by W. S. Penn
As soon as we were past The Grapevine, mother explains, steering over the carcass of some nocturnal creature and making the wheels go thump, thump, it will be clear sailing all the way to Palo Alto. I can only hope she’s as right as the Franciscan Friars who stayed to the coast, their place names a day’s journey apart, leaving the central valley to be named by the heresiarchs, madmen, and immigrants.
Mother talks to the car and the cars of other drivers who zip past us, a habit I will inherit and recognize years later as, heading east into the Holland Tunnel, I curse and kibitz drivers from New Jersey. Mother tells me that she doesn’t want to move any more than I do because they had friends in the City of Angels. They were secure. In only two years, she says, father would have had full retirement from wherever it was he worked, and from then on, it would have been a matter merely of tending what they had acquired.
She says she’s glad to have her young man along for company; who knows, she adds, maybe it will be better for all of us in northern California. And then she says, “It means The Tall Tree,” and without a question or even a movement from me adds, “El Palo Alto. The Tall Tree … I wonder if there was only one tall tree? Or was it originally Los Palos Altos? Well … do you hear that noise, is that something wrong with the car?”
Acknowledging only the last question, I say, “No.”
“How far do you think Bakersfield is?” she asks as we pass a sign that reads “Bakersfield—32 miles.” “Do you think I should stop for gas in Bakersfield?”
I try to concentrate on the gray line of the horizon, drawing Palo Alto towards the car. Each time I focus in on the distance, the car begins to slew across the lines demarcating our lane.
“Mother,” I say, drawing her attention to the fact.
Mother’s vision is limited to the near distance. My concentrating on the far distance pulls the right side of the car ahead of the left. Were I to continue, despite what corrections she might make with the wheel, mother and I would begin travelling in a broad circle. From time to time, I am forced to look backward, focusing on what was behind me just to keep the car on the road.
Distance is doing what concentration might have done, making Marily and Tommy and Margaret into little more than symbols with voices. By the time mother and I reach Bakersfield, their voices will be too weak to penetrate the barrier of brown smog engulfing the city where men once spoke with the tongues of angels. My heart feels heavy, as though it’s packed with sawdust.
“You shouldn’t look backwards,” mother says with the authority of a Harlequin Romance. She presses the power brakes of the ’57 Rambler and skids slightly beside the gas pumps. Bakersfield.
“Can you fill the tank with regular?” mother asks. The gas jockey nods his head sideways at the driver’s window, his eyes riveted on the distance as though he has heard for the first time in his life the fading tap-tap of his distant drummer.
“It should take about three dollars’ worth, I guess. It’s half empty, but I don’t know how many gallons the tank holds, do you?” At $1.25 an hour, the attendant could care less. It takes him a month to save enough to buy more chrome for the chopped Harley leaning like an amputee on its kickstand in front of the station’s office.
“I don’t like to let the tank fall below halfway. My husband says it’s bad for the engine and on long trips you never know what’s going to happen. When you’re not going to be able to find a gas station.”
Her voice has a peculiar inflection, one which would better fit a small breed bitch in heat when confronted by a German shepherd. She always talks to supermarket clerks, A & W waitresses, gas station attendants, telling them whatever they might not know or care to know. In this case, there is a flirtatious and frightened edge to her voice. It is provoked by the size and gender and, more importantly, the race of this gas jockey. Mother has known Spanish men; this fellow isn’t what she would call Spanish. He is indubitably Mexican. Mother has a fine sense of distinction. Possibly I am misjudging her. Some of the fear may have been caused by the fact that the gas gauge had dropped measurably below the halfway mark before she found this station east of San Luis Obispo. And running out of gas in a strange place rates among mother’s top forty fears.
“You never know what might happen,” she has said, over and over, hunched over the wheel and searching the horizon for the sign of a station. For mother, every mile takes the worry and concentration of two. She imagines rapists, pillagers, and plunderers lurking behind manzanita bushes beside the road, just waiting for an opportunity to take advantage of a helpless woman and “her young man.” It was stupid.
It was never silly. Not then and not later. I was slow to see that all men were rapists to mother. It wasn’t until Caryl Chessman, who used red lights to stop single women on the roads at night, had been put down in San Quentin’s gas chamber, and mother had substituted her boss as the central character in her worried monologues, that I began to see what I had always suspected. Not until I was telling Sara Baites about mother did I begin to understand what I had seen. I was telling what had become my favorite anecdote about mother. “Mother,” I said, “fucked my father three times in her life.” It was either that or her three children were adopted. “And look what she got.”
“Did it ever occur to you,” Sara said, “that your mother married to avoid copulation?” If that was true, then father was the first rapist, not Caryl Chessman, and mother’s coyness with gas jockeys and grocery store clerks was her enactment of the rituals of a fourteen-year-old girl.
I was always a little slow, I guess.
“Will you show me how to check the oil?” mother says to the attendant. Daintily, making sure her skirt covers her calves, she gets out of the car. “My husband showed me how to do it before we left, but I don’t remember where the little stick thing is that tells you if you need to add oil.”
The jockey considers mother for a moment. Decides. He’ll check the oil because not checking it isn’t worth the trouble of listening to her. I know the look on his face. I’ve seen it on my father. I’ve seen my sisters trying to disguise it. I’ve seen it in mirrors and in the stainless reflections of toasters. As he leans in and releases the car hood, I give him my version of the look. He grunts. I climb out to get a soda.
The gas station looks like the one Edward Hopper made famous. Two old, round-topped pumps with large tin numbers inside windows that seemed always smoky or misted with condensation. On the sides are yellow bulbs in which a metal fan turns as the gas bubbles through on its way to the nozzle. Inside the wooden shack that serves as shelter from the elements as well as a commentary on life in that county, there’s a girl with skin the color of mesquite. In hip-hugger denims, cut-off T-shirt, and headband of silver conchas, she was a Mexican version of Gerri. She disdains looking at me. I put in coins, open the vertical door of the soda machine, and pull at the neck of a grape soda. The metal wedges that are supposed to release the bottle jam. I pull again, tearing the skin on my fingers on the bottle cap.
“Motherfucker,” I curse quietly, giving the machine a kick in the chrome.
Concha moves on rollers like the chair; she slides back, swinging those golden legs to the floor and slipping over beside me, next to the machine. I can feel the way she walks even though I don’t dare turn around because I’ve left off underpants in an effort to combat the heat of the long drive which mother is managing to make much, much longer.
“Chengado,” she mutters. “Ésta máquina es una puta.” Okay, I think. All right with me. Coolly, easily, she extends her hand towards me, palm up, and in a moment of perfect communication, I understand, reaching into my pocket and finding another dime. I drop the dime into her cupped palm like the dimes I used to drop in the church collection basket.
“What you want. Grep?”
I nod. Concha drops in my second dime, moves the coin return lever part-way down, saying, “Hold this.” Slapping the side of the machine like an indifferent lover, she reaches in to the bottles and grabs a grape and a root be
er simultaneously and deftly jerks them out. I don’t mention the fact that I’ve paid for her root beer as I stand in the doorway of the shack sipping my grape soda and trying not to look at her.
Screwing up my courage, I say, “Qué hora es?” What am I supposed to say? What’s a nice girl like you doing with a hog biker like that? She isn’t a nice girl. The fat lazily rolling over the top of her jeans as she sits there seems to say that while she isn’t nice, she’s easy—at least for the proto-simian outside.
“Trés y media.”
She isn’t even pretty, eyes too far apart, her face flat, high cheekbones curving into points around her mouth like a teardrop or gourd. Even to look at her has already cost me something. Girls like that may be easy; they’re never free. Still, that roll of fat speaks to me, hints to me that sleeping with this girl would be easier and more natural than with most of the girls you see walking around.
Three-thirty. We’ve been on the road since dawn and we’re only halfway there. If mother pushes it, we might make Palo Alto by tomorrow.
Mother is following the attendant around the car as he washes the windows, including the side mirror, and then begins to check the tire pressure. It’s odd the way mother can get someone like him to do everything but wash the car for her.
“I appreciate your doing all this,” I hear her say. “We’re going all the way to Palo Alto. El Palo Alto. Means the tall … but you know that, don’t you.” She giggles. “Moving. My husband has changed jobs. My children will go to new schools in the Fall.”
The attendant drags the air hose to another tire and sinks over his haunches, unscrewing the cap on the valve and testing the pressure with the pencil gauge mother has purchased for the journey.
“They all skipped a grade.” She is proud of this and oblivious to the blank look on the attendant’s face.
He’s wondering what’s so special about skipping a grade since he’s skipped several.
“Well. Half a grade, anyway. To tell the truth. The school years are different in Palo Alto. So they had to either skip half a grade or go back half a grade because they all started kindergarten early.” As mother starts the car and presses the button for first gear (she likes to shift through the automatic gears; it gives her a sense of control), she tips the guy a quarter. The expression on his face echoes what Concha called mother as she watched out the office’s window: “Cuños.” I am not certain, but from the look on his face, I can guess what cuños means. I have a long time to decipher his expression because there is a truck about half a mile down the road, coming toward us as we wait to pull out, and I know mother will wait until that truck docks in San Luis before risking merging onto the road.
The gas jockey stares at the quarter in his hand. As he begins to recede into the distance slowly, as mother punches her way through the gears, he lifts his hand as though offering a host to heaven. The middle finger suddenly sticks out from the rest of the hand as he waves goodbye to mother and me. Oh, Concha, watch out, I think. You’re in for it now.
12.
Mother has told the truth. I’ve been moved ahead half a grade in school. So had my sisters, once Pamela could be lured with Velveeta cheese out of her closet long enough to be tested, and once Elanna had gotten mother’s mother’s approval. With me, the problem hadn’t been to get me to sit for the Stanford Binet Intelligent Quotient Test, it had been to get me to pass.
“He’s a little slow,” my teacher said to the principal. They had checked my first score out with Dr. Bene, a descendant of Alfred Binet, himself.
“You cannot score zero,” Bene insisted, long-distance.
“He did,” the principal said.
“Everyone is guaranteed 200 points,” Bene said. “Even a master-sergeant in the U.S. Army can get two hundred points. Some of them score three hundred!”
Bene flew down from Stanford.
“He’s slow,” my teacher said, as Bene looked at the score sheets.
“Real slow,” Bene answered. “Exceptionally slow.” He sorted through the sheets. “The continental shelf will kiss Japan before this child learns to think,” Bene said. My teacher laughed. The principal, his hand on my shoulder, tried not to laugh but I could feel his torso quaking with contained humor.
They gave me the test again. “His sisters passed. Very high scores,” they said. His sisters. It seemed a little unfair to me to be compared to my sisters. They were older. And one of them had had all those years in the closets of the houses we lived in to polish her thinking while mine was still in the geological stage of being compressed by the weight of school.
“You can’t score minus fifty,” Bene said, again over the phone. He had returned to Stanford. He flew back again.
“I’ll administer the test, personally,” he said. He locked himself in a small room with me for three consecutive days. By the time we were finished, I knew how many punch holes there were in the acoustic tiling. And I knew how wonderful silence would be—if only Bene hadn’t been there.
“This one’s easy,” Bene would begin. “You know this one.”
He’d ask a question.
“But that answer isn’t one of the choices,” he would tell me. Over and over he told me. I felt sorry for him. Each time he said that, his voice climbed like my uncle’s light plane, and then, Bene regaining control, it dipped to the sonorous tones of the intellectual.
It was the middle of the second day. Asked a question, I gave my answer. “You’ve lost a coin purse on a baseball field,” Bene said. He showed me a diagram of a baseball diamond.
“I don’t have a coin purse.”
“Okay. Keys. Keys, then. You lost your keys.”
“To what?”
“To your house!” he shouted. “I don’t know. Your house. Or … or …”
My house key, the only key I carried, was chained around my neck inside my shirt. I drew it out and showed him. “I never lose it. Father would …”
“Pretend. Okay? Pretend you’ve lost it in the ballpark. You have to find it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You have to find it because your parents aren’t home. Your sisters have gone away on a visit. If you don’t find it, you’ll be locked out of the house.” (He ignored my asking whom my sisters were visiting.) “It’s raining, and you’ll be locked out of the house. Thunder and lightning. Heavy rain. Drenching rain. Lightning striking trees, telephone poles. Your parents won’t get home until very late at night. You’ve got to find those keys!”
“Okay,” I said. He was pretty worked up, so I went along with him. He sighed. Panted a moment, catching his breath.
“All right,” I said. I closed my eyes. Grandfather smiled, sort of.
“The keys could be anywhere.” He showed me the diagram again, zig-zagging his pencil around it randomly, without touching the paper. “Now how are you going to find it?”
“I’d …”
“Remember. Lightning,” he said. “Rain. Where would you start? Just mark where you’d start.”
“Here. Or here.” I marked the edge of the field, then put an X in the center, too.
He stared at the X in the diamond’s center longer than mother stares at the green lights in San Luis Obispo before driving on.
“How would you go, if you began here?” he said, pointing hopefully to the mark on the diamond’s edge.
“I’d see if I could walk around the edge of the diamond, spiralling in to the center.”
“What if you started here?” he asked. His voice seemed weak, tired.
“I’d try to spiral outward.”
“Draw it for me, will you?” I drew a spiral for him.
I just happened to say, “That’s how I’d do it, but …,” and he nearly leapt out of his chair.
“But what? What? Tell me.”
I considered whether what I was going to say had anything to do with the silence in the room. “But mother,” I said, “would start here and go back and forth across the field at intervals of two or three feet.”
“Draw it! Draw it for me?” He quickly sketched out a diamond on a clean pad of paper and I drew it for him. “That’s right!” he said. “That’s the right way to do it. That way, you cover all of the field. Logically, you would find your key for certain that way. Right?” I shrugged. “Do you see why that’s the right answer?” he said.
“You asked how I’d do it. Not how mother would do it.”
“You mean you’d still try to make a spiral, even though I’ve told you the other way is the right way?”
I nodded. He looked defeated, as though a god had just determined his fate and that fate was bad.
“Mother’s way isn’t any fun,” I said.
He was going to tell me that I wasn’t there to have fun but there to find the damn key. He was going to remind me of the thunder and lightning and rain.
“Mother would be just as soaked as I would be,” I said. “And what if I found the key right away, at the edge of the diamond?”
I didn’t know what Dr. Bene did with his test after the third day. There were rumors, though, of a frazzled man haunting the ivied halls of Stanford. Eventually, I imagined, the frazzled Bene would change his name; or everyone would forget it, as he metamorphosed from a researcher into a character.
Mother, it turned out, had a very high I.Q. Mother was very smart. I couldn’t help but admire her for it. Even years later, before she partly recovered from her years in electroshock therapy, when she would walk back and forth across the living room like someone trying to remember what it was she was looking for, despite her black and blue temples and the ghostly angularity of her face, mother had a gleam in her eyes that told me that she knew how the world worked. Even if she could not exactly tell me how that was.
13.
By the time mother noses the car down the grade north of San Luis, second gear has begun to go. Out on the highway, this doesn’t matter much, as long as mother maintains cruising speed. Fortunately, the road has become flat and fairly straight, curving only as it swings past towns like King City. King City looks like a mirage in the sunset, and I convince mother that she can make it all the way to Gilroy before stopping for gas again.