Authors: Sue Miller
There’s a group of men on the corner ahead. She is going to ask them where she is, but they stare at her with such unreadable blankness as she approaches that she doesn’t; she drives
on. She rolls up her window and switches on the air conditioner.
She comes out on to a wide street with stoplights, cars whizzing past. The street sign on the corner has been removed from its bracket. Lottie takes a right, arbitrarily. She passes several gas
stations, but they are deserted. She looks at her watch. It’s six-thirty. Six-thirty Sunday night, and these streets have the deserted air of a postcolonial city. She passes a group of
adolescent girls walking together. Even through the closed windows she can hear their raw, high voices.
The street is gentrifying slightly; showing, anyhow, signs of commercial life. There are stores – closed now, on Sunday evening, but viable-looking. Then a Dunkin’ Donuts, a
Chevrolet lot. Lottie feels reassured. She sees, several blocks ahead, the bright primary colors of a gas station sign. She opens her window again; the hot air strikes her arm and the side of her
face. Her tooth hurts.
The man in the service station is elderly and soft-spoken. He slowly and carefully cleans Lottie’s windshield, and she feels a tender kind of gratitude to him. He tells her she’s
drifted pretty far from the turnpike entrance. She’s closer to the Wilbur Cross Parkway here, if she just keeps going.
Lottie uses the ladies’ room nervously – the door won’t lock, and the walls are covered with the unreadable hieroglyphics of urban graffiti. There is no toilet paper. When she
leaves the station, she follows the old man’s advice and continues down Dixwell Avenue. She passes between shopping malls on either side of the road. The lots are even now half full. Ugly
vistas of commercial success, she thinks. Not much better to look at, finally, than the empty shells of failure in the ghetto.
Then she is thinking of Ryan again. She sees his swollen face and feels ashamed. How, after all, can she fault Derek for denial – for pretending – when she has apparently spent the
summer in a kind of waking dream? Her mind goes back to the fight with Cameron, to the ecstatic and vicious release she felt pounding and slapping him. She remembers the nagging swirl of
Elizabeth’s skirt in the edge of her vision, the way Cameron’s face had lifted in contempt for her and her life’s choices. She sees again the dark line of blood on the back of
Ryan’s hand.
The green and white sign to the Wilbur Cross looms ahead, and she signals. She’s thinking of all this, and of how she’d yearned after what Elizabeth and Cameron seemed to have. Then
she’s thinking of Jack – just of how he looks, then of the moment in the hotel when she felt such tenderness for his gangly nakedness. She flips her visor down against the bright, low
sun. Her tooth is really hurting now. This qualifies as an out-and-out toothache. She pulls her bag over to her, fishes blindly in the zipper pocket, and pulls out a Percocet. She holds it up,
visually records its size, and puts it between her front teeth. She bites down. A little piece crumbles off and lands on her lap or on the floor, but there’s a bitter tiny chunk in her mouth
too. Lottie swims her tongue in her mouth until she’s generated enough saliva to swallow it. She holds the Percocet up again. She must have eaten about one third.
She pushes her bag into the middle of the passenger seat again, she adjusts the visor a little more. She reaches into the open pocket below the radio for her sunglasses. And then she realizes:
she’s heading into the sun. She’s taken the wrong turn again; she’s going west.
We lie to ourselves about such things. We say they were meant to happen. We let them thrill us, shake us. Lottie does:
I’m going to Jack
, she thinks, and feels a
light-headedness, an excitement, that makes her hands tremble on the wheel, that quickens her breath.
But of course Lottie has read Freud too. She knows very well that this kind of mistake is like a slip of the tongue, that it reveals intention more than destiny – that this is the more
reasonable way to speak of it. So later what she will say is that she was so afloat in her confusion about what she had done that she missed the first two exits where she might have turned back.
And that by the time she reached the third, she had consciously made a decision to drive on. She will speculate that if she hadn’t been someone who drove so much to make a living, it might
not have happened. If the car itself, the breaking open into four lanes, the green and white signs, hadn’t somehow signaled
beginning
to her, maybe the reality of the distance to be
covered would have been too daunting.
She will speak, too, of how pretty the Wilbur Cross is for that old stretch, pretty in a way that American highways used to be – winding, barely wide enough, with trees growing in the
median strip and little hillocks rising on either side, giving way to sudden mild vistas. It could be said – she’ll say it herself – that this, too, might somehow have helped.
And she will feel, but not say so often, that maybe if she hadn’t hit Cam, to whom she would have to return; if he hadn’t been held by Richard Lester, whose sounds she would hear in
the night; if the same sprung chairs hadn’t been waiting in the same vague, unwelcoming circle; if the angle up the street to Elizabeth’s house with its glimpse of the porte cochere
hadn’t been there – if she hadn’t had the sense that she would be returning to the sordid scene of a crime, a terrible and ugly accident she had some responsibility for –
maybe then she would have turned around at the first exit, or the second. She will always know that some part of it, too, was running away.
But she will also always believe that it was the thought of Jack that made her make the mistake in the first place, and she will privately take that as a sign of her destiny, her fate,
adolescent at heart that she is.
White trash
she’ll call herself, when she thinks of it this way.
For whatever the reasons, then, Lottie drives on. The sun sets, gold and then pink in the clear western sky ahead of her. In the twilight it leaves behind, she can still see the muted shapes of
everything, but other cars begin to turn their fierce silver lights on. Once or twice, unbidden tears begin to slip from Lottie’s eyes, though she could swear this is happiness she’s
feeling. She winds into heavier traffic as she passes the last, expensive shore towns in Connecticut, as the houses thicken up in New York and become more suburban. Her heart is swishing steadily
in her ears, and her tooth throbs to its rhythm.
Jack
, she is thinking. Not that she’s trying to imagine him in terms of what his response will be to her, particularly – that seems dangerous. But his physical presence. A
gesture: his clenched fist and grimace of pleasure when a musical passage he loves begins on the stereo. His slow, widening grin when she says something that surprises or amuses him. His
distinctive smell, soapy and salty, and how she wears it after sex. The ease with which he carried her up the stairs one night when they were alone in the house. The way he walks in winter, his
coat open, no scarf.
She remembers facts about him, parts of his story that she loves. That he grew up in a small town in western Ohio with four brothers. That his father was the high school principal. That every
night there was a meal on the table. His father sat at one end, his mother at the other. There was attention, as evenly distributed as food, passed up and down.
That his mother was an island of calm, unflappable in spite of her sons’ wildness, their fights, their broken limbs, their pranks. Though once his father had criticized her for something
– no one could ever remember what it was, it had seemed so harmless: maybe they could eat a little earlier, maybe the boys should take on some chore for her – and she had lunged forward
suddenly and bit him. Her teeth had pushed through fabric and skin, and his father had cried out in shock and pain. Jack couldn’t remember whether he had been present or not; it was one of
those memories that are retold so often, every detail made so familiar, that everyone feels he must have been there.
His father had driven himself to the emergency room and lied about the accident. He said he’d been wrestling with one of his almost grown sons and it had gotten out of hand. They cleaned
him up, put a stitch or two in the deepest holes. It scarred him, though, Jack said, a curve of little white marks across the flesh of his shoulder. She didn’t like to see him without a shirt
on after that, even at the beach. It must have been emblematic to her, Lottie thinks now, of a moment when all that love failed her. When she felt as trapped as an animal, suddenly, and fought for
something vital in herself that she couldn’t have known until that moment she cared about.
She didn’t like them to joke about it, but they did, of course. Later in her life she would sometimes be able to laugh too, he said. The first time she did, they all applauded her, having
understood without speaking of it that this meant that she’d finally forgiven herself.
Lottie has always envied everything about this story. The peace, the order. The encircling applause. The sense of violence as aberration. Now she thinks, too, of the powerful control his mother
must have exerted on herself much of the time: the revelation that perhaps it took great effort to achieve the kind of family Jack had had. The extraordinary fact that to someone it was almost
always worth that effort.
What else does she know about him? That he played in a band in high school – all of his brothers did when they came to be an age when their parents would let them, each a different
instrument. They traveled in a radius of one hundred and fifty miles or so to high school proms, to roadhouses, to private parties. The permanent members of the band were older, men who taught
school in town or worked in banks. They would drive around in a car belonging to one of these men, crammed in, five or six of them usually. Jack had his first drink on the road with them, his first
cigarette, his first sexual experience – with an older woman who followed him outside during a break. ‘Older,’ he’d said. ‘It occurred to me much later that she was
maybe twenty-five or so.’
Lottie has seen a studio photograph of him at that age, holding his clarinet. He’d paid for the picture himself; he had thought, then, that he might become a musician. In it he’s
wearing a dark suit, his hair is pomaded wetly back. He is unbelievably long and skinny, but there’s a sense, too, of something knowing, something hungry about him that stirred Lottie when
she held the photograph, even all those years afterward.
The excitement of those days had folded into Jack’s love of music, even into his love of dancing. Once when they were moving together to a swing-band tune at a hotel ballroom in Chicago,
he’d bent over Lottie and whispered, ‘Care to dance?’ and when she’d said yes, they walked straight off the slick floor to the front desk and rented a room.
She’s in New Jersey now, on route 80, floating on the Percocet. She can still feel the pain, a light, steady throb from under the tooth, actually, but it seems almost to be happening to
another Lottie, another Charlotte. Dusk has deepened into near-dark along the highway, but there’s still a light cast to the sky. The dark moving shapes of the trees are silhouetted against
it. The needle teeters at around 72, 73. Lottie feels invincible. She has asked for directions when she crossed the George Washington Bridge, and she has made every connection, feeling a peace and
accomplishment simply in driving: in making this curve, in signaling so politely to change lanes. Traffic was heavy around New York, but it has cleared out now, and she takes comfort in the distant
taillights ahead of her, the headlights that move up from behind and then sweep past. Others on ordinary errands. Or, like her, hastening home, mending rifts.
Lottie turns the radio on. She thinks of the music she listened to on the way out east, when she thought she was leaving Jack. It seems another universe. But what has changed?
She thinks momentarily of his big house, the handsome rooms – too many, too much. Of Megan’s closed face across the dinner table.
But love is something you choose to do.
Cam said that.
Nonetheless.
I have changed, she thinks. I can do it. I can.
She finds another oldies station but tires of it quickly. They seem to specialize in white boys – Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon. She pushes the Seek button, settles on the first clear
station, a call-in show. They’re discussing the effects of crack cocaine on kids in the ghettos. There’s an expert, of course, full of statistics. His voice is nasal, nerdy. Lottie
would put money on it, he’s never done drugs. Crack is cheap, he says. It’s highly addictive, it’s the beginning of the end. She thinks of Ryan, of finding dope in his jeans
pocket when he was fourteen or fifteen, of trying to decide whether to confront him. She’d talked to Jack about it.
He said she had to.
‘But I smoked dope, Jack. I
don’t
disapprove. In the abstract.’
‘He’s not abstract, Lottie. That’s the point.’ His concerned face, the lines deepening. His light eyes on her.
The calls start now on the radio. Gradually the tone of the show changes. Nobody is forcing these kids to use it. Nobody’s excluding them from the American dream if they just get off their
asses and go to work. The talk show host is on the callers’ side. Maybe addicts deserve their fate.
Lottie changes the station. She finds some soft rock, then an Elvis retrospective: the Las Vegas years. She turns the radio off. The Percocet isn’t making her sleepy at all. Just somehow
tranquil, in absolute control. Practicalities begin to occur: she’s left everything behind. She’ll have to go back for her computer, her books and papers. Her clothes. She moves through
the house mentally. She packs everything up. Then she starts again, rearranging. Then: did she lock the door when she left? Should she call Richard? Might he be worried? Cam?
Cam. God. She doesn’t want to think about him. And suddenly she’s aware of the pain again, sharply this time. She fishes in her purse, swallows the rest of the pill.