American Estrangement Read online

  I have the troubling awareness that the patrolmen might be flirting with Lizzy, and have in fact been flirting with her the entire time, unbeknownst to me, this being their chief diversion until their shift ends.

  But suddenly, the game is over, if ever it was a game, and they are unfurling our rolled-up travel documents, already having been stamped with that most coveted phrase ENTRY PERMITTED, below the raised seal of New Hampshire, a woodcut image of a ship from yesteryear, either going out to sea or run aground.

  “Here you are!” they say, big New England smiles.

  “Thank you, sir!” I am grateful. All is forgiven. I take our travel documents gently, as if they are scrolls which will crumble on contact.

  Lizzy says nothing. Later, Lizzy will say, “Why do you thank them for what is yours by right?”

  “Take the HOV lane,” the patrolmen say, “it’s on us.”

  But the last thing we’re going to do is take the HOV lane.

  “We sure will!” I say anyway.

  And just like that Lizzy and I are across the New Hampshire border, the toy car getting smaller in the rearview mirror, my foot on the pedal, Lizzy continuing to mutter beside me in the passenger seat.

  “Do you see?” she says. “Now do you see what this has come to?”

  “We have our stamps, don’t we?” I say.

  “That’s the point,” she says.

  “What’s the point?” I say.

  “It will be gone before you know it!” Her voice is rising, and to emphasize the importance of her words she bangs her fist four times on the center console trimmed in wood: it. will. be. gone. Here she might also be referring to us.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I say.

  “It means that this is just the beginning!” she says.

  I’m still not sure what this means.

  “First states,” she says, “then cities!”

  Now she’s screaming. Not at me, at society. Society in general. She’s stuffing our stamped and precious paperwork back into the glove compartment.

  “Be careful!” I say.

  “Paperwork can’t break!” she says.

  She slams the glove compartment closed and it pops right back open. She slams it again.

  “The glove compartment,” I say, “that can break!”

  “What do you care?” she says. “You don’t own this car!”

  “It’s on my credit card,” I say.

  “No,” she says, “it’s on our credit card.”

  So this is going to be the first fight of the trip, and I have the inclination to go ahead and take the HOV lane after all, just to be spiteful. Instead, I split the difference and turn the leather steering wheel hard, swerving down the back road, going fifty in a twenty-five zone, dirt kicking up around the Escalade, speeding past some town named Ossipee, population four digits, which probably doesn’t have an inn, and beyond which is the New Hampshire countryside, indistinguishable from the Maine countryside, bucolic and watercolored, breathtaking really, where a single peach stand comes into view, first distant, then immediate, a rare sign of life, two tables long, manned by a family of Ossipees and loaded with fruit the size of orange softballs.

  “Look,” we say, “peaches!”

  Oh, but who would I be without Lizzy? Or more to the point, who would I become without her? I had never done yoga until we’d met. I had never drunk green tea. I had never contemplated society. “I’ve never eaten an avocado,” I’d confided in her one afternoon, standing in front of an avocado display at the natural food store, six weeks into our relationship. She must have sensed my shame and embarrassment, thirty years old and so unworldly. “Don’t blame yourself,” she’d said, “blame your parents.” I’d appreciated her compassion. I’d appreciated how she’d regarded this minor oversight about food as symptomatic of larger oversights in my childhood. I’d never considered my childhood.

  She’d bought six avocados right there on the spot, good parent that she was, and later we sat cross-legged on her living room floor, amid the iconography of ancient goddesses as she sliced one open with a paring knife, slowly, sexually, cutting into the soft flesh just for me. I thought it would taste like an olive, given its giant pit, but it tasted like unsalted butter at room temperature. When we kissed, she told me, “I’ve never really been loved before.” Indeed, she’d had the opposite of love, mostly in the form of an alcoholic college professor for a father who had once chased her around the living room with a frying pan while her enabling mother watched from the armchair, so blaming parents came easy for her. “Love can’t exist under these conditions,” she’d said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about her parents or society. We were three months into the relationship when I moved into her apartment with twenty cardboard boxes and a full-sized futon, almost big enough for two people. We commingled our finances, we applied for a joint credit card, we paid our bills from the joint credit card. We made dinner each night from scratch, kneading bread, simmering broth, crushing spices with mortar and pestle. “Slow cooking,” she’d said. One evening I accidentally dropped a jar of molasses from the uppermost shelf in the kitchen. It fell and shattered, oozing like lava across the floor. We watched and laughed, marveling at its incremental, almost imperceptible progress, and it was only afterward that I thought how we should have seen this, not as comedy, but as the first sign of ailment sent from the ancient goddesses, if you believed in that sort of thing. “I love you,” I told her, standing in the kitchen, the molasses twelve inches from our feet, but hours away. “Do you mean it?” she said. She got serious. “Do you really mean it?” “Yes, I mean it,” I said. And I did mean it. And I still do.

  But four states later we haven’t had sex. Not in the Motel 6. Not in the Best Western. Not in the Hilton Garden Inn, which is not an inn or a garden, and which, halfway through Pennsylvania, we decide to splurge on spur-of-the-moment, designed as it is for an even higher-end traveling executive in mind, because let’s live a little. Lizzy and I drink the complimentary bottled water and wrap ourselves in the bathrobes, and we lie together on the king-sized bed, as we do every night, our fingers intertwined, considering the popcorn ceiling, having been subdued and sedated by the Cadillac Escalade. In the morning we wake at dawn and pack up the free hotel toiletries and drive onward below the speed limit, taking the long way through society, wary of what might have changed for the worse, but noticing nothing, unless nothing is something. When we do see other cars, the license plates are always of the state we are in. Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Still, we go deeper. Five, six, seven states. We eschew the landmarks for the lesser known: the streams, the bluffs, the mom-and-pops, the farm-to-tables, the things that will be gone, according to Lizzy, before we know it. Speaking of the mom-and-pops, they are the ones who have become wary, as have the farm-to-tables, as have the peach stands. They are concerned. They are skeptical. They are fascinated. “Where are you from?” they want to know. “Where are you headed?” We tip big to show we’re just regular people on vacation. Later, Lizzy tells me, “This is how society is changing.” She gets melancholy about this. When we fill up for gas, which is every day, the gas station attendants will ask, “Where are you from?” But generally the gas stations are self-serve.

  By the time we get to Iowa we have lost track of what we’ve seen and where we’ve seen it, the landscape of the country transforms so gradually that it’s only one hundred miles after the fact when we realize mountains have given way to cornfields have given way to plains. “Remember that river?” we say to each other. “Remember that lake?” Which state was that lake? Illinois? Rhode Island? New York? We can’t recall. Lizzy says, “What difference does it make what state was that lake? States are random delineations anyway.” There is truth to this, of course, but at each border we stop and show our travel documents, and at each border we are waved through by the patrolmen, no questions, no problems, New Hampshire apparently having been the exception to the rule.

  “Have a go
od trip,” the patrolmen say to us, barely glancing at our travel documents, now stamped with the seals of a dozen states, mostly images of frigates and agricultural implements.

  “We hope you come back,” they say. “You’re welcome here anytime,” they say.

  “See?” I say to Lizzy.

  “See what?” she says.

  “See things are not so bad.”

  She says nothing. She places our precious travel documents in the glove compartment. She closes it with care.

  “So why do you thank them,” she asks, “for what is yours by right?”

  In Kansas we decide to really splurge spur-of-the-moment and book a room at the Marriott, ten stories, ultramodern, sheathed in glass, room service, turndown service, also whirlpool on the ground floor. I withdraw my joint credit card with a flourish and the clerk swipes it once, twice, three times and tells me it’s been declined.

  “Must be a mistake,” I say.

  “Must be a mistake,” Lizzy says.

  “Must make a phone call,” the clerk says.

  “Yes,” I say, “must make a phone call.”

  “Yes,” the clerk says, “must be a mistake.”

  But I know it’s no mistake. Lizzy knows it, too. So does the clerk. We have deferred too long. Now Lizzy and I try to save face and come up with cash to pay for the night, along with our checking account information to cover minibar incidentals, of which there will be none. I fill out even more forms than I did for our travel documents, signing and initialing everywhere. “I’ve never done this before,” the clerk says, as if he’s engaged in an interesting experiment that he’ll be able to tell his buddies about. Twenty minutes later, Lizzy and I are anticlimactically granted the keycard that will get us into the room that we can’t afford, Room 814, top floor and bittersweet, designed not so much for traveling executives than for traveling royalty, with shear drapes, wood floors, Neutrogena toiletries, no bad art, no popcorn ceiling. Tonight Lizzy and I do not lie on our backs unwinding silently on the king-sized bed, instead we get ready to go straight to sleep, ignoring the bathrobes and the imperial opulence, ignoring each other, mustering our energy for “the talk” that we both know we are going to have tomorrow, the talk about the joint credit card, which I am sure, even as I step naked into the shower with the frosted glass and the marble walls, won’t be a talk but a fight, and it won’t be about the credit card but about us, and what ails us, what has always ailed us, which we’ve only ever deferred.

  We can go slow no longer. In the morning we take the turnpike, paying the toll with loose change, which clinks with the ring of indigence. “They should be paying us,” Lizzy says. How she has come to this conclusion, I do not know. Immediately the unrelenting sameness of the country sets in, the crushing loss of distinction, the absolute homogeneity, the straight line of asphalt. No bluffs, no shoppes, no mom-and-pops. No watercolors from days of yore. Lizzy is right, they will be gone before we know it. I’m doing sixty-five in a sixty-five zone, fast is the new slow, the Cadillac Escalade hurtling earthward like a projectile. Kansas, Kansas, Kansas, say the license plates. Lizzy is arguing out loud beside me, saying something about turnpikes and big boxes and hollow calories. Somehow they’re all connected. “Whatever happened to family-owned?” she says. “Whatever happened to DIY? Whatever happened to washing your clothes in the river?” I can tell she’s just getting started and that she’ll keep listing things all the way to the Nebraska border, where she will finally conclude with, Whatever happened to beating our rugs with a broom?

  “Do you know who’s to blame?” she asks me.

  No, I do not know who is to blame. I am tired and confused. Mainly I am angry, mostly at her for having convinced me to break the bank with this Cadillac Escalade which we both knew full well we could not afford and which will now pursue us at top speed for years to come by way of a maxed-out monthly credit card statement, of which we will only ever be able to pay the minimum.

  “Yes, I do know who’s to blame,” I say. “You’re to blame!” But I don’t say it, I shout it, at the top of my lungs, while banging on the center console with my fist to emphasize my words: you’re. to. blame. And she’s yelling and banging, too, and we’re going through every fight we’ve ever had, like the time she left the empty jar of tomato sauce in the refrigerator, and the time I broke the bathroom light bulb after she’d just replaced it, every fight that will lead straight to this fight in the pristine confines of the Escalade. “Ten years for what?” Lizzy is asking me. But she’s not asking, she’s stating. She’s cataloging every one of her grievances, each one still fresh in her mind, recalling them in vivid detail as if they’d just happened, especially the missed opportunities. She’s yelling and then she’s sobbing. Yelling while she’s sobbing, trying to get the words out, but they’re garbled, but I can understand her anyway, we don’t need language anymore. And soon she’s stopped doing an inventory of her slights, and begun doing one of her life, big picture, where it’s been, where it’s going, which is nowhere, really. “It’s too late for me at forty,” she keeps saying. Even in the midst of the chaos and rage, I want to assure her that this isn’t true, that slow living has been good to her, slow living, slow cooking, and that yoga has been good to her, too, Saraswati, that it’s been a balm, that it’s kept her young, that she still has a bright future ahead even in middle age. Who would she be without me, I had wondered. Why, she would be someone wonderful. I’m the one who should be concerned, balding, can barely touch my toes, diminishing chi. She’s the one with hair that’s brown and lush, scented with motel shampoo, and even though she has the onset of crow’s-feet, they’re only noticeable when you stare at the side of her face from two feet away, like I’ve been doing for however many miles.

  And it is right then that I become aware that I’m being followed by the border patrol in an unmarked, unremarkable sedan, four-door and white, the kind, in hindsight, we would have been better off renting from that eighteen-year-old summer employee at Hertz. It’s been following us for the last fifty miles or so, constant in my rearview, strangely always about a half car’s length away, closer than what you’re taught in driver’s ed, and whose presence has suddenly wound its way up into my consciousness as a thing about which I need to be aware.

  “Who is that?” Lizzy asks. She has stopped shouting.

  And as if in response, the border patrolmen put on their high beams, shooting straight through the hatchback of the Cadillac Escalade and over three rows of empty seats, lighting up the interior, sunshine notwithstanding, the universal sign for pull over, which I do, on the side of the turnpike, putting the car in park and popping the glove compartment open.

  “Now do you see?” Lizzy says. She knows she’s won.

  Now we wait, our precious travel documents in hand, the white sedan idling behind us, one long stream of cars passing by at sixty-five miles an hour, everything a blur. Kansas, Kansas, Kansas. I should be focused on the border patrol, but I’m focused on the fight and the sadness, and the feeling that we are in a place in our relationship, Lizzy’s and mine, from which there is no going back. And it also occurs to me, far too late of course, that we are not actually waiting at the border, nor anywhere near the border, but rather in the middle of the state, and that the white sedan is not the border patrol, but something of which I should have long been wary.

  When the car door opens I am momentarily relieved to see that exiting the sedan are two old men, somewhere between avuncular and grandpa, dressed in loafers and khakis, ambling toward the Cadillac Escalade as if on their way to a picnic on the side of the turnpike.

  I roll down the window. “Hello,” I call, and this is where the avuncular ends and the menace begins.

  “What are you doing here?” they want to know. There are no smiles. There is no Midwest goodness.

  “No business,” I say, upbeat and reassuring, “just personal.”

  “That’s not what we asked you,” they say.

  “What gives you the right to ask us anyt
hing?” Lizzy says. Which is the wrong thing to ask, because they pull me shirt-first from the car, nearly dragging me along the pavement, some combination of pushing and pulling. They are surprisingly strong for being so old, and even in the midst of my distress, I wonder if I will be as strong as they are when I am their age, if ever I am.

  “I have travel documents, sir!” I say, my voice at a high pitch. Lizzy’s directive to always maintain dignity now a distant theory.

  They don’t care about the travel documents. They don’t care about the border patrol. They don’t care about the green tea in the cooler.

  “Do we look like the border patrol?” they ask me. They sound insulted.

  No, they look like they could be the regional managers for the Motel 6, and somehow I know that this makes things much worse.

  I can hear Lizzy shouting from the front seat, Stop, stop, stop, and the cars whooshing past, the passengers staring out and wondering, briefly, what that man must have done so wrong, and I have a vision of running through the underbrush of Kansas, poor wayward fool, being chased by old men in loafers.

  “Concerned citizens of Kansas,” they tell me. I can’t tell if this is an organization or a figure of speech.

  “I’m not a drinker, sir,” I say, because perhaps they’re concerned that I’ve been driving through their state under the influence.

  But they don’t care about drinking and driving.

  “What’s wrong with your own state?” they ask me.

  “The zigzag route,” is all I can think to say.

  They have me up hard against the hood of the Cadillac Escalade, which is covered in the dust and dead insects of a thousand back roads. Still, the beautiful crimson shines through, cherry-red in the sunlight, painted so skillfully that there is no evidence of even a single brushstroke.

  LAST MEAL AT WHOLE FOODS

  I’m having dinner at the Whole Foods on Center Boulevard with my mother, who is dying. My poor mother, whom I’m trying not to sob over, is sitting across from me in the booth, transfixed by her cardboard plate, eating, with a strange and elegant enthusiasm, broccoli cake and something or other, as if any of this mattered.