Drives Like a Dream (16 page)

"Angry with her father, I assume."

"She wouldn't admit it, but you're probably right. There's plenty of rage headed Cy's way already. Ivan has that territory well occupied, so I guess Jessica has to look for other battles."

"So it's misdirected?"

"For the most part, yes," Lydia said, though she hadn't considered it in quite this way. "Maybe she wishes that I had taken Cy on."

"What do you mean?"

M.J. had an almost eerie way of putting her at ease, and Lydia wondered how many jobs Cy had gone through since they'd been together. Twelve? Fifteen? More? Bringing up such details with his new mother-in-law hardly seemed fair, though. "I put too much time into my work," Lydia offered instead.

"There's always a reason for not wanting to fight for your marriage." M.J. dug her spoon into the cottage cheese and took a large bite. "I don't mean to pry. I'm trying to figure out why Jessica would be angry with
you.
"

"You and me both," Lydia said and laughed a little.

"Do you want my theory?"

"Sure."

"Be a dear, dear," M.J. said to Casper. "Grab me a cheap white wine and maybe a sandwich. Who am I, pretending to have no appetite?"

Casper stood up and made his way back to the food line, as though accustomed to taking such orders.

"Should I give him a hand?" Lydia asked.

"He sees much better than you'd think." M.J. finished the cottage cheese and scraped the bowl with her spoon. "You and your daughter are too much alike, that would be my guess. Granted, I've known you all of a couple hours, but my intuition has been hailed as legendary from here to Montreal."

"I might have said we were too much alike when Jessica was a girl, but not anymore. I can hardly get in a word without her taking me to task."

"That's because she's patently antagonistic where you're concerned. You could tell her the sky is blue and she'll say red, just to choose a different color. People should always come back to who they were as children. And as a child, like you said, she was mother's helper."

M.J. theorized that people came up against a few crises in life, and those who made it through preserved their true identity. "Everyone comes up against something," she said. "The ones who make it, who find some measure of happiness in the world, don't run away. I worry for my daughter. I don't think she realizes what a major step she's taking."

Lydia wanted to ask,
What's the crisis?
But she could just as easily guess. Ellen, the only child, had not left gracefully. She had lingered around home for thirty-five years and her parents had grown used to her company—so settled into the habit of having her nearby that this departure must have felt like a desertion. Ellen had waited too long, until her parents could no longer imagine life without her. Lydia's children had left one by one. When Ivan went off to college, two kids remained in the house, which made the separation bearable. When Jessica left, Davy was always around to help out. And by the time her youngest was gone, Lydia had grown to expect that her children would split off in all directions for a while. But they would come back. They had to come back sometime.

Lydia told M.J. about the ersatz Buddhist who rolled into Royal Oak one day and slid open the door to his van. "Just like the sixties," she said. "And she followed him to the coast."

"She's waiting for a test, something to challenge her," M.J. said.

"The divorce has been a test."

"Yes and no. It's a late divorce, so she probably feels awkward raising a fuss about it." M.J. polished off the fruit cup. "She needs a bigger test, I think, something that pits her against her own resistance."

Casper returned with two mini-bottles of wine, plastic cups, and a turkey sandwich.

"I think I will have a glass of wine, after all," Lydia said, and began to get up from the table.

"Here, have mine," Casper offered.

Again M.J. saw through Lydia's motives. "You're right," she said. "We can't have him drink and drive." She poured wine for herself and Lydia. "Just as well. This means more for us."

"So what did I miss?" Casper asked.

"The eternal mystery of mothers and daughters," Lydia said.

"Parents and children should aim for zero friction. It's impossible, of course, but this should be the goal." M.J. bit into her turkey sandwich and continued talking. "In a marriage, on the other hand, friction is essential. Isn't that right, mon cheri?"

"I suppose you'd like me to disagree," Casper said.

"Exactly. We agree to disagree, and therein lies the secret. This turkey sandwich you brought me, for example, is wretched. Processed within an inch of its life. Soggy bread, lettuce from last week's salad bar. Is this the best you can offer? Is this what forty-five years of marriage has come to?"

"You are what you eat," Casper said.

"So tell us, Lydia, about this man you're seeing?" M.J. asked.

"Did I say I was seeing someone?"

"That's one of her old tricks." Casper laughed. "I knew you wouldn't fall for it."

"Well, it does so happen that I've been corresponding with a man through the Internet," Lydia found herself saying. She didn't know whether she was sharing this because the Spiveys had a way of drawing her out or, just as likely, in the hope that the news would reach Cy.

"The Internet? How terribly modern you are," M.J. said. "Tell us about him."

Lydia took them back to five days ago, when she had seen Norm at the museum, then visited the message board and sent him a note. His response, she said, had in its tone more than a small hint of the possible. She recounted from memory, almost to the word because she had read the note over so many times, the reply letter she had sent earlier that morning.

"It was a little forward, I have to admit," Lydia explained.

"You don't know what forward is," M.J. said. "If you think that's forward, you'll be alone for the rest of your life."

"But I asked him where he lives, what his work is. I pretty much said I was lonely."

"He started it, darling. You gave him far less than you think you did. I think we should write your new friend a spicier note."

"Oh, no—"

"I think it would be a marvelous way to spend an afternoon. We're done here. Casper, why don't you ask the lady at the register where we can use a computer."

"The library has computers," Lydia said, before she could stop herself.

M.J. lowered her head and leveled her eyes at Lydia. "I'm beginning to think you like my idea of sending your boy a note."

"I didn't say that."

M.J. smiled. "Oh, but you did."

J
ESSICA STOOD
on the fourth-floor deck of her apartment in Eugene, just back from a long walk with the dog up Hilyard to Alton Baker Park. They'd strolled along the Willamette River through the bright, clear morning. As usual, Bedlam had flown off the path, found the nastiest muck by the riverbank, and dug in with his paws and snout. Now he slumped at her feet languorously cleaning his long fur.

Today was her day off and she wanted to get out of town, leave her tiny apartment, just go somewhere. She lived in one of the most beautiful states in the country, but since Blane had left with the van, she'd been more or less stranded in Eugene. She rode the bus to work, relied on friends to shuttle her around. But nearly all of them, graduate students at the University of Oregon, had gone home for the summer. She wished she had a car, but she couldn't afford one.

She remembered it was Void's day off, too. He worked part-time at a head shop and hung around cafés and a comic-book store near the University. He'd once mentioned that he'd gone to Stanford for a while but had found Palo Alto so bourgeois that he'd dropped out and moved to Alaska to work on a trawler for a couple of years. He talked nostalgically about the ocean. "Let's go to the coast," Jessica said when he answered the phone. "I've got my day bag packed."

Void sounded as if he had just woken up, but within an hour there he was below her balcony, waving from the window of his old red Civic. Jessica filled Bedlam's food bowl, kissed the dog goodbye, and locked up her apartment.

She and Void had been seeing less of each other lately, which was fine with her. The mystery of Void, which had drawn her to him in the first place, had been steadily eroding over the past month. Now he seemed less the inscrutable rebel and more the self-obscuring lost soul, and her patience was wearing thin. Recently, without any prompting, he'd said that his real name was Kevin and that he'd borrowed his moniker from a Seattle alt-radio DJ named Void Oblivion. "But don't tell anyone. I need to be able to trust you," he'd said. "There are people who don't like me, you know. I've got reasons for keeping things under wraps."

"So where are we going?" Void asked as Jessica climbed into the car.

"It's a surprise. You just do the driving."

"Look at the adventuress," he said.

They drove on 126 west from Eugene, into the countryside of old farms, trout ponds, and bright green fields. Outside Noti, the road began to wind; the terrain turned rugged. Void pointed to a general store with a red gas pump out front and said he'd stopped in there once. "I got into a long conversation with a fourth-generation logger. He told me people don't
neighbor
like they used to. What do you think, Jess? Do you still
neighbor?
"

"I called you, didn't I?" She looked over at him, and he gave her a little pout. She hadn't seen him in more than a week, since before her father's wedding and hadn't even bothered to call him when she got back. He looked even younger than usual today, reedy, with pale, almost bluish skin and deep red lips. From the first time they'd met, Jessica had felt old around him, and she wondered now if he weren't making everything up, from his name to his age to the Alaskan trawler story. He'd probably dropped out of high school and come to Eugene, like others she knew, to blend in with the scenery. She didn't know how old he might actually be. Certainly not twenty-eight, as he'd claimed.

She was waiting for him to ask about her weekend, was all prepared to tell him what had happened at the wedding. But Void was saying something about old-growth forest, pointing out the wild blackberries growing along the side of the road. Jessica realized that she had barely mentioned her family to Void in the four months since they'd met. So why begin now?

Their relationship was marked by a desire for company, not necessarily companionship. They tended to meet in busy places where they didn't have to pay close attention to each other. They went to art films and danced at the Workers of the World meeting hall, once a hotbed of labor activism, now boasting "the best hardwood dance floor in the Pacific Northwest." They had cheap drinks and free food at happy hour in noisy bars and after dancing would go back to her place, always her place. Unlike Blane, whose three hundred daily prostrations to Buddha made him sinewy and pliant, Void felt fragile when she held his narrow shoulders. Looking into his face in the murky light some evenings, she had the odd feeling that she could have been seeing her own face, a bit unsure, searching for approval. Bedlam would come up and nudge them with his nose, wanting to go outside. Later, Void would drive back to his own apartment, a place that Jessica wondered if she'd ever see.

"Up or down?" Void asked at the intersection of 126 and the Oregon coastal highway, and Jessica said north. She breathed in the salt air, watched the gulls and cormorants swoop and dive, and thought for a moment that she might like to live here, in the seaside town of Florence. They drove past the marina and chowder joints, Mo's and Captain Jack's, and started up the coast, which was more breathtaking on this cloudless day than the one time Jessica had driven the same stretch with Blane.

Void looked as if he'd seen it all before. He had an annoying habit of weighing every experience against one that he'd had in the past, and always the present paled in comparison. Jessica could almost feel him getting ready to gush about the scenery in Alaska. Anticipating this, she said, "So I've been thinking about applying to graduate school." In fact, she had only really considered the possibility over the past few days. Something about her father's leaving made her realize that time was slipping by. She'd come back to a quiet town, a more suburban city than she wanted to admit. Eugene was no nirvana, no perfect solution, and with her friends gone and the campus mostly deserted, she'd found herself, to her surprise, actually thinking a year ahead.

"Grad school?" Void sounded disapproving. "In what?"

Yesterday she'd gone to the library after work to look into some programs. In the back of her mind she'd always figured she would do something similar to her mother. But she knew she couldn't be a historian; she had no desire to trespass on that territory. For all Lydia's speeches about politics and groupthink, Jessica still believed in that unfairly tormented idea: "making a difference." She had looked up programs in Urban and Regional Planning, vaguely recalling that her mother had taken a similar degree but hadn't pursued a career in the field. "Urban planning," she said now, as if she had given it real thought.

"What are you doing living in Eugene if you want to be an urban planner?" he asked.

"I did grow up around Detroit. And my mom went to grad school in regional planning. There was a lot of talk about cities around the house."

"I don't know." Void hesitated. "They'll brainwash you in grad school. You'll think you're working for the greater good. But follow the paper trail, and some oil company is paying for your research."

"These are public universities," Jessica said.

"Public, private. It's all the same these days. Everyone's getting paid off." Void seemed about to cook up one of his diatribes when Jessica saw the sign she'd been looking for.

"Turn here," she said.

***

Atop a high cliff sat a small building overlooking the Pacific. "So is this your big surprise?" he asked as they reached the entrance.

"You'll see." She opened the door and hurried him in.

When she and Blane had driven the coast on a rainy weekend in late fall, the sea lion caves had been closed, and she'd regretted missing out ever since. At the admission desk she bought two tickets.