Paradise (4 page)

Mavis swung away from the curb, sad and frightened by how dumb she was. Not only was the whole neighborhood familiar with the car, a photograph of it would be in today’s paper. When Frank bought it and drove it home the men on the street slapped the hood and grinned, leaned in to sniff the interior, hit the horn and laughed. Laughed and laughed some more because its owner had to borrow a lawn mower every couple of weeks; because its owner had no screens in his windows and no working television; because two of his six porch posts had been painted white three months earlier, the rest still flaking yellow; because its owner sometimes slept behind the wheel of the car he’d traded in—all night—in front of his own house. And the women, who saw Mavis driving the children to the White Castle wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, flat-out stared before shaking their heads. As though they knew from the start that the Cadillac would someday be notorious.

Creeping at twenty miles per hour, Mavis entered route 121, thankful for the shelter of darkness left. As she passed the County Hospital, a silent ambulance glided out of the driveway. A green cross in a field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow. Fifteen times she had been a patient there—four times for childbirth. During the next-to-last admission, when the twins were due, Mavis’ mother came from New Jersey to help out. She kept house and minded the other children for three days. When the twins were delivered, she went back to Paterson—a three-hour drive, thought Mavis. She could be there before
The Secret Storm,
which she had missed all summer long.

At a Fill ’n Go gas station, Mavis checked her wallet before she answered the attendant. Three ten-dollar bills were folded behind her driver’s license.

“Ten,” she said.

“Gallons or dollars, m’am?”

“Gallons.”

In the adjacent lot, Mavis noticed the window of a breakfast diner reflecting coral in the early light.

“Is that there place open?” she shouted over highway truck roar.

“Yes, m’am.”

Tripping occasionally on gravel, she walked toward the diner. Inside, the waitress was eating crab cakes and grits behind the counter. She covered her plate with a cloth and touched the corners of her mouth before wishing Mavis a good morning and taking her order. When Mavis left, carrying a paper cup of coffee and two honey dips in a napkin, she caught the waitress’s broad smile in the Hires Root Beer mirror by the exit. The grin bothered her all the way back to the gas station until, stepping into the car, she saw her canary-yellow feet.

Away from the pump, parked behind the diner, she put her breakfast on the dashboard while rummaging in the glove compartment. She found an unopened pint of Early Times, another bottle with an inch or so of scotch whiskey, paper napkins, a teething ring, several rubber bands, a pair of dirty socks, a battery-dead flashlight, a tube of lipstick, a Florida map, rolls of breath mints and a few traffic tickets. She dropped the teething ring into her purse, twisted her hair into a sad little ponytail that stuck out from the rubber band like hen feathers, and smeared the stranger’s lipstick on her mouth. Then she sat back and sipped the coffee. Too nervous to ask for milk or sugar, she’d ordered it black and could not force herself to take a third swallow. The stranger’s lipstick smirked sloppily from the cardboard rim.

The Cadillac drank ten gallons of gasoline every ninety miles. Mavis wondered whether to call her mother or simply arrive. The latter seemed smarter. Frank may have called his mother-in-law by now or might do so any minute. Better if her mother could say truthfully, “I don’t know where she is.” Paterson took five hours, not three, and she had four dollars and seventy-six cents when she saw its sign. The fuel gauge touched E.

The streets looked narrower than she remembered, and the stores were different. The northern leaves were already starting to turn. Driving underneath them, in the dappled hall they made, she felt as though the pavement slid forward instead of retreating. The faster she traveled, the more road appeared ahead.

The Cadillac shut down a block from her mother’s house, but Mavis managed to coast across the intersection and incline the automobile against the curb.

It was too soon. Her mother wouldn’t be home from the preschool till the afternoon children had been picked up. The door key was no longer under the reindeer, so Mavis sat on the back porch and struggled out of the yellow boots. Her feet looked as though they belonged to somebody else.

Frank had already called at five-thirty a.m. when Mavis was staring at Peg’s rose of Sharon. Birdie Goodroe told Mavis she had hung up on him after telling him she couldn’t think what the hell he was talking about and who the hell did he think he was, dragging her out of her sleep? She was not pleased. Not then and not later when her daughter tapped on the kitchen window looking like a bat out of hell, which is what she said as soon as she opened the door. “Girl, you look like a bat out of hell what you doing up here in little kiddie boots?”

“Ma, just let me in, okay?”

Birdie Goodroe had barely enough calf liver for two. Mother and daughter ate in the kitchen, Mavis presentable now—washed, combed, aspirined and swimming a little in Birdie’s housedress.

“Well, let me have it. Not that I need to be told.”

Mavis wanted some more of the baby peas and tipped the bowl to see if any were left.

“I could see this coming, you know. Anybody could,” Birdie continued. “Don’t need more’n a mosquito’s brain.”

There were a few. A couple of tablespoons. Mavis scraped them onto her plate wondering if there was to be any dessert. Quite a bit of the fried potatoes were still in her mother’s plate. “You going to eat those, Ma?”

Birdie pushed her plate toward Mavis. There was a tiny square of liver, too, and some onions. Mavis scraped it all onto her plate.

“You still have children. Children need a mother. I know what you’ve been through, honey, but you do have other children.”

The liver was a miracle. Her mother always got every particle of the tight membrane off.

“Ma.” Mavis wiped her lips with a paper napkin. “Why couldn’t you make it to the funeral?”

Birdie straightened. “You didn’t get the money order? And the flowers?”

“We got them.”

“Then you know why. I had to choose—help bury them or pay for a trip. I couldn’t afford to do both. I told you all that. I asked you all straight out which thing would be the best, and you both said the money. Both of you said so, both.”

“They’re going to kill me, Ma.”

“Are you going to hold that over my head for the rest of my life? All I’ve done for you and those children?”

“They already tried but I got away.”

“You’re all I have, now your brothers gone and got themselves shot up like—” Birdie slapped the table.

“They got no right to kill me.”

“What?”

“He’s making the other children do it.”

“What? Do what? Speak up so I can hear what you saying.”

“I’m saying they are going to kill me.”

“They? Who? Frank? What they?”

“All of them. The kids too.”

“Kill you? Your children?”

Mavis nodded. Birdie Goodroe widened her eyes first, then looked into her lap as she held her forehead in the palm of her hand.

They didn’t talk anymore for a while, but later, at the sink, Birdie asked, “Were the twins trying to kill you too?”

Mavis stared at her mother. “No! Oh, no, Ma! Are you crazy? They’re babies!”

“All right. All right. Just asking. It’s unusual, you know, to think little children…”

“Unusual? It’s—it’s evil! But they’ll do what he says. And now they’ll do anything. They already tried, Ma!”

“Tried how? What did they do?”

“Sal had a razor and they was laughing and watching me. Every minute watching me.”

“What did Sal do with the razor?”

“She had it next to her plate and she was looking at me. They all was.”

Neither woman spoke about it again, because Birdie told Mavis she could stay if and only if she never talked that way again. That she wouldn’t tell Frank, if he called back, or anybody else that she was there, but if she said one more word about killing she would call him right away.

In a week Mavis was on the road, but this time she had a plan. Days before she heard her mother talking low into the mouthpiece of the telephone, saying, “You better get up here fast and I mean pronto,” Mavis had walked around the house, while Birdie was at the Play-Skool, thinking: money, aspirin, paint, underwear; money, aspirin, paint, underwear. She took all she could find of the first two, the checks in two brown government envelopes propped against the photograph of one of her killed-in-action brothers, and both bottles of Bayer. She took a pair of rhinestone clips from Birdie’s jewelry box and stole back the car keys her mother thought she had hidden so well; poured two gallons of lawn mower gasoline into the Cadillac’s tank and drove away for more. In Newark she found an Earl Scheib paint shop and waited two days in the Y dormitory until it was sprayed magenta. The twenty-nine dollars advertised turned out to be for a standard-size car only. Sixty-nine dollars is what they made her pay for the Cadillac. The underwear and thong sandals she bought at Wool-worth’s. At a Goodwill she bought a light-blue pantsuit, drip dry, and a white cotton turtleneck. Just right, she thought, for California. Just right.

With a crisp new Mobil map beside her on the seat, she sped out of Newark heading for route 70. As more and more of the East was behind her, the happier she became. Only once had she felt this kind of happiness. On the Rocket ride she took as a kid. When the rocket zoomed on the downward swing, the rush made her giddy with pleasure; when it slowed just before turning her upside down through the high arc of its circle, the thrill was intense but calm. She squealed with the other passengers, but inside was the stable excitement of facing danger while safely strapped in strong metal. Sal hated it; so did the boys when, later on, she took them to the amusement park. Now, in flight to California, the memory of the Rocket ride and its rush were with her at will.

According to the map the way was straight. All she had to do was find 70, stay on it until Utah, make a left on down to Los Angeles. Later she remembered traveling like that—straight. One state, then the next, just as the map promised. When her funds dwindled to coins, she was forced to look for hitchhikers. But other than the first and the last, she could not remember the order of the girls. Picking up girls was easiest. They were safe company, she hoped, and they helped with gas and food and sometimes invited her to a place where they could crash. They graced primary routes, intersections, ramps to bridges, the verges of gas stations and motels, in jeans belted low on the hips and flared at the bottom. Flat hair swinging or hair picked out in Afros. The white ones were the friendliest; the colored girls slow to melt. But all of them told her about the world before California. Underneath the knowing talk, the bell-chime laughter, the pointed silences, the world they described was just like her own pre-California existence—sad, scary, all wrong. High schools were dumps, parents stupid, Johnson a creep, cops pigs, men rats, boys assholes.

The first girl was outside Zanesville. That’s where sitting in a roadside diner, counting her money, the runaway appeared. Mavis had noticed her going into the ladies’ room, then, quite a bit later, coming out dressed in different clothes: a long skirt this time, and a flowing blouse that touched her thighs. Outside in the parking lot, the girl ran to the Cadillac’s passenger window and asked for a lift. Smiling happily, she jerked open the door when Mavis nodded. The girl said her name—Sandra but call me Dusty—and talked for thirty-two miles. Not interested in anything about Mavis, Dusty ate two Mallomars and chattered, mostly about the owners of the six dog tags that hung from her neck. Boys in her high school class or whom she had known in junior high. She’d got two from when they dated; the rest she begged from their families—souvenirs. All dead or missing.

Mavis agreed to drive through Columbus and drop Dusty at her girlfriend’s house. They arrived in a soft rain. Someone had done the last mowing of the season. Dusty’s hair matted in brown licks; the glorified scent of newly cut grass in rain, the clink of dog tags, half a Mallo. That was Mavis’ memory of her first detour with a hitchhiker. Except for the last, the others were out of sequence. Was it in Colorado that she saw a man sitting on a bench under pines in a rest area? He ate slowly, very slowly while he read a newspaper. Or before? It was sunny, cold. Anyway somewhere around that place she picked up the girl who stole her rhinestone clips. But earlier—near Saint Louis, was it?—she opened the passenger door to two girls shivering on route 70. Wind beaten, their army jackets closed tight around their chins, leather clogs, thick gray socks—they wiped their noses while their hands were still pocketed.

Not far, they said. A place just a few miles out, they said. The place, a sparkling green cemetery, was as peopled as a park. Lines of cars necklaced the entrance. Groups of people, solitary strollers, all patient in the wind, mixed with boys from a military school. The girls thanked Mavis and got out, running a little to join a set of graveside mourners. Mavis lingered, amazed by the unnatural brightness of the green. What she thought were military students turned out to be real soldiers—but young, so young, and as fresh-looking as the headstones they stood before.

It must have been after that when Mavis picked up Bennie—the last one and the one she liked best and who stole her raincoat and Sal’s boots. Bennie was glad to know that, like her, Mavis was going all the way to L.A. She, Bennie, was heading for San Diego. Not a talker, small or big, Bennie sang. Songs of true love, false love, redemption; songs of unreasonable joy. Some drew tears, others were deliberately silly. Mavis sang along once in a while, but mostly she listened and in one hundred and seventy-two miles never got tired of hearing her. Mile after mile rolled by urged and eased by the gorgeous ache in Bennie’s voice.

She didn’t like to eat at highway stops. If they were there, because Mavis insisted on it, Bennie drank water while Mavis wolfed down cheese melts and fries. Twice Bennie directed them through towns, searching for colored neighborhoods, where they could eat “healthy,” she said. At those places Bennie ate slowly, steadily, with repeat orders, side dishes and always something to go. She was careful with her money but didn’t seem worried about it, and shared the cost at every gas pump.