DAY 9
The next thing that happens is the sound of the alarm and the squawk of Honey who is exactly the age she is and no younger. I sit up and see her standing looking gleefully over the railing of the Pack ’n Play her curls twisted up in a peak above her high forehead. “Good morning, Miss Critter,” I say to her, and she beams at me. I crawl to the foot of the bed and reach into the Pack ’n Play and drag her up on the bed with me and lie back and she lies on me and puts her head under my chin and I am thinking Keep this moment, let’s keep this one and while I am trying to fossilize the moment or X-ray it or photocopy it or do something that will make it stay with me forever she is squirming thrashing rolling and she is off the bed, she is on the move and suddenly I have what I think may be my most important epiphany about motherhood which is that your child is not your property and motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapı, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and you’ll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if you’re lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they finally turn out the lights. I pack up our things and consider this while Honey uses the cord to pull the telephone off the nightstand onto her toes.
Alice is standing outside the door when I open it and she says “I was wondering when you’d wake up” and it is only 7:05 and I start feeling annoyed right off the bat but say “Good morning, Alice, I hope you slept well.” I leave Honey in her care to get her bag and ours and haul them down the corridor to the lobby where I confer with the attendant who is a young man with flaming red hair about breakfast. The Wagon Wheel does not offer a breakfast. I leave our bags and things and trundle back down the hall and say “There’s no breakfast, we can snack with our leftover picnic things or the manager says we can go to the Black Bear diner or we can go to the Safeway,” and she says, “You just feed her—I want to get on the road” and I say “Ten-four” and dig out a banana and peel it and give a piece of it to Honey along with a verbal contract for a string cheese when she’s finished. I ask Alice to wait with her and haul everything to the car but when I walk away Honey cries and toddles after me and I say “Wait with Alice” and she cries louder and I say okay and heft her up and take what bags I can with the remaining arm and we make for the car. The attendant trots out from behind the desk and grabs the Pack ’n Play and I feel so indebted so grateful so helpless so guilty and I hate this feeling but I just say thank you.
We hit the road. It’s two hours to the camp and I try to suss out the plan on the way there, because I realize we still have no plan.
“Is there a museum or visitor center or something we can go to?” I ask and Alice says “No” and she sounds irritable and I say “Sounds good” and think about what I am going to do, then, because now that we are away from Altavista I know with great certainty that we can’t go back, we can’t go back to the mobile home, we can’t go back to the High Winds Market. We have to go Elsewhere. Alice doesn’t make a peep and Honey doesn’t make a peep and I’m thinking why did I sign on to chauffer this person around who I don’t even know, etc. But I’m bored and I’ve had so little conversation in the last week, the last eight months, that I decide to make some.
“Can you tell me about this camp thing? I don’t know about it.” She turns from gazing out the window and faces ahead. “During World War Two they let conscientious objectors do public works instead of putting them in jail or making them take office jobs in the army. But they gave ’em awful jobs, working in mental institutions and doing heavy labor, like where we’re going. He liked it, though, the harder the better.”
“Was this the thing where they sent Depression guys to plant trees?” and she raises her eyebrows at me. “No, that was before, but they used the same camps. The ‘Depression guys.’ Huh. What do they teach young people? It was three million people,” she says. “It’s why you have all these nice parks and the country didn’t just blow away with the dust storms.” She frowns. “It was segregated, though. So my husband disapproved. But the CO camps weren’t.”
“You said you came out here to see him?” and out of the corner of my eye I see her nod. “When I got out of the service,” she says. “We had been writing letters. I met him in school. Quaker college. I joined up halfway through school, after he left, but I was only in for a year. I came and visited him and then I went back to school. We waited for each other.”
I don’t know whether she means sex or just generally waiting. “How long were you apart.” “A couple years, all told,” she says. “And now fifty years.” I look over at her.
We are taking the shorter route rather than the truly scenic one that would have wound around the big mountain and covered more California ground than Oregon. We pass farmland, pine forests, little tiny towns: population 54, 240, 300, 76. It’s good to have that feeling again of the endless west rather than the circumscribed plain of Altavista and the unrelieved sagebrush and juniper scrub. We are beginning to leave the monotony of the high desert and there are green hills like dells I think they are called, and the trees are different and when I press the switch to roll down the window I can feel the influence of the sea in the air just the slightest bit. This feels like Humboldt land, Del Norte land, the trees are taller, the air is wetter. Honey blats in the back and I crane my neck and catch her eye in the rearview and say “Hullo baby” and she kicks and grins at me and pants and doesn’t look the slightest bit ruffled. The sky, which has been foreboding since our picnic yesterday, is dark and ponderous to the west.
“Looks a little unpleasant toward the camp, weather-wise,” I say.
“I brought my umbrella,” Alice says looking ahead.
We haven’t been driving for very long when she starts speaking extempore.
“I keep thinking about that trip to Turkey, the one you made me remember.” I glance over at her and make a sound for her to go on.
“We took a train all the way to the east part of the country, Diyarbakır it was called.” Diyarbakır where Ellery died, my mnemonic device until the end of time. “It was such a boring train ride—very long unbroken expanses of countryside.” She laughs. “I remember that’s what he said to me, ‘My goodness, this is a rather unbroken expanse of countryside,’ and then he flashed me a little look and suggested we pass the time by kissing and I said all right so we set about kissing, and it made a tremendous scandal. There was a lot of tsking from the ladies around us.” She laughs and her voice is rusty in her throat. “I was always such a prim young woman, I can’t believe now that I did it.” I’m honestly stunned by this story. “I’m amazed someone didn’t attack you. In 1960!” It’s hard to picture this woman behaving like a drunk Brit on a beach package tour, rolling around in the sand while the aunties and uncles cluck their tongues with scorn.