The Leisure Seeker (4 page)

After a bathroom and gas stop in Arlington, Route 66 disappears and we are forced back on I-44. Though the books tell us how to get back onto the old road after a short distance, we cheat a little and stay on the interstate. At yet another Springfield, I direct us back onto the old road.

“How are you feeling, John? You doing all right?”

John nods, runs a hand over his head, then wipes his hand on his sleeve. “I’m all right.”

“You tired? Want to find a place to stop for the night?” I’m asking him, but I suspect it’s me that really wants to call it a day. I feel sore and shaky. I am experiencing
discomfort
.

“Yeah, okay.”

Of course, once we decide to stop, we can’t find a place to stay to save our lives. We meander through a braid of towns with curious names: Plew, Rescue, and Albatross; old places of log
and stone. In a town called Carthage, we find a campground that will do. We pay our money and set up shop for the night.

The late afternoon sun is too intense, so we sit at our table inside the Leisure Seeker. I turn on a little fan, take my afternoon meds, and settle in to read an old
Detroit Free Press
. After a while, John goes to the back of the van to lie down. The van shifts slightly with his movement. Something creaks in the undercarriage.

“Ella, where are the kids?”

“They’re at home.”

John sits up in bed, stares wide-eyed at the seam where the paneling meets the ceiling. “We left them there?”

“Uh-huh.” I know what’s coming.

He twists his head now, searching for me, eyes frantic with fear. “For Christ’s sake, we left the kids alone?”

I slap down the paper, in no mood for this. “John, the kids are adults. They’ve got families of their own now. They have their own houses. They’re fine.”

“They are?” he says, not quite believing.

“Yes. Don’t you remember? Kevin and Cindy both got married. Kevin and Arlene have got two boys, Peter and Steven. And Cindy has a boy and a girl.”

“They do?”

“Yes, John. Don’t you remember? Their names are Lydia and Joey.”

“Oh yeah. They’re little kids.”

“Joey’s eighteen. Lydia’s in college. Remember going to her high school graduation?”

Sometimes it feels like all I ever say is “Don’t you remember?” to John. I know that somewhere inside of his head, floating around, are all these memories of our life together. I refuse to believe that they are gone. They just need to be coaxed out. And if they need to be nagged out, then so be it.

“Lydia gave a little speech at graduation, about knowing where you’re heading, finding your own way into the future? Everyone applauded? Joey played in the band at the ceremony?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, good. You should remember. Keep remembering it because I’m goddamn sick and tired of remembering everything for you.”

“I’m sorry, Ella,” he says, shamed.

Sometimes I just want to smack myself. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, too, honey. I didn’t mean to get mad.”

“It’s this memory of mine.”

“I know, dear.”

I turn the page and decide to tackle the Jumble. I look around for a pencil.

“Ella, where are the kids?”

Deep breath. “They’re fine, John. Why don’t you take a nap?”

So, I tell him to take a nap and what happens? I fall asleep
at the table. Involuntary catnaps: it’s another reason why getting old is for the birds. You don’t mean to fall asleep, but then suddenly you wake up and hours have passed. It’s an entirely different time of day. There’s a gap, an in-between period you just can’t account for.

It’s pitch-black in the van now and it scares me. John and I have not let it get completely dark in our house for years. These days, it disorients him and it just plain spooks me. When we go to bed, we always leave lights on all over the house. We sleep in half-dark rooms, doze in shadows. We live there, in the half night, especially John.

“John!” I yell, trying not to panic. He’s snoring to beat the band. Finally, I remember that there’s a lamp right over the table. Jesus. I reach up and fumble around till I find the switch. The light makes me safe again.

“John, get up.” I look at my watch.

“What is it?” he says, voice sticky with sleep.

“We’ve been snoozing for almost three hours. It’s dark outside.” I try to get up, but my legs are asleep. I wiggle my feet to get the circulation started. “Could you help me?”

“Just a second,” he says. In a moment, he’s at the table, his hands outstretched to pull me.

“Ow, ow, ow.” The edge of the table scrapes my belly. “Old Two-Ton Tessie here.” Then I’m back on my feet, knees discomforting like crazy.

“Hush,” John says, smoothing back my hair. His hands smell vinegary, but I welcome his touch.

“I’m okay. You hungry?”

John brightens at the mention of food. He’s in good post-nap spirits. Sometimes he wakes up mean as the devil. It can go either way.

“Why don’t I make us some eggs and bacon?” I say.

“Good deal.”

I shuffle to the kitchenette, all of three steps. (This is why RVs are the cat’s ass. When you get old, everything gets farther away. But here in the Leisure Seeker, everything’s right there where you need it.)

I fire up the electric frying pan, pull bacon and eggs out of the icebox, and lay six strips in the pan. After I hound him into washing his hands, John is on toast detail. He stands at the counter, a stack of Wonder bread in front of him.

“Don’t put it in the toaster yet,” I say.

I watch as he closes up the bag with a twist tie and starts rummaging in our junk drawer till he finds the scissors. He then snips the excess plastic bag just above the twist tie. John has done this for the last couple years. It’s the sickness. At home, he was always stacking, straightening, fiddling with something. He’d trim the bag, leave the room, then come back in and do it again. Sometimes before we even use any of the bread, the bag is trimmed down to a nub. Despite this, he’s more lucid than usual and all this feels pretty normal.

“Hey, how about a cocktail?” I say.

“Sounds good.”

I know you’re probably thinking, she’s grateful for a pre
cious few moments of clearheadedness with her husband and what does she do? Make him dull with booze. You would have a point, but I really don’t care. I reach up into a cupboard and pull out bottles of Canadian Club and sweet vermouth.

“We haven’t had a cocktail hour in a long time,” I say as I turn the bacon on low. “Get some ice out of the cooler.”

John surprises me by turning on the tape player to some music. The van is suddenly filled with the sounds of lush strings and a mellow baritone sax. Years ago, he taped a lot of our favorite albums for us to listen to on vacations. All kinds of good stuff—Arthur Lyman, Tony Mottola, Herb Alpert, Jackie Gleason.

“Is that ‘Midnight Sun’?” I ask.

“I guess,” he says, coming back with a tray of ice cubes.

“I think it is.” I mix us manhattans, extra sweet. After the kids left home, John and I started having a little drink before dinner. We would sit downstairs at our rumpus room bar where we used to entertain, light a candle, put on some music, and just chat. John was just finishing up as an engineer at GM then and he would tell me about what was going on over at the Tech Center, who was stabbing who in the back, who was getting laid off, and so on. He didn’t care anymore since he was retiring. (Thank God for “Thirty and Out.” It was the mid-’80s, just as the Detroit auto industry was going to hell in a handbasket.) I would tell him who I had talked to that day, what was going on in the kids’ lives, sales at the grocery store—nothing earthshaking. But we got things out there, shared information.

Now we sit around our table staring at our drinks without a word. I’m thankful for Andy Williams singing “Moon River.” At least someone’s saying something. I give my drink a swirl, watch the cherry drop to the bottom. I lift my glass. “Well, here’s mud in your eye.”

John raises his glass and smiles, like he always has. Is there such a thing as cocktail muscle memory? I take a sip. It’s cold, sweet, and strong, and I remember that there is nothing like that first sip of a cocktail. Ah! The pleasure of forgetting, then finding again. This gives me renewed hope for the idea of this trip. John sips his drink and squeezes his eyes shut. I worry for a moment, then he sighs contentedly. “God damn, that’s good.”

“We’re making progress, don’t you think?”

John nods. “Sure are.”

“I think we did maybe about three hundred miles today.”

John takes a second sip and frowns. “Doesn’t seem like very much.”

“We’re doing fine. It’s just slower taking the old road. Don’t you worry.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he says.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I repeat, raising my glass. And never have two words seemed so true.

After our dinner, I decide that we need something else to do. I give John a Pepsi and make myself another drink. “Time for the evening’s entertainment.”

“It is?” says John, rolling a toothpick in his mouth.

John didn’t know that I packed the projector and a big box of slides. At home, in our basement, there’s a cabinet stacked with trays of slides—vacations, family reunions, weekend outings, birthday parties, weddings, new babies, everything that’s ever happened to us. At one time, John was quite the shutterbug. He was our official family photographer.

It’s a balmy night, and I like the idea of watching slides outdoors like at a drive-in. A floodlight has just ticked on nearby, so it’s not so dangerously dark. I leave the lights on in the van, which spreads a warm glow over our campsite yet is still dim enough to use the projector that I have John lug to the picnic table.

“How you doing out there, John?” I yell out to him.

“Where’s the screen?”

“Uh-oh. I forgot to bring one. I’ll get a sheet.”

I rummage around in our little cardboard storage chest and find a bunch of them, orphans left over from sets that wore out long ago. I’m not prepared for how they make me feel. Seeing these old sheets right now, rubbed so smooth, washed hundreds of times over the years, I can’t help but think of my life, or at least my married life, in terms of linens: the spotted stiff white wedding gift linens of our first hungry years together; those same sheets yellow with urine from Cindy climbing into bed with us; the pastel sheets I picked out after eighteen or nineteen years of marriage (that time where early components of a union need replacing—mattresses, radios, towels, all falling apart at the same time—reminding you of just how long
it’s been); those same replacement sheets following us into middle age; then newer striped cotton-blend linens from the outlet malls we would encounter on the road (the luxury of three or four sets to choose from), taking us into deep middle age, then agedness, these last linens now softened to silk by constant scrubbing, lately soiled by John’s gradual lack of hygiene, the smell of an unwashed body preparing itself for a long slumber.

I think of my closet full of linens at home being sold at an estate sale. When I used to go to the sales, I never even considered buying anyone’s linens. Old sheets are just too personal, too full of dreams.

I pull out an old white sheet, almost worn through, that will suit our purposes nicely. I step outside to find John at the picnic table, quietly weeping.

“John, what’s wrong?”

He looks up at me, eyes red and wet, brimming with frustration. “Ella, Goddamn it. I can’t get this thing started.”

It disturbs me to see him cry. “Sweetie, it’s all right. Let me see.” I look around and find that he has plugged the extension cord to the outside outlet, but has not connected the projector cord to the extension cord. “It’s okay. You just forgot to plug this in.”

John lifts his glasses, uses the heels of his hands to wipe his eyes, pressing hard into the sockets. “
Goddamn
this memory of mine.”

I kiss my husband’s cheek and hand him a Kleenex from my sleeve. “Come on. Let’s watch some slides.”

It’s a long sunset over Lake St. Clair. Our daughter, Cindy, is lounging on a dock in her middle teens. We can see only her silhouette, her then-new young woman’s body set against the sky, which is fiery orange and gold with streaks of periwinkle. The colors seem artificial now, sharpened red with time, hyper-real like the colors of my dreams, on those occasions when they are in color. (As old as I feel, I’m sometimes surprised that my dreams are talkies.) It was a cottage where we spent many summer weekends, one that we shared with my brother and sisters and their families.

“Who’s that, John?” I ask, testing him. “Do you know who that is?”

“Of course I do. It’s Cynthia.”

“That’s right.” I’m holding the remote button. I click to the next slide. There is a shot of the four of us all together, a lovely one that John must have taken with the self-timer on the camera. We are all gathered in our shorts and bright-colored shirts and blouses after a long day outdoors. We look sunburned and happy, except for Cindy, who is sulking, most likely over some boy.

“That’s a nice shot, John.”

“Yeah.”

A few slides later, we are in the kitchen of the old cottage. My baby brother Ted and his wife, Stella, are there with their three kids, Terry, Ted Jr., and Tina. (Some parents are determined to alphabetize their offspring and there is no way to
talk them out of it. I always felt bad for Stella, being one letter off from the pack.) My older sister Lena is there as well with her brood. Al, her soak of a husband, was probably off getting sloshed in the garage. He spent most of his time there, near the beer fridge. (Cirrhosis, when it happened, was no surprise to any of us.)

“Looks like a party,” John says.

“Just dinnertime.”

In the slide, people are standing around a table, helping themselves. The table is covered with lunch meats and potato chips and macaroni salads, Jell-O salads, bowls of dips and crackers, bottles of pop (red, orange, green) with names that I barely recognize: Uptown and Wink and Towne Club. I think about dozens of other photos like this one over the years, huge spreads of food, tables covered with it. I think about the people in the slides, most of them gone now, heart attacks and cancers, betrayed by the foods we ate, by our La-Z-Boys, by our postwar contentment, everyone getting larger and larger in every year’s photographs, our prosperity gone wide.