I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? Read online

  Sometimes, when she had to, she slept in a cardboard box under an overpass. Snow fell, and she survived it by wrapping herself in paper. She believed in talking and listening to people even if they looked a little scary. If you found yourself lost, it was probably that other person sleeping under the bridge, the raggedy one in the rusty metal drum, who could tell you how to find your road again.

  “But Mom,” I used to say, after we’d dropped Peace Pilgrim at the side of the road again on a sunny autumn day, so she could walk to Kansas City, or Peoria, or Indianapolis. “What if she gets too tired to walk any farther? Won’t she take a ride?”

  “No,” said my mother. “She’ll just sleep wherever she is. She’ll take a ride inside a city but between cities—walk, walk, walk.”

  I guess she was the first big traveler I knew, besides my dad. She marked me.

  Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn’t quite have the energy to be there.

  Staring at the map, staring at the postcard picture of the motel with the kidney-shaped sky-blue swimming pool, felt much better than standing next to the dingy pool smelling the chlorine.

  It was hard to wrap your mind around it.

  Anticipation jingled and smelled like vanilla.

  Arrival clunked. Huh? This is the place? This cluttered gift shop was worth stopping for? I don’t think so. Let’s get back on the road.

  It took a while for the reality of being somewhere to replace the anticipation of being there.

  Better standing back, just imagining.

  It’s too cold. It’s too windy.

  Someone will take you. Someone will pick you up.

  What if they don’t? What if I wave my hand, and no taxi stops?

  Which hand do I wave? Is there a code? A method? And what does that light on top of the taxi mean? Empty or full? How do we learn all these things?

  You’ll put your life in the hands of people you don’t know a million times. And it will be fine.

  This is the human condition? Our lives in the hands of people we don’t know?

  This is the human condition. And trust me, you know everyone. You know them because you’re human.

  Shopping for Nothing

  GRANDMA MARIE RODE A BUS FROM HER gloomy brick apartment with the shades drawn down to the heart of old St. Louis. She did this over and over. She felt less lonely in the world while riding a bus. She would have been too shy to ride in a taxi. It would have been expensive. No one in my family ever did anything expensive.

  Also, a taxi might have required a conversation. Grandma Marie was expert at blending into a scene, repeating invisible phrases like “Never mind” and “Whatever you say.”

  Her husband dragged their laundry in a silver cart with wheels to a local OPEN 24 HOURS Laundromat at 3 A.M. so he could have the whole place to himself.

  But she got lonely. She asked me if I wanted to ride downtown with her. Sometimes, if I didn’t have school, I went along.

  Bundled women stepped on and off the bus, nodding at one another from the aisle, black and white women mixed, women from the old European countries wearing fringed scarves, speaking in thick accents—“It’s really a cold one, isn’t it?”—and Grandma Marie belonged to the human race again. Sometimes a bus ride was all it took to feel better.

  Coin dropped in a slot. The forward lurch of the wheels. We stopped near the zoo in Forest Park, but couldn’t see the lions. We paused for a long time near the corner luncheonette. I could spy a long, gleaming counter studded with white plates and shiny napkin dispensers. I stared at the taxis lining up underneath our bus windows. I liked the sloped lights on their roofs, the big black lettering on the sides of their cars: CA6-6666. I wanted to call them.

  Grandma Marie said she was going shopping but often came home with no parcel, no sack. When I went with her, she would stride up and down the St. Louis streets peering with great interest into the windows of stores. She appreciated the talent of window display artists—strings of beads, lavish glitter, folded-paper flower bouquets. She enjoyed the way skinny mannequins could be rearranged—hand on hip, one hand carrying a picnic basket or a beach umbrella. She repeated, “Oh my! Look at that.” She put her hand on my shoulder, and we paused.

  She often seemed timid to enter the stores. Then someone might ask her what she wanted. Grandma Marie was a soft gray flannel mouse clutching a pocketbook, poking her fluffy head out of her apartment hole. I could feel her shyness rubbing off on me. Sometimes she asked me to make an inquiry. “Go see what that big doll costs.” She’d stand on the sidewalk while I ran inside to find a saleslady.

  Other days we’d ride the elevators proudly, exploring sections of the stores that seemed arcane—men’s sports, for example, or baby’s shoes. Why did babies even need shoes?

  In those days all the big department stores had tearoom restaurants. For lunch we ate dainty tuna sandwiches or stuffed peppers at a table for two. A lady wearing a frilled white apron pushed the desserts on a fancy decorated cart around the room. Everyone stopped talking to look at what she had. I picked the biggest pieces of cherry pie and lemon cake, of course. I picked chocolate éclairs and tapioca pudding.

  My grandma and I felt secretly smart, watching the glittering ladies in the dining rooms. Lips on the edges of steaming cups of tea. All the lives that weren’t ours. We could stare at them, which made them ours in a different way. If you held something inside your head—a delicious line of pearly buttons, a folded sweater, fancy perfume bottles on a shiny mirror on a counter, a silver bracelet on a wrist—it became yours, too. You couldn’t lose it. My grandma owned the shopping bags, the feathered hats, and the salmon mousse on a platter. I owned the stoplights, the neon, the produce men in shirt-sleeves and white aprons outside the fish market, and all the lines of waiting, humming taxis.

  Take Me with You

  ROGER THE NEIGHBOR BOY ATTACHED A small silver cart to his green bicycle and pulled me around the neighborhood. He was thirteen; I was three. He never talked to me any other time. We left our houses without our parents. The wind blew our hair high up from our heads. Roger wore a green checkered shirt. He pedaled over the creek, up the Harvey Hill, past the creepy old houses. He pedaled past the farm where my mama bought tomatoes and sweet potatoes. He said, “Which way do you want to go?” and let me point the direction. He turned where I said to turn. When we eventually circled back to the driveway between the pine trees that separated our houses, I did not want to get out of the little silver soup can with wheels. I sat firmly, holding onto the sides and staying very silent, and everyone laughed at me.

  My father drove the blue Buick with three holes like nostrils in the side of the hood. One morning he ran off the road, only a few blocks from our house. Somehow he lost control of the car and coasted across a weedy ditch and into someone’s driveway. I was in the front seat and hit my head on the dashboard. We didn’t have seat belts in those days, but I didn’t die. My mother thought I might have a broken nose. It was only bruised. My father felt terrible. He thought I would not trust his driving anymore after that, but I always did. Once when I was older, he stopped at a liquor store for me because I told him it sold dress patterns. That’s what my friend Susie had told me, or so I thought. I made my dad go inside and ask for an Empire pattern with a ribboned waist. I stayed in the car and watched all the men inside laughing at him through the big window.

  My mother’s friend Irma wore spectacles that fell down on her nose as she drove us around St. Louis in a large white car. Sometimes she popped them on top of her head. I wanted to give her a vision test. My brother and I kicked her seat from the rear. We acted bad. Her thick gray hair straggled free in large strands from a fat bun. She pumped the gas pedal in her car as if it were a pedal on a pump organ: go, stop, jolt forward, sudden brake, crescendo.

  My brother and I felt dizzy. We would close our eyes, let our heads loll around on our shoulders, tell each other we were goi
ng to vomit all over her auto carpet. But then, after stopping at four boring places, Irma would roll into the frozen custard stall and we would order large cones of creamy vanilla and Irma and my mother would gulp root beer floats happily as little girls, islands of white floating on the fizzy brown, and all would be forgiven.

  In second grade, gripped with stomachache, I took a taxi home by myself from school. My mother didn’t have a driver’s license or a car yet. An old jalopy driven by an elderly man managed to ram the taxi, right in front of our house. My mother, waiting nervously in the doorway for me to arrive, a few precious dollar bills clutched in her hand to pay the driver, saw this happen. She saw the driver’s hat fly off his head into the backseat and she saw me bounce from one side of the seat to the other. Then I crawled up onto the ledge inside the back window to get a better look at the car that had hit us. I was fine. I was fascinated by having been in a wreck so innocently—in a stopped car in front of my own home. There was no telling what strange and unexpected things could happen in this world.

  My mother, who was not at all happy that I had needed to leave school in the first place, walked me to a lady doctor a few blocks from our house to see if I had a whiplash. This was shortly after the same doctor had checked my nose. The doctor said no. Children’s necks were very resilient, she said.

  School stress, stomachache, whiplash, resilience—was anything unrelated?

  My mother drove us everywhere once she got a license. When I was nine, a policeman stopped us on Grand Avenue in St. Louis and gave her a ticket for speeding. She couldn’t believe it. She thought she never sped. She cried bitterly and said she did not have the money to pay the ticket. I was in the backseat. We were parked next to one of those gigantic silos that held gas or water. I was terribly scared of silos because I thought they might blow up at any minute and could not believe the bad luck of being stopped by a policeman right next to one.

  When I was twelve, playing second violin in a youth symphony, my mother’s station wagon spun out of control on an icy freeway, right after freeways were invented. She crossed the median and the car lodged in a ditch on the other side. It was terrifying. I tossed around the backseat with my brother and my violin. No one was injured. The violin stayed in tune. The man who drove the tow truck stared at me standing back away from the road in the snow with my violin case. “You wanna play for me?” he said.

  The concept of a getaway car always seemed alluring. When one was in a school classroom being falsely accused of something, for instance—BING! Press a button and your escape car would pull up right outside the open window.

  I loved roads we hadn’t turned on yet, but knew we would someday. O crumbling, mysterious back-streets, nameless alleys, I prayed to you. Save me, take me far away from the test we were always building up to.

  Being rich would be nice, so you could pay your traffic tickets and eat more frozen custard, but it wasn’t as important as having a Big Life. To go farther than anyone could see from one set of streets, blocks, turn signals. To feel comfortable in different settings, even if you had never been there before—the other side of town, for example.

  To have more than one point of gravity. To roll on and on and feel easy and hopeful, doing that.

  In middle school, I wondered about what a person living this sort of life might be called: Hobo. Wanderer. Nomad. Itinerant. Perpetual traveler. Vagrant. I liked vagabond and ragamuffin, certainly no words anyone would write on the “personal goals” line of any application.

  What would we need when we got anywhere?

  Odd things. Not the things you thought. Fewer clothes, for example.

  Always fewer clothes. Really only one other set of clothes—something warm and something cool, and underwear and pajamas. Maybe you should only pack your favorite clothes in a suitcase. I have always packed my bags for journeys deliberately but sometimes don’t zip them up till it’s time to leave. I keep taking things out.

  I figured out early on I would definitely need a little bit of color, a piece of red-striped Mexican Indian cloth to place beside my bed, wherever I was. Even for a single night, it helped a new room feel like home.

  I would need a decent bar of soap. I would always need a notebook and something to write with.

  Dangerous Taxis

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, WHEN I WAS IMMORTAL, invincible, and could not drive, I participated involuntarily in a number of car wrecks.

  Amy, who would soon disappear from our school forever (some said she had gone off to a convent in a forest to have a mysterious baby), drove through a stop sign in downtown San Antonio and a gray station wagon crashed into us.

  No one was hurt. We had to go to court, but I didn’t have to pay anyone since I was just a passenger.

  Tina, who drove with only one arm, encouraged me to accompany her one night when she felt like borrowing our friend Bryan’s car without permission from Bryan, to drive around the block. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”

  What was I thinking?

  Tina crashed into the fancy mailbox of a dark brick bungalow. Somehow Bryan’s car ended up atop the heap of bricks that had been supporting the mailbox. Two wheels were off the ground. Hard to do. Sort of like a circus act. The car was trapped, so to speak. We had to contact not only the police, but also a tow truck, and the people whose mailbox we had wrecked (actually, Tina had to use their telephone to make the calls, which must have been awkward—I stayed outside in the shadowy yard, whistling and worrying), and Bryan himself.

  Tina did not have to contact her parents because they were dead, so we had to call mine.

  Not one person in this story was happy.

  My parents ordered me to stop riding in any car they were not driving. But they were always at work. That meant I could walk, take the bus, ride a bicycle, or stay at the library for the next ten years. Although I had grown fond of riding the bus downtown to a little coffee shop named the Gate House, where waitresses in miniskirts served steaming cups of “Constant Comment” tea, there were many places the bus did not go. Or hours it did not go there. It was harder to coordinate one’s life with a bus than many people who never ride one might imagine.

  A year or so later, after attending a peace meeting held in the basement of a downtown music store, I stepped outside to feel windy gusts of cold sweeping the city. The season had changed while we were inside, summer to fall, boom. Texas is like that. I had no sweater. Suddenly I felt the awful scratch-and-sizzle-in-the-throat that foretold a coming cold. Shivering at the San Pedro bus stop, I decided it was the flu. I would definitely have to stay home from school the next day.

  Moments later it felt like pneumonia.

  Just then a burgundy Mustang with a large dent in the hood pulled up. The young man at the wheel rolled the window down on my side and leaned over to say, “You need a ride?”

  My first thought was, I know him. He goes to my school; is he Billy Goodman’s friend? I have just forgotten his name. Was he at that meeting?

  “Sure do,” I said. “Going north?”

  He said, “Yep, hop in.”

  Within three blocks I figured out I did not know him. He had chains on his wrists and a rank, oily smell. His tight black tank top was streaked with grease. He jammed on the brakes too hard instead of slowing gradually. Worse was the way he looked at me. As if to say, “Aha! I’ve got her.” I could see he was older than I’d thought, too. He veered into a gas station. “Stay right there,” he said. He leaped from his seat, grabbed the nozzle, and began pumping gas into the car.

  I took my cue, jumped out, and began running.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted after me.

  “I’m home!” I yelled. “I live right here!”

  A bus to anywhere was paused at the corner light. I ran to it, pounded on the door until it opened, and jumped on. The driver gave me a strange look. I threw some coins into the slot, not even noticing how many.

  “Whoa! Whoa,” said the driver. “Where are you going?”

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bsp; “I am making a getaway,” I gasped. “Something terrible was just about to happen. You saved me.” I sank down in my seat and could not bear to look out the window, to see if the oily man was chasing us. The driver kept turning his head to stare at me.

  This was only one of the many things I never told my parents.

  A few years later I was riding around with a young man when he said, “Let’s take off our clothes and drive to Austin.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “It would be fun. I know some people who did it and they said it was a lot of fun.”

  “What was fun about it?” I asked. “I don’t think it sounds like a good idea at all.”

  “People in other cars looked over at them. They tried to see if they were really naked all the way down.”

  “And that was fun?”

  He stared at me. We were not destined to be friends for long, that was certain. We were not on the same highway, brother. We were not on the same map.

  My friend Beth and I hitchhiked in Wisconsin together and accepted a ride in a dump truck. We were on our way to see my grandfather, who was dying, in a little town where he had no history at all. A solemn German Lutheran, and a hoarder of old newspapers, he did not want to die in St. Louis, where he and Grandma Marie had lived most of their lives. I kept thinking of my poor Grandma after he hauled her up north a few years earlier. She was now conscripted to a tiny town that had no department stores or tea carts or shop windows. I could not blame her for descending into a stubborn silence for many months before she died.