The Thong Also Rises (18 page)
Read The Thong Also Rises Online
Authors: Jennifer L. Leo
But, relieved of my navigating duties and with nothing else to do, I fume. Arms crossed, staring straight ahead, I think, “How galling to be sexy and precise in seven languages!” For all I care, she and my husband can both get lost. I am jealous of a travel gadget.
“Enjoy the sunset,” he finally suggests, sighing, as we approach New York City, master-of-the-road saddled with a crotchety old mistress in the shotgun position.
Then tragedy strikes the happy new couple. Hoping to avoid thousands of vehicles entering Manhattan, my husband discovers he cannot suitably query the on-board guidance computer.
The James Bond woman is lacking in dimension and limits him to simple options: “Shortest Time,” “Most Use of Freeways,” and “Least Use of Freeways.” The expensive little machine fails to factor the rush-hour time of night and the circuitous route we normally prefer to avoid the bottleneck.
Following the robotic navigator's strategy, soon we are mired in traffic near a bridge we wanted to bypass, and then end up in a tangle of New Jersey roadways before office buildings disrupt our signal and erase the on-screen map. My husband begins to lose his composure.
He's fidgeting with the machine and swearing, even though the device clearly states when rebooting that “Driver should not program while driving.” This must be the first time he has defied the dame in the dash.
I'm smugly enjoying the dusk as instructed. We merge into an eight-lane highway heading west to California. An obvious mistake. Springing back to life, the computer offers a solution that seems easy but is impossible to execute among the dense traffic and poorly lit roads. Overloaded tractor trailers blast their horns as our car swerves uncertainly.
“What should I do?” finally my husband wonders aloud, jittery, inviting me to help devise a plan.
“Go south,” I coach, eager to cooperate, willing to forgive. Keeping it simple. “We'll figure it out, sweetie.” The metropolis of Manhattan looms, I am positive we can't miss it.
But the newly jilted bitch in the dash contradicts me, insisting in her firm and vaguely accented way, “Proceed to highlighted route!”
My husband, looking more like the man I married, reaches over and shuts off the misleading NeverLost. Seductive voice silenced, the screen goes dark. But as the city lights rise before us, I can still see the ghostly trace of her suggested itinerary.
A cultural essayist specializing in tales of personal adventure, Anastasia M. Ashman co-edited the nonfiction anthology
Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey.
Her writing on art, society, and culture has appeared in publications worldwide, from the
Asian Wall Street Journal
in Hong Kong to the
Village Voice
in New York. She currently lives in Istanbul with her Turkish husband, where she is at work on a travel memoir
, Berkeley to Byzantium: The Cultivation of a California Adventuress.
There's nothing like a road trip for achieving a kind of mushy enlightenment.
T
HIS IS YOUR BASIC GET-THE-HELL-OUT-OF-DODGE
story. Like a kidney stone, I passed eight years of my life in Chicago. Love left me in '97 and had yet to find me in the two years that followed. Watching my ex date everything that moved and fall in love with the one who stayed still was not my idea of a “good time had by all”âall maybe except for me.
After several reconnoitering trips, the results were in:
1. San Francisco (too expensive, too snobby)
2. Boulder (too hairy)
3. Portland (too
Deliverance
)
I settle on Seattle. While I am no tree hugger, I like the idea of recycled plastic as outerwear, appreciate John Denver moments and already own four cloth grocery bags. Finding the preponderance of vintage VW buses “quaint,” I sign a lease to live in Fremont (home of the Summer Solstice “bike naked” Parade). I then give notice in Wrigleyville where the
closest I've been to naked lately is the sight of a pendulous beer gut swinging from a White Sox fan. The sick part is this memory will haunt me with a morbid fondness when I am far away from home.
Because I don't believe in shipping sentient creatures, I decide to drive myself and my dog, Disco, the 2,000 miles from Chicago to Seattle. I ask my mom to drive with us. Given the prospect of thirty-one hours in the car, I naturally assume my mom and I are on track for a real mother and child reunion, a basic remapping of the outer reaches of familial love, a supernatural bonding implosion. I figure my mom and I are going to make emotion worthy of a retrospective at The Whitney. I have visions of deep and meaningful conversations followed by that awestruck floaty feeling I used to get when my sister and I had hyperventilating contests to see who could pass out first.
P
eople travel for myriad reasons. They travel because they crave adventure. They have dreams they've harbored for years that entail tropical beaches and too many margaritas. They want to walk among mystical castles and tragic ruins that harbor tales of passion lived long ago. They travel because they've always liked the idea of going somewhere different. They travel because they have two weeks of vacation and a desire to do something amazing with it. I started traveling because I got dumped.
âJessica Erler, “Roman Womanhood”
The morning of takeoff, I bake a double batch of chocolate, chocolate-chip cookies, buy two super-size bags of turkey jerky, select my top
twenty CDs including the '70s Preservationist Society, give Disco a doggie downer and head for O'Hare where I find my mom and her slim wheelie at Island 3 of the American terminal. I recognize her cotton candy poof of hair bobbing as she looks for me while standing semi-hidden behind the robust build of a fat-ass gentleman. The poof was how I used to track my mom down in the grocery store when I was little. After roaming around I'd walk each aisle looking above the shelf tops for the floating hair.
“Hi sweetie pie,” my mom says giving me a hug, knowing this departure is a watershed event having arrived in Chicago a naïve twenty-six-year-old and now leaving bitter at thirty-four. Disco jumps up, paws on shoulder, to lick my mom and, like a sport, she sticks out her chin for some slobber. My mom is not a “pet person” but because she likes me, she likes Disco.
Within minutes we're all in the car, buckled up, the three of us gnawing jerky. “Look what I brought,” my mom says handing me Eckard Tolle's
The Power of Now
on tape. Last year it was
The Art of Happiness.
I smile and toss the case on the back seat nailing Disco in the paw.
I hand all maps to the co-captain, put in some Joan Armatrading, hit the 90W and settle in for some hyperventilating conversation.
By Rockford, the dog has quietly vomited and my mom's asleep. Her head is conventionally thrown back, a cartoon lip pucker rhythmically sealing and unsealing like the opening to a balloon. She expels the softest “Pfooo.” I begin counting, as you would to estimate the distance of lightning, “One one thousand, two one thousand⦔ Turns out my mom is 3.5 pfooo-miles away from me.
Driving alone gives me time to think:
⢠Why does “happy” rhyme with “crappy”?
⢠“Big-boned” means fat.
⢠Shit makes things grow.
This last thought strikes me as unusually brilliant. I say it out loud to see who's really sleeping and who's just pfooo'ing. Disco lifts his head as a nod to Master's brilliance then promptly nods off again, eye whites flickering forward and backâsuch commitment to being out of it. I look over at my mom to see how seriously asleep she is. Let's just say if human eyes could nictitate my mom would put the dog to shame.
Jerky bag #1 is empty which means I've consumed enough salt for a family of fiveâ¦for a year. My not-so-local NPR station is fading as I cross into Minnesota, home of Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companions. I give up on current events and, without compassion for the sleepy, fumble in the back for the bag of cookies which just so happens to wake the dog and mom.
“You were pfooo'ing,” I say.
“Oh, was I?” she asks sipping some water. “Was I loud?”
Pfooo'ing loudly is a physical impossibility so I know she must still be sleepy. “Yeah, you woke the dog.”
“I'm sorry Disco,” my mom says turning around back to scratch his belly. “Oh, hey. Book time?” she asks. She eats a cookie and slides in cassette #1 of
The Power of Now.
“My friend Susan thinks Eckhart Tolle looks too much like a leprechaun to take anything he says seriously.”
I take the cassette cover and quickly glance at the author photo. “No, just the opposite.” I find this man so supernaturally fugly that he has just bought himself a lifetime supply of credibility.The last thing I need is a hottie telling me how to be.
Together, we zone out to the lullabic (not a word, but should be) tones of the English-accented reader:
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
I have my mom rewind this passage six times. Each time I focus on a different section and each time I banish the unenlightened thought I'll be meeting my husband naked on a bike.
By tape #2 neither of us can remember if we reversed when we should have flippedânothing sounds familiar but nothing sounds quite new either.
M
y mother always wanted a son-in-law, but I couldn't face calling her to tell her I'd be living in a one-horse Tunisian village as the wife of the police chief.
âBonnie Mack, “Long Drive Through a Small Town”