It was past midnight when Reba broke out the crabmeat and the smoked oysters and all the rest of it, and Star delivered up the cheeses. The bus was moving through the wall of the night. There was the green glow of the dash, a soft lateral rocking as if they were all inside a giant cradle. Norm was up front, his hands clenched round the wheel, Premstar squeezed into the cracked vinyl seat along with him. Ronnie was a pair of headlights somewhere behind them, Mendocino Bill and Verbie and her sister keeping him company, taking their turn, share and share alike. Marco, who'd gone along with Norm to visit the uncle-“To keep him company, and find out exactly where that mountain of gold is located, just in case we need some spare change”-was in the back of the bus with Alfredo and some of the others, playing cards under a light Bill had rigged up. The kids were asleep. So was practically everybody else.
And so it was Reba, Merry, Maya, Lydia and Star, the women, spread out across three seats, gossiping and feasting as the bus jostled down the road and the vague lights of single homes, gas stations and farmhouses flashed at the windows in an unreadable code. “You get tired of just plain fare all the time, you know?” Reba said. “Tofu paste. Tahini. Brown rice. Even though it's healthy. Even though I'm committed to it. But this”-and she laid a sardine across a thin slice of wheat bread, licking the oil from her fingers-“this isn't just a luxury, this is a _necessity,__ know what I mean?”
Appropriated crackers went round, more bread, a bottle of Liebfraumilch Reba had liberated from the liquor department. They all knew what she meant. And Star ate wedges of cheese and licked the oil from her own fingers-smoked oysters, that was her weakness-savoring the moment. In the inner fold of her backpack, the pouch between the frame and the main compartment, way down at the bottom and wrapped in a sock, were three one-hundred-dollar bills nobody knew about, not Marco, not Ronnie, not Merry or Maya. This was what she had left of her nest egg, the money she'd accumulated before she quit teaching, living dirt cheap at her parents' house when her only expenses were for records and clothes and maybe a Brandy Alexander or Black Russian at the Surf 'N' Turf, the nearest thing to a club Peterskill could offer; the rest had gone for gas and food coming across country, and everything since-food stamps, unemployment, whatever her mother managed to send c/o Drop City-had vanished into the communal pot. There was no way she was breaking those three bills, whether for luxury or necessity, and besides, Norm had guaranteed he'd float everybody through the first winter, at least as far as the basics were concerned.
Lydia, lounging in the seat across from Star, said “Paté,” as if she'd been thinking about it for weeks. “That's what turns me on. And those celery sticks with blue cheese inside. Swedish meatballs on a toothpick. Canapés and champagne. They used to have these parties at the place I used to work, and I'd just camp in front of the hors d'oeuvres tray and pig out.”
“Will this do?” Reba said, and she leaned forward in the flicker of passing headlights and handed Lydia a box of Ritz crackers and two cans of deviled ham.
“Lobster,” Merry said. “With drawn butter.”
“You haven't lived till you've had the Crab Louis at this place called Metzger's on Tomales Bay,” Maya put in. “I went there once, just after high school, with-”
“I know,” Reba said, “-this guy named Jack. With hair down to his ass and a Fu Manchu mustache.”
Star laughed. They all laughed.
Maya's voice went soft. “Actually, it was with my parents. They took me and my brother out west on a vacation. For my graduation present.”
No one had anything to say to that, and they were all silent a moment as the bus lurched through a series of broad sweeping turns, heading for the Canadian border. The engine propelled them forward with a steady _whoosh,__ as if there were a big vacuum cleaner under the hood. Wind beat at the windows, a spatter of rain. They could hear Norm's voice from up front, an unceasing buzz of fancy, opinion and incontestable fact fueled by Ronnie's speed and Premstar's lady-lotion skin, and who liked Premstar, who could even stand her? Nobody. On that, they were all in silent accord.
“Shrimp cocktail,” Reba said, feeding another sardine into her mouth. “For my money,” and she was chewing round her words, “a good shrimp cocktail, with big shrimp now, shrimp as long as your middle finger, with a spicy cocktail sauce and served on a little bed of ice, that's what I'd go for every time.”
Star said, “Pistachios. In the shell. And your fingers get all red. Has anybody in this world _ever__ had enough of those?”
“You know,” Merry said, and her voice was so drawn down and muted you could barely hear her, “I haven't seen my parents since I was sixteen. That's like five years. I can't believe it. And I don't hate them or anything either. It's just the way things worked out.”
“Where you from again?” Reba wanted to know.
Softly, as if it were a prayer, or the name of a prayer: “Cedar Rapids.”
“Cedar Rapids? Where's that?”
“It's in Iowa,” Lydia answered for her.
“Oh, _Iowa,__” Reba said, and she made it sound as unhip and lame as Peoria or New Jersey, and Star felt the mood start to slip away.
“There was this guy,” Merry began, her face lit suddenly by a pair of headlights, then sinking into shadow, “this cat, and he was twenty-three and he had his own car and money like I'd never seen before, like rolls of twenties and whatever. But that's not what did it-I wasn't like that. I'm not like that now. Money didn't mean anything to me, except that it could buy you freedom-and my parents, _Jesus,__ and my school. You know the story. Everybody does, right?”
No one rose to the bait. Star shifted in her seat. She could hear Lydia forcing her hand down into the box of crackers.
“His name was Tommy Derwin and he was from down south, Mobile, and his accent just killed me. The way he would say things, like 'Ahm just honahed that you would con-sent to be mah date tonight, Miss Merra Voight,' and then he'd take me to a bar in Iowa City where nobody ever got carded and then a motel, as man and wife, on the way back to Cedar Rapids. I never thought twice. He said let's go to San Francisco, that's where the scene is, and I went.”
Lydia was passing out crackers smeared with deviled ham, and Star took one, and so did Reba, but Maya and Merry passed-ham was meat, after all, pig, dead pig, no matter how you disguised it. “So what then?” Lydia said, and she wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
“We stayed a couple places. People he knew. We did drugs. I worked checkout at a Walgreens for a while, and when nobody was looking I'd shake pills out of bottles, you know, that sort of thing.” The cheese came round, and they all watched as Merry cut herself two thick slices and fitted them to crackers. “I don't know,” she said. “And then we joined this commune-Harrad House? It wasn't like this, not at all. More into sex. A group marriage kind of thing.”