Neither did I have friends to enjoy this with or lean on for solidarity. This was not my twenties being relived. Everyone around me was, and had been for quite some time, tied up in their lives. Our moments of connection were scheduled, consciously constructed bridges between two worlds that increasingly required sets of decisions that were unrecognizable to one another. I thought of the ledgers my mother had required of my sister and me to account for our allowance spending. I wished there’d been a similar way to teach me about how to budget freedom. Where to go when there’s nowhere you have to be.
I was wide open. But before I could stop it, into that empty space, like an emotional squatter, crept all the grief and sadness I’d held at bay. The tears I’d choked back the day we’d left my mother in the nursing home, and all the days I’d left her since. The overwhelming loss of standing by while her mind evaporated. The dismantling of an entire life. Knowing the inevitable ending that was coming. For as long as I could remember my mother had read the last chapter of every book first; she didn’t like surprises. She didn’t want to invest emotionally in characters whose outcome she couldn’t be sure of. And now I had seen the last chapter of hers. There was no comfort in this knowledge, just the awareness that there’d be no relief from it either. There was no flipping back to the beginning. I’d lived away from home for so long that if I didn’t think about it too hard, it was sometimes easy to let my mind slip into the comforting groove that life at home was continuing as it always had. But I had only to open my eyes every morning and see that couch, the ground zero of everything good about my childhood, to be immediately reminded it was not. It was over.
Sometimes I felt like the couch was haunting me. As though I had been plunged into a ghost story, and the couch was possessed by the parts of my mother that had departed her. Sometimes I simply looked up and could see a shadowy version of us sitting there: me age eight, leaning into my mother as she scratched my back and read to me about Edmund and Turkish delight, or Anne promising to be as good as a boy, or Bilbo riddling in the dark. When that happened, I would get out of bed and go and sit on the exact same cushion I had sat on then, as if by doing so I could slip the grip of time and find myself there again.
THELMA: Good driving.
LOUISE: Thanks.
20. We Are Not on the Run
When Jo and I planned our route from New York to San Francisco, I dragged the blue line on our shared Google map document up and up so that it would send us straight across South Dakota, scene of the last four books in the Little House series.
“We can take whatever route you want,” I’d said to her when we first began mapping our trip, “but it has to go through De Smet, South Dakota.”
We set out at noon on a Friday in mid-July. The air was so thick with heat it was like walking through car exhaust and left a film of dirt on my skin. I gazed at Jo’s tiny yellow Fiat with skepticism before wedging myself into the small area that had been cleared on the passenger seat. This would be our home for the next ten days. Behind me Jo’s enormous dog, Lady, half Labrador, half Rhodesian ridgeback, was equally wedged between boxes and suitcases. The car was so small I had visions of us being sucked up into the underbelly of passing transport trucks on the interstate, like dust into a vacuum cleaner. Or lifted off the road by the summer storms of the Midwest, like Dorothy’s clapboard house. I glanced at Lady, neurotic from years of New York City dog life, thinking she made for an interesting Toto.
“She would have eaten Toto,” said Jo. “She doesn’t like small dogs.”
It was a faulty analogy anyway. Neither of us was looking for a brain or a heart or a home. We were grown women, long in the habit of navigating our own lives. Nor were we, despite the inescapable Thelma & Louise references, on the run from anything. Jo was on her way to a new life with her fiancé, Nick, and I was driving her there.
“It’s like I’m walking you down the aisle,” I said as we pulled out of Pittsburgh on our second morning under bright blue skies, “except the aisle is an interstate.”
Later that afternoon we stopped for lunch at what was advertised as the largest Amish restaurant in Indiana. Jo planned to expense as much of the trip as possible and viewed every roadside sign, no matter how obscure, as a potential story.
The parking lot was the size of a city block, and on the grassy pockets sprinkled throughout, horses connected to shiny black buggies were grazing under sweeping, graceful trees. Overhead white fluffy clouds appeared painted on. The restaurant was a series of big connected rooms; the signs advertised twenty-nine different types of homemade pies.
At the hostess station a young pretty blond woman with round cheeks, wearing a bonnet, showed us to our table. I couldn’t tell if the outfit was part of a theme uniform, or her actual clothes. The restaurant was crowded with families. It was Saturday, I realized, having already slipped out of the calendar. As Jo and I walked past a series of similarly dressed servers, all of whom pointedly glanced our way, it became clear from their sideways glances that something was amiss. Perhaps it was my pants. I was, in addition to my trucker hat, wearing a pair of high-waisted white silk pajama pants I often wore in the summer. We’d been in the car almost nonstop since leaving Manhattan, and I wasn’t yet fully out of city mode. I thought of my mother, who always hated when I wore pajamas as clothing.
“Here you are,” said the hostess, as she laid a number of menus down on a circular corner table big enough to seat six. She smiled and glanced behind her.
“Oh, but we’re only two.” The former waitress in me worried about taking up unnecessary space when it was clearly crowded.
She looked back at us, as though unsure of how to respond.
“Oh.” She paused and glanced around the room. “Well, that’s okay.” She gestured at the table. “Someone will be with you shortly.” And then she quickly stepped away.
“Ahh,” I said to Jo as I slid into my seat, finally understanding the stares had had nothing to do with my outfit. “I think they kept looking at us like that because they were waiting for our husbands.”
“Maybe they think we’re a couple.”
“I suspect that’s a lot less interesting than the fact we just arrived in the middle of Indiana alone.”
On the way out, a slim young boy in suspenders leapt out from the servers’ area.
“I love your pants so much,” he said. I recognized the look, a mixture of relief and joy at seeing evidence that a lifestyle you have spent so much time wanting to believe exists, does.
“We’re on our way from NYC to San Francisco.” I rarely volunteered information about myself while traveling, but saying so felt like code for It’s possible.
“I want to go to New York someday,” he said in a tone that begged to be taken seriously. To me it felt like we’d barely left the city, had not yet reached the real part of our trip, but I suspected to him, the city felt, and probably was, about as far away and unlikely as the moon. I remembered that feeling so well.
“You won’t be disappointed,” I said. “It’s the greatest.”
By the time we made it back to the car, the blue sky had turned an alarming shade of black, and the trees were beginning to bend in ways that seemed unnatural. My phone buzzed. Tornado watch in effect.
“I can’t remember, is it the watch that’s bad or the warning?” Jo asked, letting Lady out of the car for a run.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I never knew there was a difference.” This was part of my whole theory about New York versus America: New Yorkers are experts in human nature; the rest of the country are experts in Mother Nature. “All I know is, if the transport trucks pull over, to follow their lead, and if the sky turns green and it sounds like a lawn mower is coming, you are supposed to get out of the car and lie in the ditch.”
As we pulled onto the highway the sky became even blacker. It looked as if we were driving into nighttime; off to my right the clouds began to form into strange shapes. My visions of the car sailing away returned. In the back, Lady
began to whine. My phone lost service. I’d hit bad weather before on the road a few times. Once in my twenties, I’d driven through the edges of a tornado in eastern Texas an hour outside of Dallas. But that time I’d been in a large, heavy truck, on tour with my friend and her band of Israeli musicians, who thought it all great fun. It had become fun in the retelling, as most things do, but I’d forgotten the scary reality.
“Does that look like a funnel to you?”
“Did we actually drive into Kansas?” asked Jo with a shaking laugh, gripping the wheel. “Are we going to Oz?”
“L. Frank Baum only ever went to Kansas once,” I said, leaning forward to get a better look at the alarming cloud rising up to our left. “He lived in South Dakota, not that far from Laura Ingalls, and based his description of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz on the ones he experienced there.”
The rain arrived as if it had been dumped out of an enormous bucket, landing on us in blinding sheets that flooded the road. The little yellow car swayed from side to side in the gusts, as if being punched. Every few minutes we slid over the rivers of water that had filled the dips in the road. The cars ahead of us became shadows, the transport trucks dim beasts, now with flashing emergency lights like beacons to keep us on the road. The rain turned to hail. A feeling of panicked helplessness came over me. Ferocious bolts of lightning tore through the sky, as if out of a film about the revenge of Greek gods. Each strike seemed to run straight through my veins and alight on my heart. I could feel Lady shaking in the seat behind me. But there was nothing to do but keep going.
I was accustomed to exerting an extraordinary amount of control over my person. I’d never had any health issues. I’d never yet been held captive by my own body, as my mother had, nor as women I knew had, by babies or the desire to have one. Even with all the various emergencies that had been thrown my way, some of my own making, the decision of how to deal with them had been mine. Mine alone. For better or worse. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel utterly helpless. To be helpless against forces and powers beyond my control. Or perhaps I’d never fully known.
The cloud was not a funnel. The storm was not a tornado, though later we learned one had briefly touched down fifteen miles away. It took us no more than twenty minutes to get to the other side of the blackness and reach blue sky again, though during that time each second seemed elastic. But for the next few days I obsessively checked weather apps and stared anxiously at far-off clusters of clouds for any sign of darkening skies.
We drove in silence for long stretches, sometimes listening to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. (“This book is really an extended lesson on the importance of a good editor,” I remarked to Jo.) Every few hours we turned on the radio to catch the news. As the days went by, it was increasingly filled with stories about Sandra Bland, a black woman who’d been pulled over for failing to properly signal a lane change while driving home to Illinois having just signed on for a new job in Prairie View, Texas. She’d been placed under arrest after legally refusing to leave her car. Three days later she was found dead, hanging in her cell. Jo and I had left on our trip four days after that.
Bland’s story, and fate, seemed to run alongside us as the miles rolled away and the country emptied out, the sky above us growing larger each day. I couldn’t shake the sense that hers was the alternative version of the trip we were on: women driving off to a new life but toward opposite fates. A tale of two Americas.
I had run up against that other America before. Many times, in fact. I knew it was here beside me right now, but that it was like a disease I’d been vaccinated against: by my skin color, by my upbringing, by the fact I’d been given the benefit of the doubt my entire life. It was possible for me to travel safely through the other America as a spectator, or worse, completely oblivious. On the same trip with the Israeli musicians that had sent us perilously close to the Texas tornado, our van was pulled over on I-10 in Arizona by a border patrol agent; we were seventy miles from the Mexican border. It was April 2003, and the Iraq War was barely a month old. I was driving; my musician friend, a blond New Yorker, was riding beside me in the passenger seat; the Israelis were scattered behind us in the van. I watched in the rearview mirror as the patrol agent marched up to my door, my heart beating in much the same manner it had when we’d skirted the storm. His uniform was crisp, his walk as assured as any walk has ever been. He gestured for me to roll down the window, and once I had, he leaned far into the van and took a long, silent look at all of us, lingering long on the musicians with their dreadlocks and shaggy beards and darker skin. Then he leaned back and said in a voice accustomed to being obeyed: “I will need to see everyone’s ID in the back.”
“I’m Canadian,” I said, worried that not stating it might get me in trouble if everyone else was being required to pull out their passports; I had only my driver’s license. “That’s fine,” he said, his eyes not leaving the back of the van. He wasn’t interested in me. My identity was not in question. More than a decade later, I could still remember how nonchalantly he shrugged, casually lifting his shoulders, as if I’d remarked on the sky being blue. I had a million safe narratives connected to me that didn’t require a passport to prove or disprove.
I’d spent the months since my birthday trying to figure out how to live a life that had no blueprint, struggling to know where I was supposed to go without any stories to lead me. It had been terrifying, and then exhausting, and then delightful. It would probably be all those things again, and again after that. But it hadn’t been deadly.
Later that night, after many more hours of driving, Jo and I pulled into a motel in Madison, Wisconsin, just off I-90, the interstate that would take us all the way through to Wyoming. Once we were settled, and Lady had planted herself in front of the hotel door so neither of us could leave without her, I looked up Sandra Bland. I wanted to flesh out this person who was a name on the radio and a shadowy presence on our trip. I wanted to know more about where she came from, how old she was. The details on Wikipedia were still scant, but it listed her date of birth, which held my gaze like a magnet: February 7. The same birthday as Laura Ingalls. Sandra Bland was twenty-eight when she died. Laura Ingalls, I knew without looking it up, had lived to be ninety and three days.
I’d spent my life marking two birthdays—October 21 (Carrie “Princess Leia” Fisher) and February 7—as extensions of my own. As if by doing so I could hope to lay claim to the same freedoms and potential of those women. As if it were the dates themselves that held the power. But the numbers themselves held only the power I gave them. They weren’t divine protectants or guarantees, or, in the case of my age, the death sentence I’d imagined back on my birthday. Like so much, they meant only as much as the beliefs we invested into them, the stories we attached to them. I was, by a rather extraordinary combination of timing and privilege, getting to tell my own story; to make it up as I went and live it. Sandra Bland had died as a result of the stories the world told about her, as much as the absence of stories that might have been told, but that we refused to allow space for.
•
We arrived in De Smet while the sun was still setting. It felt like the sun had been setting since we’d crossed the state line an hour ago. The enormous sky had rippled through pinks and purples as though the sunset were a symphony and the colors musical notes, and now an orange globe was hovering just above the horizon, shooting out a fluorescent pink band that made the clouds look like they were on fire.
“Imagine being Nellie Oleson,” I said to Jo. “You’re mean to some random girl in fifth grade, then her family moves away and you never see her again. Fifty years later you show up in a book and are forever known to history as the mean girl.”
“The meanest girl,” said Jo.
“It’s a dangerous thing to be friends with a writer,” I said.
By the time we pulled into the town’s outer limits the windshield was nearly black with the dead insects that had descended in clouds with the setting sun. Each
summer, over a series of weekends, the townspeople put on a pageant based on one of the books. This year it was By the Shores of Silver Lake, my favorite of the series, which recounts the Ingalls family’s arrival on the seemingly limitless plains of what was then Dakota territory. But we were too late. As we arrived at the pageant location in the middle of a field adjacent to where the Ingalls homestead was, we were greeted with the sight of a thousand headlights pulling out and disappearing in a string down the two-lane highway onto the now-dark prairie.
“It looks like the final scene from Field of Dreams,” said Jo.
The first time I’d come to De Smet was at the tail end of the same 2003 road trip. Most of the band had flown home from Seattle after the last show; my musician friend and I, and her bearded Israeli drummer who had lost his license and lacked the ID necessary to board a plane, were driving the empty van back to New York. In Wall Drug, the delightfully kitschy drugstore on the other side of the state, whose hand-painted signs advertising free water relentlessly lined the roads for hundreds of miles as far as two states away, my friend and I had purchased a picture of Wilder in her sixties and taped it to the rearview mirror. Later that afternoon we turned off I-90 and drove north to catch the state route that would take us to De Smet. From the depths of the van, the drummer, unsure why he was being dragged across the side roads of a desolate prairie state, removed his huge headphones and said: “Why are you following this old woman?”
I felt as if I’d been trying to answer that question ever since.
In the distance, I could make out the four cottonwood trees Pa had planted for his daughters the day they moved into their new home. Just as in Iceland, I was struck by a desire to call my mother and tell her where I was. That she had never gone herself to visit Laura Ingalls, who died the year she turned ten, was something I’d never been able to wrap my head around as a child.
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