by Veen, Milena
“Look how petrified this town looks,” I told Joshua. “Where are all the people?”
“They’re in their little offices, of course,” he said, “finishing off their little jobs so they can go back to their perfect little lives with two children and a dog and pancakes, and everything that goes with that. Just like in any clone town.”
“What a bright attitude.” I patted him on the shoulder.
“It’s just the way it is.”
“So if I had a job and two children and one dog and twelve pancakes, would you call me a clone?” I said, brushing my hand over the testaceous building façade.
“No, of course not.”
He stopped walking, turned to me, and put his arms on my shoulders. The ray of sunlight refracted in his eyes.
“I’m sure you understood what I meant. It’s not pancakes that make clones out of people; pancakes are just a silly symbol. I just think people should find their own way instead of just accepting rules without questioning. Most of them don’t do that, they don’t even think about it. They just live their life in blissful safety. So you can eat pancakes every day and have six children and an elephant, but you’ll never be a clone. Never. Because you’re just not one of these people.”
“Okay, okay, I understand. Don’t get upset,” I said. “Now, I think we should buy that house over there with that lovely heart-shaped pool. And I prefer cats to dogs, actually.”
He pulled his ear and winked at me. I winked back.
It was half past one when we left Flagstaff. We walked to the spot on Interstate 40 that a guy from a newsstand mentioned. The sun was ruthless. I got my Polaroid camera and took some quite somnambulistic photos. An hour passed and no one stopped to pick us up. The cars were fewer than we expected, and the soles of my canvas sneakers were sticking to the hot pavement. We decided to walk down the road rather than wait by the gas station. Joshua suddenly grabbed both of my hands.
“I need to tell you something, Ruby,” he said, gently shaking my arms.
“Oh, look, there’s a truck in the distance!” I said. “Can you see it? A metallic gray truck!”
He dropped my hands.
“I’m sure this one will give us a ride! We’ll be in Albuquerque by seven.”
He didn’t seem to share my overjoy. I slapped myself on the forehead.
“Oh, I’m sorry. What did you want to tell me?”
“Nothing important. I’ll tell you later.”
The truck driver slowed down.
“I’m only going to Winslow, kids,” he said. It was a rather screechy voice coming from a man whose imposing stomach was nearly touching the steering wheel. His cheeks were dark pink, and his smile was wide and sincere.
He told us that he had kids our age and that he was surprised our parents let us wander across the country like that. He would never allow his girls such a reckless adventure, although he couldn’t look at us without sympathy. He had done his share of wild hitchhiking when he was young, but those were different times, safer and more naive. No one had ideals nowadays, he said. Joshua agreed. He told us that he was transporting refreshments from Phoenix to other Arizona towns. He used to daydream about becoming a rock star, but life had different plans. And being a rock star is more about attitude than anything, anyway.
“Maybe it’s even better to be a rock outlaw than a star,” Joshua said. “Stars fade.”
The driver looked at him with a mild frown, as though he was saying, “You still have a life to live, kid.”
He dropped us off in front of a grocery store on the outskirts of Winslow, a town of blue sky and sepia buildings. Joshua started whistling.
“My father used to listen to the Eagles a long time ago, before he decided that music is not for serious married men who feed their families,” he said. “The song goes like this: ‘Well, I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me.’”
“You sing very well,” I said. “I wish I could sing. It’s not that I don’t try, but it just sounds tragic. Yes, tragic – there’s no other word.”
It wasn’t a girl in a flatbed Ford that slowed down, it was a woman in an orange Plymouth. She introduced herself as Debbie. Her little daughter, Dolores, was sitting in the back seat. She was a tiny creature in a pink dress with polka dot sunglasses. Debbie suggested that I sit with Lo – that was how her mother called her. I guess Lolita was her favorite book. Joshua sat in the passenger seat. Everything seemed just fine. We even warned Debbie about Joshua’s Tourette’s and she said that she had a friend in college with Tourette’s syndrome, and that she perfectly understood everything about it. They were heading for Albuquerque to spend some time with Debbie’s parents; she had gone through a terrible divorce and she really needed some time to gather herself. Little Lo was sleeping, her blond head in my lap. Her skin was so soft and pinkish. I wondered, was my skin that soft when I was three years old, and how come I have so few photographs from that period?
“You two may sleep as well,” Debbie said. “I’m sure you’re very tired.”
And so we slept. We slept until our orange Plymouth stopped by the gas station near Holbrook. Lo needed to go to the bathroom and she wanted me to take her there. Her mother scarcely separated her pinkish arms from my thigh, which she grabbed onto like a little octopus. They went away screaming and crying and came back with a ton of sweets and soda pops and smiles on their faces. Joshua and I were waiting in the shade, eating our sandwiches and talking about new-wave films. Debbie gave us a sign and we jumped back in the car. It was quarter to four. Dolores tried to feed me lollipops and M&Ms, sticking them into my mouth. When I finally said I can’t eat any more, she started screaming and hitting her hand against Joshua’s seatback.
“Please, darling, take another one,” her mother said to me in a pleading voice.
I tried to explain that a person twice as big as I am couldn’t eat that many sweets, but she looked at me with the most amiable look and just whispered, “One more, please. She likes you so much.”
I felt weird eating all those candies and even started to feel sick. Luckily, Dolores finally fell asleep, and I could ease my pain with a bottle of mineral water. But then, after a couple of quiet minutes, I noticed Joshua was scratching his left temple.
“Oh, that’s it, right?” asked Debbie. “Your Tourette’s?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s just a little winking, honey,” she said joyfully. “It’s not a big deal.”
Dolores woke up and jumped on her little feet.
“You wink?” she said sweetly, pulling Joshua’s sleeve. “Wink, wink, wink!”
He didn’t understand that she was asking him to wink for her. She clenched her teeth, tweaked Joshua’s elbow, and screamed, “Wink again!”
“Oh, you can’t pinch people like that, my little birdie,” Debbie said.
I thought that was it, that the little monster would go back to sleep, but then her mother said, in a same pleading voice, “Come on, dear, wink just one more time for her.”
“But I wink better than him, much better,” I said turning Dolores’ shoulders toward me. “Look, I know a million different ways to wink.”
She was satisfied, she was amused, she was laughing and grunting like a little pink pig. I never thought I could feel such repulsiveness for a four-year-old child.
The next hour was calm and I really believed that we would be in Albuquerque before she woke up. It was less than three hours away after all. Oh, how wrong I was! How terribly wrong! The first sign of failure was Joshua’s throat clearing. I don’t know what caused it, or if anything caused it. As far as I know, tics don’t wait for a particular reason to occur, they just come and go as they like. It goes like this – a guy clears his throat, a little girl screams, a mother stomps on the brake, a big girl’s heart jumps under her striped mod dress.
“What was that?” Debbie shouted, looking at Joshua like she wa
s going to chop off his head.
“I’m sorry, very sorry,” he said. “But that’s what I warned you about.”
“Oh, but you didn’t warn me about it, young man. This is much worse than what I expected,” she said. “You scared my little girl.”
So what happened to your friend with Tourette’s, Mrs. Debbie? You killed him while he was twitching his nose?
Debbie’s threatening finger was standing stiff between hers and Joshua’s seats. Then she turned to the back seat. I was trying to calm Dolores by holding her hand and whispering funny things in her ear.
“Don’t squeeze her like that,” her mother groaned. “What do you want – to make her bruise?”
“I was just trying to calm her,” I said, knowing that nothing I said was going to soothe her anger.
“One more mistake and you’re out of here,” she said, pausing between words.
I was fighting with the strong urge to just open the door and take us out of that ridiculous situation, but the sight of the melting desert was stronger. Debbie pressed the accelerator pedal and our gloomy journey continued. No one was talking, even little Lo was sitting silent beside me, looking through the window until she nodded off again. I was counting minutes, miles, and white clouds. We just entered New Mexico, when it happened again – Joshua cleared his throat, and even louder than the first time. Dolores screamed again, and I was sure that little brat did it deliberately.
“That’s it,” Debbie said, stomping on the brake again.
“I’m sorry,” Joshua said. I saw his fist clenching and his knuckles getting red.
“Get out!” Debbie screamed at the top of her voice.
“But we are in the middle of the desert,” I tried to sound calm. “You can’t leave us here.”
“Oh, I can’t I?” she turned to me with sarcastic laughter. “Well, just watch me, miss!”
For a moment everyone was silent. Then she screamed again, opening the door and pushing us outside.
And there we were – stranded in the desert. He should have called her a moron at least. I should have called her a moron.
“Moron!” I screamed, but they were already too far to hear me.
To burst out laughing or to burst out crying – that was the question. We did the first one, but it only lasted for a couple of seconds, until the dust behind the orange Plymouth settled down. There was nothing but rocks and desert plants around us and the sun was still burning madly. There certainly wasn’t anything to laugh about. I sighed and covered my face with my hands.
“What are we going to do?” I said. “We’re trapped here.”
Joshua looked behind.
“I guess there’s nothing much we can do but to wait for another car to pick us up.”
We started walking. My mother called and I lied to her. I said we were in a hotel in Albuquerque. It’s not that I was afraid of her reaction; I just didn’t feel like listening to her high-pitched soprano. She said she visited Mrs. Wheeler that afternoon, but she didn’t have any good news for me. Mrs. Wheeler’s state was even worse than when I visited her a couple of days before.
Not even one car slowed down. We were jumping and waving like lunatics every time we saw one approaching us, but the drivers would just act as if we were invisible. We were about fifteen miles from Gallup. I suggested that we go back and find some place to sleep there; I really didn’t want to spend the night in the desert no matter how much in love I was, but Joshua reminded me that we had only three days left before Monday, when he needed to get back to work. He said that someone would surely give us a ride. I suppose he didn’t know how lonely sunsets look at the Interstate 40. I didn’t know either. The sun goes down so quickly… well, when you’re scared to death, at least. I could barely keep the tears from spilling out of my eyes.
“Hey, are you crying?” Joshua said, gently raising my chin.
“Almost,” I said, trying to put a smile on my face. “I’m so scared.”
He leaned his face closer to mine and brushed his lips across my forehead. I could feel his heartbeat just above my collarbone.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, kissing my forehead. “I’ll take care of you, I promise.”
Another car passed by, but again – the driver didn’t even look at us. We found a lonesome withered tree and decided to spread our sleeping bag under its naked crown.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” I said.
“Sorry? Why? If anyone should apologize, it would be me. I’m the one who got us stuck in the desert.”
“Thank you for coming with me,” I said. “And it wasn’t your fault, that woman was neurotic, or something worse.”
Have you ever spent the night in the desert? The silence of the desert night is so thick that when you lie down with your face up to the sky, it’s seems like the whole universe is sitting on your chest. Joshua was exploring my palm with his thumb. My body was so close to his, so close that I felt dizzy. And frightened. And wonderful.
“I think I hear coyotes,” I said.
“You only hear your fear. Just try to relax, okay?”
“What did you want to tell me today?” I asked. “You said it was nothing important, but I think it was.”
“You know me so well,” he said, sighing and turning his eyes toward me. “I just wanted to tell you how much this means to me, how much you mean to me. I’m in love with you, Ruby. I’m in love with everything about you. And I know I’m messed up, and I know that you deserve better than a messed up, fucked up guy with a dead sister and a ghostly mother and all other shitty stuff, and I know that I should probably just turn around and spare you from my chaos and pain, but I can’t. I can’t… because I love you. I guess that’s selfish, but that’s how it is. I love you.”
C’mon mouth, unfreeze now.
“Thank you,” I heard my voice.
Oh, no, Ruby, that’s not the thing to say.
“I can be so stupid sometimes,” I said. “What I wanted to say is that… I love you, too. I really do. Some declaration of love, ha?”
“It’s the only one I want to hear,” he said.
His eyelashes fluttered against my temple. Our fingers mingled like swans’ necks when they kiss. I’d told a boy that I loved him for the first time in my life. I loved a boy for the first time in my life.
“Hey, your tics are less frequent now,” I said.
“Yeah… that’s because there are no people around.”
“Oh yeah? And what am I then?”
“You’re awesome.”
We fell asleep in each other's arms. When we woke up, the sun was up. It was Friday. We needed to get to Oklahoma City, or at least near it, by evening. We shared a burrito, packed our things, and hit the road.
Chapter Eleven
After the previous disastrous hitchhiking day, the new dawn was more encouraging. Just a couple of minutes after we raised our thumbs, a van door opened. The driver introduced himself as Dexter. He was in his late twenties, which was a relief after listening to all the preaching, warnings, and nostalgia for youth during the last forty-eight hours. He was heading for Wichita. That meant that he could drop us off in Oklahoma City. But were we really in a place to be optimistic after everything that had happened the day before? I looked at Dexter’s smiling face with suspicion, only allowing myself a shadow of a shadow of hope.
I was sitting in the back seat, soaking in the ocher landscape, immersed in my thoughts. Suddenly, that little place just under my ribs started pulsating. The picture of my father playing on the lawn with Keyla and Brian jumped before my eyes. He was running and laughing, carrying Brian on his shoulders. Then he put him down to tie his shoelace. He turned around and winked at me secretly so that no one could see. I missed him. I missed my little brother and sister. I missed being their sister. I missed myself in that picture. And at the same moment, I was so angry with my mother. How do you do something like she did to someone you supposedly love? How do you make that move? Did she hope that he would just forget ab
out everything? Would he still be with us if it wasn’t for my ill heart? Did he leave us because he was afraid that he would have to watch me dying? Or would he have left us anyway? My mind reeled with these unanswerable, painful questions until we stopped by the gas station near Albuquerque.
“Hey, you look strange,” Joshua said when we got out of the car. “You’re so pale. Are you feeling okay?”
My phone rang. It was my mother, of course. I wasn’t inclined to talk to her, so I just ignored the ringing. A flock of pigeons flew over our heads.
“Birds are free,” I said. “And so am I.”
Joshua frowned. His dark eyes examined my face.
“Is your sister always so dreamy?” Dexter asked.
“She’s not my sister,” Joshua answered.
He looked at me with a reluctant smile.
“She’s my girlfriend,” he said, taking my hand.
Dexter suggested that we have a coffee in a little café by the gas station. We gladly accepted. One squeak of the door and we were in the 1950s. The floored was checkered, the jukebox was playing Elvis Presley, even the waitress was wearing a light blue circle dress and Bettie Page bangs. Dexter told us about his job – he was working as a dog walker in New York City. He said it was the best job one could imagine, far better than spending time in a claustrophobic corporate building. He spent a week with his parents in Phoenix and now he was going to visit his sister who got married recently, and then back to Brooklyn to breathe the sweet air of cement and smog and liberty. As he spoke, I became more convinced that we were safe with him, that he wouldn’t throw us out of his car for winking, or coughing, or laughing, or being rude, or whatever else we did to deserve such treatment in the past. Dexter was one of us; he didn’t believe in stuffy good manners and conventional dungeons called offices. While he was talking, Joshua was holding my hand under the table. “My girlfriend”. Those words echoed in my head like the prettiest melody. Love makes you so mellow that it almost sucks. I suddenly regretted not answering my mother’s call.