Highway Trade and Other Stories Read online

  After a while, standing riveted, I become aware of the soundtrack underfoot. Shrieks and gunshots right underfoot. And even here there’s the smell of smoke.

  Three Dreams of Europe

  SHE WAS IN A CAFÉ, a hashish café, and she was smoking the hashish, sitting and smoking steadily, because as she smoked she at last found the distance she’d been looking for. A strange way to find it, without logic, with eyes closed. A strange kind of distance.

  Distance, difference—you would think she’d found that already, Mrs. Mooney. Already she’d put thousands of miles between herself and the Circle K where her husband and son had been killed. You would think she’d have been sprung free of her former life forever, the first moment the addict in the Circle K had panicked and started to shoot. Yet she knew him, the addict. So much had her former life followed her here, she could see him now in the bowl of her pipe. The young man who’d murdered her family had a stare she knew all too well, a rabitty stare, desperate. Trapped.

  She couldn’t look at him. She lifted her eyes from the glowing bowl. Yet still she had to smoke, Mrs. Mooney, she had to stay in her chair and smoke, because until she’d begun to smoke she’d gotten nowhere. She hadn’t found distance; she’d only become smaller. She hadn’t put distance between herself and the graveyard over the Pacific, as she’d dragged herself first to the East Coast and then on across the Atlantic. She’d only shriveled up and blown away. A child’s lost balloon, driven by a speaking wind. And the words the wind was speaking were nothing special either, words she’d memorized long ago. She was only doing what a woman in her position was expected to do.

  Until today. Today, sitting, smoking—what exactly had changed? The stuff made her choke, but since her last stop at the grave site she’d been forever about to choke. She’d been forever caving in over shriveled balloon lungs. The stuff was grown here across the Atlantic, but even across the Atlantic she’d continued to drift according to what was expected. She’d crawled along the garden paths of Lutheran meeting houses. She seemed to remember crawling through this city, actually down on all fours, over cobblestones and canal banks. With her spirit so helpless, she’d huddled down where no one could see. Must have been a dream.

  And yet it ¿s strange, now. It is different. Now, right now—with every ragged intake of breath the balloon is refilling. Or those low mounds of earth over the Pacific—they’re bulging, they’re ready to burst. A strange refilling, a wind within, wordless but irresistible. She’s never been so frightened.

  The porcelain bowl in her grip, the ember there, shows her faces no longer familiar. Maybe a murderer’s, maybe a child’s, maybe her own. The heat threatens her hand, the hand balloons till the lines there disappear—and she needs to stop, to speak, to move. If she’s at last found distance, shouldn’t she be able to move? But she’s weak as a baby and her legs look awful, her hose hangs torn and filthy and her knees are caked with blood. From behind the register someone rushes to her, maybe the man who put her here, and anyway what did her mother teach her? Never trust a stranger.

  “Loss is always the subject,” said the leader of the dream circle. “To grow older is to accumulate loss.”

  Mary’s face went flat. “I thought this group was supposed to do better than that,” she said.

  The other women chuckled supportively. A low, easeful sound, it suited the space, a domed circular home on the coast. The chuckling suited the colors, earth tones that were either timeless or, Mary was thinking, utterly chic. ’70s retro was all the rage.

  The leader was making some reply, unoffended.

  “But what I noticed,” one of the other women said, “was how it was so very male. Did people pick up on that?” She shifted on her floor pillow, an otherwise gray-haired woman with a lavender forelock. “A man sold you the hash, a man was the murderer. I mean, you even gave yourself a son.”

  Mary shook her head. Shook it twice, still needing to clear her thinking, to bring herself back out of an Old World alley and into this airy, raftery space. During her turn she’d stood and moved to the oceanside window.

  “Yah,” said the leader of the circle. “You have no son, is that correct?”

  Koh-wrecked? Perhaps it was only the woman’s accent that had Mary so bristly, so demanding. It wasn’t the leader’s fault that the Dutch sounded so much like the Hollywood notion of the Gestapo. She reminded herself of the woman’s Anglicized name, Inksa. She found a warmer tone of voice and admitted she’d never had a son. “And I’m sure you remember I prefer my maiden name now.”

  “Ach, yah. Correct.”

  Mary turned away again. At the bottom of the cliffs beneath the window, the Pacific heaved under late-afternoon brightening.

  “That’s just what I’m saying.” The lavender woman again. “Mary, I mean, what was your ex doing in there? It’s your mother who died.”

  That brought her around. Mama’s death was no secret—the retreat had begun, last night, with a two-hour “sharing session.” Nonetheless: “Excuse me?”

  “Mary, this is avoidance behavior.”

  “Avoidance, oh. I’ll tell you about avoidance. Right now, I’m avoiding scratching your eyes out.”

  Again the domed space got noisy. Women bristled back, startled, loud. They tugged at their bulky socks or at the drawstrings on their hooded sweatshirts. Yet Mary also sensed a relief in their carrying on, a letting go that surged up in her as well—this was the very blowup that she’d been pushing for all day. All day, the eight women seated around her had been reining themselves in. They’d been acting ladylike since the opening Call to the Demiurge. Mary would’ve thought they’d sworn off that kind of thing years ago, now that the kids were out of the house, now that they’d bulled themselves to management level and permanent fitness. These were hikers with certification in accounting, devotees of yoga with a staff of half a dozen. Years ago, Mary would’ve thought, they’d left the old roles behind.

  And she’d put off her own turn till last, today. She’d had enough of spilling her guts last night. Now, standing and catching flak, hearing the others too get pushy at last, Mary found herself grinning, couldn’t help it, and maybe she was even grinning at the one with the lavender hair. That woke ’em up, sister.

  But Mary couldn’t remember the woman’s name.

  Eventually a single voice emerged, under the echoing dome. Not the leader’s: Inksa sat watchful, neutral. She was a born head-of-tribe, tall with strong features. The opposite of Mary, a former bosomy catch whose hourglass now had thickened into a chianti bottle. Meantime the woman whose voice prevailed was the oldest, the one who had dibs on the lone rocking chair. A grandmother named Teri.

  “Mary, you just said you wanted to do something more.”

  Mary shook her head.

  “Hello? Mary, hello? We all heard what you told Inksa. You thought this group could do more.”

  “I said I thought we could do better.”

  “Well this is better. I believe it’s called honesty.”

  “Honesty, oh. Flinging my mother in my face like that?”

  “Well what are we supposed to do, speak in riddles? I think it’s high time we let our hair down, here.”

  One or two others murmured assent while Mary exhaled slowly, bringing the older woman into focus. Aging had shaped Teri for confrontation. Her hair in a white helmet, her nose dented but swollen, she belonged on a shield somewhere. Or inside a smoking pipe, staring from an ember.

  “Teri, tell me. What do you think of my dream?”

  “What do I think?” The woman spoke as if there’d been no change in Mary’s tone—exactly as Mary had hoped she would. “I think you don’t want to scratch out somebody else’s eyes, you want to scratch out your own.”

  “Ach, yah.” Inksa nodded. “The guilt of the survivor.”

  “Guilt and anger, sure.” This was Lavender. “Think of it that way and all the men fit right in.”

  Teri kept talking. She said Mary was only human, and there must have been hard mo
ments while her mother was dying. “Aren’t there always? And yet you wanted to be, you know, the perfect, supportive saint of a dutiful daughter.”

  “You did your best, Mary,” another woman said. “Last night, you told us, you held her hand.”

  But again Mary was shaking her head. “I’ve been all through that. I mean, all the steps. Anger, all the steps.”

  “I can see that.” Lavender. “You’ve clearly been empowered, Mary. Empowered in a major way. But everybody breaks down sometimes.”

  Mary found herself glaring up at the skylight, the sweet blue heaven behind it. September was too kind, too warm, and someone here was still murmuring nicey-nice.

  “I mean it.” She set her knuckles on her hips. “I know all about guilt.”

  “Tough girl?” Teri asked. “You’re a tough girl? That chill on your neck, Mary, that’s eternity.”

  “I’m not denying that. But, guilt, oh. Listen, after the last couple years of my marriage, when it comes to guilt I’m a connoisseur.”

  More chuckling. Two or three of the women relaxed, creaking back into the good brown leather of the mammoth sofa. But Mary caught herself glaring at that, too, and she couldn’t think why. Why the aggravation over Inksa’s taste in furniture? The circle leader wasn’t just chasing a fad, bringing them together here—and she wasn’t cashing in on one either. What Mary and the others were paying couldn’t cover a single month’s mortgage on this place. And Inksa was too much the long-faced watcher, the immigrant not in on the homegirls’ jokes, not to be making a genuine effort.

  Then too, she was taking Mary’s side. “Remember the directive of our circle,” she was saying, sweeping an extended finger around the room. “We have joined here in a dream circle. Not to psychoanalyze any one member.”

  More women sat back.

  “The night images must by their nature remain a mystery in one,” Inksa said. “It is in the congregation that the unconscious takes on its greatest meaning.”

  Her gaze shifted from face to face. But when she got to Mary, Mary had to turn once more towards the window, the heaving surf. Guilt, oh. But not the guilt of the survivor—the guilt of the skeptic.

  Hadn’t she had choices, for dealing with Mama’s passing? In the month since the funeral, how many times had her daughter mentioned the Grief Workshop at St. Peter’s Central? Mary had turned instead to the sort of books she’d always sneered at, even to radio call-in programs; she wasted whole Sunday afternoons gabbing into the phone about the end of the century, the looming new millennium. And last night she’d agreed to have her loss serve as the “group focus.” Yet here she stood, still holding these notions at arm’s length, with clenched fists. In fact giving the circle its assignment had wound up working against her. She’d wriggled and shifted in her sleeping bag, feeling alternately anxious and silly, long after the other two women in the room had drifted off.

  Maybe Mary was just tired. Maybe all she needed was a walk on the beach.

  “It’s interesting that Mary dreamed of travel.” This was a woman with a Brooklyn accent. “That makes three of us, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that make a motif?”

  Mary always heard accents like this as the voice of the real world. When she’d first been introduced to the circle, it had made all the difference that one of the women sounded like a neighbor from Bensonhurst.

  “It makes four,” Lavender said. “Remember I was in outer space, the Ursula LeGuin planet.”

  “Okay, sure. Plus I was in Vietnam where my boyfriend died and Inksa—“ the New Yorker pointed with her head—“was touring those Egyptian ruins.”

  “Ach,” Inksa said, “we don’t know they were Egyptian.” But the circle had already begun nodding, gesturing, bringing up other possible connections. Only Mary fell still, unable to escape the heat of the bay window. Blearily she looked over the talkers at her feet, thinking in an accent. Gimme a break. “Motif,” my eye. For women like these to dream of travel was no clue to the universe. Nothing emergent or millennial, nothing nearer to wherever Mary’s mother had gone. It wasn’t a dream at all, travel—it was a daydream. Even Teri’s antique shield of a face stretched into a faint but easy to understand smile. One windfall contract, and Teri too would be on the first plane to Paris.

  “To establish a motif,” Inksa was saying now, “generally requires three.”

  Three? Mary was thinking. Try all nine of them. There wasn’t a woman in the room, Inksa included, who didn’t eye the bargain fares in the Sunday Travel section. And it had to be Europe. The Old World was key to the daydream, the Sunday dream. The vineyards around Aetna, the ruins of Agrigento—yes, Mary knew what everyone was thinking. Sleepy as she was, she knew. They had in mind a Hollywood Mediterranean: fat-free breads, painless kisses, and singsong cathedral services without smoke, cold, or a cadaver.

  “Now what we begin to see is ourselves,” Inksa was saying. “Our wholes emerge as archetypes.”

  Archetypes? Mary was thinking. Try stereotypes.

  But then recognizing the thought—hearing the accent—she had to include herself in it. Herself and her anger. It was a garden variety women’s anger, a kind Mary knew all too well: another stereotype. And her dream, her damned still-terrifying dream had been just the opposite. She’d dreamed of being different.

  Neutral. The feeling’s everywhere: in the crossroads that defines the brown and stony village, in the oboe-easy call of the native horns—horns bodylength and buttress-like, played while standing up. A horn chorus stands at the edge of the meadow (edelweiss blooms low, no presumptuous flower); the players’ lederhosen calls attention to their legs, a reliable musculature right up calf and knee and thigh. Strong, these people. Hikers, forever going up or down the mountainside. Strong, flexible—and neutral, grown-up and neutral, very real world even in the measured echo of the horns. Then why is she scrabbling around so desperately, Maria? What is she searching for?

  But don’t the villagers realize—they need it too. What Maria needs to find, it’s vital, it’s as much a part of the local life-flow as all their stolid marching. Just visible at the seams of the local restraint, in the shadows—there, there! Don’t the villagers see them? Elves perhaps. Fairy folk. How’s she supposed to know the species? They’re smaller-scale creatures, that’s all she can say: the sort of faces one sees in a fire. There!

  And these faces, wayward and shrunken as lost balloons—somehow their creeping and peeking sustains the clockwork of the rest. Somehow it provides essential backup. Yes, they’re key to the dream, the workday-dream: these bird-bright imps who, at intervals in the clockworks, pop with a raucous squeal out of one neat brown cubbyhole or other. That’s when she’ll sometimes spot one.

  But she needs to do better than that. Hard as it is to pick out these small faces in the brown grid of flowers and muscle (the men so handsomely preserved!), Maria has to do better. She has to protect them. For they’re disappearing, these fragile mites; she can feel them fading out, as if her back were to the sun and the sun was going down. How could they not be fading? They’re the little people.

  Over one shoulder she spies one she knows, one that surely even the villagers would remember. A girl in a red cap and cloak, carrying a basket. Just visible as she ducks into the forest. Maria can’t let this one get away, she’s off at a run, hollering for help from her college roommate. For isn’t this junior year abroad? And isn’t there someone else who can help, a friend of her roommate, a pretty Irish boy? She hollers for him too, making wild promises if only he’ll come. But then, oh. Then, running, she sees them both—her roommate and the Irish boy. Oh! They’ve shrunk to something even smaller and easier to lose, they’re no more than fireflies in the forest dusk. She had a friend for life and a boy who loved her and yet now she can only catch a last flickering glimpse of them before she comes up against the wolf. The wolf, its breath stinking of bugs, its legs terrifying. Legs so tough and powerful that the chorus at the crossroads is suddenly nothing by comparison; they’re a sham; there can be no
other, standing at the crossroads.

  “This is growth,” Inksa said. “The fairy tale, the old magic. This always indicates greater maturity.”

  “Rich stuff, Mary,” Teri said. Her voice too was soft.

  “Rich, yah.”

  “Mary? This makes your last one look like one of those antidrug comics for children.”

  One or two others chuckled, but not Mary. She was still swallowing wetly, blinking in spasms.

  “And in this one again we see the subject of loss.” Inksa sounded warmer than Mary would have thought possible. “Insofar as we may psychoanalyze, here, I would say that this is what I see. Your loss.”

  The last word was almost a whisper, a caress. Still Mary couldn’t look at her. Once more she stood at the bay window, actually propped against the window, her hot forehead working against the glass. She knuckled her face. Midway through her turn someone had touched her, tried to put an arm around her, and at that Mary had erupted from her seat.

  The next to break the silence was Lavender. “I can’t leave it at that. Not after all we’ve been through.”

  Mary felt the response in the windowpane, a rowdy vibration. Today the circle had passed on acting ladylike.

  “I mean you know I love Mary,” Lavender went on. “We all love Mary. But that dream, it’s a manifesto.”

  What? Bouts of grief like these still left Mary empty, thoughtless. That was the wolf, or that was one of them—a sadness that devoured her brains first.

  “Haven’t we been asking where we go from here? Haven’t we? Mary, you’re so evolved. That dream is a manifesto.”

  It took Mary a long shut-eyed moment just to recall that today too she’d asked to speak last. And till now the talk had concentrated more and more on a single issue. They’d wondered whether their circle were truly something formal and dedicated—truly a church. One of the others had dreamed of a Ukrainian Christmas egg, and that was how the women shared the idea, today: like something fragile, made by hand, and covered with cryptic designs. Mary in fact had taken the lead (she had? really? this sopping wreck?).