Interstate (9 page)

D
riving home, thinking of his mother and him when he was little more than a baby, a photo. First only his mother for a moment. Doesn't know where the thought came from or why the picture popped in. But suddenly—forgets what he was thinking of just before her, probably nothing much of anything—there was her face and neck and open-collar top of the summer dress she was wearing in the photo and then the whole photo, backdrop and concrete ground and crossed knees included, her shoes and his bare feet, even the white border or frame or outline with the notched or jagged edges or whatever one calls them when they're by design kind of frayed, the style for years then, which he knows has a name because he recently read it in an article on photography but forgets or never recorded it in his head. Something he saw on the road set off the thought? He was thinking, he now remembers, of the car radio, what the call numbers were, if that's what they're called, of the public radio station of the little state he was driving through, 90.1 or 90.3 or 89.3 or 5, which he somehow thinks is one of them from the trip up a couple of days ago or should he try to find the public station of the much larger state bordering this one, which could also be one of those, when the photo first appeared to him. Bumper sticker “Save the whales, harpoon a fat chick” was the last one he noticed or remembers. Few minutes ago few miles back. But that'd have nothing to do with his mother since she was, till she started dying and became gaunt, slender all her life, even in her child photos, and though “chick” could relate to him in just his age in the photo, he doubts it was that. Said to himself when he saw the sticker “Stupid, how can a guy drive with it on his car? Stamps him as offensively dumb. Or if he's driving someone else's car, how can he without feeling embarrassed unless he also thinks it's funny? But could be he never noticed it or realized, if it was someone else's car or maybe even in all the time he owned the car, if he'd bought it used with the sticker on, what it means.” So not that one and no billboards he can recall or signs of any kind along the road and nothing on the radio, because up to about an hour before the thought he only had on solo piano and harpsichord tapes, and nothing about the music or instruments could relate, since his mother didn't like that kind or play. Also no people in passing cars he can remember reminding him of his mother or her sort of pompadour hairstyle in the photo or her clothes or anything like that when she was that age, early thirties, or him as a toddler or just his mother, period, at any age, even when she was home and then in the hospital dying. He thinks “toddler” ‘s the right word for someone just under or around one. Or anything obvious or just somewhat concealed he saw or thought suggesting that particular photo, so maybe it was something from underneath. But to be a toddler don't you have to be up and sort of walking with short tottering steps? And he wasn't walking or even standing on his own when that picture was taken, his mother said, which was why she was holding him sitting up in her lap. He'd learned to walk and talk late. Maybe his kids playing or squabbling—but you don't learn to talk, maybe not even to walk, and if you're delayed it's only because you started late. Or for a while the youngest angelically sleeping or something they said or did in back of the car or just being there with him acting as both mommy and daddy today and for the next few days had something to do with it in some way, but he doesn't see how one of those would. Doesn't know where the photo is now. Not among the ones he owns. Those he goes through about twice a year, either because he happens to come upon the two toiletry cases they're in in his desk at home—three to four times a year's more like it—when he's searching for something else in the drawer or because he wants to look at his kids when they were younger or babies or just-borns in the hospital that day or next or his wife at their marriage party they gave or a couple of years before that or after, before the kids were born, and especially sometimes the two nude Polaroids of her he took when she was eight months pregnant with their first and had breasts twice the size they usually are and the only shots of her, at least one of them, other's just shadow, with pubic hair. His mother's photographs, if he doesn't have them, are all gone, so it's gone, though he doesn't know how he let that happen. Particularly this one and a number of other old to ancient ones—his parents as children, his father as a lifeguard and in the army, their marriage photo and his mother's first day at work in a bakery when she was fifteen, her parents here and in their original country, her grandparents only there, some with them young and one with her grandmother or grandfather with his or her parents and grandparents, but was photography even born then or that advanced where one could take family portraits? That article he read said something about it but he forgets what, though he thinks the reason he got it out of the library was to find out. But the missing photographs had something to do with a plastic bag they were in in her basement where most got damaged or ruined by the moisture down there along with being in the enclosed bag for so many years, making it even worse. So he threw most of these out, didn't he?—not his infant one, which wasn't among them, but those where there were no faces anymore and the photographs were mostly mold. He was in shorts in the photo, no shirt on, no doubt diapers underneath, the shorts of course. Whenever he had a shirt on, no matter how hot the day, then underneath it an under one, for that's how his mother was right into his teens. Backs of her fingers clinging to him around the chest, short-sleeved summer print dress, she looked so beautiful, even with what to him seemed like too much lipstick and showing too many big teeth and the comical hair. She was a beauty all right, no question of it, dark, hair and skin, small features, high cheeks, gracefully slim, though big breasts in the photo because she was probably still suckling him, or he suckling, she nursing, since hers, unlike his wife's, were any other time pretty small. Less chance of breast cancer he once overheard her say, so of course she dies of it, where even the little ones she had had to be lopped off. “If I hadn't nursed you I bet I would've been spared,” she said, “not that I'm blaming anyone. I wanted the experience if I was only going to have this one child and it was also then the rage.” He said he thought that nursing gives one a better chance of avoiding breast cancer, but read that ten to twenty years before he said it and wonders if doctors still think it's true. Or was he thinking of prostate cancer and masturbating, but anyway, maybe her breasts could be the “whales” and “fat” and he the “chick,” if that's the way the mind works, or just his, but too far-fetched so seriously doubts it. Taken in the narrow backyard of their apartment at the time. First-floor floor-through. Tall green wooden fence behind them, though photo was black and white, painted that color to simulate grass and leaves, she said, couple of clay pots hooked on nails on the fence with some kind of ivy inside. All the vegetation they had back there except for a few plants from grapefruit seeds in coffee and big juice cans and an ailanthus tree from a neighbor's yard covering part of theirs, none of that in the photo. Summer deck chair she's sitting on, the attached foot and leg rest. Lots of curly hair, both, or hers more wavy than curly, his a bit lighter than hers. Who took it? Not his father. No matter how simple the camera, and he thinks the only kind they ever had, and they got a second when the first broke, was where you pressed a button and the front part, looking like a bellows, sprung open. His father didn't make coffee, toast breads, boil eggs, change pillowcases, draw blinds, take pictures, work the TV, line the garbage pail with newspaper, didn't even put in lightbulbs—he said he usually got the screwing-in part caught and was afraid if it shorted he'd have to disconnect and even change a fuse, besides not knowing how to open the stepladder to reach the socket. “I'm inept—how do you like that word?—at everything but my work and getting to and from it,” was how he liked to phrase it whenever she asked him to do a chore, and which she said was his alibi for doing nothing around the house as if he thinks his son and she are his slaves. But his light to lighter hair. She in fact used to say he was blond till he was five or six, “what they call a towhead in other religions,” but he never saw any evidence of it. No envelopes with hair, or photos, and none of his relatives remembered him that way. Also used to say his eyes were blue, at least a bluish green, till he was three, but his father said that was hooey and just another example of her wanting to think of him as some rich little patrician kid just as she'd like to see herself as a rolling-in-dough old-money lady. “Anyone for Jell-O?” his father liked to joke when he thought she was putting on an aristocratic voice or even an English one and manner. “Crickets, anyone?” was another, hand raised as if he had a tennis racket in it. “Then rickets, rockets?” till she told him to cut it out—her voice and accent, if she had one, were as regular and natural as anyone's and she was a person without airs. “What are some other examples?” he asked his father and remembers him saying—they were sitting in the sand, no blanket or towel under them, maybe their one time at the ocean together like that, meaning actually down at the water and not on a boardwalk or seeing it from a bungalow deck—where he can even remember his father's bathing suit and without summer sandals or shoes or just socks, which means of course how long had his father had that suit before he saw it?—maybe from before their marriage, so twenty to twenty-five years? A suit can stay in style as long as that? Just stay in a drawer without being moth-eaten? Anyway, it's—bathing suit and beach—they're, rather, what made that time in the sand especially memorable, though he forgets what beach it was—if it really was an ocean and not a lake—even what state it was in. Did they take a long car trip one summer, or just a short one, a week, two, a few days? Certainly one to Canada and back or cross-country or tour of the South, let's say, he'd have no problem remembering. And it had to be some time when he was between ten, he'd say, the way he sees it in his head, and his early teens. Just him and his father or with his mother but she wasn't with them on the beach that day, or maybe she was, strolling along it or wading or swimming or going for refreshments or back to their cabana to change if there was one. He tries to remember it, her in a swimsuit, which wasn't so rare, the three of them on the beach or walking back from it to the car or someplace or even looking for seastones or shells along the water, but nothing comes. A trip like that, place to place, lake to lake, ocean to lake or whatever…And it could have been after Labor Day for several days, or Indian summer October because his father couldn't get away sooner and they took him out of school that one time for it, but an event like that he'd remember easily. But one night here and other there, since there were so few trips of any extent with them—he can't right now remember one, so maybe there was none, though does remember summer vacations for two weeks to a month in various rented bungalows and once in the mountains with them with an aunt who rented one—but anyway he wouldn't think he'd forget a fairly to semifairly long car trip like that, especially if it was just his father and him traveling together, when a car pulls up, he looks at it after a while because it stays even with his but is in the passing lane. Man in the passenger seat is staring at him when he turns to it and he nods with no expression and man smiles and he smiles back and goes back to his no-expression and quickly looks front and thinks What gives with this guy? Funny look, even a menacing one, and kind of a sinister smile. Nah, he's being paranoid again. Gets like that a lot, or just sometimes. It's living in the city and reading its papers and occasionally seeing its TV news, or maybe just having been brought up in one and in a rougher city than his now and often in a tough neighborhood or bordering on one. But then it was different, isn't that what they always say? But it really wasn't. There were plenty of violent gangs, kids occasionally mugged you on the street in daylight and tried to bugger you in the boys' room in high school or that's what they said they were going to do, and some of them who you even knew beat the shit out of you if you so much as gave them what they thought was a dirty look. But at least they didn't shoot you on the spot over nothing or at least not with anything more sophisticated than a zip gun, which half the time blew up in their faces instead. But he sees a look like this, he thinks he's being threatened, when a couple of times it turned out the other person thought his look was threatening him. That mean the other person's paranoid too? He'll have to think about that. It could be that because he felt threatened he started to look threatening and that's when the other guy felt threatened, but who knows. But with this one, and why don't they move ahead instead of staying exactly even with him, or fall back and get behind him if they're not going to pass? Maybe this is the speed the driver's settled on as the fastest he can go without being pulled over, sixty-five on a fifty-five-miles-per-hour road, and he like a lot of drivers likes to drive in the passing lane. If another car pulls up behind his and wants to pass, he'll move over to the next middle lane. But that is paranoia, isn't it: someone you think's threatening you when he's not? His wife says it's just a projection of his own hostility, something she thought up or read but those were her exact words, and maybe it is but at the time he told her that was just a lot of Freudian crap, or Jungian or Rankian or whoever he used, without knowing much
about Freud and nothing about the others. His kids know the word? Bets not, or not the youngest. With this man though, and car's still even with his and when he turns to it the man's staring at him kind of creepily again, and he nods and looks front—maybe, but he doubts it, but maybe he's just a character who doesn't know how to smile right or look nicely at anyone he doesn't want to con or get something from or is trying out his creep look on him for someone else he's going to really do in later on and could be driving to now. Or else he's carrying out some sort of grudge on him meant for someone else—maybe even the driver—but is doing it in this car-quick kind of distant or removed or anonymous way. For it's just two cars driving fast next to each other on a major highway for a few miles and then in another minute or two one of them will speed up or drop back or exit and they won't see each other again. Thinks of looking over again, but maybe he shouldn't for if the man really has nothing against him and it's just the unfortunate way he looks or even some facial paralysis making him stare or smile like that, but probably not, then he might start getting angry at him for constantly turning his way, like “Who you looking at, sucker—something you see you don't like?” But looks anyway, almost in hopes of finding the guy minding his own business, and there's that same awful smile and their car is much closer now, might even be straddling the dividing line—it is, he sees, by a little—and the man if he leaned out of it and stretched his arm could almost touch his car. “Hey, watch out, you're too near,” he says, but the man's window is up while his is down and the man says “What?” and actually smiles nice and looks pleasant when he says it and indicates with his hand for him to roll his window down. Down? What's he mean? His is up and mine's down. Forget it, guy's a wise guy or stupid or just nuts but more likely just a wise guy and driver doesn't seem any better, nodding at him now but with this look of seriousness and with his right hand, while he holds the wheel with his left, making a rolling-down motion. He nods, looks front and steers the car to the right till it's almost straddling the line, and slows down to around fifty.