Mom called it clearing out the cobwebs, which made us smile because the actual cobwebs in our house remained perfectly intact.

  Mom decided it was time I learned to drive. I must have ground that gearbox nearly smooth in those first few days, but she only put her hand over mine as I steered and said, “Transmissions cost money. Try not to drive us into the poor-house.” Her teaching method consisted of watching for stray dogs and police cars while I skulked around back roads, hands strangling the wheel. Sometimes I’d glance over and she’d have her eyes closed. Cigarettes found their way to her mouth by habit.

  “You’re not watching,” I said. “I could drive us off a cliff.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  Her faith in me made me nervous, as undeserved faith always does, but soon enough I was zinging down the asphalt, the radio powering my right foot.

  “If we kept north we’d reach the redwoods,” she said one afternoon. “They’re so tall, you get vertigo just looking up at them. If you cut down a redwood, it would have a thousand rings.”

  “We could go there,” I said.

  “Sure we could. We can do whatever we want.”

  “We could go somewhere cold. Alaska or Canada.”

  “Not Canada,” she said.

  “You don’t miss it?”

  “Now and then, I suppose.” She took a long, thinking drag. “Everything seems better from far away.”

  I tried to imagine snow-capped mountain peaks reflected in ice-blue lakes, but the world on the other side of the windshield was red and orange, a landscape of fires and earthquakes that made you hot just looking at it. Mom leaned her head against her door and shut her eyes again. Across the country, kids were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Middle-aged women were swapping their tennis pros for tantric gurus. Californian ashrams were full of them. But we weren’t going anywhere. No matter how long we drove, we always ended up back where we’d started.

  Near the canal, traffic barely crawled. Heads poked out of windows, necks stretched, trying for a glimpse of something. Kids in back seats pulled faces at the people behind them. The guy behind us leaned on his horn. We were sweating through our towels by the time we reached the bridge. A crowd had gathered along the railing, everyone peering down. A policeman stood in the road up ahead, gesturing with white-gloved hands, a whistle in his mouth.

  “Don’t stop,” Mom said, sitting up straight. “You don’t have a licence.”

  “We’re Bonnie and Clyde now?”

  But the policeman hardly glanced at me as he waved me to the shoulder. I parked behind the row of cars, and we put on our shoes and walked over to see what was going on.

  “It’s awful,” a woman was saying. “I want to cry. I do.”

  “It’s unsanitary, is what it is,” the man beside her said.

  “Do you have to be like that?”

  “Now, don’t go getting all emotional. It happens every summer. That’s what the grates are for.”

  “Is it a deer?” Mom said.

  The man turned and took in how pretty she was right then with her hair back in a messy braid, her caftan waving around her like some exotic flag. “You ladies don’t want to see this,” he said.

  “Oh, now you’re concerned for the fairer sex,” the woman said. He sighed, tipped his hat, and followed her back to their car.

  We took their places along the bridge rail. Men in green overalls were piled on the grate below, reaching and grabbing for something, trying to get hold. A few stood back, wiping their brows and shaking their heads. A construction truck idled at the edge of the canal, its yellow claw hovering over the water, waiting. “This isn’t going to work,” one of the men shouted.

  “Got any better ideas?” another shouted back.

  “It’s the thirst,” the old man beside me said. “They wander off from the herd, looking for water. They go crazy, I guess. I saw it happen once. I was about your age. That was a real heat wave. We fried eggs on the sidewalk. That deer just climbed up and walked in, like it was getting into a bath.”

  Below us, the men untangled themselves and scuttled back. “Oh hell,” the old man said.

  Her long brown legs were bent at impossible angles. A bulging black eye stared up at us. I covered my face with my hands.

  “She’s so beautiful,” Mom said quietly.

  “Don’t look,” I said.

  “Someone has to.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Seconds later, I heard the unmistakable whine of a chainsaw. Mom grabbed my elbow and we hurried back to the car. We nearly ran. I was glad when she got behind the wheel. I kept seeing that black eye, like the sun’s bright orb burned onto the insides of your lids. “You’d better believe we’re leaving,” she told the policeman and he stepped aside to let us by. She drove fast, paying no mind to speed limits or stop signs. For the air, she said. “Sometimes I just can’t breathe in this place.”

  —

  That was the last time we went driving. Gas was too expensive, Mom said. It was too damned hot. The Buick would bust a gasket, or she would.

  “How am I supposed to get my licence if I don’t prac
tise?”

  “You have somewhere important to go?”

  Afternoons, I sat on the front lawn, memorizing the booklet I’d gotten from the DMV and waiting for her and the Buick to get home. She’d usually let me take a few turns around the block by myself while she sat on the step and smoked. When I got tired of studying, I’d watch ants carrying bits of leaves through the grass. I’d lay my hand in their path, but it wouldn’t stop them. They’d marched up and onward, unfazed by this mountain that had magically appeared.

  This is what I was doing when a brown station wagon slammed to a stop in the middle of the street and Carol’s face popped up in the driver’s window. I ran over, surprised by how happy I was to see her. It was refreshing to miss someone who actually came back.

  “How was camp?” I said.

  “Hell on earth. Come on. I need to show you something.” She unlocked the passenger door and I got in.

  “Since when do you drive?” I said.

  Carol let go of the brake and we lurched forward. “I’m sixteen, aren’t I?”

  Sixteen or not, Carol could barely see over the steering wheel even with a Bible and a pillow under her. We inched down the street slower than those ants. She took a right turn, then two more. “I’m not so good with lefts,” she said.

  Carol followed the canal all the way to the other side of town. At our speed it took twice as long as it should have, but that was fine by me. Finally, she pulled into the parking lot of a small shopping plaza. She parked in front of a doctor’s office and turned off the engine. There was a pet shop on one side and a beauty parlour on the other, the kind that catered to old ladies who still called it that.

  “This is what you needed to show me? I’ve seen mini-malls before.”

  “It’s not a mall,” Carol said. “It’s my destiny.” She gripped the wheel with both hands and leaned forward, peering through the windshield at the doctor’s office. “Robin, do you know what Roe versus Wade is?”