Andrea Reising Fiction
In a Cadillac
They had been on the road for about twenty hours when she first realized how in love she had become. Drifting in and out of corn fields on their way through North Dakota, she figured she would let him know right there and then. She’d been having the itching since they left the city. They were on their way to California. She was looking for a line of gigs to play and he was just looking to get out of Manhattan. She’d announced that she would drive them in her car.
She turned her body slightly toward the passenger beside her, minding, still, the road. Her arms extended out before her, resting on the ratty vinyl of the steering wheel. She leaned a little, inspecting his body, slouched there, staring silently out the window. “You know I love you, don’t you?” she asked. His face remained expressionless, unmoving, fixated on the highway. Ambivalence exuded from him. “You know that, don’t you?” She said it twice, in case he hadn’t heard it well on first admission. She wasn’t looking necessarily for reciprocity, more for proof that she had balls enough to lay her feelings down. She waited through a minute of silence, reaction, contemplation. After five or so, she turned her mind to other things. She thought about the weather and the dwindling funds to cover gas and food and lodging. She thought about every man she’d ever loved and wondered why she still felt so alone.
Muted from the highway in their air tight Cadillac, they bundled through the sharpness of cold morning. She hunched a bit, hugging the roundness of the steering wheel, hanging her body on it as she drove. She could see her breath emitting from within her, coming out before her face. Her eyes were wet and red from the cold and she kept blinking them and blinking them. She rubbed the snot from underneath her nose, using the back of her hand. Then she rubbed the back of her hand on the soft corduroy encompassing her thigh. She adjusted her body in the seat and hummed a line of “Johnny Be Good.” The highway sign said they were close to Grand Forks when she began to feel disquieted by the infringing silence.
She took the silver knob of the radio between her thumb and index, twisting it slowly side to side incessantly. The bass would rattle during certain sections of the faint reception of each song. The radio itself would shake within its casing, every time the car combated beat up sections of the road. When she’d left the afternoon before, exiting her loft on twenty-first, she wore the ski coat she had stolen from her mother years before. It was green and pink and Seventies. The breast pocket closed with a zipper and she stored money there, and cigarettes whenever she forgot that she had quit.
She’d found it in the basement one year while visiting her grandmother at Christmas. “Ask your mother first,” the old woman had forewarned, as if the youngest one would care. She put it on and wore it out the backdoor, heading for the family car. She was going for a drive, twenty minutes or so down highway C, toward the old farm that was once her grandfather’s. She felt the need to go and reminisce a bit, to walk along the old barn where he killed himself by pointing a long rifle at his chest. She came upon the deserted house, the first to notice it in years. She walked alone across the dry, yellow grass of the yard. The deadened blades crunched beneath her footsteps, just like leaves would if they’d not been blown away. She reached out for the concrete side porch, feeling coldness as she touched it with her hand. She sat there for an hour, maybe two, surrounded by a sea of remnant corn stalks lining barren highway. The wind was pressing to her huddled figure, gusting just enough to make her cold despite the jacket.
A cat, scrawny, with matted fur stuck to its jaunting bones, crawled from underneath the house. Its little body hardly holding back the wind, it struggled to inspect her foot, fighting through five feet or so of nature’s opposition. She stayed until the sky got dark, until nighttime stole away the light from where she sat in subtle stillness. When she’d had enough contemplation, she swiftly shuffled to the car, closing out the heaviness of memories, crawling into shelter. She turned a silver key firmly in the hesitant ignition, coaxing up the engine. Extending her arm across the back of the empty passenger seat, she craned her neck, looking out behind the car. She let the image of the barn ingrain upon her memory, again and again in just one instant. A tiny creature, battling the wind with vigilence, watched her as she turned away. She felt shadows playing on her face and hands as she eased the car back to the drive. Wheels moving, she grappled over gravel which sounded out like minute arguments playing out around her. Keeping her promise to the gas and pistons, she sped up and gained distance, looking up, from time to time, intently to the rear-view.
She turned off from the highway and drove into a small gas station. It was the first one they had come across in two or three hours. Laughing internally with herself, she wondered what they would have done if the tank had emptied sixty miles back. Maybe they would have waited there, beside the road, for days and days without a single car passing by. Maybe they would have taken up their bags and started walking or chosen to get naked and crawl into the ditch beside the road, simply rotting there, stuck to one another.
He took care of filling up while she vended herself coffee from the pot and fingered a key-chain that was cleverly a toothpick holder all at once, reading “Bismark” down its side. She strolled along the first and second isle of three. While flipping through the bin of beat-up oldies tapes, she kept looking past the pane glass of the wall. She was watching semis creep by slowly, miniscule as they seemed, like termites crawling at a distance. Styrofoam held stale Folgers as she sipped at it, debating with herself whether or not finishing was worth the bitter process it implied. Setting off the door chimes, entering the quick-stop with accomplishment, he laid dollar bills upon the counter. Watching him, she thought about the words she’d let loose on his ear and wondered what he might be thinking. She entertained the possibility that her emotional explosion simply culminated from the need for a diverting boredom of the road.
After glancing up at her, expressionless, signaling that they were clear to go, he turned and made his way back to the car. He paused beside the curb to move his pant leg from the inner rim of his shoe where it had lodged. She followed him out, still sipping on her coffee, moving slowly and emphasizing the movement of her hips. Taking her place in the vinyl of the driver’s seat again, she set her cup down on the dashboard long enough to crank the window down and light a cigarette with the last of her matches. Starting up the car again, she headed out to where the semis were crawling along.
It was about twelve that night when they pulled into a motel parking lot just off the highway. She went into the little office by herself and asked the woman at the desk for one room with two single beds. He followed her as she held the keys in her hand, leading the way to the door labeled 5D. She fumbled with the lock and finally swore her way into the brown and red oasis clad in polyester, framing a fine view of lot and dumpster. She clicked a lamp until it lit the room enough to see the outlines of the furniture and the flower print upon the wall. She let the car keys drop onto the carpet, prying one shoe off and then the other. He stood facing the wall by the door where they’d come in, his duffel still in hand. He was rubbing his index finger in a little circle on the flowers, over and over.
The small bathroom was dressed in mildewed tiles and yellow paint. She let loose the faucet of the sink. Gathering small puddles of hot water in her cupped palms, she closed her eyes and rubbed her face. She stood very still, meditating on the sound of the steady stream against the cheap Formica. She could smell herself, her own wretched stench from traveling. When she came back to the bedroom, he was standing, still, beside the wall, fingering it, wearing his boots and his orange, knit cap. Pulling back the starchy covers of a bed, she left the lights on as she lay in search of sleep. She couldn’t hear him moving, and gave up trying to, exhausted as she was from driving.
Morning came in through a gauzy curtain and cast itself across the crumpled sheets of her bed. She saw the bed beside her still made and empty. The lights were on, just as she’d left them when she headed into sleep. Rubbing out her eyes and tasting morning, she rolled over, groping for the shower knob, falling to the floor and crawling toward the bathroom. The only signs that he had been with her at all was his brown bag, tucked against a chair, along with her impending sense of loneliness. She showered and dressed and smoked a cigarette to the sound of morning news. She paused on her figure in the mirror as she sat upon the bed, then looked away.
The concierge was on duty, fixing someone’s drain, when she walked into the lobby. She was looking for a coffee pot and found one. She leaned over the vacant counter, found the phone and held it closely to her face. She dialed her own number and let it ring, staring at a bowl of red and white swirled peppermints before her. She knew that she was ludicrous, that no one was even there to pick up on the other end. She just felt the need to say hello, and couldn’t think of any other place to call.
She left the room keys at the counter, picking up her things and weighting her body against the door to the parking lot, opening and dragging herself through it. She’d packed her bag already and had taken his from where he’d let it lay. She threw them, now, beside each other on the back seat of the car. Starting up the car, she let the engine rev. Leaning the left side of her head against the glass window, she thought of barns and Chuck Berry. Slowly pulling from her parking place, easing up another day, she checked the pavement for cats and children and lovers.
About a mile down the road, she saw him walking on the side, balancing between the pavement and the dirt. He noticed her approaching and he halted. Crouching down, squatting on his heels, he stuck his thumb out for a ride. She slowed the car, partly out of obligation. Dust was forming clouds around his head as she drew her motion down. Rolling her window open, she looked at him, sharing his scarceness of expression, of voice.
“Got room?” he asked.
She nodded. She reached over for the lock, unlatching the handle as he crossed before the car and opened up the door. He noticed his bag with hers in back. He set one foot down on the floorboard, then the other, and hauled his body in.
“I was hoping I could have a ride,” he said.
“I let you in, didn’t I?” she answered.
“I guess you did,” he said, and, looking like he might say more, perpetuated quietness.
“I’ll need money for gas and lodging, if you’re planning to stay long,” she said.
“I think I can manage,” he said in return.
“And I don’t take bullshit,” she continued. “The last thing I need is to be fucked with.”
“Understood,” he replied.
“And I don’t just talk out of my ass, when I say something I mean it,” she clarified.
“I was hoping so,” he answered.
She sat a minute, looking at the man and then the road. She took a breath and let it out, shifting into gear. The car began to move across the pavement, drawing speed, cruising when it found itself at sixty. Looking up, she saw the sun between two clouds and hoped in passing that its warmth might break the coolness of morning. She fumbled for a cigarette from where they huddled in the pocket of her coat. Pressing in the dashboard lighter, she drove on, waiting patiently.
“Don’t bother,” he injected, scraping a flame out of a matchbook he’d pulled from his back pocket.
“I’m trying to quit, you know,” she informed him. She scrutinized his hand and then the heating lighter in the dashboard, trying to discern which option she preferred. "I think I'm going crazy," she said aloud.
“Well make up your mind,” he answered, “my thumb is getting burnt.”
She looked at him, his weird, sad face, then looked at him some more. She slowly let the end of the cigarette meet up with what he held for her. Paper singed and smoke began to curl up to the ceiling, into drafts and outside to the road.
The glowing metal of the dashboard lighter clicked for her. She let it stay, not needing it, dangling the filter of fixation in between her parted lips. Placing his hand on the section of the seat between their bodies, he vacantly prodded the crux of her knee with the end of his little finger.
“If we were to run out of gas right here,” she began in a low, throated voice, “what do you think we’d do?”
“I don’t know,” he responded quietly and softly. “I guess we would wait for a ride, or maybe start walking.” He then went on, almost breaking stillness, “Or maybe we would have to just get naked and crawl into the ditch beside the road.”
Through a crack she’d left, she flicked ash out of the window to the road. She glanced down at the fuel gage, checking for a sign of shortage.