We were both girls; that was exactly the problem.
I was shivering, but the water felt burning hot as I sat down in the washtub. My knees were up to my chin. She was behind me, very still and very quiet. I wondered what she was seeing, what she was thinking, what she was planning to do. Then I felt her fingers on the back of my neck, light as fairies. She gathered up my hair, twisting it, looping it over one shoulder. My back was bare and cold.
Oh, Flor, she exclaimed, oh, darling! The word shot through me like electricity. You’re so thin. With one of those fingers, she traced the ribs across my back. I can see every bone. One, two, three, four, from one side to the other. I held my breath. The bar of soap slid from my hands.
She reached around me for the soap and the floating sponge. I sat motionless while she soaped my back. A few times I heard an intake of breath, like she was going to say something, but she never did. The only conversation was between the sponge and the water.
She stopped, and I heard the sponge dripping. Other side? she asked softly. Turn around.
I didn’t move.
Don’t be silly, she said again, but maybe she wasn’t saying it to me.
I thought about pulling away, like I had all those times before, like every time she mentioned picnics or tents or whatnot. Maybe it was the lingering fever, maybe the morphine, maybe the fact that she’d looked at me from bottom to top, but I didn’t pull away, not this time. Instead I got to my knees and I turned around. This time, it was her breath held.
I wondered what she was seeing. I wondered what she was thinking, seeing me with my hair hanging tangled over my bare chest.
Then she leaned forward and pushed my hair back.
There was a second where she was close enough for me to kiss her. Close enough for her to kiss me. Maybe she would. She was looking me straight in the eyes. She bit her lower lip and then she glanced down. Then glanced away. Like she couldn’t find a safe place for her eyes.
She was the one who pulled away this time. I’m sorry, she said, I shouldn’t have…I just…Well, you can manage. She was still holding the wet sponge. I only came to bring you a towel.
She left, and I let the water in the washtub grow cold.
Friday
Learn to drive.
Wear trousers.
Follow byways.
See sights.
Take photos.
Watch the sun set.
Eat chocolate for breakfast.
And lunch.
And dinner.
Keep driving past Nevada.
Supper: Buttered corn and tomatoes over rice.
Camp
15¢
Gasoline
60¢
Rice
18¢
Onions
12¢
Tomatoes, two No. 2 cans
15¢
Corn, two No. 2 cans
24¢
Tomato sauce, can
13¢
May 14, 1926
When I woke, E was sitting out by the fire. It was how I left her last night. I wondered if she’d moved since. She was lost in thought, the way I usually was over a blank notebook page. I almost didn’t want to disturb her.
But she spotted me and poured out a cup of coffee. Looking far too serious, she said, We need to talk.
No good has ever followed the uttering of those four words, I can guarantee that. If Carl had waited for her to come home instead of leaving a note behind, he probably would’ve started with We need to talk.
My palms went sweaty. I wasn’t awake enough for this. It was the bath, that silly bath. Why had she come into the tent yesterday? Why had I let her?
Or maybe it had been something else. A hundred little somethings that slipped out over the past month, unplanned. Sitting too close. Watching her walk away. Breathing an I love you in my sleep. What had she noticed?
A We need to talk and I was suddenly sure that this was the end. That she’d leave me. Take the train, hitchhike, walk all the way to Nevada if she had to. Anything to avoid me after what happened yesterday.
So I blurted out, I’m sorry, blurted it out quickly to interrupt whatever it was she was going to say. I wasn’t one for getting last words in, but I wanted my apology, for everything, to be it.
She looked up from the pot of coffee. For what?
For…And what could I say?
She tucked her hair back under her head scarf. Anyway, I’m the one who should apologize. I’ve been a miserable traveling companion. Though I didn’t agree, I let her recite a litany of worries. The car. The roads. Our dwindling bank. Her anemia. Each and every dark campsite. AL. Carl. Carl. Carl. And now, she said, the radium. She was quiet for a long moment, fiddling with her scarf. I don’t want to worry anymore, Flor. I want to live.
I understood. Oh, did I. I set off thinking I was going off to die. Instead I’d spent the past five weeks feeling more alive than I had in years. More than I ever had in my life.
She read me a list she’d made in her budget book, of all the things she wanted to do. Eat chocolate. Wear trousers like explorers. Sightsee and take pictures, like we should’ve been doing all along.
Stay together.
Later
We only drove a little today. E wanted to show off her skills behind the wheel and I was content to sit in the passenger seat and actually watch the passing landscape.
At the campsite that afternoon, I washed my hair; I never did yesterday. I filled the basin halfway and washed it out by the fire, in my blouse and knickers. E avoided the whole operation. She walked to the grocery store and didn’t come back until I was drying my hair by the fire. You should put your hair up, she said as she unpacked her paper bag.
By unspoken agreement, the campfire had always been our sitting room, a place to slip off our shoes and unpin our hair. I liked letting down its weight at the end of the day. Especially now, with this new pink scar on the side of my face. Why? I asked.
She stacked cans in our food box. Because you’re sitting there with your hair all around your shoulders like Botticelli’s Venus and how can anyone get anything done?
No one had ever compared me to a painting and it made my heart beat faster. Oh, no one’s looking anyway.
But she turned from the food box. I’ve got it, she said. Let’s bob our hair.
Right now? I asked.
Yes.
And so we did.
Saturday
With my new haircut, I’m a different person. I drive fast. I roll up my sleeves. I drank my coffee black this morning. I might go all the way to California. I just might.
Supper: Meatballs in tomato sauce.
Camp
50¢
Gasoline
$2.28
Ground beef, on special
10¢/lb
May 15, 1926
Marvelous roads today. Straight and, if you can believe it, even paved in some sections! We followed along the Arkansas River for much of the way. Farms and fields flecked green stretched on the other side of the road. We stopped for a picnic (we’re back to frugal peanut butter sandwiches again) and E made a daisy chain for me to wear. She had names for all the flowers—bitterweed and black-eyed Susan and I don’t remember what else—but there was one, peachy pink with little leaves, that she couldn’t identify. I’ll call it a “Florrie,” she said, tying a posy together with a piece of braided grass. Long-stemmed and beautiful. I can’t tell when she’s teasing anymore.
Later
Colorado!
Sunday
I didn’t realize I’d love driving this much. Maybe it’s the countryside stretched through the front windshield. Maybe it’s the freedom I feel behind the wheel, like I can go anywhere or do anything. Maybe it’s the company right next to me.
Supper: Buttered macaroni.
Mountain View Camp
25¢
Gasoline
$2.50
May 16, 1926
“And where the cowboy galloped on his wild
and untamed broncho, the rubber tires of the ubiquitous automobile glide smoothly by.” (quote from our little National Old Trails Road map book)
First glimpse of the Rocky Mountains! They’re off in the distance, but better than the flat middle of the country we’ve been driving through so far. Of course we got out of the car and took pictures of each other with that little sweep of mountains far behind.
Farms are giving way to ranches. Wire fences, long-horned cattle, the occasional browned, watchful cowboy, riding the line around his herd.
Monday
We found the most beautiful spot in the world. Just ours. Every now and again I forget about what’s waiting for me in Nevada, and I wish every day could be like this.
Supper: One pocket-warm chocolate bar, broken in two.
Gasoline
80¢
Hershey’s bar
5¢
May 17, 1926
New Mexico!
Saw my first mesa.
Later
On the advice of another tourist, we turned off the road just after Raton and headed east to the Capulin Volcano. We were told it was magnificent, a single peak rising green in the middle of a prairie. Adventure? I asked E and she reached over to squeeze my hand in reply. We’ll see where this takes us!
Later
My camera rides on my lap. I’ve made E stop every half-mile or so to capture these bits of countryside on film. Dry lake beds, lava-capped mesas, little green creeks, herds of antelopes bunched on the plain.
Later
Stopped in Folsom to fill up our water cans at the train yard. Mentioned to an old man where we were headed. He asked if the fellows who told us about driving up the side of the volcano were selling moonshine. I wonder what that was all about.
Later
Nearly cheated the radium in our bones! Not once, not twice, but three times we teetered on the edge of nothingness. Magnificent? More like steep, terrifying, nearly impassable. A narrow little track of a road winding its way up MORE THAN A THOUSAND FEET. Really. If we weren’t meant to stay on flat ground, God would have given us hooves like mountain goats.
If we’d known, we probably would’ve stayed on the National Old Trails Road, without bothering about this detour. There was certainly nobody else driving up. We learned later that this road was brand-new, drawn into the side of the volcano by the old caretaker, his mules, and a dragged piece of lumber. And to this we trusted our poor little Lizzie?
But we squared our shoulders and headed up the road. More than once I had to get out and push to keep us from rolling backward. More than once I had to bite off a curse when E turned my way. Because her eyes were shining like she was an explorer on the tip of the world.
The road didn’t go all the way up. We had to abandon our poor, wheezing car and go the rest of the way on foot.
But we reached the rim, we caught our breath, and we saw exactly why it was worth it. “Magnificent” was too insignificant. We stood impossibly high above the plain. I couldn’t see any antelopes. Couldn’t even see our car below. Just sky up to forever, trees angling down to the plain. The top of the volcano wasn’t flat, like I’d thought below, but indented, like someone had pushed a thumb into the top while it was still warm. A thumb a thousand feet wide, that is. The crater was as green and rolling as a valley, with cindery gray rock in the bottom.
The sun was just starting to set, yellow and pink and orange over the green of the plain spreading below. And we just stood breathless, watching the trees and the sky and the stars start to appear. At some point, Ethel’s hand slipped into mine. She didn’t let go.
Tuesday
I’ve gotten used to waking up alone. But today I woke up warm and safe and thinking I could get just as used to waking up with her by my side.
Supper: Oatmeal with raisins. Coffee.
Orchards Camp
50¢
Gasoline
$3.00
May 18, 1926
We spent the night up there on the rim of the crater, just stretched out on pine needles, covered over with our jackets. When we woke up with the first lights of morning, E was curled up along my side.
I wanted to move away. Well, I didn’t, but I should have wanted to move away. Instead I just lay still, listening to her breathe, trying not to do so myself. Birds sang and a spider crept across my stockinged foot, but I didn’t move an inch. Above, a red hawk soared.
I knew when she woke. I could hear the change in her breathing and she flexed her toes where they rested against my leg. She didn’t sit straight up, but lay curled a few minutes more. Good morning, I said softly, and she stirred then. She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Her face was flushed from sleep, her blouse unbuttoned at the neck, her hair dark over her eyes. I’m sorry, she said. You were just so comfortable and warm and I didn’t want to wake up.
Then don’t, I said.
Later
Headed back down the mountain (a dozen more pictures on my camera). E had me drive. She was quiet all morning, maybe still tired. After we made it to the bottom, she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until we made it back to Raton.
Later
Two hundred miles today! I’m exhausted. We had to stop for gasoline twice, no easy feat in this part of the country. Service stations are strung out like stars.
Wednesday
Am painting a picture for F., because she didn’t ask.
Supper: Baked beans, no bacon.
Camp Grants
50¢
Gasoline
$2.33
May 19, 1926
Today we drove by an Indian pueblo at Isleta. I’ve never seen anything like it. Adobe buildings crouched low together. Round stone ovens, like beehives, in front. Strings of bright red peppers hanging from the side of each building. Women with bright shawls and bangles, short skirts and white fringed boots. I didn’t know something so different could be right here in my very own country. Two thousand miles and a world away from Newark, New Jersey.
We stopped. Others were stopping too, all with guidebooks and cameras. Somehow it just felt wrong. As strange as it all was to my eyes, these were people going about their business. Cooking, hanging laundry, herding children in for late afternoon naps. They weren’t a tourist attraction; they were people. So I left my camera on the front seat. Watched from the window of the car.
Later that night, I almost regretted it. As much of an intrusion as it would’ve been, I wished I’d captured at least one little piece of the pueblo. But then E came around the campfire and handed me a paper. And right there, in smudges of watercolor, she’d captured what I hadn’t. Because, she said, I know you wanted to be a part of it.
Thursday
There’s too much to see. Even if we had a dozen lifetimes apiece, we couldn’t see it all or do it all. With the lifetimes the two of us were given, we don’t stand a chance.
How many more nights are left?
Supper: I forgot.
Gasoline
$1.97
May 20, 1926
Took a detour to a place called Inscription Rock. Centuries-old graffiti, all in Spanish. On the way there, we passed some place known as the Ice Caves, all carved out of old lava and volcanic ash. Hundreds of photos.
Later
The Continental Divide! E laughed and said she didn’t think it really existed outside of our history books. It was fairly anticlimactic, but the smile in her eyes made it all worthwhile.
Later
Arizona!
Later
I fell asleep in the passenger seat. Just listening to E hum and tap out a beat on the steering wheel. When I woke up, we weren’t at the campsite. We were parked on the side of the road. E sat outside on a water can, her sketchpad on her lap, painting the sunset falling over the rocks. The Painted Desert, she said when she saw me. I saw it on the map and, oh, I couldn’t resist. The rocks glowed in stripes of orange and yellow and red. I told her, I’m glad you didn’t.
That night we pulled out our co
ts and slept there under the stars.
Friday
Last night was just the stars, the sky, and us. Can’t bear to go back to those two tents.
Supper: Cold sandwiches and chocolate.
Grand Canyon National Park
free!
Gasoline
$2.75
May 21, 1926
E has been driving more and more. Not even looking left or right, but driving straight and sure. I wonder if she is so intent on getting to Nevada. She hasn’t stopped at any post offices in a while. She hasn’t stopped for any picnics.
This morning she was so quiet. Penny for your thoughts? I asked finally. Though, with our budget, better make it a two-for-one.
She didn’t answer straightaway. Nothing. Not much. Her gaze dipped. Just realizing something, she said. But maybe you’ve known it all along.
Later
After lunch, I drove. But E was so desperate to push on. When I said it was too much for me, she had me pull over and give her the wheel. She drove past Diablo Canyon and the Indian cliff dwellings. We ate supper as we drove, sandwiches that I slapped together from the passenger seat. The map helpfully pointed out side excursions and places to stop for a rest, but Ethel kept going.
Woman Enters Left Page 17