Woman Enters Left
Page 7
Supper: Sandwiches (again).
Shipway’s Tourist Camp
50¢
Gasoline
73¢
Parson’s Vigor Tonic
78¢
Aspirin tablets
98¢
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 12, 1926
Another day of hills and sheeting rain. Another day of Maryland. E’s had to get out twice in galoshes and slicker to push us out of mud. She told me all the jokes she could think of to keep my nerves steady. (Did you hear the one about the showgirl and the trombone?) So much rain it’s been snaking in under the flapping side curtains. The bologna sandwiches I’d made in the morning were so drenched we lost our appetites.
Between the ups and downs and stops to stretch my fingers, only made it as far as Flintstone today. Campground is a stew of mud, but they had provisions. E’s limping, but won’t say a word about it.
Tuesday
Sore ankle and drowning rain. Wet socks. Too many sandwiches. Parson’s Vigor Tonic hardly helping.
Wish I was back at home, tucked into the easy chair with A.L. and a pair of books. Would even let her read a Western.
Feeling almost fragile today. A bolt of lightning and I might fall. If it weren’t for F., I would.
Supper: Peanut butter, two spoons.
Hotel Auld, 1 night (European plan)
$2.00
Gasoline
$1.50
Peanut butter, tin
25¢
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 13, 1926
Woke to a steady leak straight onto my left foot. As exhausted as E was yesterday, I don’t think she slept a wink. She looks awful this morning. I saw her swallow a palmful of aspirin with her mug of cold coffee. Packed all of our soggy things up as best I could while she tried (and failed) to beg a plate of something hot. After a while we gave up and ate plain bread, quickly, before it got wet. As I tied down the roll of canvas tent, she sat on the running board wrapped in a slicker, tapping a box of Sweet Caporals against the heel of her hand. I’ve never seen her smoke, not once. I wonder what else I’d missed over the past seven years.
Later
Stopped for lunch and a stretch, though it was too drenched outside to leave the flivver. We ate peanut butter sandwiches and pickles hunched in the steamy car. We haven’t dried from last night and it’s awful in here, everything damp and clammy. I hung my socks on the back of the seat. The car smells like a sodden sheep.
Can’t see much through the side window flaps, but what I can see is pretty. Everything soft and blurred, like a Monet landscape. Lots of green and brown, spots of reds and yellows where tulips are popping up. I’m sure Pennsylvania has much to offer apart from rain and twisting roads. E kept exclaiming as we drove all morning. I wouldn’t look anywhere but straight ahead.
Later
We rolled down a hill, backward, and into a tree.
I bumped my head, but poor E! With a shriek, she fell straight out the door into the rain. I ignored my throbbing head and crawled out after her. She was sprawled in a puddle, shaking like a kitten, but unhurt. I heaved her up—of course she was limping again—and put her behind the wheel to steer while I pushed the flivver back onto the road. It started rolling forward and I dove into the front door just before it picked up speed. E slid over and let me take the wheel. She sniffled all the way to Lincoln Hill.
The camp here was just as soupy as last night’s. Mud clinging to everything. When E opened the door, her blue hat, the one with the fan of feathers, blew out and landed in the sooty, waterlogged remnants of a campfire. I couldn’t help it, I started crying.
I feel silly about it now, of course, but at the time I didn’t know what else to do. I was wet, I was cold, I was sore, and this whole thing seemed ridiculous. I told her I was sorry, that if it wasn’t for me and my overloaded Model T she could be back at home in Newark right now, warm and dry and with a perfectly intact hat.
She stomped through the puddles to retrieve the hat. I insisted, she said. You had no choice. Despite the galoshes, she was muddy up to her knees. Anyway, what’s back there? An empty house.
We sacrificed a proper dinner in favor of a hotel room a few miles back. I spread our wet skirts and blankets to dry while she rinsed out our socks in the bathroom. Sitting on the bed in two pairs of my Chinese pajamas, we ate peanut butter directly from the tin. She fell asleep first, curled up on one-half of the bed. I waited until she started quietly snoring, on the pretense of writing this all down. But now that she’s asleep, it’s my turn. There may not be a separate tent, but the room has a rug. She doesn’t have to know.
Wednesday
NO RAIN ALL DAY. First day I’ve woken up with dry eyes. Hard to wake up otherwise with a rainbow hanging over the town.
F. left me alone this afternoon. Struck me just how alone I am. C. and A.L. gone. Am going after them, but what if they don’t want to come back?
Supper: You’ve guessed it. Sandwiches.
National Trail Camp
25¢
Gasoline
44¢
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 14, 1926
We took advantage of the sunshine and stopped early today, deciding that our damp canvas could really do with a day drying out in the sun. E insisted on setting up the campsite, so I left her there and drove in to Wheeling. It was a big enough city that I found a place to buy a second tent, folding aluminum cot, and extra set of bedding. The way E limped every morning, I knew her makeshift bed in the backseat wasn’t doing her any favors.
I also bought her a surprise. In the evenings, when I’m scribbling away in this notebook, E’s just so quiet that I wonder what else she’d rather be doing. I asked her once, whether she spent her evenings reading magazines, doing crossword puzzles, playing solitaire. She just shrugged. Cleaning up the supper dishes, planning tomorrow’s menu. Tucking AL into bed with a song.
I knew that couldn’t be all. I knew Eth was more than a mother and housewife. Supper menus and lullabies? Once she’d been the most interesting girl on the block. She painted, she swore, she mimicked, she sang like Fay Templeton. She danced the cakewalk as well as any vaudeville performer. No one could resist her energy. She’d step from her front door and light up the street like a Roman candle.
That’s why I convinced her to take a job with me at the radium company during the war, painting watch dials. She’d sing while we all worked and tell the most awful jokes. She was effervescent. Where did that all go? Marriage must be a more effective damper than I thought.
So I bought her a surprise. It isn’t much. Maybe silly, even. I bought her a paint set, one of those kids’ sets in an aluminum tin covered with bright yellow stars. Maybe she’ll laugh, maybe she’ll put it in her suitcase and never take it out, but maybe, just maybe, it’ll remind her of who she used to be. Maybe it’ll remind her of herself.
Thursday
Reread what I wrote yesterday. It’s true, maybe C. won’t ever come back. Maybe I’ll be the divorcée, the woman everyone avoids. Maybe I’ll never have answers.
F. gave me a paint set. A little gesture, and maybe she didn’t mean much by it, but it made me smile, really smile. I keep thinking of myself as “discarded wife” or “unneeded mother,” a woman suddenly out of a job, when all along she still sees me as just Ethel.
Supper: REAL FOOD to strengthen our blood. Ham, gravy, baked potatoes, pudding. F. in ecstatics.
Camp Summerford
25¢
Gasoline
$1.60
Eggs
30¢
Milk, pt
10¢
Butter, 1 lb
49¢
Flour
6¢
White vinegar
11¢
Mazola oil, qt
47¢
Hershey’s bars, 3
15¢
Potatoes, 8 lb
25¢<
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Navy beans
9¢
Kidney beans
11¢
Rice
15¢
Ham, 4.8 lbs
84¢
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 15, 1926
Ethel bought eggs from the camp store and boiled them up in the coffeepot. I really should get an actual pot at some point if she’s going to keep cooking things like eggs. She said they were to give us energy to tackle Ohio. The men at the next campsite, seasoned travelers, nodded sagely and said that one needed something to get through Ohio.
Now that we have the second tent, I should, for posterity’s sake, capture on page this little campsite of ours. I’m rather proud of it.
The two canvas tents are low lean-tos that tie to the top of the car. We use the car, sandwiched between each tent, as a sort of dressing room, and then slip out the two doors into our own “bedrooms.” In each tent is a folding aluminum cot, a stack of blankets, and an electric lantern. We don’t have much else apart from a pair of camp stools, which, around the fire, make up both parlor and dining room. We eat off tin plates on our laps. A washbasin for both dishes and laundry. Our little kitchen is nothing more than a folding cooking grate with detachable oven and windshield, frying pan with a foldable handle, and the coffeepot. They all came together, helpfully, in a single kit. E’s been eyeing the frying pan. I wonder if she can make bacon.
Later
E asked me to drop her by the grocery in town while I went ahead to set up at the auto camp. Said she wanted to get provisions. We have plenty of bread and bologna and pickles, a full can of coffee, and a little peanut butter, so I’m not sure what else we need.
I thought maybe she’d come back with something lively like jam to go with our peanut butter, but she returned staggering under a bottle crate with an eight-pound sack of potatoes dangling from one hand. She didn’t show me what all she bought, but shooed me and my notebook away to speculate.
Later
Oh, a real supper tonight! Sliced ham fried up nice and crisp on the edges, with a little pan gravy. Potatoes baked in the coals and served with mounds of butter. And if that wasn’t enough, a little pot of chocolate pudding! E fussed around our makeshift dining table (really, the lid of the food box, balanced on a stump) and “apologized” that it wasn’t much, but the best she could do on short notice. I saw new pots and pans clustered around the fire and blushed to think what E must’ve been thinking of my endless stream of cold sandwiches.
I ate and ate until my stomach hurt. I don’t know what I did to deserve a proper meal (and warm pudding!), but I won’t complain, not a bit.
As we washed up the pans, I spotted another new addition to the campsite. A scrap of wood, torn from the side of a crate and rubbed smooth, was propped up in the front window of the flivver. On it, in cheery block letters, was painted “Home, Sweet Home.”
It almost feels that way.
Friday
Sunny. F. woke up just as bright. More of Ohio today, which would dampen anyone’s mood. Planned a little surprise for lunch.
Supper: Baked beans and ham. Somewhere between there and here, F. lost her appetite.
McDonald’s Camp
40¢
Gasoline
$1.41
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 16, 1926
Just when I was getting tired of Ohio (and it’s only noon; says something about the state), E called for a lunch break and pulled out such a spread. Ham sandwiches. Potato salad made with one of those hard-boiled eggs and a dill pickle, chopped fine. She even had warm coffee in a towel-wrapped jar. She spread out a blanket over the grass at the side of the road and laid it all out. It was much more elegant than my usual peanut butter sandwiches eaten hunched in the front seat. She even pulled a sprig of blossoms from a cherry tree and dropped it in the center of the blanket. It was so sweet—I’m not sure anyone had ever been that sweet to me—that I blurted out, It’s like you’re taking me on a picnic.
I immediately blushed and she got quiet. Picnics were for sweethearts and families. Carl had probably taken her on dozens of them. She divided up the potato salad and wiped off the spoon while I wondered why I’d spoken without thinking. Especially when I’d spent my life being so very careful.
Though the spread deserved more, I ate quickly. I just wanted to be back on the road again, where I could blame the silence on concentration.
As E shook out the blanket and rinsed off the forks and plates, I stole a moment to write this all down. Somehow, seeing it reduced to nothing more than words makes me feel better.
Later
We were only a few miles down the road when she said, Carl never took me on a picnic. It broke the silence. Not never, not even when you were courting? I asked. I didn’t remember any courting with them, no dances or nickelodeons or walks along the boardwalk. My eyes were on the road, but, from the corner of my eye, I saw a little shrug. Maybe she didn’t remember any courting either.
It had all seemed so sudden, as I recalled. One minute Eth, Carl, and me were the Three Musketeers, loyal and inseparable. The war years were a quick tangle. Carl was Over There, Ethel and I here, at the dial-painting factory. I had her to myself. I didn’t anticipate his return as much as she did. But then he was back, she was happy, and, a handful of weeks later, they were engaged.
She’d brought the branch of cherry blossoms in the car and spun it between her palms. Remember when we’d see all of those couples at Branch Brook Park, she asked, sharing cold chicken and chocolate cake, sitting far too close? And we’d tell each other that, someday, we’d be old enough to be invited. Young men in boater hats, summer days, falling petals, first kisses. Do you remember imagining all that?
I remembered those walks with her through Branch Brook Park, those falling petals from the cherry trees, those girlish wishes, but the young men in boater hats, the picnics she talked about, they weren’t what I imagined. Not then and not now.
But ham sandwiches and potato salad, a plaid blanket on the side of an Ohio road, well, that was a start. At least I could pretend.
Saturday
Mothers are not above bribery. Have bought chocolate to ease the dreariness of the Midwest. Who ever knew it was so long? Mostly, though, bought it to see F. smile. Yesterday she was too quiet.
Supper: Bread and butter. F. didn’t eat.
Camp
25¢
Gasoline
$1.17
Hershey’s bars, 4
20¢
Restaurant lunch (steak, French fried potatoes, salad, biscuits, coffee)
40¢
Postage stamp
2¢
APRIL 17, 1926
Indiana today. Soon after we started driving we realized it wasn’t one bit more interesting than Ohio and resolved to do away with the whole state in one fell swoop. To help, E bought a stack of Hershey’s bars. Her rule: a square broken off for each town we passed. Halfway through we just gave up and ate the whole lot to cheer ourselves. Some things haven’t changed, she said. You still have a sweet tooth.
I have sore teeth more than anything these days. If she knew about the dentists, the appointments, the diagnoses…But I’m not going to say anything. Not to her, not to myself. I’m not going to spoil this golden little stretch of time.
Ethel was still talking about my sweet tooth, all of the sticks of penny candy and taffy and butterscotch drops we’d share on the walk home from school when we had a spare penny or two. Of course there was the time you lifted that chocolate bar, she added, and I was so startled I almost swerved off the road.
My single attempt at shoplifting and Ethel, of all people, had seen. We were eleven and I was instantly mortified at what I’d done. I couldn’t eat the chocolate, not with the newfound guilt it brought along, so I gave it to Eth as a gift the very next day. She never said a word about having seen me swipe it. You saw that? I asked, hoping she hadn’t, that it was really just
a lucky guess. She gave me a funny look then. I always paid attention to everything, Flor, she said. I never wanted to miss a single moment with you.
As I sat, my flush of embarrassment turning warmer at her words, she suddenly straightened and licked her thumb. You have just a bit of chocolate here. She reached across and I felt her thumb brush damp against the corner of my mouth. Without thinking, I turned my head. My lips were against her thumb. I could’ve whispered into it. I could’ve kissed it. She was looking straight at me. There, she said, and pulled her thumb back. Got it.
She’d likely wiped mouths dozens of times. For a mom, it was probably a gesture scarcely thought about. But I thought about it. Too much. I drove the rest of the way to Indianapolis still feeling her touch.
Later
Ethel’s finishing up her lunch. I told her I didn’t feel well and wanted to lie down in the car before we set off again. Really, I just lost my appetite.
We arrived in Indianapolis. She said she’d treat me to a real restaurant lunch and left me to find something that didn’t cost more than fifty cents. I found a place, with a fancy name and a lunch special on fried steaks. When E reappeared, it was with a small stack of envelopes and a hopeful expression. They wrote, she said, fanning them all out. Carl and AL, they wrote to me here.