The Way Life Should Be (8 page)

“No, no, no!” Lindsay is violently shaking her head. This may be the strongest disagreement we’ve ever had, and I’m a little disconcerted by how heated we’re both getting. Usually when we disagree we try to defuse things as quickly as possible. But clearly there’s enough at stake here that neither of us wants to let go. Lindsay looks at me as if I’ve just told her I’m a Scientologist. “It is
not
about fitting some ideal, Ange, and that is so wrong it doesn’t even sound like you. I have known you since you wore high-waisted pants and leg warmers, and I’ve never heard you say anything like that.” She balls up her napkin and tosses it on the table. “I think it’s exactly the opposite. It’s when you have preconceived ideas that you get into trouble, when you’re
trying to fit a person into a mold. For me, love is organic. It’s about being open to people and possibilities even when you feel closed—letting go of your fixed ideas and preconceptions and living in the moment.”

“For god’s sake!” I say. “You don’t call finding a sailor in Maine being open to possibilities? Why are you unable to be happy for me? I’m really surprised, to tell you the truth.”

She clenches her teeth, which is how I know she’s really upset. For a moment she doesn’t say anything. Then she reaches across the table for my hand. “I don’t know what I’ll do without you,” she says. “You know that already, and what pisses me off is you think that’s the whole explanation for this, which makes it easier for you to dismiss what I’m saying. But I am truly, genuinely concerned about this move, Ange. I think you’re vulnerable right now and you’re not thinking through the consequences. This guy might be the nicest guy on earth, but you barely know him. And you’re moving up to an island off the coast of Maine, where you’ve never been before, not even to visit. In October.”

“If it doesn’t work out, I’ll leave,” I say.

“You’ve lost your job. Given up your apartment. Packed your stuff away. You have nothing to come back to.”

“Except you.”

“Yuh,” she snorts.

“I have a good feeling about this,” I say. “I think things are going to work out just fine for both of us.”

“You had a good feeling about that gala, too,” she says, “and the whole thing went up in smoke.”

“Okay, okay, I’m trying to get some closure here,” I say.

As we futz with the bill, each of us ineptly trying to divide and add the tip, I say, “Promise you’ll visit.”

“Maybe in the summer. If you hold out that long.”

“Well, if things with Mr. Hot don’t pan out, maybe Rich has a friend up there.”

“No thanks,” she says. “Moving to Iceland to shack up with a native isn’t in the cards for me.” She smiles, a clear effort to blunt the sharpness of her words.

CHAPTER 8

I slam the trunk of the old silver Civic. It’s seven o’clock on Saturday
morning, and I’m set to go. I’m leaving most of my boxes in my dad’s garage, taking only warm clothes and shoes and bedding and books. And pots and pans and mixing bowls. Even so, the car is jam-packed. It occurs to me that the car, with its various dents and gouges, rust frilling the wheel caps, frying pans and spatulas poking out of a paper bag on the backseat, looks like some unfortunate person’s home.

Maybe, in fact, mine.

My dad comes out of the back door with a plastic travel mug I haven’t seen before and hands it to me. The mug is black, with a pattern of grinning white skeletons dancing around the sides. I take a sip. Fresh coffee. “Where’d this come from?” I ask.

“Starbucks,” my father says. “I thought you could use it for your trip. Halloween, I guess. It was all they had.”

“Wow. Thanks, Dad. Is this the first time you’ve been to a Starbucks?”

“Not exactly.” He looks pained, then confesses, “I kind of have a thing for that caramel macchiato.”

“Well, you’re full of surprises,” I say.

As if on cue, Sharon appears. She is more cheerful than I’ve
seen her for days; I think she was afraid I might sleep on the foldout forever. “Leaving so early?”

“If this old clunker can make it,” my father says, patting the hood. “You know this car is seventeen years old. And what’s it got—a hundred and fifty thousand miles?”

I look at the mileage. “A hundred and fifty-eight.”

“We’ll cross our fingers,” Sharon says.

“Just remember, the earth is flat,” my father tells me, reprising a running joke from my childhood. He said it whenever I set off anywhere new.

“It’s round and I’ll prove it,” I say, sticking to our script.

He puts one arm around my shoulder, a partial hug. “I just don’t want you to fall off the edge.”

“It’s round. There is no edge.”

“Oh, there’s an edge,” he says. “There’s always an edge. Promise me you’ll keep your eyes open for it.”

My dad tends to communicate emotion through metaphor. All you can do is play along.

“I promise,” I say.

Sharon has that frozen look she gets when she thinks she’s being left out of a joke. “I missed something.”

“Never mind,” my father says. He smiles at me tenderly. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I just wanted to say it one last time. For the record.”

Nonna is standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. When she sees me looking over at her, she holds her arms up and moves her fingers like a crab flexing its pincers. “Come here,
mia figlia,
” my child, she says.

When she squeezes me I smell powder and yeast and the oil from her scalp. She holds me out at arms’ length, clutching my shoulders, and says, “Do you have a warm coat?”

I nod yes.

“Maybe you need my rabbit fur. The one made in Italy.”

Nonna’s black rabbit fur coat is part of our family story. My grandfather gave it to her several years after they came to America, proof of what his new money could buy—a coat he never could have afforded back in the country where it was made. In old photos Nonna wears it over an evening dress, in the backseat of a slope-nosed motor car, posing with my grandfather on a snowy street. “I could never,” I say. “But you will wear it when you visit me.”

“Va bene.”
All right, then, she says to be polite.

“I’m expecting you, Nonna,” I say insistently, and she says,
“Tutto il a destra,”
all right, “we’ll see.”

When I pull away, the three of them are standing in the driveway. I watch them in my rearview mirror: my father waving, Nonna clasping the dish towel to her bosom, Sharon turning to go back inside.

There’s an accident up ahead
on the Mass Pike, and for the first time since leaving New Jersey, I’m stuck in traffic. I open my window and breathe. It’s a warm early October morning; the sky is cloudless. Orange trees explode against a blue sky, as vivid as Technicolor.

One evening last week my father went to Radio Shack and surprised me with a CD player for my old car, then spent another evening installing it.

“You are a lucky girl to have a father like that,” Sharon said. We were watching him out the living room window as he lay on his back fiddling with the controls, his legs sticking out the driver’s side. I could tell she disapproved of his indulging me.

“You’re a lucky girl to have a husband like that,” I said.

“You’re both lucky girls. And you can thank me for raising
him,” Nonna called from the kitchen. Sharon looked over at me and rolled her eyes.

Now, sitting in traffic, I rummage around in a box of CDs on the passenger seat, find a Van Morrison and slip it in. Van is singing in his velvet voice and the trees whisper as I pass, and I am halfway between two worlds, the known and the unknown. I feel as transparent as the wind, as if my spirit is hovering in the sky, waiting to land. I am driving toward a future I can’t see, leaving behind a past that already feels distant. Nothing is clear—and yet the trees are sharp against the sky; I can see the hard outlines of everything. The highway signs, the center line, the eighteen-wheeler in front of me.

A faded green bridge
rises out of the earth. From a distance, as the road winds toward it, the bridge looks like a mirage. My spirits soar. This is it—the narrow band of river on my MapQuest printout that separates New Hampshire from Maine. I’m here!

The road is wide, four lanes in each direction, sloping toward the midpoint of the bridge. Halfway across the river a small sign says WELCOME TO MAINE. This is not like the border of any other state I’ve been to, where you pass a road sign and things stay pretty much the same. When you enter Maine, you are crossing over water into new territory.

On the other side of the bridge, now, I drive past two white water towers with twenty-foot red lobsters painted on the sides, signs for outlet malls, acres of evergreens. After about forty-five minutes I feel like a little kid who has stayed up too late. My high is wearing off. Consulting my directions, it becomes clear that I won’t actually be “here” for quite some time. It’s more than four hours from the border to where I’m going.

I put in a Lucinda Williams CD, roll my neck, and arch my
back against the seat, like a cat. I need to pee, and the car could use some gas, but I’m determined not to stop until I absolutely have to.

I’m singing along to Lucinda
—
I am waiting in my car, I am waiting at this bar, I am waiting on your back steps
—going about seventy in a sixty-five-mile zone, when the car starts losing power. What the hell is going on? I press the gas pedal to the floor and the car goes from 40 to 30 to 20.
Fuck.
As the car rolls to a stop, I steer onto the shoulder.

I check all the warning lights—oil, brakes, battery. (I wouldn’t know what to do even if I could identify the problem, but that doesn’t stop me from checking the warning lights as if I might be able to solve this.) The gas gauge doesn’t work; the needle hasn’t moved from Empty in at least a year. But this car has always been fuel efficient; I thought that a tank of gas would get me at least as far as—

Oh.

As far as right about here, I guess.

Where in the world am I? Looking around, I see only trees. About a hundred yards back is an entrance ramp sloping down to the road, but no signs are visible anywhere. Looking at the map, I deduce that I passed Portland a while ago, but I haven’t—or at least I think I haven’t—passed Augusta.

“I haven’t dated anybody south of Augusta in ten years.”

Every now and then a car whizzes past.

So, huh, this is why people join Triple A.

The only thing I can think to do—and really, to even call it thinking is an overstatement, it’s more like blind panic—is call Rich. I punch his number into my cell phone.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re here already?”

That “already” gives me pause. I talked to him yesterday. He knew I was coming today. “You knew I was coming today.”

“Ah, yeah.” He sounds distracted, as if I’ve interrupted him in the middle of something. “I just didn’t know you’d be so fast. How close are you?”

“Not that close,” I snap. “That’s why I’m calling. I don’t know what happened. My car just—stopped.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” I feel foolish and needy. “I think maybe I ran out of gas.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“No
way,
” he says again.

This is his response? “Yeah.”

At first I think he’s catching his breath, but then I realize he’s laughing. “I don’t believe you,” he says.

Now that I’m actually talking to him, I’m not sure why I called. For moral support? Practical advice? So far he’s giving me neither. “I’m not kidding.”

“No—I mean, I
believe
you, I just can’t believe you ran out of gas. Who runs out of gas in this day and age?”

Who says “day and age” in this day and age? “Look, I live in New York. I’m not used to driving. And my car is really old and the gas gauge is broken. Anyway—I don’t need to make excuses for running out of gas. Whatever. It happened. And now I’m sitting here on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, and I only called you because I don’t know what else to do.”

“Jeez,” he says. “That’s rough luck, Angela. You got Triple A?”

“No.”

He lets out a sigh. “I don’t know what to tell ya. You gotta get to a gas station.”

“I know. I just—I don’t know where I am.”

“Have you thought about hitchin’?”

“‘Hitchin’ ’?” I repeat dumbly.

“Maybe you can get a ride to the nearest station.”

“Where I come from, people who hitchhike end up in gulleys without their heads.”

“Aw, c’mon. You’re in Maine. Stuff like that doesn’t happen up here. Not usually, anyways.”

Is it my imagination, or has his Maine accent gotten thicker since I spoke to him yesterday?

As we’re talking, there’s a knock on my window. I look up to see a Maine state trooper with a shiny gold badge motioning for me to roll down the glass.

The whole time
the kindly state trooper is giving me a lift to a Mobil station off the next exit, helping me fill the gas can the owner keeps in the back (apparently I’m not the only one who runs out of gas on these long stretches of road), ferrying me back to my car, waiting to make sure it starts, and giving me his number in case something else happens, I’m replaying the conversation with Rich in my mind.

Like white blood cells, rationalizations rush to the site of my wounded pride to minimize the damage. I did catch him off guard. I wasn’t clear; he thought I was on Mount Desert Island already—of course he was surprised. It was childish to call him. I didn’t know where I was; how could I expect him to come to the rescue?

Then, I can’t help myself, I start scratching the scab. He could have responded better in a dozen different ways. A little empathy, for a start. “That’s awful” or “I’m so sorry” or “What can I do to help?” He could’ve offered some practical advice, like calling
911. The state trooper says I could have pinpointed my location by giving a dispatcher a mile marker.