There’s too much shit in the car for me to sleep on the back seat, so I crank the driver’s seat down as far as I can, pull some sheets and blankets out, and try to get comfortable. I leave the headlights on until I’m almost asleep, fading in and out. My eyes jerk open a few times when I think I hear someone talking. I don’t let myself imagine psycho killers with hook hands. It’s raccoon chatter. It’s just raccoon chatter, I know it.
When I do sleep, I dream about Matty. I’m hanging off a cliff. No rope, no sheets. I forgot my lifeline. He’s reaching for me. My hand can’t meet his. My fingers slip through soil, dirt falling in my face. I wake up screaming, body jolting against the seat like I’m landing hard.
After that, I can’t fall back to sleep. I play a game with myself counting out the minutes, then turning the car on to see what time it actually is.
When I check the clock at 5:32, I’m seven minutes short. I turn the car off, start counting again, but next thing I know I’m waking up and it’s bright and the windows are frosted inside and out. When I check the time, it’s 8:30. I stumble from the car, bundled in blankets and sheets.
The campsite is dirty, littered with gum wrappers and burnt scraps of foil. There’s a half-melted plastic produce container in the rusty fire ring. I walk to the end of the campsite to look down the path and there’s the lake: about as blue as blue gets, banks lined with willow trees. Out a ways from shore, a layer of mist hangs above the water, thick enough to disappear in.
It’s disorienting to see a lake where you didn’t know there was one. I feel that strange false aftershock, like when a car accident almost happens, as if I could have walked into the water in the dark without noticing the cold lapping at my legs.
I cross the dirt road to the bathroom. My toes ache from being jammed in my boots all night. I was convinced something might give me reason to get out of the car and run. It’s weird, the places your brain can go when you can't see what's around you. In the light, there’s nothing scary about this campground. It’s dirty and run down, but everything looks harmless.
The bathroom building smells like a swamp. There’s no heat and it’s not even closed off from outside. A screen just below the ceiling spans the length of each wall. My breath is thick in the air, like the cloud it forms could start to snow. I drop two quarters in the coin box for the shower and undress, hoping that by the time I’m ready to hop in, the water will be warm. Pipes whine and thump. The water is the color of rust and shoots from the showerhead in hard, progressively longer spurts. I stick my hand in to test for heat and it’s like being pierced by a billion frozen pins. It takes a buck fifty in quarters to get the water to lukewarm. I jump in and lather up as fast as possible. My body is covered in goose bumps that don’t go away even when the water turns all the way to burning hot. As soon as I get some good suds going in my hair, the water shuts off completely. Soap in my eyes and I can’t find any more quarters in the change pile on the wooden bench. I throw in two dimes and a nickel, praying it will work, but I lose them to the shower gods. My teeth chatter. I sob. I worry the water will freeze in icicles on my body, so I wrap myself in the sheet and rinse my hair in the bathroom sink while I wait to run out of tears.
* * *
After I settle up with the park ranger for last night, I’m left with a hundred and fifty-eight dollars. If I know anything about money, it’s that it runs out fast. To save gas, I walk to town from the campground. It takes a long time on sore feet, but I don’t have anything else to do and I can’t exactly go blowing money on sightseeing.
The houses on the way are old. Some of them have porches that sag, peeling paint, loose shingles, bedsheets or flags for curtains. But some are freshly painted with fancy wood trim that looks like bicycle spokes.
There’s a dog on the porch of a house with a Grateful Dead flag in the front window. He isn’t leashed. He looks like a pit bull and I start walking faster. I think about crossing the street, but I don’t want him to chase me. I walk an even pace, pretending I’m calm. He barely raises his head to watch me.
The center of town is called Ithaca Commons and it’s blocked off so it’s just for people, not cars. The stores are painted bright colors like a village out of a movie. Like it might not be real.
I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Something cheap to eat, maybe a place to get warm for a while so I can plan my next move. There’s a brick building that has DAIRY painted on the outside even though it’s a bakery. I buy a donut and a cup of coffee from a lady with long white braids and take a seat at a wobbly table by the window.
The people who walk by just look different. They’re wearing a lot of clothes. Layers and layers. Thick hand-knit hats with flaps that cover their ears, or they have hair like they just got out of bed. Corduroy pants cut up the seam and turned into bellbottoms with bright patchwork pieces. There’s a man in a long skirt walking around like he’s nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it. Freaking dirty hippies, I think, smiling as I try to picture Gary walking around The Commons wearing a flowing skirt and his Harley jacket.
I eat my donut slow, breaking off teeny tiny pieces, chewing them down to mush before I swallow. After I drink half my coffee, I go back to the cream and sugar table and load the cup with cream so it’ll last longer. I eat every last crumb of donut and wait for the final drop of coffee to roll down the seam of the paper cup into my mouth.
“Want a warm up to go?” the lady with the braids asks as I stand up and collect myself. “On the house.” She holds the coffeepot above the counter.
“Thanks.” I walk over with my cup. She takes it from me and pours until it’s full.
“Cold for November,” she says. “Stay warm, sweetie.”
“You too,” I say, taking the cup back from her carefully. I throw some more change in her tip cup. Now I’m down to a hundred and fifty-five dollars, but even when you don’t have much, you always have to tip. Margo says there’s no excuse.
I walk down one side of The Commons and up the other, looking in windows. There’s a storefront full of shirts and bumper stickers that say things like ITHACA IS GORGES, MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT, and I NEED A MAN LIKE A NEEDS A . Another shop seems to sell nothing but silver rings and weird pipes made out of glass. There’s a used bookstore and a place that sells old clothes—like Mrs. Ivory would wear—for a dollar a pound. There are bead curtains and cracked CDs hanging all over the place and one of the stores has the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland painted on the glass. I wonder if this is what it feels like to go to Europe. It’s a far cry from Little River.
I walk past a coffee shop that’s dark inside even though it’s open. Lit candles in glass cups line shelves on the walls. It looks like a cave. There’s a HELP WANTED sign in the window.
— Chapter 8 —
“Um, a girl here wants to help us,” this blond guy yells toward the back room.
Everyone in Cafe Decadence looks at me. I stare at my boots, let my hair fall in my face. Long hair is like carrying a hiding place with you everywhere you go.
“Carly will be out in a sec,” the guy tells me. His voice is low and dopey like a cartoon character. His hair has streaks that are almost white. No one is that sun-kissed in upstate New York in November. He looks like he should be someplace warm. California, Florida, Barbados. He should be surfing. He hasn’t been in winter long enough to fade.
“Thanks,” I say, but he’s already taking an order. A woman in a lime green dress coat asks for something called a “half-caff soy mocha,” and the blond guy knows what she’s talking about.
I move to the side and try my best to look like I belong. There’s a bulletin board on the wall covered with neon flyers. Voice lessons, dog walkers, tutors, auditions, roommate, new play, babysitter, anarchist book club—fringes of phone numbers cut at the bottom. There’s even a personal ad, handwritten and photocopied. It says: You want me. Your body knows. Heart will follow. NSWM. Agnostic. Bi. Let’s explore your wildest fantasies and silliest w
hims. Must be open to anything; like Depeche Mode. The picture is a naked man sitting the wrong way on a chair so the chair back covers his privates. He has chicken legs. He’s wearing a black bowler hat; his eyes are rimmed with liner and there’s a fat black tear drawn on his cheek. He’s sticking out his tongue. It’s long and pointy. One of the phone numbers is torn off. I don’t know what agnostic means, but it sounds like some kind of weird sex thing. I can’t imagine the person who not only looked at that picture and wanted to do agnostic things to this guy, but also had the courage to pull off the phone number in the middle of the coffee shop with everyone watching.
“Here about the job?”
I jump back, hoping what I was looking at isn’t obvious. A short, skinny girl with spiky black and purple hair smiles at me. She has a ring in her nose, right in the middle like a bull, and holes in her earlobes filled with what look like tiny black tire rims.
“Yeah,” I say, straightening up. “April.”
I offer her my hand, and she shakes it. Her grip is weak, palm icy and damp.
“Carly. You done this before?” Her voice sounds scratchy, like she has a bad cold.
“Um, I waited tables for like five years.” I try to look in her eyes, but it’s impossible. There’s too much else to look at. Tattooed blue wisps, like the tips of tentacles, creep from her shirt collar, reaching up the left side of her neck. “After school and stuff.”
“Any experience as a barista?”
I shake my head. I don’t even know what a barista is. “I’m quick to the uptake,” I tell her. It’s what Margo always said when she bragged about me to other people.
Carly sighs. “I was hoping for someone with experience.” Her eye shadow matches the streaks in her hair. She looks back at the line of people. She’s already done with me.
I will myself not to cry. Not to think about icy pin needle showers forever and ever.
“Thanks anyway,” I say, head down, hair falling. Hoping to get to the door before I lose it.
“Hey, wait,” Carly says. “Going home for Thanksgiving?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. You’re hired.” She laughs and it’s this weird little cackle that reminds me of stepping on dry leaves. “Everyone and their roommate will be out of town that whole fucking week. If you can work through break, I’ll train you myself.”
“Thank you,” I say, trying not to smile too wide.
“Can you start tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
“Come in after the morning rush. Ten thirty. Half pay for training. Once I don’t have to hold your hand, it’s five fifty an hour, shift meals, and your cut of the tip jar at the end of the week. Okay?”
I nod.
Carly hands me a piece of paper. “Fill this out and give it to Bodie when you’re done,” she says, pointing to the blond guy.
“Thank you.”
“Ten thirty,” she says, and walks into the back room without saying goodbye.
I can’t fill out half the form. I don’t have an address. I don’t have a phone. I don’t even know which street the campground is on. I write my name, and then, under work experience, I write Waitress, Margo’s Diner, Little River, NY, 1990–94. It’s the only thing about me that’s still true.
— Chapter 9 —
There are two more nights before the campground closes. I think maybe I should pull a few numbers from the roommate ads on the bulletin board, but who’s going to take in some girl with nothing but a car full of crap and a dwindling wad of crumpled dollar bills to her name?
I wander around town looking in store windows, hoping an answer will come to me. Just outside The Commons there’s a tall brick building that reminds me of my high school and would seem just as menacing, except there’s a guitar store on the first floor with a big shiny window to show off the beautiful curves of rows of guitars hanging on the walls.
I’m not used to seeing stores for just one specific thing you wouldn’t starve without. Even the auto parts store in Little River sells livestock feed and canned goods too. It feels like I’m starving without a guitar. If I still had mine, I wouldn’t notice the cold in the campground and I wouldn’t feel hungry right now. I could play until my fingers throbbed and then walk around with fresh indents in my calluses to help me remember that the world can disappear and I can float in sound and breath and nothing else has to matter.
There’s a twelve-string acoustic hanging front and center in the window. The finish looks silky, not shiny like mine was, and I can tell even through the glass that it would feel nice to hold. Set into the neck are pearly bits carved into flowers and leaves and a squawking bird. A white paper price tag hangs from one of the tuning pegs, spinning in an air current, not easy to see. I don’t know how much a guitar costs, but I know I don’t have guitar money. My dad bought the one he gave me when he was seventeen. When I was a kid, before it was mine, every time he lifted that guitar from the case, he’d strum it and smile. “That’s why you spring for the big guns, Ape. That’s why.” He saved summer construction job money for two years to buy it. I step closer to the window, tip my head, squint hard, and manage to see $1,849 handwritten in pencil before the tag spins away again. If I added up all the money I’ve made in my whole life, I don’t think it would be eighteen hundred and forty-nine dollars.
A man with a bushy black beard walks up to the guitar and waves at me through the window. “Come in! Come in!” His voice is booming, even though it’s muffled by the glass.
I turn away, pretend I haven’t seen him. Walk fast, head down, as if just looking was a crime. Like my need for that guitar could ooze through my skin and melt the sidewalk. I rub my thumb and ring finger together to feel the callus that will wear away soon. When it’s gone, there won’t be anything about me that’s special anymore.
My face hurts from the cold. I press my palm to my nose to warm it, but my hands are freezing too. I walk to Woolworth’s and order a pretzel and a cup of hot water at the lunch counter so I can thaw out before I walk back to the campground. I eat the pretzel slowly, taking tiny bites, chewing carefully. It reminds me of Margo. I lick my thumb and use it to pick up the big white chunks of salt left on the paper plate. After I get every last one, I pick a quarter from the change on the counter, leave the rest for tip.
I call from the pay phone outside. She picks up on the first ring.
“Margo’s Diner, today’s special is chili con carne.”
I don’t make a sound.
“Where are you?” she asks.
“Can’t say.”
“Hon, you can trust me.”
“You can’t feel bad about not telling people what you don’t know anyway,” I say, because I’ve seen the toll it takes on her when she can’t tell the truth about important things.
“You’re safe? Ten fingers, ten toes? Not sleeping on the street?”
“I’m fine.” There’s a row of chewed up gum along the top of the phone. The wads are different sizes, but they’re lined up perfectly. Pink, white, green, yellow, blue. I wonder who put them there—if it was one person or a group effort.
Margo sighs like there’s air leaking from her tires. “You’re making me prematurely grey, girlie,” she says.
I don’t know how Margo would ever know if she does go grey. She’s been dyeing her hair Cinnamon Red Hot for as long as I’ve known her. But I still feel bad. I can picture the worry crease she gets between her eyebrows before one of her sick headaches sets in.
“Did you talk to him?” I ask.
“Haven’t worn him down all the way yet.” She sighs. “He says if you bring the car back by the weekend he won’t file a report. Bought you a little time, at least.”
“You know I won’t be back by the weekend.”
“Gary’s gonna talk to him. Thinks it’s a man-to-man thing. Gary’s pulling for you too, you know. Says if he had a daughter he wouldn’t give her reason to run off in the first place.”
“Thanks.”
“Saw tha
t Matty Spencer. He made me promise if I talked to you I would say to call.”
My heart beats crazy when I think about Matty. I don’t say anything.
“He’s walking around like someone pumped his puppy full of buckshot,” Margo says, clucking her tongue. She starts to say something, but stops and takes a deep breath instead. “You won’t call him, will you?”
“Don’t think so.” My nose stings. The phone crackles and a voice tells me to deposit ten cents to keep talking. I only have a few pennies in my pocket.
“I have to go,” I say. “No change.”
Margo says, “You call me. Promise you—” before the connection drops.
I keep the phone to my ear for a little while longer and pretend she’s still on the line telling me about the new beer Gary is serving, or how someone accidentally put a tomato on Ida Winton’s sandwich and she freaked out again right in the middle of the diner.
There’s a phone book on a shelf under the booth. I hang up and check for Sawicki, just in case. Find an Alice, a Paul, and a D. Sawick, but no Autumn. I look up her maiden name, but it’s Johnson. There are like seventy million A. Johnsons, and again no Autumn. This is just one phone book in one city. There are millions of phone books and she could be anywhere. She could be married again with a new name, maybe even a new daughter, and it occurs to me that I’ll probably never see her again. Good thing I don’t want to anyway.
On the walk back to the campground, I count out of state license plates to pass the time. Two from Pennsylvania. One from Michigan. Vermont. Texas. New Mexico. Massachusetts. Ithaca College stickers in back windows. I wonder what it would be like to have your mom and dad pack up your car and send you off to college, ship you packages of cookies through the mail. Ask about your grades and threaten to pull your allowance for making C’s. That actually happens to real people. To these people. It isn’t only something you see on TV. These kids aren’t looking for their moms in a phone book.
The People We Keep Page 7