Mon Nov 16, 2009
Punk is a kind of scentless incense stick used to light fireworks and ward off bugs. In the evenings, back then, when we wandered in the bushes, we were given little sticks of punk to burn to keep away the mosquitoes and other flying, biting bugs. Long, lingering evenings, when the green glowed all around the sun’s last touch shining yellow halos along each leaf. The cool, moist dampness of the ground seeped up with the scent of earth, leaves, and worms. We marched, sometimes in lines, our sticks burning slowly, till all you could see was the red tip glowing, small circles of smoke trailing away. It always seemed to be nearing July Fourth when we were there, on our biyearly travels to Nana and Grandaddy's. That’s why the punk was available. It never kept the mosquitoes from biting. My Nana never lost faith in its ability to do so. We marveled at the magic of the burning stick, and ran some more in darkness before they called us into bed.
The world was open and available until they did. We could look in the windows at our beloved grandparents and the golden glow of the lights shining out and know we were safe for a little while and would have enough to eat. I remember every detail of that house and those two people. The small back porch that Nana always called the “piazza” as though she was Italian, though she was pure English and looked it with her eyes set deep inside her classic face, her cheekbones high, with one elegant streak of gray moving up the peak of her gently curling hair.
The piazza was just a tiny little area with three steps leading up to a small platform and the back door. Sometimes she hung her laundry out there, the “unmentionables.” Calling it a piazza made it a different place, raised it above the merely normal to something secret and elegant. Stepping out of the back door lilac bushes blocked the view to the road on the right. Straight ahead was the parking lot, the Baptist Church a little cater-corner to the house. This church with its iron hand railings was part of our vast playground when we were there. We would slide down the railings looking up at the clock tower with its spidery hands that never chimed, to watch the weathervane at the top move according to the winds. The ancient hands just sat there, while the ornate weathervane turned, perhaps in the direction of our next adventure, the source of the secret.
A little farther on was that other big house that used to be home to some distant relatives who either died or moved away. Though there were chairs on the shady porch and curtains in the window there was no other sign that the house was inhabited, no people coming or going, no sense of any movement, just a collection of stationary objects. It was a mystery too.
Behind my Nana’s house was a field that led to the woods and river. Those places were the scariest of all--the most compelling.
Something was lonely all around this place. Something wanted to keep us there, something like gravity, heavy and unyielding.
It took my mother and stepfather about a week to drive “back east,” if they drove almost nonstop, in the station wagon, from Arizona to New Hampshire, one behind the wheel all day, the other all night, with the five kids and dog poured like sardines somewhere in-between. These trips were among the few times our family did anything all together, inhabiting different sections of the car, gazing out the windows at the slowly changing scenery.
My favorite spot, and the one in which I could sit for hours, was right behind the driver, between the front seat and the wheel well. Station wagons, in those days, had a round bump, covered in plastic, intruding inside the car, where the wheel, on the outside, rolled round and round. It was the perfect size for a girl to sink into and watch the outside world passing. Surrounded on three sides with only one exposed flank, I was out of the middle of the fray, drifting in and out of consciousness, lulled by the vibrations of the wheel coming through the plastic cover and the sound of the engine.
I remember waking to strange scenes, like the oil derricks of Texas moving slowly up and down, up and down, seemingly hundreds of them stretched out in the darkness on the flat desert floor. They seemed to me to be strange mechanical bug monsters bowing and rising from the ground, tethered by a long thin pole. Maybe they had come from another planet, maybe they weren’t human made at all! When I thought about that possibility I would scare myself even more. So I would look at the stars and contemplate how long and how far the light would travel--forever--until the bits of light broke apart from the exhaustion of having traveled so far. Black holes would eat up what was left; maybe these machines came from there! If the car broke down the machines would eat us! Texas seemed to go on forever.
The landscape changed slowly from desert to more deserts and then to grassy plains, while I waited for the first sign of green, of home.
The food on the trip, for the kids, usually consisted of cold cereal moistened with reconstituted dry milk for breakfast and sandwich spread sandwiches--a sort of thicker Russian dressing--on white bread for lunch and supper. Sandwich spread sandwiches were a novel meal at first, what with those tiny pickles swimming in reddish-pink mayonnaise and all, but we quickly got tired of them.
So, we’d eat out little open-faced sandwiches and run around whichever parking lot we happened to be in, or put the car into reverse on a hill, just to see what would happen.
We had our fun.
It was my twin brother, actually, who put the car in reverse that day. My brother was sitting in the front seat of the parked car with my sister next to him. Our parents and youngest brother, Michael, were in the restaurant eating, my older brother, Gary, was off somewhere, as he usually was. I was in the way back, the empty place behind the last seats, just looking around. I could hear Karen and Lindsey, my twin brother, talking about driving and playing some game. I heard the gearshift move. Suddenly the car began to roll backwards. I was out of that car so fast to this day I don’t know how I did it, running, running alongside an expanse of glass windows, to the entrance of the restaurant to warn my parents. I could see people in the restaurant beginning to stand up and look out the window at the impending disaster. I flung the glass doors open, found my parents with my eyes and stood there, mute, panting, staring at them with a wide, wild look, pointing at the car rolling down towards the highway. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man running towards the car. Somehow he jumped in and stopped the car from hitting the freeway. Many words were spoken after this incident, believe me, but a sense of amazement at our delivery from horror muted punishment to a minimum.
The wind from those lonely highways blew on our faces as we leaned against the windows and watched the states go by. After a few days of riding in a car on a long trip, getting dirtier and more wind-blown every day, something shifts inside of you. A feeling starts to creep in that you belong nowhere and that reality only consists of the small incidents that happen along the way. Like the dog I saw running so fast after the car that he belonged in. What happened to him? Why did they leave him like that? Didn’t they notice a cute doggie was missing from the car? Did they ever stop to let him in? I felt so lonely watching him, silently rooting for him to make it home. I could never admit to myself that maybe that family was trying to ditch their dog.
Why did the truck drivers honk their horns when we yanked our arms down at them, in imitation of the motion used to blow an air horn?
Why were the toilets in that Kansas rest stop shaped like the stretched out “U’s” of a vacuum cleaner utensil, the ones to get into corners with? Why did it stink so much that I ran away in fear and just held it to the next state?
Why did my stepfather let my brother and I stay up all night with him, when it was his turn to drive, the two of us strapped in with the seat belts, singing little songs or watching the stars, mesmerized by the slow return of color to the wide skies which made us look at each other gently and giggle? And then why did he get so angry with us the next day and would not let us sleep? The stars slowly faded into a colorful sky.
What was Smuckers? The sign said: “Only two hundred and fifty miles to the next Smuckers!” Why didn’t we find out about it? When we finally reached that next Smuckers, having been reminded of its arrival in closer and closer counted increments, it always looked so full of promise. Not a place where we could go inside, ever, we were too poor, or dirty, or something. We knew without asking that we didn’t deserve Smuckers.
Who were all those people driving along in the other cars?
Who was buried in those lonesome graves by the side of the road, far away from anything, in the desert sun, marked only by worn wooden crosses?
How could it feel so forlorn in the early morning, when we stood at some truck stop somewhere, hearing the anonymous high pitched whine of tires rolling along the highway, as we waited for another dirty bathroom to be free?
When would we get there?
Are we there yet?
Once, at a truck stop somewhere in the Midwest, my mother taught me how to steal rhubarb through a fence. There seemed something awful and cheap about reaching through the slats to take a stalk or two of that strange plant, as though we had been on the road forever, gleaning food from wherever we could. The weird tart flavor of the rhubarb made me forget, for a moment, the theft.
Finally, the scenery would start to change. Somewhere in the South, somewhere around Missouri, which we always called Misery because it was so hot and humid, the land, which had been barren and dry, would flush green.
One night my stepfather woke me to look at the “Gateway to the West” which looked like it reached higher than the stars disappearing in a single silver span from my angle behind the driver’s seat. I was surprised he woke me, he didn’t usually try much with me. I felt like I had an interested party for once.
We weren’t there yet, but we were getting closer. After a long blur of green trees followed by dark cities that spewed so much smoke in the air we could hardly see them, a coolness began to slip into the air, a freshness that meant...we were almost there.
We knew we were really almost-there-yet when we passed the Indian Cliffs, which sported a cutout Indian standing on the top of the rocks, way up high, with an arrow pointed towards the sky. We had to crane our heads down under the windows, almost achingly sideways to see him and then we would pass the Dolly Dimple Motel. What a name, Dolly Dimple! Was she a real person? Only in New Hampshire would there be a Dolly Dimple!
Home, home! Nana and Granddaddy, love, coolness, mosquitoes and punk, that last long hill overshadowed by trees, the first glimpse of the blue spruce, the white picket fence with the arched gate all sitting there like a miracle to our tired eyes. We’d pull into the church parking lot, all blessed, rolling to a stop on the bumpy, stinky old tar, the U-haul trailer bouncing behind us, and stagger out of the station wagon, feeling dirty, disheveled, unworthy--home at last.
Later, after hugs and kisses, all cleaned up and fed, we were given the punk and popguns with plenty of caps to go around. We chased each other around with the guns until we got bored and then we simply placed the caps on rocks, one red pillow of gunpowder at a time, and struck them with rocks until they made a loud noise. The scent filled our noses, a lovely, sharp, smoky smell filled with danger. Caps for the days, punk for nights.
We kids were always in trouble for stirring our ice cream until it melted or eating too much corn on the cob, but we didn’t care. The other life came later, after we were back in the car, on the long drive home.
No amount of punk could protect us from where we were going.
Somewhere on those long journeys across the country we learned how easy it is to be left behind, like that little dog that ran with every muscle that he had to reach the family car.
My mother plotted her escape.
My family fell apart, bit by bit, like the light falling into a black hole, and separated atom by atom. Nana and Granddaddy’s house was our refuge, the green coolness of the woods, the rare feeling of being loved. For two or three weeks every other year we got a reprieve from hell.
I drive by the Dolly Dimple Motel sometimes, amazed that it still exists, that even the same sign is there. The wooden Indian on the cliffs is long gone, though the store remains. I crane my neck to find him anyway. Not much is left of my family. My mother took the idea of that little dog to heart, I think; she left us off in different locations and took off down the road.
My grandparents’ house still stands next to the Baptist church in Candia. Many people have owned it since they passed away. Something doesn’t suit the new owners and they sell it almost as quickly as they buy it. I think the house is restless, I think it misses the family that should have stayed. I think it misses us.
One thing all of us who remain alive have is the knowledge that for a time, on those trips, we were all together in a car driving across the country. Something my brothers and I remembered when we drove north from San Francisco with my sister’s ashes in the U-haul trailer.
