Authors: Jean Thompson
I liked Vivian. She told me all this about five minutes after she met me. She had red hair done up in one of those curly, architectural styles. I was thinking about the photographer, who had a wife but didn't see her much because he was always away taking pictures of mountains and deserts and jungles. I thought about Mac and his wife, and what kind of a marriage was that?
The other woman, Rose, was a lot older. She had white hair cut straight across her forehead, Buster Brown fashion, and she wore plaids and heavy shoes and spent a lot of time brushing her teeth. She had an accent I thought was German, but it was really Scottish. This was a terrible boat, she said. The engines were noisy. The lounges were too crowded. Last night in the cafeteria they had served a really unspeakable piece of veal.
And so on. When she marched off to take her evening promenade of the decks, I asked Vivian if Rose always had this many complaints.
“Since Seattle,” said Vivian. “Every blessed day.”
“Where is it she's going?”
“Nowhere. She got on in Seattle. She's going to the end of the line, then turning around and coming back. I don't think she's been off the boat for two hours total.”
I said it was a shame that Rose wasn't having a better trip.
“Are you kidding?” said Vivian. “She's having a ball. The time of her life. Some people just got weird ways of enjoying themselves.”
I climbed into a top bunk and slept like the dead. Except I had a dream about Mac. I dreamed he was someone I didn't recognize. That is, he came up to me on the street and said, Hello, it's me, I love you. But I didn't know his face; he could have been anybody. It's me, Mac, he kept insisting, and I was embarrassed, the way you are when you can't remember people. I love you too, I said, but he could tell I was only being polite. There was a horrible jarring noise. Oh, that's the earthquake, said Mac, or the fake Mac, conversationally. I opened my eyes. Rose was thumping from the bottom bunk, telling me we were in Juneau.
I said good-bye to them both. Rose warned me about taxi drivers and unclean restaurants. Vivian said, “I wish I was going with you. You know what they say about Alaska. Ten good men for every woman.”
“Vivian, you're married, remember?”
“Sure. I got this great memory.”
The first thing I did in Juneau was try and call Mac. The dream confused me. I thought I had it backward, that if anything, Mac would be forgetting me. I thought something must be horribly wrong and the dream was a psychic signal. I called Mac at work and the secretary answered. Of course he wasn't in.
“This is Dr. Valdez's office,” I said. “When could I reach him?”
The line crackled. I imagined the secretary squinting through clouds of cigarette smoke, like a dragon guarding the telephone. The secretary smoked cigarettes that came in long pastel boxes and had snazzy, upbeat women in their ads, the kind of women neither of us would ever be. Look, I wanted to tell her. It's me. You got me. I give up.
The secretary said she thought Mac would be in at three o'clock. That was something to go on. Maybe I fooled her and she figured a doctor, she could listen in and hear something personal and embarrassing.
Juneau was a real city, the capital, with buses and office buildings and even a four-lane highway. It made you feel like Daniel Boone coming into town after a long tramp through the territories. I had some time to kill before I called Mac again, so I took a bus to the glacier. You could do that here. They called it the drive-in glacier and it was just a few miles out of town. I thought I would phone Mac from the visitors' center there. Where are you? he'd ask, and I'd say, On a glacier.
But the bus took a lot longer than I'd thought it would. We passed a shopping center, houses, a used car lot. It was like a bus ride anywhere, except we crossed a stream so thick with salmon they looked like a wallpaper pattern. When the bus let me out there was still about a mile to walk, and you were still nowhere. All I was thinking about was calling Mac. I could see the glacier up ahead in the notch of two mountains. It looked like dirty snow. I had half an hour to find a phone, I figured.
But when I got to the glacier there wasn't any phone. The visitors' center was the rustic kind, with plaques talking about eskers and lateral moraines and outwash plains. There was a nature trail and a telescope. I was really upset about the phone, like, who ever heard of a glacier without a phone? Right outside was the glacier, like the screen of a drive-in movie a mile and a half wide. The ice was gray and black and crumpled. It reminded you of an old sheet of aluminum foil. The glacier wasn't doing anything at all. It was just one of those things you were supposed to go see, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I turned back the way I'd come and stood by the side of the road with my thumb out.
An old man in a big clean car picked me up. I said I had to call my doctor before he left the office, and he could drop me off at the shopping center.
The old man said he always hated to see a girl out there hitchhiking. It was dangerous, there was no telling who you might run into. “I live just down the road a little ways. Not even five minutes. Come home with me, you can call from there.”
I looked at him. He wasn't ancient old. He was maybe sixty. He had a wedge of crimped, sandy hair and a pink face collapsing in on itself, and he was dressed like a sporty old man, in checked trousers and a knit shirt. He could have been anybody.
“No thank you,” I said. “I could be on the phone for a while.”
“I'll be there a while. I go home for lunch. Every day, that's what I do. You hungry? Ham sandwiches.”
“The shopping center's fine.”
“Five minutes away,” he said. “Then I'll take you back to town. Drop you anywhere. I run an upholstery business right downtown.”
I thought of calling Mac from the old man's house. Where are you? he'd ask, and I'd say, At an upholsterer's. “It's long distance,” I said.
“Talk all you want. What's a few phone calls, what does that cost anybody? Sometimes people just need to talk to each other.”
“Turn here,” I told him. I had my hand on the door. I figured if I had to, I would open it and kick my way out.
“You girls,” he said, sighing, making the turn, coasting up to the shopping center. “One of these days you'll end up trusting the wrong person.”
Mac's phone was busy for twenty minutes. When the line was clear the secretary told me he'd gone for the day.
I saw the Solitary Traveler again in Juneau. He was down by the waterfront smoking his pipe, just like before. I was still too shy to talk to him. Where have you been? I'd ask him, and he'd say, Prospecting. On Gold Creek, halfway up the mountain. I'm staking a claim.
But the gold's gone. It's been gone for years and years.
Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not there.
The mines closed down, I said. The prospectors went broke.
He shook his head. There's times that people ignore things right under their own noses.
Like what? I said. What things? But he was blowing blue pipe smoke. I couldn't get him to say any more.
There was a place in Juneau where you could buy phone calls, a store that sold phone calls. You paid them to dial the number for you and you sat in a little booth and talked. Travelers used it, and the Mexicans and Filipinos who worked on the big cruise ships, lining up to call home. Two young guys ran the phone call store. I told one of them that I wanted to talk to my ex-husband but I didn't want to talk to his wife. Could he place a person-to-person call for him, and if he was there, let me talk?
The phone call guy got into it. “What name should I use?”
“It doesn't matter. Anybody.”
“I'll be Bruce Wayne,” he said. “You know, Batman. We'll flash him the old Bat-Signal.” He was really into it, and he seemed like a nice guy. I felt sort of bad about telling him the ex-husband story.
So Bruce Wayne called Mac at home, but Mac had just gone out. Mrs. Mac didn't know when he'd be back. No, he couldn't be reached at the office and she didn't know when he'd get the message.
“She's a real sweetheart,” said the phone call guy. “What's she got going for her, she rich or something?”
“Something,” I said. I liked him. I thought I would have liked to get to know him better, if it wasn't for the effort of being in love.
I took a southbound ferry to Sitka. The boat was almost empty and I sneaked into a cabin, one with a real bed. Nobody seemed to mind. I still had the brandy bottle. I drank a big slog from it. I wondered what Mac was doing right then, right that minute. I thought if I tried hard enough to see him, I could. It seemed you ought to be able to aim desire like a lens, and pass your longing straight through it. Maybe I was simply out of range.
I put the cap back on the bottle. It seemed like a good idea to save some for later and besides, no one would know or care how drunk I got.
Sitka had been the Russian capital of Alaska. It had a fort with cannons, and a Russian cathedral, and women who dressed up in costumes to do Russian dances for tourists. I took a limo van from the ferry into town, and I asked the driver if the Russians had made much difference. He shrugged and said not so you'd notice, but they had killed a lot of Indians.
The hotel this time was sort of creepy. Nobody seemed to be staying there except me, and a couple of old men watching TV on a plastic-covered couch in the lobby. A sign by the front desk said that showers could be rented by the public.
But the room did have a phone. I called Mac's house. I hadn't figured out what to say this time. I was tired of having to make everything up. When Mac's wife answered I didn't say anything at all.
“Hello,” she said. “Hello?”
The line whooped and crackled. I couldn't think of one thing to say. If I'd opened my mouth the only thing that would have come out would have been some kind of animal noise, like a dog baying at the moon.
“If this is Sheila,” Mac's wife announced, “you don't have to bother calling anymore. He told me all about you. I found the apartment key. It's all over and we're going on with our lives. I think you're pathetic. Plus a few other things.”
I put the phone back quietly. My name wasn't Sheila, and I didn't have an apartment.
I walked outside. It was raining, the misty, constant rain that people in the Panhandle called liquid sunshine. I had a fold-up rubber poncho that came down low over my forehead and smelled like the inside of a shoe. I went to see all the Russian things. I went to see all the Indian things. There were still plenty of Indians around, the Tlingits. They were pretty much like everybody else now, after having been beat up by so many white armies. There was even an Indian center set up to teach them how to be Indians again and do things like beadwork and wood carving.
I walked down to the waterfront. The sun was coming out behind the veils of rain. The light came through in rainbow smears. Little islands like separate countries dotted the harbor, and at one end was the extinct volcano, Mount Edgecumbe. This was the Pacific Ocean, I told myself. This was beautiful. I was trying to make myself feel the right way about something for once.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I had to fight my way past the poncho to turn around and see. It was Willy from Connecticut. He said, “You know what's out there? Japan. It's a straight shot.”
“I'm leaving tomorrow,” I said. I'd just made up my mind.
“Leaving? For where?”
“Home. The Lower Forty-eight. The Outside.”
“So we'll go out tonight,” said Willy. “Live it up. See the sights. This is like fate, you know? We were fated to have dinner.”
I told Willy I'd meet him later. I went to the airline office and got a flight to Seattle the next morning. Everything was really over now, I told myself. But it didn't feel over yet. I went back and forth calling Mac names and calling myself names.
Chump. Stupid idiot. Prick
.
I met Willy in a bar where you could watch the sunset over the harbor. “You shouldn't be going into bars by yourself all the time,” said Willy. “I worry when girls do that.”
“Chivalry is horseshit,” I said.
“Aren't you sweet.”
“I can't help it. I'm in love. I'm in love with a jerk.”
“Is that what's eating you? Listen, love is horseshit. Back in Connecticut is this girl. Talk about love, you can't imagine two people more in love than we are. I mean, it's perfect.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Because sooner or later we're going to have to get married. You know how miserable that's gonna be? Man, it'll be a piece of work. Wretched! Big-time suffering! I don't want to spoil things yet.”
“So why get married?” I said. “And by the way, this really isn't helping to cheer me up.”
“Everybody gets married,” said Willy with conviction. “Everybody's gotta bite the bullet.”
We had dinner, Italian, and a bottle of red wine. The food was Alaska prices, that is, it would have been just about as cheap to go to Italy. Willy wouldn't eat the salad. “They put sulfites on everything here,” he said. “Somebody told me. That lettuce is probably three weeks old. Eat enough sulfites and your body gets artificially preserved. Archaeologists will dig us up in two thousand years and say, 'These people knew the secret of embalming.'”