Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 20

  Henry and I hadn’t let our parents know we wouldn’t be returning home that evening. Now that we were already on the road, it seemed that Friendly’s was as good a place as any to issue our little declarations of independence. Neither of us was under the illusion that our families would be thrilled.

  Henry went first. I leaned against the bank of pay phones and watched him dial. He cradled the receiver with one shoulder and picked at his cuticles.

  “Hello, sir,” I heard him say after a moment. “Well, no. Actually … North Carolina … Kitty’s down there … the one I took to the prom … Yes, I realize … Well, no, I didn’t know it’s black tie … well, she didn’t say … sir, I didn’t promise.” Glancing at me, Henry winked, then pantomimed slitting his throat.

  Henry’s father, Henry Charles, Sr., kept Henry on a tight leash. Despite his fortune, he paid Henry’s tuition in installments only after receiving proof that Henry was maintaining a 3.8 grade average. Each month, Henry was also expected to send home a detailed finance report, explaining each of his expenses. These included every cup of coffee and package of cigarettes he purchased.

  I myself was on financial aid. Three times a week, I worked in the university kitchen, scouring racks of humid dishware, scrubbing down tables, and serving plates of inedible turkey tetrazzini to my classmates on the dinner line. While some people considered this degrading, it seemed no worse to me than what Henry had to go through each month, adding up every receipt for chewing gum and Wite-Out.

  A moment later, Henry hung up. “Well, there’s one parent pissed off.” He began kicking the heel of one of his boots against the toe of the other, then forced a laugh, a sort of high-pitched guffaw. “At least Dad was drunker than shit, so maybe he won’t remember.” He handed me the phone. “Okay, princess. You’re up.”

  I hunkered in the corner with my fistful of laundry quarters.

  “Sweetie,” my mother said. “Are you at Penn Station yet?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “The Connecticut Turnpike.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s in Connecticut,” I said.

  “I realize that.”

  “Guess what?” I said, deciding to attempt enthusiasm. “It turns out that my friend Henry’s girlfriend goes to the same school as Jeremy. So we’re driving down to Duke.”

  “Right now?”

  “Isn’t that great?” I said. “I mean, what are the chances?”

  “But I thought you were coming home tonight. How long are you going for? Not the entire week, I hope?”

  “Probably,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Well,” my mother said, clearly displeased. “Where are you going to stay?”

  Although I’d anticipated this question, once my mother actually asked it, it hung in the air like a wrecking ball. It was one thing, I realized, to promote the idea among my peers that I was this fabulous nymphomaniac. It was quite another, however, to promote it to my parents.

  Some girls probably never admitted it. They simply got married, had children, and their parents lived with the happy illusion that their daughters were virgins until their wedding night—much the same way a lot of us daughters harbored the same illusions about our parents. On the other extreme were girls like my friend Dani, who “accidentally” left her birth control pills on the edge of the sink for her mother to find. Or Judy, who got pregnant in tenth grade. Some of my friends mentioned it almost casually, the way you might announce you’d gotten your period or flunked geometry. But in high school, I’d gone to great lengths to conceal any inkling of my sex life from my parents. Whatever freedoms they granted me, I was sure, were based on their illusion that I was a straight-A goody-goody.

  Now, I was on a road trip staged to announce otherwise. Yet hearing my mother’s voice, I was amazed how quickly my bravado dissolved; it was like Weetabix in milk. I twisted the metallic snake of the phone cord around my knuckles, willing myself to the truth.

  “I’m staying with Jeremy,” I said finally. Then I added, for emphasis, “It’s not like I haven’t before, you know.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  My mother cleared her throat. For a moment, I had the sensation of standing too close to an enormous bell that had just sounded; the reverberations felt palpable, physically jarring.

  “Well,” my mother said distractedly, after another second, “I’m annoyed you didn’t let me know sooner. I just cooked up a big pot of brown rice and seaweed, you know. And I just put out fresh towels. And I just. Oh. Well. Fine.”

  With that, she hung up.

  Back on the road, Henry and I carried on as if we’d pulled off a jewel heist. We were positively punchy, vibrating with anxiousness and relief and incredulity over what we’d just done.

  When we reached the glittering Mecca of New York, my city, as I liked to call it, I bounced up and down in my seat like a lunatic. “Oh, New York,” I cried, pointing dementedly out the window at the skyline, resplendent in all its cubist overkill. For a moment, I flashed on my mother. I was barreling past her over a bridge less than ten minutes away. Somewhere in the nestle of skyscrapers, she was leaning over our dinner table, removing the place setting she’d lovingly put out for me just hours before. I felt a stab of sadness, then forced it away. “My sweet, shining city. Don’t worry, New York,” I called out as we crossed the Triboro, “I won’t abandon you. I’m coming back, New York, I promise.”

  “Oh for fucks sake. You’re crossing a bridge, not emigrating,” Henry said.

  “Humph. Easy for you to say, seeing as you don’t live in a real city, Scarlet,” I sniffed. “You don’t mind if I call you ‘Scarlet,’ do you?” I added. “You know, given that you’re Southern. And a redhead. And a little, you know, fey.”

  “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good,” Henry grinned, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “Just keep it up, you over-breasted Yankee nymphomaniac.”

  I clapped my hands delightedly. “Over-breasted Yankee nymphomaniac” actually sounded pretty good to me. “I can take it, you know,” I informed Henry. “Seeing as I’m from New York City and all. The Center of the Universe.”

  “Yeah, well just wait till we get you over the Mason-Dixon line, Ms. Noo Yawk.”

  I rearranged myself in my seat. “Why, the South, I bet it’s just so cute,” I cooed. “With all those dilapidated plantations and lynch mobs walking around.”

  Henry began whistling. “I’m just going to let you go on,” he said cheerily.

  “Why, I’ll bet there’ll be little shotgun shacks,” I said, warming to the task. “With guys named Jethro and Willie Ray sittin’ on the porch, talking about how, one day, they’re fixin’ to fix the rusted car in their yard. And there’ll be some prissy little grandmother, too, complaining how General Sherman burned down the grain silo and stole the family silver.”

  “Keep talking,” said Henry.

  “And then,” I said rhapsodically, “we’ll stop at some quaint little country store, where two proprietors named Doc and Maw will say, ‘Well, howdy, stranger. If you’re lookin’ for some good, down-home cookin’, Lurleen over there makes just about the best pecan waffles ever you tasted in all of Virginny.’ Boy, I just can’t wait to see that South,” I said.

  “You about finished?” Henry said with some amusement.

  “I reckon I am,” I said, settling back contentedly. ‘’Reckon. That’s what y’all say in the south, too, isn’t it?”

  When we actually crossed the Mason-Dixon line it was dark. If there hadn’t been a small billboard, I wouldn’t have noticed. The Interstate was one long, mind-numbing stretch of asphalt, dark on either side except for an occasional warehouse or industrial park. We’d been traveling for over eight hours by then—we’d hit a lot of traffic passing through New York—and both Henry and I were starting to curdle from sleep deprivation and artificial stimulants. Strewn with Twix wrappers, cigarette butts, Coke cans, and McDonald’s bags, the Toyota began to feel like a giant ashtray. Since neither of us liked c
ountry & western music or Baptist preachers—just about all there was on the radio—we were pretty much left to Henry’s music collection, which consisted precisely of three tapes, Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby, and Kraftwerk, all of which I loathed. Nineteen-eighties music, to me, was manufactured and lazy. If you were going to be a musician, at least you could play your own instruments.

  The Toyota’s ventilation system seemed to alternate between chilly and smelly, and I began to think that not wearing any underwear for a seventeen-hour car trip had been a mistake, too.

  “Oh happy day,” said Henry, lighting another cigarette, then gesturing to the car in front of us going ten miles below the speed limit with its left blinker on. “We’ve got Grampa here taking his car for a walk.”

  Just south of Washington, we pulled over to a gas station. Henry bought a cellophane cone full of pink and yellow daisies for Kitty, which he propped up on the floor of the back seat in an empty Mountain Dew bottle he’d filled up with water.

  “I hope these’ll keep. You don’t think they’re too withered?” he said, nibbling at the cuticle on his thumb. “I wanted roses, but these were all they had left.” Then we walked over to a phalanx of pay phones by the roadside to let our paramours know we’d be late. It was eleven o’clock at night. The wind was hot and relentless. Cars tore by on the overpass, making it difficult to hear. On Jeremy’s end of the line, there was a ball game on in the background, which didn’t help any.

  “What did you say?” I shouted.

  “I said, ‘What?’” he said.

  “I said, ‘We’re going to be even later!’” I yelled.

  “Are you really coming down here?”

  “We’re in Virginia,” I shouted. “Go to bed if you have to.”

  When we got back in the car, Henry said, “Kitty’s at the library now, but her roommate says they’ll leave the door propped open with a knee sock. Fucking hell. This is what my sex life has come down to,” he said. “A knee sock.” He started up the Supra and swung it out of the station with a jerk. “The things you go through for poontang.”

  I laughed. I’d seen a picture of Kitty, and “poontang” was not a word she brought to mind. In the photograph, she was standing primly in a mint green evening gown with silk gloves pulled to her elbows and her head turned demurely to one side. It was hard to imagine Henry going out with her. At this particular moment, he was wearing a shredded “Adam Ant” T-shirt and combat boots.

  Henry was an only child, and sometimes when I looked at him, I could see in his face his parents battling for his soul. One day, he’d walk around unshaven and flinty-eyed in cowboy boots. The next, he’d be foppish, almost fussy, in an antique silk vest and ascot. He’d dress preppie for a football game, then put on eyeliner and hair gel to go clubbing. For the trip down to Durham, he had on his Road Warrior costume, replete with a leather jacket and safety pins.

  We drove for a while in silence, trapezoids of silver light sliding across our faces from time to time from the oncoming traffic, which was thinning out considerably. I followed along on the map as we passed turn-offs for Manassas, Richmond, Norfolk, green exit signs pointing off into a void. We were hurtling deeper and deeper into the South. Except for a school trip to D.C., this was the farthest I’d actually ever been from home. And yet it was all the same: a repeat of shrubbery, guardrails, wind-tossed trees, the dark road sliding beneath us as if the car were devouring it. Then Henry steered the Supra down an access ramp and into an industrial parking lot. He cut the engine quickly, stopping us with a jerk. “VoilÀ,” he said.

  Around us were nothing but abandoned rigs, enormous, ghostly eighteen-wheeler trucks, and huge metal shipping containers in what looked like a graveyard for cargo. Sodium lights overhead bathed everything in ghastly orange fumes. In the distance was a squat concrete building with steam billowing out behind it. You could hear the hiss and rasp of its ventilation ducts. It seemed to throb like a heart, like the centralized nervous system of some alien organism. It was well past midnight. Except for an occasional vehicle tearing past on the freeway, there was no evidence of life. Even the saplings at the far edge of the lot looked skeletal.

  “C’mon,” Henry said, unfolding himself from behind the steering wheel.

  “Where are we?” I climbed out of the car awkwardly and tugged at my silver skirt, which was beginning to look more and more like an accordionized gum wrapper. It was misty outside. The air was leaden with the smell of wet soil and gasoline. A thin film of moisture coated everything.

  “You wanted to see the South,” Henry said, starting across the lot.

  I squinted at the structure ahead. “What’s that? A substation?”

  “No. The Jarratt, Virginia, truck stop. C’mon. Coffee time.”

  I had to trot to keep up with him, and as we drew closer to the building, I noticed a small neon sign reading “FOOD, DRINKS” sputtering in the window. Every other second it hissed and crackled, then half the letters blinked dark, so that it spelled out “FOO, DRI” instead. The building was massive, much bigger than it had looked from the parking lot, and eerily windowless. Though it would make a fine morgue or secret munitions plant, it didn’t look like any place you would ever want to eat.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Henry swung the door open and grinned. “After you, Ms. Noo Yawk,” he said. Ever since Maryland, I noticed, his Southern accent had grown more pronounced, ripening with languor. “Well, thank yew ma’am,” he said to the toll booth attendant. “Y’all have a good evening.”

  Inside the entrance a small boutique had been set up. Instead of selling the usual for-the-road mints, cigarettes, and plastic flashlights, it had racks upon racks of ornate cowboy boots. Stetsons hung from the ceiling, twirling lazily like mobiles. Finely crewled leather belts hung down the walls. In a corner by the cash register, a walrussy-looking man sat on a stool beneath a sign that said “O-K Corral Apparel. Custom Made.” He was chewing gum absentmindedly and staring out at the parking lot. In one hand he had a pair of bright green dice that he kept shaking and releasing out on the countertop without once glancing to see what he’d rolled.

  Henry led me through two fire doors and suddenly we were in an enormous room blazing with artificial light. It was the kind of light you find in casinos, designed to simulate daylight and sterilize time.

  We were in a cafeteria the size of an airplane hangar. A countertop snaked through the room, and hundreds of truckers sat along it on orange vinyl stools, hunched over cups of coffee and tucking into plates heaped with pancakes and sausages. At every bend of the counter stood waitresses in peppermint-striped uniforms and harsh makeup, with hairdos that seemed to have been whipped up out of a frozen custard machine. Toward the back of the room was what looked like a glass-enclosed deejay booth displaying a splashy sign: “WQJR: Travis, Conway, and Wayne Every A.M.!” Beneath it, a makeshift photography studio had been set up. A man who looked like a televangelist stood rod-still in front of a white backdrop while a blonde in a red polyester suit and stilettos patted his face with a powder puff. A photographer in suspenders paced back and forth between two light stands, smoking and flicking his ashes on the floor and looking generally irritated. The room hummed with activity, and yet everyone seemed oblivious to what was going on around them. The truckers chewed blearily. The waitresses refilled coffee cups mechanically. The man being groomed for his close-up looked embalmed. In New York, I was used to all kinds of bizarreness. But this was surreal.

  “Henry, let’s go,” I said.

  “Whatchew tawkin’ ‘bout, woman? This here place is right homey,” Henry announced, his drawl now in full bloom. “Yew jes’ sit yerself down and order me some coffee. Ah need a piss.”

  With that, he turned and sauntered into the men’s room. I stood there, alone in the unforgiving light. A trucker whose forearms were scrolled with tattoos glanced casually over in my direction and nudged his buddy.

  In addition to my silver miniskirt, I had on little pointy black elfin bo
ots and a black rip-necked sweatshirt pulled seductively off one shoulder Flashdance-style. With my fingerless lace gloves and one enormous rhinestone earring, I’d felt pretty proud of myself fourteen hours earlier, preening in the mirror back at college, convinced that I looked like a star in my own MTV video. Now, standing in the middle of what was, essentially, the National Trucker Convention, it suddenly occurred to me what a mother lode of bad judgment this had been.

  I slipped past the truckers as coolly as possible, then hoisted myself onto a stool. “Hey, sugar,” a waitress drawled. “What kin ah git fer yew?”

  Hearing her address me like that made me utterly tongue-tied. Surely the moment I opened my mouth, the entire room would realize I was a Yankee and elect to string me from a tree.

  “Two coffees to go puleese,” I said with a slight inflection. I didn’t know who I thought I was kidding.

  Henry seemed to be taking his sweet time in the men’s room. Casually, I surveyed the cafeteria and tried to pretend that I was perfectly used to hanging around truck stops at two in the morning dressed like a prostitute.

  Back in New York, I’d spent countless afternoons with a notebook, spying on various people and inventing stories about their lives. On any given Saturday in Central Park, the city pretty much spoon-fed characters to you. A fat woman in a purple caftan would shuffle by with a cat on a leash, followed by two Hispanic men in identical white leather pants. It was easy to divine characters from people who on some level, I realized, saw themselves as characters already, who put themselves on display in the hopes that they’d be someday immortalized. But the truckers in Jarratt, Virginia, were of an entirely different ilk. Their faces were like no faces I’d ever seen. They were like furrowed fields and scorched earth, full of turbulence and erosion. I could not begin to imagine who they were or what their lives were like. Watching them, I suddenly felt a very long way from home. There was a whole, vast, unknowable world out there that could swallow me instantly. I was completely out of my league.