All I Have in This World (23 page)

All he said to Maria was, “I am so sorry.” But he knew it was inadequate and what he was apologizing for was how he had started out sympathizing with
her
tragic past and ended up obsessing over his own.

Maria was silent all the way back to town and through it, until he pulled into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen.

“Why are you stopping here?” she said.

“I can walk back to the hotel from here.”

“But it's your day,” she said.

Marcus counted back to prove it wasn't.

“We can't use one of your days on
my
trip,” she said.

“But I was on the trip, too, remember? You were showing me Texas.”

“I should be apologizing to you for even suggesting I was some kind of tour guide. You know why I wanted to go to San Antonio. Take the car. It's your day. In fact, I owe you a few days. I owe you a week. Take it for as long as you need it.”

Marcus thought about what he should say. What he wanted to say was, I can't believe we're back here arguing about who should take the car. Why even leave if we're going to act the same way the moment we roll back into town? But he did not say that, because he could not say it. After what she had told him about the boy she loved and the baby they made and the boy dying and her leaving, he could not assume, ever again, that the way she acted had anything to do with him. And it wasn't as if nothing had changed. He wondered whether he would ever have gotten to hear her story had he not written that note on the dirty bag, and if his note had not followed so closely her mother's. His own response, after not one but two rejections, would have been to blow everyone off and head to Mexico. He did what made sense to him, but if it did not make sense he did not try too hard to make it make sense.

“Okay, I'll take the car today. But I'm going to drive you home.”

“Fine,” she said. Before she would have said no. But now she did not seem to care if he saw where she lived. He did not let himself wonder whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, because it was just a thing and water rose from the gutters and she was giving him directions now to her house, where she lived with her mother. The storm drains were clogged was the problem. The town was not used to rain and the black water had nowhere to run off.

“Right on Pecos to San Jacinto, left on Nueces, right on One Eighteen,” she said. “It's a couple of miles out.”

As he pulled into Maria's drive, Marcus tried not to stare at the Airstream. He would have thought they'd have gotten rid of it years ago, but there it was, alongside the drive. He tried to look away but the sun hit the edge of it and turned it into a mirror flashing a semaphore indecipherable but impossible to ignore. When he realized he was trying to decipher it, he turned quickly and in shame to Maria, but she was looking where he'd looked.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Don't be,” she said. “It's your day.”

The way Marcus apologized for looking at the Airstream—as if her story, the details of what happened behind it, had turned it into something he ought not even glance at—was what led Maria, her bag still in the drive, Marcus and Her Lowness just out of sight, to climb the steps and open the door and peer in.

Trapped air, and everywhere dust so thick the wood paneling—once cleaned weekly by her father and reeking of Murphy oil soap, an odor that ever after put Maria in this camper—was the wan gray of lint.

Only twice did she remember the Airstream leaving the yard: Once, the family went to Balmorhea, where she and Manny splashed around in the roped-off shallow end under their father's care while their mother did God knows what a quarter mile away in the RV park. Another time her father took them down to Big Bend. Her mother stayed home. Manny had been allowed to bring a friend, which meant Maria slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, the two older boys whispering and giggling into the night on the foldout sofa above her, her father snoring, then not snoring, then snoring so wildly she feared he was dying, in the double bed at the other end of the camper.

Not until she left home did Maria understand the camper as an emblem of her parents' stalled marriage. Her father had bought the camper from a coworker before Manny was born. They were going to hitch it to his truck and take off every summer for two or three weeks. Her father thumbtacked a map of the country on the wall above the double bed, and Maria knew that if she made it farther than the threshold, she would find the map there still, yellowed, its edges curled, looking like a relic, a newspaper from another era. Careful circles faint but still visible around the places her father had planned on taking them: Yosemite, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains. The usual destinations for middle-class families for whom hotels or even motor courts were held in suspicion because they belonged to another rung. The leisure class. Leisure, to her father, turned out to be sitting under the carport grilling chilies, or burning trash with a six-pack and a buddy who saw the smoke and stopped by to bum a beer, or leaning against a souped-up Nova talking cars with his daughter's boyfriend. I like to sleep in my own bed, she imagined her father saying to her mother in defense of his purchase, for surely her mother had put up a fight, as she was finally the reason the Airstream came to rest in the yard. But her father had also bought it
for
her mother, for she certainly wasn't going to stay in any motel. “Why would I want to spend one minute on vacation in a damn motel when all I do every day is cater to people who expect, because they've rented a room, for everything to be like it is back at home, except better?” her mother would say. “Because in a motel they don't have to pick up after themselves or straighten up at all, and my land, the way people will mess up a motel room, it's nasty. No, thank you, I know way too much about what goes on in those rooms to ever sleep in one.” And so her father, in an attempt to satisfy his curiosity about somewhere other than West Texas (or maybe it had nothing to do with actual places, for Maria doubted that had they ever actually made it to the Great Smokies, they would have done much but set up in some campsite and eat what they would have eaten at home, and their father would have burned trash in the campfire and her mother would have scrubbed the tiny shower, which was actually the entire bathroom, or cleaned the tiny oven or gotten down on her knees and scrubbed the linoleum floor while Maria and Manny played the same games they might have played at home), knowing that his wife would not stay in a motel, saved his money and bought the Airstream and brought it home one day and announced his plans to do something different from the day-to-day that had overtaken each of them, singly, as well as their marriage, that abstract union they had celebrated in a simple ceremony in a small Methodist church in Valentine, and—Maria was just now realizing this, as seeing the inside of this camper after all these years, breathing its stale air, opened up to her the secret, shadowy spaces of her parents' early marriage, the things they wanted for their union and they things they wanted for themselves—the camper was maybe his most ambitious and perhaps final shot at fulfilling his fantasy of a future with this ranch hand's daughter, this white girl he met at a dance and courted for six months and married and loved even when he knew he ought to have found someone else to love.

The camper, like her father, ended up hanging around the house long after it should have, long after it ought to have belonged to someone who would have taken it somewhere, slept in it, cooked on its tiny two-burner stove.

Maria had been the last to set foot in it. She did not know this until she opened the door and stood so tentatively a few steps inside.

But before she let herself think of that, of Randy, of the last time she'd inhabited this space, of ham thick and gelatinous and equally thick cheese, tasteless but chewy, of mayonnaise and spongy white bread, of what had happened behind the camper, she thought of campers in backyards all across West Texas, of how she'd seen them all her life and never seen them for what they were, mobile living spaces marooned permanently in backyards. Maybe it wasn't just here but in certain neighborhoods and small towns all across the country. Bought to pull behind pickups, to
go
(places different from home, beautiful places, mountains, beaches, lakes, parks) and to
stay
(sleep in my own bed, cook my own food), symbol of the hopes of newlyweds, the wishes of young married couples, of people who fall in love and think love is always going to feel the way it
did,
first flush, can't sleep or eat for want of you,
more
of you, I don't even feel like I am in my own skin when I am with you, it's like we're sharing the same space and every night is so new and different and so like a motel room in another city, the air-conditioning cranked up without a thought of how we're going to pay the bill, and all those channels on the television, and here is a hair dryer, let's take a bath and point this gun of hot air at each other's skin and then let's jump still wet in the bed and let's take all the shampoo and lotion and let's wear shower caps and nothing else. And so the trucks were trailer-hitched and the campers were outfitted and their tiny cabinets were filled with extra blankets, board games, bug spray, sparklers, and let's just take off and go, it's us—me, you, the children we made together who are each of us and us together, our future, the gift we give to the world—against the rest of them. Driving along the interstate at dusk, they watched the sun set behind the mountains of America, and the sky striped with yellows and pinks causes the father to say to his wife and children, My God, will you look at that! and life intersects with the dream you had about what life would be like for you and the one you chose to spend your life with. But after a time, maybe two or three years, five at the most, of occasional trips, you outgrow the camper, it feels cramped, the kids get older, there's no privacy, you can hear everything, and who wants to lie awake at night, ten feet away from their mother and father sharing a bed, and listen in the dark to their parents breathing and shifting in sleep, and what parents want to sleep in pajamas and nightgowns after so many years of slipping naked under the sheets? The kids get older, they want to stay home with their friends, they want to hang out at the pool, they can't miss this game or that dance, they have lessons, or practice, and who wants to have to deal with kids so sullen and brooding in such tight quarters when it is supposed to be, after all, a vacation, which is supposed to be fun and filled with discoveries? Weeds reach the bottom of the camper; the tires go flat. Maybe an errant teenager or an ailing grandparent moves into the camper. Mostly their surfaces gather dust and the carcasses of expired insects.

Maria stepped farther inside the camper. For years she did not cry. She never asked people for anything. Everything she had, she earned. Kids get older, she said to Randy, starting to sob. They change, and when they do, everything changes. Or everything has already changed and the way the kids change makes it all the more obvious how we might have changed. Randy loved this camper. “I want to go to the Grand Canyon,” he said. “After I build our house, we can get a camper like this one and park it wherever we want.” He might have tried to buy this very camper. And Randy would have been the only person her father would have considered selling it to. In the afternoons when her parents were at work they would come here after school and eat sandwiches and drink Pepsi. She pushed farther into the camper and there was the bed still made with the awful orange-and-green polyester comforter. She walked to it and sat down on it. In the afternoons when her parents were at work she and Randy would lie in this bed and practice being grown up. I want this part of life to be over, they said to each other with their young bodies. It will always be like this, Randy said to her with his hips as he moved inside her, and she said, Like this, as she wrestled him over on his back and made him sit up with his head against the map of the United States of America and sat in his lap and lifted herself up and down and grabbed his head and brought his lips to her breasts, and there were so many ways to say to each other, I want this part to be over, I want to move on to the next part, and she said it back to him every time, she never said no with her body, she only said it afterward in the car high up in the mountains overlooking the twinkling valley.

“Maria?” her mother called. Had she said, instead of Maria's name, “balloon” or “pencil,” her voice would have registered the same amount of shock and confusion. How had Maria not heard the Cherokee in the drive? Where had she been?

Her mother stood in the tight hallway. Maria wiped her nose. It ran when she cried.

“Maria?”

“I saw Manny.”

“You went there? I thought you said you were in San Antonio.”

“Manny said you never call him. He said you never talk on the phone.”

“Seems like Manny has taken up more with his father's side.”

“What does that mean?”

“If he wants to be Mexican I can't stop him. He's half me, though. There was nothing wrong with my people.”

“I think Manny just fell in love, Mom.”

“Both of them Mexicans.”

“You married a Mexican.”

“Not because he was Mexican.”

She wanted to know why her parents got married and she wanted to know why her parents stayed married, and yet instead of asking, she said, “I want this camper.”

“You want what with it?”

“I want to live in it.”

“This nasty thing?”

“I can clean it up.”

Her mother crossed her arms. She tightened her jaw. She said something Maria knew it nearly killed her to say. She said, “You're mad about that note I left you. You're mad I said that about the restaurant.”

“Actually I'm not. You were right. People want blooming onions. If the restaurant didn't make it, I'd just go back to Oregon and work for Beverly, and business-wise, as you keep on saying, it would hurt you more than me.”

“You don't want to live in this camper. It's not even hooked up.”

“I want to move it.”

“Where to?”

“It was Dad's, right?”

“Your father bought it without asking me. But you know when you're married your money all comes out of the same pot.”

“You never liked it.”

Her mother looked around as if seeing the place for the first time. The look she gave it seemed to Maria the look she probably gave it when her father brought it home. She bet her father was crushed. He had so wanted his bride to feel, stepping up into the camper, something she had gone past ever feeling again.

“Too small,” said her mother.

It was easier to take her father's side because he was dead. It was easier to take Randy's side because he was dead. The child was not dead because it was never born. But that did not mean that it did not have a side.

“I want it. I want something of him. Daddy would have wanted me to have it.”

“Well. Maria. I did not mean when I wrote that note that you—”

“I'm not leaving. But I am too old to live with my mother in my old bedroom. We're too old to act like we're acting.”

“How are
we
acting?” her mother said, but Maria ignored the spin she put on the word “we.”

“Like I am still in high school. Like I just went away for the weekend. Like I haven't been gone so long. Like I haven't changed and you haven't changed.”

“Well, I know you're grown,” her mother said. “I said when I wrote you the first time I would stay out of your way. I just didn't see why you would go and do a thing like that with someone you don't know from Adam. I just did not want you to get cheated. I do not want to see you get hurt.”

Maria started to say, You're worried about someone hurting because they got cheated? But she stopped herself because she had changed even if her mother had not. If she moved into the Airstream, would it honor Randy's memory, or would it desecrate all that had happened here? Marcus had built a shrine. “History is always skewed,” he had said about the Alamo, but he had also said that hagiography was the modus operandi of shrines. About his own shrine he claimed it was not possible to revise history. Because it was a plant he idolized, not a person. Yet sometimes he spoke of the plant as if it were someone he could never quite get over.

What was the Airstream? Alamo or flytrap? It stayed and it went. Randy loved it because it had wheels. But it never went anywhere. It would have been easy enough for her mother to call one of those Keplers and tell them to come get it, but she did not. She let it sit.

She ran her finger along a windowsill and wondered how much of the dust she picked up had accumulated since she'd been back home. “There's just not as much time as I thought there was,” said Maria.