Homesick (15 page)

By the second day my father acted as if he'd been driving the car all his life. He not only talked, he sang, and if he felt like hitching up his trousers, he just took his hands off the wheel and hitched. But as my father relaxed, my mother became more tense. “Arthur,” she finally said, “you are going forty-five.”

My father laughed. “Well, we're headed for the stable, Myrtle. You never heard of a horse that dawdled on its way home, did you?”

My mother's lips went tight and thin. “The whole point of driving across the continent,” she said, “was so we could see the country.”

“Well, it's all there.” My father swept his hand from one side of the car to the other. “All you have to do is to take your eyes off the road and look.” He honked his horn at the car in front of him and swung around it.

At the end of the day, after we were settled in an overnight cabin, my father took a new notebook from his pocket. I watched as he wrote: “May 24. 260 miles.” Just as I'd suspected, my father was out to break records. I bet that before long we'd be making 300 miles or more a day. I bet we'd be in Washington, P.A., long before July.

The trouble with record breaking is that it can lead to Narrow Squeaks, and while we were still in California we had our first one. Driving along a back road that my father had figured out was a shortcut, we came to a bridge with a barrier across it and a sign in front: THIS BRIDGE CONDEMNED. DO NOT PASS. There was no other road marked DETOUR, so obviously the only thing to do was to turn around and go back about five miles to the last town and take the regular highway. My father stopped the car. “You'd think they'd warn you in advance,” he muttered. He slammed the door, jumped over the barrier, and walked onto the bridge. Then he climbed down the riverbank and looked up at the bridge from below. When he came back up the bank, he pushed the barrier aside, got in the car, and started it up. “We can make it,” he said.

It hadn't occurred to me that he'd try to drive across. My mother put her hand on his arm. “Please, Arthur,” she begged, but I didn't bother with any “pleases.” If he wanted to kill himself, he didn't have to kill Mother and me too. “Let Mother and me walk across,” I shouted. “Let us out. Let us OUT.”

My father had already revved up the motor. “A car can have only one driver,” he snapped. “I'm it.” He backed up so he could get a flying start and then we whooped across the bridge, our wheels clattering across the loose boards, space gaping below. Well, we did reach the other side and when I looked back, I saw that the bridge was still there.

“You see?” my father crowed. “You see how much time we saved?”

All I could see was that we'd risked our lives because he was so pigheaded. Right then I hated my father. I felt rotten hating someone I really loved but I couldn't help it. I knew the loving would come back but I had to wait several hours.

There were days, however, particularly across the long, flat stretches of Texas, when nothing out-of-the-way happened. We just drove on and on, and although my father reported at the end of the day that we'd gone 350 miles, the scenery was the same at the end as at the beginning, so it didn't feel as if we'd moved at all. Other times we ran into storms or into road construction and we were lucky if we made 200 miles. But the best day of the whole trip, at least as far as my mother and I were concerned, was the day that we had a flat tire in the Ozark Mountains. The spare tire and jack were buried in the trunk under all our luggage, so everything had to be taken out before my father could even begin work on the tire. There was no point in offering to help because my father had a system for loading and unloading which only he understood, so my mother and I set off up the mountainside, looking for wild flowers.

“Watch out for snakes,” my mother said, but her voice was so happy, I knew she wasn't thinking about snakes.

As soon as I stepped out of the car, I fell in love with the day. With the sky—fresh, blotting-paper blue. With the mountains, warm and piney and polka-dotted with flowers we would never have seen from the window of a car. We decided to pick one of each kind and press them in my gray geography book which I had in the car. My mother held out her skirt, making a hollow out of it, while I dropped in the flowers and she named them: forget-me-not, wintergreen, pink, wild rose. When we didn't know the name, I'd make one up: pagoda plant, wild confetti, French knot. My mother's skirt was atumble with color when we suddenly realized how far we'd walked. Holding her skirt high, my mother led the way back, running and laughing. We arrived at the car, out of breath, just as my father was loading the last of the luggage into the trunk. He glared at us, his face streaming with perspiration. “I don't have a dry stitch on me,” he said, as if it were our fault that he sweat so much. Then he looked at the flowers in Mother's skirt and his face softened. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and neck and finally he smiled. “I guess I picked a good place to have a flat tire, didn't I?” he said.

The farther we went, the better mileage we made, so that by the middle of June we were almost to the West Virginia state line. My father said we'd get to Washington, P.A., the day after the next, sometime in the afternoon. He called my grandmother on the phone, grinning because he knew how surprised she'd be. I stood close so I could hear her voice.

“Mother?” he said when she answered. “How about stirring up a batch of flannel cakes?”

“Arthur!” (She sounded just the way I knew she would.) “Well, land's sakes, Arthur, where are you?”

“About ready to cross into West Virginia.”

My grandmother was so excited that her words fell over each other as she tried to relay the news to my grandfather and Aunt Margaret and talk over the phone at the same time.

The next day it poured rain and although that didn't slow us down, my mother started worrying. Shirls Avenue, my grandparents' street, apparently turned into a dirt road just before plunging down a steep hill to their house and farm. In wet weather the road became one big sea of mud which, according to my mother, would be “worth your life to drive through.”

“If it looks bad,” my mother suggested, “we can park at the top of the hill and walk down in our galoshes.”

My father sighed. “Myrtle,” he said, “we've driven across the Mohave Desert. We've been through thick and thin for over three thousand miles and here you are worrying about Shirls Avenue.”

The next day the sun was out, but when we came to Shirls Avenue, I could see that the sun hadn't done a thing to dry up the hill. My father put the car into low, my mother closed her eyes, and down we went, sloshing up to our hubcaps, careening from one rut to another, while my father kept one hand down hard on the horn to announce our arrival.

By the time we were at the bottom of the hill and had parked beside the house, my grandmother, my grandfather, and Aunt Margaret were all outside, looking exactly the way they had in the calendar picture. I ran right into my grandmother's arms as if I'd been doing this every day.

“Welcome home! Oh, welcome home!” my grandmother cried.

I hadn't known it but this was exactly what I'd wanted her to say. I needed to hear it said out loud. I was home.

7

WHEN AUNT MARGARET TOOK ME TO THE BACK of the house to show me around, I found everything so familiar I didn't need to be told what was what. “Here's the grape arbor,” I said, and I ran through the long archway that led from the back door to what was once the stable but was now a garage for my grandfather's truck.

“Oh, and there's the pump!”

“We have running water now,” Aunt Margaret explained, “so we don't use the pump much.”

“But I can pump if I want to, can't I?”

“Sure you can.”

Running up the hill on one side of the house was the cornfield. Running down the hill on the other side was the vegetable garden, the rhubarb plot, the dahlia beds. At the bottom of the hill was my grandfather's greenhouse.

“Where are the chickens?” I asked.

“Around the corner.”

As we went to the other side of the house, a brown-and-white-speckled rooster came strutting to meet us.

“That's Josh,” Aunt Margaret said. “He's such a serious-minded rooster, he can't stand to hear anyone laugh. He ruffles up his feathers and cusses his head off.”

I squatted down and tried to force a laugh. “Ha ha-ha ha.”

“No,” Aunt Margaret said, “he knows you're just pretending.”

Not far behind Josh was the chicken house with a big fenced-in yard around it. I ran over and looked at the hens, teetering like plump little ladies on spike heels.

“What are their names?” I asked.

“They don't have names.”

“How come?”

“We don't want to become too fond of them.”

I'd never heard anything so silly. If I was going to feed them, I ought to know their names. “Why not?” I asked.

“Well, Jean,” Aunt Margaret explained, “you know that this is a farm. In the end we eat every one of those chickens.”

I felt dumb not to have known. I decided that when I fed the chickens, I'd try not to even look them in the eye.

As we went inside, Aunt Margaret pointed to a pair of roller skates on the back porch. “I dug those out of the attic,” she said. “I thought you'd like them.” She looked at my legs. “But you can't roller-skate in silk stockings.”

“That's O.K.,” I grinned. “I have socks.”

Of course I wanted to try the roller skates right away but my mother's family was due to arrive for a welcome-home party and all of us had to get dressed up.

“Are we going to have flannel cakes?” I asked.

Aunt Margaret laughed. “That was just a joke. We're going to have potato salad and smearcase and cold chicken and apple pie and lots of other good things. We've been cooking ever since your father called.”

My mother's family arrived all at once: Aunt Blanche, Aunt Etta, Aunt Mary L., Aunt Sarah and Uncle Welsh, Uncle George and Aunt Edith, and my four cousins—Elizabeth and Jane who were much older and Katherine and Charlotte who were about three years younger. There were a couple of extra girls, but I couldn't figure out where they fit in. The family parked their cars at the top of the hill, stopped to pull on galoshes, and then picked their way down the grassy side of the road which was fairly dry. When my mother saw them, she ran up the hill, her arms out, and I watched one of her sisters run ahead of the others, her arms out too. I knew it must be Aunt Blanche. They stood beside the road, hugging, stepping back to make sure who they were, then hugging again. When the whole family got to the bottom of the hill where my father and I were waiting, everyone began crying and laughing and kissing and hugging at the same time. I never saw such carrying-on. Not just one kiss apiece, but kiss after kiss while I was still trying to figure out which aunt was which.

My youngest cousin, Charlotte, who was watching all this, suggested that we clear out until the excitement had died down. Those two other girls tagged along as we went to the back of the house where we all sat down on the platform surrounding the pump.

“I can't stand all that kissing business,” Charlotte said. “Can you?”

“No,” I agreed. “They wouldn't even let me get my breath.”

“Let's make a pact,” she suggested. “I'll never kiss you if you promise never to kiss me.”

We shook on it. But I still wondered about those other two girls, so I whispered to Charlotte, asking if they were related. She said no, they were neighbor kids who had begged to come along because they wanted to see the girl from China. “This is Ruth and this is Marie,” she said, but I could tell she wished they were someplace else.

Up to this time Ruth and Marie had just stared at me, but now Ruth nudged Marie and whispered, “You ask.”

Marie giggled. “We want to know if you ate rats in China and what they tasted like.”

“And if you ate their
tails
too,” Ruth added.

Rats! “No one in China eats rats,” I said stiffly.

“Oh, you don't need to pretend.” Ruth was smuggling her laughter behind her hands. “Everyone knows that people in China eat queer things. Snakes, birds' nests ...”

“They do not.”

The girls were looking at me as if I were some kind of a freak in a circus. As if maybe I had two heads.

“Did you use sticks to eat with?” Marie asked.

“Chopsticks, you mean. Sometimes. Of course.”

Both girls lay back on the platform, shrieking with laughter. Josh came tearing around the house, scolding, ruffling his feathers, and I didn't blame him. He wasn't any madder than I was.

“Quit it,” I told the girls. “You're upsetting the rooster.”

This only set them off again. When they finally got control of themselves, they asked if I could speak Chinese and I said yes, I certainly could.

I turned to Marie and said in Chinese, “Your mother is a big turtle.” (“Nide muchin shr ega da wukwei.”) Then I looked at Ruth and told her that her mother was a turtle too. I knew that in English it wouldn't sound so bad but in China this was an insult.

The girls were rolling all over the platform in spasms of laughter while Josh croaked and flapped. “Oh, it sounds so funny, say it again,” Ruth begged.

So I did. And I added that they were worthless daughters of baboons and they should never have been born.

“What does it mean?” they asked. “Tell us what it means.

“You wouldn't understand,” I said coldly. “Come on, Charlotte, let's go back to the party.”