Road to Paradise

I started watching Emma while she dusted, started wanting to ask her things. I’d mumble I really didn’t need such a present.

Marc thought it was hilarious.

“You’re eighteen, and she’s telling you like a stewardess at the end of a very long flight: Take your stuff and get the hell out.”

I regretted ever having had a crush on him, him and his thick mop of chocolate curly hair and his questions about his sexuality—just a fantastic trick for getting girls. Thank God, I was smart enough to stay almost completely away. I don’t count the night his mother was out and we drank her beer, too much of it, and he said, “I think I might be gay.” I fell for it for five minutes, let him test his possible gayness out on me, then his mother came home, so the result remained inconclusive, that is to say unconsummated, at least with me.

In that early June week, when I should have been dreaming about the prom and graduation, limos and dresses and flowers, I had fevered dreams instead about a tiger ripping apart a much larger lion with his teeth. In my other, even more frightening dream I ran into Emma at the local dollar store. She said, Shelby, I can’t talk too long because I’ve got a lot to do. I don’t have time to get into it with you. And then she went about her dollar-store business, cold, unfriendly, cut off.

After that dream I couldn’t talk to her about anything. I was overthinking it. That had always been my problem. I was an over-thinker and an underdoer. So convenient, that. Didn’t someone say that no decision was worse than a bad decision? Not me. I’d never say that.

The radius of my life up to this point had been only a few miles, and I was terrified by what lay beyond my open window, its deep and abiding mystery.

One night I decided to test Emma. We were done with our work and were sitting on the couch between commercials. It was a weeknight, and I was staying in. I said, “Emma, where did you say my mother lives?”

“Your what?” That got her attention.

“My mother,” I said calmly. “Didn’t you once tell me she lived in a town in California? Montecito? Manzanita? Monte Carlo?”

“I never said,” Emma said slowly, “your mother went to California.”

“You did. What was it? Mesa Vista? Mokelumme? Monte Cristo? When I was five, you said she was sick and she went to some town in California to get better.”

“I don’t remember saying that. How do you remember this?”

“It’s just the kind of stuff you remember.” Montesano? Minnesota? Mira Loma?

“I don’t think I said it.” Emma shook her head. “It’s possible I said it, but, Shelby, I was talking to a five-year-old. You asked me when your mother was coming back. What was I supposed to say? I just said something to make you feel better. Like she was far away and couldn’t leave. But honestly …”

Commercial ended; we went back to watching “Dynasty”.

That night, I pulled out a map of the United States. After thirty minutes of carefully combing the fourth largest state in the union, I gave up. Maricopa? Mission Viejo? Mira Flores?

“I don’t think it’s a town,” Emma continued the next day, as if she knew I’d been looking, thinking about it. “I thought she went to have a rest at a mental hospital. Like Bellevue. Or Menninger in Kansas.”

“What was the name of the mental hospital?”

“Shel, I don’t know. I wasn’t serious.”

“You know she went somewhere.”

“I don’t know.”

“You told me a name back then. I know you did. Did she have family from there? Why am I so sure it begins with an M? That it has four syllables?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mariposa? Minnelusa? Miramonte?”

She rubbed her eyes, as if she were tired of me. The commercial ended, “Dallas” came back on, and Emma had no time to respond. Nor did she respond during the next commercial. And then “Dallas” was over and she got up and said, “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

“I thought maybe that’s why you got me a car,” I said after her. “So I could go visit my sick mother at the Montezuma mental hospital.”

Emma turned around. “I got you a car,” she said, “so you could be free. You kept saying you wanted to be. So now you are. I don’t know where your mother is. I never knew.”

“I’m not going to be gone long,” I said. “Just a few weeks. Maybe two.”

“Two weeks? Takes longer than that to drive there and back.”

“Nah. I’ll be quick. Maybe two and a half. I’ll be back by the middle of July. You’ll be okay for a couple of weeks, won’t you?”

“I’ll be okay,” said Emma. “But two and a half weeks to where? And starting when?”

I bought a map of California from the Rand McNally store in New York City. I put my finger on the letter M in the town index, and went down, mouthing the names to myself one by one, from Mabel to Mystic, and then back again from Mystic to Mabel.

The third time through, at two in the morning, I found it.

Mendocino.

Men-doh-SEE-no.

Mendocino!

I couldn’t sleep until Emma woke up at five.

“Mendocino!” I exclaimed later, like an operatic clap.

She gazed at me through bleary, blinking eyes, as if she’d just woken up. “You have your notebooks, your running stuff?”

“Emma, Mendocino! Isn’t that right?”

“I think so,” she said. “That sounds almost right. Do you have your lunch, or are you going to buy one in school?”

“I’ll buy one in school. It is, it is right. It feels right.”

“Good. You want some eggs before you go?”

I had eggs. I had orange juice.

Mendocino=Missing Mother.

Emma! I wanted to yell. But yelling’s not our style, unless I’m angry. But how could I be angry? Marc told me Emma could have spent as much as $5000 (though I told him that was impossible) on my car so I could go find my mother. It had been so long since I’d seen her. She might be wondering how I’d been.

I laid out the map of the United States on the floor of my room and studied it like the periodic table. I measured my route with a ruler as I used to in Miss Keller’s class, with an X-axis and a Y-axis and plot points along the way. I measured the miles in days and inches. I used physics (time and distance), geometry (points along the X-axis) and earth science (weather conditions in July) to determine my course. I used my seventh-grade social studies to help me with geography. My trouble was: seventh grade was a really long time ago. I thought after Pennsylvania came Kansas, then Nevada, then California. I took earth science in ninth grade, and geometry in tenth, but physics was a senior year subject, and afraid of flunking I opted out of the physics program, and so was stuck with the most rudimentary knowledge of the space-time continuum. As in: how long does it take to travel 3000 miles? Oh, but the Shelby Mustang can fly at 136.7 mph! The Kitty Hawk didn’t go that fast. Twenty-two hours. I could be there and back in two days. Sweet. Three if I dogged it.

Utah’s time and distance didn’t even make it into my calculations. I don’t have to go through Utah to get to California, I said to myself, and dismissed it. I lost interest in geometry and physics somewhere before crossing the Mississippi.

What became clear to me was this: with my flagrant and obvious limitations, I don’t know what I was thinking, planning to go by myself. After Iowa, I had no strategy for the rest of the country. And I like to nap in the afternoons. How could I nap if I was the only one driving? With so many skillsets clearly missing, a vague half of the western country appearing to me monolithically when I slept—snow and yellow flowers between two vast bodies of water—I was on a rack of doubt.

Which was precisely why when Gina approached my breasts in the locker room and offered to go with me, to split the costs and share the driving and the fear, I did not say no right away. Anxiety danced in me, but summer danced in me, too. I was eighteen, out of high school, and had a 1966 stock-car racing Mustang with black Le Mans stripes. And Gina didn’t. Though she had had other things that I know meant a lot to her. Boyfriends, and things.

Gina and I were like sisters in kindergarten. She lived on Summer Street, a short walk away, and had a stay-at-home mom, a working dad, a grandma living with them, and a sister she didn’t get along with, but still—an actual sister.

Her mother didn’t mind that we used to play mostly at her house; she said she didn’t like the endless parade of strangers through mine. I don’t know quite what she meant by that. Strangers didn’t parade through our rooms above a garage. So there we were, tight and inseparable, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, almost to spite me, my bestest bud Gina becomes friends with the mousy, gossipy Agnes Tuscadero, whom I didn’t like to begin with but after the revelations at the Tuscaderos’ idle-talk kitchen table, I hated like Jews hate Hitler. Gina said we could all be friends. She didn’t understand why the three of us could not all be friends. So we feebly played together, got together, walked into town, went to Larchmont beach, talked about being grounded, getting freedom, lying to our parents, and suddenly, just like that, out of the blue, for no good reason, it occurred to me it wasn’t Agnes who was the third wheel.

Marc said Gina was not a serious person, that she was too lightweight for me. I deserved a better, more profound friend. Like him.

Gina maintained we were all still friends. Every Saturday she kept inviting me out, to the beach, to Rye Playland. “Come on, the more the merrier.” She wouldn’t take my no for an answer, though it was the only answer she kept getting. Except once. A year ago June she invited me out to a club with her new boyfriend Eddie. “Come out with us, please? I really want you to meet him. I want him to meet all my best friends. You’ll love him. He is so funny.”

“What about Agnes?” I said glumly.

“She’s not as funny.” Agnes apparently was grounded. I couldn’t believe I agreed to go as Agnes’s pathetic mid-day Friday, afterthought replacement. But I went.

Eddie was pretty funny.

Then Agnes wasn’t grounded anymore, and Gina cold-turkey stopped asking me to go places with her. Nearly the entire senior year had cruised by and we had barely spoken till the afternoon in the locker room.

Gina and I weren’t such strangers once, but there is something so personal about traveling in a car with someone. So intimate. Sharing the minutes of your day, your every minute for days, maybe weeks, with another human being. I couldn’t understand why in the world she’d want to come with me. But the thought of traveling alone was not entirely pleasant. Tension was inherent in both scenarios. On the one hand, Gina, but on the other, terror and alone! It was like that Valentine’s Day Hallmark card for fools: “BEING WITH YOU IS ALMOST LIKE BEING WITH SOMEONE.” Now that was sentiment I responded to. What was better: Gina or violent dread?

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I told her when she accosted me again in the hall.

“Well, I have to know soon.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? I have to pack, no? I have to tell my mother. I have to get ready, too.”

“Look, if I agree to do this, you have to agree to take a bus the last leg of your trip. I’m not driving to Bakersfield.”

“You sure about that?” Gina said, and before I could respond, quickly added, “How close is Bakersfield to Mendocino?” a wide smile on her not really Italian face.

About me. First, all the things I’m not. I am not objectively beautiful. I have found very few people who are; is that fair to say? On the bell curve, I fall somewhere near the top of the downward creep toward homeliness, though perhaps more like a drop than a creep first thing in the morning when I don’t wear mascara or lipgloss, but I bet not even Christy Worsoe, the homecoming queen, looks good then. I can be thought of as plain in my unadorned state, but Emma, who has no obligation to make me feel better about myself, says I look cute when I crawl out for Saturday morning French toast with ricotta cheese before track, all sleepy and punk-haired, and because she says this, I don’t feel as homely as I might. There is nothing wrong with my face, but there is nothing extra right with it, either.

Other things about me. I don’t function well at night. I’m a morning person. I deeply believe that in that two-word, sea-like panoply of “morning person” are veiled a thousand tributaries, big and small, which comprise the essence of a human being. I have tested this divide on my friends Marc and Debbie and Tracy, on Emma too, and found it to be true. I get up and function best early in the day. I clean my room, get my work and schoolbooks together, make sure my sneakers are dry and my clothes ready for track. I take a shower, I eat breakfast. I have a list of things to do before the bus comes, and I do them all. My brain works. I get things out of the freezer for dinner, I make coffee for Emma, I check the boiler to make sure the pilot light is on so that the Lambiels have hot water. We once had a big problem with that, and it became my responsibility to check, and I never forget. I go to school. My library books are returned on time, I don’t indulge in compulsive behavior when I have things to do. I don’t leave my schoolwork until the last minute. I don’t put down my library books and then forget where I put them. I don’t squander the little money I have. I help out. When Emma and I are working an evening for the diplomats, I stay until the work is done. I always say, is there anything else I can do? and, what can I do to help?

If Emma wants me to iron, I iron. I don’t like ironing, and once I burned a silk shirt and the top of my hand and still have the scar to prove it (the blouse needed to be thrown out), but I iron anyway.

I don’t cut corners. If I am told to run seven miles to prepare for tomorrow’s 440-meter race, I run seven miles, even if I think it’s excessive. I don’t get so obsessed in watching TV/reading/knitting/washing the car/cleaning that I forget what time it is. That’s the major part of it, I think—I, as a morning person, always keep track of time. I know when it’s time to go to school, and when it’s time to clean, and when it’s time to read, and to rest, and to ask Emma why she has taken care of me for thirteen years (though there’s never been a good time to ask that, so I haven’t). We sometimes stay up and watch a late movie on a Saturday night, but rarely. Once, in 1978, we stayed up for “Towering Inferno” because I wanted to see how it ended. It ended at two, and I’ve never forgotten the feeling of having to drag my sorry ass out of bed four hours later. I sometimes read late, in my bed, but when I see it’s eleven-thirty, I put the book down and go to sleep so I won’t feel like a zombie the next day. I hate feeling like a zombie. I hate that feeling, because it’s not me. It’s not who I am, zombie-like on Sundays because I couldn’t put down The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. I don’t like myself when I lose track of time, so to like myself more, I put down the book and go to sleep.

Now take my friend Marc. Marc doesn’t know the definition of the word “time.” He does stay up till two, three, sometimes all night, and then I don’t see him in school the next day. He is constantly on the verge of failing, making up work, being late with assignments, copying my notes between classes, rushing, dropping things, forgetting things. Oh, does he forget things. Even things that are important to him. He likes to paint; you’d think he’d remember to bring along the tools of his craft, like his brushes and oils. But no. I can’t tell you how many times he doesn’t have his notebooks, or his chalks, or his special coal pencil. He is ridiculous and knows it, doesn’t like himself but can’t help it. His mind is on a thousand things at once, and he can’t remember where he has to be, or what he has to do. Things fall away. And when he’s up, he wants to stay up. And when he’s asleep, he wants to stay asleep. He says: “Whatever I’m doing, I want to continue doing.”

“But what about the things you have to be doing?”

“Not so much for those, Sloane.”

We are quite uncertain about his future at college. He and I are both worried and frankly not optimistic. Fortunately he’s going to New Rochelle, just five miles away, and will commute, so if he flunks out, he’ll still be in his own bed.

Things don’t get away from me.

Guess what kind of person Gina is?

“Four hundred and seventy miles,” I said to Gina in the hall as we walked from Health to English. “From Bakersfield to Mendocino.”

“Well, how would I get there?”

I said nothing. I was providing the use of my outrageous wheels all the way across the country. I wanted to suggest the use of a Greyhound bus all the way across the country. Or perhaps an airplane ticket. I said nothing, hoping she would see reason all by herself, but she spent two or three minutes until the bell rang heartily complaining, after which I said, “Gina, you’ll have to get on a bus. It’s just a few hours.”

“If it’s a few hours, why can’t you drive me?”

“I’m being metaphorical about the few hours. It’s incredibly out of my way.”

“Just a few miles.”

“Four hundred and seventy few miles to be exact. And I don’t know why I have to point out the obvious, but you do realize I have to drive back to Mendocino? That’s two extra days for me. You’re staying in Bakersfield, but I’m actually driving back.”

“I’m not staying in Bakersfield,” she said, sounding defensive. “I’m coming back here. With him.”

“With who?”

“With Eddie, of course. Who do you think I’m going to Bakersfield for?”

I said nothing. Really, there are times in your life when it’s better to say nothing. This was one of them.

Gina’s blue eyes stared at me for a second longer than I was comfortable with, and then ran to class.

My hands itched all through English, I couldn’t hold a pen. What I wanted to say was, are you kidding me? I’m not bringing you and him back to New York. I’m not spending a week with him and you in my car. You might as well ask me to start speaking French or type sixty words a minute. It ain’t happenin’. Mais non. Jamais. Jamais.

Instead of talking about this, the important thing, Gina and I had an arithmetic lesson. An elementary physics lesson. A time and distance lesson. We took minutes, divided them into hours and siphoned miles through time, and time through miles, taking 470 of them, which was almost 480, dividing them by 60 minutes, and concluding with 8 hours without stops, each way, but after 30 minutes of this, Gina still couldn’t grasp what 60 minutes had to do with how fast the car was traveling, as if time and distance were in no way related. She didn’t understand why my 350 horsepower Mustang, traveling at nearly 137 miles per hour, couldn’t get from Mendocino to Bakersfield and back in 55 minutes. While explaining it to her, I could barely understand it myself, and it certainly didn’t help me to understand the most important thing—was she really expecting me to bring her and Eddie back to New York? Jamais!

The preparations were monumental. Maybe it was because I’d never been anywhere. Or because I was a planner and couldn’t plan for two weeks I couldn’t foresee in my pedestrian imagination. I didn’t want Emma to know I was having trouble because I didn’t want her to say, if you can’t pack and plan for a little trip, how are you going to pack for college? I wanted to reply to her unasked question that it’s a lot easier to pack all your stuff than to selectively pack some of it. Like, how am I supposed to know what I’m going to wear in Nevada, on an indefinite tomorrow? Is the temperature the same in Nevada as in Larchmont? “Probably a touch warmer,” said Emma.

Are there mosquitoes? “There are mosquitoes everywhere.”

“Really, everywhere? But there’s no water in Nevada. Aren’t mosquitoes swamp creatures?”

“Well, then, you’ve answered your own question.”

“No water?” said Gina when she heard. “What about Lake Tahoe?”

“What do you know about Lake Tahoe, Reed?” exclaimed Marc. He called all the girls by their last name. Took the sex right out of them. And mine stuck. This took place during lunch.

“Nothing,” Gina defended. “Except Fredo Corleone was killed on it, and it was in Nevada.”

“Oh, Fredo Corleone. Well, then, absolutely. Better bring repellant.”

Did it get cold at night? No one knew, not even Gina; that part wasn’t in “The Godfather.”

Was it windy? We decided it was. We packed some breakers.

Do I bring hairspray? Extra underwear? Warm socks?

“I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to pack extra underwear and socks,” said Emma. “But you don’t wear hairspray here; why would you start there?”

Maybe I was going to be a different person there.

Challengingly I bought hairspray.

Are hotel rooms warm or cold? Do they give you towels? Extra blankets? Sometimes I get cold at night.

“In the summer?”

We circled the horses around to the original question. Did it get cold at night and are hotel rooms warm or cold?

“Does it get cold at night where?” said Marc. “In Nevada? You’ll blow through the state in four hours. What about South Dakota? Iowa? Utah? Wyoming? Why don’t you care if it gets cold there?”

What did Utah have to do with my business, and should I bring my favorite pillow?

Should I bring a camera, my Kodak Instamatic? Or will Emma lend me her Polaroid, and what’s better, the top-notch quality of my Instamatic, or the stick-it-in-the-darkroom-of-a-partially-closed-drawer quality of the Polaroid?

Should I bring books to read?

“Do you plan to be doing much reading while you’re driving?” Marc asked. He asked this slowly to convey what he really thought of my question.

“Aren’t you all Walden Pondy,” I said, shoving him. “Go sketch something while I do all the work.”

He was sitting in my room doing nothing. He sketched me packing.

“Perhaps a book for a rainy day?” I asked. Why did I always sound so defensive, even with my friends?

“You won’t be driving in the rain, then?”

Should I bring cash?

“Yes, Sloane,” said Marc even more slowly, the wretch. “You should bring some money. After all, you might need gas.”

I threw my pillow at him, knocking the coal pencils out of his hands.

“I mean,” I said, “cash or Travelers’ checks? And if I bring cash, where do I stash it? Do I hide it?”

“Hide it from who? Gina?”

“Well, I don’t know. Can I trust her?”

“Can she trust you?” said Marc, and I didn’t have a pillow left to throw.

“One more comment like this, and you’ll have to walk home.”

“Where are you going to hide your money from her in your little Shelby car? How hard would you have to hide it before she a, realizes what you’re doing and b, takes it personally?”

I sighed. “You’re exasperating.”

“I’m exasperating?” He went back to sketching.

“How much money will I need? Do I bring more than I need? Or just enough? And what if I run out? How will I get more? I have no credit card, and who’d give me one anyway? I have no job.”

Marc got up and handed me his drawing. “I’m going home,” he said, wearily. “I’m glad I’m broke, and can’t go, and don’t have your problems.”

After he left, I wished he could come with us. He’d drawn me like a brown flurry in the middle of a messy room, with greenbacks flying in the air. I taped it to my wall, as I figured things out.