Part 2 (1/2)

On thethe course AAA had charted for us, she said, ”I don't knohy they want us to go around all these cities The road we're on goes straight through Why burn all that extra gas?” Her question got answered that afternoon in Indiana e decided to ignore AAA's advice to loop around Indianapolis Iry city coht-hand lane was no longer ideal, because it would end abruptly, forcing us to exit-or, rather, another driver would have I, however, had no intention of getting off for the si on my left-turn blinker, I si my own lane, until one of the drivers in the lane I was deter death or dis,” my mother said every time we didn't have a wreck, and I couldn't tell if she was trying to bolster my confidence or actually meant it

What orried about even more than accidents were the interstate on-rain with and further slowed by the U-Haul, siet up the best head of steam I could and keep the accelerator pressed to the floor as I entered the ra to do but watch the speedometer inch backward-20, 18, 15, 11-until finally our forward in to shudder violently ”Co the ly, terrified that we'd co line of cars behind us, ”you can do it” (She refused to call our getaway car the Death and became irritated when I did) All the way to Arizona, our lives were ruled by raet on and off the interstate several tiry ere, or how badly my mother needed to pee, if the exit's ramps, whether off or back on, looked too severe we kept on driving until we found one with a gentler incline At day's end we avoided the busy exits where we'd have a choice of places to stay and eat, opting instead for more remote ones where there'd be a lone Holiday Inn that had an on-site restaurant, because once ere done for the day, there was no chance we'd be getting back in the car beforeWe parked in the farthest, darkest reaches of theup three or four spaces, because our one absolutely inviolable rule was to never, for any reason, put the Death in reverse Oneto back out of the space we'd taken near thea trailer would be counterintuitive, and before I'd figured that out I'd jackknifed the U-Haul so completely that the two cars to my left were utterly hemmed in We'd had to enlist the help of the desk clerk to locate and rouse froht so I could extricate us by reat concern was the tee, especially in the afternoon when the July heat orst and the needle crept slowly up into the red danger range Then we'd have to pull over at a rest stop and let the ticking engine cool down When I couldn't find one in tian to billow from under the hood, the only solution was to pull onto the shoulder and wait for an hour in the broiling sun What I didn't like thinking about was that we still hadn't crossed the Mississippi What would happen e hit the desert and the te there beside the interstate, wilting in the brutal heat, the steady stream of air-conditioned cars and professionally ales of dust in our faces, we ly few people stopped to offer assistance, and those who did we quickly sent packing Everything was fine, we told the a bit for the engine to cool down, and then we'd be on the road again We didn't want coht, or that ere losing heart with each passingmy mother to throw in the towel As soon as she did, I was prepared to pack it in and return ho year Or maybe I'd contact my father You never could tell with him Sometimes he'd just happen to have what you needed, and if he had the et me on a road-construction crew if he didn't But my mother knewthroughit quits was to re days, ”Ah, Ricko-Mio When are we going to catch a break?” As if our probleh, our luck did change, in the Ozarks of all places, where a gas station attendant with the smallest head I'd ever seen on an adult sold us a brown canvas water bag shaped like a pancreas that he sould solve our radiator problem As near as I could tell from his toothless explanation, offered up as he attached the thing to the Galaxie's bug-splattered grille, the hot outside air would be cooled as it passed through the bag, the cooler air then blowing directly onto the radiator I had et seemed to reassure ear, wrong turns, and running out ofeachwith cool water as quickly and unobtrusively as I could, hoping no one would ask what on earth I was doing and oblige me to repeat, this tiuess what? The car stopped overheating Then, a couple days later in the Texas Panhandle, so e stopped for lunch This was a blow to my mother, whose excellent opinion of people outside of Fulton County was being rubbed raw by actual experience of the as it did that there were apparently other idiots in the world They weren't all in our car Over the next several days, though, every tias in the parched southwestern desert, reat water bags, the ones you attached to the grille to keep car radiators cool Even after she patiently described the bag's size and shape and color, nobody see about Apparently you could buy theenital nitwits

MY MOTHER'S NEW JOB at the General Electric plant in Phoenix had always sounded a little vague tothere, if there'd be any correlation between her new duties and the work she'd done in the computer roo, she said she'd find out all that e arrived The , she added, was that the people were nice Her new boss was so talked with him on the phone, off and on, for years, and he was always saying how great it would be if she came out west She spoke of him in the same tone of voice she used to describe the ht be why I never pressed her for details Maybe they'd uys who'd taken her out for lunch I didn't want to know, that's for sure Whatever her reasoning, she seemed confident that any salary or tenure she lost as a result of the move, she would quickly be able to shi+p, and in lowly Phoenix she'd surely be recognized as soues She just hoped she could start work immediately because, well, the trip had cost ency fund any ht around the corner there'd be first and last rocery shopping that first tiet everything: salt, pepper, a two-pound bag of flour, wax paper, you name it And she'd have to pay for her ride to work, just as she'd always done

Nor was it just money that was in short supply Time was also of our particular essence In a couple weeks I'd be heading to Tucson to register for my fall semester classes and check into my dorm My mother was a list maker, and the to-do items on the list she'd started back in Gloversville and updated periodically during our journey-find an apartment she could afford, move in, return the U-Haul and collect the deposit, open a bank account, set up phone and utilities, locate a grocery store within walking distance, find a new doctor-all had to be checked off before I headed south in the car

As ly apprehensive, not soand time was short, but because she herself see journey was behind us Against all odds-we didn't even know enough to calculate the Street-we'd somehow made it The Gray Death hadn't killed us, and neither, miraculously, had I We'd done the hard part, hadn't we? Once we got close to Phoenix, my mother had contacted our relatives, and they'd offered to let us stay with them for a few days until we settled in, and they proved a wealth of information about the area Sure, there was a lot left to do, but unlike the journey itself none of it was likely to kill us So, as ? The reason was that she hadn't written down on any list theshe had to do: Find A Job

In fairness, soht she had one Not in the sense that an actual job had been offered and she'd accepted it, or that there'd been any discussion of things like salary or hours or a start date, and certainly not in the sense that there were any supporting documents More like, If you're ever out this way, look us up Or, We could sure use so a job there was essentially a reasonable conjecture, a deduction based on available data Telling randparents that she had a job in Arizona wasn't a lie, exactly It wasn't that she didn't have a job, only that she didn't have one yet A matter of semantics, surely She was confident about both her marketable skills and her considerable experience, and that when she presented herself to the man honize her value and find so life in Gloversville's skin randfather couldn't be expected to understand how things worked out in the wider world, in a big company like General Electric GE people looked out for one another

But mostly I think my mother believed she had that job in Phoenix because she needed it so badly Because if she didn't have it, then doing e'd just done was beyond folly Because without a job waiting for her out west, when I went off to college she'd be left behind on Helwig Street Because she was in her mid-forties now and still an attractive wo was any person with hopes and dreae, without hope, without a life to call her own? She had the job in Phoenix because without it she was finished Because foras she could, and she couldn't stand it a er She just couldn't And so she had a job

THE GE FACILITY WAS located on the other side of Phoenix, even then, in 1967, an obscenity of urban sprawl It was , and I could see my mother's face fall when she sa small it was, about the size of an autoreat care that rees out, and in the hour it had taken us to drive there her hair and clothes were li fro the facility, the women dressed in slacks and casual tops and sneakers, the men in jeans and shi+rts with snaps instead of buttons A few even wore cowboy hats One of these pointed my h heels I found a shady spot, expecting to roast there awhile in the punishi+ng heat, but less than five ed her to come by if she was ever in the area hadn't worked there for a year In his place was a wos but also none were anticipated Theirs was a very small operation, and almost everyone orked there had done so forever If she'd had such a good job in Schenectady, why did she leave it?

For a fewdesert sun bake us I sawI was about to ask what she meant to do nohen she said, ”How can anyone even think in heat like this?”

We went to an air-conditioned coffee shop and sat in abooth, our wet clothes sticking to the vinyl cushi+ons Outside, the heat shi+ed brown, even the weeds pushi+ng up through cracks in the sidewalks ”What an awful, awful place,” my mother remarked, more to herself than ree, but pointed out that we'd been in Phoenix less than twenty-four hours, perhaps not long enough to pass judg,” she said, finally turning to faceso desperate it bordered on rabid I'd seen it, or so like it, a few times before, usually when she was at wit's end and instead of helping I, her only ally, did or said sos even worse At such times it seemed to occur to her thatranks of those deterainst her ”I can tell you one thing,” she repeated, challengingback”

EVENTUALLY SHE DID, of course, just as randparents had foretold, but by then a lot had happened, some of it predictable butacross from my mother in that Phoenix coffee shop, I couldn't even have predicted the next teeks, at the end of which she and I would once again put the Gray Death on the road, minus the U-Haul this time, for the relatively short trip down to Tucson, where over the next decade, I would corees, and where I would ood sense to fall in love with and, once I'd overruled her better judgment, marry In Tucson I would become a man, a husband, a scholar, a father, and a writer

In the summer of 1967, however, I was still a boy and er and more populous than my hometown I wasn't the boy who'd left Gloversville a h Nor, I think, was my mother the same woman We'd become seasoned, fearless travelers and found first the U of A and then the dorned (Apache Hall, I still remember), without difficulty or incident There I rown up in a s town he seemed proud of as only a small-town boy can be To me, it sounded like the local equivalent of an upstate New York arrulously told him all about where ere frouessed that for her Gloversville held anything but the fondest of ht she was cool In fact, motherwise, I'd lucked out Definitely He'd have continued in this vein, I suspect, if I hadn't cut hiht my mother and I ate dinner at a chain coffee shop near the interstate, a dead ringer for the one in Phoenix we'd retreated to after she learned she wouldn't be working for GE anyrandparents to let the of our journey had been successfully coistered for all ave them the number of the phone at the end of the hall in my dorm so they could reach me if they needed to And of course they had ood they were to us,” she said over dinner, and I understood fro those last terrible weeks on Helwig Street Hearing ht home to her not just how much she loved him but how ood they'd been to us was really about the whole of the last eighteen years ”I don't knoe would've done without the that we hadn't been wholly self-sufficient living under their roof and how secretly worried she was about losing the safety net they'd provided ”He was always , ”fro her voice fall, but not completely ”You're that rock now”

If it had occurred to me that she actually meant this, I'd have protested, because I didn't feel like anybody's rock, including hteen years the only rock I'd been was the one around her neck, threatening to pull her under And if she orried about the future, she hadaccount with a couple hundred dollars, h the first semester, and in my pocket was a cafeteriaI couldn't think of a single thing I had that would be of the slightest use if my mother ran into trouble My two suitcases were full of clothes that were stylish back home but would brand me as a hated easterner out here in the desert, where the frat-boy uniform was cowboy boots, button-down oxford shi+rts, and jeans with button flies I'd have all I could do not to beco this far to study in what an country ht even have suspected I'd have done a straight-up swap to be enrolling back at SUNY Albany, where I'd know people and could hop on a bus and be home in Gloversville in an hour So when my mother said that I was now her rock I assu some kindly sunrise-sunset, swiftly-flow-the-years senties

She wasn't

THE COFFEE-SHOP MELTDOWN in Phoenix turned out to be the nadir Soathered herself, and we returned to Scottsdale, to the ho us up and in whose yard our detached U-Haul now sat, its ball hitch burrowing into their desert landscaping like an anteater's snout My ht to bed, where she slept around the clock Bright and early the nextitems off her revised to-do list, at the top of which she'd noritten JOB

The first major piece of the puzzle to fall into place was an apartly horizontal city, was even then deeply committed to both unplanned sprawl and the primacy of automobiles, policies that remain unquestioned to this day as far as I kno apart up everywhere in an attempt to keep up with the influx of midwestern sobrds Their construction was shabby, but to easterners used to the grit and gri winters they felt new and clean Several complexes that were only half built offered a free n a year's lease, and that put pressure on older, established properties to cut similar deals My mother picked a place on Indian School Road that was reasonably close todistance, a moot point since there were no sidewalks Perhaps because it was so hot and gas was nineteen cents a gallon, people preferred to get in their cars even when their destination was just a block or tay

She could've gotten by with a studio apartment, but my mother rented a one bedroom so I'd have at least a couch to crash on when I visited She had to come up with the usual first and last month's rent, but after that her next check wasn't due until Noveht, almost everybody in the complex was newly divorced and recently arrived fro to outnumber woht about it In most divorces it would be the man who found hiuys wanted to put at least a few miles between themselves and the wives who'd told them to hit the bricks nobody seemed to have much money or to care much about it There were a few flashy sports cars in the parking lot, but just aspool with a cos after changing into bathing suits and grabbing a cold beer On Saturdays, around midday, soaritas and give a rebel yell People would then spill out of their apartht sun like prisoners released from their cells by an invisible warden Then the weekend festivities would begin

It must've been pretty close to the kind of lifeback in Gloversville She also must've felt like she'd arrived in the nick of tier, in their thirties, but they welcoood-natured drunks they were ”New blood!” one bare-chested young fellow called up to us fro spatula raised in triumph, e moved my mother's stuff into her second-floor apart the lease ”Where you from?”