When the sun set and the night was rising, she pulled up to the Grand Canyon. All I could see was an impossible hole of darkness. Something seemed to go out of her when she pulled into the campsite, this site right there in the National Park, just moments away from the edge of the canyon.
When I came back from the bathhouse, she had the tent set up. Singular. She cut off any protests with a plaintive I’m beat. I could’ve offered to set up the second. Maybe I should’ve. But I saw the two cots inside, chastely separated, and I said, Sure. Okay. Fine. She smiled and yawned and crawled in without changing. The whole tent smelled like cocoanut. Besides, she said, as she drifted off to sleep, you snore so beautifully.
FRANCIE
Road trips are like life, aren’t they? Moving forward, but still finding time to stop and admire the scenery. Crossing your fingers that you won’t have to make a U-turn.
BERYL
You and your metaphors.
FRANCIE
I’m a writer. I have an excuse.
BERYL
Sometimes there are no U-turns. Some things we can’t ever go back to. Once you pass them, you pass them.
FRANCIE
Like New Jersey?
BERYL
Like all of those firsts. The first time you see the ocean. First time you see a movie. First heartbreak. First kiss?
FRANCIE
(quietly)
First kiss.
BERYL
Cal was mine. Did you know that?
(when there’s no answer)
Who was yours?
FRANCIE
Ask me again later.
—Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King
Chapter Fourteen
1952
Louise is done with brochures. She’s done with touring and sightseeing and leisurely hamburger lunches. This morning when she checks out of the motel, she spots a Lucite calendar between the tinsel on the front desk, one of those that you rotate each morning for the new date. It’s shaped like a roulette wheel.
Christmas is only days away and she knows it doesn’t much matter, that dates are only numbers on paper. It’ll be Christmas when she gets there, whatever the date. Dad will hold the fruitcake for her.
But it does matter. Somehow it does. In this messed-up tangle that her life has become, Christmas Eve is still there. Trees are being cut down, mistletoe hung, Santa’s list made and twice-checked. Things are almost normal.
She forgoes breakfast and hits the road. She has a map now, bought from a Phillips 66 in Winslow, Arizona. One night, over her hotel tumbler of whiskey, she traced out her route with an eye pencil, at least as far as Oklahoma, where the map cut off. It hadn’t been necessary. After thirteen years of memorizing scripts, she had the map in her head, clear as rain.
The skies are gray so she drives with the top of the Champ up. As she passes each town, she mentally kohls out each name. Newkirk, Tucumcari, San Jon. Then across a slice of Texas. Glenrio, Adrian, Vega. Lunch in Amarillo, a “super de-luxe ham sandwich” from the Woolworth’s lunch counter. The menu promises “You Will Like It.” She doesn’t.
By suppertime she’s made it across the Oklahoma border. But she keeps driving. Erick, Sayre, Elk City. Up and through country that winds flat and scrubby with brush. In Hinton Junction, she thinks about stopping, but the little town is dusty and quiet, so she drives on to El Reno, to a stuccoed motel stained pink by years of desert dust.
She finds a restaurant near the motel, a peeling place advertising the world’s best hamburgers on a cardboard sign in the window. Her stomach is growling after that ham sandwich that was anything but “de-luxe.” Of course she wants a hamburger.
It’s small inside, but bright. There isn’t room for much beyond a counter with a few stools and an ancient cash register at one end. As narrow as the counter is, someone has made room for a potted poinsettia and a crowd of cheerfully waving Gurley snowmen. A domed glass cover curves over a cream pie of some kind, a second over a thick chocolate cake. She slides onto a stool right by the cake and eyes it through the glass.
A waitress dressed in a limp pink dress pushes through the doors in the back. She’s older, maybe how old Louise’s mother would be, with gray curls and remnants of blue eye shadow in the crease above her eyes. She’s humming “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” around a wad of chewing gum. She doesn’t notice Louise.
“Catchy tune, isn’t it?” Louise says.
The waitress blinks. She blows a bubble and lets it pop as the door swings shut behind her. The place is deserted and she seems faintly disappointed to find someone sitting on a stool. “Sorry, lady, we’re closed.” She pushes the gum to her other cheek.
Louise rests her feet against the foot rail. “The sign says ‘Open.’ ”
The waitress sets a pile of folded cloth—maybe napkins or aprons or dish towels—on the end of the counter and shuffles over to the door. She flips the sign hanging on the glass door until the “Closed” points out to the street. “Not anymore.”
Louise is tired. Tired of motels and diners and surly waitresses. Tired of heat waves shimmering above roads, of legs sweating against vinyl, of smelling nothing but dust and asphalt. She’s drunk more cups of overboiled coffee than she can count and hasn’t had a semi-decent Manhattan in a thousand miles. She wants her Columbia Green living room, the percolator in her blue-tiled kitchen, the bed in her room, with Arnie breathing, sighing, pretending to sleep, right next to her.
But this waitress, with her faded lipstick and white lace-ups, is probably tired too. Louise looks again at the folded cloth on the counter. It’s a jacket and gloves.
“I don’t mean to keep you. Honest. I’ve just been driving all day and could do with a bite to eat.” Louise leans her elbows on the counter. “Even a slice of cake. Could I take it in a bit of waxed paper?”
The waitress sighs and removes an apron from a peg by the kitchen door. On the strap is pinned an enameled red poinsettia. “I don’t aim to let you go hungry, now.” She nudges open the kitchen door with a shoulder and hollers into the back. “Frankie! Come on out here.”
As she ties on the apron, a man comes through from the kitchen with a half-empty glass of beer and a copy of The Old Man and the Sea tucked under his arm.
“Frankie, we got one more.” She jerks her chin at Louise, perched on the counter stool.
Frankie just nods and takes a long swallow of his beer.
“Can I get one of those?” she asks.
It’s been years since she’s had a beer. Not since the days when she and Arnie got through the week with nothing but a package of hot dogs and a six-pack of Brew 102. They lived in a tiny apartment then, barely big enough for the Murphy bed and for Arnie’s typewriter. That single shared beer each evening, passed back and forth as they sat cross-legged on the bed going through scripts, it was practically champagne.
She shrugs out of her jersey jacket and unpins her hat. It’s a peach basket hat, covered all over with glossy brown feathers. When she sets it on the counter, it’s as if a flock of sparrows has flurried in for a rest. “I’d like a beer and one of those world-famous hamburgers.”
Frankie gives a hint of a smile and disappears into the kitchen. When he returns, it’s without his book, but his glass balances on a plate with sandwich fixings. He holds a pink ball of ground beef on a paper.
“You ever have a burger the way we cook them out here in El Reno?” The waitress, whose name tag says “Ruby,” asks as she fills up a glass.
“I didn’t know you cooked them any different here.”
Ruby grins and passes her the drink. “Something has to make them the world’s best, lady.”
The beer is pale yellow with the barest hint of foam on the top. Louise takes an experimental sip. It’s awful, but, come to think of it, she’s always thought about beer that way, even back when she split a can with Arn.
“No potato salad left,” Ruby says, sliding a plate out from a rack. “Coleslaw?”
“No,
no thank you.” Louise runs a finger around the damp outside of the glass. “Just the hamburger is fine.” She closes her eyes slightly, just enough to block out the chatty waitress. She hears the sizzle from Frankie’s griddle and smells onions frying.
Dishes clink and Ruby keeps talking. “People who drive this way, they know our hamburgers. That Steinbeck fellow, he even wrote about them.”
At this, Louise opens her eyes all the way. “John Steinbeck? The novelist?” It’s like he haunts the whole length of Route 66.
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He wrote that book all about the grapes and the fruit.” Ruby waves a hand. “I didn’t read it, but Frankie over here did. He was pleased as punch to see a hamburger shack like ours right there in the book.”
The hamburger in question, of both world and literary fame, slides across the counter on a white plate.
“Well?” Ruby asks. Both she and Frankie are watching expectantly.
The hamburger is flat and crispy, with onions cooked straight into the meat. It’s sharp with mustard, tangy with relish, sweet with the caramel-ey brown onions. Louise orders a second before she’s even halfway through the first and she watches over the counter as Frankie cooks it. A pink ball of meat is whacked flat with a spatula, then a pile of shaved onions are pressed straight in with the frying meat. A smear of pickle relish and of mustard, a steamed and buttered bun, and her mouth is watering. She finishes her beer while she waits for the second burger, and she takes Ruby up on the coleslaw offer.
A half hour later, she waddles out of the restaurant, three hamburgers heavier but only a dollar lighter. Somehow, in all of that, she feels closer to Steinbeck. She feels more a part of Route 66 than she has this whole trip.
Sometimes Louise thinks about The Grapes of Wrath and how things might have been different. She wasn’t the only hungry young actress in Hollywood scouring the book, memorizing Rose of Sharon’s few lines, wondering how to get a screen test. In the end, Dorris Bowdon was cast. She had no more credits to her name than Louise, but she was dating the screenwriter, and that’s how it goes.
And what had Dorris done with it? Gotten married, pregnant, and right out of the business. Louise would’ve killed for that part. Metaphorically speaking. For the chance to emote, to stagger, to cry on camera, to do just about anything other than sparkle and tap-dance. It could’ve been the first step on a path to something better. It could’ve been the role that set her up as a serious actress.
But instead she took the script that Arnie Bates pushed across the library table and went to that screen test. Because it was a job. Because, stranger though he was, he believed in her. And when they asked whether she could sing, whether she could tap-dance, whether she could ride a unicycle, she said, “Yes, sirs!” because, really, what else was a girl to say? For an actress famished in the chorus, parched among the extras, faint with walk-on roles, you say what you need to. You take what’s offered. If a producer asks you to jump, you ask if he wants it done with jazz hands.
Betsey Barnes was no Steinbeck, but she couldn’t blame Arnie for that. The kid had been in Hollywood for just as long as she had with nothing to show for it apart from a few unofficial rewrite credits. Then his pal Sidney Weller pulled him in for a quick revision. The script was inane, something that Rachmann, studio darling, had put together from a frothy piece in a lady’s magazine. Could Arnie give it glitz and glam and a healthy dose of Technicolor? Of course he could. Did Sidney want that with jazz hands?
And so, instead of literature, Louise had tap shoes and a feathered skirt, false eyelashes and a big splashy musical number. She didn’t have an Academy Award, but she had packed audiences and a dedicated fellow in the publicity department who signed her pictures and marked them with a rose-pink kiss. A job was a job and, a dozen years later, she’s here with fifty dollars in her purse and a bungalow on Rodeo Drive. Betsey Barnes hadn’t been so bad. So why did she still wonder, sometimes, what if?
Arnie’d never complained. He worked on the scripts the studio passed him. Fluffy musicals, serious costume pictures, the occasional noir thriller. He was good at those. And, in between, the occasional piece for the Hollywood magazines and, less frequently, the newspapers. He always had two or three things going at once. Hollywood adores jugglers.
But no matter how many projects he had going on, no matter how many deadlines loomed, Arnie was always home for dinner. It was an unspoken promise, rarely and reluctantly broken in ten years of marriage. So when he started coming home late, started making excuses, started shutting the door to his office when the phone rang at night, she felt the first prickles of fear down her arms. It wouldn’t be the first time a Hollywood marriage was broken up by a lipsticked chorine.
She took to doing the laundry more often, checking his collars for pancake makeup, his undershirts for traces of perfume. Once he caught her at it. He swung around the doorway of the bedroom to see her with her face buried in his white shirt. She felt guilty, as though she were the one at fault. And maybe she was. A few missed cues and she was acting as if he’d rewritten the script.
“What are you doing?” he’d asked.
She’d had the chance right there, the chance to ask if he was stepping out on her. They’d always been honest. Was he still? “Biting off a loose thread” was what she said. She was afraid of what his answer might have been.
That night, Louise was fast asleep when the phone rang. Arnie hadn’t come to bed yet and was shut in the office. Though she wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, she pulled herself out of bed. In her bathrobe, she crept into the dark kitchen. She could hear Arnie in the office next door, the creak of his desk chair and the murmurs of his end of the conversation. She hid a yawn and, breath held, lifted up the other phone.
She expected an airy voice, maybe a giggle or two. Whispers of love and promises of a rendezvous.
Instead, she heard Arnie say, “I don’t know, Sid, I think he gives away that he’s the murderer with that line,” and Sidney Weller’s voice saying, “Yeah, it could do with a dab more of subtlety.” She hung up quietly.
No wonder Arn was sneaking around. Sid was his mentor and a friend, but he was blacklisted. They couldn’t exactly meet for a coffee or talk via the studio switchboard. She poured milk into a pan, added a cinnamon stick and a splash of brandy, and waited for Arnie.
When he came out of the office, she was leaning against the kitchen counter, drinking a mug of warm milk. He paused in the kitchen doorway in his shirtsleeves and bare feet. “Hi.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she lied, pouring out a second mug.
“Me neither.” He ran a hand through his hair. He desperately needed a haircut and a shave. How could she have thought he was having an affair? “Sid was talking through a script with me.”
“What are you working on?”
He pushed himself off the doorway. “I know what I’d like to work on.” He crossed the kitchen and took the mug of milk from her hands. “I’m sorry I’ve been so busy lately.”
She ran hands down the sleeves of his shirt to his graphite-smudged fingers. “I’ll forgive you if you kiss me.”
He did, wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her up on the counter. He kissed her until she was breathless and happy and no longer the least bit sleepy. “You taste like Christmas,” he said.
She forgave him.
—
The next morning, before leaving El Reno, she places a call to Arnie. It rings and rings without answer. She tries to tell herself that it’s early, not much after six A.M. there. Arn’s probably sleeping. Maybe in the bathroom. Maybe making a pot of coffee.
She waits five minutes, packing her wicker suitcase back up, loading it into the trunk of the Champ, then tries again. He could be out of the bathroom now. Back in the bedroom, changing into fresh shorts and undershirt. Combing his hair.
He doesn’t answer.
El Reno is chilly. She wears her navy Dior dress, long-sleeved with a wide collar and a black underskirt peeking out
from the scalloped back. She picks a black velvet turban hat that comes down low on her ears. Last night she rinsed out her white gloves, and she wears them now, more because her knuckles are cold than for any attempt at politeness. When she steps out and the wind sneaks into the space between her cuffs and her gloves, she shivers and decides that she doesn’t like Oklahoma after all.
She stops in the diner before leaving, for a plate of plain, dry toast to atone for last night’s orgy of hamburgers. Of course, this is canceled out by the generous slice of chocolate cake she impulsively orders on her way out. Ruby wraps it in waxed paper and slips her a fork when Frankie isn’t looking.
She has a new map. This one she plots on in lip pencil. By her math, done stretched on a motel bed last night, she figures she drove somewhere near to four hundred miles yesterday. Surely she can do just as much today. More if she eats her chocolate cake for lunch while driving.
Oklahoma seems the longest state she’s driven through. On the map it’s shaped like a saucepan. She imagines tomato soup in the pan, bubbling until it splashes on Kansas. When she reaches Kansas in the afternoon (all eleven miles of it on 66), she apologizes for the soup. There’s no denying it. Here on the road, she’s cracking up.
She really is. She’s lost track of the miles. At one point she swears she sees a buffalo standing on the side of the road, watching her. Of course it’s only a bush, but she can’t help thinking that they’re all buffaloes. One after another, lined up across Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri. She’s only going halfway across Missouri today and already she’s tired of it.
The radio holds on to stations for only a little bit. Just when “Tennessee Waltz” fills the car with three-quarter time, it crackles out and suddenly it’s “Blue Tango.” Once, the radio picks up “Silver Bells,” but, before she can conjure up the ring of sleigh bells, the smell of snow and pine trees, the song is lost. When she finds the next station and it starts to play “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” she switches it off.
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