In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  Al Green testified to how powerful it could be. “Take me by the hand. Take me to the river—wash me down.” Sandra closed her eyes next to me and moved her shoulders, danced just a little in the folding chair. The roll and trill of the organ like wavelets leaving ghostly foam arcs on the sand.

  Will our girls, watching us, have this? Maybe not. Our driveway cannot exist everywhere. We might be thought of as too accommodating. Future women might never put up with the dominoes and our patience. There will be Facebook and Tinder, but we don’t know that yet. We love our daughters, and we don’t know if they’ll ever feel how deeply these strings pull inside, the way love is all tangled up with this voice that means time gone past, but the memory of how we were once sanctified.

  It is the companionable line of our knees in the folding chairs that comforts us. We have one another.

  30

  Travels with My Ex in the Time of Revenue

  Orange County, California, 2009

  Southern California in mid-July. Everyone in the world wants to be here, but in reality they want to be dropped directly from the plane onto the beach, not to have to drive on this freeway.

  We’ve lived here all our lives, but Dwayne and I didn’t want to be here. The foothills were not just dry but drought-parched and ugly, with burnt grass like the orangey tufts of hair on Jim Carrey’s head back when he was the crazy fireman. We weren’t going to Laguna. That’s a beach we actually like. We were headed to Huntington because Delphine wanted her eighteenth birthday party at that beach.

  I almost don’t want to talk about this day. I don’t want to remember it. The terror that scarred my lungs. My heart. Probable cause. Put your hands out the window. Step out of the car.

  “I hate Huntington,” I said that day. “My least favorite beach. It’s always crowded. There’s a reason we haven’t been to Huntington in years.”

  “I didn’t want to go either,” Dwayne said. He was driving. “That beach reminds me of J—. I’m always gonna hate it now, ’cause I might see him.”

  “We’re not gonna see him,” I said. J— had once been a basketball coach. We had gone to high school at the same time—Dwayne played against him. He was ambitious, having bought a house at that beach. But he was a capricious, moody, punitive man. He had deeply disrespected Dwayne.

  “You know why his life was bad that year,” I said. In 2006, the coach’s brother had been shot and killed by police during a routine traffic stop. His other brother had been killed by sheriff’s deputies in 1992 after being pulled over.

  “Look at this traffic,” I said. “This is why I hate going through Orange County.”

  The 91 freeway, multiple lanes, often the most congested in the nation. We were driving parallel to the Santa Ana River. The freeway winds from Riverside through Orange County, past Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, to the beaches. “Why couldn’t they just go by themselves? I told her last night I wasn’t going. She’s eighteen. She’s not even polite most of the time.”

  “You know you love her,” Dwayne said. “And you know they want us to bring the coolers and chairs and pay for the parking.”

  This was a very strange feeling, to drive directly behind my own van, the dark green Mercury Villager I’d fired up every day for thirteen years. Delphine confessed to me once that she was comforted by the unique headlights; they looked like shark teeth grinning white through the darkness of the high school parking lot where she waited after practice.

  It always felt a little funny to ride alone with my ex-husband in his white GMC truck, the battered metal toolbox attached to the truckbed.

  You riding with your ex? People would laugh. But we know countless ex-couples like us. Whether it’s because we can’t afford to move away after we divorce, or we’re too lazy to dislike each other efficiently and permanently, it seems to work.

  Gaila would be a junior at Oberlin; Delphine would start USC in weeks, with nearly a full scholarship; Rosette had just won a DAR award for her history scholarship at middle school.

  But that’s why I was broke. Two kids in college. A California economy in shambles. My upcoming pay cut—10 percent. Dwayne’s—14 percent from the county juvenile institution.

  He still worked graveyard shift. That meant he’d slept for two hours, after spending the night monitoring the cells of two teenaged boys charged with a gruesome murder.

  This was the first summer none of us had gone on vacation. Nowhere. The girls and I had been watching DVDs on the old TV Dwayne found in his garage after my more elderly TV finally gave out. I read classic vacation stories on the couch—John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Calvin Trillin’s Travels with Alice, trying to figure out an ironic way to write about not traveling. When it got cool, the girls and I walked to Dairy Queen and then picked up movies from Blockbuster.

  Today we’d have the beach. In the truckbed were buckets of KFC fried chicken, watermelon in the cooler, and homemade Funfetti cupcakes.

  Ahead of us, my van was packed with teenagers. Driving was Gaila. Next to her, Delphine. In the back seat, Rosette, along with Bianca, one of our daughter’s basketball teammates, and Delphine’s boyfriend. We will call him Our Laurie.

  My house had for years seen various successions of boys who tried to be the equivalent of Louisa May Alcott’s Laurie, the young man allowed into the lives of the March sisters. My girls were quite strict about it. When Christian Bale comes out from hiding in the attic, holding his hands over his heart and pleading, “We’ll share in the telling of our most appalling secrets,” my daughters always said, “We want a Laurie!”

  Gaila was our Jo, and according to her sisters, Rosette was sometimes as annoying and spoiled as Amy. Delphine, sensitive and secretive as Beth, has had scarlet fever not once, but twice; my mother and I sat vigil beside her bed, my mother trembling because her best friend died of scarlet fever when she was a child in Switzerland. (No one claimed to be Meg.)

  The boy in the back seat of the van, Our Laurie, is willing to sit on the couch with all three Sims sisters and any attendant girls and watch She’s the Man or Fired Up. A lefty quarterback, he throws the tennis ball accurately and untiringly for the dog. His thick eyebrows rise frequently on his mobile face, and when he’s lying, he smiles only on the left side.

  He makes everyone laugh except for my ex-husband, classic hater of young males, who still refuses to pronounce his name correctly. And his name is one syllable.

  By 2:00 p.m., we’d gone only thirty miles in traffic that was now, unbelievably, stop and go. We were talking desultorily about how many police cars we’d seen that summer, how everyone we knew was getting tickets, how Delphine and Gaila had both gotten their first citations this year under dubious circumstances. “Revenue,” Dwayne kept saying. “The state is broke. They have to make money, and it has to be on us.”

  A car suddenly exited the car-pool lane to our left by crossing the double yellow line, and then another guy tried to bail on the traffic by cutting across four lanes and heading for a toll road. A California Highway Patrol car went past us on the right, but did not pull either of those cars over. He pulled alongside the green van. “What’s he doing?” I said. “Is he getting ready to run a traffic break? We’ll get separated.”

  The cruiser slowed at the rear of my van’s bumper, pulled quickly up to the side, and then hit the flashing lights.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “He’s pulling her over,” Dwayne said, resigned. “Of course he is. Car full of black kids in the OC.”

  The patrolman was shouting at Gaila through the loudspeaker. She had to slide across four lanes in heavy traffic to reach the dirt shoulder.

  “Driver, pull over to the side!” he was shouting.

  Dwayne said, “I’m going too. He’s not gonna pull any shit. I’m not having it.” His voice was grim.

  The feeling jolted me—every time we’d been pulled over by police, every time he’d had a gun pointed at his head, every time I thought he might die. He’s the one who fits t
he description. The six feet four Black Man.

  “D—,” I said, the name of Delphine’s boyfriend. I felt that nausea under my ribs. “He wants D—. He’s gonna make D—get out of the car. And then something could happen.”

  My ex-husband was jerking the truck across the lanes, too, holding up his huge hand in the rear window to signal, following the cruiser that was herding my green van like a huge border collie, barking and slanting. “He better not mess with her,” he said.

  “It’s D—,” I said.

  He’s the six-feet-five Black Guy, the one with elaborate braids under his NY Yankees cap, the one wearing size 13 shoes and a South Carolina T-shirt because he’d gotten a scholarship offer from the Gamecocks, the one with brown skin almost exactly the same shade as my ex-husband, the one we tease our daughter about because she always said the last thing she wanted to do was replicate my life.

  “He has a cell phone,” I said. That could get him shot.

  “Damn,” Dwayne said, and pulled into the dirt cloud raised from the hot shoulder of the freeway by the California Highway Patrol car and Gaila, who’d driven the van into the deserted weigh station where trucks were meant to stop.

  Our Laurie was in the dark recesses of my van. He had a Sidekick and an iPod. Metallic rectangular objects that fit in a hand. I was so scared I was panting. The back windows were tinted. What did the highway patrolman want? Gaila had been going thirty-two miles an hour, between stops. She had always signaled. After all, it was a twenty-year-old’s least favorite scenario for a summer day—driving your mother’s ugly aged van, filled with your younger sisters and their friends, being followed by your hypercritical prison-guard father.

  “The right taillight’s going out again,” Dwayne said.

  “My seat belt is still broken,” I said, my heart thudding all the way into my ears.

  Dwayne fishtailed in the dirt of the shoulder, trying to pull ahead of the van and the cruiser. The patrolman shouted, “Ignore the white truck!”

  “Pull behind him!” I shouted.

  “No, then he’ll get scared,” Dwayne shouted.

  If he got scared, he might shoot us.

  We went around them and they went around us, and Gaila must have been completely panicked now. She stopped, and the cruiser stopped, and my ex-husband accelerated and went around one more time, a terrible dance which wasn’t funny but it kind of was when the highway patrolman leaped out of his vehicle then, agitated, staring at us, holding both arms wide in the air, signaling, What the hell?

  He had reddish-blond hair cut just longer than stubble. Big shoulders. Sunglasses. He didn’t have a gun in the hands held to the sky.

  He looked straight at me, and frowned. And that was good.

  I was going to write an ironic piece about Dairy Queen. The high points of our previous summers had always been eating ice cream far from home. Gelato in Thun, my mother’s hometown in Switzerland—hazelnüsse, caramel, chocolate. Fatima, at the local bistro in Valreas, France, serving us sundaes with little clown heads on wooden toothpicks. Three of those dusty little clowns still on my dresser. Maple ice cream on Prince Edward Island, at the Anne of Green Gables house.

  Travels with Charley—Steinbeck, riding in his truck named Rocinante with a camper shell on the back, with his large French poodle named Charley, who is “bleu” when clean, which means black. When they hit New Orleans, a man leans in and says, “Man, oh man, I thought you had a nigger in there. Man, oh man, it’s a dog. I see that big old black face and I think it’s a big old nigger.”

  In 1986, Dwayne and I drove across the country in a different truck—the blue Toyota with a camper shell—and we spent an uneasy hot night in McClellanville, South Carolina. At dawn, he got up and took a walk beside the intracoastal waterway. While we slept, the campground had filled with hunters. I lay in the camper, and from the open window near my head, heard a man our age say to his young son, “See that big nigger? That’s a big nigger, right there. When you get older, I’m gonna buy you a big nigger just like that.”

  I never told Dwayne exactly what the man had said. I just said there were scary people here and we should pack up and leave. We did. I shook and shook until we reached the next city.

  Routine traffic stop. For us it’s a Lite Brite. I picture a dark brain map with tiny bulbs going off. Blink. Blink. Blink. Routine traffic stop. Dead men.

  The names and faces we’ve known all these years. The older generations had faces surrounded by rope and branches. They had Eddie Chandler I, in our family. Emmett Till. The men who died in Tulsa.

  We grew up in the 1960s and ’70s. We remember the Watts Riots, and the Los Angeles Riots, and yes, Rodney King. Alberta went to church with his mother.

  We have our own names and faces from inland southern California. The coach’s brothers, both of them shot. Tyisha Miller—shot eighteen times in her parked car at the gas station on my street. My brother Jeff’s best friend, Bruno—shot nineteen times in his white truck as he maneuvered on the center divider of the freeway, having refused to pull over. He was on parole. Either hung up on the cement or trying to back up. No weapon. A toolbox. He’d just delivered a load of cut orangewood to my driveway.

  He was blond.

  “I ain’t getting out,” Dwayne said. He had his hands displayed on top of the steering wheel. As he always does when he’s pulled over, or when the silent alarm is tripped.

  “I know! I’m going,” I said. I needed my wallet, but I didn’t want to duck down for my bag on the floorboard.

  “You go!”

  “I’m going!” The dust was settling on us. I was scared. In the truck’s side mirror, I could see the patrolman approaching the driver’s window of the van.

  Police officers have their own Lite Brite. We knew that. Dwayne was a correctional officer. Theirs is a completely different pattern and color. Blink. Blink. Blink. Ambush. Domestic disturbance. Routine traffic stop. Dead officer.

  I had my pink leather tooled wallet. My job is to be the short blond mom. At basketball games, at parent-teacher conferences, in the principal’s office when a boy has called Rosette a nigger and the male vice principal who hasn’t done anything about it sees my ex-husband—Big Dog shirt, black sunglasses, folded arms the size of an NFL linebacker, and a scowl—and looks as if he’ll faint.

  My job is to smile and figure out what’s going on.

  The truck door was locked, then jammed. And that was good. By the time I got out, the patrolman was looking at me, and Gaila was pointing at me.

  I felt faint, in the heat beating down. Would he pull his weapon on the five-feet-four blonde? I was wearing the right thing—khaki shorts, a white cotton shirt. Nothing but a mom. The traffic roared so close to us, twenty feet away from the silent weigh station. But no one to see us. I took my sunglasses off and felt my mouth smile.

  “Why did you stop? What are you doing?” the officer said loudly at me.

  “That’s my mom and dad,” Gaila said, aggrieved. She wasn’t scared. She was pissed. Like Jo. Her default setting.

  I smiled wider, trying to see Our Laurie behind her. “We’re on our way to the beach for her birthday,” I said, cheery and momlike. “Her dad and I didn’t want to get separated, ’cause in this traffic we might never see each other again!”

  My little women hate when I do this. They imitate me viciously afterward. They hate that I have to do it, that I am good at it. “What’s the problem? Is it that darn seat belt?”

  The officer squinted at me, then at the van. “One of the male passengers wasn’t wearing his seat belt.”

  I was frozen. But then he said dryly, “He’s wearing it now.”

  He stepped back. I breathed. Then he asked for license and registration and insurance. I leaned into the driver’s window, between him and Gaila, making jokes about how deep in the glove compartment the registration might be. I pulled the insurance card from my wallet. He glared at me but carried them back to his patrol car.

  Gaila began a low invective, an
d I leaned into the window to say to Our Laurie, “You weren’t wearing your seatbelt? You always wear your seatbelt!”

  He grinned, eyebrows leaping. He said, “It wasn’t me. It was Bianca.”

  Bianca, nineteen, her hair tucked into a black cap, wearing a huge black T-shirt. The officer thought she was another male passenger. Bianca rolled her eyes, furious.

  The officer approached the other side of the van. “I need the male passenger to open the door. Open the door,” he said.

  My nausea rose again. Bianca rolled the door back slowly. I could see the officer. He was not holding a gun. A clipboard. I almost threw up.

  He asked Bianca for her license. He didn’t apologize for identifying her as a guy. He didn’t ask her or Our Laurie to get out of the car. I stopped having visions of people lying on their faces in the dirt. He wrote the ticket. I leaned awkwardly on Gaila’s window until it was done.

  Three days earlier, I’d given one of our nephews a ride home after football practice. We’d spent a long time in the driveway, talking to General III, Derrick, three cousins, and a family friend. We talked about the police review of the 2006 shooting of our coach’s brother. The commission had found no fault, though the brother was pulled over three times in thirty minutes, the first time because “he had a weird look” and the second time because after the patrol car continued to follow him, he ran a stop sign and made a U-turn. The official report said he had struggled when the officers put him in the back of the patrol car for questioning. Witnesses said he was trembling, his hands shaking. His brother had been shot by deputies when he was very young. The voice recorders were turned off. One officer said the man reached for his Taser; the other officer shot him. The witnesses, who spoke mostly Spanish, said he did not reach for the Taser.

  Ben Tyson, the family friend, said he’d been pulled over the week before in the mostly white neighborhood where he’d lived for a decade. The officers said he fit the description of a robbery suspect. He gave them his ID. The suspect was described as six feet, 185 pounds, and in his thirties. Ben Tyson is five feet eight, rotund, and in his sixties. He was the first black man to work at the downtown post office in the 1950s. He was told to get out of the car and lie on his stomach on the sidewalk. He refused repeatedly, and was kept there for over an hour while the officers berated him and asked him questions.