Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Yanking open the glove compartment, I took out the vial of Austin’s Adderall and stared at it. Just one more. For clarity. To keep from having an accident. Why, it might even help me understand my son better, to experience what he did chemically. Pills, I knew, were technically as verboten as beer—hugely risky behavior, a giant AA no-no, but I simply couldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good—especially while night-driving—for the purpose of fleeing a bar—besides, didn’t desperate times call for desperate measures? Choking down the pill, however, proved more challenging than I’d thought. My throat was scorched; I might not be able to swallow normally for days.

  Slowly, finally, I did what I realized I was supposed to have done all along. My sponsor’s name was Jenny. Jenny Jaroluch, I had to remind myself as I scrolled through my contacts. I actually hadn’t spoken to her since Ashley’s high school graduation, it had been that long.

  After about twelve rings, an automated sequence of electronic notes came on informing me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service. Oddly, I felt only relief. In fact, to my great shame, I found myself hoping the number was no longer in service because Jenny Jaroluch herself had started drinking again and was sitting in a parked car somewhere, even more deranged than I was.

  I was a horrible person. And pathetic. Look at me: My one great act of rebellion had consisted of eating hot wings for three minutes, then wiping my hands on a pair of stretchy pants from Walmart. Who was I anymore?

  Yet, I felt ravenous. The monster of my own bottomless appetites had been poked awake with a stick; if I didn’t do something, I was certain I would implode.

  With a bing! of the ignition, I tore down the road again, hunting, hunting. I want. I need. Fill me. In a town called Monroeville, I zoomed past a giant discount designer shoe outlet—then made an illegal U-turn.

  Women and our damn shoes—it’s such a cliché—but the warehouse was warm and bright with its insipid, Cinderella promises, and I just didn’t know what else to do with myself. Hurrying down the grim, industrial aisles, I pulled out boxes marked “6,” stuffing my feet into silver high-top tennis shoes and ankle boots studded with biker buckles and kittenish heels. It was the end of the day. The outlet looked ravaged, picked over: I found myself actually stopping along the way to put all the random shoes people had discarded back into their proper boxes—but finally, I made it to the checkout. Somehow, I’d acquired nine pairs of new shoes (none more than $19.95! Buy 2 get 1 free! What a deal!), and as the cashier rang them all up, I actually felt suffused with pride, as if I’d achieved something enormous. (Wait ’til they saw these at my book club—especially the jeweled kitten heels—and heard how little I’d paid!)

  But no sooner was I outside in the parking lot again with my purchases than I was overcome with a nearly debilitating sadness. The high heels: They reminded me of Joey. I didn’t even bother opening the trunk; I just threw everything in the backseat.

  I still felt seized with hunger, by great internal claws of craving. The shopping malls were now on the verge of closing for the night—I could see security guards rolling the metal lace down over the glass doors. There was a Sporting Goods Outlet—and Austin did need new shin guards for hockey—but then, at the end of a strip, like a beacon, I saw the sign GUITAR CENTER. The only brand-new musical instrument I’d ever purchased had been that Traveler Guitar—and not for me, but for my son.

  “Ma’am, we’re closing in twenty minutes,” a goitered manager informed me.

  “Nuh-nuh-nuh, please!” I raced past in my papery ballet slippers. “I’ll be quick.”

  Now in the mirrored showroom, hundreds of shiny new guitars sat propped in their stands like curvaceous, up-ended lollipops, butter and rosewood and onyx and royal blue—acoustics and electrics, double-cutaways, basses, guitars with chrome fingerboards and wireless capabilities. I wanted something insanely amped-up, a top-of-the line, kick-ass electric—blazing red, shining like maraschino syrup—with effects pedals that would make the sound howl and distort and rip flesh from bone.

  But beneath a Day-Glo 20% OFF sign was a basic Rogue Dreadnought acoustic. Cheap, lightweight. Something I could afford (sort of) that would go easy on my unpracticed fingertips. I grabbed a case as well, plus a strap, a couple of colored picks, and then, at the cash register, I saw a bunch of clearance “vintage” sweatshirts with band names on them. Since my hoodie from Walmart was now soaked with beer, I grabbed the only one they had left in my size. It wasn’t until I was back in the Subaru that I saw it read ANTHRAX. An awful band—just yelling without politics—but then, I thought miserably, isn’t that what Ashley would say about me? Besides, it was getting increasingly colder now, and the sweatshirt was fleecy and warm.

  And then I was driving, and driving some more, plunging deeper and deeper into the darkness, way past where I’d vaguely imagined I’d finally stop and turn back. Instead, I was bouncing up and over the curvaceous hills of Pennsylvania, with my new purchase beside me. I kept sneaking happy little peeks at it. My brand-new guitar. I thought of B. B. King. How he’d called his Lucille. I named mine, inexplicably, Aggie.

  As the reflective emerald signs floated past me overhead, with their pointillist letters and arrows, and the road unspooled before me, I was overcome with a strange, prickly feeling of déjà vu. A rest stop, a gas station off I-78. The mini-mart. I had once stood in line there—I was sure of it—drinking a bottle of Diet Pepsi in the punishing, bleached lighting, breathing in the same fumes of floor cleaner and coffee and boiled hot dogs. And at the turnoff, I knew without checking my phone that there would be a weigh station for trucks.

  How did I know this? Had Toxic Shock Syndrome ever been on tour here? No. We’d never played anyplace farther east than Cleveland. I was certain. “Aggie, this is freaking me out,” I told the guitar. Maybe I really was caught in a time loop—or brain-damaged from all that hot sauce. Traffic had thinned; a slight fog had descended. The interstate was wide but dark and ghostly now with vapor and glitter; to steady my nerves, I had Elvis Costello playing, the entirety of My Aim Is True—a brilliant album, still holds up to this day—but suddenly, in the middle of the song “Allison,” he cut out. Just like that. “Al-li—” he was singing. Then nothing. At first, I thought it was a trick, a tease recorded by Costello himself—which was just stupid, of course—I’d only listened to the album about five zillion times. But it scared me. It sounded like a sudden amputation. Keeping my eyes on the road as best I could, I reached for my phone. It had run out of power.

  I swerved over onto the shoulder, put on my hazards. I fumbled through the glove compartment, then my purse, then the storage compartment in the armrest. While I’d managed to purchase entire outfits and boxes of shoes and snacks and beverages and even a brand-new musical instrument, I did not, anywhere, have a charger.

  My electronic umbilical cord to the rest of the world had been effectively cut. “Whoa,” I said aloud. “Shit.” The clock on the dashboard said 12:07 a.m. On a phone, somehow, the time never seemed like a pronouncement to me so much as a cute numeric glyph, part of the decorative, digital wallpaper. But now I stared at the blank rectangle of onyx. The hour sank in. “Well, that’s it,” I said. It was too late to veer off the highway again in search of a store. What’s more, I realized, I didn’t want to. Not now. Not yet. For the first time in years, for better or worse, I was completely off the grid.

  Switching on the radio, I drove on blindly now. No GPS, no map app. “We’re on our own, Aggie,” I said. “Just us and the stars. We’ll have to navigate the way seasoned pilots and mariners have for centuries.” Of course—who was I kidding—there were road signs all over—I was hardly Odysseus or Magellan or Harriet Tubman—yet I was plunging forward unassisted, not knowing where I was heading—only that I was not ready to turn back.

  Now it was just me and my cheap new guitar and whatever the music gods transmitted over the airwaves. The rock station I’d located seemed clairvoyant. All your favorites from the ’70s, ’80s, and
’90s! Iggy Pop and Alanis Morissette and Grace Jones. I became convinced that their songs were coded messages to me. I am the passenger…All I really want is deliverance…Won’t give in and I won’t feel guilty… God—if there was one—was speaking to me directly through the hit singles of my past. I began rehearing, relistening to them with the same reverence that I’d had at sixteen, singing along with total abandon, and at the same time, in my own way, praying: Please, don’t forsake me. Please, forgive me. Please, tell me what to do.

  Somewhere outside Harrisburg at around one o’clock in the morning, the Ramones song “Blitzkrieg Bop” filled the Subaru. And as I gingerly sipped a Diet Coke from a drive-thru McDonald’s—my mouth was still blistered but almost painfully dry—for some reason, I was weeping again, too—I was runny-nosed, shivery, my voice fracturing—it came to me. The Ramones. The first song of theirs I’d ever heard had been “Rockaway Beach,” and as a teenager, I’d always imagined I’d go there one day to pay homage and see it for myself. Rockaway Beach. Why, just that past weekend, I’d read an article about how Patti Smith had bought a little bungalow there, her first bona fide “room of one’s own.” Of course. Rockaway.

  I would make a pilgrimage. A great rock ’n’ roll pilgrimage in honor of my best, former self—hell, I already had a guitar! I’d feel my way in the dark, driving without a map—you couldn’t get more punk rock than that. Surely, there had to be road signs leading me through to Rockaway, to the Atlantic Ocean, which I had never in my life seen before. I would figure it out. I’d make my way to the birthplace of the Ramones, to the ruins of CBGB, maybe even to Patti Smith’s house. Why not? It seemed oddly ingenious.

  What they never tell you about the iconic American road trip, though, is how mind-numbingly dull so much of it can actually be—especially at night—especially alone—with only a guitar to talk to—the miles and miles of pavement and wan lights and nothing much doing—until, suddenly, you’re in New Jersey on the Turnpike, feeling sorry as hell for the tollbooth clerks, who—no matter what’s gone on in your own pathetic, shattered life, have got to inspire pity—all that carbon monoxide, the endless hours on your feet, the claustrophobia, the loneliness—and where the hell do you pee? After passing through the tolls and spending insane amounts of money to enter turnoffs and tunnels, I found myself barreling through the night streets and expressways across Lower Manhattan, down into Brooklyn, too tired to see anything beyond what was right in front of me, turning and following and hoping and stopping a couple of times to shout/ask directions from a couple of winos by a gas station—until, in a dream, I saw I was near, or there, or close enough—I was sure I could hear the ocean—certainly, I could smell it—and with less than a quarter of a tank of gas left, I pulled into what appeared to be a parking lot by a low building at the edge of the shore, perhaps the very edge of the earth, nothing beyond it but black. You’ve made it, I told myself. “Aggie,” I said, “we’re here! In Ramone-land!” And I put the Subaru into park and somehow hauled myself over the gear-shift in the dark to the passenger seat, and tilted it back and collapsed. But I needed someone to hold, something to love, to commemorate the occasion, and so I hugged Aggie. And I popped an Ativan now, too—just to balance out the Adderall—Ashley would hardly miss one pill—and I needed it now, because even though I was beyond exhausted, my heart was still percussive, and I was scared, and I didn’t want to think too much at all. “I’m just going to shut my eyes for a few minutes,” I told Aggie. “I’m just going to unwind so that we can start our great rock ’n’ roll adventure properly. This is awesome, isn’t it? Rockaway Beach?”

  It was only later, in the bright, stinging light of morning, when the cops found me asleep in the Subaru and woke me up that, well, I had to admit: The tableau I’d created was beyond pathetic—too fucked-up, in fact, for words.

  Chapter 6

  A psychic once told me that in my very first life, I was a slave in ancient Babylon. My existence was short, filthy, and brutal—as were my next dozen or so, which she summed up as: peasant, baby, concubine, serf, vassal, goatherd, peasant. I seemed not to have been reincarnated over time so much as inbred. “Oh my God,” I’d groaned. “I’m like karmically retarded.”

  “Nah,” she said breezily. “Folks always imagine we were great historical figures in the past. But most of us were just poor.” My own lives didn’t get remotely interesting until the late eighteenth century, she said, when I was a royalist flunky beheaded by Robespierre in Paris, then a medicine woman in Borneo, then an ill-fated surveyor of the Panama Canal, whose shoelace got caught in the gearbox of a tractor. However, the life I was currently living, in the United States of America, straddling two millennia, this one, she announced, would be infinitely better. I would enjoy unparalleled comfort, health, and freedom.

  “Hm. But, wait. You’ll have to be careful around your forties or fifties,” she warned.

  I shifted uncomfortably on her futon. “Why? Does something terrible happen?”

  She stared at the cards. “I’m seeing a sudden crisis. Some sort of collapse? Maybe marital strife? A financial problem?” She drew another from the deck. “Oh. Now, this is odd. If you can stretch yourself—”

  “You mean, like a contortionist? Oh my God. Am I supposed to join the circus?” I started to giggle. The psychic started giggling, too. She was my college roommate Brenda, and we were both stoned out of our minds. Before she’d offered to perform a “regression reading” for me as a graduation gift, we’d smoked an entire bowl of Peruvian hash with my Philosophy TA in the basement.

  Brenda read tarot cards from time to time, and she’d often alluded that she’d inherited some “psychic sixth sense” from her great-aunt Eliza in Trinidad. But Brenda seemed to have an endless parade of aunties whom she was always inheriting things from, which made it doubly hard to take her seriously now.

  The idea of me ever being forty—or God forbid, fifty—one day was ridiculous. Though I planned on living forever, I certainly did not plan on aging. “You and I, Brenda, we will always be fabulous,” I proclaimed on her futon. “And I will never have a midlife crisis because I, for one, will never be ‘middle-aged.’”

  Decades later, however, after the police woke me up in Rockaway, it was a struggle to simply climb out of my damn Subaru. My ankles had swollen. Every joint in my body felt like a rusted hinge.

  Blinking at the hypnotic tumble of the waves, I was hit by a longing for my mother, gone so many years—then my daughter three thousand miles away in London, burrowing into the wind with her umbrella. I saw the spatula thwack across Joey’s face, blood spattering on the kitchen tiles. Hacked-up pleather in the Walmart bathroom. Heaps of gnawed chicken bones. Ghoulish halos of fog along the New Jersey Turnpike as I tore through them in a fugue.

  “Oh, Aggie,” I said aloud, blowing my nose in a paper napkin. “What the hell have I done?”

  And my mind snagged on Brenda’s prediction from twenty-five years earlier. Was I actually caught in the beginning of some personal apocalypse?

  No, no, I told myself. I was being ridiculous: It was just the Adderall talking. The adrenaline rush of it was much stronger than I’d anticipated. I’d merely gone for a long drive, was all. So what? Didn’t everybody do that from time to time? Ashley even had a theory that Americans were addicted to road trips because none of us were really rooted here. “Our country is one giant displaced persons camp,” she’d insisted. “Even the Natives have been kicked off their lands and marched someplace else.” (When I pointed out that Troy, Michigan, was hardly—Where exactly were those tent cities? Africa someplace? The Lebanese border?—she’d responded with exasperation, “I mean in the scheme of the world and history, Mom.”)

  Yet try as I might, I could not shake my own terrifying suspicion that I’d done much more than simply put my car into gear. Alone on a beach, it was difficult to keep lying to myself. Maybe every marriage came with secret, niggling doubts—maybe this was an intrinsic part of forsaking all others. But long before I’d
caught him in the kitchen with his mistress, I’d known, in the deepest recesses of my heart, that I hadn’t fallen in love with Joey so much as willed myself to love him. He had seemed so sturdy. So loving and normal. But ours had not been a great, volcanic romance. Rather, we were a partnership forged as practically and deliberately as a bridge. Like a piece of steel, I had bent myself to fit it.

  Now, I was buckling. I felt the very core of my soul crack open. The thought came to me with such violence, it dropped me straight to the sand. Was my marriage over? Look at what had happened to us over the years. To me. I never thought my life would turn out like this. Suddenly, I was forty-five. Suburban and manic. As beige and lumpy as oatmeal. Was this it? Were my best years all gone? And if so, who would ever take me seriously—or love me—or even look at me again?

  In the past, I’d kept such wretched thoughts at bay by drinking. Here, all I could do was get back in the car and lean my forehead against the steering wheel and weep. I wished I had a mother, a road map, someone wise enough to reassure me and tell me what to do.

  I tried to remember: What had Brenda said exactly? Something about stretching? A circus? Nothing was making sense anymore. I started to shiver. Sniffling, I slowly eased the car out of the sandy lot and lurched onto the road.

  Patti Smith. Once, my punk-poet idol had set aside her own musical career to be a mother in suburban Detroit—just like I had. In fact, when I was feeling particularly frustrated, sorting through my children’s dirty laundry in the mudroom, I’d console myself sometimes by thinking, Well, Patti Smith is probably sorting through her children’s dirty laundry in her mudroom right now, too! It began to dawn on me: Was there anyone better in the entire universe for me to talk to right now? Surely, Patti Smith could advise me about what the hell to do with a cross-dressing husband. I could track her down—right here on Rockaway Beach. Okay, yeah, absolutely, it was a long shot—but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was, in fact, possible. Why not? Weirder things had transpired in the past twenty-four hours.