Better Than Fiction 2 (20 page)

‘Well, Dad,’ I say, fumbling for words, ‘I guess this is it.’

But it isn’t it.

As I stand there listening to the refrigerators hum, I think about how, before he got sick, people often mistook him for Muhammad Ali. It was easy to do. He had the presence and personality to match. If he were here now, he’d be sauntering down the aisles, his arms loaded with frozen packages of smoked boudin and andouille sausage, never bothering to disabuse staring onlookers of their belief he might be the real prizefighter. Now, standing under the fluorescent lights in the bustling store, I
thank Dad aloud for letting me tag along on all those road trips. I tell him about my book. I tell him Mom’s going to be okay and that Jennifer and I are talking again.

When I finish, Mom grabs my hand and squeezes.

We give Jennifer the signal – two thumbs up – and the three of us walk back to the car.

Two more stops and we’ve established a rhythm. The Best Stop Supermarket. Billy’s Boudin & Cracklins. My mother keeps the plastic spoon. We have our goodbyes down to five minutes. We pass through Saint Martinville and scatter cremains in the parking lot of Joyce’s Supermarket. Rabideaux’s in Iowa doesn’t sell boudin so it’s not officially on the trail, but we swing by anyway because Dad swore they made the best andouille in South Louisiana. It’s a tiny shop with a counter and a single display case. In a place this small we’d get busted for sure, so we mix ashes into the soil of a potted palm near the door.

The Walmart Supercenter in Jennings is our last stop before we call it quits for the night. The place is larger than three football fields and it takes us a while to find the Outdoor/Sportsman section, which is where the insulated food bags are sold. As far as Dad was concerned, you couldn’t have too many, so we pick out one we think he would have liked and place it on the bottom shelf. And since we’re less concerned with sanitation, we scoop out a heaping spoonful of cremains and sprinkle them liberally underneath. The cleaning crew will mop this aisle by this time tomorrow. At least we’ve paid our respects.

The next morning we drive to Elton, Dad’s hometown. When Dad was a kid, he planted an oak sapling in his front yard. The house he grew up in has long since been razed, but the sapling is now a massive oak tree – four stories tall with roots so thick
they’ve buckled the sidewalk.

Here is a scene: Two sisters stand at the base of an enormous oak—a tree their dad planted sixty-five years earlier. They are surrounded by twenty-five people – aunts and uncles and cousins; their great-aunt Dell, who just turned ninety-three, and a few of their father’s childhood friends. Their cousin, Antoinette, steps forward and sings the first verse of ‘At the Cross’ – their dad’s favorite hymn. Her voice is crisp and clear, a siren’s voice that rises into the oak tree’s highest branches. And when the rest of the crowd joins in the singing, the sound carries down the street and out to the road. The group sings two more hymns, both
a capella
, the way black folks in the South used to sing when the girls’ dad was a boy. The moment has an old-timey feel.

When the singing stops, the sisters hold hands. They watch their Uncle Sonny dig a hole between the tree roots. Their mother places the little wooden box inside, and then their Uncle Charles fills the hole with concrete and places a small marble headstone over the spot.

It’s done. Their dad is home.

It’s a long drive back to New Orleans. Jennifer and I are speaking again, a gift of my father’s illness – but no-one has much to say. We pass all the boudin joints we visited along the way but this time, we don’t stop.

I don’t realize how different, how sacred, a trip this has been from what I expected till I get to the airport and see them again: my food bags.

They are empty.

W
hen my family began to fall apart, we turned to France. My parents, deep in money trouble and increasingly desperate, came up with a hare-brained scheme: rent out the Texas McMansion we couldn’t afford and move our family to Brenthonne, a tiny Savoyard farming village in the foothills of the Alps. The thinking was, simply and insanely, that by moving to where we had once been happy, we would become happy again. Never mind that my parents had no jobs secured, little money saved, and no plan for schooling. Place would be our salvation; we would move into the upstairs rooms of our friends’ farmhouse, and there we would recover ourselves through fresh air, good wine, and long walks in velvet green fields.

Brenthonne was to my family what the Hebrides were to the Ramsay family in Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
: a haven of peace and beauty, a vacation spot where we could leave
the struggles of a difficult world behind for a few weeks every summer. Every July, we left behind the heat and dust of our home in Saudi Arabia for the cool mountain air and pastoral loveliness of rural France. At first, we stayed in a rented farmhouse, a rambling three-story place with a mossy water trough out front where my sister, brother, and I would bathe in the cold water. We children marauded around the property in nothing but our underwear, climbing plum trees to pluck the sweet fruit and let the juice run down our chins, and turning nut-brown beneath the sun. In the morning we threw open the green shutters and sang to the cows that moved lazily in the fields below. When we tired of the country, we drove a short way to Thonon-les-Bains, rented a pedal boat and glided far out onto Lac Leman, where we swam until our bodies couldn’t stand the icy alpine water any longer. Floating on the lake wrapped in a warm towel prickly from air-drying on the farmhouse line, I felt happy in the way a child does: like it was my birthright, eternal and unremarkable.

Over the years, my parents struck up a close friendship with the farm’s proprietors, Henri and Madeleine, and soon we were invited to stay in the family home just up the road from the old farmhouse. We had made the leap from tenants to close friends, and as formalities fell away, we reaped the benefits of cross-cultural friendship. Henri took us hunting for
champignons
in the wet field flanking the nearby creek, where we learned to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones in the shadow of a mysterious abandoned farmhouse; we were privileged with evening visits from the neighbors, who wanted to enjoy a glass of Gewürztraminer and banter with
les Américains
; and Madeleine let us harvest the bounty of their huge summer garden, bringing in bulging
tomates
and lettuce heads smelling of earth. Later, she would serve the tomatoes sliced and drizzled
in a Dijon salad dressing that I have tried to replicate for years without success. Mornings, we gorged on
tartines
spread with Madeleine’s homemade jam and bowls of
chocolat chaud
.

We ate long, lazy meals under the striped awning of the patio, the Alps rising to the west, lights flickering on in distant chalets as evening fell gently across the valley. The only disturbance came when my father and Henri discussed Algeria, where Henri had lost his finger in the war. My father believed Arabs were people; Henri did not. Perhaps we forgave him this bias because his wound meant he had seen things we had not. One year, we came at Christmas, hiking into the mountains to find the perfect pine tree. For lunch, we built a fire and roasted potatoes in foil, and Henri tried to scare us with stories of the fearsome
sangliers
, wild boars with tusks perfect for goring naughty children. On Christmas Eve, I dressed in black velvet and accompanied the adults to Midnight Mass, feeling very grown up, and very tired. When we returned to the house, I tasted my first champagne, but the golden bubbles disappointed me, bitter when they should have been sweet. Our visits were distinguished less by season and more by an overriding sense of joy and well-being.

I can almost forgive my parents for thinking that France would cure us, would reinstate joy in their marriage, which had grown increasingly fragile after our transition from Saudi Arabia to Texas. Tired of living in shabby company housing on the oil compound in Arabia, they built a grand home of white Austin stone filled with pink Saltillo tile. But my father struggled to find work. Savings dwindled and tension mounted. We no longer had the funds for lavish vacations to France.

When my parents told us we were moving to France toward the end of my freshman year of high school, I was thrilled. Sure, it meant I wouldn’t be able to play competitive basketball
any more, but I’d have the farmhouse, the garden, Henri and Madeleine, maybe even a French boyfriend who rode a moped to school. I told everyone I wouldn’t be back for sophomore year and felt a swell of pride when I told them where we were going,
France
, the word so elegant and full of promise.

But we never made it to Brenthonne. At the last minute, my mother nixed the plan after her therapist convinced her it was madness, just another example of my father’s faulty decision-making. In the fall, I re-enrolled at Lake Travis High School, slightly embarrassed to be back. A couple of years later, my parents divorced, and I went to college. My memories of Brenthonne grew gauzy. When I did finally make it back, I went alone on spring vacation during my junior year abroad in Scotland. While the farm was just as beautiful – the roses obscenely large and fragrant, the birch trees by the creek shimmering silver – it had a haunted quality about it now, my family moved permanently from the present to the past tense. At dinner, Henri pressed me to explain
why
my parents had divorced.
C’est fou!
He admonished them from afar. At night, I lay alone in the upstairs bedroom I had previously shared with my sister, listening to a passing train sound its whistle. The magic, I realized, wasn’t just the place.

W
e had been driving around America for a year because we were tired of 9 to 5, though we had no right to be tired. Four and three years out of college respectively, Dana quit a marketing job to do the trip, and I quit theatre. The whole thing was my idea. The reason I gave her was an ambiguous choking feeling I had in Philadelphia. I have always read too many stories whose main characters say fuck this, and leave. I was ready to say fuck this, though I had no right. But I did, and then Dana did, and then her grandfather said the eternal fuck this and left her a Buick Regal in his will. We would leave on September 13, 2001. We made a list of who we knew where and Dana bought bags and bags of dried fruit. Two days before our scheduled departure, a group of religious zealots flew two planes into the World Trade Center.

Dana called me in the middle of the night to ask if we should still go. Now more than ever, I said, it was now or never.

Kristi was Dana’s childhood friend whose family had moved to Tetonia, Idaho, when they were 12. All Kristi retained from Philadelphia was the return address on Dana’s regular letters. When Dana went to college, Kristi married a dry farmer named Kirt. Now she had a four-year-old daughter named Alyssa and a newborn named Wyatt.

Tetonia (population 247) was settled in the stubble of the Grand Tetons on the eastern border of Idaho. On the other side of the mountains, celebrities vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. However, Tetonians aren’t star-watchers. Their finicky mountain passes stay closed for most of the year, so their valley remains untouched except for the trailers that move with the weather, and the occasional flourish of small native rodents called pikas, darting under the thrush. The valley had been sucked airless the day we drove up. Alyssa was the only human moving, streaming through her yard to meet our car. Kristi swayed on birth fat in the doorway. She and Dana exchanged a hug that Dana appeared to think would be longer. Kristi gave me a hard rap on the shoulder and introduced us to Alyssa.

Alyssa had a pudgy face and a mop of orange hair. She wore a shirt with a rainbow ribbon she could tie by herself. She was tying and untying it when she asked me if I liked my eyebrows. My eyebrows are bushy, and if I let them have their way, they’d connect. People used to mention them to my mother constantly when I was growing up. I love them, though, and I told her this.

We went inside and watched television. From the car, Dana brought in her photo album that detailed the first six months of our trip. We had worked as housekeepers in Montpelier, Vermont, for foliage season, then had spent five weeks driving out to the West Coast. In San Francisco, we found an apartment and jobs – me as a barista and Dana as a babysitter for a famous
musician’s children. Dana is an only child, and good with kids. I’m the baby of the family. I’ve had to fight for food and attention, so what’s mine is mine.

Dana meticulously maintained the scrapbook and expected people to look through it and be wowed. Kristi seemed uninterested, and brought Wyatt to her chest apologetically. Dana held up the book, turning the pages as Kristi nursed.

Later, we heard the loud aluminum sneeze of the screen door as Kristi’s husband, Kirt, slammed in. ‘Too fuckin’ hot out there, Mom.’ He cracked a beer. ‘Lo, Dana.’ He took a long swallow and looked Dana up and down. Then he said hello to me.

He told us the other dry farmers called him ‘short pants’ because he rode the baler every day wearing them. Every day, the ground rebelled by throwing up jags of stones and dirt as he roared by. He propped his leg onto the counter and showed us his scars. Over the years, aided by the sun, these stones and dirt had caked themselves into a second skin. Kirt’s original skin color could be seen only on the palms of his hands and thighs.

After dinner, we gave Alyssa the kite we bought her in New Orleans. It was a purple butterfly that, supine amidst the ashtrays and magazine on the coffee table, seemed exotic. It looked up as if to say, where the hell am I? Alyssa wanted to fly it right away. Kristi consulted the small window above the couch.

‘No wind, Alyssa.’

Later, Kirt’s father arrived and we sat on the prairie scorching marshmallows over a fire. Alyssa called him Pappy and sat on his lap as he worked a marshmallow over the flames. The stars were as bright as people tell you about when you’re not listening. We pulled blankets around us.

‘Everybody in this valley at some point worked for my grandfather,’ Pappy said. ‘He and his brothers made moonshine. They’d hide it along the posts of the old road. Someone would come into the store wanting moonshine, and they’d tell ’em what post they could find it behind. That way, no one could track it to them.’ He hacked up a dusty giggle and shook his head.

‘Yep,’ Kirt said.

‘One day, a couple agents from the FBI came looking for my grandfather and found one of his brothers. He wouldn’t tell them where he was. They said they’d pay him a lot of money. “Give it to me now,” he said, “cause if I tell you where he is and you find him, you ain’t coming back.” ’ Pappy and Kirt hacked up more laughter.

Father and son were long and lean and buckled in the middle by a similar brass set of initials. In fact, Pappy and Kirt differed only in that Pappy wore oversized glasses. When he told stories, they reflected the entire prairie: its horizon, the rough bushes that outlined the yard, our bonfire. It was as if each of his eyes was burning from the middle.

I allowed myself to think sloppy thoughts about America. I thought I could do worse than live a life of moonshine and hay bales. I likened Pappy to Woody Guthrie and sang old songs in my head.

Later, Alyssa slept in his lap as he told stories about a hell ride he had through Niggertown in Chicago. They had to lock their doors. Those people are nothing but animals, he said, and handed his marshmallow tenderly to his granddaughter.

Alyssa’s life unspooled in front of me. I saw her outgrow the cuteness of being six to the ruddy toughness of the teen years. She’d be on a softball team, holding up a wooden bat to a camera’s flash. She wouldn’t leave the prairie but would slam out of the
screen door over and over to whatever truck awaited, as all of her relatives’ opinions solidified into walls inside her thinking, as much a part of her as the brick-red hair. I felt sorry for her in advance and wanted to take her with us when we left. Then just as quickly, I didn’t care about her or her future. I yearned to leave and forget these people, who had tricked me into thinking we were in it together. It would be up to her to think beyond the mountains.

The next day Kirt announced it was time for us to meet his dry farmer friends. They’d been chomping at the bit to take a look at ‘his city girls.’

‘I told ‘em you were fat,’ he said. ‘But they didn’t believe me. They want to see for themselves.’ He sipped from a can, legs propped over the side of the couch. It was noon and, he said, too hot to work.

The dry farmers arrived as the prairie darkened on our third night. Each man drove up in a blaze of gravel, already consuming a six pack. They leaned against their pick-ups, kicking at their tires until they were invited in by Kristi.

They sat on the counters, folding chairs, and the floor of the kitchen. One of them, a thick-fingered farmer named Meaty, listed every reason he thought we should live in Tetonia. The prairie was quiet, for one. No one would bother us, except maybe the environmentalists, who were trying to lower the hunting quota to one moose per person. But they were fighting that. He drank mud from a jug with a faded label. By midnight, Dana and I were the only ones sober. Alyssa’s door squeaked open and she stood in the doorway rubbing sleep out of her eyes. We had woken her up.

Smiling, she dragged her car seat between Meaty and a young
farmer they called Face. She came up to their elbows and a couple times Meaty barely missed her head with his swinging jug.

‘What’s in there?’ she said.

‘Don’t know, little lady, but they told me it’s not what the label says.’

I went into the other room where Kristi sat in a recliner, nursing Wyatt. Her eyes were red from exhaustion. ‘Having fun?’ she said.

Kristi and Kirt’s house was a tetris of three connected trailers. We slept in a fourth that stood detached in the backyard where laundry sagged on ropes. There were no other houses on the prairie. When I walked to our trailer at dawn, the sun was an orange flap, clinging to the horizon. The prairie was dark except for a stubborn rainbow pinwheel, in conversation with the sun.

In the trailer, I used our shared cell phone to dial a number in Philadelphia, though I knew he wouldn’t pick up. The way I knew the waitress in Austin would launch the pot of coffee across the counter into the man sitting next to me, and that he would, flinging himself from his chair, upset my newspaper and corn muffin. The way I knew when we entered a bar in New Orleans, tired and broke and the whole city booked, we’d leave with a place to stay. The way I knew the man at the Grand Canyon would turn to his son and not his wife when he let out a low whistle and said, ‘Would you believe a river did all
that
?’ Somewhere I had acquired a kind of road psychic ability. I had theories as to why that I worked on as we traveled. It had to do with shearing the distractions of one’s life until all that remained was the act of following a line on a map.

In my message I said I was scared, that I felt pressed to hang out with a bunch of seedy farmers, that there was no lock on the trailer’s flimsy door. These things were true, though I thought
these men were most likely harmless. I was still young enough to exaggerate fear to cop a cheap call back from a boy I liked.

It was early 2002, and some kind of scrim had been yanked away from the country, revealing how vulnerable we had been. Yet as the East Coast receded in our mirrors, so did the immediacy of the impact. For some, the devastation was a faraway idea, yielding nothing more disruptive than pinning a ribbon to a sweater or buying a patriotic bumper sticker. The footage played in the background indifferently – in the homes of acquaintances, in town squares, on banks of televisions hanging over empty bars. But most of us understood that there were probably other ways in which we were still vulnerable. We were polite, confused, and prepared to flinch.

I was a city girl who had never heard a coyote. At night, their calls filled that Idaho prairie. They sounded like women screaming.