Highway Trade and Other Stories Read online

  She had. She’d argued that Inksa hadn’t come all the way from The Hague just to arrange a little girl-talk. Mary had even opened up about her anger the day before. She’d warned everyone that she’d had another dream about Europe, then joked, Now don’t set me off again. Don’t start talking about bargain rates.

  But what was this dyke behind her saying?

  Mary jerked upright, stiffening. The anger. The anger again, bang on top of the grief. Behind her the other women chimed in after Lavender, before her the big windowpane shivered once more with the echo, and all Mary could think was a nasty pun: Good vibrations. Oh, wow. She shook her head. The Brooklyn woman was saying Mary’s dream felt like proof they had a church, a real church, because it connected them to ancient stories and patterns.

  “Isn’t that a true faith?” she was asking. “One that encompasses both past and future?”

  Mary thought: How about one that encompasses both weeping and insults? In the same minute? Oh, she was whirling. On top of everything else, she stood there as sleep-deprived as yesterday; last night she’d lain awake again. Now the ocean’s rise and fall, at the foot of her view, triggered a jaw-cracking yawn. Whirling.

  Last night she’d even started worrying about work. She was stretching an already-extended leave from one of the State Senate offices. Then her thoughts had gone the opposite direction, back to the haunts of childhood insomnia: terrors about the size of the universe.

  Teri was speaking now. “I think Mary’s dream reminds us that in order to go forward, first we have to go back.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you about my mother,” Mary said. “Something about her dying.”

  The only one she could look at was Teri.

  “Your mother, Mary?” someone else asked. “Something personal? Aren’t you the one who’s been saying we have to get beyond the personal?”

  “Hello?” Teri said.

  “I was jealous of her,” Mary said. “Jealous of her dying.”

  She kept her eyes on Teri. The old, heavy face hung low, halfway down in the well of the rocking chair. “Working with Mama day after day, working through all those stages. I started to think, now this is truly getting somewhere. This is truly—spiritual communion.”

  “Ach, yah. The greatest challenge of the Demiurge.”

  “The chill of eternity,” Teri said. “I’m with you.”

  Mary was shaking her head, turning back towards the sun-flecked ocean. “No. No, I don’t think you’re with me. I think we’re all still only talking about ourselves.” The window held a faint reflection of the group. “We’re still just finding out about ourselves, the kind of women we are.”

  “Oh now, Mary,” one of them said. “You’re not going to chide us again for making money?”

  “All we’ve ever done,” Mary said, “is find out about ourselves. For us, our generation, even when a mother dies it’s only another book from the library. It’s only another set of steps to read about. It’s really about ourselves.” The surf’s noise, a static beneath her, had Mary thinking of the radio shows she’d called in to; she was on hold again, wondering what she’d say. “So many steps, so many movements. Once upon a time, we came clear across the country.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself,” someone put in. “I was born in the Valley. Right in Four Corners.”

  “We left everything,” Mary went on. “We crossed the country. As if all that mattered out there was ourselves.”

  Teri: “Are we supposed to be virgins, Mary?”

  She frowned. “I’m just saying, I think I’m saying—we aren’t the heros of this story. Not losers like us.”

  After a long moment Inksa spoke up. At her coolest, her most Aryan, she pointed out that previous movements in fact provided a useful structural model. “The circle expands in this way too, via intrapersonal pyramiding. I must thank you, Mary, for the suggestion.”

  “What? Thank me?” Mary couldn’t stop talking, she couldn’t let go of the floor, and she found herself apologizing, an old reflex. Sorry, guys. Teri came back with reassurances: It’s always good to hear what you think. Then somewhere in this old-shoe give and take, as if she and the others were ten years into a difficult marriage—in there, somewhere, Mary grew hot with the discovery of what she needed to say.

  “Mama,” she said, “what Mama went through, she was a virgin.” She whipped round, scowling at lineup on the sofa. “At that we’re all virgins. Every time, we’re a virgin.”

  The women before her retreated, sliding deeper into the noisy old leather.

  “I held her hand. I felt her go.”

  “Mary?” This might have been Teri. “Mary, maybe this is all a little too soon for you…”

  Mary stamped her foot, a huge noise in that space. “I felt it, like that. Gone! Nobody understands, nobody.”

  “And,” Lavender said, “you were jealous?”

  “I was jealous!”

  “But that just shows you’re evolved. You’re right on the verge, so close to some greater—“

  “Close? I was close when I was in the terminal ward.”

  Lavender fitted the sleeve-ends of her sweatshirt together, hiding her hands.

  “The millennium,” Mary said. “We need a new spirit, a new connection to the spirit, for the new millennium.”

  “The millennium? The end of the world?”

  “The end of our miserable empty lives. When Mama went, I had nothing left!”

  “Oh.”

  Mary had no idea who spoke. She had her head down, suddenly, and when she again stamped her foot it wasn’t nearly so loud. Massaging her forehead, her dry old forehead, she felt murky contradictions behind the bone. It felt almost as if all her kicking and screaming had been about opening up to the others, about asking their help. Coming away from the window had put her in the center of the circle. But still she didn’t care for how Teri and Inksa sat poised behind her, like two pincers ready to close in. She didn’t care for the room’s silence, alert, breathless. The clogs and Birkenstocks before her, along the front of the sofa, were up on the balls of their feet.

  “Oh, Mary.”

  She couldn’t tell who spoke, but she heard the sympathy. The good vibrations. At the first touch—someone creaking forward on the sofa—she bolted for the door. She ran for the sea air, the cliff steps.

  Where was she going? Why didn’t she head to her bedroom to pack? The anger didn’t allow her an answer, the anger or the pain (was there a difference, really?). If she heard a shout as she crossed the scrap of lawn under Inksa’s window, she couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t say why she slowed down so soon, either; she slowed to a stagger just minutes after coming out on the beach.

  She stopped, leg-sore already on the soft sand. She kept yawning, tasting rare oceanside heat. Inksa’s window must have been treated, photo-sensitive. Out here the sun seemed stuck in place, some organ too fat and slow for its gauze-like blue body.

  In a nook between fingers of cliff, protected from what little breeze there was, she found a hump carpeted with soft grass. It wasn’t sea grass; it didn’t crackle. And she was through with running.

  At last a place she knows: a church. She knows the church and she knows the country: the mild, homey sun that catches the designs on the cathedral floor, the ancient Imperial tile recycled to make those designs—mosaic circles and whorls, such designs—and she knows the worshippers too. Everyone’s dipping down on one knee, down into a three-point genuflection, and she herself dips down, with knee and toe and knuckle to the mosaic floor before the Resurrection. She knows well that dip and touch, as natural as surf, and yet personal, intensely personal. Mary knows the whole stony arena so well that at first even the film director carrying on behind her doesn’t disturb the stodgy warmth with which she waits, almost asleep in her pew, for the Host to come around.

  But he’s impossible to ignore, the director. He’s nothing like a man at mass, shuttling people around with the full vocabulary of gestures this country is f
amous for, with meaty thoughtful pouts and eloquent shrugs. The director does so much of this—too much, really, for someone in such a good silk suit—that Mary’s eyes open again and stay that way. She understands that the national instinct for gestures is bound up in the rituals of the church: in that brief stagger as a worshipper enters the sanctuary. She understands, as she watches the director taking bearings through a lens that dangles around his neck (at first glance you might mistake it for an icon), that the cathedral is missing its fourth wall. The tile underfoot is plastic. The sun in the stained glass is halogen.

  How long has she been in a movie? When, she demands, did I ever say I’d play the hero?

  The director is nothing but compassion, kneeling beside her with a lippy expressive face almost a mother’s, a sister’s. He speaks apologetically, though with something in his tone that makes clear he’s explained this all before. He must have her face, he says. He simply must have her face.

  What’s this, she asks, a fairy tale? The old magic?

  Looks like it: now through the cathedral ceiling—no, through boom mikes and track lighting—descends the oldest magic of all, the Great Mother herself. The Great Mother in her famed watchful pose, down on one knee so that she may spy on the latest indiscretion of the Great Father: on his latest “epiphany” before her pretty young votives. Slung on a rig beneath an ear-shattering helicopter, the Mother drops hugely into place before the Resurrection. And she’s not marble, not white, but honest brown.

  Hides-the-dirt brown—hashish brown, cuckoo-clock brown—all these and other browns spin through Mary’s head (the color’s basic after all, she reminds herself: as basic as dirt) because now she’s spinning literally, or her face is at least; the director has taken her face and flung it towards the low-hanging head of the goddess. In the wash of the rotors Mary spins, she crosses vast distances—crosses oceans and continents, tossing and turning—but there’s no denying gravity. She ends up the face of the Mother. It’s what’s best for the movie.

  Then too, the set’s ungainly mannequin doesn’t feel so bad, against the inner lining of her eyes and mouth and ears. It’s a snug fit, natural as dirt, and it’s not nearly as scary as Mary had thought it would be to hang exposed up here—exposed just as she is, alone and no longer pretty, in the vibration and echo of the domed machine over her head. Behind Mary’s face, now, the jerry-rigged deity speaks. Hello, it says. I’ve got a riddle.

  What, it asks, walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night?

  Mary chuckles supportively. She’s heard this one before. And they do more of this, riddle and answer, she and the blind, unfinished creature within.

  Yes, she’s at ease at last, Mary, settling into the role. But she needs to ask the director one final question. Is this all it takes? she needs to ask. Another dream? The man is hard to find, however, in the confusing, wide-open church. She sees only extras, a thickening circle, uncertain but eager foreign folk struggling for something that will come across as grace, faith, communion.

  Period Sets

  STANLEY WAS OFF draping towels over all the mirrors in the house. Nonie waited by the coffee. She studied the strip of newsprint between the steaming mugs, an inch-long cutting, curled at the ends like a tiny boat. Stanley’s doubts were so obvious—this last-minute delaying tactic with the mirrors—that Nonie made a point of keeping her own face formal, unafraid. Studying the newsprint. The stain on the paper at least was interesting, a mazy rainbow stipple. It was a shrunken slice of the Grand Canyon wall, a flat patch of cartoon coyote once the Roadrunner was through with him.

  When Stanley returned Nonie allowed herself a short smile, watching him work. He used his X-acto blade to halve the paper, splitting the stain precisely in half. He used tweezers to lift each half into their cups. Careful as a spider. He buttoned both the blade and the tweezers back into his kit before he touched his coffee. At such times Stanley reminded her of her father, switching off between a twenty-pound maul and a bottle of Rainier. If only the man could always be at this busy distance, handling his tools. Then there’d never be any question about loving him.

  But as he stirred in the stain, the drug, Stanley started to talk about the old days again. He said the business with the mirrors had made him think of it. Today would be so different from back in the old days, back at NYU, when he and old Ollie used to do acid all the time.

  A lie: Alden had told her Stanley never tried hallucinogens. Nonie lifted her cup and drained it.

  And choked; you weren’t supposed to gulp such a rank brew. They’d picked up some Nicaraguan blend in Eugene yesterday. It meant a special trip, one more hassle before they’d headed up here to Brownsville. But Stanley had insisted: a little extra kick, man, a little taste of the Sandanista Revolution to help us get off. Likewise by the time Nonie caught her breath he’d already started to embroider the lies about his acid trips with “Ollie”—with Alden. He’d started to work in details he knew she would have picked up from her younger professors, or from MTV. Guys like Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg, he said, they were in control right from the start. Guys like Ginsberg didn’t have to play it straight in front of their parents. But now Stanley was older himself, and a glimpse in the mirror wouldn’t make him freak the way it used to. It wouldn’t make him go jump off the roof or anything.

  Today, Stanley said, he’d covered the mirrors for Nonie’s sake. He didn’t want Nonie to freak.

  She kept her face formal. He was lying, and at the same time he was putting her in her place. He had a mean streak, certainly. But strange mean, indirect like just now: she’d been with Stanley two years now, and only in the last month or so had she begun to pick it up. Who was he, anyway? Even his clothes were a lie. That biker’s jacket and cap, that Italian undershirt, and always the light gauge on a chain round his neck. Granted, Stanley had the face to go with it. A rough-knuckle handsomeness, the eyes aging soft but the cheeks aging mean. His heavy mustache centered the vivid wrinkles and lines. And he had the energy, he was up clearing the table. Last night he’d hauled the table out from the kitchen, out here by the windows. There were still times she couldn’t keep her eyes off him.

  He withdrew to the sink, still making explanations. More new trouble, he never used to complain so much. But now it was Nonie, my life is crazy, this wasn’t what I wanted. What kind of an artist works as a professional photographer? Stanley shook water off the coffee mugs and set them in the dry rack. He arranged them, really, propping each so the handles faced together from opposite sides of the rack. Meantime still griping, what kind of an artist has a contract with Sunset magazine? Man, all this western good-life stuffjust isn’t me. He returned to the table with two hefty slices of the bread he’d baked this morning. Each slice was paired on its dish with a folded cloth napkin, the dish a bumblebee colored earthenware that Nonie hadn’t even known her family owned. The bread was warm with butter and honey.

  “I just have to remake my whole life,” Stanley announced. “I have to strip it down and see what it looks like naked.”

  He sat and spread his napkin across his lap. Then he said it was time they got started, it was time they looked at Alden’s letter.

  Nonie turned to the window. Brownsville, and another foul September sky. Her face was slack, ashamed. It wasn’t just that Stanley had finally brought up Alden’s letter; it was Stanley himself. There were still times. It was that Stanley lied to himself, as natural as lying to her, and when had their life together become this long-undusted houseful of lies? Everything knotted with dirt and smothering.

  When Nonie had first seen the letter, yesterday, the effect was just the opposite. As soon as she’d spotted it in Stanley’s hand she’d withdrawn to an icy private sanctuary. She’d withdrawn to safety even as she stood there answering questions and knotting her thumbs. A mental holding pattern, she’d discovered the place when she started taking dance classes. Though yesterday, Stanley too had acted remotely. He’d made no move to open the letter. He’d
smoothed the envelope against his drafting board, watching the paper emerge from his hand, and he’d asked about her folks’ place up in Brownsville. Still empty, babe? You still got the key? He’d asked—zoning off even further—if she’d heard the news: some outfit from Hollywood was using Brownsville as the set for a movie. A horror movie, babe. You heard?

  Of course the house was still unsold, of course she’d heard about the movie. The answers were blips across a screen unreachably deep in her head. Only then had Stanley begun to come to the point: Think of it, Nones…just up the road, an actual movie.

  Talking around a thick chaw of bread, Stanley pointed out the letter’s return address. Managua, babe. But in the other corner of the envelope, the postmark said Mexico City. “Alden must have had someone hand-carry it over the border,” he said. “Makes you wonder what he had to hide.”

  He went back into his bag, getting his X-acto. Nonie hugged her knees. One instep jigged hotly at the edge of her chair, she couldn’t get back into her holding pattern.

  She wished the drug would take over. God yes, take over. Better that than Stanley’s pick-pick-pick, so many delays that she wondered if he knew. Out the window, the landscape kept turning briefly to quartz. But it wasn’t enough. Nonie blinked and the stony interior folds were gone. Indeed the glimpse only made her think of herself: of how exposed and foreign she looked on Stanley’s contact sheets. Today’s shot had particularly harsh angles. Dancer’s shoulders and strong cheekbones, Indian hair and the long straight fall of her Peruvian skirt.

  And Stanley read the letter in a normal adult voice, without the usual tics and twitches intended to sound streetwise. She had to stay with him; she had to keep thinking. He’d always played the straight man around Alden. His goodboyness after his friend arrived in Eugene had prompted her first suspicions about the stories. Alden proved so much more than the amphetamine-heated liner notes scrawled across a few bootleg Dylans. He was sloppy with red meat and scotch. He was marriage and a child and the separation which had brought him out West. Till then they’d both ridden the same legend, MacDougal and Bleeker and Stanley and Ollie. The first two into everything. But come June, Alden had actually shared the house. Commencement was past and Nonie had nothing going but her workshop sessions. Now the letter described his divorce. Alden was the first to try that too.