Road to Paradise

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“No, that’s why I’m asking. What kind of fun are you talking about?” She narrowed her eyes. “There’s a bowling alley in South Bend. It’s about forty miles away. But that’s a college town. It can get real rowdy there. Real rowdy. There’s an outlet mall in Michigan City. It’s closed by now. You can go there tomorrow.”

“We’ll need to be on our way tomorrow, Aunt Betty,” said Gina. “I’m just asking for tonight. Anywhere to go to in Three Oaks tonight?”

Betty’s eyes remained narrowed. “What kind of fun you talkin’ about?” She looked at Ned, dutifully drinking his beer, not looking up from his news page. He was re-reading the story about the obese woman. “Boy fun?”

Gina shook her head. “Not boy fun. I have a boyfriend. We’re getting married soon.”

“You are?” I whispered. “Shh.”

“What about your friend, here?”

“I can’t vouch for Shelby,” Gina said. “Can I, Sloane? Vouch for you?” She was turned to Aunt Betty when she addressed me. “We were looking for a bar or something. To get a quick drink.”

“No bar you’d want to go to. Girls don’t go to bars around here. Not good girls anyway.”

Some small measure of sense and her aunt’s Calvinist expression kept Gina from saying, “Who says we’re good girls, anyway?”

“You don’t want to be going into no bars around here.”

“Okay, gotcha.”

“You’re my sister’s kid,” said Aunt Betty. “I don’t care if you’re forty-seven, you ain’t givin’ up no pooty while you stayin’ in my house.”

Pooty? Gina stifled a groan. “Allrighty, then. Well, Aunt Betty, we’re feeling kind of tired. I think we’ll have a shower and head on to bed. Get up nice and early tomorrow, set out. Thanks for dinner. Goodnight.”

“We’re going to bed?” I whispered. It was nine in the evening!

She pulled me to our room. I told Gina I’d been there a thousand times, when a woman who was not my mother kept me from going out, from having fun.

“So what’d you do?”

“Nothing. I stayed in.”

“Fool. I just lied to my mother.” Gina was looking in her suitcase for clothes. “I told her I was sleeping over a girlfriend’s house. She never checked. She wanted to trust me, and as long as I didn’t get caught, I knew I’d be okay.” We giggled at the gullibility of mothers and Emmas trying to keep their girls from having fun. “Well, don’t just stand there. What are you doing, pulling out a book? Hurry, go have a shower, get dressed.”

“For bed?”

Gina grinned. “Whatever you want to call it, girlfriend. Just put on some ‘pooty’ clothes.”

“We’re going out?”

“Of course. What do you think? I didn’t let my mother tell me what to do, you think I’m going to let my mother’s enfeebled sister do it?”

“But she said no!”

“Oh, well, better tuck ourselves in, then.” She snorted. “Come on. We’re not going to walk out her front door.”

“How are we going to get to the car in the driveway?”

Gina pointed to the window.

“We’re going to sneak out the window like cats?”

“Cats on the prowl. What, you’ve never done it?”

“My window was on the second floor above a garage. So—no.”

“Chicken. I would’ve built a ladder in the trees.”

“Yes, I suppose you would’ve.” After showering, she put on her jeans, and a cute beige top that came with cleavage. I didn’t have a beige top that came with cleavage, but I had runner’s legs. So after showering I put on a mini-skirt and high heels. We spent extra time on our makeup. Gina was really taking time with hers. Three different eyeliners, two shadows, mucho blusho.

“Gina … um. What about Eddie?”

“What about him?”

I watched her apply another coat of black mascara. “Must be some fun you’re thinking of having with four coats of Great Lash. Didn’t you just say you’re going to California to marry your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé. He asked me to marry him before he left.” She waved the mascara wand, licked her lips. “I love Eddie. He’s the only one I want. But he’s been up to no good.”

“How do you know?” And is that how it worked?

“Oh, he confessed. He didn’t like having the burden of his wrongdoing on his conscience. To make himself feel better, he told me.”

My throat went kind of numb. I said, “Told you …”

“His little thing with Teresa. You know Teresa, the county slut? God. He justified it, as he justifies everything, by saying it was my fault. After all, he said, I had a boyfriend I refused to break up with when we first got together.”

“Huh,” I said carefully, throat less numb. She did actually have a boyfriend she refused to break up with when she and Eddie first got together. He was the tallest jock in school. Eddie was short.

“I know. But I was in love with Eddie, and he knew it. Still am. I just didn’t know how to break it off with John.”

“So how’d you break it off?”

“Don’t you know anything? Agnes isn’t doing her job. I didn’t. He broke up with me. So then Eddie and I were supposed to be exclusive, but now he’s gone back to Bakersfield and I know there’s a girl there he used to, like, date.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. He doesn’t like to keep that stuff to himself.”

“Really?” I wasn’t looking at her, and she wasn’t looking at me.

“They’re sitting by streams, on rocks, picking flowers, reciting poetry or some shit. When we talk he tells me they’re hypothetically talking of what it might be like to be married. After all, that’s what they talked about when they were twelve.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Does he know you’re coming?”

She nodded. “I called him before I left, told him I’m on my way. He said, please come as soon as you can. Please. Save me from myself. I think I may accidentally end up marrying her.”

I blinked.

“I don’t want to talk about it any more with you,” Gina said. “All I’m saying is, he hasn’t been good. And he doesn’t have to know about tonight. Come on, let’s go. Let’s get us some real rowdy.” She smiled. “How do I look?”

“Great,” I said. “But the dogs are outside. They’ll start barking. They’ll hear my car.”

“The dogs are already barking.” Gina winked. She messed up the bed and put towels and pillows under the sheets to make it appear as if two sleeping forms were underneath. “I’m sure my aunt’s out by now. It’s eleven; way past her bedtime. Don’t worry. They’re both none too swift. Ready?”

Dolled up, done up, I hitched my mini-skirt, adjusted my tube top, made sure money and ID were in my pocket, and crawled out the window into the side yard littered with broken lumber. We tip-toed our way to the car; of course the tiny dogs, mistaking themselves for German Shepherds, snarled like we were about to rob the house.

I put the car into neutral and released the handbrake. In her heels, Gina helped me back it out the drive, I started it on the road, and we drove off, giggling like kids. “Why are you wearing underwear?” she said in the car on the way to South Bend. “I’m not.”

“I know.”

“Come on. Trust me, you feel completely different without underwear. Like anything’s possible.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But my skirt’s too short. I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure.”

Gina said her mission was to make out with a cute college guy. She’d never had a college guy. She wanted to test if that thing they said about men and women was true.

“What thing is that?”

“That when a woman wakes up she can say to herself, today I will get laid. And have it be true. But when a man wakes up, he can say, I may never get laid again. And have that also be true.”

I laughed. I hoped it was true. We were wearing shiny lipstick, and had on lots of drugstore perfume, Coty and Jean Naté. Gina’s jeans were tighter than my skirt, but that was only because I was thinner. Too much running, though not since being on the road. Felt weird not running every day.

In South Bend, we cruised the noisy strip of bars, looking for a boisterous place where the patrons were neatly dressed and young. Gina didn’t want to go to Vickie’s (“Only girls there”) or McCormick’s or Corby’s (“The Irish get too drunk and pass out”). We debated between Linebacker Lounge and Library Irish Pub. She wanted the former, I the latter.

“Are you joking?” she said. “Library Pub? You want them to talk to you about Hardy and Yeats? Or do you want them to look like linebackers? That’s really the question here.”

“I want them to be able to speak.”

“That’s the only thing they’ll be able to do at Library Pub,” Gina returned.

“I would like,” I said, “a better class of boy.”

We had to play rock, paper, scissors to decide. We played best of three. I won. “If only all decisions were that easy,” said Gina, as we pulled into the Library parking lot.

“What do you mean? That’s how we used to decide everything.”

“Everything, Sloane?”

Two preppy, clean-cut guys walking inside saw us getting out of our car and whistled. “Nice ’Stang, girls!” And I, Shelby, smiled, because it was my Shelby. I may have kept my underwear on, but I had a nice ’Stang.

“That was so easy,” Gina whispered to me, as they were walking up to us. “Maybe you were right about this place.”

“Yeah, the car’s a stud magnet,” I whispered back. “Even with bookworms.”

The car, the mini-skirt, Gina’s moniker and panty-free manner combined with two or seven Sloe Gin fizzes was enough to hook us up with two sophomores from Indiana State, English majors and on the lacrosse team. The music was too loud, we couldn’t talk. We just sipped our drinks, smiled, and stood close. They kept leaning toward us to hear the words we weren’t saying, like, “You come here often?” and “Yes, I’ll have another drink. And another.” I laughed too much and too loud, which is what I do when I get a little tipsy, and thought everything they said and didn’t say was so funny. And every time my boy spoke, I touched his arm. Alive and Kicking were holding on a little bit tighter, baby, and Blondie was dancing very close cuz it was rapture time.

Gina and I didn’t get back to Three Oaks until her goal was more fully accomplished than even she had expected, and since I didn’t have a goal, I was quite surprised by the turn of events. So, at four in the morning when we climbed into our room, sneaking in like thieves into the den, we felt as if we’d run a marathon, or aced the SATs, or perhaps come in first and second in our class. Giggling, inebriated, and relaxed, Gina barely threw off her clothes before climbing into bed, and though I was also drunk, I folded my clothes, put them away, and got out my outfit for the morning, my notebook as well, but in bed I asked how in heaven’s name I was supposed to drive tomorrow, and Gina, nearly unconscious, muttered, let’s stay a few more days. I tried to remember my mother, whether the cover charge had been more or less than I’d budgeted for, and to count up how much money we’d spent so far. Had I paid for any of the drinks? I think I ordered bacon potato skins and buffalo wings, and tipped the waitress, maybe bought one drink. Thirty bucks, forty? But a song of freedom kept whirling in my head for the happy road day, won’t you help me sing … redemption songs. Redemption songs.

2

The Chihuahuas

We woke up at noon! Which was so not like me, and for some reason noon and sobriety didn’t make me feel as great about the previous night as last call, intoxication and songs of freedom had. I’d had a bad dream. And, who were those guys we’d been with?

“Who cares?” Gina said, stretching, rolling over. “We were like men last night. We came, we took what we wanted, we left. Wasn’t it awesome?”

My heavy skull cracking and my mouth parched, I said, “Yeah. Totally.” I wasn’t used to drinking, I was dehydrated. My dream had been so creepy and real, I didn’t know how I had continued sleeping. I sat up in bed and looked around. Everything in the room seemed to be in place. Our two suitcases, our makeup. Maybe we could ask Aunt Betty to let us do a wash today. “Did you get his name?”

“Todd.”

“Hmm.” I licked my lips, touched my face. Did I forget to take off my makeup? Yuk. “Mine said he was Todd, too.”

We stared at each other for the briefest of moments. “So?” Gina pulled open the curtain to glance outside. “So maybe they lied about their names. What, you think guys’d care if we lied about our names? If I said my name was Kathleen, you think they’d care? Look, a beautiful day again. And so hot, too. Want to go swimming? And tonight we can go back to South Bend.” She winked naughtily. “We’ll try the Linebacker Lounge this time.”

“Swimming?” I was still stuck on the boys and the dream. “Swimming where?”

“Uh—Lake Michigan?”

“Oh.” We were stretched out in bed. “But we didn’t lie, did we?” I said. “We could’ve, but we didn’t. We wanted them to know us.”

I didn’t tell Gina my bad vision of trouble: I had woken in the blue of night, and there, in our room, in the chair by the door, sat Ned, watching us, his scalp flaking, his belly overflowing, eyes slow-blinking.

We threw on clothes and went to the kitchen, where Aunt Betty eyeballed us like we were stale cheese. Ned sat at the corner table, reading the newspaper. He didn’t look up. Betty said the dogs had barked at four in the morning and woken her. “They never bark in the middle of the night.” Cleverly, we said nothing. She asked why we slept so late when we went to bed so early. Again, a simple shrug sufficed for reply. But at that moment Ned looked up from his early 70s newspaper, and gave me a slow blink.

I got scared, then. Perhaps, after all, nothing in the night had been a dream. When I quickly looked away from him, I saw Aunt Betty staring at me with those doe moist eyes, now wary, and considerably cooled.

As she was sliding me some unfriendly toast and burnt bitter coffee, she asked if we wouldn’t mind taking two of her homegrown Chihuahuas to a very good customer a few miles away. She said the pups had been born eight weeks earlier and the woman’s young sons were dying for them. They’d been inspected and paid for so all we had to do was deliver them, a quick in and out drop-off thing.

“See, Sloane,” said Gina, sipping her coffee as if it were champagne, “there are some people in this world who like dogs.”

I ignored her, pushing my cup away. “Aunt Betty, did you tell the woman,” I asked, “that whether or not her sons get the puppies at eight weeks or eight years, the Chihuahuas are going to look exactly the same?”

“Excuse me?” She remained humorless, and then turning to Gina said, “Please, niece? A favor to me?”

Gina looked at me with a friendly open shrug, as in, why not? I wasn’t reluctant, just silent. “Aunt Betty, we’ll be glad to, right, Sloane? But I haven’t seen you for so long, we wanted to stay a few more days, go to the mall, swim in the lake. Is that okay?”

Betty shook her head. It wasn’t okay?

“I’ll give you 200 dollars to deliver the dogs today.”

That’s when I perked up, that’s when my cement-head morphed upward into swamp-head. “Two hundred dollars?”

Gina generously offered to split it with me.

“Oh, you will, will you?” I returned. “Well, why not, after all, you’ll be doing half the driving.”

“Shut up. Aunt Betty, we’d love to, but please, can we go tomorrow?”

Vehemently, Aunt Betty shook her head. “You have to leave today.” Suddenly 200 dollars became a hefty chunk of change to drive two rodents a couple of miles down the road. I became suspicious. “Hang on a sec,” I said, my turn to narrow my eyes, furrow my eyebrows. “Where exactly are we going?”

“De Soto.”

“Ah, well, De Soto.” I got up to swill my coffee into the sink. It splashed and left a terrible mess. Not one to leave a mess behind, I cleaned it while saying, “And where might this De Soto be?”

“I have the address,” said Aunt Betty. “It’s just down 55-South. It won’t be any trouble. It’s on the way for you, girls.”

How many places were “on our way?” How could everything be on our way? Every single thing? What kind of coordinates did our way have? It zigged down and zagged up, it meandered on country roads, on Erie Canal, then curved around a bend—South Bend—and a lake, two Great Lakes even, and now was jutting on 55-South. South! Did anyone realize we were heading west? Everything between New York and California, point A and point B was on the way. Everything between the coasts was on the way. From Canada to New Orleans was on the way.

I went to get my map. Aunt Betty also disappeared, emerging a few moments later with cash in hand. “Are you girls packed, ready?”

“Ready? Aunt Betty, we just got up. We haven’t even showered!”

Betty frowned. “Why would you need to shower again? I heard you showering at nine last night.”

Without a blink, Gina said, “Always like to start my day with a shower, Aunt Betty. Sort of like brushing my teeth.”

“Well, no use wasting my water. I got a well around here, it runs dry on hot days like this. Why don’t you two get going. You can be done by evening.”

Well, at least De Soto was close enough to get to by evening, though by the hurried way Betty was shepherding us out, maybe this evening was optimistic. “I can’t find it on the map, Aunt Betty,” I said. “Show me.”

She declined. “I’m terrible at reading maps,” she said. “But I have the address.” Betty handed me a scrap of paper and a donut. Everything was on a scrap of paper. “You best get going. You wanna get there before dark. The Kirkebys live in the country, no lights anywhere; will be hard to read the street signs.” Before I could protest, she stuffed four fifties into my hand. “Here. You look like you need the money.”

“Do I?” What can I do never to look like that again? Is it my Levi’s shorts? Or my plain white blouse? Is it the Dr. Scholls on my feet? Or the two-dollar Great Lash mascara that was caking from last night? I didn’t carry a purse, but did my eight-cylinder, 350 horsepower stock car that cost someone a second mortgage give my financial status away? What was it about me that made me look impoverished to a pale woman with slow speech and a mute man that almost never looked up from his newspaper?

Money in hand, sugar from the donut sticking to my fingers, I opened up the piece of paper like it was a fortune cookie: “YOU WILL BE RICH.” “YOU HAVE MANY GIFTS.” “1809 Chariot Way, De Soto, MO.”

“MO?” I muttered. “Gina, what state is MO?”

“Dunno. Montana?”

“Not Montana!” That was Aunt Betty. “Where would I get a customer from Montana?”

“Is it here? Is it Michigan?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Betty, collecting the toast plates. “This isn’t Michigan. Flo always gets it wrong. It’s Indiana. We’re right on the border. Listen, don’t get yourself in a twist. You have the money. Go.” And then she added, “Need directions?”

Puzzled I stared at her; clear-eyed and judgmental she stared back. Where had I heard that before, seen that before? Need Directions? I saw it like a billboard in front of my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “Where’s De Soto?”

“St. Louis,” Aunt Betty exclaimed. “Just a few miles south on I-55. Why don’t you go and get ready. It’s getting late.”

Near St. Louis. A few miles south. On I-55. Carefully, folding my map, I said, “Is that on the way to California?”

“Of course!” replied Aunt Betty. “Don’t you know what St. Louis is called? ‘The Gateway to the West.’ What do you think the St. Louis Arch was built for?”

I straightened up and shook my head. “Aunt Betty, I don’t think St. Louis is that close. We were planning to stay on I-80.”

“What, two hundred isn’t enough?” she said. “Shaking me down for more money, Shel?”

“What?” I exclaimed. “No, of course not, like I would, no, but … now that you mention it …”

“Sloane!” That was Gina.

“No, no, niece, she’s right.” Aunt Betty smiled ruefully. “That’s fine. I’ll give you a hundred more. Will that cover it?” She stared at me meaningfully. “And here’s some water for the road.”

We’re leaving? But I hadn’t planned my route yet, hadn’t written things down in order—

Within thirty minutes we were flasked, packed, dogged-up, and shown the door. Betty did not allow us to shower.

“Goodbye!” She waved, disappearing into her broken-down trailer with the cow and the goat. “Was so good to see you, girls. Gina, I’ll tell your mother we had a nice visit. Be careful, you two!”

“Wow,” I said as we drove out onto the main road. “Wow.”

“Wow what?”

“Huh. Nothing. Strange is all.” I turned around to glance at the Chihuahuas in the crate taking up most of the backseat. What odd-looking dogs.

“What’s strange?” Gina opened the map.

“Don’t even pretend. Put that map away,” I said. “You didn’t get the feeling she was trying to get rid of us?”

Gina looked up. “No. She’s just efficient. Doesn’t like nonsense.”

“Yeah, that must be it.”

“Do you know where you’re going?” Gina put the map away.

“Haven’t you heard? St. Louis.”

We left that moment, not a few days later, like I planned, like Gina wanted. We were hurried out in the middle of an afternoon. I could’ve said no to the dogs, to the money, and didn’t. I could’ve said no to many things, and didn’t. Like I keep saying, sometimes, life alters by increments and sometimes by insurrection.

3

Two Todds

Route 12 was rural. Stretching through the strip of trees that flanked Lake Michigan, the countryside stopped being pretty, became utilitarian. But to me, where Aunt Betty lived looked like not a bad place for kids to grow up. There was nothing to do, but there were fields and forests. The kids could have adventures. In Larchmont you always had to be careful. Look both ways, don’t jaywalk. Not much adventure. Here, the kids just ran with the dogs. And the goats.

“Is Ned your aunt’s husband?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Gina. “I think they met up in a rest home Betty had been living in, recuperating.”

“Recuperating from what?”

“I don’t know. Life’s little stresses. She gets stressed out easily.” Gina chuckled. “You saw Ned.”

“You could say I saw Ned.”

“What?”

“Nothing. What was he recuperating from?”

“Well, I don’t know. He’s had some problems.”

“You don’t say. What kind of problems?”

Gina raised her eyebrows. “Mental problems.”

“Oh.”

“But I don’t really know.”

“Why don’t you ask Agnes? She’ll tell you.”

“How would Agnes know about Ned?”

“Agnes often speaks of things she knows absolutely nothing about.”

“You think?” said Gina, with a breath, then another. “But sometimes Agnes speaks of things she knows something about. No?”

After the briefest of pauses, I said, “No. Tell me about Ned.” See, this is when we needed Molly! No wonder Gina had brought her. If it wasn’t for crazy Ned, she’d still be with us.

“Once I overheard my mom say he was out on parole.”

“Parole?” My head jerked. “For what?”

Gina hesitated. “Look, he was falsely accused. He didn’t mean any harm. But some young girl, about fourteen, who’d run away, claimed Ned took her into his home where he was living with his mother and wouldn’t let her go. Kept her there like a slave or something. I mean, that’s preposterous, isn’t it?”

My heart was in my stomach. “Gina,” I said, because I couldn’t keep quiet, “why would you go visit your aunt when the man she’s with has accusations like that hanging over him?”