Part 6 (1/2)
”It's Christmas Eve,” I say after a while, pus.h.i.+ng the words out into the silence. ”Everyone's probably safe at home.” My voice sounds small. It sails off into the darkness without resistance. Even the insects are settled for the night.
Wayne is rummaging in the trunk. He pulls out a bottle of wine and the chocolate truffles we bought in Sacramento.
He slides the cork out of the bottle.
”Wait!” I open the glove compartment and lift out my camera. ”Go stand on the Route 66 sign. With the wine.”
I crawl into the driver's seat and flick on the headlights. Wayne squints. He is standing between the two sixes, holding up the wine in one hand, his gla.s.s in the other. Then he thinks better of it, takes a long drink, refills the gla.s.s, and resumes his pose.
I snap a picture. Wayne is a pale ghost hovering on the road. I lean back into the darkness of the car and snap a couple more.
I'm cheating, I know that. When Garry Winogrand travelled across America on his Guggenheim, ten years after Robert Frank, he took his pictures through the winds.h.i.+eld, too-while he was driving. The hood of the car, the dirty gla.s.s, the dusty dashboard are all part of the composition, which creates an odd effect: the road that seemed so vast in Lange's and Frank's photographs seems familiar in Winogrand's hands, just another highway to anywhere. Viewed from the seat of a car, the endless desert shrinks to the size of a movie screen, neatly framed. Something that can be understood, ignored. The yearning is still there, but the forlorn, gentle randomness of Frank's roaming is cranked now to an edgy frenzy. It isn't hopelessness or the urge to move on one feels in these photographs, so much as impatience, an unwillingness to stop.
But we have stopped. I stow the camera in the glove compartment and join Wayne on the road, where we sip the last of the Willamette wine and hold truffles in our mouths until they melt.
”Happy Christmas,” we say at exactly the same time, which makes us laugh, and then we kiss.
6 / GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA.
MY head hurts. We started Christmas Day with fresh-squeezed orange juice and some cheap bubbly we bought in Anderson but didn't drink, the setting being too downscale for even faux champagne. Even here, it doesn't seem to have agreed with me. We're in Needles, California, which feels at this moment like a town of addicts, though I know the place is named for the sharply pointed spires of rock we can almost see from our motel window.
We have driven 2,250 kilometres, some 1,400 miles, since we left Vancouver. Last night, we decided we owed ourselves a treat. Instead of a Motel 6 or a Super 8-or ”Suppurate,” as Wayne quips at every opportunity-we pulled into the parking lot of a brand-new Best Western. The plump young woman at the desk did not seem pleased with our late-night arrival.
”I just want to get home to wrap my Christmas gifts,” she grumbled as she reached for a key.
I smiled and, without argument, accepted the price she offered. It was Christmas, after all.
We nosed into the parking spot in front of number 4. Beside us was a s.h.i.+ny black Harley. Wayne grunted, man-speak for ”This isn't going to be good.” The window in front of the motorcycle glowed blue. As we walked past, I glanced in: a p.o.r.no flick.
I didn't even put the key in the door. ”It's Christmas!” I moaned, turning back toward the office and calling over my shoulder, ”This won't take long, I promise.”
Wayne does not believe in switching rooms. You take what you're given, that's his motto. No matter if it's across from the ice machine or beside the elevator or over the all-night bar. He sees it as a kind of karma: you get what you deserve. He'd rather stay up till 3 AM rail-ing-” What? Do I look like a b.u.m? Like I don't appreciate a good night's sleep in clean sheets in a decent bed?”-than ask the desk clerk to see another room.
”Oh, no,” I groaned when we pulled up outside number 18. It was tucked beneath a staircase blockaded with lumber and bags of concrete. I imagined air hammers and power drills in the morning.
The girl gave me another key. No neighbours, no construction.
”This looks good,” I said cheerily.
”What did you say?” I learned to read lips as a child, watching American movies dubbed into Portuguese. I think I missed a couple of Wayne's words at the beginning, but that was the gist.
”I said, This looks good.”
We were yelling. A sign outside the room was buzzing like a giant hornet.
”One more time,” I begged.
”It's Christmas Eve,” I said to the plump young woman. Even I could hear the whine in my voice. There was room at the inn, obviously, but what we wanted was a decent room. ”We're a long way from home,” I pleaded. ”Please. Do you have something nice?”
She put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece. When I came in, she was saying, ”Look, I'll be there as soon as I can, you get started, you can do that much, can't you?” She leaned over, took number 25 off the hook, and threw it on the counter.
”Thank you,” I said, but she was already back on the phone, giving instructions as to what went in the stockings, what under the tree. She must have had her babies when she was twelve.
”This is fine,” Wayne said, challenging me to disagree.
And it was. A second-floor room that looked out over a row of palm trees to the desert and, if we stretched, those rocky spires. Yes, it was at the top of the stairs, and yes, everyone in the place would pa.s.s by our door in the morning, but how many people would be staying in a motor hotel on Christmas Eve?
”And it has Internet!” I said. ”We can Skype the kids and it won't cost us a cent.”
Except that I couldn't get the Internet to work.
I dialled the front desk and asked how to hook it up properly.
”I wouldn't know,” the disgruntled young mother replied. ”I've never been in any of the rooms.”
IN THE morning, we pack our bags, rinse out the champagne gla.s.ses, and return the key. A different woman is sitting at the desk, an older woman, which makes me happy. I want that plump young woman to be home with her kids. I want to be home with my kids.
When I get in the car, I tie the red ribbon from our Sacramento shortbread around the rear view mirror.
”There,” I say brightly. ”Now it feels like Christmas.”
Though it doesn't, not at all. Christmas morning is supposed to be sticky buns and coffee with Baileys and stockings full of toys and treats and silly, sentimental, useless stuff. Then presents, really good presents, with turkey perfuming the air for hours, the kids huddled over a jigsaw, or around the piano, or suiting up for the toboggan hill.
I cast about for something else to prop up my mood. We watch birds for a bit, I do a few Sudokus, stare out the car window. My head still hurts. I consider asking Wayne if he'd like me to read him my novel, but instead I pull out the newspaper I picked up in the motel office. We haven't seen or heard the news for almost a week.
”The Denver airport is completely snowed in,” I report, scanning the headlines. ”Las Vegas has been hit by a blizzard for the first time in a hundred years. That's not far from here, is it? Nothing about Canada, but in Minnesota, there's no snow at all. It's the warmest December since 1931. How weird is that?”
”Sounds like El Nino.”
Never travel south in an El Nino year: how could we have forgotten that traveller's rule? To be fair, the boy child of world weather has been a bit of a brat: he shows up whenever he feels like it, every two years, maybe seven, which isn't exactly something you can plan for. Typically, in El Nino years, the weather in the southern part of North America is wet and cold, while the north is treated to a warmer-than-usual Christmas. And there it is in big, bold print: temperatures across the northern United States are six to twelve degrees above normal, which means our kids probably haven't pulled out their down-filled jackets yet.
There's a cold draft blowing up my summery skirt. I turn on the car heater, close my eyes, and rub my temples.
We have made a terrible mistake. We headed south to avoid snow on the Prairies; now here we are in Arizona, without the kids, freezing in the desert, a champagne headache on Christmas morning: it's all wrong, wrong, wrong.
WE cross the Colorado River into Arizona at the same place the Joads crossed it, going the other way. They would have been stopped by armed guards, employed by the factory-farm owners to prevent union organizers from entering the state; we stop of our own accord to take a closer look at the river.
Even after coming down through the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River is still a major watercourse, about two hundred feet across, I'd guess, curving somewhat desultorily around a bend to the east, past an expensive-looking, Spanish-style house with white stucco walls and a red clay tile roof. Since there doesn't seem to be anyone around, we walk down the sloping drive to the river's somewhat precipitous bank and look over the edge. The reeds Steinbeck noted are still there, leaning and waving downstream. The river glints in the morning sun, and we s.h.i.+ver beneath the highway in the shade of the metal bridge. We keep forgetting it's December.
We climb back to the car. At Kingman, Route 66 takes a loop north to a town promisingly called Peach Springs, but we veer instead onto the I-40 and press on. Speed is the thing now. We have to be at the Grand Canyon by five for our dinner reservation. ”Speed,” wrote Jean Baudrillard, the French post-structuralist who visited the United States in 1985 and, like me, fell in love with the desert, ”creates pure objects.” I take it he meant that when you're moving at speed, your eye doesn't have time to focus on inessentials: you see a tree as an isolated object, not as a living organism surrounded by other living organisms. It isn't pine or spruce or oak, it just registers as tree.
”We'll turn north at Williams,” Merilyn says.
”What about Flagstaff, Arizona?” I say. ”And don't forget Winona.”
”We'll have to get our kicks at the Grand Canyon,” she says, although it doesn't sound as though kicks are likely to be in our future.