The Whore's Child (7 page)

She ordered me two cheeseburgers, fries and a large Coke. For herself, just coffee, but before long she took a French fry, then another. When I began to slow down, midway through the second burger, she pointed a long, drooping fry at me and said, “I hope you’re enjoying this. Because we’re not Burger Doodling all the damn way to California.”

We made it, that first night, to Waterbury, Connecticut. My mother’s mood stayed buoyant the entire afternoon, as if she really was high on the pure oxygen of freedom. But she crashed shortly after we checked in and I think it was our room that did it. She’d opted for the smallest of several motels near the exit. “Independently owned and run,” she explained. “They’re always cleaner and cheaper and better than the chains.” It might’ve been cheaper, but the room also was tiny and dingy, and bands of lines scrolled down the television screen on every channel. When I came out of the bathroom, I caught her counting our money at the end of one of the beds, and based on the look on her face I guessed that we’d spent more than she’d planned to that first day.

But there was a fancy-looking restaurant across the street, and she insisted on having dinner there to celebrate our first night of freedom. She got dressed up in high heels and a short skirt. Her eyes looked even more Egyptian. Twice she tried striking up a conversation with a man sitting alone at the next table reading a
Wall Street
Journal.
“I’ve been in friendlier towns,” she remarked to me, loud enough for him to overhear.

“This isn’t a town,” I said, twirling my spaghetti. “It’s an exit.”

At the next table the businessman curled his lips.

“What made me think you’d be good company on this trip?” my mother wondered aloud.

After we walked back across the intersection, my mother felt our car was “too conspicuous” so she moved it around back.

For some reason I awoke in the middle of the night thinking about the dog I’d stoned, the long odds of its turning right when I threw, how dazed and stupid the animal had been to conclude I was its friend. All of which scared me so bad I couldn’t stay in bed. From the window you could see the off-ramp and hear the traffic rumbling down the highway. Despite the hour, cars were streaming into the bright Mobil station across from our motel. Despite my mother’s assurance that my father wasn’t the sort of man who’d follow us, it occurred to me, there in the rank darkness of our grungy motel room, that maybe she’d misjudged him. After all, neither of them seemed to suspect what kind of boy I was, their own son. And my father never would’ve guessed my mother was the sort of woman who’d just up and go, leaving him a one-word explanation. So maybe he was a different man than she— or either of us—knew. He could be closer than we imagined. Maybe this man we didn’t know was right across the street, gassing up a borrowed car and getting ready to cruise the parking lots of all the motels. Maybe we were all in for some surprises.

Over the next few days we fell into a routine that was more leisurely and less contentious. We stopped whenever AAA or a highway billboard alerted us to some interesting attraction nearby. My particular interest was caves, and we made wide detours to visit a number of these, including a great one in New York State where you took an elevator down into the cavern and then got a boat ride. My mother was taken with places where you could climb up and look out over where you’d been and were heading toward, where she could feel the wind of freedom in her hair. We stopped at every scenic overlook, and she told me about a rotating restaurant at the top of some thirty-story building in California where we’d have a three-hour dinner and see everything there was to see. One afternoon in Ohio we saw the top half of a festively decorated hot-air balloon through the trees, and my mother immediately decided we had to take a ride in it. But the next exit was miles down the highway, and then we got lost trying to backtrack. When we finally found it, we discovered it wasn’t a working hot-air balloon at all, just an advertising gimmick tied to a pole in the parking lot of a car dealership.

After that first day, we avoided Burger Doodles in favor of truck stops almost exclusively at lunchtime. “Truckers do this for a living,” my mother explained. “They know all the best places.” So we parked between semis and ate huge, open-faced turkey sandwiches and mashed potatoes or chicken-fried steak. I noticed that my mother enjoyed the way the men swiveled on their counter stools when we came in. “It’s a good thing I’ve got you with me, sweetie,” she said more than once as we studied our menus, feeling the warm stares and hearing the soft murmuring of road-weary men her age and older, and I thought there was just a shade of regret in her voice. Still, the fact that I
was
there made me feel tough and important, like a man who maybe could protect a woman, not just torment dogs and old people.

Nights we splurged, as my mother put it, at the nicest restaurants we could find in the vicinity of the motel. Often we’d have the place to ourselves, our entrance interrupting some intimate conversation between the cocktail waitress and the bartender. When there was no one interesting to look at, we’d haul out the AAA book and search the maps for attractions. “There isn’t much real life this close to the highway,” my mother observed sadly, checking her white lipstick, another new touch, in the mirror of her compact. “The good stuff’s all hidden away, where only the locals can find it.”

With each passing day we worried less about being pulled over for driving a stolen car. We were paying for everything in cash, so as not to leave a trail, and my mother chortled each afternoon when we got off the highway. About the only precaution we still took was to park around back of the motel at night, usually in the darkest corner. Which is how—in Joplin, Missouri, at a Holiday Inn supposedly owned by Mickey Mantle— the Ford was a sitting duck for vandals, who took what the police said must’ve been a sledgehammer to the windshield.

When we came out with our suitcases the next morning, the car was alive with glass. To make matters worse, this was on a Sunday morning, which meant we had to wait an extra day to make repairs. The motel manager pretended as best he could to be solicitous, and he did lend us a small whisk broom to sweep the broken glass off the seats. His mistake was to wonder out loud why we’d parked in the remotest corner of the huge lot. My mother had been looking for somebody to blame, and now she had her man. By the time she finished, she’d questioned his intelligence, his management skill, even his parentage. She’d also expressed her grave reservations about the Holiday Inn chain, the city of Joplin and the rest of Missouri, which she’d never admired in theory and liked still less in reality. Moreover, she doubted Mickey Mantle had ever stepped foot inside the place.

The manager was a small man, and it was clear he hadn’t much experience in being dressed down by a woman as good-looking and angry and eastern as my mother. And she may well have been the first woman he’d ever seen wearing white lipstick. At any rate, he accepted her criticisms quite calmly, until the Mickey Mantle part. The Mick certainly did own this Holiday Inn, he begged to inform her. He came here all the time, and there were photographs in the lobby to prove it. Furthermore, it wasn’t fair, in his opinion, to judge the whole state of Missouri on the basis of what happened one Saturday night in the furthest reaches of a single parking lot.

“That’s another thing,” my mother said, when the manager made the mistake of letting his voice drop. “What’s this Missour-uh stuff? That’s an ‘i’ at the end of the word, right?” By now we were back in the lobby, and my mother, spying a motel notepad on the desk, tore off a sheet, circled the word “Missouri” and underlined the end of it three times. How, she wanted to know, could the letter “i” be reasonably pronounced “uh”?

“Madam,” the little man pleaded, “what does this have to do with your automobile?”

My mother was ready for this. “It just goes to show that people who can’t pronounce the name of the state they live in should never be given a public trust,” she said, and then told him we’d need a room for the night and that she expected it to be free of charge. Informed that a large convention of Baptists had booked the entire inn, and had already begun to arrive, she said, “Well,
un-
book it, Missour-uh, unless you want your snake handlers treated to some words they’ve never heard before, right here in the damn lobby.”

So we returned to the same room we’d had the night before, where my mother crashed, as she often did after an outburst. “Watch some TV, sweetie,” she told me, and within ten minutes she was fiercely asleep, her face clenched tight, her teeth grinding audibly. She didn’t wake up until afternoon, and even then she was groggy and lethargic. I was sitting at the window, looking out into the parking lot. Our car, minus its windshield, was barely visible through the torrential rain that had been pounding down for half an hour. All the anger that had animated her that morning had now leaked away, replaced by something akin to grief.

“Why?” she said, looking out the window over my shoulder. Nothing had been stolen from our car, and that’s what was troubling her, that this had been a purely malicious act. “What sort of person would do such a thing?” She seemed to have no idea she was sharing a room with a person who just might be able to explain it to her. After a minute she closed the drapes and turned the TV back on. Then she found some hotel stationery and started doing some calculations. Finally, she wadded these up and tossed them in the wastebasket. “What’s all this going to cost?” she wondered, her eyes brimming.

By the time we went to dinner, her spirits were, if anything even lower. She’d showered and put on a normal-length skirt and neither eye makeup nor lipstick. The dining room was full of Baptists and every time we heard the word “Missouri,” it was pronounced exactly as the manager had said it.

My mother sighed and contemplated her menu as if it were printed in a foreign language. “We’ve died and gone to hell, sweetie,” she said in the voice she used for not-strictly-private observations.

That night, once I was acting like I’d fallen asleep, my mother slipped out. She was gone only a few minutes, just long enough, it later occurred to me, to make a phone call.

Unfortunately, the next couple days provided considerable evidence to support my mother’s theory that we’d died and gone to hell. As we came down out of the green hills of eastern Oklahoma, what shimmered below was a truly hellish landscape—flat and dry and empty, as large as the ocean off the Maine coast, but brown. Suddenly the temperature was in the nineties, and our rain-soaked upholstery smelled musty. We didn’t have air-conditioning, so we rolled down the windows and let the desert air thunder in around us like so many angry demons. The noise made impossible the conversation we’d lacked the heart for since Joplin, and the turbulence turned my mother’s hair into a rat’s nest of tangles. She didn’t try to make out like it was the wind of freedom, either. She still wasn’t wearing makeup.

As far as my mother was concerned, Oklahoma had even less to recommend it than Missouri. In fact, its single virtue seemed to be that its inhabitants didn’t offer an unusual pronunciation. I tried my best to raise my mother’s spirits, but she stared straight ahead at the empty landscape with palpable loathing. What had happened in Missouri seemed to have made her a fatalist, and now she seemed incapable of even fear, her most dependable highway emotion. Since Maine every time we were passed on the highway by a semi and felt the sensation of being vacuumed beneath its huge wheels, she tensed, bracing for the imagined impact. No more. She seemed not even to notice the big trucks as they roared past, blaring air horns at us, some of them. Her lack of concern was spooky, because I couldn’t tell whether the miles had taught her that there was less danger than she feared, or whether the vandals of Joplin had demonstrated how vulnerable we were, despite all her care and planning.

We made fewer stops now because there was next to nothing, according to my mother, worth stopping for, though she did take grim satisfaction from paying a dollar to a toothless old man in Texas for the privilege of peering down a shallow, bowl-shaped well at a dense knot of lethargic, dusty rattlesnakes. However dispiriting, though, the snakes weren’t our biggest problem as we blew like a hot wind through the panhandle. The glass was, and had been for days. Naturally, we’d done the best we could with the tiny slivers of broken glass that had rained throughout the car’s interior. The company that replaced the windshield had vacuumed—once to their own satisfaction, and then again to my mother’s—but the glass had worked itself deep into the seams and creases of the cloth seats, until we coaxed them out with our tender flesh. The microscopic shards insinuated their way into our haunches and thighs and behind our knees, registering first as mild discomfort, a squirming and scratching inability to get settled. Only later, starting the first night out of Joplin, did we realize what was happening. My mother was in the shower, and I heard her yelp as the hot, soapy water bit like gasoline into the scores of tiny cuts. Between us, we went through a whole box of Band-Aids that night.

“I don’t know what to say, sweetie,” my mother admitted when she finally switched off the lamps. “We’re losing blood.”

“Actually, it’s a lot like being married,” she explained days later as we neared the New Mexico state line, referring to the multitude of nicks that still had us squirming in the front seat of the Ford. “You don’t quite know whether to shit or go blind.”

The vulgarity made me look over at her hopefully, because it meant her spirits were on the mend. My mother enjoyed swearing, but it required effort and imagination; so, when she was depressed or exhausted, her speech became timid and mild.

“Your father’s not a bad man,” she continued, broaching the subject we’d been avoiding for about two thousand miles and which had me pretty puzzled. I mean, I knew my father wasn’t a bad man. He’d never been bad to me, and I’d never witnessed him being bad to her, but her desire to flee did imply there was something wrong with him.