The Bette Davis Club (17 page)

The goal of finding Georgia unites us. Yet I notice Tully and I talk around Georgia, not about her. Our conversation remains largely superficial. It feels like we’re both holding back.

Of course, once again, it’s as though we’re time traveling. Not all of Route 66 still exists, but we follow the parts that do. We cruise past abandoned shacks and ghost towns, motels and run-down filling stations, red neon signs and vintage diners.

Each night, Tully and I engage separate rooms in whatever respectable motor inn we come across. Each morning, we climb back into the MG and drive until the sun goes down.

On our third day of travel, Tully and I cross the state line from Kansas into Missouri. We stop for dinner at a roadside eatery. I ask Tully to go on inside, I’ll follow in a minute. I want a cigarette.

When I do enter the diner, there’s Tully parked in a wood booth. I sit down opposite him. He looks up from the menu and studies me.

“Okay, it’s none of my business,” he says. “But I’ve been thinking this since the first day we got in that car: I can’t believe you smoke. I can’t believe you treat your body the way you do.”

I open the menu and scan the entrées. Pretty much everything on offer is beef.

“I didn’t smoke for a long while,” I say. “I started up again last year.”

Tully leans forward. “And what happened last year that was so awful it made you want to smoke tobacco and drink martinis?”

“Oh, you know how it is,” I say. I close the menu and lay it down on the table. “I accidentally missed the spring sale at Saks.”

The waitress comes over. Tully and I both order steak. While we wait for dinner, I look round at the Formica counter, the chrome stools, the jukebox in the corner. It puts me in mind of a vanished Manhattan diner I used to frequent, which makes me think of home.

“I know you were raised in Los Angeles,” I say to Tully, “but you haven’t told me how you ended up living in Brooklyn.”

“No?” He picks up a straw and rips one end off the paper cover. He blows on the straw and the paper flies off. “After high school, I got into New York University, which was great,” he says. “But about the time I graduated, my mom died, which was hard. I didn’t see much point in going back to LA after that, so I stayed on the East Coast. Before college, when I was a teenager, I lived with my mom and Malcolm Belvedere. They were married for a few years, you know.”

“Malcolm told me your mother left him,” I say.

Tully taps the straw against his water glass. “I think that’s his way of saying she died. He was pretty broken up. He’s always been good to me, but the real reason he came to the wedding was in her honor.”

“Your mother must have been very special.”

“She was,” Tully says. “She was beautiful. She had style.” He leans back against the booth and looks at me carefully. “Like you, actually.”

“More like the MG,” I say. “Oh! I meant to show you.”

I reach into my tote bag and produce a 1950s sales brochure for the MG TF. “I found this in the door pocket next to my seat, when I was having a smoke,” I say. “It must have been in the car forever.”

I flip through the brochure, reading aloud about the MG’s features and benefits. “It has rack-and-pinion steering. Synchromesh gears. Also, it grips the road like a limpet.”

Tully laughs. “Like a what?”

The waitress appears with thick steaks, mashed potatoes, and homemade biscuits and gravy. Tully and I forget all about limpets. I put the brochure back in my bag and we tuck into dinner.

After we finish eating, the waitress removes our plates. She returns with the bill and two pieces of apple pie. We haven’t ordered dessert, but the waitress plunks it down in front of us even so. “Cook thinks you should have pie,” she says.

When we leave the diner and get in the car, I gaze back at the long, narrow building silhouetted against the open sky. Tully pats his stomach. “Cook thinks you should have pie,” he drawls.

I laugh, and so does Tully. For a moment, we look at each other, giggling. We forget about Georgia, Charlotte, the terrible mess our lives are in. For a moment, it’s a kick being alone together in the middle of America, just the two of us—away from everybody else, away from our troubles.

Tully and I follow the Mother Road through seven states until, at last, on our fourth day of travel, we cross into the eighth and final state traversed by Route 66: Illinois.

Early spring in the West had been hot, pleasant. Early spring in the Midwest is chilly, blustery. After we stop for fuel, Tully eases the car over to one side of the station and shuts off the motor. He rubs his hands together.

“It’s cold,” he says, and you can see his breath. “I don’t suppose you know how to put the top up?”

Actually, I do.

We exit the car and Tully comes round to my side. We stand there, both of us peering down at the MG’s interior like it’s a crib containing a newborn infant. A rather scary newborn. Possibly something out of
Rosemary’s Baby
.

“Putting the top up is a bit like doing a puzzle,” I say.

“I don’t care if it’s Rubik’s Cube,” Tully says. “I’m freezing.”

“Well, first we have to get these seats out of the way,” I say. I lean into the car and tilt the seat backs forward toward the dashboard, exposing the white box that contains Georgia’s wedding dress. It’s crammed into the shallow storage space behind the seats. “And we need to take out that box.”

“Why?” Tully says. He gapes at the car’s interior.

“Because the sidescreens—the side windows—are stored underneath. Putting the top up to keep out the cold won’t do us much good unless we put the windows on as well.”

“Fine,” Tully says. “Swell. Except now I get that this isn’t a real car. It’s a Tinkertoy.”

“Not a classic?” I say.

Tully lifts out the garment box and puts it on the asphalt next to the car. Once the box is out, you can see the flat horizontal compartment behind the seats. I undo the snap that secures the compartment and push back the lid. Inside, neatly stowed in the felt-lined interior, are the four sidescreens: two for the front, two for the rear.

Tully contemplates the sidescreens. “I take it back,” he says. “It’s not a Tinkertoy. It’s an onion. We keep peeling away layers and finding more and more car.”

We unfold the soft top and tease it out and up, marrying it to the connectors at the uppermost corners of the windshield. Then we attach the sidescreens. It’s a delicate job fastening them to the car. Each of the two front side windows has a metal pin that hangs down and which you have to fit just so into a socket in the door. There’s also a bracket that slides down, hooks over another pin, and gets clamped into position with a wing nut. Plus, there are snaps that secure the sidescreen flaps to the door trim. The rear windows are more or less the same. I hear Tully swearing under his breath.

When the fourth and last sidescreen is attached, Tully picks up the garment box and stuffs it back in behind the seats.

I get in the passenger seat and try to tighten the wing bolt, in the corner above the windshield, that holds the top to my side of the car. But the bolt is stuck, it won’t budge. Tully, once again in the driver’s seat, watches me struggle.

“Here,” he says, and reaches over to help.

In the close quarters of the MG, Tully stretches across me and I’m pressed back into my seat. I can’t help but be aware of his physical presence, how good he smells. I’m staring at the upper right corner of the windshield, watching Tully turn the wing bolt. He finishes, but his hand remains where it is, not turning the bolt anymore, just holding it, his body more or less suspended over mine. I shift my gaze from the corner of the windshield to him. His face is only inches from mine.

“I gotta tell you,” he says. “You have great eyes.”

“Yes?” I say, my throat gone dry.

“Yeah,” he says sincerely. “They’re so blue.”

For a moment, we stare at each other. Then Tully lets loose of the bolt and plops back into his seat. “We’re done,” he says.

Are we? Oh right, he means the car. Our shiny red roadster now has windows and a tan-colored top.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Tully says. He reaches up and taps the fabric over our heads.

“Done and done,” I say, equally pleased with our success.

Tully slides the key into the ignition. “Now all I need is for you to show me how to turn on the heater,” he says. This reminds me of the moment—just days ago, but it feels longer—back in Malibu, when Tully and I first got in the car and I had to explain to him that there weren’t any seat belts.

“There isn’t one,” I say.

Tully frowns. I rush to explain that in the 1950s, when the factory at Abingdon, England, was producing MG TFs, heaters were not standard. “But the cockpit is quite compact,” I say. “Now that the top and sidescreens are on, our body heat alone will . . . warm things up.”

He looks at me skeptically. I prattle on. “However, then the problem will be interior moisture. Because I’m afraid we don’t have—”

“A defroster,” Tully says, defeated.

A few hours later, we’re on the outskirts of Chicago. The sun has gone down; the air has grown even colder. Luckily, I found a wool blanket nestled in with the sidescreens, and I wrap myself up in it. The blanket, like everything else about the car, is another relic from my shattered childhood.

When my mother drowned herself, I was eight years old. Some weeks later, having nowhere else to take me, my dad brought me to live with his other family—his legal, sanctioned-by-the-state-of-California family—in the big Spanish-style house at Malibu, on the bluff overlooking the Pacific. He parked the MG in the circular drive. He relieved me of the car blanket I was clutching, folded it up, and put it in the sidescreen compartment. Then he took me inside. We climbed some stairs and went down a long hall.

“This is your place, here, kiddo,” he said, showing me into a room. It was clean and sunny and smelled of the sea. Most of my things were already moved in, a photo of my mother stood on the dresser. We went out on the balcony. My father lifted me up to take in the view. “Look,” he said. “You can see the ocean.”

“I don’t like the ocean,” I said.

We lingered, gazing at the water, my father’s cheek snugged up against mine. I felt something wet by my ear. “Daddy, are you crying?” I said.